ownership and its intersection with social trends and social movements, including an essay in The Business of Emotions in Modern History (Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp, editors, 2023).
Michals applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II, and reported the following:
What an intriguing concept! When you open my book to page 99, you will find a photo of advertising mogul Mary Wells, circa late 1960s, sitting on what appears to be her desk. She is confidently running a meeting with several men in business suits surrounding her. The text that carries over from the previous page completes the description of Wells’ rise to the top of the male-dominated world of advertising. The rest of the page discusses how many women like Wells, specifically those in other predominantly male realms such as finance, blazed trails for themselves and other women to follow, though often without (at least initially) any direct involvement with the women’s movement or by identifying as feminists. Later, however, this page notes, some, like Julia Walsh, the first woman to own a seat on the American Stock Exchange, and Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (both in the mid-to-late 1960s), either forged relationships with feminist leaders as Walsh did with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, or supported efforts to advance opportunities for womenas Siebert did. The page ends with the first two lines of a new section that discusses increasing press coverage of women entrepreneurs in the 1960s.Visit Debra Michals’s website.
A reader who flipped first to page 99 would get a small snapshot of some of the key themes of my book such as women seeing opportunities in business ownership that they could not find in the labor market and women breaking into male bastions for the first time. Page 99 also touches on two other important topics: the complicated relationship of women entrepreneurs to the women’s movement of the 1960s and their increasing visibility in mainstream newspapers/magazines and business publications. Page 99 comes toward the end of the third chapter which focuses on the changing social landscape of the 1960s with rising divorce rates, Great Society social programs, increased civil and women’s rights activism, and the ways in which women turned to business ownership to help themselves and other women through all of this. It’s also a chapter that shows how the 1960s laid the foundation for the revolution in women’s entrepreneurship that would come in the next two decades. While this is a fun page to land on, it does not capture the expansive coverage my book gives to the history of women’s entrepreneurship and to the various women who were a part of it. This page (which is really only a half- page because of the photograph) does not include immigrant women who started ventures or the rich description of African American women’s businesses in the 1960s, their links to the civil rights movement, and their efforts to avail themselves of the Small Business Administration initiatives to help people of color start businesses. Missing from this page, too, is the role of government programs in encouraging women’s small business ownership after World War II and in the 1960s and 1980s; the legislative changes (especially equal credit laws) needed to do that; or the way civil and women’s rights activists hoped their businesses could create a better, more egalitarian society. And while Mary Wells does go on to be a celebrated business leader with some famous ad campaigns, looking at page 99 alone would miss out on the rise of the celebrity entrepreneur in the 1980s and the increased use of the internet or growing interest in social entrepreneurship in the 1990s and beyond.
--Marshal Zeringue
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