Female Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century London: a Prosopographical Study of Businesswomen in Lombard Street, Gracechurch Street and Cornhill in the

该项目将调查历史悠久的伦敦市一个富裕的地理区域内从事各种行业的女商人，该区域靠近被认为是其商业中心的皇家交易所。这项外貌研究将追踪他们的职业培训、家庭环境、亲属关系和信用网络，并衡量他们企业经营的规模和寿命。这样做，它将回答这样一个问题：在主流叙事表明女性经济参与度下降的时候，女性是如何创造、维持和发展企业的？它将设法查明这些人的生活和背景中的任何显著特征，并评估这些特征是否随着时间的推移而发生变化，例如，由于一个人的婚姻状况和家庭情况发生变化或对外部因素作出反应。该项目力求在更长的时间内，利用比迄今为止开展的其他研究更广泛的资源，更全面地了解首都女性创业的情况。它将为女性工作领域的学术研究做出贡献，但也会让我们了解商业史和大都会史，并解决女性在这两个领域的历史编纂中相对缺失的问题。

This project will investigate businesswomen in a variety of trades in a wealthy geographic area in the historic City ofLondon, in close proximity to the Royal Exchange, considered its commercial heart. This prosopographical study willtrace their occupational training, family circumstances, kinship and credit networks and measure the size and longevity oftheir business operations. In so doing, it will answer the question: how did women create, maintain and grow businessesat a time when prevailing narratives suggest women's declining economic participation? It will seek to identify anynotable characteristics in these individuals' lives and backgrounds and assess whether these may have changed overtime, for example as one's marital status and family situation changed or in response to external factors. This projectseeks to provide a more comprehensive picture of female entrepreneurship in the capital over a greater span of time andutilising a wider range of sources than other studies undertaken to date. It will contribute to scholarship in the field ofwomen's work, but also inform our understanding of business history and metropolitan history and address the relativeabsence of women in the historiography of both.