ECOLOGICAL

ECONOMICS
ELSEVIER Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140

ANALYSIS

Women, nature and the social construction of 'economic man'

Mary Mellor *

School of Social, Political and Economic Sciences, University of Northumbria at Newcastle. Northumberland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne
NEI 8ST, UK
Accepted 11 October 1995

Abstract

This paper argues that the social construction 'economic man' is the product of a hierarchical dualism in western society
that has also created 'rational man' and 'scientific man'. Women and the natural world form the subordinated half of these
dualisms. Central to this paper is the claim that this dualism is not only a cultural/theoretical one, but also a material one.
The social construction of 'economic man' is the product of a bifurcated knowledge system and a materially divided society.
'Economic man' reflects a society in which the embeddedness and embodiedness of humanity is hidden by the division of
mind from body, and science/culture from the natural world. For this reason it is not possible to incorporate women and
nature into the 'economy' through the commodity form by according them a value as price. It is argued that the economic
system can only exist if women and nature remain externalised, as women form the bridge between an autonomous
individualised 'man' and the biological/ecological underpinning of his existence. Central to this analysis is the distinction
between social and natural/biological time. 'Economic' man lives in social time (clock time) while women are responsible
for biological time. This is not because women are closer to nature/biology in an essential sense. Rather, this relationship is
imposed upon them by a male-dominated society.

1. Introduction society and culture (Plumwood, 1993). These du-

The androcentric assumptions of the existence and
nature o f ' e c o n o m i c m a n ' that lie at the heart o f both
classical and neo-classical economics has been
strongly challenged by feminist theorists (Pujol,
1992; Ferber and Nelson, 1993). This echoes the
critiques that feminists have made o f 'rational m a n '
(Nye, 1988; Lloyd, 1984) and 'scientific m a n '
(Keller, 1985; Harding, 1991; Rose, 1994). Eco-
nomic, rational and scientific man are all manifesta-
tions o f the dualisms that are central to western
* Tel. and Fax: (44-190 227-3445.
alisms are not merely dichotomous; the economic as
against the uneconomic, the rational as against the
irrational, the scientist as against the untutored
layperson, they are also judgmental, with the second
half o f the pair seen as inferior and subordinated to
the first. Within these dichotomies w o m e n are gener-
ally assigned to the subordinate part alongside, and
as members of, other marginalised and stigmatised
groups.
Although there are feminists who see the origins
o f w o m e n ' s subordination in prehistory (Eisler,
1990), explanations o f the emergence of dualism in
western society is generally traced to the Greek
division between the ' f r e e ' unlimited world o f the
mind and the ' u n f r e e ' death-limited world o f the

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130 M. Melbr/ Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
body (Plumwood, 1993, p. 69). Within the western
tradition women are the repository of human embod-
iedness, the subordinated half of the dualism, the
Other (de Beauvoir, 1968).
Feminists have sought to confront this association
of woman and nature/necessity in various ways.
The earliest response was to demand an equal free-
dom for women, arguing that women are as rational,
reasoning and scientific as men, as in Mary Woll-
stonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’.
For two centuries liberal and marxist/socialist femi-
nists have argued that women and men are not
fundamentally different and have interests that are
not ultimately at odds. Cultural feminists, on the
other hand, argue that men and women are funda-
mentally different and confront dualism by celebrat-
ing and valuing its subordinated Other, Woman
(Daly, 1979). While the first approach seeks to ‘dis-
solve’ the dualism, the second reifies it. A third way
forward is to confront the dynamics that sustain the
dualism by arguing that men are subject to the same
realities of embodiment as women, but that women
bear the burden of that embodiment.
‘Economic man’ denies the embodiedness of hu-
man beings in their biological functioning and the
embeddedness of humanity in its ecological context.
In consequence, the social construction of the ‘econ-
omy’ and ‘economic man’ is not just an ideological
justification for male domination (Wailer and Jen-
nings, 19901, but represents the material exploitation
of women and the natural world. Women bear the
burden of ‘economic man’s’ embodiedness and the
natural world the burden of ‘his’ embeddedness.
will argue that the relationship between women and
the natural world in this process can be understood
in terms of the construction of ‘social time’ as
against the ‘biological time’ of embodiment and the
‘ecological time’ of embeddedness.
To concentrate in this paper on a challenge to
‘economic man’ based on the exploitation, subordi-
nation and exclusion of women and the natural world,
is not to overlook the material exploitation of other
groups and peoples on the basis of racism, class or
colonialism. Certainly, life for many men in eco-
nomic systems exemplified by ‘economic man’ is
exploitative and frustrating, often leading to an early
death. Challenging ‘economic man’ is not only in the
interests of women and the natural world but most
men as well. What is needed is to ‘break the bound-
aries’ of male-dominated economic structures (Mel-
lor, 1992a) and the anthropocentric and androcentric
divisions they represent.
