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9780814203989

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Susan Ingalls Lewis s eagerly awaited book will give us the best scholarly picture to date of how ordinary people shaped their livelihoods, their day-to-day lives, even their identities, through their work in pre-corporate, urban America. She knows, better than anyone now, how nineteenth-century American urban women who were neither elite nor poor acted on their decisions about work: what to do, how to manage it, and where to do it. Pamela Walker Laird, University of Colorado Denver

Unexceptional Women, a path-breaking piece of scholarship, convincingly demonstrates that in nineteenth-century Albany (and, by extension, other cities in the United States and Europe), businesswomen were ordinary rather than exceptional. Lewis is especially adept at showing how idealized notions of womanhood, individualism, entrepreneurial success, obsession with change over time, and erroneously clear-cut distinctions between 'business' and 'labor' distort the realities of businesswomen's lives and careers. --Wendy Gamber, Indiana University

Unexceptional Women, a path-breaking piece of scholarship, convincingly demonstrates that in nineteenth-century Albany (and, by extension, other cities in the United States and Europe), businesswomen were ordinary rather than exceptional. Lewis is especially adept at showing how idealized notions of womanhood, individualism, entrepreneurial success, obsession with change over time, and erroneously clear-cut distinctions between 'business' and 'labor' distort the realities of businesswomen's lives and careers. --Wendy Gamber, Indiana University

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Susan Ingalls Lewis is associate professor of history, the State University of New York at New Paltz.

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