The Butcher, the Baker, and the Wife

In his more famous book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith forcefully prescribed the individual pursuit of self-interest. He has some­times been accused of inconsistency on this score, but his earlier book had made the case that self-interest would generally take a benevolent form.

Smith also offered a spatial solution to the tension between virtue and self­interest, assigning one to the family (outside the economy) and the other to the market. In one of the most famous sentences in the history of economic thought, he wrote ‘‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from regard to their self- interest.”⁵¹ Smith neglected to mention that none of these tradesmen actu­ally puts dinner on the table, ignoring cooks, maids, wives, and mothers in one fell swoop.

Smith marveled at the efficiency of specialization in the factory but never in the household. Despite his great attention to the variety of occupations which men pursued in agriculture as well as in manufacturing, he seldom mentioned women's work either in the market or in the home.⁵² Paid domestic service was widespread in his day, accounting for a significant share of all wage employment for women. Aristocratic families (such as the one in which he briefly served as a tutor) employed a panoply of servants. Smith gave them no attention.

His productive and unproductive labor ignored both paid and unpaid domestic work.

Smith judiciously noted that many occupations that failed to meet his standard of productivity (increasing the market value of a tangible com­modity) were nonetheless necessary. Churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters, the army, and the navy all graced the list of those who deserved the support of productive workers. Neither domestic servants nor wives nor mothers were included. This does not imply that Smith thought these women undeserving of support. It does suggest that he believed their efforts were irrelevant to economic growth. Such views were explicitly challenged by one of his female contemporaries, Priscilla Wakefield, as early as 1798.⁵⁵

Smith did call attention to the importance of education and training of children.⁵⁶ He realized that some assumptions regarding population growth were necessary to a theory of wages: In the short run, subsistence could be defined as the wages necessary to enable the worker to return to work the next day; in the long run, subsistence required funds sufficient to compen­sate for the attrition of the adult work force by sickness, old age, and death. A predecessor, Richard Cantillon, had suggested that a man's wage must be sufficient to support two children, as well as the wage earner, assuming that a mother’s productive activities were sufficient to provide for herself, but not for her children.⁵⁷

Extending this reasoning, Smith added the astute qualification that more than two children must be borne, in order for two to survive to maturity. He went on to suggest that economic factors sometimes affected family size decisions.

Smith is often cited as a critic of state intervention in the economy. In the Wealth of Nations, he roundly criticized policies that interfered with free trade or the free mobility of labor. His discussion of the poor laws portrayed the state as a moral institution that could, like an overprotect- ive mother, stifle male initiative. Yet he had few quarrels with the state’s hold on women, including the denial of independent property rights to married women and children, or restrictions on access to education and apprenticeships.

In this respect, he resembled other men of his day and age and social class. The journalist and dictionary author, Samuel Johnson, with whom Smith dined at least once, was famous for his social repartee, much of it recorded by his faithful friend James Boswell. The conversation at a Mr. Dilly's home in the late 1770s turned to cookbooks, and Mr. Johnson opined that men could doubtless do a better job on these than women. His remark provoked a Quaker dinner guest:

Mrs. Knowles affected to complain that men had much more liberty allowed them than women.

Johnson: ‘‘Why Madam, women have all the liberty they should wish to have...”

Mrs. Knowles: ‘‘Still, Doctor, I cannot help thinking it a hardship that more indulgence is allowed to men than to women. It gives a super­iority to men, to which I do not see how they are entitled.” Johnson: ‘‘It is plain, Madam, one or the other must have the super­iority. As Shakespear says, ‘If two men ride on a horse, one must ride behind.' ''

Dilly: ‘‘I suppose, Sir, Mrs. Knowles would have them to ride in panniers, one on each side.''

Johnson: ‘‘Then, Sir, the horse would throw them both.''

Mrs. Knowles: ‘‘Well, I hope that in another world the sexes will be equal.''

Boswell: ‘‘That is being too ambitious, Madam. We might as well desire to be equal with the angels.'' ⁰

The tone, even more than the content of this exchange, shows how effort­lessly women's protests could be dismissed. In his lively discussion of eighteenth-century confidence in the civilizing effects of commerce, Albert Hirschman repeats one of Samuel Johnson's most famous quotes: ‘‘There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.''⁶¹ Would Johnson have agreed that this was true for women as well? It is unfortunate that Mrs. Knowles did not ask him this more specific question.