Late nineteenth-century San Francisco was an ethnically diverse but
male-dominated society bustling from a rowdy gold rush,
earthquakes, and explosive economic growth. Within this booming
marketplace, some women stepped beyond their roles as wives,
caregivers, and homemakers to start businesses that combined family
concerns with money-making activities. Edith Sparks traces the
experiences of these women entrepreneurs, exploring who they were,
why they started businesses, how they attracted customers and
managed finances, and how they dealt with failure.
Using a unique sample of bankruptcy records, credit reports,
advertisements, city directories, census reports, and other
sources, Sparks argues that women were competitive, economic
actors, strategizing how best to capitalize on their skills in the
marketplace. Their boardinghouses, restaurants, saloons, beauty
shops, laundries, and clothing stores dotted the city's landscape.
By the early twentieth century, however, technological advances,
new preferences for name-brand goods, and competition from
large-scale retailers constricted opportunities for women
entrepreneurs at the same time that new opportunities for women
with families drew them into other occupations. Sparks's analysis
demonstrates that these businesswomen were intimately tied to the
fortunes of the city over its first seventy years.