Joan Robinson and the Americans

Marjorie Shepherd Turner, MarjorieShepherd Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780873325332
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351561662
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Employees with valuable skills and a sense of their own worth can make their jobs, pay, perks, and career opportunities different from those of their coworkers in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This book shows how such individual arrangements can be made fair and acceptable to coworkers, and beneficial to both the employee and the employer.

Chapter One
Joan Maurice at Cambridge

Joan Robinson the economist is inseparable from the complex person that she was. A strong woman, who as a teacher could make her men students cry themselves to sleep in despair, who as a colleague could cause some of the world's leading economists to tremble with rage, she was never a feminist. An admirer and critic of Marx, she was never a Marxist. She approved of the communist social experiments, particularly those in China and North Korea, but was not a communist. She expressed deep sympathy for the working class, but she was sometimes a critic of the Labour Party. She was a tender mother and grandmother, and a devoted and popular teacher. She never yielded a point until she could see it plainly. Joan Robinson's family background, her education in economics at Cambridge, and the changing times through which she lived were important factors in molding her views and personality.

Family background

Joan Violet Maurice was born in 1903 in Surrey into an upper-middle-class family. Her father was well-launched into a promising career as an army officer. Joan was one of four girls in a family of five children.

In England, before the many changes brought about by World War II, it was difficult for intelligent and ambitious boys, and even more so for girls, to go very far unless they were born into fairly wealthy, upper-class families who sent them to private schools to be educated. Schooling in state schools ended at age fourteen, except for the few outstanding students who qualified to go on to a Grammar School. University educations were almost entirely for the privileged classes. For Joan Maurice, as a member of an ancient and distinguished family, opportunity was her birthright.

Joan's family had many ties to Cambridge University. Her maternal great-great-grandfather Spencer Perceval (1762-1812) and paternal great-grandfather Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), attended Trinity College, one of the more famous of the many colleges attached to Cambridge. Spencer Perceval was the second son of the second earl of Egmont, and distinguished himself in politics by becoming Prime Minister, only to be assassinated by a bankrupt madman while in office. As Prime Minister he had tenaciously carried on the war against Napoleonic France. F. D. Maurice was one of the "invigorators" of the celebrated Apostles society, and his bust still looks down from its post in the Cambridge University Library.¹

During her girlhood, Joan's maternal grandfather Frederick Howard Marsh was professor of surgery and Master of Downing College, Cambridge. Her father, Major General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, was given an honorary doctorate of laws by Cambridge the same year that Joan received her titular degree. Her uncle, Sir Edward Marsh, for whom she had deep affection, was a Cambridge man as well. He was both a supporter of the arts and a collector of paintings and sculpture in the 1920s. Under his influence, Joan Robinson also became a collector of art objects.

There had been well-educated, achieving women in her family, although Joan was the first to go to the university. Her grandmother, Jane Perceval Marsh, a nurse, had founded the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease in London. Great-great-aunt Mary Maurice (sister of F. D. Maurice) established a school for governesses at Southampton.

Joan Maurice's bonds to teaching were equally strong. Both her father and her paternal grandfather, Major-General Sir John Frederick Maurice, taught in the Staff College at Sandhurst. In one of the first efforts to establish higher education for women (1848), F. D. Maurice helped found Queen's College in London. He also helped to organize a Workingmen's College (1853) of which he became Principal, and encouraged the founding of Girton College at Cambridge where Joan later matriculated.

Among family scholars and authors were Joan's grandfather, Major General Sir John Frederick Maurice, whom the New York Times called "one of the ablest writers in the British Army." Her uncle, Sir Edward Marsh, edited for both Winston Churchill and Somerset Maugham.²

After his military career ended, Joan's father turned his attention to writing, both as a journalist and a military historian. His historical studies and biographies were "noted for their clarity and conciseness."³ As forF. D. Maurice, a bibliography of his works published by Macmillan (which much later published Joan Robinson's Imperfect Competition) mentions a novel, sermons, and philosophical works, some fruits of his career as a writer for fifty years. In such a family it is not surprising that Joan Maurice came to enjoy poetry at a young age. As a schoolgirl she went up to Hyde Park Corner once a week. There she stood under a lamppost and read poetry to anyone who wanted to listen. She had a regular group who came to share with her.⁴

