Papers presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández since 2019

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"Gender and the Multiple Currencies of Multinational Business"

Abstract:

This study focuses on the multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company from a gender and cultural perspective. Though multinationals’ operations capacity to influence and structure the global marketplace is undeniable (Coffin 1983, Domosh 2005, de Grazia 2006, Arnold 2011, Gordon 2012), I argue that ideas and perceptions of women’s work and evolving domesticity ideologies had a central role in shaping economic transformation and global business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist and gender historians have examined the place and role of women in business, arguing not only that a history of the corporation without considering women was incomplete, but also demonstrating that women were front runners of companies in a varied and extensive list of industries (Kwolek-Folland 1994, Gamber 1997, Gálvez Muñoz & Fernández Pérez, 2007, Lewis 2009). My analysis goes deeper by looking at the financial and cultural strategies that women used to support their families and the economic and cultural well-being of their homes, and how these made them participants and makers of capitalism as they were so intimately related to the growth of one of the largest US multinational companies. This paper explores credit opportunities, sewing and embroidery practices, cultural practices in relation to work and home production, and women’s consumption and production activities using Singer sewing machines in Spain and Mexico between 1860 and 1940. These are all factors that demonstrate the reaches of business into the private sphere; an important perspective that also brings back the study of the multinational enterprise as a culturally embedded organization, an approach mostly ignored within the scholarship of international business history.

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