2. ‘Economic man’
The theoretical abstraction ‘economic man’ is rep-
resented by male-domination of economic systems
- gender segregation in the labour market, and the
sexual division of labour and location as between the
public world of male-dominated economies and the
private world of the home and domestic work (Brad-
ley, 1989). The marginalisation of nature is repre-
sented in depleted resources, toxic waste dumps,
dangerous production processes, polluted water and
air.
Central to the feminist critique of ‘economic man’
is exposure of his false autonomy as the disembodied
and decontexualised choice-theoretic model of the
‘separative individual’ (England, 1993). This does
not represent the reality of most women’s lives as
they juggle family responsibilities on small budgets
and limited time, nor the lives of poor people gener-
ally. Equally important is a critique of the division
between activities that are defined as economic and
those seen as non-economic (Jennings, 1993) in an
economic system that prioritises what men value and
what men do and denigrates and undervalues what
women value and what women do (Waring, 1989;
Lewenhak, 1992). As a result women cannot estab-
I lish their needs as ‘claims’ within a male-constructed
economy (Peattie and Rein, 1983; Waring, 1989).
This critique is well-known and much debated.
What I want to do is to bring together ecological and
feminist critiques to argue that women and the’natu-
ral world are both treated as externalities by western
dualist economies. Bringing together women and
nature in this way is not unproblematic. Since the
emergence of ecofeminism in the mid- 1970s. there
has been considerable debate about the claims made
by ecofeminists of a direct link between the patriar-
chal domination of nature and of women. This has
been expressed either as an affinity between women
and nature (Griffin, 1978; Collard, 1988; Plant, 1990)
or a shared experience of domination (Merchant,
1983; King, 1989). As I have argued elsewhere, I
 M. Mellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
think it is possible to argue that women and the
natural world have been put into a material relation
within male-dominated society without falling into
the essentialist trap of arguing that women and na-
ture have some direct affinity (Mellor, 1992b). This
can be achieved by not concentrating on what women
are, but what on what most women do, that is,
women's unpaid and underpaid work (Meilor, 1992a,
p. 196).
Central to this critique is the position of women
and the natural world as external to male-dominated
economic systems while at the same time forming
the necessary material base that underpins them.
3. Outside the economy: W o m e n and nature as
externalities
" T h e modern creation myth that male western
minds propagate is based on the sacrifice of nature,
women and the third world. It is not merely the
impoverishment of these excluded sectors that is the
issue in the late twentieth century; it is the very
dispensability of nature and non-industrial and non-
commercial cultures that is at stake. Only the price
on the market counts." (Shiva, 1989, p. 221).
" I n the UNSNA (United Nations System of Na-
tional Accounts) the things that I valued in my
country - - its pollution-free environment; its moun-
tain streams with safe drinking water; the accessibil-
ity of national parks, walkways, beaches, lakes, kauri
and beech forests; the absence of nuclear power and
nuclear energy - - all counted for nothing... Hand
in hand with the dismissal of the environment, came
evidence of the severe invisibility of women and
women's work." (Waring, 1989, p. 1, 2).
I once asked a class of students if it would be a
good idea to pay women the 'family' wage as they
were mainly responsible for the home and family,
while men carried out their present work for nothing.
The male students were flabbergasted as they could
see no reason why men should be willing to do
unpaid work for the benefit of their family, yet this is
the reality for most women. One of the most impor-
tant boundaries that the 'economy' has constructed is
between men and women's work (Armstrong and
Armstrong, 1988). Most of women's work is unpaid
because crops grown, meals prepared, clothes washed
131
are used directly rather than bought or sold as a
commodity on the market.
On this basis as Waring (1989, p. 78) points out
most of women's work counts, quite literally, for
nothing. One of the most important achievements of
feminist economics has been to gain recognition for
the vast resource to societies all over the world
created by women's domestic and subsistence labour
(Lewenhak, 1992; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Folbre,
1994). This is particularly critical in the south (the
so-called 'third world') where women are predomi-
nantly responsible for 'survival and subsistence
needs' (Sen and Grown, 1987). The invisibility of
women, women's work and women's needs goes
right to the heart of world decision-making systems.
Women's unpaid work is not calculated in a nation's
wealth and their needs are not prioritised in its
expenditure (Waring, 1989, p. 2). Aid programmes
often ignore women's needs for such fundamental
things as access to clean water or sanitation (Dankel-
man and Davidson, 1988; Rao, 1989).
