Making provision

: female grocery proprietors in Edwardian London

Abstract

This study is a collective biography of London’s female grocery proprietors, employing quantitative and qualitative techniques to probe (mainly) genealogical sources. It is the first study of British female entrepreneurs to focus on the shop-keeping sector which, though a frequent choice for women, was dominated by men. Of approximately 1500 ‘Grocers & Tea Dealers’ in the Post Office London Trades Directory (1911) about a tenth were led by women. A broad range of genealogical sources was supplemented by others which are novel in this context. These included Inland Revenue Valuation Office Field Books, Charles Booth’s poverty maps and police notebooks, and the exterior of surviving shop buildings. This study examines directly comparable cohorts of men’s and women’s businesses across an unusually broad spectrum of business characteristics. It argues that men and women operated their businesses in a similar way: most were one-location sole proprietorships, based at home and employing family members. The shops themselves, and the streets where they were located were of a similar type, whether the owner was a man or a woman. There was no ‘typical’ female, or male, grocer. Female grocery-shop proprietors were a diverse assortment in terms of birthplace, class, ethnicity, occupational experience, age, marital status, and household composition. This study inquires further into socioeconomic status than previous surveys and develops new categories to analyse the reasons why women started their businesses. The ‘space’ of the grocery shop sector was dominated by men, in terms of both the physical space but also of the role of grocer and business-owner. Yet many women, from diverse backgrounds, ran successful businesses in this sector. This study argues that a grocery business inhabited a liminal zone in several senses, where formal/informal, domestic/commercial and public/private overlapped. This blurring of lines helped women to subvert cultural norms, particularly those which associated women with domestic activities. This study breaks new ground by comparing the longevity of women’s businesses with men’s in the same sector. It challenges prevailing definitions of ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘success’ to reveal and assess the contributions of female grocery-shop-keepers to their families and to the economy.

Date of Award	1 Jun 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Patricia Thane (Supervisor)