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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as a source of economic information and as such are becoming part of the history of economics (see, e.g., Maas, 2016).

      As the household became more and more the exclusive realm of women in Western Europe, the gendered divide in public and private domains also became part of the political philosophy of the time (Habermas, 1989 [1962]; Fraser, 1992 [1990]). In the tradition of earlier thinkers like Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) focused on “men” and assumed that citizens were exclusively male. In A Discourse on Inequality (2016 [1755]), he put forward a history of society in which he articulated a divide between the state of nature and the state of society. Rousseau philosophized that man’s natural state was single and independent and that women and “savages” lived in the state of nature. Over time, civilized and educated men built a society of men and the family, located “outside culture,” was characterized by Rousseau as a remnant of natural relationships. The natural state was healthy, according to Rousseau, and had little to do with property rights and other economic laws that were part and parcel of culture and politics and as such corrupted. Rousseau, a friend of David Hume, had a profound influence on the thinking of Adam Smith, who applied these ideas about the gendered nature of private and public life as building blocks to his Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]) (see Rendall, 1987).

      In his works, Smith made a silent but crucial move: he shifted attention away from the household. Changing the focus 180 degrees, he turned his back on the household, and put the autonomous male individuals center stage. He made this move silently in the sense that he simply excluded women and the household from his works. He used the term “œconomy” for what we would call Home Economics or Household Management, thereby separating it from “the economy,” the term he uses for productivity and wealth in the public realm.

      In the two books Smith published during his lifetime, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the Wealth of Nations (1776), it is the (male) individual who represents the household in the contexts of the law and market exchange. It is these individuals who have “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange goods one thing for another” (1976 [1776]: 25). It is this male individual who becomes the basic unit of economic analysis – also known as Rational Economic Man – and, as such, the focus for generations of economists to come.

      Since the household and women had become excluded from political economy, it was mostly women who further developed the literature on household management over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Retaining the traditional focus on how to run an efficient household, the growth of this field of economic study gravitated outside academia. By the end of the nineteenth century, part of this research was being conducted by women as a subfield of economics, which became known as Home Economics. In the US it was the only field in which women could obtain a position within economics departments (Le Tollec, 2020). Hazel Kyrk (1886–1957) would restructure the home economics department she was heading by applying the scientific method to her research on the household, and by theorizing the consumption process in her 1923 book A Theory of Consumption. Her PhD student Margaret G. Reid (1896–1991) focused her attention on productive activities in the household, and published Economics of Household Production (1934). Reid defined unpaid household production here as – in brief – those unpaid activities in the household which can be (but are not) replaced by market goods or paid services. Using this so-called “third person criterion” enabled her to make a clear distinction between unpaid household production and personal care. It would later enable economists to investigate productive activities conducted in the household and to develop a method to estimate the value of unpaid production in the household in monetary terms (see UNDP, 1995).

      In the 1960s, Gary S. Becker (1930–2014), then an economist at the University of Chicago, picked up where Kyrk and Reid left off and applied neoclassical economic theory to explain household behavior. In his 1965 article “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” he perceived women’s unpaid work in the household as productive and reasoned along the lines of Reid. Later, others like Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown (1979) and Marjorie McElroy and Mary Horney (1981) would apply game theory to explain intra-household decision-making. The application of neoclassical and game theoretical models in the analysis of household economic decision-making tended to provide explanations of hierarchical gender relations as being rational and as producing efficient outcomes.