of the economy and the history of economic thought.
The book introduces the reader to a wealth of works by both women economic writers and women economists, the difference being that the former wrote about economic topics but did not have an academic status. For many of these women, their lack of academic status was caused by the fact that universities were closed to them. This only changed at the end of the nineteenth century, after which female economists were able to enter the discipline and start to publish in academic journals. The reader will meet a diverse group of women who put their economic thoughts and experiences on record; their insights are out there waiting to be rediscovered. Synthesizing my extended exploration of their works, I highlight a set of themes that emerged from bringing these writings back into the limelight.
This book aims to meet the need for a more accessible text on women’s economic writing that can be used in courses on the history of economic thought – a book that introduces students, as well as a general audience interested in the development of our economic thinking, to the work of women economic writers and economists. Each of the nine chapters of the book addresses a theme, while telling the stories of these women and analyzing their work along chronological lines. It has not been possible, by any means, to cover all women economic writers and economists in the UK and the US. To maintain some coherency, I had to step away from discussing the work of some of the great women whom you might expect to appear in these pages; Mary Robinson, Madame De Staël, Helen Bosanquet, and Emma Goldman come to mind, but there are (many) others. This does show, though, that there is still more work out there that deserves to be analyzed and brought into the herstory of economics.
The themes distilled from these women’s economic writings coincide with some of the main debates in the academic field of political economy, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, came to be known as “economics” or “economic science.” Together, the chapters in this book cover the period from 1700 to 2020. While the story in each one unfolds in a chronological manner, each chapter also focuses on a specific period in which the main theme of that chapter surfaced in economic debates inside and outside academia. The last chapter brings the main findings together, thereby collating some of the lessons that can be learned by listening to our foremothers and reading their work.
Most of the women economic writers and economists who come forward in this book led fascinating lives. The reader will be introduced to these women and to their main economic works. Most of them come from the UK and, in a later time period, the US; it was, after all, in England and Scotland that political economy emerged and that makes these women particularly relevant for this herstory of economics. After the global economic hegemony had shifted to the US – following World War II – the center of gravity in the field of economics moved from Cambridge, UK to Cambridge, Massachusetts. This book aims to break open and disrupt the settled story of the history of economic thought that has been written from the perspective of European – and, later, American – middle-class white men. As the author of this book, I am aware that the consideration of women’s experiences and feminist perspectives is only a start and that much more work needs to be done to bring in economic contributions from Asian Americans, Native Americans, and the economic writers and economists from countries in the South.
Presented in this book is a rarefied group of women. In the eighteenth century, even those upper-class and aristocratic women who had learned to read and write saw their lives strictly regulated by laws and social norms that limited their ability to study, write, and publish. Practically all women in the UK were excluded from higher education and universities over most of the past four centuries, and it was against the law to teach enslaved people to read and write in the US. Because of these restrictions, most of the women who were able to read and write and who left economic texts for posterity were upper-class and aristocratic women. Some working-class and enslaved women did manage, against all the odds, to learn how to read and write, including on economic issues, and some of their texts are included in this overview.
Women economic writers wrote predominantly in non-academic genres: pamphlets, letters, diaries, household books, poems, etc. Quite a few of them commented on, translated, and engaged with the work of the male academic economists of their time. Again others focused fully on the day-to-day interests and concerns of women, which they wanted to become more widely known. Others were involved in politics, activism, and public debates. Rather than aiming to make a name for themselves, these women articulated their views in order to make their point as a contribution to their cause.
The topics these women wrote about differed from those addressed by academic economists, such as money, trade, government policies, competition, and investment. In much the same way that gender norms have set the focus of male economists, women economic writers have proceeded from their own experiences, which were highly impacted by contemporary gender expectations. These impacts were considerable, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when gender norms set strict limits on behavior in most West European countries. Rather than engaging in the abstract reasoning that some of their male contemporaries excelled in, it was women’s daily experiences that led them to write about how to run a household or estate, their lack of economic rights, their particular roles in production and consumption, their social and economic dependence on their husbands, their limited rights to earn and keep a wage, the difference between women’s and men’s wages, and other topics. These women developed perspectives on social and political institutions, moral behavior, and care, and thus provided a broad perspective on the economy, if one only cared to read their work and listen to their message. In this book, you will learn about these economic writers’ views on the issues they were concerned about, fought for, risked a prison or mental-hospital sentence for, or, like Olympe de Gouges during the French Revolution, lost their life over. This book will also make extensive use of women’s economic writings as background, as secondary sources, and as illustration. We will see that including their analyses in the history of economic thought will shift the focus, change the main narrative in this field, and, as an intended consequence, restructure the story of the history of economic thought with which some of you are already familiar.
Some context and central concepts
The writings of the economic authors discussed here have to be seen against the historical background of the emergence and growth of industrial society and the capitalist system. To give the reader a brief, rough sketch of the women’s and gender history from which these texts originate and to which they refer, I would like to start by stressing the profound shift brought about by the change from an agricultural and feudal society to an industrial society dominated by money values and market relations. For women of the lower and middle classes this change meant that the productive work they used to do was increasingly pulled out of the home to be conducted in workshops and factories. Women and girls who were part of the working class were forced to work outside the home and earn a subsistence wage. Most middle-class women remained in the home where their productive tasks were reduced to raising children and running the household, while their economic dependence on their husbands increased substantially. Low wages for women’s work and a lack of decent jobs open to women made it impossible for them to live independently, and the insufficient number of men available on the marriage market meant that this arrangement failed large groups of women who strived for economic security over their lifetime (Atkinson, 1987 [1914]). The emergence and strengthening of abolitionist, labor, and women’s movements, the increasing role of the government in the economy, and, more generally, the growth in productivity and technology led over the nineteenth century in Europe and the US to changes in marriage laws and property rights. As middle-class women emerged onto the labor market over the twentieth century, their participation in the workforce grew from about 20 percent in 1900 to around 50 percent in 1980 (Goldin, 1990). Although the shift of productive activities from the household to the market is still ongoing, the increase of female labor force participation has by now maxed out, stalled, and, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, reversed into a decline. Thus far, the twenty-first century has brought some severe economic crises, and industrial society faces limits in various other respects, such as the exhaustion of resources, climate change, and the unsustainability of white male dominance.
