“About Making a Living”: Immigrant Businesswomen in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Cities
Monday, January 5, 2015: 9:10 AM
Madison Suite (New York Hilton)
The vaunted rags-to-riches stories of individual immigrant businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie reflect only a small fraction of the businesses conducted by immigrants and their progeny in the geographically expanding, rapidly industrializing, and increasingly urbanized nineteenth-century United States. Operated by women and family groups, a myriad of smaller ventures, from peddlers, to street stands, to mid-sized retail establishments and artisanal workshops, spread immigrant enterprise throughout the nation. The immigrant businesswoman, like the immigrant wife, mother, and worker, was omnipresent wherever nineteenth-century migrants settled. Such entrepreneurs made a significant contribution to their family economies; they also represented a group of proprietors appreciated in their own communities as honest and hard-working, respected and respectable.
This paper will compare immigrant businesswomen from Ireland, Germany, Britain, and France in cities across the United States, while contrasting them with native-born female proprietors in the same locations. Linking information gleaned from the credit records of R. G. Dun & Co. (1840-1885) to demographic data from the federal manuscript census, it will explore the trades in which women engaged, the viability of their enterprises, and particularly how female proprietors of different nationalities negotiated the volatile urban marketplace in order to support themselves and their families. Although many of these individuals were described by local credit examiners as just “barely” or “about” making a living, credit reports reveal a variety of strategies through which immigrant women survived, and even thrived, at the edge of the marketplace.