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Victoria Bateman, "Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power" (Seal Press, 2025)
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to have back onto the podcast Dr. Victoria Bateman, to tell us about her latest book, published by headline in the UK and Seal Press in the US in 2025, titled A Global History of Women, wealth and Power, which does really what the title suggests ambitiously takes us to loads of different places and times, all the way up really till now, helping us understand stories of women that do involve women being wealthy and powerful and contributing to the economy in ways that are perhaps not the stories we most often hear. And yet it turns out if we go back into the historical sources, as Victoria's done in this instance, they're there in the sources waiting for those stories to be told. So Victoria, thank you so much for coming back onto the podcast to tell us about your latest work.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, thank you for having me back on the show. It's a pleasure to be talking with you, Miranda.
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New Books Network Host
Well, I'm very pleased to have you back. But for listeners who maybe haven't listened to your previous interview with us, could you reintroduce yourself a little bit and then tell us about this project? How did you come up with it? What questions were guiding this research?
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So, I'm Victoria Bateman. I am an economic historian, an author and a historical consultant.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I've spent 20 years now teaching economic history at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And what I've always really wanted to write is. Is a global economic history.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So one that takes us from the.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Stone Age all the way through to the present day, weaving together all of those different threads of history, journeying through.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
All of the major economic revolutions from the birth of farming onwards, and tracking.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
That repeated rise and decline of civilizations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And hopefully drawing parallels that can help us as we look towards the future today.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So I've always wanted to do a project like this, but looking at all of the existing books out there, you know, all of the existing global economic histories, one thing I noticed is that they tend to be written by men, for men, about men.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so there's in a sense, a kind of gap in the market that.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
I wanted to fill. And I think we see that in the fact that when you look at the type of people that get mentioned in economic histories, people like Genghis Khan.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And Hernan Cortez and Henry Ford and.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
JP Morgan, they're men.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And women, by contrast, are assumed to.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Have spent most of history as housewives.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And unsurprisingly, most readers of global economic histories, therefore, tend to be mentally.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Which leaves half of the population women underserved, and the rest of the population men, perhaps with an incomplete picture of the past, an incomplete picture of what drives the fortunes of nations. So, I mean, I really hope that what the book shows is that once.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
You add women and stir, your understanding.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Of the past really does change, change forever.
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New Books Network Host
Well, that is a fabulous goal for the book. Obviously, we are not going to be able to cover all of those times and places with the level of detail that the book does. But hopefully we can do a bit of a highlights tour of at least some of the main ways in which we can insert women back into this history. So I want to start kind of as far back as we can, or at least one of the places we can go quite far back on, which is the rise of settled agriculture, which is a key part of history. And economic history is sort of a story that is often told in a particular way. But you talk about some, maybe different or expanded reasons behind the rise of settled agriculture than the kind of main story that's usually taught yeah, yeah.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Say this question of why did we as human beings first settle down in one place? You know, that question is one that as academics we've been working on for a very long time and we're still trying to properly get to grips with.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Still trying to properly answer. And it actually turns out to be.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
One of the most difficult questions because the thing is that farming was actually a much harder life than, than foraging.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So living that kind of settled life.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Of being a farmer was an incredibly difficult back breaking life compared with living.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
A more nomadic life and foraging for.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
What you need to survive. So we see, for example, that the skeletal remains of foragers suggest that they were much better nourished than were our first farming ancestors, us. And that foragers seemed to have more time to spare. You know, foraging was part time work, whereas farming was hard and relentless. So to try and explain how people settled down, started to farm the land, we probably need to go beyond thinking purely about food because if it was all just about food, then, you know, more of us might still be foraging today. So in the book, what I argue is that we also need to think about manufacturing and tie that to how we first settled down and started to farm the land. And the first thing I would say there is that when we lived this more nomadic life, then belongings obviously had to be kept to a bare minimum because there was a limit to how much you could carry while, whilst you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Were constantly on the move, you know, and in the days before a wheelie bag, when you had baskets, for example, you could carry even less than you can, you know, when you're going to your conferences today.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So, you know, once you start to settle down in one place, that lifts a constraint on manufacturing. In other words, you can actually own more stuff.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So if you want to, you know, own stuff, stuff, then actually settling down in one place is a good start.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And certainly what archaeological evidence seems to suggest is that it was once we started settling down, once we stopped being nomadic, that at that point then our ancestors started collecting the seeds from wild cereals and then planting those seeds and then through that, growing our own food. And if women really were like today, the people most likely to be cleaning.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
