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This address urges a more self-aware business history. It uses autobiographical details and select biographies of literary figures and women professionals to shed light on the subtle and not-so subtle inequalities associated with business and capitalism. The deliberate tease in the title—WOMEN CHANGE EVERYTHING—is intended to convey the power of word placement to change interpretive meaning and significance, and the power of history to modify understanding. Modifiers are key to an appreciation of the constraints and opportunities that have framed the lives and experiences of women in economies and societies. Even footnotes function in this address as modifiers, uncannily revealing sources of authorial intent and inspiration and throwing light on literary and historiographical hierarchies.

This is the story of two women with differing visions about business who have largely been forgotten. Miriam Beard, the maverick daughter of Progressive reformers Charles and Mary Beard, wrote the first international cultural history of the businessman in 1938. Henrietta M. Larson was Harvard Business School's first lady, the first female faculty member and the first woman to be tenured there. The two women never met or interacted. Yet their lives and histories were entangled when one woman, Henrietta, wrote a critical review about the contributions of the other. This article uses their untold story to trace the contentious process of professionalization that sidelined one maverick outsider and kept a maven insider on the margins of a fledgling discipline she had helped to create. Its significance is to make gender central to the reintegration of business and culture and of women's roles in the historiography of business.

Trade protection commonly is viewed as a support—external and perhaps occasional—granted to an industry by government policymakers. Focusing on the steel industry, this study argues that protection is better viewed as a commodity, an input into the production of steel. The development of the market for the protection commodity during the past century is related to the history of regional, national, and international markets for steel.