Greed Lust And Gender

This book dramatizes the history of self-interest by describing a centuries-long debate over greed, lust, and appropriate gender roles in terms that ordinary readers will enjoy. Ranging from the 18th century to the present, it offers a deft and engaging critique of economic history and the history of ideas from a feminist perspective.

This book dramatizes the history of self-interest by describing a centuries-long debate over greed, lust, and appropriate gender roles. Ranging from the 18th century to the present, it offers a deft and engaging critique of economic history and the history of ideas from a feminist perspective.

When does the pursuit of self-interest go too far, lapsing into morally unacceptable behaviour? Until the unprecedented events of the recent global financial crisis economists often seemed unconcerned with this question, even suggesting that "greed is good." A closer look, however, suggests that greed and lust are generally considered good only for men, and then only outside the realm of family life. The history of Western economic ideas shows that men have given themselves more cultural permission than women for the pursuit of both economic and sexual self-interest. Feminists have long contested the boundaries of this permission, demanding more than mere freedom to act more like men. Women have gradually gained the power to revise our conceptual and moral maps and to insist on a better-and less gendered-balance between self interest and care for others. This book brings women's work, their sexuality, and their ideas into the center of the dialectic between economic history and the history of economic ideas. It describes a spiralling process of economic and cultural change in Great Britain, France, and the United States since the 18th century that shaped the evolution of patriarchal capitalism and the larger relationship between production and reproduction. This feminist reinterpretation of our past holds profound implications for today's efforts to develop a more humane and sustainable form of capitalism.

A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economist In this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and reformulation of Marxian political economy, drawing on a larger body of scientific research, including neoclassical economics, sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology, to answer the defining question of feminist political economy: why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has improved living standards and increased the scope for individual choice for women; on the other, increased inequality and the weakening of families and communities have reconfigured gender inequalities, leaving caregivers particularly vulnerable. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems examines why care work is generally unrewarded in a market economy, calling attention to the non-market processes of childbearing, childrearing and the care of other dependents, the inheritance of assets, and the use of force and violence to appropriate both physical and human resources. Exploring intersecting inequalities based on class, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and citizenship, and their implications for political coalitions, it sets a new feminist agenda for the twenty-first century.

Presents an overview of the concept of greed as it has evolved through the ages, from an early Christian concept of greed as a sin up to its twentieth-century definition as a psychological problem.

This book presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality. Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, the authors demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions.--[book jacket].

Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.

This book explores how the classical economists explained the status of women in society. As the essays show, the focus of the classical school was not nearly as limited to the activities of men as conventional wisdom has supposed. Chris Nyland from Monash University.