“Great Social and Economic Questions Await her Interference”: Women Educators’ Contribution to and Use of Economic Thought, 1890–1930

Abstract

Over the past hundred years neoclassical economics has maintained its position as the predominant school of thought in economics departments and business schools, perpetuating the idea that economics is a science that focuses solely on the market and its mathematical predictabilities. This singularity in economic approaches was not always the case. In the 1890s and early 1900s, before neoclassical economics rose to near-hegemony, a broad range of economic approaches and methodologies coexisted and rivaled. Women participated substantially in this pluralistic discourse. Self- and formally trained in the social sciences, women challenged the universal, ahistorical understanding of economics put forth by classical and neoclassical economic approaches; questioned the principle of homo economicus and its underlying ethos of individualism; and developed alternative visions of the economy. Moreover, women applied this economic expertise to other their areas of work, especially social reform work and education. This dissertation examines the economic thought of three women educators and asks how their economic expertise shaped their educational philosophies and practices. In three individual chapters, it follows the work of Anna Julia Cooper, an African American scholar, teacher, and activist born in the American South in 1858; Emily Greene Balch, a white American, middle-class social scientist, reformer, and college teacher, born on the East Coast in 1867; and Alice Salomon, a Jewish-born, German social work pioneer, economist, and teacher born in 1872. The analysis of their work is based on a close reading of the women’s writings, speeches, and lectures, as they pertained to economic and educational questions, and is placed against the backdrop of the transatlantic economic debate of the Progressive Era. Situated within the context of the socio-political conditions in Germany and the US as well as the respective institutional conditions of knowledge production, all of which were strongly shaped by race, class, and gender, the three studies examine further how the women’s different social locations informed their economic thinking and produced similarities as well as differences and blind spots. The study of the three women’s economic thought expands our knowledge about the institutional and intellectual histories of the social sciences. The cases of Cooper, Balch, and Salomon show that women not only de-naturalized and historicized economic relations in their research but also theoretically connected economic questions to questions of race and gender (although they did so to different degrees). They used the economic knowledge—increasingly made available to them on women’s college campuses and through women’s networks— to transgress a single focus on class relations. They developed pioneering, intersectional approaches that exposed the intertwined workings of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and insisted that economic research ought to be guided by a moral vision of a more just society. The women’s ideas thus ran counter to the emerging neoclassical paradigm, which, pushed by representatives of businesses and the capitalist state who increasingly controlled universities’ governing boards, insisted that economics was an abstract, ahistorical science. As such, the marginalization of women’s ideas became part of a bigger project that separated economic questions from political, social, and ethical questions, and considered economic relations as free from power relations. The dissertation further calls attention to the significance of economic thought for women’s educational work, indicating a flow of ideas between economics and education particular to the Progressive Era. While neoclassical economics’ underlying narrative of reckless individualism and greed as the “natural” drivers of economic growth lends itself at best as a rationale for education for individual social mobility, the women’s historical and relational understanding of the economy informed educational approaches that highlighted civic agency as social responsibility (Balch and Salomon) and Black solidarity (Cooper). Knowledge about the historical (and thus changeable) nature of economic relations, the women thought, was a prerequisite for students to understand themselves in relation to others, recognize the power structures of which they were part, and develop strategies for social change.