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Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
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Dr. Randa Melcher
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
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Dr. Randa Melcher
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
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Dr. Randa Melcher
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
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- [01:32]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Randa Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Deborah Michaels about her book titled she's the The Rise of Women's Entrepreneurship since World War II, published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. Helping us understand how we get to a point where today, and actually not just today in recent history as well, women have been very much at the forefront of entrepreneurship that came from a particular place in time. We've had women entrepreneurs in many places and times throughout history, but there's definitely been a change in the second half of the 20th century. This book focuses on the US to help us understand what made that a thing. How much was it sort of supported, for example, by government initiatives versus not? We're going to talk about sort of all the various ups and downs. Deborah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:28]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for choosing my book for your terrific podcast.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book. What questions are you asking in this investigation?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
Sure. So I'm Deborah Michaels. I am the associate professor and chair of humanities at Merrimack College. I'm a women's historian, and I concentrate on the 20th century, but really the post World War II era. I don't know that I ever decided to write this book. I think this book told me I was going to write it. I think it had been kind of coming in my life for a really long time. I started my professional life after I graduated from college as a business journalist. I worked for Business Week. I worked for Women's Wear Daily. And I found that in that time of my life, I was writing a lot, actually, about women and the kinds of businesses that they started and their, you know, successes and failures, good choices and bad choices. And when I decided to go to graduate school, when I decided to change careers and become a historian, it seemed that the kinds of projects that I was gravitating to or that professors were pointing me to also had to do with women's. Both work history and women's entrepreneurship. And honestly, when I went to graduate school, I thought I was going to write about the women's movement. That's why I went to graduate school. I thought that's the history I'm most interested in. And yet, no matter what I did, something kept pulling me toward business history and women's entrepreneurship and labor history. And by the time I got to the stage of writing my dissertation, it appeared that this was the project, that the project was going to be women's entrepreneurship. Before that, I writing smaller pieces like, you know, articles or essays about women's banks or about black women's beauty shops. And by the time I started thinking about this in larger terms, I thought, this is really about something bigger. It's really about not just one category of what women do, but all the kinds of things women do. The other thing I really want to make clear is that I think of this book not as a business history. I'm a social historian. I'm a women's historian. This is really about the role of business in both the lives of individual women, as well as its connection to other things going on in society. So that's really how that all happened. It seemed like that early business journalism training and the history training kind of intersected in this. In this book.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
Well, actually, hearing that backstory, I can definitely see a lot of those elements in the final book. As you said, this is not a sort of. And then this business was founded, and Then that one was founded. You know, it is much more of a kind of wait, how do all these social, political, economic, media factors kind of all go together and change over time? So we obviously have a lot of things to discuss. And one of them or the first place might seem a little bit odd because of course the subtitle of the book suggests that we're going to be talking since World War II. But I think to understand the rise, we probably need to look a little bit at what women's business ship ownership, women's business ownership looked like before World War II.
