The purpose of this special issue is to explore the relationship of gender in several national contexts to the service industriesbusinesses that provide benefit to others or produce items or infrastructure that support others. Several questions have guided our overall purpose. What do we learn about business history generally, and the service sector specifically, by taking gender into account? Is what we learn the same in different national contexts? If not, why not? We hope that the answers suggested in the essays will stimulate dialogue on both national case studies and comparative themes and will illuminate transnational patterns and perspectives in the history of women, gender, and business.

Despite the importance of service-sector activities, both to women and to the U.S. economy, services have not figured prominently in business history. A consideration of the usefulness of this subject to business history is followed by a case study of household services in the nineteenth century, showing their social and economic value and the ways in which they exemplified the integral relations between women's work and business.

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the country's service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of wel-fare-state policies. Yet women's self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.

Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activi-ties than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.

Structural changes during the past two centuries shaped Spanish women's economic activity in firms, family businesses, and self-employment, reflecting women's adaptation to a social system that assigned gender-specific roles and rights. In response to the discriminatory effects of labor segregation, Spain's female workers specialized in the service-sector jobs that were available to them. Until the twentieth century, Spanish women's business initiatives in this sector were mainly in domestic service, retail distribution, and social services. During the 1900s, the cumulative impact of rapid industrialization, the growth of service industries, legal reform, and the shift to a democratic system in Spain during the 1970s paved the way for women to enter public and private firms as professionals. As a result, more women became self-employed or helped to run family businesses related to tourism, the hotel and restaurant industries, design, fashion, and the arts.

Women have been important contributors to Greek mercantilism since the time of the economic migration that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, and they were deeply involved in Greek capitalist development. Their role was particularly pronounced due to the predominance of the family in Greek society and business. Diaspora women operated as keepers of the internationally dispersed Greek clan, while their counterparts in mainland Greece perpetuated and strengthened the local family network.

Transportation is one of the service industries in which women are now active participants in both mature and developing economies. Traditionally dominated by male entrepreneurs and workers, transportation in westernized nations has had to accommodate the demands of women with the passage of legislation imposing conditions of equality. The global search for cheap labor is another factor that has propelled women into the fields of international and local travel, tourism, and transportation. Although businesses in recent years have placed a premium on human mobility, rapid movement of goods, and instant communication, there has been little historical research that connects the past with these developments, nor has there been a concerted effort to under-stand the impact of gender on the shifts in direction.