I suspect that few business historians will be surprised to learn that a woman who has been tagged “106 percent feminist” intends to deliver a presidential address titled WOMEN CHANGE EVERYTHING. The “Yeager Grumble” has acquired brand status. By now, it’s practically a litany: “What about women? Where are the women? Does nothing ever change?”Footnote 2
Yet the title “Women Change Everything” did not come naturally, even to this self-identified feminist.Footnote 3 For me, “inequalities” have been more an everyday life-puzzle than a life-long intellectual project. I was raised on two farms, one in the South Dakota badlands and another in Montana, where cattle outnumbered people and the buffalo still roamed.Footnote 4 Life lessons abounded. When my method of ditch irrigation flooded a ten-acre wheat field and my decision to sunbathe while driving tractor ripped out a fence line, I learned that issues of “equality” hardly mattered.Footnote 5
As a test of gender equality, this farm experiment was definitely rigged. It was tied to physique and brute strength, and was administered by my father, a free farmer patriarch who used the results to underscore what he considered to be women’s natural subordination to men. I dared not contradict. Evidence did not lie. A younger, bigger brother got the family farm, not through inheritance but by going into debt: His farm income provided yearly annuities to keep our parents afloat in old age.Footnote 6
Who could argue with such an outcome? In such a world, I was not fit to be a farmer. Early on I realized that no amount of bulking up or hulking up was likely to place me on an equal footing with Brother George.Footnote 7
I was fit for the life of a farmer’s wife, but it didn’t fit me. My mother filled that role as competently as Dad did his, with the requisite blend of feistiness and fealty: She defied him and deferred to him in unequal measure. As the youngest of five sisters and three brothers hailing from a cotton-farming family in Butler, Oklahoma, Mom knew the value of both sisterhood and homemaking. As a girl she dreamed of being a legal secretary and a honky-tonk piano player, but she kept those dreams to herself.Footnote 8
Married to my workaholic dad, she toiled alongside him, even as his ambitions stretched beyond the farm. A hailstorm demolished our South Dakota farm,Footnote 9 but before he started another he built the first drive-in theater in Conrad, Montana.Footnote 10 Mom enlisted sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, and all three of her children for the project, coordinating the “chicken sandwich brigade” to stock the theater’s concession stand. It was a thriving community enterprise that was suspended only once, when Montana winds blew the screen down, and was halted nearly a decade later after being bought out by better capitalized local rivals from Shelby, Montana, who also invested in Conrad’s indoor Orpheum theater.Footnote 11
My father’s unlikely job resume left me with mismatched roots in both farming and entertainment. I did not have to become a student of Al Chandler to learn that no two industries were alike. The movie and farm businesses were as different as the landscapes of Hollywood and Montana. Mother Nature dared farmers to dream. Moviemakers turned dreams into money. My own dreams ranged even further. I pictured myself an Olympic gold medalist; a solo concert clarinetist; a singer in an acid rock band; a news anchorwoman; and a translator for the United Nations. I even dreamed of marrying a movie star.
In farm country, I learned the differences between real men and “Economic Man,” that badly miscast character whom Frank Knight called “the frictionless machine of economic mechanics.”Footnote 12 My father was hardly frictionless. Farming didn’t allow for that. In the face of a crisis he would weigh available information, he would guess what others were going to do, he would decisively act, and he would pray.
