Booksology The Commercial Lives of Irish Women, 1850–1922: Business as Usual
Author: Antonia Hart
ISBN-13: 9781836244844
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Guideline Price: £100
The hardest history to trace is that which belongs to people who left no documents behind, no diaries and no records in their names. And so it is with most women – as shown in this enlightening book, the first full-length historical study of Irish women in business. Although she sketches faint outlines of scores of female pawnbrokers, hoteliers and other entrepreneuses, Antonia Hart explains that most disappeared in death, cloaked by losing their maiden names, for instance, or being described on official papers simply as “wife”.
But the presence of female proprietors was so widespread pre-1922 that they ran, she estimates, about 10 per cent of businesses in the Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) area of Dublin. And they took their commercial instincts abroad – notably to San Francisco, where female Irish émigrées outnumbered their male counterparts in business because hawking and peddling had become feminine skills back home.
Women stood out in particular trades – running 32 per cent of Irish tobacconists in 1900 and diversifying away from the volatile cigarette market into household items. Among pawnbrokers, one in eight was a woman at the industry peak of 1866. The Shelbourne Hotel was owned and managed by Margaret Cotton Jury during the 1870s, reflecting female dominance of the accommodation sector down to the lowliest lodging houses.
The course of Irish history was, arguably, changed by one of these women, dressmaker Kathleen Daly (later Clarke) who supported her precariously employed husband Tom by starting an ice cream shop and later through the family tobacconist and newsagent at 55 Amiens Street in Dublin. With her full blessing, the building doubled as an underground communication hub for the nationalist network, culminating in the 1916 Rising. Independence, however, undercut these feminine freedoms, particularly under a coalition of the 1932 Fianna Fáil government and the Catholic Church, says Hart.
She researched this subject for her PhD at Trinity College and the vagaries of publishing mean she has two books reaching the shops within a month. The other one, Guinness, A Family Succession: The True Story of the Struggle to Create the World’s Largest Brewery, might be the more successful commercially, not least because its €25 price is a quarter of this one. Her muses might have smiled wryly at that marketing stroke.
