Labor-Management Relations

The experiences of Lewis, Beech and Rudkin reveal that these female business leaders did not behave as champions of employees or women as feminists then and now might have hoped. Instead, they acted in commonplace ways as architects of a “new welfare capitalism” characteristic of American companies starting in the 1930s and made labor-management decisions designed to blunt the impact of unions within their companies like so many business leaders in the middle of the twentieth century. Leveraging the language of family, they built companies that asserted overtly employee-oriented policies that rewarded loyalty and efficiency with strong wages, benefits and noblesse oblige for the workers they wished to retain long term. All of them relied on this approach as a way to maintain control of labor-management relations, as an expedient business strategy and as one ideologically resonant with their beliefs. Lewis, Beech and Rudkin were business leaders of their time, evangelists for the free enterprise system, in favour of less government regulation, and in support of company cultures that treated their employees as resources with a responsibility to increase the company’s profit margin.

Conclusion

Writing Lewis, Beech and Rudkin into the “canon of business leaders” forces us to reconceptualize the 1930s-70s as a context for business entrepreneurship and leadership and also how we think about business success. All three founded, managed and sold their businesses during a time period when gender fundamentally shaped both their opportunities and threats, and thus their “nose” for business needed to be attuned to their gendered context. They needed to be able to navigate these gender-specific opportunities and threats along with those shaped by more general contextual factors in order to be successful. We need to consider this in order to understand women’s leadership during this period. Thus, adding Lewis, Beech and Rudkin and a gendered analysis of how they started successful big businesses in the mid-twentieth century delimits the story of entrepreneurship and makes it more useful to us today, in particular for women trying to learn how to navigate gender in business and other professional contexts in the twenty-first century.

Introduction

To become a “boss lady” in the middle of the twentieth century was to fly in the face of a popular set of ideas about the proper roles for men and women in the business world. The term “office girl” used to describe one in three working women in the U.S. in the 1960s infantilized women at precisely the moment when a small but impactful group of female executives, including Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin, rose to the upper echelons of the business world. In contrast to the legions of female clerical workers, women who led businesses in the middle of the twentieth century were transgressors whose very presence seemed a threat to those anxious to preserve men’s power. Navigating a business world that viewed them as fundamentally different because they were women was a key challenge. To succeed they needed to find a path into a professional world deeply ingrained with male privilege and steeped in rigid gender conventions that shaped both obstacles and opportunities.

Gender as Brand Management

Lewis, Beech and Rudkin positioned themselves in distinctly gendered ways relative to their products and their customers. For each one, their marketing messages changed over time, moving toward a more stereotyped presentation of themselves. All three played a role essential to their brand identities—Lewis as housewife, Beech as hostess and Rudkin as grandmother—that was a gendered idea leveraging the femaleness and femininity of the company leader to imprint its product with a particular emotion, value, and promise for mid-twentieth-century consumers and customers. Each of the brands promised quality, but since this claim no longer was a point of distinction for most companies by the middle of the 1900s, all three businesswomen used gender to feminize their delivery of quality and in so doing to distinguish themselves from competitors. It was a complex and even contradictory identity for women at the helm of big businesses in the mid-twentieth century, one that revealed women’s restrictive roles even as it advanced the trajectory of their brand management.

Asserting Self-Worth

Asserting self-worth was necessary for twentieth-century female business owners in order to be successful and Lewis, Beech and Lewis each did it skilfully yet differently—respectively positioning herself in terms of stature, the irrelevance of gender or competence. They had to generate a positive valuation of themselves at a time when gender roles and stereotypes triggered an automatic discount to their worth expressed in lower pay, questions about their abilities, and the trenchant hold of the “family claim” positing that their job, first and foremost, was to care for husbands, children and homes. Articulating a counternarrative that established their value to their companies was important for female business owners and had an impact on the bottom line. Additionally, all three came from non-traditional backgrounds, making an unorthodox entrance into corporate leadership positions from secretarial jobs. This in combination with a lack of formal education beyond high school or even elementary school and the fact that they operated businesses in the highly male-dominated manufacturing sector, meant that the task of self-presentation was both complex and essential in order to achieve the most advantageous outcome for her company and herself.

Constructing Entrepreneurial Pathways

Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin all provide examples of how successful mid-twentieth-century female entrepreneurs in large-scale manufacturing companies carved out a place for themselves at the top of the American business world by leveraging their relationships with the men in their personal and professional lives. The goal here is to understand the way in which this generation of women hampered by marriage bars, professionally crippling domestic expectations and lack of access to higher education, made the most of their relationships with male family members to plot their paths into business leadership and ownership. Access to social capital was particularly key for women breaking into the male-dominated manufacturing fields Lewis, Beech and Rudkin occupied, and male family members provided that connection. Privilege paved the way toward entrepreneurship and leadership for all three women too—another corollary of the ties they forged and leveraged through marriage.

Government and Women’s Business Ownership

Lewis, Beech and Rudkin all took advantage of government opportunities and actively resisted its intrusions, and this was essential to their success. Close examination of the World War II and Korean War eras—key episodes in the expansion of the federal government as regulator and customer—shows that for these businesswomen building a relationship with government was both necessary and important. Military contracts and Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans kept Lewis and Beech in business while Excess Profits Tax posed a real threat that both women fought and wartime rationing as well as regulations by the Office of Price Administration fundamentally shaped Rudkin’s business strategy and success. Prevailing scholarly interpretations have argued that women’s businesses were too small to attract federal attention but the experience of these entrepreneurs reveals that for women who operated businesses big enough to cater to a national market, government programs were fundamental to their success and federal regulation threatened significant losses in profit. By the mid-twentieth century, in fact, developing a relationship with the federal government was hardly a choice; a strategic one could determine a business’ future.