Market values
There should be more to economics than self-interest, says a cadre of female scholars. Among other issues, these economists point to wage inequalities and child care.
By Kimberly Blanton
In 1975, as the nation was churning in Watergate's wake, Nancy Folbre fled the stifling heat and conservatism of her home state of Texas and barreled into her future in a 1963 Dodge pickup. She drove north to a radical's refuge, the graduate economics program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Folbre never left UMass. She is now an economics professor at her alma mater, but Texas is with her still. In their mountaintop sanctuary near Amherst, she and her husband, Bob Dworak, grow ancho chilies and tomatillos in papery shrouds alongside the chard and sweet peas in their garden. Folbre grabs an apple from a bowl on top of the refrigerator. The kitchen door leading to the backyard is bracketed by two black-and-white photographs of her parents, from years ago, each of them astride a horse. She crosses the sun-speckled yard to a one-horse barn, where she trades the fruit for a nuzzling from her gelding, Prince of Ghazal. "I got a horse, I got a gun, and I got a pickup," Folbre exclaims, her joke out of synch with a soft voice that carries only traces of a Texas accent.
Nancy Folbre has always operated on the fringe, first as a radical college student in Texas, then as a Texan in Yankee Massachusetts. And now, she is a feminist outlaw challenging the orthodoxy in a discipline shaped almost entirely by men.
[...]
Yet economics continues to lag decades behind other fields, such as sociology, literature, and history, in accepting feminism as part of the debate. Look no further than the elite universities where the discipline's thinking is shaped. At Yale University, no women are among its 43 tenured faculty in economics. The University of Chicago and Stanford each have one tenured woman, out of 16 and 26 economics faculty members, respectively. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two of the 25 tenured faculty in economics are women. At Princeton, three out of 32 are women.
[And the current issue of the Nation includes eight articles on the incoming Bush admin, not one by a woman. - Doug]