Loans For Women Moved To "back Burner"

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Carol Peterson was a scrub nurse in a Boston hospital in 1977 when she decided to moonlight in the clothing business. Borrowing $1,500 from relatives, she started selling South American clothes in a space she subleased in a fashionable Boston neighborhood.

Seven months later, she obtained a $5,000 Small Business Administration low-interest direct loan and opened a store of her own. By the end of 1981, she expects sales at her Pan-Andes boutique to approach $400,000.

Peterson was one of the lucky ones. Between October 1979 and September 1981, approximately 4,000 women will have obtained "miniloans" of up to $20,000 as part of a special pilot program for women enterpreneurs that operated under specially designed credit criteria.

The pilot program is scheduled to be discontinued September 30, and SBA sources predict that programs aimed at all minority-group entrepreneurs, including women, will be placed "on the back burner" if the appropriation for fiscal 1982 comes in substantially below current levels.

Despite the uncertainty over potential SBA cutbacks, Peterson hopes to get a second SBA loan to expand her operations into one of the "revitalizing" neighborhoods of Boston and to set up a mail-order lingerie business. Today her boutique sells both women's and men's clothing. With profits from the clothing store, she has also started Brief Encounters, an upscale version of the sexy lingerie business pioneered by Frederick's of Hollywood. She opened a Cape Cod branch this summer.

"Believe it or not," Peterson says, "I still have trouble getting banks to lend me money. If the federal government doesn't maintain its financial commitment, the chances for women to prove themselves in business will be lessened." According to recent Census Bureau studies, 702,000 women entrepreneurs in this country generate $42 billion in gross receipts annually, primarily in retail and service industries.