- [05:55]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Sure. I mean, that was. It's interesting that you asked that question because I'm often asked, why did you start where you started? Certainly women have had businesses long before World War II, and of course they have, but something changes, and I know we'll get to that in a minute. With the war period before the war, there's a lot of different things happening around women's business ownership. Early in American history, women started businesses mostly to stave off poverty. You know, if your husband died, if, you know, you had no family support, you might start a tavern in the colonial or early American, you know, history, time periods, you might own a sewing business or a millinery. We see that a lot in the 19th century. Certainly women inherited businesses early on, you know, that they then turned into very, very big businesses. Around the early 20th century. You see the connection between the rise of the new woman and the suffrage movement with what women are doing. So you'll start to see in the teens and twenties, major women's, the kind businesses that became major companies like the founding of Maiden form, which is, you know, a women's lingerie and undergarment company. Now it was then Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein all start big cosmetic businesses in the early 20th century. And that made sense because that's the era that women are starting to sort of, you know, feel their independence, having the right, you know, or fighting for the right to vote or getting the right to vote. The Depression kind of changes all of that. So you see this moment that could have been in the early 20th century had not. Had it not been for the. The Great Depression. And the Great Depression basically has people kind of hunkering down, figuring out how to survive. There are still women starting businesses during the Depression. Margaret Rudkin starts Pepperidge Farm and Elizabeth Estee Lauder starts, you know, her business. But for the most part, women are just trying to figure out how to survive the Great Depression, which gets us, of course, to the World War II era.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
Yeah, that is helpful to understand because, of course, as you say, this could be written about a lot of times, but the dip, I think, before World War II definitely makes that time period kind of especially interesting. So let's move to talking about World War II and the kind of immediate years after it. Why was this a moment where entrepreneurship for women was particularly recognized?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
So the war changes everything, right? And wars often do. During the war, women are recruited to go into the workforce to take jobs that soldiers were leaving behind and that really needed to be done to keep the war machine going. Right. The whole Rosie the Riveter thing. Women are going into war plants, they're working in factories, and they're being recruited by the US Government to see themselves as economic beings. And everywhere they go, the message is, you know, we need you in the workforce so a soldier can go and fight for freedom around the world. And jobs that women had wanted before the war, like welding, you know, traditionally masculine jobs that they wanted before the war, they were told they couldn't do because they were too hard or they would take years of training. They're now being recruited to do them and being trained in a matter of days or weeks to do them. I'm mentioning this because all of those women, many of those women, there's a transformation during the war for them. They start to see themselves as economic beings. They start to really like the money. They start to like the independence that they have. And both during the war and after, both government officials and women themselves and various business organizations all start to wonder what. What's going to happen when the war ends with all these women who've been working? And many of them will need to continue to work because husbands may not come home, may come home too injured to work. So when the war ends, that's the big question in the air. What do we do with all these women? And in New York, Governor Dewey, who got elected because women helped get him elected, decides to appoint the first deputy Commerce commissioner as a woman, Jane Todd. And I like to think about Jane Todd in this moment because she's kind of this unique woman who I think starts this engine going in a big way. But she's not the only one. Lots of people are talking about, what do we do with the women? And maybe small business is a place for them because small businesses started in the home. Todd takes that and kind of runs with it. When she gets appointed to be Deputy Commerce Commissioner for the State of New York, she starts a women's council and a women's program. And initially they're about jobs, but very quickly, they become about helping women start businesses. She organizes what she calls small business clinics. We might call them seminars, conferences, or workshops. Today, she taps women like Elizabeth Arden to help teach women how to start businesses. She aligns with the National Federation of Business and professional women's clubs to take her ideas national. So she is everywhere and in New York at the same time. And she. Her agency starts getting 750 phone calls a day from women all over the country asking how to start a business. Wow. So you can. Yeah, so you can really see, like, the. This engine starts. If we get to get women out of jobs for returning soldiers, hey, let's put them into business. And not only does that keep the economy going, not only does that restore all the small businesses lost during the war, but it also keeps women thinking about themselves as economic entities, should there be another war, so we don't have to retrain, change their mindsets. So, yeah, it plays a. There's a national role for women being in business, and there's this real connection between business and the home. If small business starts in the home, why can't women do it? We're not radically altering their gender roles to tell them to start a business.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
