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From the Archives: Women's History in Baker Library's Business Manuscripts Collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Laura Cochrane
Laura Cochrane
Affiliation:
LAURA COCHRANE was the survey archivist for the Women in Business Project at Baker Library, Harvard Business School.She is currently assistant librarian of special collections at the University of Delaware.
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Abstract

“[O]ur ladies know nothing of the sober certainties which relate to money and they cannot be taught,” wrote Frederic Tudor in 1820, in a sweeping indictment of women's financial abilities that was common for the period. Despite such stereotypes, many women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries participated in commerce, both as merchants and as manufacturers. Because they mainly oversaw small and shortlived concerns, however, their enterprises did not fit into traditional understandings of successful business, either in their own time or later, when the field of business history developed in the twentieth century. As a consequence, when Harvard Business School's Baker Library began amassing business manuscripts, curators generally concentrated on collecting the records of large firms and well-known industrialists. Their big-business bias not only affected what was collected, but also how manuscripts were processed. Search aids and cataloging records did not distinguish materials made by or about women because gender was not a compelling issue for early twentieth-century historians.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2000 , pp. 465 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2000

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References

1 Frederic Tudor to Delia (Tudor) Stewart, March 15, 1820. Tudor Collection II (vol. 39, folder 3), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

2 Both Wendy Gamber and Susan Lewis have used the R. G. Dun and Company credit ledgers to study female entrepreneurship. Gamber studied women as milliners and dress makers for her book, The Female Economy. The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1997). Susan Ingalls Lewis wrote on women business owners in Albany, New York, in her article, “Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840–1885,” in Business and Economic History 21 (1992): 65–73. Thomas Dublin has written extensively on women mill workers in New England in the first half of nineteenth century. His 1993 book, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1993), made extensive use of the textile industry records housed at Baker Library.

3 Account book, 1785–1811. Charles C. Chandler Collection (vol. 1), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

4 Account books, 1833–85. Matilda Oliver Collection (vols. 1 and 4), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

5 Massachusetts, vol. 15, p. 122, R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

6 Massachusetts, vol. 15, p. 177, R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

7 Account book, 1743–1806: Nathaniel Chamberlin Collection (vol. 1), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

8 Payroll, 1825–26, Hamilton Manufacturing Company Collection (vol. 250), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.