Women's Economic Thought in the Romantic Age

Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought

Joanna Rostek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429665318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy.

Women's Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics.

Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women's Economic Thought in the Romantic Ag e retrieves women's overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.

1
INTRODUCTION

Can you name any English women to have made original contributions to economic thought around 1800? Any women from that period that would qualify as economists? If your answer to these questions is no, then it aligns with what remains a glaring research gap: no detailed study of English women economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exists to date. This book redresses this lacuna in two respects: firstly, drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, feminist economics, (feminist) history of thought, and gender studies, it develops a transdisciplinary methodology that enables the identification of women economists of the past – a method that can also be applied in future research. Secondly, using this methodology, the book presents and analyses selected contributions to economic thought developed by seven English women during the Romantic Age and beyond. The women economists covered are Sarah Chapone (1699–1764), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Mary Hays (1759–1843), Mary Robinson (1756/1758?–1800), Priscilla Wakefield (1750–1832), Mary Ann Radcliffe (1746–1810?), and Jane Austen (1775–1817). The earliest examined text was published in 1735 and the most recent in 1811. The book concentrates on the authors’ observations on the economics of marriage, women’s access to paid work, and moral economics. It reveals that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women thinkers were formulating demands for equal pay, investigating how women could earn money, negotiating property and marital rights, criticising cultural norms that led to women’s economic marginalisation, and challenging the institutionalisation of male economic privilege.

Before expanding on the main argument and structure of this book, I wish to lose a few words about its genesis. My impulse to write it arose from the seeming non-existence of women economic thinkers that would be contemporaries of men whose names are well-known: Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and James Mill. I thought back to my time as a student when I took a degree in International Cultural and Business Studies: in none of the classes on the foundations of economics had I been acquainted with a single theory developed by a woman. I consulted anthologies devoted to the history of economic thought: hardly any women were mentioned, and those that were for the most part (had) lived in the twentieth century. At the same time, as a literary and cultural scholar, I knew very well what numerous scholars of English had demonstrated: economic concerns permeated the writings, especially novels, of women authors of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. I was also familiar with the publications by early nineteenth-century female popularisers of political economy, Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau. The discrepancy between the absence of women in accounts of the history of economic thought and the presence of economic matters in women’s literature struck me as odd. Why were the discourses so gendered? Where were women in the history of economic theorising? And what did they have to say about economic matters while the founding fathers of classical political economy were penning their texts?

My declaration that I was working on women’s contributions to economic thought in England in the decades around 1800 commonly met with one of the following reactions: “That’s an interesting topic. But isn’t suitable material to analyse hard to come by?” or “That’s an interesting topic. Are you then reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and so on and discussing how the work of female authors relates to their theories?” Both responses made sense, but they also made me question the premises of my project. If my interlocutors were correct, I would have to do the exact reverse of what had been my intention: instead of reading many economic texts by female writers, I would have to read many economic texts by men, firstly because the latter’s publications were the standard to which I had to relate, and secondly because women had not written much in that domain anyway. It was true that I could write a book exploring if and how female authors of the Romantic period engaged with the thought of male economists of their time. But I did not want women to end up as satellites revolving around and responding to the standard set by male economists. To borrow Mary Eagleton’s expression, my aim was to “rescue […] women’s work from being secondary source material, merely an interesting gloss on the primary male text” (252). This made me probe a different perspective: what if the problem lies not with the meagre quantity and quality of economic texts produced by women but with the very notion of what ‘the economy’ and ‘economic knowledge’ are? What if not the amount of available material is too limited but the notion of what counts as ‘economic thought’ and ‘economic writing’? Out of these considerations, this book emerged.

The texts introduced and examined in the following chapters prove that contrary to what standard histories of economic thought convey, English women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries developed and formulated original ideas on the economy. They wrote as women (i.e. from a female perspective), revealing how fundamentally gender determines economic experiences, roles, and outcomes. Their gender-sensitive approach does not mean that their contributions represent a biased supplement to an objective, gender-neutral enquiry by their male contemporaries. Rather, women’s texts constitute an equally important counterpart to the writings by men classical political economists. It is socially relevant to pursue the aim of a ‘herstory’ of economic thought, not only because “economic discourse is a prime terrain for political struggle” (Seiz, “Gender” 43), but also because the formation and dissemination of knowledge touches upon relations of power, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and ways of making sense of the world – both in the past and present.

The observations of English women economists around 1800 convey that what their contemporaries – but also some scholars today – considered as simply ‘the’ economy was a system in which material and immaterial resources and privileges were distributed unevenly between men and women, to the overall detriment of the latter. From this vantage point, ‘the’ economy emerges as a patriarchal economy, for whose functioning it was indispensable that women’s dependence persists and men retain the discretion over women’s economic agency. The analysis and critique of the patriarchal economy marks radical interventions (Wollstonecraft, Hays, Robinson) as well as more moderate, in parts even conservative, texts (Chapone, Wakefield, Radcliffe, Austen). Similar economic phenomena, then, preoccupied women from differing ideological backgrounds. Their common gender and class experiences – they all hailed from and for the most part wrote about middle-class women – certainly contributed to these parallels. But the parallels also suggest how entrenched the patriarchal economy has been.

