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Four suggestions for different directions to try: 
 
1.  Senior thought that women were better treated in factories than 
in weavers' households, where he thought there was a great deal of 
spousal abuse (didn't call it that of course) -- he thought that 
working class men were lazy beasts and that the only solution was to 
educate children, since "civilized" people did not treat their wives 
that way, and if the children grew up to be productive adults, the 
women could stay at home where they belong ...  
     Ending up in the same place from a different perspective, 
Marxists and many other socialists believed that if workers made a 
"living wage" then ... women could stay at home where they belonged. 
To some extent, this was realistic:  much in the way of household 
productivity could not be reproduced through the market and a household 
that did not have someone at home performing home production of goods 
and services DID suffer in terms of effective total income. 
     The point here, though, is that this is the context in which you 
will find most references to women in the economics literature 
for a LONG time -- tangential to the REAL issue, which was men working. 
 
2.  Almost as soon as the theoretical distinction was made between 
"production" and "consumption", women became associated with the latter. 
There are references going back into the 1700s.  And as late as my 
first course in economics, where the professor divided the economy into 
households and firms, production and consumption -- since women rule 
the household, the household rules consumption, women's role in the 
economy is as a consumer.  So you will find a whole line of thought 
on THAT subject -- still difficult to shake.  A tractor that will last 
20 years (?) is a capital expenditure; a washer/dryer that will last 
20 years is a consumption expenditure.  (Only if you aren't the 
person doing the laundry.) 
     Only now are economic historians beginning to study the impact 
on economc growth in the nineteenth century due to reorganization of 
the household and household innovation.   
 
3.  Where does Charlotte Perkins Gilman fit into the history of 
economic thought?  What does it mean that the issues that concerned 
her -- the costs of home production, the societal imperative that women 
be responsible for home production -- were considered either trivial 
or frighteningly radical at the time? 
     How much of our concepts of what is appropriate "free trade" 
policy, and what is inappropriate "socialistic" policy, determined 
along an implicit, subconscious association with business=male/ 
important/public; household=female/unimportant/private; issues such  
as health, food, education, child care are female; capital gains, 
banking, production subsidies (agriculture and export) are male. 
     To what extent was gender (and race) deeply embedded in ALL 
academic nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse -- and hence  
still embedded in economic thought today?  In this you are looking for  
unconscious attituders toward what is female, what is male -- overtly,  
why was Charlotte Perkins Gilman so completely dismissable? 
 
4.  One more implicit male/female dichotomization is the goods/services 
conceptual dichotomy.  And to return to the earlier discussions about 
what is possible with neoclassical theory:  if production of services 
such as teaching or caring of the sick includes a sense of self- 
satisfaction in the act of CARING for others -- and if women predominate 
in performing those functions -- what does it mean that neoclassical 
economics does not have any good way of dealing with that behavior?   
Is it just implicitly assumed that BECAUSE it is women who do these 
things, they are not economically important?  Where does the imperative 
to study only those transactions that take place in the market fit in 
all of this? 
 
In other words, I'm suggesting that you look not only at how economists 
explicitly spoke about women, but also how they implicitly incorporated 
beliefs about gender and gendered activities in their theories.   
--  
Mary M. Schweitzer , Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History 
Villanova University (on medical leave since January 1995) 
Email:  <[log in to unmask]> 
URL:  http://www2.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html 
 
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