A Herstory of Economics. Edith Kuiper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Edith Kuiper
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Экономика
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509538447
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      Introduction

      One possible point at which to start this herstory of economics could be the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith (1723–90) is generally considered to be the founder, or father, of political economy. To find the women in political economy, however, we need to dig deeper. We need to go back to the first texts in the tradition that brings about political economy in the second half of eighteenth-century England and Scotland. In doing this, we will find ourselves reading texts by Ancient Greek philosophers and medieval writers who focused on the economy of the household, the field of study referred to as “œconomia.”

      This chapter will shed light on the early texts by Greek philosophers and later texts by women economic writers on the economy of the household. The second thread in this chapter explores women’s economic writing in the 1700s, engaging with a new morality that emerged with the growth of the middle class. I will describe the cradle of political economy and some major shifts that define the field over the centuries that follow.

      The focus on household economy made sense in Greece, which was in those times an agrarian society divided into a number of city-states. In Athens and Sparta, cities that were frequently engaged in warfare, the estate was the central economic unit. Such estates generally contained large, self-sufficient communities of families, servants, slaves, horses, and other animals. Aristotle, whose influence on economic thinking has been substantial and ongoing, had a negative view of women. They were, according to him, merely incomplete men and – using his binary logic – cold and passive, in contrast to men, who were seen as hot and active.

      Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of economy. The kind that aimed at sustenance for members of the household by providing food, clothes, and shelter, and that took place within the estate; he called this the “natural economy” or œconomia. He considered the dealings and trades that took place outside the household and that aimed at making a profit, including lending money against an interest, to be part of the “unnatural economy” or chrematistikè. The unnatural economy was a necessary evil that needed to be contained and kept on the margins of society, otherwise, according to Aristotle, it would lead society to chaos (Ekelund and Hébert, 1997).

      During the Middle Ages, many learned women lived in monasteries and wrote religious and philosophical texts. Christine de Pisan, for instance, was a prolific writer in many genres and the first woman in Western Europe to express herself in the vernacular language about women’s issues. In her view, women should be educated and they had the virtues, interests, and potential to contribute to many fields and excel in many professions. In her Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she described many negative myths about women and told of women’s strengths, using the allegory of the building of a city based on women’s virtues – a city in which women could be safe and respected (Richards, 1982). A few centuries later, Anna Maria van Schuurman (1607–78), in her day an acknowledged genius who spoke at least twelve languages, wrote a scientific thesis, The Learned Maid, or Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar (1638). Schuurman also stood up for women’s rights to be educated and to study. Moreover, she claimed that women’s minds and the daily schedule of privileged women enabled them particularly to engage in scientific study. De Pisan and Schuurman, however, were viewed as exceptions, and, luckily for them, they were accepted as such.

      Educated and upper-class women started to document their skills in running extended households. Lady Grisell Baillie (1665–1746) turned the art of running a household practically into a science. Hundreds of people lived and worked at the Baillie estates in Edinburgh, London, and at the large Mellerstain House in Berwickshire in southern Scotland. Grisell Baillie was a celebrity in Scotland at the time, known and famous for her heroic behavior as a 12-year-old, when she secretly visited her father in prison and brought him food. Her father, a political prisoner and religious agitator for the Covenanters, would later escape from prison and flee to Holland with his family. After they returned to Scotland in the wake of William III and his wife Mary II claiming the English throne in 1692, Grisell and her family were restored to their property. Grisell married the love of her youth, George Baillie, and, in the years that followed, she and her husband played a central role in the Scottish aristocracy.

      Grisell Baillie was so successful in keeping the books in her own household that both her father and her brother-in-law let her run their estates as well. The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692–1733, published in 1911, provides insight into the management of these three households, including the rules for personnel, extensive menus for large dinners, money spent on weaponry, hunting, traveling, the wages of domestic servants, and additional funds spent in support of these workers. As such, Baillie’s books paint a detailed image of the way such households were run. Marion Lochhead (1948), for instance, used it as the basis