To recuperate these significant and topical contributions to economic thought by women of the Romantic Age, it has first been necessary to reveal and dismantle the gender bias inherent in established definitions and practices of scholarship generally and economics in particular. Furthermore, it has been indispensable to make visible and uproot the gender bias underlying the distinction between genres of writing around 1800 and thus between literary and economic texts. This is also why the title of my book, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought, purposefully avoids signal words that would point to literature. My aim is not to show that ‘literature’ (by women) was processing similar topics as ‘economic thought’ (by men) around 1800 but to delegitimise the rigid distinction between the two. In some contexts, this distinction is useful and indispensable; in others – such as women’s economic thought around 1800 – it is problematic. Finally, I had to cross the boundaries between academic disciplines so that knowledge of women’s economic writing as well as methods that already exist in English departments could travel to economics. Part I of this book retraces this epistemological groundwork and develops a transdisciplinary methodology for a herstory of economic thought. Part II illustrates that once it is applied, women’s contributions to economic thought are no longer needles in a haystack. They provide a vital and hitherto neglected perspective on the economy and enlarge our understanding of economic processes, historically and today. This is why women’s texts ought to be included in the canon of economic writing.

Transdisciplinarity

In focusing on texts authored by women, my project shares the impetus of early feminist scholarship, which has successfully made women visible – as writers and readers, as minds and bodies, as subjects and objects – and confirmed the value of their contributions. From the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies, the feminist project has been so successful as to establish gender studies within the academic mainstream and render self-evident the presence of Jane Austen or Mary Wollstonecraft in the literary canon and academic curricula. Four decades ago, literary scholar Elaine Showalter coined the term “gynocritics” to describe “the study of women as writers [and of] the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition” (184–85).¹ Since then, literary feminism and gender studies have evolved, gone through various phases and controversies, yielded numerous results, and developed into sub-fields.

But the fact that feminist approaches are relatively established within literary and cultural studies does not mean that the project of analysing the intersections of gender on the one hand and epistemological (dis-)empowerment on the other has become superfluous. There remain academic disciplines that have not sufficiently responded to and incorporated the insights yielded by women’s and gender studies. Heike Kahlert notes that “[w]ith respect to the history of science, gender studies and gender research are new- and latecomers in academia. This reflects the history of science and academia which is built on a long tradition of the dominance of men and the exclusion or marginalisation of women as subjects and objects of scientific knowledge” (“Introduction” 2). Economics and its history remain a blatant case in point in this regard, despite notable efforts by feminist economists. A first weighty argument in favour of a transdisciplinary methodology presents itself at this point: because literary and cultural scholars have by now more experience in retrieving women’s texts and perspectives, they may lend their expertise to other disciplines.

This book, in fact, uses and promotes transdisciplinarity as an approach that is paramount for a herstory of economic thought. I do not seek to delegitimise alternative terms, such as ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘cross-disciplinary’, or ‘multidisciplinary’, which often designate projects that work along similar lines as mine. But the prefix ‘trans’, which comes from the Latin ‘across’, ‘over’, or ‘beyond’, has the advantage of highlighting that rather than merely enabling a dialogue between academic disciplines, a transdisciplinary approach seeks to go beyond, reposition, and partially blur the boundaries between them. In my understanding, it translates the languages that different academic disciplines speak so that they can communicate with each other; it transports ideas and texts from one domain to the other so that they can travel and circulate; it transcends conceptual and generic boundaries that both delimit and limit what is recognised as legitimate and valuable knowledge; and, ideally, it transforms the disciplines involved. Gender studies frequently resorts to transdisciplinary research because, as I explain in the course of this book, modern scholarship and contemporary academic mapping are suffused with androcentric biases that are apt to marginalise women’s (and other social groups’) contributions. Knowledge historically produced by women and other underprivileged subjects often evades the frameworks of established disciplines, which is why to move beyond gender it is necessary to move beyond disciplines. This is also true of economic thought.

Transdisciplinarity entails the benefits but also potential dangers inherent in any approach fusing divergent academic disciplines: dilettantism, inconsistency, methodological reductionism, oversimplifications, and so forth. Besides, writing a transdisciplinary book invariably carries the risk of remaining unintelligible and/or banal to practitioners from the respective academic fields.² I nevertheless follow Sandra Harding’s optimistic assessment that “[f]eminist work in economics and other social sciences, as well as in biology and the humanities, has made its greatest contributions to the growth of knowledge when it has been able to step outside the preoccupations of the disciplines” (“Feminist” 164). She notes that although

there is nowhere that is outside all culture; there are no vantage points anyone could find that are not themselves also discursively constructed within power relations, it will be easier to identify the contours of a given conceptual scheme or paradigm from ‘outside’ than from within its categories, puzzles and other preoccupations that usually fill up the entire horizon of our thought. We want to start off our thought from ‘elsewhere’.

(“Feminist” 160)

As a literary and cultural scholar, I propose that my disciplines can serve as the “outside” or “elsewhere” for the his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I A transdisciplinary methodology for a herstory of economic thought
• Part II Women’s economic thought in the Romantic Age
• References
• Index