The natural world has also been equally 'invisi-
ble' to both capitalist and non-capitalist economic
systems, in particular the environmental impact of
mining, industrialised agriculture and manufacture.
Industrial firms have traditionally treated pollution as
an 'externality' that is, something for which the
individual producer is not responsible (Kapp, 1978;
Sagoff, 1988). As a result, the penalities of pollution
and depletion have been borne by the environment
and the people directly affected by it. Racism and
poverty mean that the worst effects of environmental
dereliction fall on the least powerful (Hofrichter,
1993). Being able to use the environment 'freely' as
a dump for waste increases the profits of privately
owned firms until the ecological damage directly
affects its own conditions of production. This has
been described by James O'Connor (1988) as the
second contradiction of production, the first contra-
diction being the crises internal to the capitalist
process that Marx identified. Unfortunately the eco-
nomic consequences of the 'second contradiction'
will not rebound upon the firm until the ecological
damage has already been done. State-owned indus-
tries may equally well ignore externalities in the
short run (as in Eastern Europe), but the costs will
eventually have to be born by the government in the
form of clean-up operations or extra costs imposed
132 M. Mrllor/ Ecolo~icul
by the ill-health or early death of the present
future population.
4. Bringing women and nature back in?
“The myth of female incapacity, rooted in this
isolated woman dependent on someone else’s wage
and therefore shaped by someone else’s conscious-
ness, has been broken by only one action: the woman
getting her own wage.” (Dalla Costa and James,
1980, p. 164).
“We demand the immediate application of the
principle that the causer of pollution must pay its
costs.” (Programme of the German Green Party,
1983, p. 30).
The most obvious way to challenge the domi-
nance of neo-classical economic thinking and the
boundaries of the ‘economy’ is to demand that
women’s work and the ecological impact of produc-
tion be brought within the commodity form, i.e., that
they be given a price.
4.1. Valuing women’s work
The question of paying women for their domestic
work as ‘wages for housework’ has led to prolonged
debate within the feminist movement (Males, 1980).
There has also been an equally protracted ‘domestic
labour debate’, over whether Marxist economic the-
ory could incorporate women’s work (Hamilton and
Barrett, 1986).
The weakness of arguments for money payment
for women’s work is that this would merely legiti-
mate the very structures that have created the pat-
terns of women’s social exclusion. As the majority
of personal services in a society are already provided
by women mainly as unpaid labour or as low paid
jobs, to provide payments would not alter this situa-
tion. In fact this point was clearly made by Dalla
Costa in her original article:
‘The demand.. . “pay us wages for housework”
would run the risk of looking, in the light of the
present relationship of forces in Italy, as though we
wanted further to entrench the condition of institu-
tionalised slavery which is produced with the condi-
tion of housework.” (1972 - reprinted in Malos,
1980, p. 175).
Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
or Feminists argued that paying wages for domestic
labour would further ghettoize women into the home,
rather than fight for equality for women in paid
work, or get men to share domestic work. However,
the women who made these arguments were mainly
white and middle class. Black feminists, on the other
hand, claimed that most black and working class
women have never had the chance to stay in the
home and would like to be offered sufficient income
to avoid having to do the low paid and unfulfilling
work they are forced to do in a racist and class-rid-
den society (Hooks, 1982, 1989). Single mothers
also argued that the campaign to get men to share
domestic work was not relevant to their needs.
Feminist theorists from Charlotte Perkins Gilman
to Christine Delphy have shown that women cannot
gain economic equality or independence while they
remain in domestic relation to men (Gilman, 1966;
Delphy, 1984; Delphy and Leonard, 1992). No mat-
ter how hard they work in the domestic context (or
even in the paid service sector for that matter)
women cannot improve their economic position. It is
only in the limited sphere of the professions that
women have gained parity with men and even then
men still dominate the upper echelons and highest
paid jobs (Cockbum, 1991). Calculations of what
women would need to receive for their unpaid work
on a direct comparison with paid work (cook, house-
keeper, nanny) produce very high figures indeed that
would represent a large percentage of current GNP
(Lewenhak, 1992, p. 223).
If women did receive equal pay for equal value
for their paid and unpaid work without any other
fundamental changes to the economic system, it
would put a vast amount of purchasing power into
the economy that would either push up prices or
expand production and consumption dramatically
which would, in turn, push up against the ecological
limits of economic growth. Only if all additional
expenditure were to be made in terms of services
(teaching, nursing, counselling, personal care, enter-
tainment) would there not be any adverse ecological
reaction and even then only if the services provided
produced no additional consumption or pollution.
Despite these criticisms Marilyn Waring (1989) (p.
