WGSS 30.04 Women, Work, and Wealth
It is one of the most famous sentences in the English-language canon, a short-hand for the entire foundation of modern economics: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations, “but from their regard for their own interest.” But of course none of those men actually served the lifelong bachelor his dinner: his mother did, and whether she did so from benevolence, self-interest, or some less easily classified motivation, the field of political economy was defined by her exclusion from its questions and answers. This course interrogates the sexual and racial contracts at the heart of modern economic relations, and asks how returning mothers, wives, daughters, and servants to the history of capitalism alters our assumptions about economic man.