Book review: A Herstory of Economics

Books that outline the history of economic thought tend to look, from the outside perspective, like a history of white male social scientists. A few key female economists' names may get a mention, such as Joan Robinson, or Elinor Ostrom. An enthusiastic chronicler of the history may even include Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, or Harriet Taylor Mill (the latter in conjunction with her husband John Stuart Mill). Otherwise, these histories mostly ignore the role of women in the development of economics.

Filling this void in our understanding of economic history is important, and is part of the goal of A Herstory of Economics, by Edith Kuiper. As she explains:

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.

The book is incredibly well-researched, and well-written, albeit in quite an academic style. Kuiper had a lot to share, and I definitely learned a lot. Some of the things I learned were relatively benign, such as the fact that 'home economics', as taught in high schools (and until relatively recently, in many universities, before it was renamed 'family and consumer sciences') had the same academic roots in antiquity (oeconomicus) as did the political economy of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Other things were somewhat more profound, such as this description of the reality of work in a pin factory (which contrasts with the complete lack of a gender lens in Adam Smith's description of a pin factory in The Wealth of Nations), referencing the work of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna:

Tonna uses Smith's example as she describes how one would enter the pin factory and find the men in the first room. Walking on, however, one would find young women and children in terrible circumstances doing their work, practically in the dark, in the back of the building:

We enter at once a new scene - the interior of a pin manufactory. It is winter, the chilliness of a November day ... We proceed through several departments of busy employment: in one there are children winding slender wire, which, being passed through a machine by steam-power, is drawn out by men. Here, the boys work, generally under their fathers; and whatever we may think of their close, protracted confinement, the labour itself is not severe. In the next room we find many little fellows, more fatiguingly employed, being perpetually on foot, walking to and fro, assisting their seniors by the operation of straightening the coiled wire furnished by the drawers, which the men cut into length and point. ... Hitherto, we found no girls, nor very little children; but enter the next department, and the scene will change. Here is a room, if we can call it by that name ... and here, seated before machines unlike any that we have yet surveyed, are about fifty children, of whom the eldest maybe thirteen, but the general age is less, much less - they are mere babes...

This description sits uneasily beside the more straightforward description that Adam Smith provides, of how specialisation and division of labour enable the workers in a pin factory to be much more productive than are individual craftsmen making pins (see the third paragraph of Chapter 1, Book 1, of The Wealth of Nations here).

As in the quote above, Kuiper draws out many of the important contributions that women economic writers have made. Many of those contributions are hidden, because they were not written in scholarly books or journals, but rather in novels, in poetry, in trade magazines, in translations of books, or in other forums. There is a lot to be learned from these sources that have mostly been overlooked by the mainstream history of economic thought. For example, I believe it would be worthwhile for more people to explore the criticism of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments by Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet, who was the first to translate Smith's book into French.

I do have a couple of small quibbles with the book. First, because Kuiper is quite exhaustive in her sources, I often found myself thinking that I wished she had written more about some of the women economic writers that she references. For instance, the work of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American women to obtain a PhD in economics, was only given the merest of mentions. Of course, by providing hints about the value of writing by previously under-rated women economists and economic writers, Kuiper is inviting the reader to look further on their own, and she cannot be faulted for making those invitations quite inviting. Second, because the book is written in quite an academic style, it may not suit all general readers. I found many of the stories of great interest, but that reflects my own background and interests. A general reader might prefer if the stories of these women economic writers could 'come alive' on the page a little more. However, perhaps that is best left to a more mainstream treatment.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book, as complementary to existing histories of economic thought. It would be good to read alongside Robert Heilbroner's excellent book The Worldly Philosophers (which I reviewed here) for example. For someone wanting to see a more rounded view of the history of economic thought, that doesn't mostly ignore that women also thought about economic issues, this book is to be recommended.