Don't miss: Online Exhibit: "From Ideas to Independence: A
Century of Entrepreneurial Women"

Women’s entrepreneurship is everywhere in the news these days. In September 2009, Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, declared that women’s businesses offer the “highest return on investment.” As of 2013, reporters and women’s business groups were hailing record growth: the number of women’s ventures has increased by 54 percent in the past fifteen years with revenues jumping 58 percent. Women’s achievements are more impressive given that they historically had little access to traditional forms of business capital, often having no other choice but to use credit cards and savings to launch their ventures.

There were other challenges, too. Operating both within the larger world of commerce yet without the insider status that men’s businesses have typically enjoyed, women entrepreneurs throughout history often had to go it alone, create parallel networks to traditionally male organizations, or forge alliances to gain access to vital means of producing, distributing and growing their businesses.

Women have always owned businesses; what changed over the last century is their increasing acceptance, prominence and movement into a vast assortment of enterprises and the role of technology in making entrepreneurship more accessible and affordable. This exhibit explores the forces in the last century that led to this moment.