I watched with the eyes of a farm girl, learning more than I ever realized. There was no competitive equilibrium on family farms.Footnote 13 Gender as performance trumped gender as an analytical tool. Tools were useless if they could not work the earth. Methods and theories were only as good as the assumptions on which they were built. I was no young Sylvia Thrupp, but I grasped instinctively the wisdom of her advice to historians years earlier: “Any medieval peasant who ever sold a cow could have told [you] as much or more about the forces of supply and demand as was to be learned from nineteenth century theory.” Theory was no match for farm work, and life was seldom fair.Footnote 14
Needless to say, I never dreamed in those days of becoming a business historian. Who among us did? But these life lessons in business did teach me that the business of “self-making” was going to be an ongoing project, neither easy nor automatic. In my teen years, the terms I used to evaluate and understand behavior were not fully formed. Inequalities of resources, asymmetries of sex, and patriarchal power were of little concern. That Big Montana Sky was an equalizing force. Everyone looked small under that vast dome. I sensed that I was capable of achieving almost anything that didn’t demand the physical strength of a gorilla.Footnote 15
But capabilities, as Amartya Sen has reminded us, are nothing without the resources needed to achieve them.Footnote 16 I played the clarinet well enough to be crowned Queen of the Canadian Legion Band Festival,Footnote 17 but I never played Carnegie Hall; I did a passable impersonation of Dean Martin at Montana Girls’ State, but no one ever mistook me for Janice Joplin.Footnote 18 I was the runner-up debater in a state forensics competition, but I came nowhere near to filling the big Montana shoes of native son Chet Huntley.Footnote 19 I mastered Latin well enough to ride in a chariot as Queen of the National Junior Classical League, but the UN translator’s job was beyond my reach.Footnote 20 Latin, I discovered, was not a spoken language.
Some dreams, of course, come true. I did marry a movie star.
Why, you might ask, am I talking so much about myself? This is, after all, a presidential address at an academic conference. There are perilous risks to a scholar’s reputation in promiscuously sharing her biographical details in this forum.Footnote 21 But as I set out to fashion tonight’s address, I found that biography—my own and that of several other women—aggressively pushed its way into my field of vision. By now, I have come to see biography as a framework for my remarks with the potential to illuminate my current thoughts on “Inequalities,” the grand theme of our conference, not to mention the happy winners and the hapless losers in business.
I gleaned one insight into the uses of biography when I did a quick review of past presidential addresses. Of the Association’s thirty-two male presidents, many chose to blithely weave personal details into their chosen topics. One historian whose topic was the faceless managers of managerial capitalism chose the surprising title, “A Personal Experience.” Another introduced a loveable Galambosian clan that later reappeared in his book The Creative Society. Another, with a poetical bent, offered up a Shakespearean sonnet on the subject of “Dad and the TVA.” Another entertained the crowd with a dramatization of “...Business History As Human Activity.” Yet another boldly applied his own unique personal touch: He delivered no address at all.Footnote 22
But beginning in the mid-1990s I noticed that things began to change. Priorities seemed to subtly shift. Presidential addresses took on a little more sobriety and gravitas. Autobiographical self-mockery went missing. Schedules were even altered to place the speeches before rather than after the traditional wine-soaked presidential banquet. I began to wonder: Was there a connection here? Did this gradual change in tone have anything to do with the growing number of women in our organization and in the office of president?
