Business as Usual? Investigating Women and Enterprise in Australian History

DR CATHERINE BISHOP

Abstract

That ‘women have always worked’ is well-known; less so is their presence in the commercial world of business, as sole operators, employers and partners in small, medium and large enterprises. Businesswomen in Australia are often spoken of as if they are a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, born out of second-wave feminism, but even a cursory delve into the past challenges this. The history of Australian businesswomen, however, is under-researched. Feminist historians have tended to focus on the importance of women’s work in the domestic sphere, on labour and employment, and on politics. Business historians have pretty much ignored women entirely. In this paper I will talk about my research on colonial Sydney and my collaborative project with international scholars on nineteenth-century businesswomen across the globe. I will also introduce my DECRA project ‘Gendered Enterprise: A History of Women in Australian Business since 1880’, focusing on my planned areas of enquiry, tentative hypotheses and methodologies.

About the Author

Dr Catherine Bishop, ARC DECRA postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, is the author of Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (NewSouth Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Ashurst Business Literature Prize, and the forthcoming Women Mean Business: Enterprise in Colonial New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2019). She is co-editing with Jennifer Aston (Northumbria University) Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2020), and embarking upon a history of Australian women in business since 1880. Her other projects include a biography of a female missionary, and a history of Cold War World Youth Forums.