Chapter 3, “Education,” addresses what functioned as the gateway for both women and men to become full members of society and be able to contribute to social, economic, and cultural developments. Education was, therefore, a central and recurring theme in the women’s movement. Mary Astell (1666–1731), Anne-Thérèse, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733), and Maria Edgeworth, amongst others, wrote about the importance of a sound education and training for girls. Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) spoke in 1898 about the way black women in the US had made large strides and had caught up with respect to the level of their education, and about the progress the black community had made by that time, building their own colleges and universities.
Elizabeth Montagu, whom we already met in Chapter 1, was an early contributor to the emerging school movement in England. To support the improvement of the education of girls, she started her own schools, thus setting an example that many women economic writers would follow. Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810), who also started her own school, wrote a handbook on how to start and run a school, The Oeconomy of Charity; or, an Address to Ladies Concerning Sunday-Schools (1787). Trimmer was one of the many economic writers who wrote about their experiences and views on improving education for girls, Mary Wollstonecraft being another of them.
More specifically, on economic literacy and education, Hannah More (1745–1833), Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858), Harriet Martineau (1802–76), and Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) wrote works that rendered political economic principles and concepts about daily life into accessible language. The last writer addressed under this theme is Ayn Rand (1905–82), who became famous for her novels in which she brings economic ideas to life that have substantially influenced the Tea Party movement in the US.
Chapter 4, “Women’s Relation to Wealth: Capital, Money, and Finance,” points out that women’s loss of control over their capital, their labor, and their land rights contributed to the rise of the (Gothic) novel at the end of the eighteenth century. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), for instance, contributed in a major way to this genre and provided a venue for women to vent their economic ideas and experiences, and gave witness to women’s concerns, if not plain anxieties, that their complete dependency on men brought about. This development is strengthened by changes in social norms around women dealing with money that rationalized and accommodated the distancing of women from their economic assets. Novels remain an important venue for women to express ideas about the role of money in their lives, as Jane Austen (1775–1817) shows in her books. A few decades later, with the economic crises of 1837 and 1857 hitting the US, we again see the emergence of a wave of women’s economic novel writing. The reclaiming of control over economic assets and means of production continues to this day, which we see reflected in, for instance, Bina Agarwal’s (1994) pathbreaking empirical research on women’s control and use of land in India. The chapter ends with an account of women’s role in the financialization of the economy and the more recent work of economists such as Susan George (1988), Gary Dymski and Maria Floro (2000), and Libby Assassi (2009).
“Production,” the theme of Chapter 5, has always had a gendered meaning in economic theory. Economic writers such as Mary Collier (c.1688–1762), Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722–93), and Priscilla Wakefield (1751–1832) provide us with their personal experiences as, respectively, washer woman, farmer and merchant, and author and banker. Over the course of the nineteenth century, economic historians such as Elizabeth Hutchins, Olive Schreiner, Edith Abbott, and Ivy Pinchbeck wrote about the history of women in industry. Focusing on women’s labor force participation, the first section of this chapter reports on the work of the Langham Place group in London, headed by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91), which examined women’s work and education and engaged in activism to change the laws that kept women back, using data as presented in the census to back up their statements. The next section discusses the work of the Fabian Women’s Group, founded in 1907 in London, which was engaged in the debate about occupational segregation based on gender. This chapter ends with an exploration of the experiences and views of women economic writers and economists concerning running one’s own business.
Chapter 6, “Distribution,” discusses work by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946), and others who criticized and suggested various gender and income distribution arrangements or social contracts. It lays out the initial emergence of the abolitionist and labor movements that preceded the women’s movement. Women contributed to the early labor movement and wrote pamphlets and in magazines to make their point – as did, for example, Harriet Hanson Robinson (1825–1911).
This chapter also describes the debate in The Economic Journal between several male and female economists on the demand for equal pay for equal work. As the patriarchal social contract had turned into a middle-class ideal, this gender ideology would also take over in economics, as is shown for instance in Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family (1981). The increase in the number of women economists in the 1960s and 1970s brings about a new literature in which Paula England, Francine Blau, Claudia Goldin, and many others apply neoclassical analysis and other economic theories to explain the gender and racial wage gaps.
Chapter 7, “Consumption,” outlines a field in which women had a lot of daily experience. Consumerism, in which women have played a central role, developed alongside production in industrial society. Novelists like Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–65) describe the impact of the increase of consumerism on women’s lives in British middle-class households. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Hazel Kyrk (1886–1957) and Margaret G. Reid articulate, respectively, theories of consumption and household production. Marion Talbot (1858–1948) and Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866–1948) further develop the study of household administration; Helen Woodward (1882–1960) was one of the founders of the study of marketing, in which she took the perspective of the consumer. Political economists and, later, economists left the study of marketing and consumer behavior to business economists, leaving the consumer underinformed. More recently, consumer choice has become the focus of Behavioral Economics, the analysis of non-rational consumer choice behavior.
The provision of goods and services formerly produced in the household has been in part taken over by local and national governments. Chapter 8, “Government Policies,” addresses the increase in tasks and responsibilities of national governments due to the monetization and marketization of production of what used to be seen as “women’s work” and took place in the household. The chapter starts with the debates about the role of governments with respect to population and birth control, followed by a discussion on the work of authors such as Elizabeth Leigh Hutchins (1858–1935), who described the slow but consistent increase in factory legislation in England. After outlining the emergence of large-scale policy research in the early years of the twentieth century, the focus shifts to the development of policy analysis by feminist economists, and of gender responsive budgeting in particular. The chapter ends with a discussion on the limits of the government provision of women’s former production in the household, such as care work, waste reduction, and conservation of the natural environment.
Chapter 9, “Findings, Feminist Economics, and Further Explorations,” briefly outlines the main findings that emerge as different from the traditional narrative of the history of economic thought. In addition, the chapter provides a brief account of the development of the field of feminist economics, and ends with an exploration of directions for future economic research that takes