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  • Rethinking the History of Capitalism:Gender, Women, and Power in the Economy
  • Tracey Deutsch (bio)

It's a pleasure to engage with Riv-Ellen Prell's essay in this volume. I want to thank the editors for inviting me, and thank Dr. Prell for having written such a generative and important essay. I agree with much of what she says. I particularly want to flag the importance of gender's absence from so much contemporary historical scholarship on the economy. Overlooking women's presence is, of course, striking. But it is just as striking that scholarship overlooks the ways that men's gender and sexual normativity gave them access to capital. Prell's essay powerfully delineates the limits of much contemporary scholarship on the history of capitalism.

My analysis, however, also differs from Prell's on a few points, based on my experience as a US historian concerned with gender, capitalism, and consumption. (I am not an historian of American Jewish history, to be clear). I have a keen sense of the importance of the "new" history of capitalism and thus a somewhat more sympathetic view of the state of the field than Prell. In particular, I appreciate how historical work on capitalism has generated important conversations around race among US historians. This strikes me as evidence of these scholars' ability to think intersectionally and to embed capitalism in social hierarchies (albeit not gender). I am also aware of the extensive work that does talk about gender and capitalism. Finally, and relatedly, I would frame consumption as a more complicated endeavor than Prell does, and one that is even more important than she suggests. In fact, I believe that reframing consumption is key to addressing the exclusions of women, and the stunted view of capitalism, that Prell and many feminist scholars have identified. Provisioning and consuming reveal fuller pictures of Jewish history, women's history, and economies as a whole.

Prell's essay says aloud what many of us who engage with questions of gender and capitalism actually think: that new literature has elevated questions of capitalism while erasing feminist thought and gender as a category. Some of this, as Prell shows, is intentional. A few scholars have asserted quite directly that history went awry when scholars took seriously questions of culture and discourse—and those scholars then proceed to equate questions of gender and sexuality with arenas of culture and [End Page 531] with "soft" power. Others have simply sped past questions of gender, the presence of women, and whole systems of sexuality—treating these as of topical relevance but not of analytic importance.1

This inclination to privilege class, capital and men in economic history reaches far beyond Jewish history. Scholars of early and antebellum US history have also made this point, as Prell notes. Scholars who research more recent US history, as well as scholars from other disciplines, have long made similar observations.2 We are in a moment when economic history might seem to be a victim of its own success; having successfully defined capitalism and the economy as key objects in human affairs and worthy of study, it has also disconnected these from other objects and systems—particularly gender.

To be clear, work on the history of capitalism has made important contributions to US historiography. It is part of a broader academic engagement with "new materialist" thought, emphasized the importance of labor and productivity, and helped scholars confront the continuity of inequalities in American life. Work on finance has revealed the long [End Page 532] roots of instruments that structured, and continue to transform, the American economy. Most importantly, attention to capitalism has utterly recast the history of slavery. Since the publication of Walter Johnson's landmark study, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999), slavery has come to be understood as inseparable from American economic development, financial practices, and business history, and to have had a presence long after its legal abolishment. Rather than opposites, capitalism and slavery have been shown to be very compatible. It is difficult to imagine where contemporary US history would be without this key insight. We are all better for this work.

That said, in work...

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