Women in Economics: Their Thought and Actions in the Past
Vol. 3/2024
Women in Economics: Their Thought and Actions in the Past
di Manuela Mosca
1. Where are the women? The question of the sources
In the history of economic thought women are absent both as creators of knowledge and as topic of research (Agenjo-Calderón, 2021). This paper is about how to find them, in both cases. The historiography on women in the history of thought (in general) faces the methodological problem of how to identify them, and historians of economic thought, too, have dealt with the methodology to be adopted for the identification of women economists of the past. There is no volume of herstory of economics that fails to mention the problem of women’s scarce visibility, from the “seeming non-existence of women economic thinkers” by Rostek (2021, p. 1), to the “invisible women economic writers” by Kuiper (2022, p. ix), to the aim of “making visible … the contributions of women economists” by Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Forget and Singleton (2022, p. 2), to the general and recurrent question: “Where are all the women?” by Reeves (2023, p. 1).
Considering that in the past an academic career was precluded to women for a long time, they usually did not publish academic books and did not write in scientific journals. For this reason, the specific nature of women’s intellectual history requires specific research methods.