The Aylward Papers are predominantly made up of correspondence between male merchants, but sometimes letters do emerge from women, offering glimpses into their lives and work. I felt it would further understanding of the community as a whole to explore how both men and women operated in Atlantic–Mediterranean trade. My research into the history of women in business thus came about almost by chance, as my focus had up until that point been on their apparently dominant male counterparts. Yet I soon realised the importance for my study of looking into the lives of women, or of those few who had left behind valuable traces of their work and thoughts. Unlike their husbands, fathers, or brothers, women in their business correspondence would also often discuss their health and families, worries and emotions, offering the opportunity, I felt, to humanise the work and explore what merchants experienced when operating in those ports. This chapter is not an exhaustive analysis of female traders in a religious minority, but opens a new line of enquiry that might benefit from further investigation.

Trying to understand if the women represented in the Aylward Papers were anomalous or not, I started to investigate the literature, which is extremely rich on the topic. All over Europe – in Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain – women worked alongside their husbands and fathers in the most diverse businesses, ranging from trade to retail, and from shipbuilding to the textile industry. When necessary, they refocused the family business and certainly showed more entrepreneurship than male family members did in similar situations. For men's business craft, the contribution of their wives seems to have been indispensable, and judging by the relative ease with which these women were able to continue their husband's trade following bereavement, scholars disagree that married women were restricted in their labour by their reproductive and domestic duties. Marriage could be vital to provide access to the business world, and no one denies that many women failed in business due to lack of expertise and contacts. Female business owners always ranged between five and nine per cent of the total number of owners. There were barriers against women in the political and legal systems but economic practice diverged –women knew business and when working they outperformed men.