Okay, so that's a whole bunch of reasons why there would be a push in this moment and why it would be so widespread. Was this popular in terms of mainstream media and popular opinion beyond the women putting in those phone calls?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
I. Yes, absolutely. So it's written about in Life magazine, which is the leading popular magazine at the time. And I like to talk about Mildred Pierce, that film, that 1945 film, which is kind of a sort of take on suburbia. It's kind of a takedown of suburban life and conformity. But really what strikes me about that film is that it's a very popular film about a woman entrepreneur. Mildred Pierce owns a business. She starts a restaurant and then a chain of restaurants because she and her husband have a falling out, and she has daughters to support, and she wants to support them comfortably and well. So this image of women's entrepreneurship is everywhere. The New York Times is writing about Jane Todd's clinics. Local newspapers everywhere, when they are being offered in their areas, are writing about these clinics. The magazine of the national business and professional women's clubs are writing about, you know, how to start a business. And it catches fire so quickly that nine states start to launch their own women's programs as well.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
Okay, so widespread here, which is great. How long, though, did this enthusiasm last?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
Well, the enthusiasm lasts for, you know, well into the 1950s. But the energy, the real energy is in that first five years after the war ends. And you see that the number of women owned businesses jumps from 500,000 to a million in that five to six year time span. I think what starts to happen in the 1950s, 50s is this kind of, you know, rising Cold war climate, this notion of keeping women, you know, in the home, the rise of sort of the, you know, redomestication. This is sort of home and family for women and work for men, the male breadwinner model. And so what starts to happen is that women don't stop, stop their interest in business, but they recalibrate it to speak to it as this. I do this because I'm a good mother. And that's very much in keeping with the climate of the 1950s. So I'm starting my candy store, I'm starting my, you know, if you're Lillian Vernon and you're starting what becomes a major catalog business, you're doing it because you want to give your kids, you know, piano lessons and live a comfortable life and help supplement your income. So they recalibrate how they talk about it, but that doesn't change their interest in it. And Jane Todd's clinics, they continue well into the 60s and they're still widely attended by women. Hmm.
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Dr. Randa Melcher
This adaptability is really interesting. Is it really just kind of on the surface level, like going from yay, I'm contributing to the war effort to now, I'm contributing to our robust post war economy to I want my kids to have piano lessons. Like, is that, do we see any other sorts of adaptations?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
Well, I mean, there's a lot of other adaptations. So there's outreach to women by the national association of Manufacturers and the National Chamber of Commerce during the Cold War, partly through this message of free enterprise, you know, is the better system than communism. And. But the outreach to women is if we're going to beat communism, you need to consume, consume, consume. Right. We need our businesses to run, we need our free enterprise system to grow. And it doesn't matter what the message is. What's important is how women and how anyone internalizes it. So the message may be we're supporting free enterprise and we're part of the system. And you can see that in all the newsletters that women write in their auxiliaries to both of those organizations. But experience is transformative. Once women start launching businesses to contribute to the free enterprise system, what happens is they start to see themselves as part of the economy as more than just, you know, the, the mom who stays at home, a very important role, but someone who can also be part of the nation's success economically and, and that's very transformative.
- [17:05]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Okay, so this definitely sounds like it's making a pretty widespread impact, even if some of the messaging is sort of changing a little bit depending on what's going on sort of in the bigger social picture. What is significant then? When we're talking about, for example, the 1960s, we've mentioned it a few times. Is this a key transitional moment or is this sort of continuing this kind of adaptation of the. How do we do the post war and the Cold War all at the same time?