This study examines female self-employment in British Columbia from 1901 to 1971.
Entrepreneurial women comprised a small proportion of the total female labour force but they
exhibited differences from the rest of the labour force that deserve attention. The study relies on
the Census of Canada to gain perspective on trends in female self-employment over a broad time
period; qualitative sources are also utilized, including Business and Professional Women’s Club
records, to illustrate how individual businesswomen reflected patterns of age, marital status, and
family observed at a broad level. The role of gender in women’s decisions to run their own
enterprises and in their choice of enterprise is also explored. While the research focus is British
Columbia, this study is comparative: self-employed women in the province are compared to their
counterparts in the rest of Canada, but also to self-employed men, and to other working women,
in both regions. Regionally, women in British Columbia had higher rates of self-employment
than women in the rest of the country between 1901 and 1971. Self-employed women in both
British Columbia and Canada were, like wage-earning women, limited to a narrow range of
occupational types, but they were more likely to work in male-dominated occupations. Self employed
women were also older and more likely to be married, widowed or divorced than
wage-earning women; in these aspects, they resembled self-employed men. But there were
gender differences: whether women worked in female or male-dominated enterprises, they
stressed their femininity. The need to take care of their families, particularly if they had lost a
spouse through death or desertion, provided additional rationale for women’s presence in the
business world. Family, marital status, age, gender and region all played a role in women’s
decisions to enter into self-employment between 1901 and 1971. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/10370 |
| Date | 27 November 2018 |
| Creators | Buddle, Melanie Anne |
| Contributors | Baskerville, Peter A. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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