Folbre N.. Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford University Press,2010. - 304 pages. 2010
When does the pursuit of self-interest go too far, lapsing into morally unacceptable behaviour? Until the unprecedented events of the recent global financial crisis economists often seemed unconcerned with this question, even suggesting that "greed is good." A closer look, however, suggests that greed and lust are generally considered good only for men, and then only outside the realm of family life. The history of Western economic ideas shows that men have given themselves more cultural permission than women for the pursuit of both economic and sexual self-interest. Feminists have long contested the boundaries of this permission, demanding more than mere freedom to act more like men. Women have gradually gained the power to revise our conceptual and moral maps and to insist on a better-and less gendered-balance between self interest and care for others. This book brings women's work, their sexuality, and their ideas into the center of the dialectic between economic history and the history of economic ideas. It describes a spiralling process of economic and cultural change in Great Britain, France, and the United States since the 18th century that shaped the evolution of patriarchal capitalism and the larger relationship between production and reproduction. This feminist reinterpretation of our past holds profound implications for today's efforts to develop a more humane and sustainable form of capitalism.
CHAPTER I The Eye of the Needle
Thus it came to pass that every womanly function was considered as the private interest of husbands and fathers, bearing no relation to the life of the State, and therefore demanding from the community as a whole no special care or provision. Alice Clark
CHAPTER 2 The Springs of Desire
Why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Thomas Hobbes
CHAPTER 3 Defining Virtues
Self-love is the instrument of our conservation. It resembles the instrument that perpetuates the species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden. Voltaire
CHAPTER 4 Free Trade but Not Free Love
You have heard it, my friend, as a common saying, that interest governs the world. But, I believe, whoever looks narrowly into the affairs of it will find that passion, humour, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs, which are counter to self-interest, have as considerable a part in the movements of this machine. The Earl of Shaftesbury
CHAPTER 5 The Limits of Affection
There can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mother and children to the father. John Adams, Letter to his Son
CHAPTER 6 The Perfectibility of Man
Never has a people perished from an excess of wine. All perish from the disorder of women. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
CHAPTER 7 The Greatest Happiness
It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. Jeremy Bentham
CHAPTER 8 Self-love, Triumphant
Benevolence yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire, and lords it triumphant over the world. ThomasRobert Malthus
CHAPTER 9 Production and Reproduction
Factory females have in general much lower wages than males, and they have been pitied on this account with perhaps an injudicious sympathy, since the low price of their labour here tends to make household duties their most profitable as well as agreeable occupation, and prevents them being tempted by the mill to abandon the care of their offspring at home. Andrew Ure
CHAPTER 10 Whose Wealth?
... her floors and soil Groan underneath a weight of slavish toil, For the poor Many, measured out by rules Fetched with cupidity from heartless schools, That to an Idol, falsely called ‘‘the Wealth Of Nations,” sacrifice a People's health, Body and mind and soul William Wordsworth
CHAPTER II The Social Family
If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed? When you shall acquire a right knowledge of these, or their curious mechanism, of their self-adjusting powers; when the proper mainspring shall be applied to their varied movements—you will become conscious of their real value. Robert Owen
CHAPTER 12 Equal Opportunities
God has given me a mission to call the poor, and women, to a new destiny, to give admittance into the sacred Family of Man to all those who have hitherto been excluded from it, or treated only as minors therein. Pere Enfantin
CHAPTER 13 The Subjection of Women
All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women. John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER 14 Declaring Independence
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention
CHAPTER 15 The Icy Waters
The wife is the breadwinner while her husband stays at home to look after the children and to do the cooking and cleaning.... In Manchester alone there are many hundreds of men who are condemned to perform household duties. One may well imagine the righteous indignation of the workers at being virtually turned into eunuchs. Friedrich Engels
CHAPTER 16 The Sacred Sphere
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital, the most precious part is the results of the care and influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts, and has not been hardened by the strain and stress of unfeminine work. Alfred Marshall
CHAPTER 17 The Unproductive Housewife
The more we have concentrated on money values the more we have overlooked that part of our economic system which is not organized on a profit basis. Margaret Reid
CHAPTER 18 The Nanny State
People rear children for the State and the future and if they do that well, they do the whole world a service, and deserve payment just as much as if they built a bridge or raised a crop of wheat. H. G. Wells
CHAPTER 19 Human Capitalism
The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. John Maynard Keynes
CHAPTER 20 Beyond Economic Man
I have a little dream that in 1990—91, which is the next period designated by the United Nations for a census to be held in every country, all women claim unpaid worker as their designation. Marilyn Waring
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