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of backtrack a little bit here and say that I think about my book sort of having a couple of different threads. And one is what's happening in society. Right. How is society changing? Because we' not static. Even if our essential core values may not change as a, as a society, what's going on around us may be changing technology, who our leaders are long held grievances that we're fighting back against. Right. All of those things. So one part of the book is talking about what's going on in society and the other couple of parts of the book is how is government responding and how are women seizing that moment or thinking about how to survive and thrive in their own lives. So there's multiple threads here. I think when you think about the 60s, it's both a transitional moment and not a transitional moment in terms of numbers. Right. So it's a transitional moment in terms of what's happening in the country. And it's a transitional moment in terms of how women are starting to see themselves. And when I say women, I mean women of all races. But it's also not in terms of the numbers are going to grow smaller, they're not going to grow dramatically for much of the 60s. In terms of the number of women business owners. We're going to see a big surge coming in the 70s and 80s. What's happening in the 1960s is of course the election of John F. Kennedy. You've got sort of this, we're still in a Cold War era, but we, we've got some of the women who were of that post war generation raising daughters and their daughters are starting to come of age. The women who were involved in that post war generation have been waiting for 15 years for the promises that were made to them during the war that they would have equality in the economy, that they would have equality in the system for their contributions during the war years. That pent up demand really kind of comes to a head by the time Kennedy's elected. And so what we see happening in the 60s is women demanding that Kennedy's new frontier be a new frontier for women. And that is a big reason he starts the President's Commission on the Status of Women to explore women's inequality. So you have that happening. You have a rising divorce rate escalating in this country. People who had been in unhappy relationships are starting to say no more, which, which of course leads to more single mothers raising children. And that means they need to figure out how to provide for them. All of that in a world, you know, today we have mandated child support. There was no mandated child support. You could not, you could not garnish your, your spouse's wages in the 1960s the way you can today if you earn a child support settlement in the courts. So you've got a lot of social conditions happening. And of course you have the civil rights system movement that is still going strong from the 50s and the six into the 60s, all kind of happening at the same time, and all of them contributing to what motivates women to start businesses. So when the President's Commission on the Status of Women produces its very remarkable study on the American woman and talks about all the things holding them back in the workforce, that resonates for women and they start making demands on the workforce. That of course, with the exception of the passage of title VII in 1964, it's a long, slow slog to get more equality in the workforce. So what's not happening for them in the economy, women are going to go do for themselves. They're starting employment agencies to help themselves and other women. They're starting companies that explore opportunities and transformations for women. The very first licensing of products happens in the 1960s when Constance Boucher buys the rights to Snoopy and the Charlie Brown gang and starts to sell products to children with those names and logos on them. And moms start looking for ways to combine work and family, and you can't do it. In the 1960s, there isn't a national child care system. So small business becomes a way for them to do that. They can start a business, they can set their own hours, they can raise their own children. That's happening. And of course, for women of color who are in civil rights, the 60s becomes a way to, I mean, the climate of the 60s, entrepreneurship becomes a way to both support themselves and their families and to contribute to the movement.
- [22:27]
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- [24:53]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Yeah, those are a whole bunch of reasons why I can totally see this would be lots of reasons to push women to go, hang on a second. You know what? This is going to be the best way forward. And so many different threads are coming through together there. But I'd love to throw another one in if we can think thinking of sort of pent up feeling, particularly moving into the 70s, we get, of course, feminist movements. How does that impact these incentives for pursuing female owned businesses?
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Dr. Deborah Michaels
This was my opportunity in this book to finally write about the women's movement. Right. So I mentioned earlier I thought I was becoming a women's historian to write about social movements and the women's movement. And who knew I was going to find feminism and entrepreneurship in the same place? But I do. Right? And very. And in ways that very much replicate what we see in civil rights. So there's a couple of strands. As you know, in the women's movement, there are women like Betty Friedan and others who just really want women to have the same rights and opportunities that men have. Right. That's the national organization for Women. We just want what men have and we want equal opportunity. There's another strand which is the sort of more radical younger group of women who say, you know what, the system is broke. There's no way to fix it. We're going to build a new world. And they're more. Some of those women are socialists, some of them are lesbian feminists. And all of these women, no matter where they are on the spectrum of feminism, see the, see opportunities for changing the world through business ownership. And that to me is an exciting proposition. Right? Because we don't think about business ownership as the tool of a social movement. But it was, it was for women of color in the civil rights movement who said, especially, you know, it's hard to imagine that you can have civil rights activists who are also Republicans, who. Right. In our world today, we're so bifurcated and so contentious. But then people could be on any part of the spectrum and still want to solve inequality. And we see this also with feminism, that women are on all parts of the spectrum and want to solve the problem of inequality. And all of those who are in the