Capital Intentions - (The Luther H. Hodges Jr. and Luther H. Hodges Sr. Business, Entrepreneurship, and Public P) by Edith Sparks (Paperback)

About the Book

Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

Book Synopsis

Late nineteenth-century San Francisco was an ethnically diverse but male-dominated society bustling from a rowdy gold rush, earthquakes, and explosive economic growth. Within this booming marketplace, some women stepped beyond their roles as wives, caregivers, and homemakers to start businesses that combined family concerns with money-making activities. Edith Sparks traces the experiences of these women entrepreneurs, exploring who they were, why they started businesses, how they attracted customers and managed finances, and how they dealt with failure.

Using a unique sample of bankruptcy records, credit reports, advertisements, city directories, census reports, and other sources, Sparks argues that women were competitive, economic actors, strategizing how best to capitalize on their skills in the marketplace. Their boardinghouses, restaurants, saloons, beauty shops, laundries, and clothing stores dotted the city's landscape. By the early twentieth century, however, technological advances, new preferences for name-brand goods, and competition from large-scale retailers constricted opportunities for women entrepreneurs at the same time that new opportunities for women with families drew them into other occupations. Sparks's analysis demonstrates that these businesswomen were intimately tied to the fortunes of the city over its first seventy years.

Review Quotes

"A lively, engaging, and far-ranging look at women entrepreneurs. . . . Sparks fills a large gap in historians' understanding of women's role in the development of the West. . . . There is much to glean from Sparks's investigation."
-- "Register of the Kentucky Historical Society"

"Study makes an undeniably significant contribution to the fields of women's, business, and San Francisco history."
-- "Western Historical Quarterly"

About the Author

Edith Sparks is associate professor of history at the University of the Pacific.