INDUSTRIFEM

The INDUSTRIFEM project concerns the question of female entrepreneurship in France in the nineteenth century, which remains largely underrated. Economic history has long accorded women entrepreneurs a very minor place, relegating them to the status of historical anecdotes. This perspective of a break in women's entrepreneurial activity during the industrialization process has long dominated historiography. However, it has recently been subject to a fundamental questioning. A literature focused on the Anglo-Saxon world shows that female entrepreneurship did not disappear in the nineteenth century. French women entrepreneurs, however, have received little attention. The project INDUSTRIFEM fills this gap. It aims to bring these women entrepreneurs out of invisibility by highlighting their contribution to the French industrial take-off, by shedding light on the specificities of their entrepreneurial practice - if there are any - as well as the role played by the legal framework within which it was deployed. Women’s economic involvement in the industrialisation process has mainly been analyzed through the prism of waged employment (female labour force participation, earnings – the “gender wage gap”). Their participation outside the framework of salaried employment has not been examined in depth. From this point of view, the INDUSTRIFEM project renews the vision of the economic role played by women in the nineteenth century. Because of the issues at stake, this economic history project mobilizes varied and complementary disciplinary skills, brought together in a consortium of four partners including legal historians (CLHDPP, U. Lyon III), researchers in management sciences specializing in women's entrepreneurship and innovation (Magellan, U. Lyon III), researchers in economics specializing in economic history and in history of economic thought (BETA, U. de Strasbourg) and historians (University of Ottawa). By bringing French women entrepreneurs of the 19th century out of invisibility, the project intends to nourish and complete, through an original historical perspective, the current reflections on the role and representation of women in corporate governance in our societies.