Business and Professional Women of Colonial America

This work plumbs two centuries of androcentric culture to disclose the females who breached convention to earn a living by pursuing a career. The one hundred forty-six subjects in this book acknowledge female entrepreneurs during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Personal details place women in a wide range of commercial endeavors, from sorting fish, vending brooms and baskets, and marketing plum cake and West Indian fruit to publishing poetry and surveying the shells, fishbones, birds, and seaweed of the Atlantic coast. Guides to professional women organized by career and by place are also included.