p. 22 Mary Robinson, in her spirited Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination of 1799, pondering the establishment of a university for women
“Had fortune enabled me, I would build a UNIVERSITY FOR WOMEN, where they should be politely, and at the same time classically educated: the depth of their studies, should be proportioned to their mental powers, and those who were incompetent to the labours of knowledge, should be dismissed after a fair trial of their capabilities, and allotted to the more humble life, such as domestic and useful occupations. The wealthy part of the community, who neglected to educate their female offspring at this seminary of learning should pay a fine, which should be appropriated to the maintenance of unportioned scholars. In half a century there would be sufficient number of learned women to fill all the departments of the university, and those who excelled to an eminent degree should receive honorary medals, which they should wear as an ORDER OF LITERARY MERIT.”
p. 26 The Lost-Gems approach … seeks for “gems that were always there for the looking” … such an approach infuses, for example, Lynn McDonald’s Women Theorists on Society and Politics (1998) and Dorothy Lampen Thomson’s pioneering Adam Smith’s Daughters (1973)… demonstrating the compatibility of endeavours by women (or other marginalised groups) with conventional rules for formulating academically valid claims is initially probably the easiest route into having their intellectual contributions noticed and recognised.. unlikely to displace the patriarchal bias at the heart of institutionalised knowledge production and ironically even serve to solidify a system that works to the detriment of the marginalised.”
p. 27 “advocates of epistemological criticism emphasise that finding a place for women in the history of knowledge cannot stop at inserting them into the established canon but involves rethinking and dismantling the gendered dimensions of scientific practice as such … women should be able to join the game, but the game’s rules must be reformed too.”… Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment … entails recognition of science as a collective endeavour rather than the playing field of certain gifted (male) individuals. Scholarship and science rely on the work of numerous, yet systematically overlooked people.
Sandra Harding’s pioneering work is worth introducing in connection with epistemological criticism, not least because feminist economics has subsequently drawn on her insights: an essay by Harding entitled “Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective?” featured in the first issue of Feminist Economics in 1995…. Harding makes a case for what she terms strong objectivity: a scientific standpoint that consciously states and reflects on its values and interests instead of pretending to be neutral.”
p. 34 Cornelia Klinger … around 1800 constitutes a watershed in the history of gender relations… women… became Modernity’s other … precisely because Modernity needed the other in order to stabilise itself/its self. … Women became the outside®s of modern knowledge; but because without the outsides the identity of the core would collapse, they are an essential, albeit hidden, part of the process of modern knowledge formation.”
P 37 Shelley “seems to have sensed that admitting women into scholarship and knowledge formation would meet with immense obstacles. Yet she is quite clear on the consequences of the refusal to allow for the female’s existence, of the explicit fear of her (pro0)creative energies: the absence of a female companion turns the male creature into a monster and ultimate leads to catastrophe.”
p. 47 Brue and Grant’s student textbook on The Evolution of Economic Thought, the 8th edition of which was published in 2013. … out of more than 70 names of individual scholars mentioned in the book’s chapter headings, only one, that of British economist Joan Robinson, refers to a woman. Her Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) is moreover the only text authored by a woman to be mentioned in the textbook’s list of “Selected Classics in Economics”.
p. 48 Somewhat heretical from the standpoint of mainstream economics … Tomas Sedlacek’s economics of Good and Evil – is not exempt from androcentrism. … the 12-pages long index contains a mere six references to women, and that is counting Pandora and Mother Nature.
p. 55 Critics have demonstrated that the literary character of Robinson Crusoe is a widely used example in explaining the concept of homo economicus…. A paradigm of Western, white, male middle-class imperialism… many economics overlook role of his mother and Friday “and present Crusoe as the quintessential self-sufficient model of economic behaviour”.
p. 56 “Choice is another crucial concept for mainstream economics… yet for feminist economists, what is frequently undertheorised or omitted within this model is the aspect of power, which for a substantial amount of people factually limits the possibilities to choose freely. .. Strassmann puts forward this in economic theory “the lack of emphasis on constraints and interdependence … deemphasizes (if not ignores) the fact that human being begin (and often end) life in a state of helplessness and unchosen dependency…. With caring work… “knowledge production and science as such could not have developed”.
p. 57 “prioritising positivist over normanist statements is epistemologically flawed because it fails to acknowledge that the positivist stance – just as its supposed counterpart – steeped in cultural values and clandestinely promoting the interests of particular groups. .. accords the status of value-neutrality to what in fact is value-blindness.”
p. 61 “Mary S Morgan “Economists use their economic models to explain or to understand the facts of the world by telling stories about how those facts might have arisen. The stories are neither ‘merely heuristic’ nor ‘just rhetoric” but an essential part of the way models are labelled and used.
