A Herstory of Economics. Edith Kuiper
(1810–86)
Marion Talbot (1858–1948)
Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944)
Elizabeth Church Terrell (1863–1954)
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790–1846)
Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810)
Flora Tristan (1803–44)
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1783)
Priscilla Wakefield (1751–1832)
Beatrice Potter Webb (1858–1943)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931)
Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785–1848)
Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97)
Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927)
Helen Woodward (1882–1960)
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Frances Wright (1795–1852)
Ann Yearsley (1753–1806)
Clara Zetkin (1857–1933)
Preface and Acknowledgments
Being part of the history I have been writing about has been a mixed pleasure, I can tell you that. As a philosopher and historian of economic thought, my research on the invisible women economic writers and economists in the history of economic thought quite literally cost me my job, as this topic was considered “not core to the field.” This book tells the larger history, or perhaps better, the herstory of economic thought. It tells the story of women, a long line of women who wrote about economic topics, theories, insights, and their experiences – the story of women economic writers and women economists and their work. Because they were women and because they wrote about women, their work was ignored and left to gather dust.
This book will put a spotlight on these women, most of them still unknown even to scholars of the history of economic thought. Many of them were impressive and insightful people, who stepped forward and wrote about what they considered to be highly relevant and important, what they thought needed to be said. Occasionally their writing made them rich and famous, but, in other cases, these women faced dire consequences for publishing their thoughts. This book aims to show that their work is worth reading and that they can teach us about crucial aspects of an economy.
Losing my job worked out well for me in the end. I found a position that provided me with the support and opportunity to gather together the essays, letters, pamphlets, and books of eighteenth-century women economic writers (see Barker and Kuiper, 2010; Kuiper, 2014) and to teach on the topic. It also enabled me, subsequently, to write this book about these women. This book presents a selection of voices that tell us about how women lived in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France, and in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century US; about the economic problems they encountered, the solutions they proposed and fought for, and the way they viewed the economy. This book will provide you with a new perspective on the history of economic thought. Be warned, though: once read, there is no going back …
I would like to thank the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) for supporting my initial research on women’s writing in the history of economic thought with their VENI grant, which enabled me to do four years of research, to change my mind, and to receive the institutional support that I needed. I would also like to thank the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and all the friends and colleagues I had the chance to work with over the years and who provided me with an inspiring and supportive professional environment. I warmly thank my colleagues of the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz’s Economics Department – Mona Ali, Hamid Azari-Rad, Laura Ebert, and Simin Mozayeni – who so wholeheartedly supported me in writing this book, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department – Karl Bryant, Meg Devlin, Heather Hewitt, Kathleen Dowley, and Jess Pabon – who taught me so much, and also the students in my History of Economic Thought courses, who pushed me to be more articulate and to sharpen my thoughts and narratives. I would also like to thank my friends and dear colleagues for their time, comments, discussions, and inspiration, especially Drucilla Barker, Ann Davis, Koen Bron, Hettie Pott-Buter, and Jolande Sap for their support in this lengthy endeavor. I would particularly like to thank my students Adrienne Springer, Claudia Garcia-Robles, and Yili Hasandjekaj for their research, respectively, on Émilie du Châtelet, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sadie Alexander.
Finally, in the words of Mary Lee Chudleigh (1701), I do “beg your pardon for the length of this Address, and for the liberty I have taken to speak my Thoughts so freely, which I do not doubt but you will readily grant to one, who has no other Design but that of doing you Justice.”
Enjoy the read!
Introduction
What is a herstory of economics? And why do we need it?
As it is taught today, the history of economic thought consists of a chain of intriguing and engaging stories about great economists, with a focus on a fixed set of male Western economists. Political economy emerged in Western Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century, and, during British economic hegemony, it was centered at the University of Cambridge in England. The history of economic science was traditionally taught using an internalist approach. This meant that teaching focused on the rational considerations of great minds like Adam Smith (1723–90), Karl Marx (1818–83), and John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) (rhymes with ‘brains,’ as US economist Deirdre McCloskey would say), and the debates between them and their contemporaries. Recently, historians of economics have become more and more interested in applying an externalist approach, paying attention to facts not directly related to political economy – for example wars, revolutions and political backlashes, economic crises, as well as personal friendships, mental health issues, class, and personal hang-ups – to better understand the development of economic concepts, models, and theories. As part of this, there is an emerging interest in the role of women, as well as norms, values, and institutional practices around gender and women’s voices in economic science. Historians of economic thought have started to turn their eyes to the role of gender in economics (see Pujol, 1992; Groenewegen, 1994; Folbre, 2009), the work of female economists (see Thomson, 1973; Libby, 1990; Dimand et al., 2000; Madden et al., 2004), and the reasons for the low representation of women in the history of economic thought (see Dimand, 1995; Madden, 2002). Collections of texts by women economic writers and feminist economists have been compiled (Barker and Kuiper, 2010; Kuiper, 2014) and women’s economic writings are being analyzed (see Madden and Dimand, 2019; Rostek, 2021). This book is a logical follow-up to this work and makes grateful use of it.
In the overall discipline, however, most women economic writers and women who were professional economists, including those who were once well known and engaged in the economic science of their time, have been forgotten and excluded from the narrative of the history of economic science. Even those who were very famous in their lifetime – Oprah Winfrey-like famous – were, mostly by default, excluded from accounts of the history of economics. It is still the case that few historians of economics, let alone other economists, have heard about the work of Mary Astell, Sarah Chapone, Priscilla Wakefield, Elizabeth Hutchins, or Hazel Kyrk. Those who put together lists, websites, posters, and calendars of economists generally overlook women economic writers and economists. At best, their number is reduced to one, Joan Robinson, or two, Joan Robinson and Rosa Luxemburg, as women economists who somehow made it to the surface. Joan Robinson (1903–83) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) were both fine economists. Robinson wrote about monopolistic markets and price discrimination and she had the dubious honor of being the woman who “should have received the Nobel Prize for Economics” but never did. Luxemburg described and analyzed imperialism: why and how the capitalist system spreads more and more widely over the globe. The history of women economists generally stops here, as if mentioning two women in the history of economic thought is enough – more than enough.