Special Report: Women Entrepreneurs: She Calls All the Shots

Mary Farrar never thought of herself as a trailblazer. But with five children to educate, the Kansas City, Kans., homemaker decided to get a job to save money. A high school graduate, Farrar went to work in 1972, once all the children were in school, as a bookkeeper for a local steel contractor. Before long, she was supervising fieldwork as well. In 1978, with just $500 in savings, she started her own steel-contracting firm, Systems Erectors. Result: her children are getting all the education they want. Farrar's company racked up $5 million in sales last year. Says she: "There is nothing special about me. I had no family members in the business, little formal education, no business training, no money, no genius."

But Farrar did have something special: the courage to be in the vanguard of a movement that is transforming the face of American business. Like Farrar, millions of women are setting up their own businesses and pursuing the entrepreneurial pot of gold that used to be mostly a man's dream. While there have always been a few women with the initiative and opportunity to start a company from scratch, they were the exceptions. No longer. At least 3.7 million of the more than 13 million sole proprietorships in America are owned by women, nearly double the 1.9 million such businesses they owned ten years ago. The Small Business Administration expects that one-half of all self- employed people will be women by the end of this century.

Most companies started in the past by women specialized in fashion, food and other areas traditionally viewed as women's work. Examples of early successes: Florence Nightingale Graham co-founded the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company in 1910, and Margaret Fogarty Rudkin started Pepperidge Farm in 1937. But today women own all kinds of firms. While the majority are service companies (women own nearly half of all retail businesses, for example), female entrepreneurs are also making rapid headway in manufacturing, construction, mining and other industrial fields.

Most of their companies are still relatively small, but some have grown into sizable corporations. Among the largest: Liz Claiborne (1987 revenues: $1 billion), the New York City fashion conglomerate built on Designer Claiborne's clothing for working women; Lillian Vernon (fiscal 1988 sales: $126 million), a mail-order gift company based in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and founded by Lillian Katz; and ASK Computer Systems (1987 sales: $125 million), a California software manufacturer started by Sandra Kurtzig.

One in four of the companies that women launch begin as home-based enterprises. Kurtzig set up ASK in 1972 as a part-time business in a spare bedroom in her apartment but soon had to move to larger office quarters. Katz founded her company at home while she was pregnant with the first of her two children. Said she: "We needed the money."