Strong personalities and values can be fostered by the self-awareness which comes from family stories and experiences. Within this great family, forthrightness was expected. F. D. Maurice had engaged in fundamental controversies over religious questions. And in 1918, a controversy erupted that was much closer to Joan—the Maurice debate in Parliament. Joan was fourteen years old, a student at St. Paul's School for Girls, when her father, Major General Sir Frederick Maurice, wrote an unprecedented letter to the London Times accusing Prime Minister Lloyd George's government of deceiving Parliament and the country about the strength of the British army on the western front. While on the imperial general staff, Maurice and his superior, Sir William Robertson, had warned the cabinet that the Germans would attack in the West. The cabinet had ignored their recommendations for reinforcements. When, in March, the Germans broke through the British lines and drove them almost to the Channel ports, the government was charged in Parliament with having contributed to these disasters. Lloyd George defended himself successfully in April, but on May 7, General Maurice's letter "gave the direct lie to this and other statements made by the government. "⁵

Maurice's biographer John Kennedy argues:

Whether he was right or wrong in what he did there can be no difference of opinion regarding his supreme moral courage and sense of duty. His action was instigated by a sincere belief confirmed by a visit to France that the morale of the troops was in danger of being undermined by attempts to shift responsibility for the March disaster on to the shoulders of the military leaders and by the conviction that a plot was being hatched to remove Haig [Field Marshal Lord Douglas Haig], To the end of his life Maurice believed that he had saved Haig, whose only reaction at the time was a characteristic disapproval of conduct which he regarded a as mistaken and improper.⁶

The Maurice debate was covered daily in the London Times. Before Maurice's letter appeared in the press, he wrote to his daughter Nancy, then seventeen, telling her that he fully realized what the consequences might be for himself and his family. He closed by saying, "I am persuaded that I am doing what is right and once that is so, nothing else matters to a man."⁷

These events came in Joan Robinson's formative years, and ever after she felt a great injustice had been done. It is very likely that this had a profound effect on the development of her view that one must act on conscience.⁸

Her family background, permeated with innovative accomplishments and acts of courage, helps explain Joan Robinson's independence of mind. It was written of her great-grandfather F. D. Maurice that he had "an even excessively scrupulous  sense of honor, and throughout his life was devoted exclusively to setting forth what he held to be the truth. He was at times moved to vehement indignation, and could be very sharp in controversy; some natural irritability joined with his keen sense of the importance of certain truths, and with the consciousness that, from whatever cause, his meaning was very liable to be misconceived."⁹

How like him his great-granddaughter Joan Robinson was!

Titular degrees for women

Joan Violet Maurice had a seriousness of purpose early on which made her eligible for the outstanding St. Paul's School for Girls in London and subsequently for the Gilchrist Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. Her younger sister Phyllis remembers vividly Joan's persistence at her study table in their shared room. In the large family of Maurices, it was determined that the sharing of rooms between daughters of greatly different ages would promote amicable relations among the four girls.¹⁰

Girton College was the first of the women's colleges to be attached to either of the Great Universities (as Cambridge and Oxford are known in England). Founded in 1869, Girton was followed by Newnham College, Oxford, in 1873. Women students were first admitted to the Tripos, the honors examinations leading to Class I and Class II degrees, in 1881. The right to earn a titular degree was conceded in 1921, the year of Joan Maurice's matriculation. However, the right actually to earn a Cambridge University degree with full university privileges was withheld from women at Cambridge until 1948, when Joan Robinson had been on the faculty for some fourteen years. At Oxford after 1920, women could earn university degrees. Austin Robinson does not think this particularly bothered his wife.^*11

Men had the option of both the honors and the "ordinary degree," the latter provided by men's colleges for those who were perhaps more interested in cricket and socializing than in a particular field of study. Such students might take all of their work within their own college and never attend a university lecture. Women could go only for honors. Girton was "founded on the clear principle of aiming at the highest education" and playgirls were not encouraged. For a girl to attend university was unusual even among the upper classes. She had to be not only bright and ambitious but determined. "Honors degrees" required an intense interest in a single subject, and careers for women were limited. Even though a girl was very bright, her family might discourage her from seeking a university education for fear that she would be branded as a bluestocking and unsuitable for a good marriage. Many of the women graduates continued into careers in teaching.