320) argues that the economic value of women’s
work should be calculated in order to expose the
failure of the formal economy to acknowledge it. She
 M. Mellor / Ecok~gical Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
follows Hilkka Pietil~i in maintaining that this would
show that women's work forms the majority of work
in society unlike work connected to the global mar-
ket economy (which Pietil~i calls the fettered econ-
omy) which involves only a small proportion of the
sum total of hours worked (Pietil~i, 1987).
For Nancy Folbre (1994) the essence of women's
work is that it operates under 'unfair structures of
constraint' that stop women being able to have their
work recognised on the same basis as men. Central
to this is women's location within structures of
obligation that see women's work as both natural
and altruistic, what elsewhere I have called 'imposed
altruism' (Mellor, 1992a, p. 252). After noting the
tendency of neo-classical economists to treat the
family as a non-economic sphere based on altruistic
relationships, Folbre argues that 'altruism doesn't
emanate from our genes or fall from the sky. It is
socially and culturally constructed, economically and
politically reinforced' (Folbre, 1994, p. 250). As a
result women are allocated a "set of responsibilities
to which they have been unfairly assigned' (Folbre,
1994, p. 252). As Foibre points out, the failure to
recognise and reward women's work is leading to a
global 'crisis of social reproduction' (Folbre, 1994,
p. 254).
This concern is also central to Dalla Costa's
recent work in which she describes phenomena such
as Italy's collapsing birthrate as ' w o m e n ' s great
refusal' (Dalla Costa, 1995, p. 13). Daila Costa
argues that tinkering with present economic struc-
tures will not do. Instead she calls for a "new type of
development in which human reproduction is not
built on an unsustainable sacrifice by women, as part
of a conception and structure of life which is nothing
but labour time within an intolerable sexual hierar-
chy" (Dalla Costa, 1995, p. 13; italics in the origi-
nal)
4.2. Making the polluter pay?
In a competitive economy it is unlikely that firms
will willingly incorporate environmental costs
(Jacobs, 1991). However, some governments have
shown at least a theoretical willingness to address
the environmental costs of production. The British
Government, for example, sponsored a report.
'Blueprint for a Green Economy' (Pearce et al..
133
1989), which argued that failure to take account of
future environmental costs gives a false picture of a
nation's wealth. To give a truer picture the costs of
coping with pollution should be deducted from mea-
sures of national income (GDP, GNP). This would
give a measure of sustainable income, i.e., the level
of income that can be achieved without adverse
ecological impact. Pearce argues that all products
should reflect in their price their 'true' environmen-
tal costs, both now and for future generations. Gov-
ernments could achieve this by imposing a pollution
tax or issuing a 'tradeable permit'. Those who wanted
to discharge waste or use raw materials could bid
against each other for the right to do so.
Certainly it is possible to influence the market
through taxation. When the British Government re-
duced the tax on unleaded petrol the number of cars
converting from leaded to unleaded fuel increased
dramatically. This did not, however, decrease car
production or car use. A report to the European
Commission in 1990 showed the limitation of taxa-
tion in curbing carbon emissions, as use of fossil fuel
only dropped by 2% for every 10% increase in tax
(New Scientist, 1990, p. 38). The effectiveness of a
tax depends on how essential the product is and the
different spending patterns of the poor and the rich.
Taxes or any other cost added to a product must
penalise most heavily those who are least able to pay
(Elson, 1988; British Association of Nature Conser-
vationists, 1990).
The idea of tradeable permits has also been con-
demned by many greens as 'buying the right to
pollute'. The British Association of Nature Conser-
vationists has suggested that a better approach would
be to look at ways of technically overcoming envi-
ronmental problems with strict rules for conservation
(British Association of Nature Conservationists,
1990). The same argument has been applied to pollu-
tion taxes: 'pollution needs to be stopped not taxed'
(Wail, 1990). Even fines are not a very effective
instrument unless they are very high. In 1990 a
report by the Women's Environmental Network in
Britain sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Na-
ture found that despite a fine of £10000 and dam-
ages of £200000 to restock a river poisoned by a
chemical spill, a paper mill still found the fine and
damages cheaper than buying new equipment to deal
with the problem.
134 M. Mellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
Even with inducements, the capitalist market can-
not resolve the problems of the environment. It is
geared to short-term profit-making, not long-term
conservation. Resources are only valued while im-
mediately useful and relatively easy to extract. The
'life' cycle of both resources and products from the
depletion of nonrenewable resources to the final
disposal of discarded waste are not covered in eco-
nomic calculations (Moss, 1994). Imposing permits,
regulations or taxes undermines the capitalist idea of
a free market; they are not compatible with the
maximisation of profit. In a competitive market there
would always be an incentive to undercut other
producers by ducking environmental taxes, quietly
discharging effluent or moving to a more impover-
ished country that could not afford to be too fussy.
