Victoria Bateman: If every woman had the ability to control her own fertility, the world would be a very different place

Victoria Bateman, Cambridge economist and historian, has spent years unpicking the stories we tell ourselves about money, power and progress. In her new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power, she challenges the myths that have written women out of history and warns that denying women autonomy – over work, money or fertility – has destabilised societies for millennia.

In this piece, for The Skylark, Bateman explores the myths that have obscured women’s role in history, the dangers of today’s “tradwife” revival and the consequences of restricting women’s freedom over their own bodies.

From Genghis Khan and Hernan Cortes to Henry Ford and JP Morgan, men are typically seen as the people who have determined the wealth – and poverty – of nations. Women are instead assumed to have been either passive beneficiaries or victims. The presumption seems to be that women have spent most of history as housewives – only “entering” the workplace in substantial numbers as a result of having to take on “men’s work” during the world wars of the last century. This is not only a mistelling of history, it fuels modern-day misogyny.

Historically speaking, and for millenia, the home was the workplace and the workplace was the home – not just for women but for us all. But, once growing numbers of people began to work outside of the home, it created the illusion that the economy was something “out there”. Work carried out within the home became gendered, and the “housewife” was born. Wives who laundered their husbands’ clothes and provided them with fuel in the form of hot food were classified by government statisticians in the nineteenth century as both “economically inactive” and “economic dependents”. This remains the case today.

Feminist economists have attempted to put a value on all of the unpaid labour that is carried out within the home, finding that it equates to between 20-60% of the economic activity (GDP) that is being measured. Based on the higher end of these estimates, this is the equivalent of excluding the US, China and the EU from global GDP. This is not a small omission.

But, to me, the biggest problem isn’t simply the macro one (i.e. failing to measure such work), it’s the micro one: the fact that those who perform unpaid labour – no matter how hard they work – are not always properly valued by their nearest and dearest, leaving them vulnerable to mistreatment. This is a particular problem in parts of the world where women’s labour force participation rate is low, such as in South Asia and the Middle East. It also makes the “tradwife” trend in the US something of a worry. Changing how we measure GDP isn’t going to solve this bigger – underlying – problem. Ultimately, women need cash in their own pockets.

Unsurprisingly, and as I show in Economica, the women that society labels “housewives” have always had an appetite for paid work that could be conducted alongside domestic duties. The financial rewards that they have received for this labour have, however, been a pittance. This is because those doling out “work from home” knew that women with family responsibilities didn’t have much of an alternative. Being a mother a century or two ago meant working long into the night to make ends meet; making hats, gloves or garments from the kitchen table, using raw materials supplied by local merchants or shop owners – often in competition with factory equivalents produced by younger, unmarried women. Today, the flexibility offered by remote working also comes at the cost of a lower salary. That means that those who are expected to carry the weight of domestic responsibilities are experiencing less financial reward for their work. This has lessons for today, giving added impetus to attempts to address the two factors that continue to trap women in the home: cultural systems that favour female seclusion and the “crisis of care”.

A half of the burials in the workers’ cemetery at Giza were of women.

​​One of the findings of the book is that women have long been working in parts of the economy that tend to be seen as male-dominated. For example, women were helping to build pyramids alongside men in Egypt – a half of the burials in the workers’ cemetery at Giza were of women. They were also working alongside men to plumb the ancient city of Rome (in fact, a far higher proportion of plumbers were women in ancient Rome than in Britain or the USA today). Women were also brewing beer in medieval London (where almost 40% of the brewers’ guild in the early 15^th century were women), mining silver for the Spanish in South America and carrying coal out of coal mines in, for example, Pembrokeshire (Wales) and Midlothian Scotland.

But, if there is one part of the economy that is most consistently associated with women’s work, in whatever part of the world you look and whatever time period, it is cloth-making. Female cloth makers also, therefore, feature in the book. They include a woman by the name of Lamassi, who, 4,000 years ago, was making cloth in Mesopotamia that her husband (Pusu-ken) in turn traded in Anatolia. This husband-and-wife pair lived 1200 km apart and kept in touch by letter, which is how we know about their business. Their son and daughter were also involved in the family business – their daughter as a cloth maker and their son, like his father, as a cloth merchant. This was the era of the Bronze Age, and it was the cloth that women produced that paid for the tin that, when mixed with copper, produced bronze. Later in history, it was also women’s cloth that acted as the currency of trade on the Silk Roads. Cloth did more than clothe our bodies; it was, for a long time, a form of money. And it was a form of money produced by women.

I wouldn’t like to be in a world where muscle power was the only thing that humans had left to contribute.

New technologies are not always gender neutral, which means they can sometimes exacerbate gender inequalities. Historically speaking, that included, for example, the plough, which was much more dependent on muscle power than earlier farming technologies (the digging stick and the hoe). Where terrain was suited to the plough, farming therefore became seen as “men’s work” and gender inequalities tended to increase (leaving a legacy today). By contrast, technology in the form of home appliances and contraception has helped to alleviate, rather than exacerbate, gender gaps. So technology can go in either direction. Because AI is impacting so many parts of the economy – from speeding up the development of new medicines to challenging systems of education – it will likely have a variety of effects, some of which are gender neutral (helping us all) and some of which are not. Whether the outcome will be the equivalent to that of the plough will very much depend on the degree to which AI (and other technological developments such as robotics) replace brain power as opposed to muscle power. I wouldn’t like to be in a world where muscle power was the only thing that humans had left to contribute. I don’t think I’d fare particularly well in that world.

