Book: ECONOMICA: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WOMEN, WEALTH AND POWER
Author: Victoria Bateman
Published by: Headline
Price: Rs 899
“Once you ‘add women and stir’, our understanding of the past changes forever”, writes Victoria Bateman in the Introduction to her book, adding that “By restoring women to their rightful place in global economic history, this book attempts to remove the blinkers that have been placed on the story of how the world grew rich.”
That rightful place is restored by squarely placing women within specific occupations in the major economic epochs of human history. Just a look at the Table of Contents reveals the incredible range that women have had as workers through millennia: hunters, farmers and clothiers; doctors, scribes and innkeepers; courtesans, poets and potters; merchants, property developers and moneylenders; brokers, concubines and wet-nurses; dairy maids, brewers and shopkeepers; scientists, bankers and writers; factory hands, miners and maids; arm dealers, pirates and sex workers; typists, teachers and engineers; creatives, carers and clean-tech innovators. Each group in the above list gives the context to a chapter in the book with the focus chronologically shifting down from the Stone and Bronze Ages through
the ancient civilisations to the European Renaissance, the Industrial Age, and the era of colonisation all the way to the 20th and the 21st centuries.
Through the twelve chapters of the book, three basic arguments emerge: the nature of women’s work has mostly rendered them invisible, leading to a lack of recognition in economic history; the economic prosperity of empires and nations has been directly proportional to the freedom women enjoyed in terms of work; and it is during periods of labour scarcity that women have joined the work force substantially without societal impediments. Important instances of that is the period after the Black Death in medieval Europe, when farms were short of male workers; and after the First and Second World Wars when the absence or death of male bread winners brought women out of homes in record numbers. Yet, the invisibility of women’s labour has been a constant in human history — be it domestic labour or caring responsibilities at home, or being the force behind family businesses that today run half the world’s economy.
What makes Economica a compelling read is the way in which economic history meets a non-fiction narrative. It is filled with interesting and extraordinary stories of women, both well-known to or obscured by history. Sample these: Hortensia speaking out in the Forum against Roman taxation on women without representation; Maryam, gifted by the Mughal emperor to an East India Company official and marrying another after his death, using her network in the Mughal court to establish her husbands’ trading ventures in India; Priscilla Wakefield opening the first ‘Penny Bank’ for women and children in 1798 in England; Bertha Benz taking the first test drive of the gasoline ‘Motorwagen’ in 1888, setting into motion not just a car but an entire industry; Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams publishing the first critical account of the Russian Revolution, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, in exile in 1919.
Through the book, we find insightful analysis of the uniqueness of economic epochs and changes in practices through material items. A good example of it is in the first chapter itself — about how the invention of the plough in the seventh millennium BCE transformed farming, putting an end to the forager way of life. Because the instrument cut furrows into the land and turned the soil, it allowed a farmer to plant seeds more easily and cultivate a larger area of land, leading to food surplus beyond the family’s need. While this increased productivity, the greater muscular strength that was required to handle the plough made it primarily men’s work; with the result that women were pushed to the domestic sphere, grinding grain and making cloth. It would be the beginning of more gendered roles in economic production, something that both nomadic pastoralism and private property would entrench.
The scope of Bateman’s book is epic — it encompasses the entire history of
(wo)mankind. It is thus thoughtful of her to break down its salient points in a comprehensive conclusion, which includes some telling statistics. For instance, only 10% of working women in high-income countries are self-employed, compared to a whopping 88% in low-income countries. She also underlines how the past bears upon the present in terms of the structural inequalities that women face in society: “… two factors […] continue to trap women in the home: cultural systems that favour female seclusion and the ‘crisis of care’ that is making it increasingly difficult to juggle paid work with caring responsibilities, slowing down women’s ability to make further progress in the workplace. ”
One can only hope this will change sooner than later in the near future.