The toilet areas, the toilet facilities in these settled communities, then they were, you know, probably the first to see that.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
The seeds that people left behind in their excrement, let's say that those seeds were naturally sprouting and starting to grow.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, you know, there is a reasonable chance that if women were there from the start of time cleaning the, the toilet facilities Then they might well have.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Been, you know, the innovators that saw the way in which when you plant these naturally growing seeds rather than just eat them, you know, if you plant them, then you can actually grow your own food in that way. So we'll, we'll never know for sure.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Who, you know, who sowed the first fields, but I think typically we assume.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
It'S men and, you know, perhaps we shouldn't be. And a further bit of evidence there is the fact that what we do know from skeletons found in burial sites from some of the earliest settlements is that women were the ones milling the grain. So transformation forming grain into something edible. So we know that we can see from the joint damage and the lesions on women's ankles, toes, knees and their lower backs from, you know, 10,000 year.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Old bodies in these earliest kind of.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Human settlements, we can see that women were actively involved in this process of, of milling grain. So women very much involved one. Societies did start to settle down in one place. Women very much involved, I would argue, in producing the food. But you know, farming wasn't just simply about producing food. It was also about producing something just as important, and that is cloth, clothing. So precisely around the time that we started to settle down in one place, the climate underwent a mighty shift. So you'd had the end of the Ice Age and that had brought warmer weather, and that led to the release of meltwater, glacial melt water. And the release of that glacial meltwater created a rather sudden and unexpected drop in temperatures. And that was a problem for us as a species because we'd long since lost our fur.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
You know, we didn't need our fur after the end of the Ice Age. So we were left scantily clad and.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Really rather quite cold and wet as well. And so we needed a way of protecting our bodies. But we had, you know, pushed to.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Extinction things like woolly mammoths and other sizeable beasts.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So basically we had to domesticate animals that could give us their fleeces and start growing crops that could give us things like flax or hemp or cotton.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that we could produce cloth.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So again, in terms of us, you know, settling down and farming the land, it's really, it wasn't just about food. It was very much about manufacturing and making cloth in particular.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So once we settled down, clothing really.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Did become big business. And one thing we know from, you know, whatever period of history that you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Look at and whatever society is, clothing.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Has always been women's business.
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New Books Network Host
Yeah, I mean, that's such a compelling kind of piece of the Story we don't usually hear about. If, though, I mean, that sounds like women are very much at the heart of these sorts of developments and kind of need to be. Why then do we end up with so many of these, if not most of these agricultural societies becoming patriarchal?
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Yeah. So I would say I would reduce this down to the three Ps, what I call the three Ps, the Plough pastoralism, and in particular, nomadic pastoralism and.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Property rights, and so some mixture of those three Ps. So starting with the plough.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Now, the plough, an amazing invention, raised productivity, meant that we could produce more.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Food on the, on the, you know, amount of land that we, that we had to farm.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
But it was a mixed blessing. So it also had a downside. And what we find is that in the earliest artistic depictions of the plough, and that includes, for example, in ancient Egyptian tombs, what we find is that men were almost consistently the ones in charge of ploughs. So the people in charge of plowing the land handling a plough required much more muscular strength than some of the older farming technologies, like using digging, sticks and hoes. So what happened was as society shifted over from the older farming technology to instead use ploughs, then farming becomes seen as more of a, of a male type area of work. Farming becomes seen as men's work, and women are increasingly pushed into the home.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So the plough were not such good news when it came to, you know, gender balance in farming. Now, fortunately, the plough wasn't suited to.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
