Conclusion

This book opened with a quote from Harriet Martineau voicing her concern that the people of Britain remained ignorant of the amount of business in the country carried out by women. Until very recently, many researchers of economic, business and women’s history in nineteenth-century England also shared this ignorance, and it is only through work by Barker, Phillips and Kay that the actions of businesswomen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have begun to be recognised. In spite of this recent work however, the business activities of women outside of London and in the latter half of the nineteenth century had, prior to this study, received very little academic attention. The preceding chapters have addressed the issue and through using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies and a wide range of sources, have built upon this new body of research to shed light on female business ownership in late nineteenth-century England.