In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism
  • Mary O'Sullivan (bio)

There is a received wisdom in other Anglophone countries that Americans do not get irony. I have never been quite convinced that is true, but in preparing an address to be delivered in a country with Donald Trump as its president, I did hesitate a bit before settling on my title. It may well be that some of you thought I was making immodest suggestions about my own intelligence in proposing "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism," and there may even be an inkling of truth in that suspicion. Nevertheless, the title is primarily intended as an ironic nod to The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, published in 1928 by the redoubtable Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.1 Here, you see the book with its original cover, [End Page 751] featuring a delightful blonde woman, partially nude, no doubt to emphasize her intelligence (Figure 1).


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Figure 1.

Cover to Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Woman's_Guide_to_Socialism_and_Capitalism#/media/File:The_Intelligent_Woman%27s_Guide_to_Socialism_and_Capitalism.jpg

From the 497 pages of guidance that Bernard Shaw's book offered to the intelligent woman, one piece of advice strikes me as especially useful—to approach questions that might seem closed as if they were really open—and it has guided me in preparing my remarks. But my address is inspired too by a riposte to Bernard Shaw's book, written [End Page 752] by Lilian Le Mesurier, who objected to the assumptions he seemed to make about female intelligence.2 Her advice to the man himself was to go back to what he was good at, which was writing plays, and her advice for intelligent women, at least as I see it, was to guide themselves on socialism and capitalism.

Sadly, that advice is almost as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago, although the primary focus of discussion has shifted from socialism to capitalism. Besides the occasional exception like The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, or Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, men continue to exercise a virtual monopoly in writing guides to capitalism, with some of them explicitly targeting these guides at their own daughters and granddaughters.3 Indeed, the extent to which opining on capitalism remains a man's world is as striking as it is disgraceful. In the recent Cambridge History of Capitalism, which runs to two volumes and 1,200 pages of text, there are only two women—Ann Carlos and Kristine Bruland—among its forty-one authors, and each of them coauthored her essay with a man.4 Historians do better in this regard, with Slavery's Capitalism counting four women among its sixteen authors, but that still leaves some distance to travel.5 It seems far from impertinent to suggest, therefore, that another women or two might dare to reflect on what the intelligent woman might look for in a guide to capitalism.

That is what I will do this evening. My goal is to suggest some questions that I think are important rather than to offer answers to them. Although I have worked on some of these issues myself, I have made a conscious effort in writing my address to avoid citing my own research. Well, you might say, will that not make my presidential address representative of precisely the kind of academic practices that women should avoid? We know that men are more confident in projecting their ideas, and we know their ideas circulate better, with men being cited more than women by their colleagues and, more controversially, by themselves. If women want their voices heard on capitalism, therefore, should they not adopt the practices that have proven so successful for men?

Sometimes it is good advice for women to ape the practices that keep men at the center of scholarly discourse, but there are intellectual [End Page 753] advantages to being on the edge of academic clubs. In a paper presented at this conference, Les Hannah described me as a scholar with "somewhat renegade perspectives."6...

pdf

Share