Women’s Duties

Alfred Marshall expounded a gentler version of individualist reasoning from his Cambridge University chair.³⁴ The title of Marshall’s famous textbook, The Principles of Economics, signaled the replacement of ‘‘political economy’’ by a less contentious term.

Many found his tone of reasoned compromise appealing. He was more optimistic and idealistic than most of his neoclassical counterparts. His watchword was ‘‘duty’’, a kind of amalgam of social responsibility and Christian obligation reminiscent of Smith’s moral sentiments:

Political economy will help us rightly to apply the motive force of duty, but the will to do one’s duty must come from some other source. Still political economy will doubtless show, in many cases, that selfish action is also foolish and suicidal. And on the whole it does show, in almost every case, that when a man adopts action which injures others, he injures himself more than he thinks he does.³⁶

At some points, Marshall went so far as to suggest that economic man could not be considered selfish because he was making provision for his family.³⁷ His most systematic treatment of the issue came in an article entitled ‘‘The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry”, in which he described himself as a socialist in the sense of being one who wants to promote the ‘‘social amelioration of the people.” But he reproved social critics for exag­gerating the evils of present economic conditions.

Marshall’s concept of chivalry was embedded in Victorian views of appropriate gender roles. Like Jevons, he fretted that women might behave in selfish ways and favored strict limits on their choices. One reviewer welcomed his Principles of Economics as an excellent source of arguments for excluding women from wage employment.⁴⁰ Not all his colleagues agreed with such arguments. Marshall’s immediate predecessor at Cambridge, Henry Fawcett, had spoken out in favor of women’s rights. Fawcett’s wife Millicent, an activist in the campaign for women’s property rights, published popular books on economics similar to those of Harriet Martineau.

Marshall himself fell in love with an economist. At a time when women were allowed to take courses at Cambridge but not to matriculate for degrees, his brilliant student Mary Paley became the first woman lecturer in political economy. Marriage represented a violation of the terms of Marshall’s employment, but he took the chivalrous plunge and moved to University College, Bristol (he would later return to Cambridge). Mary Paley had begun work on an elementary text entitled The Economics of Industry; the newlyweds collaborated on completion of the book, which bore both their names. The coauthored volume introduced many of the argu­ments later spelled out in The Principles of Economics but, unlike its succes­sor, addressed the issue of gender differences in wages.⁴¹

With that publication, Paley’s career came to an end. She did not publish again until after her husband’s death. Marshall’s students recall a devoted wife who never participated in intellectual discussion.

He holding that woman was a subordinate being, and that, if she ceased to be subordinate, there would be no object for a man to marry, that marriage was a sacrifice of the masculine freedom and would only be tolerated by male creatures so long as it meant the devotion, body and mind, of the female and no longer. Hence the woman must develop in no way unpleasant to the man: that strength, courage, independence were not attractive in women, that rivalry in men's pursuits was positively unpleasant. Therefore masculine strength and masculine ability in women must be firmly trampled on and ‘‘boycotted'' by men. Contrast was the essence of the matrimonial relation: feminine weakness contrasted with masculine strength, mas­culine egotism with feminine self-devotion.⁴⁴

Marshall said as much outright in his Principles of Economics, explaining that the employment of women was a ‘‘great gain in so far as it tends to develop their faculties; but an injury in so far as it tempts them to neglect their duty of building up a true home, and of investing their efforts in the personal capital of their children's character and abilities.''⁴⁵ Constant revision of the book was Marshall's main preoccupation in life; virtually all of its many editions contain this or similar warnings.

Marshall rejected feminism because it questioned women's assignment to sacred moral duties. He described the demand for women's suffrage as an example of ‘‘a selfish desire among women to resemble men.''⁴6 The only constructive role he could foresee for women in the academy lay in pursuing ‘‘certain delicate inquiries related to women and children in which a man would be out of his element (such was the advice he offered Beatrice Webb).⁴⁷

In 1896, Marshall actively campaigned against the granting of Cambridge degrees to women.

However severe the illness of those dear to her, however urgent the need for her presence at home, she must keep her terms under penalty of losing recognition for her work. If she decides to go her own way, and let her family shift for themselves, she gets her honours; but her true life is impoverished and not enriched by them.⁴⁸

Most male students cheered Marshall's views. In 1897, over two thousand of them signed a petition to the chancellor asking that women be excluded from the university. Not until 1948 were full privileges accorded to women students at Cambridge (and then, under conditions that limited their numbers).⁴⁹

Marshall's economic theory provided a theoretical basis for such restric­tions. He argued that child rearing and education fulfilled national needs that could not be satisfied by the mere operation of individual self-interest. By interpreting these domestic activities in terms of human capital Marshall emphasized their essential complementarity with the larger process of capital accumulation.⁵⁰ Though never entirely comfortable with the analogy between self-interested investments in physical capital and altruistic invest­ments in children, he praised middle-class fathers for investing in their children's education.⁵¹

He exhorted fathers, as well as mothers, against selfishness. But he viewed familial altruism as a moral dictum rather than an empirical issue. As a result, he seldom considered the possibility that parents might abuse their children, even at a time when social reformers were calling for policies that would limit patriarchal power, including restrictions on child labor and the expansion of mandatory education. As the epigraph to this chapter indicates, Marshall idolized motherhood without expressing much concern for mothers themselves.⁵² Many of Marshall's contemporaries worried that men's wages were insufficient to support a full-time home­maker (see discussion in Chapter 18). Marshall worried that women's work outside the home would both diminish virtue and reduce economic growth by lowering the quality of the nation's work force.⁵³ Those worries probably refracted personal disappointment: the Marshalls never became parents.