Mill, Political Economy, and Women's Work

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY J. HIRSCHMANN
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Productive Labor ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Relationship Of

The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women's work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the “second wave” women's movement, but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science. This paper argues that John Stuart Mill'sPolitical Economyprovides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem. Productive labor is essential to Mill's conception of property, and property was vital to women's independence in Mill's view. Yet since Mill thought most women would choose the “career” of wife and mother rather than working for wages, then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women's equality. Mill, however, is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor, and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender. But because Mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy.

Women's Work in Agriculture: Divergent Trends in England and America, 1800 to 1930

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McMurry
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Agricultural Work ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Background ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

scholarly journals Global Political Economy in Context of Evolution of Political-Economic Thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolay Eletsky
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
New Phenomena ◽  
Relationship Of

Globalization of economic processes requires an adequate transformation of the economic Sciences. In the modern world, the globalization of actors and results of production leads to the formation of global relations of ownership and governance. It modifies the subject field of General economic theory and generates the global political economy. The essence of its subject matter is the relationship of the global ownership and the resulting global economic contradictions. The methodological toolkit of global political economy reflects the particularities of contemporary scientific knowledge due to the new phenomena of globalization. Global political economy is the methodological-theoretical basis of all Sciences investigating global economic system. At the same time, it is a special branch of the modern system of economic Sciences, characterizing by the spatio-temporal specificity of subject matter and method. The proposed approach is an alternative to the common preceding scientific interpretations of global political economy as, in fact, the international economic politology.

scholarly journals ‘Women’s Work’ in Indonesia’s Social Media-based Online Store Business: Social Reproduction and the Feminization of Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Fathimah Fildzah Izzati
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Online Store ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Working Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Business ◽  
Online Stores ◽  
New Forms Of Work

This paper seeks to analyze ‘women’s work’ in Indonesia’s online shop businesses by looking at the forms of work that emerge in those businesses. This paper employs qualitative research methods by using transcribed in-depth interviews with 20 informants from six cities in Indonesia. By looking at flexibility as the defining characteristic of exploitation under platform capitalism, home as the central working space in the social media-based online store, and the ongoing process of feminization of work in the online business sector, this study advances two claims. First, the intersection between platform capitalism and logistics revolution in the online shop business has created new forms of work. Second, the social media-based online store, which is mostly operated by women, shows that flexibility and feminization of work under platform capitalism have direct impacts on the lives of the female business operators and their work. A closer look at the emergence of online stores also reveals how social reproduction work shapes ‘women’s work’ in the online business

A connected history of political economy in Asia and Europe, ca 1750–1914

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
History Of Political Economy ◽  
Political Economic

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).

Economics and Political Economy Today: Introduction to the Symposium on Fine and Milonakis

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Ashman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Reason ◽  
Historical Reasoning ◽  
Subjective Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sphere Of Influence

AbstractEconomics has long been the ‘dismal science’. The crisis in classical political economy at the end of the nineteenth century produced radically differing intellectual responses: Marx’s reconstitution of value theory on the basis of his dialectical method, the marginalists’ development of subjective value theory, and the historical school’s advocacy of inductive and historical reasoning. It is against this background that economics was established as a discrete academic discipline, consciously modelling itself on maths and physics and developing its focus on theorising exchange. This entailed extraordinary reductionism, with humans regarded as rational, self-interested actors, and class, society, history and ‘the social’ being excised from economic analysis. On the basis of this narrowing of its concerns, particularly from the 1980s onwards, economics has sought to expand its sphere of influence through a form of imperialism which seeks to apply mainstream economic approaches to other social sciences and sees economics as ‘the universal grammar of social science’. The implications of this shift are discussed in Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis’s two volumes, where they analyse the fate of the social, the political and the historical in economic thought, and assess the future for an inter-disciplinary critique of economic reason.

scholarly journals How Men Valued Women's Work: Labour In and Outside the Home in Post-War Britain

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-468
Author(s):  
Laura King
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Female Labour ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Post War ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractThis article examines men's valuing of women's work in the post-1945 period. It considers men's perspectives on female labour in and outside the home in the context of women's wartime work, the increase in married women working and the greater involvement of men in family life. I argue that men saw their wives’ and partners’ work as of lesser value than their own, in various ways, even if the money women's paid work brought in could significantly improve living standards. This was true even in the most caring, loving relationships. The article employs a broad definition of value, considering the social and cultural value of work alongside its economic outcomes. It places subjective accounts from interviews within a wider cultural and political context and contributes a new perspective to post-war British historiography by focusing on both paid labour and domestic work, and the negotiation of value between men and women.

Redefining “Women’s Work”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Job Segregation ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor

This chapter examines the sexual division of labor in the automobile industry during World War II to find out whether job segregation by gender had been dismantled during the war. It begins with a discussion of “women's work” in the auto industry in the prewar period and goes on to explore how the idiom of sex-typing of occupations was implemented and readjusted in the face of a dramatic change in the economic constraints on the sexual division of labor, along with the ensuing political struggles over the redefinition of the boundaries between “women's work” and “men's work.” It then considers the ambiguity and labor–management conflict over “women's work,” the various exclusionary tactics employed by male auto workers against women, and the disputes over the question of equal pay in the industry during the war. It also discusses the process through which war factories reproduced new patterns of job segregation by sex in the industry, instead of eliminating it.

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