Business History Review

Despite the importance of service-sector activities, both to women and to the U.S. economy, services have not figured prominently in business history. A consideration of the usefulness of this subject to business history is followed by a case study of "household services" in the nineteenth century, showing their social and economic value and the ways in which they exemplified the integral relations between women's work and business.

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the country's service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of welfare-state policies. Yet women's self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business-history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.

Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activities than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.

Structural changes during the past two centuries shaped Spanish women's economic activity in firms, family businesses, and self-employment, reflecting women's adaptation to a social system that assigned gender-specific roles and rights. In response to the discriminatory effects of labor segregation, Spain's female workers specialized in the service-sector jobs that were available to them. Until the twentieth century, Spanish women's business initiatives in this sector were mainly in domestic service, retail distribution, and social services. During the 1900s, the cumulative impact of rapid industrialization, the growth of service industries, legal reform, and the shift to a democratic system in Spain during the 1970s paved the way for women to enter public and private firms as professionals. As a result, more women became self-employed or helped to run family businesses related to tourism, the hotel and restaurant industries, design, fashion, and the arts.

Women have been important contributors to Greek mercantilism since the time of the economic migration that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, and they were deeply involved in Greek capitalist development. Their role was particularly pronounced due to the predominance of the family in Greek society and business. Diaspora women operated as "keepers" of the internationally dispersed Greek clan, while their counterparts in mainland Greece perpetuated and strengthened the local family network.

American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein. Reviewed by Michael French.

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De gjorde Danmark større . . . De multinationale danske entreprenørfirmaer i krise og krig 1919–1947 [They Made Denmark Larger, but Did They Make Her Greater? Danish Construction Companies in Crisis and in War, 1919–1947]. By Steen Andersen. Reviewed by Knud Knudsen.

Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948–92. By Xiaolan Bao. Reviewed by Yong Chen.

Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. By David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson. Reviewed by Michael R. Adamson.

The Politics of CANDU Exports. By Duane Bratt. Reviewed by Barry E. C. Boothman.

Business Expansion and Structural Change in Pre-War China: Liu Hongsheng and His Enterprises, 1920–1937. By Kai Yiu Chan. Reviewed by Morris L. Bian.

Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia. By Sherman Cochran. Reviewed by Adam McKeown.

Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970. By David Edgerton. Reviewed by Alan Booth.

Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology. By Duncan K. Foley. Reviewed by Keith Tribe.

Discounted Labour: Women Workers in Canada, 1870–1939. By Ruth A. Frager and Carmela K. Patrias. Reviewed by Carmen Nielson.

Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns that Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires. By Kristoffer A. Garin. Reviewed by Ferry de Goey.

La Banque d’Amsterdam et le florin européen au temps de la République néerlandaise (1610–1820) [The Bank of Amsterdam and the European Florin under the Dutch Republic (1610–1820)]. By Lucien Gillard. Reviewed by Joël Félix.

Rails Through the Wiregrass: A History of the Georgia and Florida Railroad. By H. Roger Grant. Reviewed by Sean Patrick Adams.

Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955. By Adam Green. Reviewed by Robert E. Weems Jr.

The Rise of Spanish Multinationals: European Business in the Global Economy. By Mauro F. Guillén. Reviewed by Núria Puig.

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. By David M. Henkin. Reviewed by Robert MacDougall.

Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II. By Andrew E. Kersten. Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky.

A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis. By Alan Lawson. Reviewed by Jason Scott Smith.

The Entrepreneurial Shift: Americanization in European High-Technology Management Education. By Robert R. Locke and Katja Schöne. Reviewed by Susanne Hilger.

Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. By Karen Ward Mahar. Reviewed by Pennee Bender.

North East England, 1850–1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region. By Graeme J. Milne. Reviewed by Maurice Kirby.

The Effortless Economy of Science? By Philip Mirowski. Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter.

A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business. By Rowena Olegario. Reviewed by Mark R. Wilson.

The Paradox of Democratic Capitalism: Politics and Economics in American Thought. By David Prindle. Reviewed by Mary Furner.

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetary Supremacy. By William L. Silber. Reviewed by Maury Klein.

Ortsempfänger, Volksfernseher und Optaphon: Die Entwicklung der deutschen Radio- und Fernsehindustrie und das Unternehmen Loewe, 1923–1962 [“Ortsempfänger,” “Volksfernseher,” and “Optaphon”: The Development of German Radio and Television Industry and the Loewe Company, 1923–1962]. By Kilian J. L. Steiner. Reviewed by Peter Jelavich.

The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization.Edited by Masayuki Tanimoto. Reviewed by David G. Wittner.

Der Anspruch auf das Glück des Tüchtigen: Beruf, Organisation und Selbstverständnis der Bankangestellten in der Weimarer Republik [A Claim on “Fortune Favors the Bold”: Business, Organization and Self-Conception of Bank Employees in the Weimar Republic]. By Imke Thamm. Reviewed by Ingo Köhler.

From Marriage to Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work. By Susan Thistle, Reviewed by Miriam Cohen.

The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster. By Werner Troesken, Reviewed by Mark Aldrich.

Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000. Edited by Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser. Reviewed by Christian Stadler.

The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860–1914. By David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten. Reviewed by Marcelo Bucheli.

The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865. By Mark R. Wilson. Reviewed by Michael S. Green.