The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought

Abstract

Deep within the lobby of the Woolworth Building—one of New York’s oldest skyscrapers and a living monument to American capitalism—is a golden mosaic. At its heart is the goddess of commerce, flanked on each side by two men on bended knee, presenting the transport innovations that first enabled globalisation: the ship and the railway. However, in the real world—as opposed to the world of the gods—economics is bereft of women. There has only ever been one female Nobel Prize winner in the subject, Elinor Ostrom, while, at the other end of the pipeline, there are two-to-three times as many young men in the USA and UK studying economics as there are young women. Histories of economic thought are filled with great and bearded men—well known figures such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, and Friedman. One of these figures, Alfred Marshall, despite being married to Mary Paley, the first woman economics lecturer in Cambridge, did not hold back on why he thought there were few female economists, writing in 1894 that ‘[e]conomics is a subject generally unsuited for advance by women’. Mark Blaug’s book ‘Great Economists’ (1986), includes 100 economists, only three of which are women. On the one hand, one could argue that this dominance of male figures in the history of economic thought simply reflects fact: that, historically speaking, there have been very few female economists. On the other, we should instead acknowledge that women have long been writing about the economy—but that their work has been overlooked and under appreciated. Indeed, Kirsten Madden et al.’s herculean ‘Bibliography of Female Economic Thought to 1940’ (Routledge, 2004) lists the work of more than 1,700 female economic thinkers.