Business Was a Family Affair: Women of Commerce in Central Europe, 1650-1880

Although the mercantile activities of German women reflected a tradition dating from the high Middle Ages, the formal sanction of women's exchange privileges was a relative recent phenomenon. Pre-modern economic factors established the commercial agency of German businesswomen & promoted family-based enterprise in Germany's modern economic growth. In the 17th century, the family firm emerged as the fundamental institution of Germany's economic elite. The interlocking interests of family patrimony & the firm's continuity created a special niche for the business widow, legally secured by 17th- & 18th-century exchange codes. Recent social history on Germany's 19th-century middle classes has begun to identify the roles of women merchants, especially in retail trade, & family-based enterprise in Germany's modern industrial expansion. As in the pre-modern period, the women of middling family businesses played management roles & sometimes assumed control as widows. The "separate spheres" ideology, relegating women to house & home, was a prescriptive ideal with relatively little influence on the women of modest family retail & manufacturing firms. Thus the pre-modern practices of family-based enterprise shaped the legal & social structures in which women continued to exercise an important economic function into the 20th century. Adapted from the source document.