Out of the Margin

Feminist Perspectives on Economics

Susan Feiner, Edith Kuiper, Notburga Ott, Jolande Sap, Zafiris Tzannatos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415125314
• eBook ISBN: 9781134800766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Out of the Margin is the first volume to consider feminist concerns across the entire domain of economics. The book addresses the philosophical roots of 'rational economic man', power relations and conflicts of interest within the family, the limitations of relying on secondary data and the policy implications of neo-classical models.
With its range and depth of coverage this is not only an excellent introduction to the field but also indespensible for those seeking more in depth knowledge of issues of gender and economics.

Part I

HERSTORY OF ECONOMICS

Editor Susan F.Feiner

The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of women who try to write music. “Of Mlle Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr Johnson's dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. ‘Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’” So accurately does history repeat itself.

(Woolf [1928] (1957):58)

1
INTO THE MARGIN!

Michèle Pujol

INTRODUCTION

The neoclassical economic paradigm is now over one hundred years old. Since its inception in the 1890s it has grown to be the dominant paradigm in economic theory, building its hegemonic power to the exclusion of alternative approaches. I have studied and then taught economics for nearly twenty-five years now. I had come to economics, as an undergraduate student in Paris, with a lot of excitement and trepidation: that discipline was going to help me understand what was going on in the world. I soon found out that the neoclassical paradigm, while providing some seductive modeling, did not come close to answering the questions I had. But it was only much later, in graduate school, that other questions started coming up. As a woman in the field, I started realizing that my own realities were missing, that they were dismissed or trivialized when issues of women's places in the economy were brought up.

Examining the origins of the neoclassical paradigm, one can identify the Victorian ideology which is at the roots of the treatment of women within it. The founding fathers—Marshall, Pigou, Edgeworth, and Jevons—wrote as one in a voice laden with patriarchal condescension. Unfortunately this attitude towards women has remained virtually the same. Yet, simply cataloging the neoclassical record on the status of women seems increasingly fragmentary: giving voice, again, to “the big men” could not be the sole object of an exploration of the patriarchal bias of neoclassical economics. Two other imperatives emerged.

First, to give voice to women, to feminists, writing on economic matters, asserting their disagreement with the status quo, in society and within the profession; and adding to these the voices of the few male economists approaching “the woman question” with a more sympathetic and innovative outlook.

Second, to go beyond a mere history of thought project to challenge the neoclassical monolith by rooting the contemporary feminist critique in the discipline's own history. This work contributes to the development of a feminist epistemology and ontology. It poses the questions: “who is writing theory? for what purpose?” It also challenges the notion that an epistemology based on the standpoints of women and other marginalized groups¹ in the capitalist/patriarchal system could ever find a place within the neoclassical paradigm.

Such an approach challenges two of the main silencings routinely performed within modern day neoclassical economics: the erasure of women and feminists both within the paradigm and as voices of dissent, and the dismissal of methodological critics of the paradigm. I will note here that the second erasure is explicit, while the first is still implicit only. It is relevant to mention, in this respect, that my book (Pujol 1992) has been criticized so far, not so much for its feminist stance and its challenge of the erasure of women and feminists in the discipline, but for daring to criticize the neoclassical paradigm, to suggest that it is flawed. These flaws can be seen more clearly when we analyze the five elements which characterize neoclassical views of women.

1All women are married, or if not yet, they will be. Similarly, all women have or will have children.

2All women are (and ought to be) economically dependent on a male relative: father or husband.

3Women are (and ought to be) housewives, their reproductive capacities specializes them for that function.

4Women are unproductive (whether absolutely or relative to men is not always clear) in the industrial workforce.

5Women are irrational, they are unfit as economic agents, they cannot be trusted to make the right economic decisions.

Through all these elements women are constructed as different from the norm (men). All the above characteristics together contribute to rationalizing women's exclusion from the public realm of economics: the market. These characteristics are seldom openly and clearly stated by economists. They fall within what economists call “unstated assumptions” (even though there is so little awareness of their existence). And because they are unstated, it is not entirely easy for women in the discipline to put a name on the source of our malaise. And I quote here my own inner voice:

my voice, the “I” I am using here, a scary thing to do (there is no I in my book). I am doing it because it is necessary for us, women/feminist economists to use our own voices, to claim the right to do so. As Diana Strassmann and Livia Polanyi say, in economics:

direct voices have seldom been female voices, seldom been voices on the margin, seldom been voices not legitimated by the mainstream of power and control…until women speak their own thoughts and experiences in their own voices and legitimate their speech by the authority of their own histories and experiences, we will not have a truly feminist economics.

(Strassmann and Polanyi 1992:13–14)

Let us remember, as feminist economists, that the personal is political and the political is economic. As a woman, as a feminist, as a lesbian, and as a survivor within the discipline of economics, my identity, and the experiences I have encountered in this discipline for twenty-five years inform my analysis of economic theory².

