Content area
Full Text
The Feminine Economy and Economic Man: Reviving the Role of Family in the PostIndustrial Age. By Shirley P. Burggraf. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1997. Pp. xv, 285. $24.00 cloth. ISBN 0-201-47961-3.
Shirley Burggraf has written a book that is a lot of fun to read and bound to rile up just about everyone. It's written for a popular audience and from an unusual perspective in the discussion of the economic status of women, children and the family - that of a market-positive feminist.
She begins with the idea that the "truly invisible hands" in the economy have been those of women involved in reproductive labor, which she terms "the feminine economy" [10]. This is familiar territory in heterodox traditions. Among Marxists, the domestic labor debate raged without resolution because reproductive labor cannot be squeezed into an analytical construction designed only to encompass production. The alternative, to rebuild from the ground up, was proposed by feminist economist Marilyn Waring [1988], who called for rethinking our most basic economic concepts, including work, value and production. Feminist economists are currently attempting both projects, incorporating the "the feminine economy" and "caring labor" into economic analysis, and creating an economics capable of analyzing both reproduction and production [Folbre 1994, Ferber and Nelson 1993]. Burggraf, however, is a nearly unique voice, ready to harness the power of the market to save the family.
Burggraf is both entertaining and right to the point in her discussion of the absolute void in our intellectual traditions on the role of women and the family. She quotes Hobbes as stating that "we should think of individuals as springing up like mushrooms" [41]. Adam Smith told us that "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." However, as Marilyn Waring pointed out, if Smith was fed daily by Mrs. Smith, he omitted to notice it or to mention it. Smith did not, of course, pay her. What her interest was in feeding him we can only guess, for Adam Smith saw no "value" in what she did. [1988, 23] My favorite quotation along these line comes from Heilbroner and...