Economic valuation is in any event irrelevant
where the loss of resources, species and habitat for
future generations is, as Waring (1989) has argued,
incalculable. This is particularly true where the loss
of 'common wealth' is also a loss to those species
themselves and the integrity of the 'natural world'.
In a society dominated by 'economic man' where
responsibility for productive decisions rests with
(mainly) men in companies, laboratories and govern-
ments, there can be no voice for women or for the
natural world.
5. Beyond economics
Is it possible to devise an economic system that is
ecologically sustainable? By 'economic' in this con-
text I mean a system of provisioning for the whole
human community that is sufficient to meet survival
and quality of life needs, while being ecologically
sustainable. A provisioning that would be, in both
senses, a 'sustaining economy'.
Hopefully, the answer is yes, otherwise there is
no future for the human race. A sustaining economy
would necessarily put at its centre the provisioning
of society within the boundaries of ecological sus-
tainability and not utility- and profit-maximisation
(Nelson, 1993). If such an economy was to meet the
survival and quality of life needs of the human
community, it would have to function on a socially
equitable basis. On these criteria it is highly unlikely
that the current global capitalist market system would
provide a suitable model (O'Connor, 1994). Far from
moving towards egalitarian sustainability, global cap-
italism in its triumphalism is overrunning the bound-
aries of self-sufficient subsistence communities, de-
stroying their economic autonomy and scooping out
their labour and resources at grossly exploitative
prices (Shiva, 1989; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Lang and
Hines, 1993).
Radical alternatives to capitalist/market systems
from green and feminist perspectives are beginning
to emerge (Mellor, 1994). However green perspec-
tives are not necessarily feminist. Apart from rare
exceptions such as Hazel Henderson (1978, 1980,
1991, green economics, like classical and Marxist
economics, is dominated by male theorists. As I have
argued elsewhere this has meant that the green chal-
lenge to the market economy has not focussed upon
the gendered nature of market economics and there-
fore is in danger of transporting patriarchal assump-
tions into green alternatives (Mellor, 1992c).
A recent attempt to set out what is variously
described as the 'new economics' 'real-life eco-
nomics' or the 'living economy', shows the limita-
tions of a green perspective that is not feminist
(Ekins and Max-Neef, 1992). Women only appear
once in the index and (eco)feminism not at all,
although one of its thirty-six sections is on house-
hold production. Nevertheless, the authors conclude
that one of the book's 'main ideas' is the inclusion
of household production as one of the four spheres
of society: the market, state, households and civil
society (Ekins and Max-Neef, 1992, p. 425). Al-
though many radical ideas are presented such as an
emphasis on social, ethical and ecological dimen-
sions of the 'human situation' and expanded indica-
tors of the quality of life, the book is weakened by
still seeing women and women's work as peripheral,
women are firmly in their place in the household,
while the 'real economy' carries on elsewhere. Al-
though there is an intention to broaden the concept
of "real-life' economics to include the 'whole econ-
omy', including community provision and domestic
work, the concluding definition presented is still set
in classical economic terms as the competitive allo-
cation of scarce resources:
"Living economics is an economics of and for
real life. Its starting point, with which few would
disagree, is the factual statement that in real-life
 M. Mellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
people do put scarce resources to competing uses for
the purposes of creating their welfare." (Ekins and
Max-Neef, 1992, p. 423).
This definition still seems to see people using
resources badly or wisely depending on the 'rational-
ity' of their calculation. Even though 'real life'
economics is not prioritising money exchange as the
basis of economic life, it still sees the 'economy' as
an extant form. A feminist perspective would want to
start from a critique of the gendered construction of
'the economy' as a social process distinct from other
aspects of human existence.
6. Women and nature as mediators of economic
systems
" I f human maintenance, mental and physical, and
the nurturance of human beings are not taken care of,
no other economy is possible." (Pietil~, 1987, p. 11).
" T h e current organization of social reproduction
is unfair, inefficient and probably unsustainable."
(Folbre, 1994, p. 255).
Women and nature were not left out of economic
calculations by accident. This was not an error or an
injustice that can be ameliorated by suitable reforms
as we have seen. The exclusion of women and nature
is central to the social construction of 'economic
man' and the economic system that ' h e ' personifies.
'Economic man' as a rational, calculating individ-
ual is one-half of the dualistic constitution of western
society that rests on the existence of an 'Other' who
can absorb the subordinated aspects of his existence.