Certainly something was at work. Of the five women who have preceded me as president, nearly all downplayed their own life stories to sharpen their focus on how decision makers, owners, innovators, firms, and competitors act in history. Few references were heard on the large subject of gender. Indiana’s Irene Neu stood out ever so slightly: As the 1985 president, she dutifully tipped her hat to the struggles of the women’s movement before excavating the biographical details of the lives and fortunes of three businessmen.Footnote 23
Our reflexive disdain for the biographical may just be a function of our impatience with subjective back stories. “This is so, but does it matter?” we cry. “What if it weren’t? Would it make any difference?” Business historians have been distancing themselves from biography since the 1940s, when company biographies had become the field’s defining feature and weighty albatross. Two recent surveys of the state of the field fail to even mention biography or explore its methodological possibilities as critique.Footnote 24
Nor has such disdain of biography been limited to scholars of business. It remains undervalued across the social sciences. No less a figure than Sigmund Freud expressed his doubts about biography in a letter to Arnold Schweig in 1936: “To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies. … [B]iographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were to be had we could not use it.” Adam Phillips seconded the motion. To him, Freud’s unconscious forces made deterministic readings of cause and effect impossible. As he put it, “A biography, like a symptom, fixes a person in a story about themselves.”Footnote 25
But biography is not just about a person. Capitalism, like feminism, is generating its own biographies, which reveal a wide range of properties, traits, biases, and inequalities. Only three nights ago, at this very conference, Ariane Daguin told her own story, spinning off a hundred details of the complex workings of the competitive business of fine food purveying. As moral philosopher Mary Midgely proclaimed, “Understanding someone’s character, through seeing the patterns of motivation and emotional response in his or her life-story, is as vital to human survival as understanding how to make crops or fire—one cannot be substituted for the other. … What makes a clock tick is different than what makes a person tick.” Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, whose most recent intervention privileges the ideas of redistribution, recognition, and representation, shares with Midgely a desire to understand capitalism not only as an economic system, but also as a form of life.Footnote 26
Mary Wollstonecraft grappled with these issues two hundred years before. A late eighteenth-century literary iconoclast, Wollstonecraft was an avatar of early feminism. Writing in the 1790s, she unabashedly made herself “the hero of her own tale.” In her 1797 Letters from Sweden, she insisted, “A person has a right... to talk of himself” [emphasis added]. The use of that small, grammatically correct pronoun lays bare the difficulties Wollstonecraft faced when she wanted to talk about herself. As biographer Charlotte Gordon explained, “Mary knew only too well, women were not supposed to place their experience at the center of any narrative, fictional or otherwise.”Footnote 27 Virginia Woolf may have known, but she didn’t care. “For most of history,” she caustically declared, “Anonymous was a woman.”Footnote 28
I caught a mild dose of this Woolfian fever. Biography intruded as I struggled to relate women to inequalities, as they related to the intertwined histories of business and capitalism.Footnote 29 Inequality forced renewed consideration of what Margaret Atwood has so colorfully described as those “ancient balances,” which include notions of fairness, reciprocity, equivalences, and values. It is a topic that, in important ways, has defined the realities of most women’s lives throughout the world and across a range of institutions, including households, families, and business organizations. Donning a historian’s hat, Atwood reminds us that “after several thousand years of rigorous misogyny, during which gods replaced goddesses and women were subordinated and downgraded, the female justice figures persisted.” She poses a piquant question: “Why does Justice continue to wear a dress, at least in western tradition?”Footnote 30
Such questions haunted me in ways that I didn’t expect. Emotions challenged intellect. I could not resolve the historical tensions between such opposites as fairness and unfairness, equality and inequality, reciprocity and selfishness, and the presence and absence of opportunities and outcomes. I had a stake in this history, not only by virtue of my sex and gender, but also because of my status as a historian of business and of women. Serving as both historical subject and object forced me to explore what I most cared about. And what I most cared about were the moral and intellectual presumptions of economic life.Footnote 31
Big questions arose: How have economies and cultures interacted to frame our ideas of individuality, gender, sex, and race? Are business historians equipped to link humanistic conceptions and personal life to economic experience? How have they come to understand the claims that women have made about their roles in their personal and professional lives? How have they integrated the cultural and economic components of women’s new ambitions?Footnote 32
My small story suggests a larger purpose. I embrace biography as part of a collective and ongoing enterprise. It is an enterprise that salutes some of the women who have colored my thinking about inequalities, business, and capitalism. In so doing, I offer a perspective based on my own intellectual journey, tapping into two intersecting research streams. The first involves the literary biographies of women writers who have deepened my understanding of women’s rights and feminism.Footnote 33 The second touches on two female economists who have theorized about business, firms, or capitalism.Footnote 34
Among the literary figures, Mary Wollstonecraft changed how I thought about almost everything. She penned A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1791, twenty-eight days after Edmund Burke published Reflections on the French Revolution. Without divulging her identity, she critiqued Burke’s philosophical and moral stance. Critics applauded resoundingly. When she attached her female name to the second edition in 1792, however, many of the same critics did an about-face. They savaged a book that had previously won their acclaim, and bestowed upon Wollstonecraft a new identity: dangerous radical. Emboldened, she produced a sequel: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.Footnote 35
Wollstonecraft’s words about the “woman question” became a critical touchstone in the early battle for social justice. By connecting the condition of women to the distribution of wealth and power, she did for women what neither Karl Marx nor Thomas Piketty chose to do: She implicated capitalism and the men who had engineered it in the subjugation of women. She also tightened her talons around business. Alone with a young daughter, and disdainful of the institution of marriage, she hurled a critique against business and the pursuit of wealth. Her screed’s hidden agenda was to shame Gilbert Imlay, her businessman mate, to stop his philandering and return home. The attempt failed, but her passionate cri de coeur still resonates.Footnote 36
Wollstonecraft wanted to challenge the way of the world, to change everything that kept her from being what she wanted to be. She took on an ever-expanding set of obstacles—the state, religion, patriarchy, marriage, motherhood, and anyone who accepted the institutions that compromised and constrained individual freedom and free love. Her ideas about equality, feminism, and freedom were targeted at educated middle-class English men and women. The smart ones listened.
