Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas

"It’s a work of economic history—it looks at everybody from Ricardo, Mathus, Marx, all those ‘brand’ economists, and how they have approached the question of women in the economy. We see that the idea of what was ‘right’ for women to be doing in the economy developed over time. What you see is you go from, I think, a fairly sincere desire to figure out how women and resources and population work together to produce wealth or poverty in a national. But later you get into the kind of neoclassical period of the 1950s, they dismiss women who work in the home as quote-unquote ‘unproductive’; I’ve seen some of the studies where they would categorise unpaid work, such as in the home, as ‘leisure’, as if it required no effort. It’s a very readable book, and you see the progression of thinking that leads up to the present moment. So I came to this topic after having written a book about the rise of the fashion and beauty economy, called Fresh Lipstick . I did quite a bit of primary research for that, which meant I read a lot­—11 decades of women’s magazines. I saw that some things about the modern economy actually enabled women, facilitated the rise of the feminist movement, and that the two were linked. What I felt I saw was that there were things that happened in 19th century America that provided economic liberty for women, so that if we tried to replicate them in the world today might alleviate poverty and so on. So I started from that basis. I had a crazy idea. The Economics and Social Science Research Board in the United Kingdom awarded me one of my first grants, and they laughed at me when I presented the idea because it was so out there. But I started doing research, in mostly rural, remote areas of very poor countries, trying to figure out how to enable women economically and what the impact would be. At that point we were coming to realise that the impact of economically enabling women is very positive, particularly for children—they get better food, more education, it’s just a really good thing to do. So as that was becoming more known, what I was doing suddenly went from complete madness to being right at the centre of international economic interest. I had lots and lots of projects, and the chance to go all over the world studying this topic. I came to understand that I was seeing the same phenomenon everywhere I went, even though conventional wisdom of the time held that it should be different everywhere. It was not. I think everyone who has done work in this area over the last two decades has come to this conclusion; there’s just not enough variability to pretend it’s culturally individual. I was very aware of how women had been economically constrained in the past, and that the same restrictions still exist in poorer countries. But you could see the vestiges, the fingerprints of them in developed countries as well. So it’s really a global phenomenon: that women’s subordination has an impact on war and hunger. I wrote this up as The Double X Economy , making the argument that there’s a full women’s economy—not just labour, but investments, charitable donations, credit standing, everything—that is different to men’s because you’ve had this longstanding, global system of exclusion. Unequal pay exists because of this past total exclusion from the money system—it’s not just because in certain countries, in certain industries, some of the time, women are paid less. In our lifetime? No. But the evidence is at this point very compelling that we not only need to change the situation, but that we can—it’s pretty clear how we would do it. So it’s strictly a matter of finding the political will, and for people to become aware of just how important it would be for everyone if we dealt with this instead of ignoring it. But yes, I’m very hopeful. We absolutely can do it, we know it’s good for us, we know why to do it, and we know how to do it."