Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://journals.cambridge.org/JSP
Karen Gardiner
Janice Peterson and Doug Brown (eds.), The Economic Status of Women
under Capitalism - Institutional Economics and Feminist Theory. Edward
Elgar, Cheltenham, 1994, 208 pp., £39.95 hard.
This collective work puts forward convincing arguments to show how radical
institutionalism can provide an analytical basis for a feminist economics. It
does this by illustrating the existing similarity in purpose and methodology of
the two bodies of literature but also by developing the current institutionalist
methodology further to deal with issues of gender. The fundamental common
thread is a post-modern approach which discards the 'universal truths' upon
which orthodox economics is based. The implications are many including the
rejection of theory which attempts to explain individual behaviour outside of
the cultural context, the rejection of the notion that economics can be objec-
tive and the rejection of the idea that economics and policy making should
only be concerned with the artificially constructed categories of 'public' or
'market' at the neglect of the 'private' or 'household'. Instead it proposes a
'holistic' approach, argues that all economics is inherently value-laden and
insists that 'the personal is political' and economics is concerned with all
social-provisioning activities. Whilst institutional theory is provisional - every
situation has to be examined in its own cultural context and is subject to
constant re-evaluation - there is a commitment, shared by feminists, to
democracy and full participation in society for all. This is to be achieved
through institutional adjustment which provides the 'balancing wheel of the
social-provisioning ... process', rather than the price system.
A flavour of what this means in practice is given in Part 3 of the book.
For example, chapter 7 questions the simple equation of increased participa-
tion of women in the paid labour force with an improvement in women's
position in society, looking at the USA and the former Soviet Union. It high-
lights the lack of willingness of policy-makers to see a role for policy inter-
vention with respect to the division of labour within the home. Peterson
argues that this is a result of the dominant ideologies in the two countries
which both utilise a public—private dualism which designates a role for the
state in the former but not the latter.
This is a challenging and inspiring book which is consistently well argued
and impressively comprehensive. The only disappointment was the first chap-
ter, which ironically adopted the very descriptions of women eschewed in the
rest of the book. The suggestion seemed to be that all women are 'crippled' by
sexism in the same way, implicitly presenting a picture of inferior individuals,
even if through no fault of their own.
Finally, the importance of the proposed approach goes beyond providing a
basis for more realistic explanations of economic behaviour. 'Most people rec-
ognize that in the real world of human lives and livelihood, the household
and the economy are not separate and distinct, but part of the same matrix
of social relationships. Problems arise when we construct social policy and
live this artificial dualism as if reality really were separated in this way.'
KAREN GARDINER
London School of Economics and Political Science
Jenny Hewison and Therese Dowswell: Child Health Care and the Working
Mother: The Juggling Act, Chapman Hall, London, 1993, 189 pp, £12.99
paper.
What do you do if your child wakes up ill in the morning? Well, if you are a
father the chances are you just go off to work. If you are a mother, as this
book reveals, you have to make a series of decisions concerning whether
or not your child is well enough to go to school and, if not, can you find
someone else to look after her or him, or should you stay off work yourself?
This study is concerned to make visible the hidden decisions most working
mothers have to make at some stage, about the health care needs of their
school-age children in relation to their employment obligations. Based on a
three-stage survey of 139 white working-class mothers of children aged 6/7,
over the course of two school terms, Jenny Hewison and Therese Dowswell