For the past two weeks, I’ve been posting about feminism and economics, but I haven’t said much about feminist economics, a sub-discipline within economics. I have not studied as much explicitly feminist economics as I should have, so to introduce you to the fiel I’ve tapped into a much more qualified resource – Susan Feiner, a professor of women’s and gender studies and economics at the University of Southern Maine. This is a sort of guest post within a guest post – below the cut, there is a Q&A with Feiner about the difference between mainstream and feminist economics, how she got started in the area, why undergraduate economics courses can be so alienating, and more.
If you enjoy this post, you should check out Feiner’s own site and her blog, Economics She Wrote. Two good posts to start with are mock transcripts from a meeting introducing women’s studies to economics. You also might like her book, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization.
AM: In a nutshell, what’s the difference between mainstream, econ 101 economics and feminist economics?
SF: Feminist economics differs from mainstream, orthodox, plain vanilla economics in a couple of major different ways. First, or at least first for me, is that feminist economics is deeply influenced by feminist "science studies," the scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (continuing today) which shows the deep flaws in the idea that knowledge is "objective."
Mainstream economics accepts the ideas and concepts of "markets," "competition," "supply," "demand," "price," quantity," etc., the lexicon of Econ 101 textbooks as eternal verities. Economists are unwilling to consider the possibility that the core concepts of economics (more examples "opportunity cost," "efficiency") have history and so contain within themselves value positions.
In feminist science studies scholars like Carolyn Merchant, Evelyn Fox Keller, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Emily Martin showed how the history and social conventions of the day played significant roles in the development of ideas about nature as "female," and science as "male." Nature was seen as irrational, wild, untamed, verdant, fertile, etc etc. Science was male, rational, progressive, civilizing. The same male/female, rational/irrational dichotomies underlie the concepts of economics.
The key here is rationality. Through most of the 19th century and until quite late in the 20th economists always talked about "rational economic man," and they did mean MAN. Through these often (but not always) unconscious moves mainstream economics excluded women and women’s activities from consideration. This reinforced laws that excluded women from owning property, entering contracts, or taking jobs.
That’s the first major difference – feminists reject the idea that all of human productive behavior can be reduced to the exchange of goods for money, and money for goods. The economy is larger, much larger, than THE MARKET.
The second difference is that economics completely abstracts from power. In all the textbook models the default assumption is that markets are impersonal, and no one buyer and no one seller influences the outcome. This is patent nonsense. Feminist economists in contrast explicitly incorporate power—who has it, how it’s used, and why it’s important—into their work.
AM: You’ve been cited as one of the founding scholars of feminist economics. How did you end up working in this field?
SF: One of the reasons I went to graduate school in economics was because it was always obvious to me that the lack of civil rights, the war in Vietnam, imperialism, and most of the evils humans suffer have an important economic basis. African Americans were disenfranchised because their unfreedom supports white wealth. Indigenous peoples around the world were enslaved and colonized to enrich Europeans. Wars are fought for markets and/or access to resources. Religion is another way of defending the order of who has wealth and power. All of this seemed so simple to me I could never actually understand why others didn’t "get it."
Graduate training in economics did not disabuse me of this world view. But that’s because I went to UMass Amherst, one of the only places in the US where alternatives to vanilla economics were allowed to flourish.
In my first full time teaching job, at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond VA) I was not treated well (understatement) by my male colleagues in the economics. Early on in my first year the path breaking report by Bunny Sandler and Roberta Hall, The Classroom Climate, a Chilly One for Women was published. I went to a seminar on this and suddenly a whole lot of things made sense. I started to read …
Experiences in the classroom also piqued my interest. Let me just put this quite baldly: I observed that many more female and black students were having to take introductory economics a second (or third) time to pass. Given the penchant of economists to see things as social darwinists, they explained this by referring to the innate abilities of the different groups of students. I said, BS! And began to investigate.
Thus was born something we started to call "multi-cultural approaches to economic education." I wrote a slew of articles analyzing the treatment of race and gender in economics textbooks. Yes, they were for the most part quite biased so it was not surprising that minority students and women were having a hard time relating. This compounded by the fact that in the 1980s there were so few women or people of color teaching economics.
I continued to read. When I was denied tenure in 1987 I knew sexism was accepted practice in economics.