Conclusions

Abstract

In exploring the interplay between the configuration of class and gender relations that characterises the family enterprise this book has challenged popular stereotypes of family women as marginal helpers in the family enterprise. Alternatively, it has demonstrated the centrality of female kin in the family enterprise and in this sense the contribution this book makes is that it establishes that they are critical to the formation of wealth within the boundaries of the family enterprise. In arguing this point, masculine ownership has been questioned to reveal a complex and close but changing relationship based on a constellation of vested and shifting interests between men and capital suggestive of Hartmann (1979) and Walby’s (1986) dual theory approach. Illustrative of Pateman’s (1988) argument, correspondingly it has been argued that the relationship between family women and capital is mediated by the dynamics of the power relationship between men as husbands and women as wives and leads to women’s systematic exclusion. In this sense masculine ownership symbolises two sides of the same coin, with men on the one side and capital on the other, whereby the unity of married partners represented in male ownership conceals the embodiment of women’s efforts. It has been argued that this is a problem for the entrepreneurial wives in business partnerships with their husbands for it is difficult for them to gain recognition as entrepreneurs, and this perpetuates gendered stereotypes.