Women Entrepreneur Journeys from Poverty to Emancipation

This study examines the processes and mechanisms through which entrepreneurship leads to the empowerment and emancipation of women living in poverty. Drawing on the entrepreneuring as emancipation perspective, we identify specific activities through which emancipatory entrepreneuring manifests itself in the context of women’s entrepreneurship in India. We observe that the activities of a social entrepreneur—the SEWA trade union—complement the activities of individual entrepreneurs and lead to economic, personal, and cultural empowerment. Further, we find evidence of emancipation at the collective level, expressed in changes of sociocultural norms about women’s entrepreneurship. Our study extends the entrepreneuring as emancipation perspective and contributes to research on empowerment and emancipation, women’s entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship in developing countries.