Abstract

"Italian businesswomen in the twentieth century: data and sources"

Giacomo Gabbuti, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (giacomo.gabbuti@santannapisa.it)

In this paper, expanding our recent works on this subject, we unveil the steady, but so far overlooked, presence of businesswomen in the Italian economy, over the whole twentieth century. We manage to reach this objective by reconstructing new indicators from two different sources: on one hand, we approach tabulated evidence produced by population censuses; on the other, we use micro-data collected from the Chamber of Commerce rolls – specifically, the one preserved in Bergamo (Lombardy), a medium-sized town in Northern Italy. While well-known to historians, neither of these sources had been adopted for this purpose before.

By means of these sources, we estimate the number and share of women independent workers at census years from 1901 to 2001, with regional and sectoral decomposition for 1901, 1951, and 2001, and yearly figures on female start-ups between 1925 and 1978 in Bergamo.

Despite the impossibility to fully consider family co-helpers, which recent literature rightly pointed out as businesswomen in all accounts, our estimates show that according to population censuses, the women share of independent workers outside agriculture was never less than 20% in the 20th century, with the absolute number of female independent workers steadily growing from 1951 to 1991. Figures from Bergamo, while focusing only on start-ups, show the same results, with the women share going from 20% in the early 1920s, to around a third in the 1940s. Trends which, while contrasting prevailing narratives in the Italian public discourse, do not lead to support any “traditional” explanation for female entrepreneurship.

While highlighting the role played by women in the creation and management of (small) businesses, our results lead us to emphasizes the effectiveness of reading even very traditional sources of economic and business history, such as those adopted in this paper, by means of gender lens.