Wollstonecraft’s jibes at business were grounded as much in moral as economic considerations at a time when other (mostly male) thinkers were itching to understand a new kind of free–market-oriented industrializing capitalism. To Mary, business was important only to the extent that it affected the well-being of those she loved. She died soon after she gave birth to her daughter Mary Shelley, who, in turn, gave literary birth to the Frankenstein monster, a rampaging male marauder who stalked the land during the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 37
Wollstonecraft did not speak for all women. Nor did she succeed in changing everything. But she stirred radical conversations about sexual inequality and human rights and boldly pushed the discourse about women and equality into the public sphere. By giving birth as an unwed woman to a daughter whose own life had a revolutionary impact, Wollstonecraft ensured her own contested legacy. Two Marys, linked by biology, wrote an early chapter of a history created by women and for women. Between the lines, we can glimpse the future of business history—changing.
I arrived two centuries after those other two Marys, but even in my own era I came late to feminism. I was a business historian of manly industries such as meat packing and steel, whose mentor had privileged cost over sex differentials. As such, I felt I was Mary-come-lately to the feminist sisterhood. Early in my academic career, I did not understand feminist organizing strategies and theories and I wasn’t sure I should care. I published an article called “Will There Ever Be a Feminist Business History?” but I did not provide a definitive answer to my own question. The piece echoed questions that had been asked years earlier by female scholars in women’s history and the associated disciplines of sociology and economics. I used “feminist” as an identifier for what I hoped might become a new type of business history, written by women for both women and men—a business history of their own.Footnote 38
I figured, who better than feminists? Their gender claws had been sharpened by a world dominated by men, and by firms and businesses dominated, in turn, by the male sex. I regarded the opportunities for gender analysis as wide-ranging, covering both men and women in business, and encompassing a whole spectrum of races and ethnicities.
But this Yeager brand of business feminism was tepid by the social justice standards of seasoned feminists. Swedish writer Anita Goransson, surveying gendered property rights, pulled no punches: The firm was “a bourgeois front organization dominated and controlled by men to exclude women.” She asked a question that stopped me in my tracks: “Could it be that there exists a systematical relationship between gender and economic power—historically as well as today?”Footnote 39
Frozen in place, I had no answer. I had the inclination, but I needed to regroup. I was a business historian, not a feminist activist jumping on the barricades. But I had begun to listen to other women’s ideas about business and capitalism, and I’d begun to ask my own questions about the business interactions between women and men.Footnote 40
Feminists, I found, were hardly a cohesive bunch, either in terms of their own identities or the issues that they prioritized. The one thing they agreed on was women’s devaluation in cultures and economies. If earlier, first-wave feminists targeted capitalism and patriarchy as dual oppressors of women, second-wave successors moved toward questions of recognition. Women’s identities as women began to matter in new ways as multiculturalism took hold.