more liberal end, not the radical end, think we can use the system to fix it capitalism can fix it. All we need is to get in. So you have women like Betty Friedan and others who want to pass the Equal Credit act and do in 1974, which will give women access to capital, because the majority of women owned businesses then and now are started with personal savings or credit cards. And if you can't have money, you can't get into the system. So they're working for the. To. To establish the tools that will get women in. And eventually those same women will start banks to help women have their, you know, their own access to their own money. But on the radical end of the spectrum, women who were socialists, for example, and women who were lesbians and felt marginalized by the system, they looked at business ownership as a way to set up their own institution. So they didn't see business as business per se. They saw it as a counter institution. If we set up women's publishing companies, we can decide what kinds of books get published. We can give women a voice. If we set up bookshops all around the country, which they did. We can create community centers where women can meet, but also where they can purchase the books that support the women's movement and new ideas. They were setting up all kinds of business everywhere. Health centers, art galleries all over the country as counter institutions as a way to use capitalism, make money, fund a revolution. The interesting thing about that is that they, they didn't believe in the profit motive. The, the women on the socialist end, they paid people according to need not. They didn't have hierarchies. And you can imagine over a period of years, they were likely not going to be financially solvent. Most of them, eventually they had to figure out either to enter the system and to play by, you know, the rules of capitalism or to close up shops.
- [29:26]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Yeah, I found this a really interesting part of the book. Kind of how the feminist movement sort of first tries to use this to let's set up our own sort of parallel system. And then. Ooh, hang on a second. That isn't really gonna work. And is this sort of why by the time we get to the 1980s, discussions about gender equality are so tied to discussions about business ownership?
- [29:46]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
This is interesting to me. You know, it's funny that chapter on the women's movement in the 1970s kind of. I'm still kind of a bit of a. An optimist about that. I teach about it, I write about it. I've written about this for decades. And there's this part of me that still thinks it didn't have to End the way that it did. These women who are starting all these businesses, they're getting talk about media attention, they're written about everywhere, and they're written about in exactly the way you and I were talking about, you know, can feminism and business, you know, alignment. And I think that, that they had this real, really utopian vision of what was possible, that they tried to merge onto capitalist realities. You know, you still have to pay your rent and you still have to, you know, find ways to bring in. In revenue in order to keep a business going. And. But yet they had these utopian visions of how to organize their businesses, how to do things differently, that they could somehow use capitalism to be anti capitalist. I think, you know, was sort of the problem. I still, the optimist in me likes to say, if if only they had been a little less utopian, a little bit more in line with profit, they might actually still have existed and have achieved more. But what they do achieve, and this feeds into your question about what happens by the 1980s, what they do achieve achieve, is a language that whether you are a feminist or not, women start to internalize. And the language is, I have a right to start a business. I have a right to be a player in this economy. And why, and why is it that banks can discriminate against me when I, when I need money for my business? In the, in, in passage of the Credit act for women in 1974, it excludes business loans. So women could go out after 1974 and get credit cards on their own or mortgages on their own without being discriminated against. But not business loans. You could be turned down for a business loan and a bank would not have to answer you for why they, they turned you down. And that doesn't happen until 1988. And I think without the women's movement giving women this sort of engine to think about the fact that they had a right to be players in their nation's economy, that as 51% of the population they had had certain rights. That language of rights came directly from the women's movement and became very mainstream. So that even if you weren't a feminist, even if you disliked feminism, you still somehow began to adopt that language of I have a right to have a business. So I think by the 80s, what's happening, you know, you've got in, in the late 1970s, you've got President Carter looking at, he starts the Interagency Task Force on Women's entrepreneurship, studying the issue. Ronald Reagan in 1983 says, why don't these women like me. And he meets with women's business groups to basically ask that question. And he, and he says to them, you know, forget politics. The economy is where you're going to get real equality. You need to have rights and opportunities in the economy. And I think that starts to build an engine of change that leads to some new leg, new and important legislation in the 19 by the end of the 1980s. But I also think, Miranda, that the recession of the 1970s was also a really important force driving women into business ownership because the first fired were often the women who had benefited from educations under title nine. So all these women who had graduated with MBAs into a recession economy, had a job for a few years, were often the first let go. And many of them started businesses again.
