At the 1990 meetings of the American Economics Association a group of dissident women formed a network that evolved into the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).
European members organized a meeting in Amsterdam with the title ‘‘Out of the Margin” challenging the economic profession’s tendency to marginalize women and resist challenges to mainstream approaches.1 The title of an important collection of feminist economic essays published in 1993 also conveyed a message: Beyond Economic Man?
Those essays explain that the man who knows exactly what he wants and how best to get it on his own is a caricature dependent on the women who nurtured him as an infant, care for his children, and promise to care for him in old age.
No society based on selfishness could persist, and neither could any society that simply takes altruism as a given. The claim that everyone pursues their own self-interest is circular. What matters is the size and shape of the circle—the boundaries of the self and extent to which its preferences include concern for moral values and the well-being of other people.The history of men's efforts to claim women as appendage to themselves— whether in the home, the polity, the labor market, or the national income accounts—reveals the impact of economic power on economic theory. As women gained more individual and collective bargaining power, they gradually changed the discipline. Feminist perspectives in economics join a host of other efforts to better understand the ways in which individuals come to identify with, and care for, others. Such forms of solidarity challenge the conventional assumption that self-interest is just another word for selfishness. They also help explain the formation and pursuit of collective interests.