Did Women's Freedom Build the Modern Economy? | IEA Podcast
About this episode
The episode discusses the historical economic role of women and its impact on civilization and economic prosperity.
In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Dr Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. Bateman has taught economics at both Cambridge and Oxford, and her earlier books include The Sex Factor and Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe. The conversation traces the economic role of women from the Palaeolithic to the present day, and sets out Bateman’s central argument: that across history, the most successful civilisations have been those where women were freest to take part in the economy, and that civilisational collapses have tended to follow a rolling back of women’s rights. Bateman explains how economic historians find evidence of women’s work before written records, drawing on burials and human remains, and points to the finding that around 40% of big game hunters in the Stone Age Americas were women. The discussion moves through the five economic hotspots of the Bronze Age, the contrast between ancient Athens and Rome, and the case of Hortensia, the Roman woman who challenged a tax levied on women without political representation. Bateman argues that…
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