Feminist Political Economy

FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY. Theories of feminist political economy integrates the unpaid reproductive labor done in households on equal footing with paid market-based work. Traditionally, economics has focused almost exclusively on production for markets and the allocation of scarce resources according to decisions made to maximize an individual’s utility acting alone, freely, in competitive markets. In feminist political economy, the central task is understanding social provisioning—the way individuals provide for themselves, their households, and their communities—in a context determined by structures and institutions.

Feminist political economy has roots in Marxist economics as well as in institutional economics and other branches of economic thought. According to Marx and Engels, production has two sides, that of people and that of things, but they often ignored the former. To paraphrase what Marx wrote in Capital, Volume 1, the reproduction of workers can “safely be left to itself.” Engels argued that capitalism would pull women into the labor market, where they would participate in proletarian struggle; after the revolution, when there would be no more reason for the oppression of women, all would be liberated. Ignoring household labor was a fatal flaw, a topic taken up by many Marxists and Marxist-feminists in the 1970s. An early entry in this new wave of Marxist analyses of the unique work of women in the home, appearing in the Monthly Review, pronounced it a feudal labor process, a precapitalist stage producing use-values, while most writers in Socialist Revolution, the New Left Review, and other outlets saw both women working primarily at home and men working primarily for pay outside the home as providing critical resources for capital accumulation. One approach went so far as to claim that women create surplus value and to demand wages for housework, arguing that women would form a critical force in the anti-capitalist movement. These analyses incorporated women into the working class and put their struggle against capitalism at the fore, with any struggle against patriarchy so minor that it would fall away after the revolution.

Analyses focusing on capitalism, Heidi Hartmann pointed out, do not adequately address the feminist question of male power over women. Women’s domestic labor may produce and maintain the workforce for capital, but men also benefit directly by not having to do domestic work themselves, giving patriarchy a material base: men’s control over women’s labor. Additionally, men, working together, seize the better positions in the labor market, helping to keep women dependent upon them. She argued that patriarchy is an equally powerful force as capitalism and, together, they shape possibilities for women and men.

Feminist political economy established itself early in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), which was founded in 1968 to create a space for radical analysis within the discipline of economics. A walkout of virtually all the women attending the 1971 URPE summer conference, during a business meeting, resulted in the formation of the Women’s Caucus. The women made four demands regarding representation: that women be part of conference planning, included in membership, on the editorial board of the Review for Radical Political Economics (RRPE), and on URPE’s steering committee. As Jennifer Cohen points out, these demands neatly linked the concerns that women participants felt about the conditions of their reproductive labor (families came with children only to find dreadfully inadequate food, toilet, and bathing facilities at the conference) and their paid labor, which many were pursuing in academia. The women felt disrespected, taken advantage of. Many were wives and girlfriends of male economists; some were graduate students (no women economics faculty were present); some were both. Those who were community organizers or had brought about change in other disciplines helped shape the demands put forth. The women returned to the meeting, business resumed, and their demands were approved by vote of the membership.

With women represented on RRPE’s editorial board and the steering committee, conference programming included issues of particular interest to feminists; women presented at the conference and published special issues of RRPE focusing on women. Special issues appeared in 1972, 1976, 1977,1980, 1984, 1991, and 2001 with another planned for 2021, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Caucus. The conditions of the summer conferences also improved, with better facilities and better-planned childcare. The heyday of the Caucus was in the 1970s (when URPE also had its peak membership). Caucus members met; shared materials; presented at conferences; and prepared and circulated public education content on unemployment, childcare, and other issues, and used it in community work. The Caucus’ presence waned considerably after 1991, but in early 2019 it reconvened as the Caucus of Women and Non-binary People.