All types of terrain. So there were some places where more traditional farming methods hung on.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Where women.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Continued to work and work the land and with it, maintain rights over the land. But then there was also much more inhospitable terrain, like in mountains, deserts, expensive arid grasslands, you know, like the grasslands that stretch from Eastern Europe to Mongolia, where herding instead grew in popularity. You know, herding sheep, goats, yaks, reindeer.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Cattle.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And, you know, where herding became the kind of agriculture of choice, then life remained pretty nomadic, largely because it was easier to take animals to water and to fodder than it was to keep your animals in one place and.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Keep bringing water and fodder to the animals. So you would kind of seasonally move your animals according to where the best supplies of water and fodder were.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So in the really inhospitable places, then this kind of nomadic life held on and increasingly focused on herding animals and, you know, for men who wanted to escape societies that were perhaps, you know, relatively equal and perhaps even matrilineal then herding, you know, developing your own herd and going off with your own herd offered a potential way out for you as a man.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
You could, you know, develop your herd.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Develop your kind of property, your financial independence in the form of your herd.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And off you go, you know, starting a life for yourself away from your mothers and your sisters and your grandmothers.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So this kind of nomadic pastoral life offered an opportunity for men, became very dominated by men. And whilst men were away with their herds, what they worried about was that their, their women, what they saw as their women that they left behind and potentially being impregnated by other men. And so what you found is that in these nomadic pastoral communities, all types of social practices developed through which men could, you know, control the women in their lives. Whether that was through things like, you know, genital cutting, veiling, and you know, still today in parts of the world where you have this history of nomadic pastoralism, you find women have far less freedom of movement. There are higher rates of male violence, there is, you know, greater adherence to quite strict and restrictive social norms. So where you get this nomadic pastoralism developing that, that tended to bring about a turn against women. And then the third p is property rights. And that really brings us of course, to, into the realm of that famous compatriot of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And you know, for Engels, private property.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Was at, really at the root of the first sex turn in history. So as far as Engels was concerned, foraging communities were like a primitive form of communism, one in which land was communally owned and where people, men and.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Women, could work cooperatively to achieve their common goals.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And Engels argued that that type of more egalitarian and more gender equal society therefore began to disappear in places where private property rights first emerged. And what you know, with prior. Well, what does property brings? It brings ownership. It involves communal land being fenced off, made inaccessible to people who are then deemed, you know, the outsiders, the people who don't own the land. And what you find is that this, you know, land and herds that are the other form of, you know, initial private property, land and herds is placed in, in men's names, so it becomes privately owned by men. So in the way that Marx saw private property as being at the root of wealth inequality, Friedrich Engels saw, saw private property as being at the root of gender inequality. And in particular, if we then kind of build this in with that story of ploughing, so if men are increasingly the ones ploughing the land, then perhaps it makes sense for land to be.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Put in men's names. And if men are the ones looking after the herds, then herds get put in men's names. And so it's men, not women, that.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Perhaps are granted the first property rights in history. So, you know, whether it is the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Plough or pastoralism or property rights more generally, what we do see is this.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Uptick in patriarchy developing quite early on in, in, in farming communities. And it's visible more than anything else in one quite shocking fact that I talk about in the book, and that is that between about 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, the genetic diversity of human males collapsed across large parts of the world. In the Middle east, in Africa, in Asia and Europe, male genetic diversity collapsed to the point that the male population had only 1/17 of the genetic diversity.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of the female population.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And what that seems to indicate to me, you know, why is it that so many Y chromosomes were going extinct? It's because men were increasingly living in patrilineal communities, so with their own relatives, so in patrilineal groups, whereas women were more specific, spread out, you know, they were scattered, they were, you know, exchanged between communities.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
They were the second sex rather than the first sex. So exchange between communities.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And so what happens is as societies clash and empires develop, and so as you get, you know, communities being wiped out as people literally compete in the most fearsome way with one another, is you could get whole male lineages being wiped out in a way that didn't happen with women. Because we were the people being exchanged and traded. Yes.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So by about 5,000 years ago, clearly something had happened, whether it was the.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
Plough, whether it was pastoralism, whether it was property rights that pushed societies in this more patrilineal, this more patriarchal direction.
- [22:11]
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
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New Books Network Host
Yeah, no, it's definitely some very clear facts there, at least some very thought provoking ones. And of course, once we've got settled farming communities, these, then some of them start to kind of get together and we start to get early cities. So this is both sort of a story, as with most things of continuity and change from those farming communities. So what were the roles of women in these early cities?
