Encyclopedia of world trade_volume 4_edited by Cyntia Clark Northrup

Women
During ancient and medieval times, women remained in the background but still worked and produced items for trade. In drawings of cave dwellers, there are illustrations of woman making stone utensils, fishing, scraping with antler tools, cleaning animal hides, and foraging for food.
Barbara Uttmann, the wife of a wealthy Annaberg patrician in Erzgebirge, Germany, introduced lace making in her region around 1560 and established an expanding and profitable industry that employed mostly women.
United States
One of the first images of women and trade in the New World is from an undated illustration in the collections of the New York Historical Society that shows Iroquois women at work in a sugar camp; these same women taught the art of making maple sugar to subsequent English, Dutch, and French settles of the seventeenth century.