Before the mid-nineteenth century, death was handled at home , it was a family affair.

There was no funeral industry pre-1850, though with industrial and modern management techniques, the trade went through a fast transformation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, mandatory state licensing and educational requirements (sanitary and funeral-related training) were implemented, and the professional society the National Funeral Directors Association (created in 1905) standardized certifications for practitioners.

This foundation led to the development of what we know as a modern funeral home, with its functional areas the clinic (for embalming), the home (for reception), and the chapel organized into a single operational unit.

Within this process, a family member, part-time undertaker, was becoming the full-time funeral director.

How Big Business Came to the Deathcare Industry, But Did Not Conquer It

Shift towards conglomeration happened after World War II with the appearance of funeral chains like Service Corporation International (SCI) that was founded in 1962 and grew from three funeral homes to 276 by 1981 .

SCI went on to become international in the 1990s and slowly bought successful smaller independent firms across the US.

The industry did not become fully consolidated, with the majority (89.2%) of U.S. funeral homes in the 2020s still categorized as small, independent operationally, averaging about 110 funerals per year.

These homes rely heavily on personal trust, name recognition, and long-standing community relationships, all of which are difficult to scale.

Legacy in the Making: The Modern Evolution of a Small Family Firm

Almost everyone recognizes the local funeral home in their home town.

The Baue funeral home in St. Charles, Missouri, was founded in 1935. Lisa Baue, former and last director of her family’s business, remembered her grandfather Arthur Baue and his partner Clarence Hackmann telling her about how they opened their first funeral home on North Sixth Street.

Arthur’s timing was both terrible and, in the grim arithmetic of the profession, inevitable, as people kept dying during the Depression, but not always could pay for a funeral. It was common for him to provide services for free or accept whatever a family could offer.

The physical space of the Baue funeral home was also a family home. Though they were told to be quiet, children still played when a visitation was underway downstairs, playing hide-and-seek among the coffins as families were selecting one for their deceased.

Many funeral families lived this way in the mid-twentieth century, where the boundary between domestic life and the commerce of death was merely a staircase and a whisper.

Women In US Funeral Businesses

When death-care became a profession, however, women were edged out. The late nineteenth century recasting of the trade also made it male-dominated.

Both Lisa’s grandmother and mother, however, were licensed, and the Baue funeral home path towards inclusion continued with Lisa’s father. In the early 1980s, while serving as education director and chairman of the board of the National Foundation of Funeral Service , he launched what Lisa describes as the first women-in-funeral-service program in the profession’s history. Perhaps aware of his own daughter becoming part of the business, he worked to design a course to help women funeral directors develop as leaders at a time when the field remained heavily male-dominated. That early initiative later moved to the National Funeral Directors Association, where it evolved into the Professional Women’s Conference.

After her father suddenly died, Lisa had a funeral home to run, a newly acquired cemetery to manage, and a pre-planning funeral company to oversee.

Though she started with much to learn, over the next thirty-two years, Baue transformed a single funeral home into a group of funeral care companies—four locations, an eighty-acre memorial gardens cemetery, a crematory, a flower shop, a pre-planning firm—serving more than 2,500 families a year and becoming one of the leading firms in the Midwest.

When Lisa started working in 1979, the traditional model was intact: embalming, viewing, casket, church service, burial.

Then the ground shifted. Cremation, once a marginal practice in the United States, began a steady ascent that would reach 61.9 percent of all dispositions by 2024, with projections above 82 percent by 2045.

COVID-19 accelerated the curve: the National Funeral Directors Association reported an 8.1 percent jump in cremation in 2020 alone.

The pandemic also forced the industry into technological adaptation—online arrangements, live streamed services, and what Baue describes as “drive-by funerals” with radio-broadcast graveside services to accommodate capacity restrictions.

What Women Need in The Funeral Business

Baue ended up being able to sell a well established business to Park Lawn Corporation.

And when she retired, something became clear to her. Over her last decade as an owner, she had increasingly found herself mentoring women—young funeral directors navigating a profession that still, despite demographic shifts, wasn’t built for them. The numbers told a stark story: roughly 75 percent of mortuary school graduates today are female. But 2019 data showed that 55 percent of people leaving the profession were women.

They were entering in force and leaving almost as fast.

The reasons, Baue learned through her coaching work, were structural. Workplaces that lacked adequate maternity leave. Inflexible scheduling in a 24/7 profession. Cultures that hadn’t evolved past the era when women served coffee to mourners. “The profession hasn’t been supporting them as they need and deserve,” she said. “I’m on a mission to end that.”

In 2024, she founded Funeral Women Lead , a nonprofit organization dedicated to leadership development, wellness support, and mentorship for women in funeral service. The organization has drawn over 6,000 members and is launching an eighteen-month leadership program.

It represents, in Baue’s view, the work that matters most after a career spent navigating the profession’s evolution from the inside. Her journey and reflections on her experience as a leader in the industry are now also narrated in her book Wake-Up Calls: A Journey of Learning to Lead and Succeed in the Funeral and Deathcare Profession .

Now, as women flood back into funeral service in record numbers, the question is whether the industry will accommodate them—or whether it will continue to lose them at the threshold, as it has for more than a century.