------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.NET (October 2004) 
 
James Cicarelli and Julianne Cicarelli, _Distinguished Women  
Economists_. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. xxvi + 244 pp. $65  
(hardbound), ISBN: 0-313-30331-2. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Claire Hammond, Department of Economics, Wake  
Forest University. 
 
 
_Distinguished Women Economists_ by James Cicarelli, Professor of  
Economics at Roosevelt University, and Julianne Cicarelli, of the  
Huntington Learning Center in Arlington Heights, IL, contains  
fifty-one biographical essays of living and dead women economists.  
Each woman was chosen because her career as an economist has  
exemplified performance at a high level and has "advanced economics  
in meaningful ways" (xi). 
 
Since at least 1986 when Mark Blaug's _Who's Who in Economics_ was  
published with entries for only a handful of women out of some 1400  
living and dead economists, efforts have been made to uncover the  
names and contributions of women economists who might have been left  
out by Blaug's critieria: for living economists, the frequency of  
citations in economics journals indexed in the Social Sciences  
Citations Index (SSCI); for dead economists, inclusion in the indices  
of leading histories of economic thought. Of course, as time goes by,  
the number of entries for living women economists is growing as they  
accumulate citations in the SSCI and get added to updated versions of  
_Who's Who in Economics_. Economists prolific enough to get included  
are invited to write their own entries. 
 
In order to understand the contributions of women economists of the  
past who did not make it into the standard history of thought texts,  
Robert Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand and Evelyn Forget solicited  
biographical essays from eighty authors on the careers of 120 retired  
or dead women. Their edited volume, _A Biographical Dictionary of  
Women Economists_ (2000) covers one hundred and ten economists not  
included in _Who's Who in Economics_. While Dimand, Dimand, and  
Forget attempted to publish a complete dictionary of past women  
economists they acknowledged that pressure to go to press and lack of  
information forced them to omit some women. They urged their readers  
to continue to "fill the gaps in our institutional memory" (2000,  
xvii). 
 
Unlike these other two, Cicarelli and Cicarelli's volume is not  
designed to be a comprehensive biographical dictionary. Instead, they  
want to "have a balance of accomplished and emerging economists;  
deceased and living economists; cognitive [engaged in research and  
teaching], policy, and business economists" (xix). Their purpose is  
to show that "women have played a vital role in the development of  
modern economics almost from its inception. ... [However] women's  
contributions to the field were all but unrecognized, and even today  
their input is undervalued despite the fact that a full one-third of  
those who identify themselves as economists are female" (xi). 
 
Their attempt at balance backfires. Without set criteria for  
inclusion, their list of economists appears a hodgepodge of names.  
With room for only fifty-odd entries it is unclear how they decided  
who to include. Twenty-three of their entries overlap with those in  
_A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists_. Twenty overlap with  
_Who's Who in Economics_. Only sixteen are unique to this volume. 
 
It is clear why some of these sixteen were chosen. Theresa Wolfson  
was a labor economist active in the 1930s and 1940s who won the John  
Dewey Award of the League for Industrial Democracy. Nancy Teeters was  
the first woman appointed to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.  
Marina Whitman was the first woman to serve on the president's  
Council of Economic Advisors. Laura Tyson was its first woman chair.  
Juanita Kreps was the first woman and economist appointed U.S.  
secretary of commerce. Heidi Hartman and Nancy Folbre are MacArthur  
Fellows. But for the rest it is unclear why they were picked over  
many other successful, contemporary women economists. To be sure,  
Rebecca Blank, Abby Cohen, Kathleen Cooper, Kathryn Eickhoff, Ann  
Horowitz, Caroline Hoxby, Isabel Sawhill, Diane Swonk, and Marjorie  
Turner have made or are making contributions. But to include them  
begs the question of why not include others. For example, it struck  
me as odd that there is an entry on Irma Adelman and not one for her  
frequent co-author, Cynthia Taft Morris. The essay on Adelman refers  
to Morris simply as Adelman's coauthor without acknowledging that  
this co-author is also an extremely successful woman economist [see  
Blaug, 1999, pp. 800-801]. 
 
Each entry consists of an introduction, a short biography, a section  
on the subject's contributions to economics, and a bibliography of  
selected works by and about the subject. The entries are uniformly  
informative but in many cases they exaggerate the contributions of  
the women. For example, Cicarelli and Cicarelli write that "Shirley  
Almon was to econometrics what the mythical Helen of Troy was to the  
Greek navy" (11). They contend that "half that award [Milton  
Friedman's Nobel Prize] belonged to Anna J. Schwartz" (170). This is  
simply untrue by any account including Schwartz's own [see Blaug,  
1999, p. 1006]. Other statements are silly or unnecessary. Consider  
the following: "Of all her contributions to economics, none matches  
the importance of simply being Kathleen Cooper" (56). Or, Laura Tyson  
suffered from "professional jealousies aimed at the former high  
school cheerleader, who favors designer suits and bouncy earrings"  
(203). Or, Diane Swonk's graduation from the University of Michigan  
was "no small accomplishment for someone with a learning disability"  
(183). 
 
These overblown and frivolous statements suggest a volume that is  
better suited to encouraging high school girls to consider economics  
as a career than as a serious addition to the collection of  
biographical dictionaries. 
 
Bibliography: 
 
Mark Blaug, editor. _Who's Who in Economics_. Third Edition.  
Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1999. 
 
Robert W. Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand, and Evelyn L. Forget, editors. _A  
Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists_. Cheltenham, England:  
Edward Elgar, 2000. 
 
 
Claire Hammond is a Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University  
and author of four entries in _A Biographical Dictionary of Women  
Economists_. She is currently co-editing the correspondence of Milton  
Friedman and George Stigler. 
 
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