However we choose to look at woman and economics, it is noteworthy that Woolf, like other feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, believed that feminism must be grounded in economic independence. That feminism has historically been intimately concerned with economic independence for women makes it all the more curious that economics has been one of the last social sciences to develop a feminist voice. In practice, economics has been, as Paul Samuelson so aptly put it, “the study of how men [sic] and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society” More correctly, economics has been the study of how men study how men and society choose to employ scarce resources to produce commodities and distribute them for consumption.
