A Herstory of Economics

Edith Kuiper

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509538447
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Economics
• Categoría: Economic History

There were only a few women economists who made it to the surface and whose voices were heard in the history of economic thought of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman – right? Wrong!

In this book, distinguished economist Edith Kuiper shows us that the history of economic thought is just that, a his -story, by telling the her story of economic thought from the perspective of women economic writers and economists. Although some of these women were well known in their time, they were excluded from most of academic economics, and, over the past centuries, their work has been neglected, forgotten, and thus become invisible. Edith Kuiper introduces the reader to an amazing crowd of female pioneers and reveals how their insights are invaluable to understanding areas of economics ranging from production, work, and the economics of the household, to income and wealth distribution, consumption, public policy, and much more.

This pathbreaking book presents a whole new perspective on the development of economic thought. It will be essential reading for all students and scholars of the history of economic thought and feminist economics.

1
The Emergence of Political Economy

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.

Œconomia or the study of household management

Most of the very early women’s economic writings are lost in the mists of history. Only a few phrases of, for instance, Aspasia (470–400 bc), the Ancient Greek political philosopher, have been retained. Xenophon (431–354 bc) and Aristotle (384–322 bc), whose writings did survive, wrote quite extensively about women and gender. A large part of Xenophon’s Œconomicus (362 bc), which translates to “the man who manages the household” (Ekelund and Hébert, 1997), reports on Socrates’ dialogues. Socrates talks about setting up a household, the division of tasks between husband and wife, and the use of training a young wife to become a prudent housewife. He tells us that having a good housewife is crucial for the wealth of the household. “And I can show that some so treat their wedded wives also as to have them as fellow workers in helping to increase their estates, and that others treat them in a way in which most of those who do so bring themselves to ruin” (Xenophon, 2021: 13). Socrates also explains his marriage to Xanthippe, with whom he quarreled on a constant basis, by the fact that she was a strong woman. His remarks are sharp and teasing; in other words, Œconomicus is a good read. Most textbooks on the history of economic thought that point out the importance of the division of labor in Xenophon’s text, like Ekelund and Hébert’s book, referred to above, do so, however, without mentioning his focus on the original division of labor: that between husband and wife, men and women.

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).

The household would remain center stage in economic thinking over the centuries to come. At the end of the Middle Ages (1500–1600s) Europe was still an agrarian society and the early Renaissance literature on husbandry described methods of farming: when to sow, when and how best to harvest, how to deal with animal sickness, etc. Books on husbandry, as Keith Tribe (1978) explains, were mainly based on biblical images and religious concepts, recounting the vertical, hierarchical relations between Adam and the Earth, God and Man, and so on. In this context, when biblical stories and some local folklore were the main narratives that the general populace had access to, just as paintings in the church dominated the imagery they had access to, Eve was pictured as the woman who seduced Adam. Women – as daughters of Eve – played either a negative role in these stories or were simply left out. Some scholastic political philosophers and early economic writers, like Jean Bodin (c.1530–96), for instance, took this perception of women so far that they contributed to the witch hunts that raged throughout Europe from about 1450 to 1750 (see, e.g., Federici, 2014).

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.

With the rise of Protestantism and a new class of merchants and middlemen, the household became more and more ideologically perceived as “a man’s castle” in which women were domesticated and kept as housewives. Until the sixteenth century, and even into the seventeenth, aristocratic women in Europe still had a say in political matters, but over the course of the eighteenth century, especially in the UK, even these women were increasingly kept out of the public sphere. Rising in importance, politics, trade, and industrial endeavors became exclusively male territory, and the household the realm of women. Whereas earlier, keeping the household account books was mainly a task for men, women over time developed their knowledge of running a household and many of them kept their own household books.

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 for her analysis of the wealth development of the Baillie household. Similar account books have recently been revisited as a source of economic information and as such are becoming part of the history of economics (see, e.g., Maas, 2016).

This literature on household management developed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and Scotland into a library of books that dealt with a range of aspects of household management. Consistently ignored by economists and historians of economics alike, it is a large literature on how to best run a household, including how to deal with personnel and sickness, how to remove stains, use herbs for food and medicine, and maintain and repair various kinds of woodwork, tapestry, and clothing, and, of course, how to do the conservation and cooking. Books like Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife; or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s, and Gardiner’s Companion (1758), Mrs. Smith’s The Female Economist; or A Plain System of Cookery: For the Use of Families (1810), and Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) were meant specifically for middle- and upper-class young women who started and ran their own households. Note that Mrs. Smith closes her introduction by stating that her book is well adapted to the purposes of domestic economy, considering “moral attitudes such as economy, cleanliness, and propriety as inherently part” of these household management books. It is Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) that becomes more or less the standard work and that it is still being reprinted and sold today.

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).

Smith built his monumental work on the early industrial economic system on the work of other scholars too – for example, the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whose comprehensive theory of gravity and the application of natural laws gave Smith a model for his theoretical framework. William Petty (1623–87), who started the Royal Society in London and measured the national income of both Ireland and England, provided the groundwork for macroeconomic analysis. French philosophers and economists, including François Quesnay, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boiguilbert, provided Smith with important tools for his analysis of the economy.

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.

These specific binary notions of private and public, nature and society, femininity and masculinity thus became part of political economy at a fundamental level. Smith perceived manhood and masculinity in terms of self-control, individuality, the ability to make decisions on one’s own account, and the freedom to pursue one’s own interest. Femininity, on the other hand, was defined merely by default and in negative terms, such as “effeminate,” “economically dependent,” “driven by strong passions,” “sexually teasing,” and so on (Kuiper, 2003). These notions of masculinity and femininity are still with us today. Take, for instance, a basic macroeconomic model: the Circular Flow Model. The idea of public and private as fundamentally distinct realms still informs the definition of the main actors in this model. It is the firm that produces, the firm that is active and makes the economy grow, while the household is perceived as having a more passive role, consuming goods, choosing between goods and services supplied to them, and providing labor, land, and capital, which are then used by firms in a “productive manner.” It is not until the publication of Beyond Economic Man in 1993, as part of the emergence of feminist economics as a field of study, that we get a thorough critique of the use of binary concepts in economics. In this book, edited by Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson, a group of economists identify binary concepts such as productive/unproductive, investment/savings, culture/nature, public/private, linking them to notions of masculinity/femininity and, as such, structuring mainstream economic theories.

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 b...