The extemalised life of the private world of domestic
work and the ecological tolerances of the natural
world combine to make 'his' life possible. The social
construction of 'economic man' is just that, a social
construction. The 'economy' he represents takes only
what it wants from the complexity of the human
situation and gives back only what is profitable or
what is socially valued by male-dominated public
sector economies. Nuclear weapons not nurseries.
In the construction of 'economic man', what is
left behind is the natural part of his existence, the
embodiedness of his humanity in his biological needs
and his embeddedness in the ecosystem. The econ-
omy only wants ' m a n ' when he is fit, mature but not
old, mobile and without extraneous demands. The
economy does not want his childhood, his sickness,
135
his hunger, his need for rest and sleep, his dirty
clothes, his worries, his parenting, his ageing, his
responsibilities. Man here, of course, can also be a
woman. The gendering is in the construction of
'economic man', it is not an absolute biological
divide. Women, particularly working class women,
have always been part of the labour force.
The industrial system broke the link between
work and home, between the worker and (his) em-
bodiment. The worker came to work prepared for
labour and returned home to be rested and restored
for the next day. Unpaid domestic labour in the
home, usually provided by a woman, bears the bur-
den of the needs of embodiment. I f / w h e n the worker
is no longer fit for work, employment ceases. For
many people this also means loss of access to the
economic system as a provider of basic needs. The
commodification of both labour and natural re-
sources has destroyed the basis in industrialised soci-
eties for independent access to the means of provi-
sioning outside of the formal economy. Women, to
the extent that they are only involved in unpaid
labour, have no independent access to provisioning.
The separation of 'economic man' from his em-
bodiment is one aspect of a general disengagement
from the natural world in western society. As
ecofeminists have argued, western dualist thinking
has separated ' m a n ' from 'nature'. Westem science
has treated the natural world as an inert object for
observation, experimentation and exploitation
(Merchant, 1983); western philosophy has separated
'mind' from ' b o d y ' (Plumwood, 1993).
That humanity is part of nature was the crucial
insight of Marx, and the starting point of his materi-
alist analysis:
" M a n lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body
and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if
he is not to die. To say that man's physical and
mental life is linked to nature simply means that
nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature."
(Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1884; Colletti, 1975, p. 328)
Unfortunately Marx retained the dualism at the
centre of the industrial/capitalist economy in his
distinction between production and reproduction. As
a result his critique of capitalism became trapped
within the boundaries of a male/capitalist economic
framework (Mellor, 1992b).
136 M. Mellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
With Ariel Salleh I would want to argue that
women, or more precisely women's work, bears the
burden of the link with nature, in that they mediate
between the socially constructed world of male-
dominated economic systems and the embeddedness
and embodiedness of humanity within its natural
milieux (Salleh, 1994). Julie Nelson quoting Fee
(1983) makes the same point that woman is the
'mediating force between man and nature' (Nelson,
1993, p. 25). For Nelson a feminist economics would
be about 'how we live in our house, the earth'
(Nelson, 1993, p. 33).
This is not making the essentialist argument that
women are 'naturally' more attuned to the natural
world, but rather this represents their experience in
male-dominated society. As Ynestra King has put it,
• It is as if women were entrusted with and have
kept the dirty little secret that humanity emerges
from nonhuman nature into society in the life of the
species and the person." (King, 1990, p. 116).
Nor is this arguing for biological determinism in
the sense that women's bodies or nurturing powers
are more relevant for humanity's 'dirty little secret'.
What does exist is the biological reality of human-
ity's embodiment. This is the material base of human
life that Marx identified; humanity is part of nature
and nature is part of humanity. Biology does not
determine human development, but neither can hu-
manity ultimately transcend its own biological and
ecological framework. Women and men are both
naturally and socially constructed; it is impossible to
separate the two. An essentialist debate about ulti-
mate differences between men and women is more
helpfully redrawn in terms of a materialist analysis
of humanity's engagement with its own embodiment
and its gendered nature (Mellor, 1992b; Mellor,
forthcoming).
7. Women, nature and time
How then does women's work mediate between
' m a n ' and 'nature'? Why can this work not be
incorporated into economic systems? I would argue
that the importance of women's work rests in its
temporality rather than its particular form. W o m e n ' s
work of cleaning, cooking, caring for people, and
giving emotional support is carried out as both paid
and unpaid work. Men also do this kind of work.
What is distinct about women's work is its existence
in time.
"Because it is the labour of ensuring human
subsistence, the production time of domestic labour
can never be reduced, it can only be shared or
redistributed." (Luxton, 1987, p. 172).
" T o speak of women and time is to speak of the
ultimate theft ... only free men can undertake to
give up their time while women ... don't have it to
give." (Forman, 1989, p. 1 and 5).
