Women music publishers have existed since the late 16th century, but were comparatively rare before the 20th century.
Most of these names were extracted from searching WorldCat using prefixes such as "Veuve" or "Witwe" and their variants (both meaning widow in French and German respectively).
The years active were determined from the holdings in Worldcat or as indicated in the footnotes.
Since Worldcat should not be taken to represent all published works, most of the dates should be considered approximations primarily based on the evidence available.