We turn, now, to an examination of the work of the early neoclassical economists to show how these five unstated assumptions have been used consistently³, and contrast them with the actual situation of women and with feminist economic analyses of women's situation.

WOMEN AS MARRIED AND DEPENDENT

The first two characterizations, that all women are married or are to be married⁴, and its immediate corollary that they are the economic dependents of men, invariably inform neoclassical discussions of women's labor force behavior, and beyond that of any economic activity in which they might be engaged. This sets the stage for questioning women's presence in the labor market or for refusing to take this presence seriously. Women, being supported, have no reason to be in the labor market. The concerns they might have— particularly for higher wage levels and for access to employment—can be and have been dismissed as inconsequential. By contrast, men's presence in the labor force has never been questioned by neoclassical economists⁵.

This characterization leads economists to see women as non-autonomous agents. For Pigou, the main determinant of (all?) women's labor supply is their husbands' labor income (Pigou 1960:565–6). In modern/ Beckerian neoclassical economics, women seek employment as the result of a “household decision” (Becker 1981). One can wonder if, in neoclassical economics, the decision to seek employment is an individual decision for women. Clearly such an approach allows us to avoid asking why women continue to supply their labor when: their wages are so low; such a decision might reflect an individually nonoptimal use of their productive abilities; and women are not allowed by market conditions to optimize returns to their human capital investment.

Women's presence in the labor force is not seen as a contribution to economic welfare, it is instead problematized as threatening severe negative consequences for national welfare and “household utility.” Edgeworth warned with alarm that large numbers of women in the workforce would bring a “depression or debacle of industry,” a “debacle, ultimately ruinous alike to wealth and family life” (1922:436; 1923:493). Marshall, Jevons and Pigou all expressed concern for the impact of employment on women's household duties and on infant mortality rates (Marshall 1930:198, 685; Jevons 1904; Pigou 1960:187).

Ironically, the solutions to these “problems” proposed by the heretofore “free market” economists relied on draconian interventions into existing labor market conditions. Marshall supported the Factory Acts (1930:198, 751), Edgeworth argued for the maintenance of barriers to women's entry into occupations (1923:490–4). Jevons was more severe, advocating legislating the complete exclusion of mothers of children under the age of three from factories.

In the same vein, where Pigou advocated state intervention to correct market failure in the labor market, women were explicitly exempted⁶. Marshall, Pigou and Edgeworth were all either against legislating minimum wages for women, or against minimum wages set at the same level as men's. None of them supported equal pay for equal work legislation. These economists' opposition to women's employment went hand in hand with their support for both preserving men's privileged access to employment and an enhanced male pay packet such that all men, whether married or not, could earn a “family wage” (Edgeworth 1923). Such proposals, if implemented, would have removed what they saw as the main cause for women's labor force participation: their need to earn complementary family income.

We can find direct parallels in the contemporary neoclassical treatment of women's labor force participation. Since Mincer's (1962) seminal article, the focus has been on married women's labor supply. The main question has been “why are these (married) women in the labor force?” and not the appropriate pay scale, working conditions or utilization of their human capital investments. Hence, (all) women's waged employment is constructed as problematic, their human capital investment behavior as anomalous (see Mincer 1962; Mincer and Polachek 1974, 1978; Sandell and Shapiro 1978; Mincer and Ofek 1979). Thus the New Home Economics is a rationale for (all) women's “specialization” in reproduction and housework as opposed to income-earning employment (see Becker 1973, 1976, 1981; Schultz 1974).

By implicitly generalizing from married women to all women, the existence and the needs of women who are not attached to men are denied, and the “norm” of women's economic dependence is ideologically reinforced by both contemporary (Mincer, Polachek) and early neoclassical economists (Marshall, Pigou, Edgeworth, Jevons). One has to look hard to find references to single women, or to no longer married women, let alone to lesbians—whom economists must never have heard of⁷.

Yet, the actual situation of women differed substantially from the view proffered by the neoclassical economists. In nineteenth-and early twentieth-century England, a substantial proportion of women were and remained unmarried (Bodichon 1859:28), and among those who married, full economic support by husbands was often far from the more distressing reality (Cadbury et al. 1906; Smith 1915; Rathbone 1917, 1924). Women, both married and unmarried, were present in the labor force in large numbers (Scott and Tilly 1978). These facts were reported and documented by feminists who often used them as a basis for their demands for the means to economic independence for women: access to jobs, education, professional employment and equal pay (Bodichon 1859; Fawcett 1892, 1916, 1918; Webb 1914, 1919)⁸. The so-called “family wage” was described by Eleanor Rathbone (1917, 1924) as an inadequate mode of support for families, and furthermore, as a completely ineffective mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• Part 1 Herstory of economics
• Part II Economic theory
• Part III Interpreting economics
• Part IV Economic measurement
• Part V Empowerment of women
• Index