In the interim, women’s activism within URPE declined partly because economists formed the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 1990 to make space for feminism in a broad range of economic approaches. It, like URPE, encouraged heterodox and feminist research, and enabled economists with feminist work to find peers, share research and teaching ideas, and, in 1995, publish in the new journal Feminist Economics (FE). Seeking not only to analyze reproductive labor and place it at the center of economics, but also to analyze male power, some feminist economists have focused on dynamics within households, challenging the dominant neoclassical paradigm in mainstream economics that posits a benevolent male dictator whose utility function is assumed to maximize welfare for the entire family. Writing in FE and elsewhere, they find gendered differences in time-use, the disproportionate burden of care on women, their lesser access to education, and their need for land ownership in agrarian economies to ensure survival for themselves and their children.
The recognition of important hierarchical social relations has blossomed, both in URPE and IAFFE as well as in many areas of scholarship beyond economics. Women of color such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins paved the way in analyzing how gender and race intersect, shaping human possibilities. Race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, disability, citizenship, and other aspects of group membership are understood as power relations, like class and gender. Feminist political economists also point to the importance of public and community safety nets—education, health care, childcare, eldercare, and housing—and the struggles to make them available on an equitable basis. The infrastructure of social reproduction not only enables individuals to care for themselves, their households, and neighbors, it can also contribute to their ability to navigate and overcome barriers.
While feminist political economy does not ignore labor markets, economic development, imperialism, or trade, it demands an inclusive interpretation of production, considering not only the provision of marketable goods and services, but also the production of people and everything required for raising children and caring for adults and the elderly. This broadened research scope in economics has contributed to developing comprehensive indicators of human progress that go beyond measuring gross domestic product. The 2015 United Nations Millennium Development Goals emphasized girls’ education and maternal health worldwide. In India, substantial land reform was informed by feminist political economic research and activism. In the UK, the Women’s Budget Project influenced how tax credits were distributed to and within families. In the US, a feminist economic case was made for paid family leave. Feminist macroeconomists’ research incorporates time spent on care into macroeconomic models, so that the gendered impacts of downturns can be used to estimate future growth trajectories (see, for example, the Care Work and the Economy website at American University).

While feminist political economy has had policy impacts in many countries and in several international organizations, its success in transforming the economics discipline has been uneven, with differential recent progress in radical economics and mainstream economics. Feminist Radical Political Economy (FRPE), a community with members in URPE and IAFFE, organized the first FRPE panel at the 2018 American Economic Association (AEA) meeting. FRPE has also helped reopen the space in URPE that the original Women’s Caucus fought so hard for. Cohen calculated that, through 2017, only 15 percent of authors published in RRPE were women. Her updated audit of RRPE for 2018-2020 shows that 26 percent of authors are women and 32 percent of the articles have a woman author (up from 15 percent). The share of authors who are women, an imperfect indicator of the presence of feminist scholarship, is one necessary if not sufficient indicator of change. In contrast, the mainstream has changed little in this regard: female authors in the top five mainstream economics journals remain stuck at about 15 percent. A sizeable group of women working primarily in the neoclassical tradition has focused research on documenting discrimination against women in the discipline and potential solutions. In response to this work, as well as activism by IAFFE and URPE members and others, the AEA began taking new steps in 2018 to improve the situation of women economists, especially around sexual harassment and the hostile climate of the field. In addition to the longstanding Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, the AEA has initiated Committees on Equity, Diversity, and Professional Conduct and on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession. Disappointingly, there has been less effort to expand the theoretical and methodological approaches considered valid by the mainstream. The disciplinary impact of an increasingly diverse pool of economists is necessarily limited if their diverse ideas are not also welcomed.

Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Banks, Nina. 2020. “Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production.” The Review of Black Political Economy, 47(4), 343-362.

Cohen, Jennifer. 2019. “The Radical Roots of Feminism in Economics.” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 37A: 85-100.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1): 139–167.

Hartmann, Heidi. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital & Class, 3(2): 1-33.

Jacobsen, Joyce P. 2020. Advanced Introduction to Feminist Economics. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.