Nancy Folbre, the eminent feminist economist (a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science), has written a gendered history of economic ideas, critically examining the inconsistent treatment by economists of self-interested behavior of men and women. Wide-ranging and scholarly, the product of extensive reading and reflection, Folbre’s book is not only thought-provoking and informative, but also entertaining. Although aspects of this history have been considered by others (e.g., Michèle Pujol Reference Pujol1992; Dimand and Nyland, eds. 2003), Greed, Lust & Gender is the first comprehensive gendered history of economic ideas comparable both in scope and quality to the path-breaking gendered histories of political and social thought that have appeared in recent decades, such as Susan Moller Okin (1979) or Terry Kendal (Reference Kendal1988). Economists are familiar with greed as a motivator of economic activity, but are reminded by Folbre that “Lust is to feminist theory what greed is to economic theory—a marker of contested moral boundaries.”

Folbre examines how economists in Britain, France, and the United States in the past three centuries have often (but not always) praised the social utility of self-interested behavior by men while fearing self-interested, calculating behavior by women. As she explains (p. xxxii), this book is not just history for its own sake: “If we want to care for others, we need to build social institutions that encourage that care, rather than taking moral sentiments as a given. The intellectual history of greed and lust offers some discouraging insights into the relationship between ideals and reality. However, it also reveals useful efforts to set boundaries on selfish behavior. Tracing the movement of these boundaries over time might help us to decide where we think they should be placed. Whether we will ever be able to move them where we want them is, of course, another question.”

Some of the episodes from intellectual history are as striking as they are discouraging, such as Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s combination of utilitarian ethics with a blithe assurance that women have less capacity for happiness than men (p. 240)—a claim that Jeremy Bentham would have rejected. While economists from Bernard Mandeville onwards stressed the social usefulness of greed as a motivator in the market sphere, writers as varied as Adam Smith and William Godwin excluded the work of women within the household from the realm of self-interest and reason (chapters 4 and 7). Following Ulla Grapard, Folbre notes that in his famous statement that we owe our dinner not to the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker, “Smith neglected to mention that none of these tradesmen actually puts dinner on the table, ignoring cooks, maids, wives, and mothers one fell swoop” (p. 59). Thomas Robert Malthus worried more about the economic consequences of lust than of greed, but accepted the pressure of supporting a family as a necessary evil to keep workers motivated (chapter 8). Malthus sometimes praised the virtue of women of his own class or above as a source of moral restraint (p. 120), but generally ignored women as decision makers when discussing the determinants of population growth. Influenced by Malthus, Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, main authors of the Poor Law Report of 1834, feared the lust of working class women as a source of paupers. David Ricardo considered labor as the most important input in production, and, like Malthus, viewed population as responsive to deviations of the real wage from the “natural price of labor,” but did not discuss labor as the product of non-market activities that were not explicitly priced (chapter 9). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (unlike August Bebel) were unconcerned about the possibility of gender inequality and conflict in socialist society and the proletarian family, believing that the elimination of distinctions of social class would suffice to eliminate all inequality (chapter 15). Those who did pay attention to gender inequality risked ridicule: Folbre (p. 186) quotes Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, in his History of Political Economy in Europe published in 1837, as claiming that the utopian socialist Saint-Simon’s “crazy attempts at the emancipation of women” discredited his larger arguments. The history of economics provides many opportunities for such acerbic revelation of blind spots, so Greed, Lust & Gender is entertaining as well as scholarly.

After these examples of chauvinist blindness of male economists, it is refreshing to encounter Jeremy Bentham’s acceptance of gender equality in capacity for pleasure, rational choice, and the franchise (“Let There be no Distinction Between the Sexes”), and his libertarian disapproval of all laws regulating marriage, divorce, and sexuality (pp. 105–108). Bentham advanced an economic argument for allowing divorce: contracts that cannot be renegotiated are inefficient. Similarly drawing on economic analysis to make a feminist point, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill held that married women could be fully equal only if they earned an income outside the home, which would increase their bargaining power within marriage (p. 195).

Folbre (pp. 118–120) notes the circumspect mention by James Mill, and bolder advocacy by Francis Place, of contraception as a response to Malthusian population concerns, and remarks that apparently James Mill’s remarks on the subject were considered racy. Indeed: Colonel T. Perronet Thompson, responding to Mill in 1820 (quoted in Mill Reference Mill and Winch1964, p. 239), wrote, “What then, is to be the situation of the women of the lower and middle classes, when in every street political economists go about seeking whom they may devour, under the assurance that they bring with them the ‘expedients’ for evading the ordinary consequences of sexual irregularity?”

Given the extensive coverage of this fine and wide-ranging book, from the patriarchal ideology of the medieval church to responses to the current financial crisis, a reader inevitably will find difficulties with the treatment of some issues. Some points are minor: Edith Abbott (AEA vice-president in 1911) is credited with seven articles in the Journal of Political Economy (p. 259), but Abbott actually published nineteen JPE articles. Folbre (pp. 215, 229) takes it as obvious that Marx’s support for expelling Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin from the First International was solely due to their stand on women’s rights and free love, even though Folbre notes that Woodhull and Claflin “struck it rich” as stockbrokers financed by Commodore Vanderbilt, which Marx might well have considered inappropriate for the leaders of a section of the International. More seriously, Folbre’s discussion of Adam Smith’s neglect of women in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations (rightly emphasizing his dismissive relegation of unpaid reproductive work within the household to the category of “unproductive labour”) is excellent as far as it goes, but overlooks the origin of those two books in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, from which he intended to develop a third book, an “account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society.” In that section of his lectures, Smith stated that “the laws of most countries being made by men generally are very severe on the women, who can have no remedy for this oppression” (contrast Folbre, p. 60, on Smith’s having “few quarrels with the state’s hold on women”). Smith’s lectures sketched a conjectural history of the evolution of property rights and the status of women across four historical stages of hunting, pasture, agriculture, and commerce, and suggested that the further development of commerce and industry would make physical differences between men and women less important, allowing improvement of women’s social and economic position (see Dimand and Nyland, eds. 2003).

Relying on an out-of-context quotation of Walker by Joseph Dorfman, Folbre (p. 205) misrepresents the pioneering American feminist economist Amasa Walker (of Oberlin, an early coeducational institution) as approving of the fact that women’s wages were low because “the prevailing ideas of the community restrict them to easily dispensable occupations.” However, Walker (Reference Walker1872, p. 288), having remarked that “An increase of her wages can result only from an increase of her employments,” proceeded to declare

“Recognizing that women might pursue interests inconsistent with their own,” concludes Folbre (pp. 324–325), “the fathers of economics banished them from the realm of social theory. The androcentric blinders they created blinded them for centuries to the relevance of women’s unpaid work and the impact of expanded wage employment on family life. These blinders also obscured the ways in which patriarchal rules and norms helped stabilize an emergent capitalist economy.” Nancy Folbre has developed this thesis with eloquence, verve, and scholarship in a readable, thought-provoking, and important book.