My lack of muscle aside, women are equally as capable as men, and that is clear in the fact that, throughout history, men have often formed their own collectives in an attempt to lock women out of their line of work. Professional bodies in areas such as law and medicine ruled that women were not eligible to practice and, in the course of the nineteenth century, trade unions attempted to similarly deprive women of opportunities in printing, hat making and spinning. While women were told that this was to protect them from workplace exploitation (that they would be better off in the home), it was instead driven by greed and self-interest. After all, locking women out of the most lucrative jobs halved the amount of competition men faced and rendered women subservient to them.

Educational institutions (including universities) and societies (all-important for networking and advancement) often did the same. Still today, some male-only societies continue to exist (think of certain London clubs, for example). Others, despite now admitting women, still have practices or structures that were designed to suit men who either lived as monks or had a wife at home to look after the children (think of Oxbridge High Table dining, for example).

In terms of seeing women as a threat, the parallel today would be seeing immigrant workers in the same light and so wanting to exclude them from the labour market. And, just as unions in the nineteenth century spun their exclusionary actions as “protecting women”, certain political groups are employing the same rhetoric today when it comes to immigration.

But the costs of exclusion are not only seen in the labour market. They have also been written into the very demographics of societies, with restrictions on women’s choices feeding directly into patterns of population growth. That included pre-industrial China, where deforestation – in an attempt to create extra farmland to help feed the growing population – caused flooding that hurt urban centres and harmed the trading links between the town and the country. But this type of situation should not be seen as independent of what was happening in women’s lives. The population pressure was the inevitable consequence of a society in which ordinary women were not free to determine their own destinies; one in which women were married young, resulting in extended families that were growing in size, with few means – other than infanticide – of suppressing population growth. By contrast, in Europe, where, at the same time, young women engaged in paid work outside of the home – and so avoided being married off young as they had other options – population growth never got out of control in the same way. That, I argue in the book, is at the root of why Britain usurped China to become the richest country in the world.

In terms of today, far too many women across the world still face child marriage and/or are denied the freedom to control their own fertility. The result is that – much as in preindustrial China – women are locked into a cycle of poverty, struggling to feed an ever-expanding family which they in turn cannot afford to educate. This not only creates an endless cycle of poverty it also feeds into current immigration patterns, as it pushes increasing numbers of people into the hands of traffickers (and onto small boats) in an attempt to escape that poverty, as well as fuelling conflict as people fight for what limited economic resources do exist. If every woman had the ability to control her own fertility – to make her own decisions about her body – the world would be a very different place. It is a shame that so much focus today seems to be on problematising falling fertility in the West when, once you zoom out, the problem is a very different one.

The economy is not – and never has been – just for men. 

Women have always been movers and shakers when it comes to the economy, so much so that those who saw them as competition sought to marginalise them, and not just in Victorian Britain in the way described earlier. As I show in Economica, marginalising women – taking steps to limit their economic opportunities – contributed to the downfall of numerous “great” civilisations in history (including the Roman Empire, the Abbasid Islamic Empire and Yuan Dynasty China). From denying women legal status or the right to their own property to forcing them to marry and have children or binding their feet such that they were rendered immobile, states and societies have come up with numerous ways of trying to limit women’s choices, all in an effort to control what they do and extract the value that they create. And every time, it has not only hurt women it has hurt the economy. Let’s not repeat that same mistake today and let’s confront those who do with what history has to say.

Open any economics textbook and you will find a whole section on how women entered the workforce in the 20th century, creating the impression that women have spent most of history as housewives. The reality is that the economy is not – and never has been – “just for men”. Only by recognising that can we insulate ourselves from those who today seek to marginalise women.

Victoria Bateman’s new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power, is published by Hachette and is available now in hardback, ebook and audiobook from major retailers.

Responses were provided in writing by Victoria Bateman and have been lightly edited for clarity.

Our thoughts

Unpaid but indispensable

Globally, women perform around $10.8 trillion (£8.9tr) worth of unpaid care work each year (equivalent to about 13% of the global GDP), according to Oxfam – three times the value of the tech industry. Until economies count it, they are running on hidden subsidies. The Women’s Budget Group campaigns to make this work visible in the UK.

Fertility and freedom

Every $1 spent on family planning saves governments $3 in health, housing and education costs, according to the UN. Yet 218 million women worldwide still lack access to modern contraception. The UNFPA works to close this gap, recognising choice as a driver of growth.

The cost of exclusion

The World Bank estimates that closing gender gaps in work and enterprise could lift global GDP by 20% by 2050. CARE International supports women’s economic empowerment programmes across 100 countries.

Valuing care

Unpaid carers in England and Wales contribute a staggering £445 million to the economy in England and Wales every day – that's £162 billion per year – almost the entire NHS budget. The charity Carers UK is calling for stronger policies to protect those who carry this load.