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
So the earliest cities were actually relatively gender equal. So one of my favorites is Catalhoyuk, which is or was in present day Turkey and is one of a number.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of cities that can lay claim to being the first city in human history. It grew up at the foot of.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
A volcano 9,000 years ago. It housed family homes. And these homes were constructed from brick and clay. You entered these homes actually via a.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Ladder up to the roof. So you entered the home via the roof. And in some ways, the rooftops of.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
The homes therefore functioned as the street level and as the public meeting places. Each home had its own hearth, some had their own shrines, and they were decorated with paintings of hunting scenes and.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Also paintings of goddesses, female hunters, for example.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
The inhabitants of Catalhoyuk, they herded livestock, they farmed with hoes. So the kind of more traditional farming technologies, rather than the plough, they drank.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Alcohol, they wore jewelry, they had mirrors. You know, they could see themselves in mirrors.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
As I say, it was a relatively equal society. And actually not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of wealth. So we can see that in the fact that women seem to be as well nourished as men were. So we can see that, you know, in the evidence left over from the skeletal remains that women were as well nourished as men. They seem to have worked outdoors as well as indoors. And in terms of the things that they were buried with, they seem to have been sent into the afterlife with a similar number of grave goods as their men folk. So this was a city in which women and men seem to have been pretty equal. But over time, what happens is bigger governmental structures develop, societies start to develop over Bigger territories over greater geographic scales. So you see the rise of the ancient Egyptians of the pyramid's fame. You see the rise of Mesopotamia, of course, the Indus River Valley civilization, China and Peru. So those were the kind of five hotspots, you know, 5,000 years ago, those were the five economic hotspots that had really developed, you know, since the days of Catalhoyuk. And, you know, between those five different early civilizations, there was a much greater degree of variety in terms of both wealth inequality and gender inequality. So you're seeing that uptick in terms of perhaps more patriarchal societies starting to develop, but at the same time you're seeing that it wasn't inevitable.
- [27:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Some parts of the world remained gender.
- [27:25]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Equal and even matriarchal.
- [27:28]
New Books Network Host
Yeah, it's definitely interesting to see the kind of differences across space at this very, very early time. And in fact, that is what I'd like you to tell us a bit about in the next question, even though we're going to fast forward through time.
- [27:42]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Fast forward, yeah.
- [27:44]
New Books Network Host
And I am going to ask you to compress a whole bunch of different space as well. So two things really, but I'm sure our listeners will go with us for it, knowing that the book has way more detail for anyone interested. But if we move to the ancient Silk Road trade, which of course, as we know, connected communities all the way from China to Rome and kind of everywhere in between in all sorts of different ways, this is a story that we're familiar with in many senses and kind of know certain parts better than others. But the focus is often on the objects, often on certain communities, often on the travelers, not so much on the women who were involved, but as you document in the book, they were involved in all sorts of different ways. So can you give us a sense of their contributions?
- [28:29]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Yeah. So when we think about the Silk Road, as you say, we tend to think of the mail merchants that were.
- [28:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Travelling hundreds of miles from east to.
- [28:37]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
West, but the currency of their trade was silk. Silk produced by women. Now, silk was an ideal currency for long distance trade because, well, first thing, it was lightweight, secondly, it was non perishable. So even moths don't want to eat silk. And of course, we all nowadays have.
- [29:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Problems with moths in our wardrobes eating through our favourite woolly jumpers.
- [29:06]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
But even moths don't seem to like silk. So silk is non perishable. It can even survive the moth. And also, silk is pretty easy to judge in terms of quality. You know, you can feel and you can look at it to judge its quality, quality so silk was an ideal currency of trade. So when you think of everything that was being traded on the Silk Road, you know, from horses to enslaved people, silk was the currency of exchange that was being used, you know, instead of, you know, silver or gold or something like that. And women were the people behind the scenes, the invisible labor that were breeding the silk was worms and weaving the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Silk, so keeping, you know, greasing the wheels of that silk road trade.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
And, you know, this is a theme that's of course, repeated throughout history. The cloth that is made by women being used as the currency of trade. You know, not just in the Silk Road, but, for example, in the Bronze Age, women were making the clothes that was used to buy tin so that in turn, bronze could be produced. And then more generally, if we think about long distance trade, if we think about, you know, going back to the Silk Road and in particular the connections between China and, say, the Romans, then what you find at the other end of the trade, you know, the Roman end of the trade, is women who are actively involved in long distance trade. Women who own ships that are plying.
