Between the 1930s and the 1960s, only a few women reached the top ranks of American corporate leadership. Historian Edith Sparks identifies three who succeeded to the highest levels. These talented and energetic executives worked successfully with male employees and regulators to outdistance competitors in fields as distinct as food canning, bread baking, and aircraft manufacture. Sparks's executives also wore dresses and high heels, dated and married, and gave birth to children. And on most days, Sparks's executives had to take care not to threaten the narrative of men's natural ability to direct businesses and women's preference for domesticity. Sparks's executives were bosses and ladies, both at once, a balancing act never demanded of men in that period. To succeed in many situations, as Sparks perceptively determines, the women executives at this book's center often deployed their femininity as an entrepreneurial strategy.

Tillie Lewis built Flotill into a large vegetable-canning operation located in Stockton, California. During the 1930s, she launched her business by acquiring the right to market a variety of pomodoros (tomatoes). An early business partner—a businessman—supplied contacts, know-how, and capital. Italian Americans and their urban neighbors comprised a large market for pomodoros. The popularization of immigrant tastes helped a family business thrive. Sparks's colleague, Ken Albala, characterized Lewis as “The Tomato Queen of San Joaquin” (p. xi).

Olive Ann Beech followed a different path to the presidency of Beech Aircraft, a plane manufacturer. In 1932, Beech and her husband founded the firm, and Olive Ann Beech served as a director. In 1940, at age thirty-seven, her husband's illness pushed Beech into the top post. She had recently given birth to their second child. Still more, federal officials had begun to step up orders for military aircraft. At this uncertain moment, fourteen male engineers led a revolt against her leadership. Beech, on such key occasions, chose not play the “woman's game” of smiling and seeking to ingratiate herself with employees (p. 28). She fired all fourteen. Like Lewis, however, Beech relied on male expertise, as well as on her husband's wide range of contacts in the aircraft business.

Margaret Rudkin's husband and their family physician helped her build Pepperidge Farm into a large baker of specialty breads. Family responsibilities had steered her toward baking. During the mid-1930s, Rudkin's son, the youngest of three, had asthma, and the family doctor advised her either to leave Connecticut for a drier climate or to enrich the boy's diet with B vitamins. Rudkin turned to her Irish grandmother's recipe for stone-ground bread. Early marketing efforts through the doctor added legitimacy to her claim about the bread's healthful qualities. Rudkin's husband, a prominent and wealthy figure in Wall Street circles, raised start-up cash.

By any measure, Rudkin's, Beech's, and Lewis's doctor, husbands, and business partners helped fix their new firms in the middle of abundant cash and prestigious connections. Had Sparks built her story only along these lines, we would have an assignable and conceptually impressive account of the ways in which businesswomen and men engaged gender and social capital during the last century's middle decades. We would also enjoy a further validation of business historian Pamela Walker Laird's thesis about the importance of “pull” in the promotion of business leaders (Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin [2006]). As is, these important topics represent only one point in Sparks's superbly crafted and deeply researched volume.

Sparks explains how her three executives dealt with the federal government's World War II regulations. Now, it turned out, these innovative businesswomen behaved like a large number of their male counterparts. Historian Mark R. Wilson explains the keen desire of businessmen for military contracts to manufacture the great weapons of war, like B-17s, and Wilson details those businessmen's simultaneous loathing of federal rules regarding items like employee unions (Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II [2016]). Even with contracts in hand, Sparks reminds us, Lewis, Rudkin, and Beech disliked the government's “intrusions” (p. 51).

Sparks extends Wilson's findings into the less glamorous business of bread baking and canning. Pepperidge Farm's Rudkin and the other women bosses had to establish business relationships with military procurement officers. In assessing price, quality, and delivery dates, military buyers could be insistent, fickle, and dismissive. Lewis in turn often asked male employees to negotiate for her, dodging what Sparks describes as the “liability” of being a woman in “the hypermasculine, male-dominated sphere of military contracting” (p. 54).

But it was not only the presence of men in uniform that put off these women. Rudkin in particular resented rules set by civilian officials in the Office of Price Administration (OPA) that rationed raw materials (like flour), fixed retail prices, and limited her ability to expand baking operations. As it turned out, the OPA's many edicts actually encouraged homemakers to bake less and buy more bread in the grocery store. In equal fashion, Lewis's Flotill emerged as the largest packer of military rations. Federal contracts, Sparks maintains, allowed these three women to guide their small businesses into large corporations. And yet, after the war, Beech flew in her private plane, named The Free Enterprise. Sparks joins Wilson in reminding us that enthusiasm for a federal contract and grudging acceptance of government rules were among the ritual behaviors of postwar business leaders.

Sparks's important and impressive book directs us toward a large space in business history scholarship. Every male executive who ever smoked a cigar, teed off on a weekday, downed a second cocktail at the Four Seasons, or tossed a memo on a woman's desk understood the concept of deploying one's gender. We need to put that concept front and center as we make sense of famous and nameless bankers, inventors, and middle managers. Equally valuable would be accounts of these men that took explicit account of their family and work responsibilities as self-consciously male beings. We would advantage our field with the addition of nuanced ideas regarding “pull,” the administrative state, and a historically constructed masculinity. Sparks's magnificent book is important both for what it accomplishes and for what it might portend.