Martha MacDonald Economics and Feminism The Dismal Science ?

Feminists are actively engaged in many academic disciplines in attempts to create new knowledge relevant to feminist issues. Attempts have been made to work within the mainstream of some disciplines, whose self-defined scope seemed to include these issues naturally. For example, women have been a legitimate topic of study in sociology, anthropology and psychology. The problem being recognized by feminists in these disciplines is that the disciplines are dominated by a male concept of society, coined in the term "malestream thought." This results in a male "norm" and a female "other," and it affects methodology.' Thus, even though women have been studied, feminist research research from the point of view of women has not been possible. Most of the current emphasis of feminists in these disciplines is on restudying familiar issues from a methodologically distinct feminist perspective. In other disciplines, the study of women, or the study of a world in which women figure as prominently as men, is at a more primitive stage. History, for example, has only recently begun to recognize women. Women's history has become a fringe field within the discipline, while most fields of history remain essentially histories about men. Economics is at an even more primitive stage. Though economics claims as its domain the whole of production, distribution and consumption in society the whole use of resources (both