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Margaret Hardenbroeck
After her first husband died, Hardenbroeck inherited his business and bought ships for trade across the Atlantic. Dutch legal arrangements gave her room to act as a merchant in her own right. Her ships also carried enslaved people, a part of the family fortune that belongs in the story of how she built it.
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Glückel of Hameln
Glikl of Hameln kept trading after her husband’s death. She bought and sold pearls, dealt in imported goods, and manufactured stockings in Hamburg. Her memoir describes business from the inside, down to the night she sat up drafting a trial partnership agreement for her husband to review.
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Elizabeth Timothy
After her husband died, Timothy kept the South Carolina Gazette in print and ran the shop while training her son. The first issue she produced appealed directly to subscribers for their continued support. Her career shows how much a colonial newspaper depended on the business of keeping readers and getting a new issue out on time.
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Eliza Lucas
Pinckney managed plantations and experimented with growing indigo for export in colonial South Carolina. Her surviving letters make it possible to follow some of those decisions as they happened. The wealth came from plantations worked by enslaved people, whose labor made commercial production possible.
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Mary Katharine Goddard
Born
Goddard ran a Baltimore printing business and produced the first edition of the Declaration of Independence to print most of the signers’ names. Printing was a trade as well as a political act: the same skills and shop could turn out newspapers, government notices, and a document the new country wanted widely circulated.
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Rose Bertin
Bertin built a business around Le Grand Mogol, her Paris fashion shop. Marie Antoinette was her best-known customer, and Bertin continued supplying her when the royal family was under house arrest. The shop shows how much a fashionable business could gain from royal patronage, and how quickly those ties could become a liability.
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Madame Clicquot Ponsardin
Barbe-Nicole Clicquot took over her late husband’s Champagne business in 1805. The house credits her with introducing a riddling table, which holds bottles as sediment is worked toward the neck for removal. That cellar process is an example of how a producer could change the look of the wine customers bought.
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Rebecca Lukens
Lukens took charge of a Pennsylvania ironworks after her husband died in 1825. Look at the mill’s production of iron plate for boilers to see what she was running: a heavy industrial concern that had to keep machinery, workers, orders, and credit in step.
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Efunroye Tinubu
Tinubu became a substantial merchant in nineteenth-century Lagos and Abeokuta. The surviving evidence identifies her involvement in both the palm oil trade and the sale of enslaved people, although it leaves many details of her dealings unknown. Her career puts a prominent woman at the center of markets connected to Atlantic commerce and local political power.
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Elizabeth Keckley
Keckley’s dressmaking brought in money and built a circle of clients willing to lend her the funds to buy freedom for herself and her son. In Washington she made dresses for Mary Lincoln. Following her work from one city to the next shows how a customer’s recommendation could open doors to a new market.
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Mary Ellen Pleasant
Pleasant invested in businesses and property in Gold Rush-era San Francisco, including through a partnership with Thomas Bell. Her career shows what capital and business relationships could do for a Black woman who still encountered open discrimination in the city. The contrast comes through clearly in her fight for access to its streetcars.
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Lydia Pinkham
Pinkham built a patent-medicine business around a vegetable compound marketed to women. The advertisements and packaging made her own name and likeness part of the product. They show how a firm could sell a sense of direct advice from a woman to customers it might never meet.
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Hirooka Asako
Hirooka helped take the Osaka merchant house Kajimaya into coal mining and banking in the 1880s. The same firm later helped form Daido Life Insurance. Her part in the coal venture gives you a place to start tracing how an established merchant house put its resources into new industries.
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