The analytical tools associated with the triad of gender, race, and ethnicity arrived late to business history, just as the field was in the throes of its own deconstruction project. Subdisciplines were sprouting up devoted to small businesses, specialty manufacturing, black enterprise, and ethnic minorities. For a brief revolutionary moment, business historians made an end run around the economy to engage “culture” in a scramble for the meaning of business. The Chandlerian paradigm was in disarray, leaving the detritus of economics in its wake and paving the way for the re-entry of business into society.Footnote 41
Concurrently, my life was undergoing its own deconstruction, albeit a joyful one. My waltz with feminism and capitalism coincided with the jubilant embrace of motherhood and a calamitous professional reckoning. Who had constructed these promotional ladders? And for whom? There was no pause in the tenure clock, no downtime, no maternity or paternity leave. A solicitous male colleague suggested that better planning might help. He himself had contrived that his wife should deliver their babies in the summer months, to minimize his teaching burdens.Footnote 42
Where was Mary Wollstonecraft when I needed her?
The two Marys, of course, did not formally belong to a card-carrying profession. Like other literary women of their era, they wrote to survive economically at a time when few other occupational alternatives were available to them. They associated with white middle-class writers, secured male publishers to disseminate their work, and achieved hard-won recognition of their claim to professional status.
By the twentieth century, it was a good deal easier to make such a claim. But challenges remained. As a young scholar navigating the two male-dominated sub-disciplines of business and economic history, I ran across the writings of a number of female professionals who demonstrated that when women theorize, things change.Footnote 43
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a self-taught, uncredentialed sociologist, writing around the turn of the century. Gilman fearlessly placed the root of women’s subordination at the intersection of sexuality and economics. She wanted to run with the big boys instead of staying home with husband and kids. In a piece called “Aunt Mary’s Pie Plant,” she offered a hopeful parable of a woman succeeding in small business. It was a trifle, but a pungent one. Far more ambitious was her Women and Economics, a weightier theorizing project that injected feminine values into the social and economic life of her day.Footnote 44
Miriam Beard, writing as a professional outsider and “amateur historian,” offered the first ever global history of the businessman, just as war clouds were gathering in the late 1930s. She threw a literary lifeline to this beleaguered male figure, not forgetting the women and wives who played critical roles in everyday capitalism. She listed as many businesspeople as she could find, portraying all of them as struggling mightily to steer American capitalism away from the forces of fascism and totalitarianism. Few professionals paid much attention.
A few decades later, in the stacks of the Harvard Business School, I met a woman who gave me the courage to be myself. Her work stirred me to write about business and educational institutions in a way that illuminated their rules, power, and unequal hierarchies. Her name was Henrietta Larson. Larson was a farm girl from Minnesota, a declared Republican, and the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books and articles. Most notably, she edited an authoritative three-volume history of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Newsweek christened her “The Iron Lady of the Harvard Business School.” The men at Standard Oil adored her. She adored them. Harvard tenured her twenty-eight years after she arrived and a year before she retired. This made her the first tenured female professor at Harvard Business School. It was 1962, the same year Harvard Business School admitted its first seven female MBA students.Footnote 45
Biography was essential to the rediscovery and the repositioning of each of these professionals in business history. Their histories and visions inspired me at critical junctures in my own professionalization process. But none were more inspiring than two economists who, as women and as professionals, kept my mind focused on the big picture of economic change and development.Footnote 46