The question of time is critical to the relationship
of both women and nature to the economic system.
Women's unpaid domestic work creates the 'free'
labour time which is the central feature of modern
economic systems. By separating home and work,
industrial society set aside a clearly designated space
and time for paid, time-limited labour. For the natu-
ral world the conflict of temporality lies in the
time-scale of economic systems in relation to the
time-scale of ecological destruction. Jeremy Rifkin
(1987) has argued that humanity and the Earth are
engaged in a 'time war' that has seen human society
move away from the biological and ecological
rhythms of the planet at an ever-increasing pace. It
took millions of years to reach the boundary of
hunter-gatherer resources, thousands of years to do
the same for agricultural resources, but only a few
hundred years to reach the limits of non-renewable
energy resources. Ecological time is the time-scale of
ecological sustainability that allows time for regener-
ation and renewal. Biological time is the time-scale
that takes account of the rhythms and needs of
human existence.
Time is becoming an increasingly important topic
in the study of modernity (Adam, 1990, 1995). Mod-
e m society has been described as the society that
conquered time. The clock-ordered life of the Bene-
dictine Monks is seen as one of its earliest manifesta-
tions. The fact that time was 'invented' in a secluded
male community is an important indication of its
gendered nature. The control of time is essential to
the functioning of modern industrial economies. Time
in industrial systems was dictated by the discipline
of paid working time, which was fixed and limited,
with all other activities fitting around it (Thompson,
1967). At the start of the industrial revolution the
new factory owners found it very difficult to get
 M. Mellor / Ecological Ecwnornic~ 20 (1997) 129-140
workers to accept the new work-time discipline. In
the end industry resorted to using child labour as 'it
is found nearly impossible to convert persons past
the age of puberty into useful factory hands' (quoted
in Gorz, 1989, p. 21).
Despite this initial reluctance, as the new indus-
trial system developed it was men who predominated
in time-limited paid work, while women found them-
selves divided between work and home. This was not
achieved without a struggle between men and women,
particularly in the nature and role of trades unions
(Taylor, 1983, p. 274). Although the imposition of
fixed working time meant that industrial workers
could not choose their pace and time of work, it did
create a time that could be separated off as leisure.
Throughout the nineteenth century men increasingly
took advantage of this time and space to create a
public and social life for themselves (Hart, 1989).
For women, work outside the home brought conflict-
ing loyalties and obligations: 'in a world where time
is money, and where money can mean time, women
have little of either' (Forman, 1989, p. 3). The most
important element in the development of industrial
time and 'free' labour was that it separated clock
time from 'biological time', i.e., the time necessary
to maintain human physiological and emotional exis-
tence. Paid work was time-oriented and not task-ori-
ented. While women did paid work-time in the facto-
ries, their work in the home still remained within
task-oriented, biological time. People needed to be
cleaned when they were dirty, babies needed to be
fed when they were hungry, nursed when they were
tired. The sick needed treatment when they were in
distress or pain. Their demands did not cease be-
cause it was 'outside working hours'.
Over historical time economic systems have
evolved and changed. Aspects of domestic life have
been incorporated into the market system. For exam-
ple, food preparation is now largely done by com-
mercial firms, particularly in Britain and the United
States. A proportion of care for the elderly, childcare
and care for the sick is provided by the public or the
private sector. However, this is not being done in
order to bring economic time into line with biologi-
cal time. Activities are being incorporated either
because they are profitable or because there has been
public lobbying for their provision. In the latter case
public provision remains dependent on the function-
137
ing of the private ' wealth-creating' sector as a source
of tax revenue. Replacement of domestic work such
as food preparation may also have repercussions in
ecological terms as in the transport of fresh and
packaged food over huge distances.
A sustaining economy would have to shape its
provisioning to the dynamics of biological and eco-
logical time. It would have to enable people to live
within their bodily time-scale - - to have time to be
ill, to grow old, to be around for family and friends.
It would have to live within the dynamics of ecologi-
cal sustainability not 'market forces' based on cheap
wages, cheap energy and externalised pollution. It is
inconceivable that a capitalist market economy could
evolve into a sustaining economy. Nor could a state
economy that did not address the sexual division of
labour and create a system of provisioning that was
ecologically sustainable.
Barbara Adam argues that the dualistic division of
time in western society means that it fails to confront
the ontological conditions of human existence:
'dualistic analyses exclude as irrelevant the times of
the body and the natural body and they avoid an
involvement with ontological issues' (Adam, 1995,
p. 43). For Adam this denial of ontological condi-
tions damages humanity by dividing embodiment
from the mind within individual consciousness. Ex-
clusion of embodiment and the dualism it represents,
denies the existence of a 'mindful body' that would
transcend this division:
" T h e rhythmicity of the mindful body works the
seam of intersection between nature and culture,
body and mind, life and death." (Adam, 1995, p.
