Narrating histories of women at work: Archives, stories, and the promise of feminism

This paper explores narrative in Business History and business histories as a means of understanding the absence and presence of women. We develop the argument that narrative is constructed in the historical research process, and note the implications of this for our understanding of business history as product and practice. We suggest that business historians work with a distinction between stories in description, generated by participants as found in traces of the past, and narration through analysis, created by historians writing in the present. We suggest that business historians can work productively with this differentiation, and that histories will be better able to consider the position of women in both forms of narrative. We conclude with reflections on the nature of the archive and feminist perspectives on history to outline a research agenda that would develop our argument empirically and conceptually.