Taking Care of Business: Stories of Canadian Women Entrepreneurs

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

One of the most useful feminist concepts deployed over the last decade
has been the notion that for all society’s talk of equal opportunity,
women keep hitting their heads on “glass ceilings” that invisibly
bar their way to continued participation in nontraditional fields. In
small business, for example, women encountered all sorts of
stereotypical attitudes from the guardians of this bastion of male
activity—bank managers, for instance, insisted that loans to would-be
female entrepreneurs be cleared by their husbands. Facing such barriers,
women were lucky to succeed in opening a lemonade stand.

Times are slowly changing and the notion of women-owned businesses is
no longer just a notion. Taking Care of Business is both a chronicle and
a celebration of how 20 Canadian women have launched their own
businesses. Each success story is written by another woman—usually a
journalist or a woman in the communications industry—and presents the
twists and turns of female business ambitions stretching across the full
spectrum of small business in Canada, from ecotourism to court
reporting. The style is chatty, inspirational, and testimonial in tone.

Editor Heather Robertson does her best to extract some overarching
lessons from these wide-ranging experiences, but it is difficult to
generalize about these self-made women. In many ways, there is nothing
gender-specific about the tales of these women, except their courage in
battering male-made stereotypes about their initial entry in small
business. Once inside the bastion, women succeed for much the same
reasons that men do: they fashion a realistic business plan, find
profitable niche markets, they network, listen to their employees, and
put in long, long hours. Undoubtedly, textbooks on female-run businesses
will appear that will better tutor would-be businesswomen, but these
pages provide an inspiring tale of pioneering.