In response to an invitation from the editor of Enterprise & Society, last year David Sicilia and I put out a call for papers for a special issue of the journal that would focus on gender and business history. The call elicited twenty-five submissions, an impressive array of scholarship from authors who addressed the subject from a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. From these submissions, we chose the four articles that appear in this volume and three others that will be published in the next issue of Enterprise & Society (June 2001). We made our final selections on the basis of thematic, national, and organizational representativeness and on the ways in which the articles complemented each other and revealed aspects of the “state of the field.” Let me thank the more than fifty referees who generously read and commented anonymously on the original submissions. I enjoyed working with them, with the authors, and with David in this communal endeavor.

Women's work has often been portrayed as unskilled and lowpaid labor done for the benefit of others. But the role of female enterprise in eighteenth-century Lyon presents another dimension: non-guild women workers who secured control of raw materials, labor,and distribution networks within an underground economy. In an unusual twist of fortune,a small but significant number of women in the silk,hat-making, and button-making industries turned to their own benefit the advantages customarily provided to male entrepreneurs. These women workers stole materials from the guild workshops in which they were employed. Having learned the technology needed to manufacture silk,hats,and buttons from guild masters,they set up clandestine workshops and trained their own workers. Even in the face of official guild protest,their low prices and competent workmanship induced some masters to buy their goods to reduce the cost of their own products. The women used a set of capitalist practices to survive in a difficult transitional era of superficially regulated norms.

Exploring the relationship between gender differences in labor turnover—which have been linked to male-female wage differentials—and the early twentieth-century development of internal labor markets, this case study suggests that observed gender differences in labor turnover in the twentieth century can be attributed, at least in part, to the specific employment policy decisions of firms. These policies, and the internal labor markets they helped create, directly addressed some of the causes of male turnover but did little to confront the sources (often non-market) of female turnover. The results of this analysis call into question the assumption that the higher rate of female turnover is exogenously determined.

Women flourished as producers, directors, screenwriters, and editors in the first quarter-century of the film industry. But by 1925 their presence in all but screenwriting was severely diminished. The argument of this essay is that the process of gendering the industry ultimately closed studio doors to female filmmakers. As studios moved from the artistic and entrepreneurial stage, conducive to the perceived qualities of women, to the corporate stage, the needs of the industry became masculinized and women were excluded. This process is explored by examining the assumptions regarding gender inherited by the early movie industry and the context in which gender was discussed within the industry, and by asking whether explicit assumptions about the fitness of women and men were ever factors in determining what and who a filmmaker should be.

The media celebration of media owner Ted Turner's career and personal biography reflects important shifts in the image of American corporate leadership over the past thirty years.Even aspects of Turner’s life we would normally consider private, such as his sex life and his marriage to Jane Fonda, have taken on this very public function.As a result Turner has served as a transitional figure between two competing visions of corporate identity and responsibility: paternalist managerialism and the “real entity” theory of the firm on the one hand, and on the other, antimanagerial market adventurism and the new economic theory of the firm as a nexus of contracts.The story of how Turner has come to serve this gender-charged iconic function helps clarify how the balance of representational power continues to shift back and forth between these two visions during a period of considerable upheaval in the social, legal, and symbolic construction of the American corporation.