45).
The division of human lives that dualism has
produced means that social time loses touch with the
natural cycles of birth, death and regeneration so that
social life is continually harried by a sense, and
dread, of mortality. Life in the world of socially
constructed 'economic man' is not a happy one. It is
worked continually against the clock and the time-ta-
ble with the sense of 'a finite quantity of time which
is running down and out, stress, disease, fear of
death' (Adam, 1995, p. 53). For Barbara Adam,
clock time has become abstracted from the 'historic-
ity of being, and separated from the past, present and
future' (Adam, 1995, p. 131). Adam urges us to
'de-alienate time: reconnect clock time to its sources'
138 M. M ellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
(Adam, 1995, p. 54) and the key to these sources is
'the embedded, creative and constitutive times of
life' (Adam, 1995, p. 53).
To the extent that women are responsible for
biological time, embedded time, they do not have
time, they both give and generate time. They live in
a world where time is unbounded apart from the
limits of physical exhaustion, and many women live
even beyond those. As a result women lose control
over their own lives and have no way of creating
'time for themselves'. Insofar as their work is geared
to biological time, time can never mean freedom for
women. Ironically women may take paid work as a
way of escaping for a short while from biological
time (Deem, 1986). Where women do paid work it is
often linked to their domestic role and has low
economic value. Paradoxically, as Lewenhak points
out, this is not because this work is of limited value,
but because it is too essential and potentially unlim-
ited in scope, particularly in areas like health care
(Lewenhak, 1992, p. 84).
The exclusion of biological time means that eco-
nomic systems are no longer rooted in the physical
reality of human existence. Unlike the disciplined
fixed and limited time of early industrial society,
time in modem economic systems is becoming en-
tirely disembedded and disembodied. The fixed
working day allowed the worker time to go home
rest and replenish. In today's electronic world the
working day is both unconditioned and unlimited. It
has lost even a residual connection with the body as
people wander in virtual reality on the Internet. It
may be that such technological developments could
reconnect people with their local environment, the
electronic cottage, for example. But if the new tech-
nology is used with the same underpinning assump-
tions as the present economy, it is unlikely that more
than limited change could occur.
The freedom and flexibility of such systems is
also an illusion. A small minority of men and women
may cruise the twenty-four hour information high-
way, but their provisioning needs will still have to be
met - - real people in real factories and homes, real
garbage collectors, teachers and nurses. An eco-
nomic system that has broken free of the physical
reality of biological time must also have become
distanced from ecological time and ecological real-
ity. It has lost its awareness of the interrelatedness of
human physicality with other sensate beings and the
natural world.
8. Conclusion
'Economic man' can only exist if he excludes
from his world the fact that he is embedded and
embodied within the bio-system. A woman can also
become 'economic man'; it is important not to as-
sume that all women have a common experience of
biological time. Feminists have quite rightly been
criticised for falsely universalising the experience of
the white middle class housewife (Hooks, 1982;
Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Ramazanoglu, 1989).
However, where women wish to escape their respon-
sibility for biological time, they must find someone
else to take on that responsibility, usually another
woman. The world of 'economic man' is not one that
liberates all men and restricts all women. It is a
world that liberates some men and a few women at
the expense of the rest of humanity and the planet.
At the same time it has created an immensely
powerful economic, political and ideological frame-
work that insists that the different parts of human life
are kept separate. Ecofeminists have argued that
these false boundaries run deep not only in society,
but in ourselves, dividing our minds from our bodies
and the material and spiritual sides of our nature
(Plant, 1990; Diamond and Orenstein, 1990). A soci-
ety composed only of 'economic man' would be
unsustainable not only socially and ecologically, but
psychologically and spiritually. Our task is not to
expand or reform the concept of the 'economic' and
the ' m a n ' who constructs it and is constructed by it.
We need to deconstruct both the concept and the
reality. If we are to be in tune with ecological time,
the time-scale of ecological sustainability, the so-
cially created time of economic systems will have to
be abandoned. We will all have to live in biological
time where we share in the tasks of feeding, clothing
and nurturing ourselves and others within the bound-
aries of ecological sustainability. As I have argued
elsewhere, the male-dominated/capitalist economic
system is not the only alternative; it is not even a
feasible alternative. It is a utopian, ideological con-
struct based on real relations of exploitation that are
in danger of destroying us all (Mellor, 1994).
 M. Mellor / Ecological Economics 20 (1997) 129-140
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