- [33:47]
Dr. Randa Melcher
This sort of generational thing of this is the promise that has been made. And, okay, I've grown up. I want my business now. Right? It's coming back again. So that's really interesting. And of course, as you mentioned, the laws are key part of this, too. And so it seems like from reading the book, that kind of with these laws put in place, as you mentioned, sort of the end of the 80s into the 90s, the idea of kind of it's my right to own a business, and I want to take the thing that, you know, I feel like I've been promised that feels like it kind of continues into the 90s and early 2000s. Is that roughly right?
- [34:20]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I want to say also that, you know, as the sort of feminist impetus for business ownership becomes sort of less intense, you have the beginning of women's networks. So you have the national association of Women business owners in 1972, 75, rather, being founded to begin to document women's presence in business ownership and to advocate for women. And again, not. Although their roots are in feminism, it's not a feminist. It's not a feminist mission. It's a women's mission. Right. It's that rights mission. They're still with us today, still fighting that fight. And they are actually a big force behind some of the legislation in the late 1980s. You have the American Women's Economic Development Corporation that starts in the 70s and goes strong in the 1980s as a tool to help women start businesses, frankly, doing exactly what Jane Todd did in the 1940s. They, and I say this in the acknowledgments, by the way. They. They hold these conferences for women in the 80s, and when I was still a business journalist I attended their biggest conference in 1989 where Oprah Winfrey was speaking. And I remember the energy in the late 1980s of women attending this to learn how to start businesses. And I think all that energy leads to HR 5050 in 1988, which is the Women's Business Ownership Act. That is during Reagan's second presidency. And I think it's his, you know, his and Congress's effort to close the, the gap. That that legislation ends discrimination in business lending, but it does other things that are kind of really mind boggling it. In this document, in all the historical documents, it says, we know women have been discriminated against for decades and it's time to put an end to that. We know women don't get access to federal contracts, which are the most lucrative, you know, opportunities for business ownership. And it promises that women should get 5% as the goal per year of federal contracts. And I can tell you that since that legislation was passed in 1988, what my, what, what, what my research shows is that they've only ever hit 3% twice and never 5% and right now are struggling to even get to 1%.
- [37:03]
Dr. Randa Melcher
So where are we at then? Now?
- [37:05]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Yeah, where are we at now? Well, women own 40% of all the businesses in the U.S. they, they are important employers. They generate trillions of dollars in revenue every year. But the, you know, when people ask me what my book's about, my shorthand is, if you don't want to read the book, here's what you need to know. Women start businesses for multiple reasons, but in the easiest way to explain it is what the labor market would never do for women. Entrepreneurship could. And so I think that's where we are now. Women who hit the glass ceiling in the 1980s bounced out into this, we call it a rubber roof. Right? Bounced out of this into entrepreneurship because they could achieve as much as they wanted to in a business of their own. And we're still seeing that today in the 21st century, that if you are hitting that glass ceiling, you can't get promoted above middle manager. Maybe you take your expertise and start a company of your own. That continues to be an issue. The groups most discriminated against, big surprise. Are also the fastest growing category of women's entrepreneurs today, which is women of color. They're starting businesses at 1.5 times the rate of any other group in this country, particularly white men. And again, they're doing this because of the limitations of the job market, both in terms of their personal lives, raising families, but also in terms of their professional growth and development. If you're hitting that glass ceiling, if you're limited in where you can go in a company entrepreneurship, the sky's the limit. But I think what we're seeing is that, and this is a dangerous trend, access to capital still remains a major obstacle for all women. White women only get about 3% of venture capital money today. Women of color barely get over 1%, which means that the vast majority of women are still financing their businesses with personal loans, credit cards. And for many women of color, it's payday loans. And those can have usury rates of 30, 40, 50, 60% interest. So that's a dangerous trend and a, and something I think we need to care about because the, the ability to gain access to money means basically comes down to whether you have a cushion or not. Right? If you can get a bank loan of, I don't know, $50,000 to start your business, but you only need $10,000 of it per year to fund your growth, you've got five years of that money. But if you are taking a payday loan for 5,000 or $10,000, you can't afford to fail. Because if you do right, how are you ever going to pay it back? So the access to money is a big issue for women who start businesses in terms of whether or not they have that cushion that most new businesses need, because most new businesses will fail very quickly without it. So that's an important and scary and dangerous trend. I wanted to say also that in the 90s, people thought technology would be the great leveler for women's and men's business ownership because of the Internet, the beginnings of the Internet. And in the wild, wild west of the Internet, we saw lots of people start businesses online for 400, $500. You couldn't start a business online for 400 and $500 today because in a fully developed Internet, you need to drive people to your website, right? You need SEO, you need analytics, and it can cost $180,000 to launch a web based business today. So you can see that, you know, things that people thought would be helpful aren't always, aren't always helpful.
