Nineteenth-Century French Liberal Economists and Women's Work

The Dark Side of Industrialization

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4297726
AutoresNathalie Sigot (PHARE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne ([email protected]), autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen56
Número4
Páginas587-624
Fecha de publicación2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory of Political Economy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2702 • E-ISSN: 1527-1919
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182702-11242733
OpenAlexW4394769513
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas32

This article reconstructs the debates on the woman question in which nineteenth-century French liberal economists participated: it aims at showing that their analysis contradicted their conviction that, in Bastiat's words, "men's interests, when left to themselves, tend to . . . work together for progress and the general good." Indeed, French liberals are usually labeled optimistic: they denounced the pessimistic and fatalist character of the "English school of economics" based on Ricardo's rent theory and Malthus's law of population. On the contrary, they attempted to prove that economic development improved the situation of all, especially that of workers. However, their optimism did not extend to their analysis of the situation of women: most of them recognized that women were not benefiting from the general improvement in terms of wages, labor conditions, and social mobility. The article then shows that the reasons they gave to explain the bad situation of women present many challenges, linked respectively to the issue of state intervention and wage theory. Moreover, it is unlikely that the only solution they proposed for improving it, that is, the promotion of female education, could have worked

Conviction · Development economics · Economics · Industrialisation · Intervention (counseling · Labour economics · Market economy · Neoclassical economics · Optimism · Pessimism · Political science · Population · Positive economics · Promotion (chess · Sociology · Wage · Work (physics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Legal and Social Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology · Social Psychology