Nancy Folbre is an American consultant, educator and one of the pioneering economists who helped institutionalize the field of feminist economics within the discipline. She is a Professor of Economics Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Background
Nancy Folbre was born on the 19th of July, 1952 in San Antonio, Texas, United States. She grew up in a middle-class family in the Southwest. Her father took care of the personal and business affairs of a Texas oil dynasty. Her mother died after a long illness when Nancy was 18.
Education
Nancy Folbre studied at the University of Texas, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy 1971. Later in 1973, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Latin American Studies from it. She also attended the University of Massachusetts, where she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Economics in 1979.
Career
Nancy Folbre began her career as an assistant professor of economics at Bowdoin College, where she served from 1980 to 1983. In 1980, she received the position of a staff economist at the Center for Popular Economics, where she served until 2013. In 1981, she was a consultant for the Maine Commission for Women. In the same year, she was a consultant of the Kenya Fuelwood Project for Beijer Institute at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (RSAS).
In 1983, Folbre became a consultant of the Zimbabwe Energy Planning Project for the Beijer Institute at RSAS. In the same year, she joined New School for Social Research, where she took the post of an assistant professor of economics and worked there until 1985. In 1989-90, she was a consultant for the International Center for Research on Women and the Population Council on the Project on Female Headship in the Developing Countries. From 1989-94, she was a consultant for the Population Council.
In 1984, Nancy joined the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she was an associate professor of economics until 1991. In 1991, she was promoted to a professor of economics. From 2013, she is Professor Emerita there. She also was its chair of the Department of Economics from 2003 to 2004.
From 1989 to 1990, Folbre was a consultant for the International Center for Research on Women and Population Council. In 1991, she was a visiting associate professor at American University. In the same year, she also worked as a visiting lecturer for Eugene Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992, she received the post of a visiting scholar for Women's Research and Resource Center at the University of California in Davis, and was a consultant for the International Labour Office.
Nancy Folbre also worked as a consultant for World Bank in 1994-95. In 1995, she was a visiting scholar for the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. From 1995 to 1996, she took the post of visiting chair in American studies at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. In 1997, she was co-chair for Research Network on Families and the Economy at MacArthur Foundation. In 1998, she co-founded the Dancing Monkey Project, serving also as its chief executive officer.
In 2000, Nancy Folbre accepted the position of a consultant at the Historical Statistics of the United States. From 2003 to 2009, she took the post of an adjunct professor of Social and Political Theory Program for the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2005 and 2010, she was a consultant for the United Nations Human Development Office. She also worked as a coordinator at Russell Sage Foundation Working Group on Care Work from 2009 to 2011.
During her career, Nancy Folbre wrote extensively. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the editor of Women’s Work in the World Economy that was written in 1991. In 1994, she wrote Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint. With Randy Albelda and the Center for Popular Economics, she produced The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual in 1996. Her book, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values came out in 2001. Her most recent book, For Love Or Money, was written in 2012. She is also a contributor of professional articles to periodicals and books.
Views
Nancy Folbre doesn’t see sexuality as a prime vehicle but as one aspect of a larger set of conflicts over the distribution of the costs of caring for dependents. Traditional Marxian theory focuses on the conflict over the distribution of the surplus, defining surplus in relatively narrow terms in the simplest, but most telling model, as the pile of the corn leftover after the harvest has been divided up into the pile necessary to feed the workers and to serve as seed corn for the next year.
In her view, care for children, the sick, disabled, and elderly represents another, equally important use of surplus and patriarchal systems force women to overspecialize in caregiving, thus lowering the cost of what men have to pay for it. Control over women’s sexuality is part of this process indeed, one can think of sex as one of the most important forms of care that adults provide one another. She believes that patriarchal systems effectively displaced more egalitarian social systems in effect because they contributed to increased population growth, technical innovation, and intensified competition among men.
The conventional view is that feminism is a set of concerns about gender inequality, and that feminism is an effort to give women the same rights as men. This is so simplistic and unsatisfactory. Feminism is a much bigger theory, offering major contributions to the way we understand all dimensions of historical change. And it’s not just about rights – it’s also about obligations.
Here are three related claims that emerge from her feminist political economy. First, women have a collective identity and some collective interests based on gender. These are not necessarily any more important than other forms of collective identity and interests (based, for instance, on class, on race/ethnicity, on citizenship). They may come into play in different ways in different historical conjunctures. But interests and identities based on gender are particularly important to the organization of social reproduction and care for dependents.
Second, people have inherited a set of cultural norms that emphasize the desirability of female altruism toward dependents, and are far more tolerant of the pursuit of individual self-interest by men than by women. These norms are now being contested, but the outcome of the contest is unclear – will women become more like men, less encumbered by responsibilities for dependents, or will men become more like women, willing to subordinate their own interests to care for dependents? Or will we simply see greater variation in levels of commitment to dependents, less determined by gender roles?
Third, we cannot understand the economic organization of social reproduction, or distributional conflict over the distribution of the costs of care, without closer attention to unpaid work that takes place outside of the marketplace. Time-use studies show that even in the most advanced capitalist countries about half of all work time, on average, is devoted to activities like housework, child care, studying, and volunteering. Yet most economists continue to measure economic well-being primarily in terms of market income.
Quotations:
"I think Feminist Economics is a part of the whole heterodox challenge to the mainstream economics, and I fell good about that".
"Work can be very productive and create value for society even if it’s unpaid".
"Leading happy and worthwhile lives is kinda the point of the whole economic enterprise and sometimes we lose sight of that. And there’s certainly a lot of evidence that what makes people happy is good human relationships, having close ties with family and friends and community. If we appreciated that a little bit more fully, we could organize our economic system a lot more successfully".
"Definitions of femininity and masculinity are changing in a positive way".
"We need to change the way we think about work and about value".
Membership
Nancy Folbre is a past president of the International Association for Feminist Economics.