Nickless on Sparks, _Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (March 2007)

Edith Sparks, _Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San 
Francisco, 1850-1920_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2006. xv + 329 pp. $20 (paperback), ISBN: 0-8078-5775-0.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Pamela J. Nickless, Department of Economics, 
University of North Carolina-Asheville.


In all likelihood, everyone reading this book review is the customer 
of a small proprietor. Particularly in largish cities, small 
proprietors abound -- coffee carts, lunch carts, neighborhood 
groceries, alteration shops, nail shops, hairdressers and barbers. 
Edith Sparks' _Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors on San 
Francisco, 1850-1920_ begins her story by reminding us of the small 
businesses serving our daily needs. As she points out, when we notice 
the women, men and families who run these small, often tiny, 
businesses it is as human interest stories not as businesspeople. It 
is her contention that female proprietors in San Francisco's past 
were also quite common and overlooked.

Sparks' work joins a growing body of literature on nineteenth and 
early twentieth century businesswomen. Like Gamber, Lewis and others 
[1], she uses the R. G. Dun and Company records, city directories, 
the published census and newspapers to seek out information on women 
running businesses. She has also laboriously collected information 
from the Bankruptcy Case Files for northern California for 96 
businesswomen who declared bankruptcy. The information from these 
records includes a wealth of details including information about 
creditors, inventories, amount of debt and occasionally testimony 
from court cases. Anyone who has worked with archival data that is 
not indexed will appreciate the amount of time and frustration 
involved. Consequently, the best part of this work is the chapters on 
women as financial managers and women whose businesses failed.

Sparks frames her analysis with the assertion that women proprietors 
had "capital intentions." By this she means that while females in 
business were usually providing services that were within the 
domestic sphere, they had made a commercial decision in choosing what 
services or goods to offer. They intended to profit and they intended 
to provide a marketable commodity. For most women, this was a good or 
service that was "domestic" in nature. San Francisco in the early 
days suffered a lack of women. Indeed, the gender imbalance in 
population was pronounced for most of this period. (The male/female 
ratio was 158/100 in 1860, declining to 117/100 in 1900.) This gave 
women an edge in the hospitality industry where a woman providing 
food or shelter was often seen as superior. Women in San Francisco 
would continue to work in this sector in proportions larger than 
other U. S. cities.

The text is organized thematically. The first chapter is an overview 
of San Francisco female proprietors. Using census data from six other 
U.S. cities, Sparks argues that San Francisco was unique in some 
respects such as the ethnic make-up of women proprietors. In other 
respects, such as the concentration of women in jobs considered 
feminine, the city was similar. Like other cities, the number of 
female (and male) small proprietors declined in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries. Sparks finds that in San Francisco the 
new opportunities for women in clerical work as well as the 
competition from name-brands and large retailers explain this decline.

Each succeeding chapter looks at an element of women's businesses: 
why women went into business, how women went into business, how they 
attracted customers and finally, women as financial managers and 
women who failed. The thematic approach is at first distracting, each 
chapter seems to repeat gold rush stories, but the last three 
chapters are quite good and make use of a small database effectively.

In particular, Sparks has collected information from the R. G. Dun 
and Company records on a comparable group of San Francisco 
businessmen and is able to compare women and men. She finds that the 
experiences of men and women who ran small businesses were not all 
that different. Her discussion is interesting and nuanced bringing 
into sharp relief what is one of the core problems in studying women 
(or men) who run small enterprises.[2] To put it simply, what do we 
mean by being "in business?" Is the owner of a tiny enterprise using 
entirely her own labor and her own money "in business?" What is the 
distinction between self-employment and running a business? Are both 
terms too grand for women who are working every waking hour at sewing 
(or baking or cleaning or performing any of the myriad tasks of their 
business)? Many of the women and men Sparks examines were in business 
because it was the only way they could earn a living. Particularly 
for women with domestic responsibilities, a small business that could 
be run at home (or in the case of a boarding house _is_ home) had 
obvious attractions. Without other opportunities and access to 
education and training, a business may be a last resort.

The bankruptcy records, where Sparks's data are for women only, also 
highlight the problems for small business owners where illness, fire, 
recession or earthquake could bring down the house of cards. The 
bankruptcy records cover the years 1872-1920 (not inclusive) and the 
experience of the female proprietors seems to echo that of their male 
counterparts. Nothing is as certain as failure for small businesses. 
When combined with the Dun records, it seems clear that both men and 
women who failed often tried again. Sparks argues that some 
persevered out of gumption or tenacity; others simply had no 
alternative but to try again. The bankruptcy records also highlight 
the challenges women faced as the financial management of a business 
became more complex. It is likely that with the exception of some 
ethnic groups women were less educated than men in financial matters.

This is a fine study and a nice addition to the continuing work on 
female proprietors. The bankruptcy records provide the first 
substantive information on women as financial managers and Sparks's 
use of the Dun records to study both women and men in San Francisco 
is intriguing. I wish she had collected a more inclusive sample of 
San Francisco businessmen but time is short and the Dun records do 
not readily lend themselves to scientific sampling. I also found 
myself wondering if we could learn about the typical by studying the 
atypical bankrupt business. But with female proprietors the variety 
is so great; it is hard to know what is typical. In short, those who 
are interested in the history of small business in the U.S. should 
read this book.

Notes:
1. See Wendy Gamber, _The Female Economy: The Millinery and 
Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930_ (University of Illinois Press, 1997) 
and Susan Ingalls Lewis, "Women in the Market Place: Female 
Entrepreneurship, Business Patterns, and Working Families in 
Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885," Ph.D 
dissertation, SUNY Binghamton, 2002.

2. On this point see Susan Ingalls Lewis, "Business or Labor? Blurred 
Boundaries in the Careers of Self-Employed Needlewomen in 
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany" in _Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in 
the Nineteenth Century_, edited by Beth Harris, (Ashgate, 2005).


Pamela J. Nickless recently published "Scarlett's Sisters: Spinsters, 
Widows, Wives, and Free-Traders in Nineteenth Century North 
Carolina," _Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth 
Century_, edited by Beth Harris (Ashgate, 2005) and has recently 
started a study on nineteenth-century female proprietors in 
Charleston, SC. 
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