Female entrepreneurship. The ancient tale of restrained ambition
Given the challenge of gender inequality in the workplace, we believe that it is relevant to examine the mechanisms at work in the dysfunction of female entrepreneurship. We believe that it is wise to look at the social representations linked to women’s entrepreneurship in the long term, in the process of being constructed and disseminated, to give them a historical reading. To do this, we decided to examine fiction as an element in the construction of the social representations of entrepreneurship and its role in society. We call upon 19th century French, English, and German literatures to show how female entrepreneurial identities are shaped. Our thesis is that the old narrative is still at work in our contemporary societies, preventing women from achieving careers similar to those of men. The selected novels are treated as case studies from which we have identified possible roles for the reader’s imagination. Novels, contemporary of the industrial revolutions have not disdained the role of women in the economic world and have detailed how women could have access to the management of companies, at least in fiction.