DR CATHERINE BISHOPABSTRACT
That ‘women have always worked’ is well-known; less so is their
presence in the commercial world of business, as sole operators,
employers and partners in small, medium and large enterprises.
Businesswomen in Australia are often spoken of as if they are a
late-twentieth-century phenomenon, born out of second-wave feminism,
but even a cursory delve into the past challenges this. The history of
Australian businesswomen, however, is under-researched. Feminist
historians have tended to focus on the importance of women’s work in
the domestic sphere, on labour and employment, and on politics.
Business historians have pretty much ignored women entirely. In this
paper I will talk about my research on colonial Sydney and my
collaborative project with international scholars on
nineteenth-century businesswomen across the globe. I will also
introduce my DECRA project ‘Gendered Enterprise: A History of Women
in Australian Business since 1880’, focusing on my planned areas of
enquiry, tentative hypotheses and methodologies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Catherine Bishop, ARC DECRA postdoctoral fellow at MACQUARIE
UNIVERSITY, Sydney, is the author of _Minding Her Own Business:
Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney_ (NewSouth Press, 2015), which won
the 2016 Ashurst BUSINESS LITERATURE PRIZE, and the forthcoming _Women
Mean Business: Enterprise in Colonial New Zealand_ (Otago University
Press, 2019). She is co-editing with Jennifer Aston (Northumbria
University) _Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A
Global Perspective _(Palgrave, 2020), and embarking upon a history of
Australian women in business since 1880. Her other projects include a
biography of a female missionary, and a history of Cold War World
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18/09/2019 Last update