Gender and Economics Through a Trifocal Lens: Production, Distribution, and Consumption

I am honored that Riv-Ellen Prell has included my 2001 book Shylock's Children in a body of scholarship that, over the past two decades, has integrated economics into modern Jewish history and Jews into the economic history of modern Europe and the United States. If one includes work on early modern Europe, the "economic turn" in Jewish history goes back quite a bit further, to Jonathan Israel's pioneering European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (1985), and produced seminal works such as Jonathan Karp's The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (2008) and Francesca Trivellato's The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (2012). One important difference between the literature on Jews in the economic systems of early and late modernity is a shifting of emphasis from distribution (Jews in commerce) to production and, more recently, consumption. Prell's overarching critique—that much of the scholarship on Jews in the modern economy neglects women by overlooking the family as an economic unit—might be even more relevant to early than late modernity, and is applicable to all three branches of economic activity.

My own book, like Karp's, was about political economic discourses and practices that were overwhelmingly the work of men. If they thought about women at all, they conceived of them as objects to be assigned specific tasks in order to render Jews more productive, moral, and socially acceptable. My book, as Prell points out, did not seek to make an original contribution to the history of what Jews did for a living—on this subject my analysis was heavily synthetic—so much as what Jews thought about their economic position. Women were indeed actively involved in the embourgeoisement of Jewish life in the home and in philanthropic associations. But they did not contribute (at least not until the fin de siècle, and then only sparingly) to the public discourse by Jews in the press and in communal and inter-communal organizational reports.

If we move from sensibility to activity, however, the story is different. In any time and place, and for any population, whether defined by nationality, ethnicity, or religious community, both men and women have been economic actors. Women and men often encountered modern capitalism differently, because women were more likely than men to work within the confines of the family home, which, whether nuclear or extended, functioned as an economic unit (hence the word "economics," from the Greek for "household management"). I would, however, blur somewhat the distinction that Prell draws between men and women, because women (including Jewish women) could encounter capitalism in many ways, some of which more closely approximated the experience of men than others.

Women's economic functions differed most from men when men produced commodities or objects for barter or sale and women engaged in unremunerated domestic labor. This labor was no less an economic activity than that of men, and even if it was not measured in monetary terms, it had an implicit monetary value. If women did not provide uncompensated labor, someone else would have needed to, and that person would have been a servant or slave: the former of whom received a wage, in money or in kind, and the latter of whom had been purchased at a rate commensurate with predicted productivity. Women's economic activity was not always explicitly market activity, yet women in early capitalist societies encountered the market in various ways, such as cottage production, or through assisting, co-managing, or solely-managing a family business. This latter practice was common among Jews in Eastern Europe well into the nineteenth century.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish women increasingly worked outside the home as wage laborers or white-collar, salaried employees. Some became teachers and social workers, and a few became physicians. Their encounter with the modern economy still differed from that of men because of perceptions of women that justified lower wages, gender-segregated work, and patriarchal authority...