Journal of Social Policy

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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.

Karen Gardiner

Journal of Social Policy / Volume 23 / Issue 04 / October 1994, pp 617 - 618

DOI: 10.1017/S0047279400023515, Published online: 20 January 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0047279400023515

How to cite this article:

Karen Gardiner (1994). Journal of Social Policy, 23, pp 617-618 doi:10.1017/
S0047279400023515

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 Reviews 617

spectacular as the differences in machinery would have led one to suppose.

All the governments have had to draw back from expenditure on social
programmes. It could have been easier for the reader to compare outcomes
in the three countries if it had been possible to assemble key indicators into
tables.
One was also left wondering whether these three countries provided the
best foil for exploring the potential political alliance of feminism and prona-
talism. The most obvious places to look at should surely be Scandinavia, East
Europe and the incorrigibly pronatalist France? This is taken care of to some
extent by extensive reference to these countries, particularly in the
Demography chapter. The US is also drawn in, particularly as an example of
using a model of sex equality which will not allow for special treatment of
women, e.g. for maternity benefits. The province of Quebec does provide,
within the study countries, an example of pronatal politics. After the fran-
cophone province recorded the lowest fertility in Canada, measures were
introduced in 1988 to boost cash bonuses for births and to increase the
number of day-care places. The Quebec Advisory Council on the Status of
Women was not in alliance with the pronatalists. They feared more mater-
nity leave would jeopardise gains in equity. Others felt that general and mar-
ital insecurity and an environment hostile to children would keep fertility
low despite the measures. The jury is still out on whether the Quebec mea-
sures have had any impact, and what evidence there is in this book is unfor-
tunately scattered around. The policy process is what you learn most about
from this substantial study.
The mass of ideas and information in this book are summarised and syn-
thesised in its opening and concluding chapters, which contain a fuller dis-
cussion of the measures still needed for women's equality. The emerging con-
cept of 'state feminism is based on the premise that family and work respon-
sibilities should be shared by both women and men' (p. 293). She also sug-
gests they should not result in the undervaluation of unpaid work. Any tran-
sition from sex equality based on women's special needs to gender neutral
support for the family will be interesting to monitor, in the countries studied
here, or beyond.
HEATHER JOSHI
City University

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-

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618 Reviews

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

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