The Commercial Lives of Irish Women, 1850–1922

This book examines Irish women’s lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a new angle, investigating how they inherited, bought, or started up businesses. Some guided their operations to impressive profit and growth, while others coped with devastating failure. The many and varied primary sources which inform Antonia Hart’s research place all these businesswomen in public-facing roles, in commercial environments, making economic decisions and operating with autonomy which they sought out and claimed. These were not unusual women. They were present in the main streets of towns and cities, their businesses both visible and unsurprising to passers-by.

Women’s businesses mattered. They enabled employees, both women and men, to earn their livings. They paid fees for professional services to accounting and legal firms. They contributed to the local and national economies. They provided training, and sometimes accommodation, for apprentices. Women’s businesses mattered in the credit economy, not only in their extension of credit for goods and services, but also in the form of collateralised loans, from the pawnbroker’s counter, while the Dublin pawnbrokers also contributed an annual sum to the city policing budget.

In the context of well-ventilated ideas about what a woman should be, many girls grew up seeing their teachers, mothers, sisters, and neighbours bring pragmatism and creativity into commercial lives. This book shows how private realities diverged from public ideals, and describes for the first time a robust and intriguing national heritage of Irish female entrepreneurship.