Women and Business in Urban Northern Europe

When studying historical populations, assumptions have often been made about the inability of widows to hold on to property or actively engage in production. Married women, on the other hand, have been viewed as appendages to breadwinning husbands and helpless in the absence of male support.

The aim of this article is to challenge such ideas. When studying female activity in an urban environment like nineteenth-century Helsinki using occupation registers, municipal trade licence applications and tax records in combination with household composition data, we find ever-increasing categories of women working and contributing to the household economy. The nineteenth-century tax records include information about economic activity of female household heads, like widows and spinsters. Activities by wives have to be gleaned from other documents. Using such documents we find that by 1900 working-class women were working, unless they were lucky enough to possess a house that could generate rent income. Middle-class women had entered the professions and the office world. However, although the early nineteenth century had seen many women in business in Helsinki, it would seem that the easing of regulations resulted in ever more women running small, middle-sized or large business enterprises. Examples can be found of women owning factories or breweries as well as being engaged in sewing or ironing. Shop keeping seems however to have been the field of activity of choice, particularly selling food products, going back on a proud tradition of females engaged in production and sales of food and clothes. We can see how females in turn of the century Helsinki collaborated with family members within and outside the immediate biological unit. However, one of the issues that is abundantly clear is the presence and increasing presence of women in all aspects of urban economic life.