- [41:15]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Well, that's what's helpful to understand.
- [41:18]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Yes, exactly. Exactly. You know, it was hard figuring out where to stop this book because as you know, as a historian, we don't like to draw conclusions about the present. I, my, my old journalist self is happy to do that, but my historian self gets very nervous when people say, what do you think all of this means? I, I don't know. You know, at one point, I thought I was going to publish this book during the. During the pandemic. If I had, I'd have been wrong about a few things. So I'm glad it came out after the pandemic because during the pandemic, we were all worried about the fact that women were leaving the workforce to go home and help their kids, you know, with schooling and other things. And there were a lot of new trends that didn't really hold. But so, you know, I end the book where I end it with kind of an epilogue that looks at the 90s, 2000s, and is a little predictive. Talks about social entrepreneurship, which is very important to the millennial and Gen Z consumers and also entrepreneurs. But I think the jury is out on a lot of things. Crowdfunding as well, has been really important for women entrepreneurs, um, and for younger entrepreneurs. But again, it's hard to say where all this is going to go, particularly in this. In this political moment.
- [42:38]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Yeah, definitely. Lots of interesting things to pay attention to, to see what happens. Is this going to be where your scholarship continues, or do you have any upcoming or future projects you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [42:51]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Yeah, I have a lot of things. My problem is, you know, I have too many ideas and too little too time. Right. I'm sure you hear that a lot from people, but I thought when I finished this book, I would just do a book on feminist entrepreneurship, but I don't think that's where I'm going. There are so many possible books that could come from my research, but one, I've narrowed it to two possibilities at this point. One, I'm very interested in the representation of women entrepreneurs in cinema and media and film, especially film, because there are probably more than two dozen films and more every day that are about a woman who starts a business to get out of some kind of jam in her life. And I think there's a story to be told about trends among those businesses. I'm also working on, and this is my sort of secret labor of love project. I'm working on a biography of a woman. What I call a biography of a woman in an institution. So it's parallel biographies. The woman who starts this business as a social kind of problem solver in the 1960s. And also her personal story, why. Why it drove her to do this, why she saw this business as an opportunity to, again, help create a more equal society.
- [44:13]
Dr. Randa Melcher
Okay, so still staying in the same sort of universe, which makes sense given, you know, there's so many things that I read in the book, certainly that I could see. Ooh, that could go over here. Oh, what about this? You know, I'm not surprised that you have so many ideas because there's a lot of rich stuff here. So for anyone who wants to get further into the details, we're not able to cover without obviously taking over your life for, I don't know, 12 hours. The book is titled she's the the Rise of Women's Entrepreneurship since World War II, published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. Deborah, thank you so much for join me on the podcast.
- [44:46]
Dr. Deborah Michaels
Thank you so much for having me. This is fun. I could talk about this all day.