Abstract
The history of women’s emancipation is the history of how women gained their access to public sphere after being traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere, according to gender categories, which are a set of cultural roles that define appropriate behavior for the sexes. It is the story of the ‘quiet revolution’, as described by Nobel laureate and Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, that transformed the condition of women “from agents who work because they and their families ‘need the money’ to those who are employed, at least in part, because occupation and employment define one’s fundamental identity and societal worth” (Goldin in American Economic Review 96:1, 2006).
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Notes
- 1.
Goldin summarized her argument as follows. During Phase I, female workers in the labor market, as opposed to those working in the household or family business, were generally young, unmarried, and unskilled. Only a minority were professional workers, such as teachers and clerical employees. This group expanded massively in the 1910s. They usually exit the labor force once they got married. During Phase II, the labor force participation rate for married women increased mainly because of the enormous growth in high school enrollment and graduation that occurred between 1910 and 1930. During Phase III, married women’s labor force participation continued to expand, female labor supply became more elastic and responsive to changes in wages, although married women remained the secondary earners in their households. Phase IV is the revolutionary one: women started to close the educational gap and have careers rather than jobs; they established themselves as professionals by asserting that their identity is shaped by their work rather than their role within a family: “women had longer horizons than did previous generations and an altered identity that placed career ahead, or on equal footing, with marriage. Wives were less often secondary workers, the flotsam and jetsam of the labor market” (Goldin, 2006, 19).
- 2.
Influenced by Rousseau, Tocqueville emphasized the traditional division of labor between the genders despite the restriction on women’s freedom. Nevertheless, there is also feminist literature that praises him (Locke & Hunt Botting, 2009).
- 3.
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus presented a picture of the exemplary wife of a landowner: uneducated, exclusively devoted to the household, and treated as a minor. In Plato’s Republic the separate spheres were not applied as women may be guardians, and no property and family existed. However, in the Laws, family and property are back in the picture as well as the natural argument for the division of sexes/roles based on the natural differences between men and women. In Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, women were regarded as naturally inferior to men and the argument for separate spheres was a direct consequence of the different nature of men and women.
- 4.
Some empirical studies reveal that the term ‘family’ took a considerable amount of time to become widely accepted in everyday language (Spolsky, 2012).
- 5.
As Yentsch (1991) noted, public space was not entirely public, but it contained private components and private space also included elements of the public.
- 6.
During the nineteenth century, the legal recognition of women’s property rights was introduced, leading to significant changes in the dynamics of decision-making within households (Moses, 2008).
- 7.
- 8.
In earlier times, only the most fortunate wealthy girls and women in some urban contexts would open their homes to host scholars and artists of various kind. The phenomenon of salonnièrs intensively grew during the nineteenth century in European and American cities, creating a network of cultural exchange that allowed for the cultural interaction between both genders, which had previously been denied. Salons served as a means to extend the influence of women into traditionally male-dominated realms of culture, politics, and the economy (Baird, 2014; Brown & Dow, 2011).
- 9.
As McElroy pointed out (1992, 2022), while classical liberals focused on restrictive social and cultural norms, libertarians focused on legal restrictions. American libertarians of the Progressive Era, including figures such as Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Stone, Lillian Harman, Angela Heywood, and many more, argued that achieving equality and dignity for both sexes was a path to anarchism. They regarded sexual liberation as a manifestation of social freedom.
- 10.
As illustrated by Grossbard et al. (2023), Becker founded two workshops: the Labor Workshop at Columbia University in 1958 and the Applications of Economics Workshop at the University of Chicago in 1970. Jacob Mincer co-directed the Columbia workshop. Both workshops played a pivotal role in advancing research in household economics, labor economics, and the economics of human capital. They also significantly contributed to the development of the research agenda on marriage and fertility. The proportion of women participating in both workshops was relatively high and many of them followed Becker’s approach.
- 11.
In Becchio’s work (2020), the term ‘gender economics’ was used to denote standard economics applied to gender isssues.
- 12.
As Moos wrote: “Domestic and care work – both paid and unpaid – have been a central issue for feminist economics. In contrast to mainstream economics formulations that have justified the gender division of labor in the household and the allocation of unpaid labor to women in the name of efficiency and harmony, feminist economists have viewed this gender division of work as the lynchpin of gender inequality” (Moos, 2021, 90).
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Becchio, G. (2024). Introduction: The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres. In: The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51262-9_1
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