Joan Robinson was born in Surrey, England, in 1903 to Sir Frederick and Helen Maurice, both Christian Socialists and independent thinkers from distinguished families. One of four daughters in a family of five children, Robinson grew up adhering to a stern lesson learned at home: Say and do what is right, no matter what the consequences. She earned a degree in economics at St. Paul’s and Girton, then moved on to Cambridge University in the mid-1920s. Once there, she joined a formidable cohort of male economists known as “the Cambridge circus,” committed to modernizing economics. She cut her economic teeth on intellectual debates with the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Piero Saffra, exploiting the privileges of their network while building a professional identity unlike that of any other woman in economics. Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes, in their innovative 2009 biography The Provocative Joan Robinson, place Joan in the same ring with these manly economists, boxing gloves on, testing her ideas against theirs within the confines of one of England’s most elite institutions of higher learning.Footnote 47 Along the way, she developed a dazzling writing style that leaped off the page. Listen to her vibrant literary voice as she tartly critiques the mainstream economic models of the 1930s:
Nothing much is usually said about the inhabitants of the model. The ancestry of Adam Smith is often claimed for it, but his world was inhabited by workers, employers, and gentlemen. Here there are only transactors or economic subjects … the people in this model are like the conventionally invisible propertymen of the Kabuki theater, and only the commodities have speaking parts.Footnote 48
As Joan’s biographers describe it, 1920s Cambridge “had a long and inglorious history of discrimination against women unique among British universities.” But, Joan, in their words, viewed economic theory as “an androgynous enterprise,” and “her work transcended differences of gender.” In that biased environment, she survived. She married Austin Robinson, a network man who provided her with financial security, and she concentrated on ideas.Footnote 49 Although she bore two daughters and played hostess to relatives and friends, her priorities were immutable. “I find intensive family life quite amusing,” she wrote, “but I can see it wouldn’t suit me for an occupation.” She kept on debating and writing, producing a string of publications and pulling herself up the promotional ladder. In 1931, she earned an appointment as an assistant lecturer and, after six more years, a lectureship. At least nine books and hundreds of reviews later, she finally won a full professorship in 1965.50
But despite her stunning achievements, Joan Robinson’s life and career were far from trouble-free and, for me, her struggles tell a cautionary tale. She was drained by combative intellectual jousting in an environment that advantaged men over women. She was unable to manage marital strains, complicated by an extramarital fling with another network economist. She was gravely alarmed by an impending arms race far beyond her powers to fix. Overwhelmed by such emotional strife, she succumbed three times to nervous collapse.
An academic disappointment was less harrowing but just as poignant. Professional gossip had led Joan to expect the Nobel Prize for her massively impressive set of publications. She was denied it. Year after year, laureates were named whose work she considered no more important than hers. She was stung by the slight but feigned not to care.
By most standards, the Joan Robinson biography is a tale of triumph—but her struggles resonate. One can rationalize power imbalance and inequality as the just products of merit, effort, or talent, but too often, something else is at work. I happen to agree with those scholars who believe that a profession that disadvantages women more than men is a profession in trouble and in need of change.
Let me end with one last anecdotal snippet from my own biography. This one involves a brief encounter with a second female economic giant. It took place in the early 1980s, when I attended one of the annual meetings of our organization at the Harvard Business School. A plenary session of that conference featured a panel whose topic was business historians who stood “On the Shoulders of Giants.” Perhaps not surprisingly, all the panelists and all their subjects were men. The mostly male audience listened intently.
Halfway through the proceedings, I had had enough. I could not contain the Yeager Grumble. I stood up and challenged the panel with a rapid fire volley of questions: “Have no women ever stood on male shoulders? Are there no female shoulders to stand on? What about female theorists of industrial organization? Imperfect competition? The growth of the firm? Come on, guys! What about female candidates for the Nobel Prize?”
The panelists fell silent for a moment. They looked at each other, peeved and perplexed. Finally, as if on cue, they flashed big smiles and spoke the only name that came to mind, and only after considerable thought: “Why, Joan Robinson, of course!”
Minutes later, as the panel wrapped up and the audience headed for the exits, I spotted a familiar figure who had attended the session seated next to my mentor, Al Chandler. It was Edith Penrose, the revered economist and theorist of the firm. She caught my eye, smiled, and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Honey,” she said, “do you think you will change anyone’s mind?”
Well, Edith, I’ve been trying ever since. Women don’t change everything. But given time, they change a lot.