A History Of Women's Struggle For Economic Independence

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me." Zora Neale Hurston’s words hang in the air like a ghost of a question, a bewilderment perfectly suited to that strange, not-so-distant past before 1988. It was a time of baffling contradictions, when a woman could conceive of a universe, draft a business plan brilliant enough to power a city, yet find her own signature insufficient on a loan application.

There was a phantom limb to her legal identity, a space on the dotted line reserved for a husband, a father, a brother—a spectral male presence required to validate her ambition. The logic of it was a confusing, circular thing, a quiet institutional madness that saw female ingenuity as a liability, a flight risk, something to be tethered to the more grounded and supposedly more reliable world of men.

A man had to sign.

Then, a quiet tectonic shift. The Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988 was not a thunderclap but a change in the legal weather, a lifting of a low-grade atmospheric pressure that women had simply learned to breathe. Suddenly, the signature was whole. The women who were already building their empires in the penumbra of the official economy—the caterer whose quince tarts were the secret centerpiece of every important dinner party in town, the woman who repaired antique German clocks from a table in her sunroom, the basement coder subsisting on instant coffee while building a database for a local veterinarian—could finally step into the light.

Their work, once classified as a “hobby” or “pin money,” could now be incorporated, funded, and expanded on its own terms. It was the freedom to fail, gloriously and on one’s own, without dragging a male co-signer into the wreckage. The freedom to build an edifice, however small, with a key bearing only your name.

This was not a uniquely American confusion.

Across the world, the story echoed, just with different accents and hurdles. In India, well into the 1990s, the barriers were less about a single missing signature and more a chasm of social expectation and inaccessible credit. An aspiring female entrepreneur faced not just a skeptical loan officer but the weight of a culture that had long prescribed her domain.

A woman seeking to scale her family’s handloom operation into a national brand was a creature of fiction. The government’s eventual creation of programs like the Mahila Udyam Nidhi was a crucial acknowledgment, a small key offered for a very large, very heavy door. It was a recognition that a nation’s economy has a blind spot when it ignores the intricate, powerful, and wildly creative commerce being conducted by half its population.

And so the question hangs in the air today, in this month of anniversary.

Where are we now? The overt requirement for a man’s permission has vanished, but its ghost lingers in the machine. It lingers in the venture capital meetings where questions to female founders focus on risk while questions to male founders focus on potential. It persists in the networks that still feel like boys’ clubs, in the persistent funding gaps, in the subtle astonishment that a woman can, and will, build something monumental all on her own.

The work continues, a reclamation project happening with every business launched, every payroll met, every invoice sent. Reclaiming not just economic power, but the very authority to imagine a world and then go out and build it. Without asking.