p. 68 “women around 1800 turned to other genres of writing such as journals, letters, diaries, and, in particular, novels to make their thoughts known. They used them as a textual arena on which they could systematically prove various concerns, among them economic ones… Poovey observes that “the prevalence of financial topics in women’s novels suggests these matters were not far from women novelists’ minds, even if few women contributed articles to the financial press”.
p. 75 Humen “reads Pride and Prejudice as a “glum but telling satiric protest against the socioeconomic position of early 19th-century women, elegantly camouflaged in a fantasy romance.”
p. 83 Melissa Kennedy “In today’s increasingly neoliberalised university, the humanities are under pressure to justify their value in economic terms, in which concepts of the imagination, critical thinking, ‘soft’ skills, literacy and foreign languages have little use-value. In the current late-capitalist, developed world that has almost fully succeeded in attributing financial values to formerly non-financial things – including the commons, water, air, education, knowledge and ideas – the humanities have been so sidelined, and literature so devalued, that it is hard to even imagine that these disciplines might have an important role to play in interpreting or critiquing economic beliefs”.
Imagined Economics – Real Fictions: New Perspectives in Economic Thinking
p. 94 “Cicley Hamilton in Marriage as a Trade (1909) “Some day [man] will discover that woman does not support life only in order to obtain a husband, but frequently obtains a husband only in order to support life.”
p. 104 Chapone is in some respects a radical, in others a conservative critic. She does not argue against marriage per se,… nor does she demand absolute equality between husband and wife. She indicts, however, the extent of the inequality under the present system and accuses the law of not protecting women sufficiently in case the husband reneges on his obligations. .. she buttresses these points by arguing both on an abstract plane and with references to concrete examples of economic violence towards women”.
p. 120 Wollstonecraft’s liberalism and her radical promotion of equality. The ‘hoarding up of property “ and power – be it political, legal, landed or monetary – by one group is to her always a sign of a corrupt system. The emphasis on an equal distribution of resources between members of society expressly includes the equal distribution of resources between the sexes, also underlies her feminist economics of marriage.”
p. 140 “Based on a remark by William Thomason and Anna Doyle Wheeler in their Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretentions of the Other Half Men (1825), the authorship of Appeal is generally attributed to the Dissenting feminist Mary Hays. Born to a middle-class English family on 4 May 1759, the largely self-educated Haus earned her living through work – a decision that was reinforced by the example of her widowed mother who conducted business as a wine merchant as well as the fact that Mary Hays never married. (Her finance John Eccles died unexpectedly in 1780, shortly before the marriage ceremony was due to take place.) For most of her life, Hays lived in and around London, pursuing a career as a professional writer and social commentator. Her lifetime corpus includes poems, pamphlets on religion, politics and the status of women, two autobiographical novels, journalistic articles and reviews for the Analytical Review and Monthly Magazine, didactive stories for children and the laboring classes, historical profiles of public female figures … radicals respected and supported her, conservatives condemned and satirised her.”
p. 149 both Wollstonecraft and Hays “highlighted… the interdependence of women’s political and economic marginalisation”.
p. 151 “Angelina … expresses Robinson’s condemnation of « the marriage market, the slave trade, and the ‘cruel business’ of war.”
p. 169 Mary Hays Appeal
“few, very few are the employments left iopen even for women of the inferior classes, by which they can secure independence, and to which without a doubt may be greatly attributed, the ruin of most of the sex, in the lower ranks.”
Mary Lamb, letter to British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany written under the pseudonym Sempronia corroborates Hill’s conclusion that the majority of women in the 18th century tended to work very hard, for many hours, at tasks that were heavy or unpleasant. But because the work was frequently unwaged, multioccupational, flexible, involving a range of skills and thus eluding straightforward definitions, their contributions risked being overlooked as secondary to those of men.”
p. 174 Mary Hays Appeal “the business appropriated by custom for women, are so very few in proportion to the number of candidates, that they are soon monopolised.”
p. 182 Priscilla Wakefield did not devote her entire life to rearing famous men, and she deserves a place in her own right within the history of economic thought: she has a claim to have founded the first savings bank in England and to have authored the most systematic exploration of women’s employment opportunities around 1800 – Reflections on Present Conditions of the Female Sex with Suggestions for its Improvement.”
p. 207 Mary Ann Radcliffe The Female Advocate drew on her own experiences. The whole of Radcliffe’s Memoirs document her struggle with this impossible role … the responsibility of maintaining herself and her children, even after they reached adulthood … a role she was not keen on having and felt badly equipped for.”
p. 258 “female authors disclose to what extent the economy of their times relies on a continuous and systematic disenfranchisement and exploitation of women. Since there is no alternative to the patriarchal economy, women must participate in it to secure their self-preservation and satisfy basic needs. Yet this coercive mechanism is concealed at the level of official discourse … the patriarchal economy maintains that it protects women”.
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