Mary Paley Marshall, the wife and former student of Alfred Marshall, had been a student at Newnham College at Cambridge and continued to be intellectually active through her long life. According to Austin Robinson, Alfred Marshall's treatment of his wife was one of the few things which aroused Joan Robinson's feminism. She would storm in private against Marshall's attitudes. Mary Marshall had been a lecturer in economics at Newnham College, and Austin Robinson says it was known that Mary had helped Alfred with his early book, The Economics of Industry (1879). Joan Robinson thought Alfred Marshall treated his wife as a housekeeper and secretary rather than as an intellectual equal. Perhaps Mary Marshall did also. After the publication of The Economics of Imperfect Competition, she wrote to Joan Robinson, "Thank you for helping to lift off the reproach cast on the Economic Woman."¹² Robinson, on the other hand, always seems to have thought of her own reputation as being that of an economist, not a woman-economist.

Young ladies at Girton College

In 1922, Girton College had fifty-two acres of grounds—one for every undergraduate. The college was more than two miles from the university campus, placed so as to be "not too inaccessible yet not too near the men." Buses plied back and forth and cyclists covered the ground even more quickly. Some said the place had a "hoydenish blush." Undergraduates were free to be out and about until the college gates closed at 11:15 p.m.¹³ The original founder, Emily Davies, a friend of Joan Maurice's paternal great-grandfather, felt that Girton should be some miles from the University. Originally it was situated at Hitchin, a full twenty-six miles away.

Girton's architecture is forbidding. C.S. Lewis called the "vast edifice in the three main courts 'The Castle of Otranto'."¹⁴ Others described Girton as "most uncomfortable to inhabit . . . designed with its claustrophobic corridors by successive members of the Waterhouse family."¹⁵ Some of the college rooms were traditionally associated with St. Paul's and other famous public schools, but I was told that Joan Maurice did not have one of these.¹⁶ There is no evidence that she was particularly fond of the place. In later years, though she was a fellow both at Newnham and Girton, she was more inclined to have her meals at Newnham.¹⁷

E.M.R. Russell-Smith, a contemporary of Joan Maurice's, remembered that women students at Cambridge felt accepted and were treated courteously in university lectures, which were coeducational. She wrote, "Anti-feminism with which earlier generations had had to contend had disappeared completely. My contemporaries were for the most part hardly aware that it had ever existed."¹⁸ This view seems to have been shared by Joan Maurice.

While women could join most of the university societies, they were not permitted to join the Union Society, which was the center of undergraduate political debates. Nor were they invited to become members of the Political Economy Club founded by Keynes. A few organizations were for women alone. The Women's Research Club was one, but Joan Maurice was not a member. With Dorothea Morison (afterwards Mrs. R. B. Braithwaite) she once presented a satirical paper to the Marshall Society—their rendition of an economist's version of "Beauty and the Beast," which is now considered Joan Robinson's earliest professional work.

Perhaps the vestiges of nonacceptance of women (other than Keynes' club) did not affect Joan Maurice. In England, se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Joan Maurice at Cambridge
• 2 The Years of High Theory
• 3 The Making of Imperfect Competition
• 4 American Economics and the Chamberlin Controversy
• 5 Keynesian Conversion in Both Cambridges
• 6 How Economics Changed in England and America
• 7 Joan Robinson and the Marxists
• 8 Generalizing the General Theory
• 9 Standoff between the Two Cambridges
• 10 The Meaning of Capital: Robinson versus Solow and Samuelson
• 11 The Sweet and Sour of Befriending Americans
• 12 The Mature Years: Beyond the Capital Controversy
• 13 Her "Great Friend," John Kenneth Galbraith
• 14 North America in the Sixties: Visits and Exchanges
• 15 Robinson and the American Post Keynesians
• 16 North America in the Seventies: Lectures and Honors
• 17 What Are the Questions?
• APPENDIX
• Endnotes
• References
• Names Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author