------------ 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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Published by EH.Net (October 2004). All EH.Net reviews are archived
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