The Waves

Feminist movements, like the business cycle, have always had their ups and downs. Intellectual contributions and political successes have not always moved in concert. By the early twentieth century, women’s groups in the U.S.

Feminist intellectuals in France reached into philosophy and literature, but were more effectively excluded from the discourse of economics than their counterparts in the English-speaking world. Simone de Beauvoir’s classic, The Second Sex, anticipated many of the concerns of the women’s movement of the 1960s, but did not reach much of an audience in the United States until similar concerns regarding the treatment of women as ‘‘other’’ were expressed in more practical terms by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique.⁴

After 1950, the pace of change in married women’s entrance into wage employment picked up, and women gained access to more reliable forms of contraception. These economic and demographic changes gradually and unevenly destabilized conventional gender norms.⁵ Other forms of collective mobilization came into play. The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. in the early 1960s contributed to the resurgence of the women’s movement there.

Passage of laws against overt discrimination in the U.S. and the United Kingdom increased women’s access to professional and managerial jobs. These economic gains probably contributed to a significant backlash and intensified class and racial differences among women in the U.S.⁶ However, women's increased presence and power within academia fostered the devel­opment of Women's Studies programs and women's caucuses within separ­ate disciplines. Feminist theory itself began to be... theorized.⁷

Women were slower to enter economics than other social science discip­lines and also less likely to assert a gendered perspective. In the 1980s, women were less well-represented in the discipline in the U.S. than they had been in the 1920s, and few economists in the early 1990s acknowledged any awareness of feminist issues.⁸ Lack of awareness is not, however, the same as immunity from influence. Pressure from many grass-roots women's organizations, as well as international networking efforts prompted the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing to call for an end to gender inequality in paid employment and greater recognition of women's work in the home.⁹ Also in that year, the first issue of the journal Feminist Economics came off the press.