Female entrepreneurs
Female entrepreneurs are women who organize and manage an enterprise, especially a business. Female entrepreneurship has steadily increased in the United States during the 20th and 21st century, with female owned businesses increasing at a rate of 5% since 1997. This increase gave rise to wealthy self-made females such as Coco Chanel, Diane Hendricks, Meg Whitman, and Oprah Winfrey. History The first female-owned business in the United States is recorded in 1739 when Eliza Lucas Pinckney took over her family's plantations in South Carolina when she was 16 years old. In the 18th and 19th centuries, women operated small businesses that they attained from inheritance or to supplement their income. In many cases, they were trying to avoid poverty or were replacing the income from the loss of a spouse. At that time, the ventures that these women undertook were not thought of as entrepreneurial. Many of them had to focus on their domestic responsibilities. For instance, with longstanding and significant barriers to educational and alternative employment opportunities, Black women were historically relegated to low-paying jobs and domestic work—particularly in the Jim Crow South. As a result, Black women of the early 20th century developed entrepreneurial niches in dressmaking, Black