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Female Entrepreneurship in Spain during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Lina Glvez Muoz  and
Paloma Fernndez Prez
Lina Glvez Muoz
Affiliation:
LINA GLVEZ MUOZ is assistant professor at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville.
Paloma Fernndez Prez
Affiliation:
PALOMA FERNNDEZ PREZ is assistant professor at the Universitat de Barcelona.
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Abstract

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Structural changes during the past two centuries shaped Spanish women's economic activity in firms, family businesses, and self-employment, reflecting women's adaptation to a social system that assigned gender-specific roles and rights. In response to the discriminatory effects of labor segregation, Spain's female workers specialized in the service-sector jobs that were available to them. Until the twentieth century, Spanish women's business initiatives in this sector were mainly in domestic service, retail distribution, and social services. During the 1900s, the cumulative impact of rapid industrialization, the growth of service industries, legal reform, and the shift to a democratic system in Spain during the 1970s paved the way for women to enter public and private firms as professionals. As a result, more women became self-employed or helped to run family businesses related to tourism, the hotel and restaurant industries, design, fashion, and the arts.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2007 , pp. 495 - 515
Copyright
Copyright The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2007

References

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18 One of the latest examples of this debate was published by Gabriel Tortella in the newspaper La Vanguardia, 4 July 2004, in which he reiterated his belief in the scarcity of male entrepreneurs, an argument he first put forth in the late 1990s.

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24 The laws that have governed Spanish labor contracts market since 1938.

25 The female president of the Francoist Seccin Femenina commented in 1943 that, according to the new regime, Women never discover anything, they lack, of course, the innovative talent reserved by God for male brains. We women can only interpret, for better or for worse, what men have done to us, Luis Otero, La Seccin Femenina: De cuando a la mujer espaola se le pedia ser hogarea, patriota, obediente, disciplinada, abnegada, diligente, religiosa, decidida, alegre, sufrida y leal (Madrid, 2004)Google Scholar.

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44 The most recent of such appointments took place under the new Socialist government, elected in March 2004, which assigned a cabinet that was 50 percent male and 50 percent female (excluding the president).

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47 See Carreras and Tafunell, Spain: Big Manufacturing Firms between State and Market, 277-304. Even in capital intensive sectors, such as that of metal mechanics, the large private firm was not the norm in Spain before the Spanish civil war. Fernndez Perz, Un sigh y medio de trefilera, ch. 3.

48 Borderas, Entre Lneas; Pilar Domnguez Prats, Trabajos iguales y condiciones desiguales: Las guardesas y los guardabarreras en RENFE, 1941-1971, in Privilegios o Eficiencia? eds. Sarasa and Glvez, 357-78; and Muoz, Lina Glvez, Compaa Arrendataria de Tabacos, 1887-1945: Cambio tecnolgico y empleo femenino (Madrid, 2000)Google Scholar.

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50 An amalgam of the name of the owner, Toton Cornelia, and the abbreviation for Barcelona, BCN.

51 For most of these women entrepreneurs, see Cien empresarias: Testimonios de 100 mujeres que lo han conseguido (Madrid, 2003)Google Scholar. For the Tous family firm, see La Van-guardia, 23 Mar. 2003, 79.

52 Before the civil war, Vzquez attended secondary school, and her knowledge of the French language and typewriting turned out to be of great use to her as a French exile, when she served as a translator for Spanish refugees. Back in Barcelona, she studied to be a nurse and obtained a Ph.D. in psychology in La Habana. The strong influence of her background in social Catholicism and of Pope Leo XIII's doctrine, which held that employers had to care for their workers, led her and her family to found the Barcelona business school E.A.D.A. in 1957, one of the most important private business schools in Catalonia. Now eighty-one years old, she still works in her office. La Vanguardia, 28 Mar. 2004, 67.

53 Also of note are the small Independent Container Agency S.L. founded by Coral Ortega, and Consignaciones Cuys S.L., founded by Caridad Cuys Jorge in the field of maritime and land transport, as well as the Laboratorios Biolab S.L. (a chemical lab), founded by Ana Escario Garca-Trevijano. See Cien empresarias.

54 La Vanguardia, 26 Jan. 2003, 67. Another interesting example is Amparo Moraleda, president of IBM Spain.

55 Data from the Confederation of Spanish Chambers of Commerce are cited by Berta Moreno in the Centro de Estudios Econmicos Tomillo, Mujer y Empresa en el siglo XXI: El papel de la Consolidatin Empresarial, seminar at the Cmara de Comercio de Madrid, held in Madrid, 29 Apr. 2003.

56 The conclusions of the Deloitte study have been summarized by Enrique de la Villa, partner of Deloitte and the person responsible for the firm's human capital section, in Politicas de conciliatin: La familia? Bien, gracias: Equilibrar vida profesional y privada es un deseo legtimo pero casi imposible de alcanzar, in the Dinero section of La Vanguardia, 11 July 2004, 26. In the same section, Carlos Obeso, Escuela Superior de Directin y Administratin de Empresas (ESADE), professor and director of the Instituto de Estudios Laborales, declared that the increase in the number of working hours per day among top managers is not the main factor in the struggle to combine a job with personal and family life; rather, it is the need to work on weekends, during school vacation, or on holidays.

57 Cited by Rosa Cullell in her report to the Twelfth International Women's Summit of Barcelona of 2002, and in El Pais, 13 July 2002, 53. In 2003 the total active working population in Spain was almost 17 million (6.5 million women). Only 5.41 percent of the presidents and 2.56 percent of vice-presidents of IBEX35 companies were women. Data from the Web page of the Instituto de la Mujer, based on EPA (Encuesta Poblacion Activa) figures.

58 On Marced, see El Pais, 28 July 2002,15.

59 Rodrigo Rato, in his prologue to Cien empresarias, 9.

60 Fernndez Prez, El rostro familiar de la metrpoli, and Mujeres y burguesia en el Cdiz del siglo XVIII, in La burguesa espaola en la edad moderna, ed. Recio, L. M. Enciso (Valladolid, 1996), 28098Google Scholar. For sixteenth-century Seville, see also Mary Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville.

61 Lazonick, William, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, Identity and the Boundaries of Business History: An Essay on Consensus and Creativity, in Business History Around the World, eds. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 1130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Granovetter, Mark, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 See Maria Pallars, Una carrera de obstculos: el lastre de los estereotipos de gnero, at http:www.emprendedoras.comarticle854.html.