Elizabeth Strutt and middle-class woman of the family enterprise in the 18th century

Dana Tom

Why were Elizabeth Strutt and many middle-class women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries successful in contributing to their family enterprises, despite the imminent emergence of "the separate spheres" of the sexes?

Elizabeth Strutt possessed a unique, romantic marriage with her husband and thus earned the entrusted role as an economic contributor to the Strutt family enterprise, unlike the subordinate roles of most wives during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, aside from her unconventional, marital partnership with Strutt, Elizabeth accurately represented the role of many eighteenth-century middle-class wives as the hidden investments of family industries before the later years of the Industrial Revolution. And yet, ironically, the economic contributions of women during the late eighteenth century eventually fazed them out of all economic activity during the nineteenth, as European corporations industrialized and grew and as “the separate spheres” of the sexes consequently emerged.