- [30:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The Mediterranean, women that own the shops.
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Dr. Victoria Bateman
In which the silk is, is being.
- [30:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sold and brought to, you know, the new markets in, in Europe. So, yes, once you start to look.
- [31:01]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Again, women are everywhere.
- [31:04]
New Books Network Host
Yeah, doing all sorts of things, focusing on the silk production side of things and on the China side of the Silk Road. Can we stay in that sort of region for a bit to talk about China's golden age? Known for all sorts of things. I mean, intricate objects, high culture, loads of things going on there. How big a part were women of this? And was that seen as kind of one of the reasons it was a golden age?
- [31:31]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Yeah. So China witnessed a golden age between, well, roughly the 11th and the 13th centuries of the Song dynasty, one of.
- [31:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
My favorite Chinese dynasties. And at that time, really, China becomes.
- [31:45]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
The richest part of the world. It was a time when the old elites had gone, you know, the, the slate had been wiped clean by the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Previous fights that preceded the Song dynasty. The economy was being liberalized.
- [32:02]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
It was becoming increasingly commercial. The government administration was becoming more meritocratic. So there was the civil service exam that was being rolled out in terms of land. Personal bondage gave way to contractual tenancy. This was also the time that paper money developed.
- [32:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Chinese economy was becoming more urbanized. So reaching the point that one in.
- [32:28]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Eight people lived in towns and cities.
- [32:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Amazing, considering how long ago this was.
- [32:33]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Was printing was taking off. So this was a real kind of period of economic miracle for China.
- [32:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And typically, of course, when we think.
- [32:45]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
About this, we don't necessarily think about the women, but women were really there at the heart of this economic miracle.
- [32:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Not just continuing to breed the silkworms and weave the cloth that was so important for long distance trade, but they.
- [33:01]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Were also increasingly working in fields, you know, trading everyday wares, fermenting alcohol, working in tea houses, selling medicine, working as matchmakers, shamans, midwives, wet nurses.
- [33:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You know, women were doing everything.
- [33:19]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
So as business were booming, as business was booming in the economy, that was creating more and more opportunities for women in all kinds of, of different parts of the economy. But I think what's really interesting, and it's a parallel that again, I try to draw throughout the long span of history, is wherever you see this happen, booming economy and lots of opportunities for women, you also see a backlash. And so what you see developing during this golden age is increasing anxieties and about women's involvement in the economy. The fact that economic growth is creating new opportunities for women means that women, not just as daughters, but as daughters.
- [34:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In law, are challenging, you know, existing family structures. They're challenging Confucian ideals.
- [34:15]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
You know, they're bringing bigger dowries into.
- [34:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Marriage, and that's disrupting the power of their parents in laws, for example, they're.
- [34:23]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Using those towries to invest and build their own businesses and so on. And so, you know, there are lots of men in the economy that don't particularly like that. So a battle of the sexes begins to develop. And what happens as the Mongols then, you know, Mongols rampage across Eurasia and depose the Song dynasty, is that the Mongols really play to those anxieties. So of course, the Mongols are trying to curry favor with the Chinese population. And the way they do that is to fan the flames of dissatisfaction, fan those anxieties, and so offer a new social model that is a kind of return to Confucian ideals and that clamps down on women's property, women's rights, women's freedoms. So, for example, denying women the rights to their own dowries, denying women inheritance rights, denying women freedom to remarry if they're widowed, leaving widows as the property of their parents in law. So, you know, it's a really sad fact that as I say, we see repeated throughout history that wherever you see, see these golden ages, these economic booms that are working to women's benefit, you then get a backlash. And with that backlash, what happens is that families try to extract the value that women create, you know, leaving women working hard, so, for example, producing clothes but not themselves able to take the value of that cloth. And so as the Song dynasty, as that golden age starts to peter out and the Mongol, the Yuan dynasty, really takes over, the practice of foot binding, for example, spreads across China. And foot binding becomes a means through which families are able to effectively chain their daughters to. To the spinning wheel and change that.
- [36:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Chain their daughters in law to the spinning wheel.
- [36:42]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And so limiting women's freedom of movement, limiting the ability of women to take charge of their lives and to be financially independent so that families, the patriarchy, can extract the value that women create. So quite tragic, really. Yeah.
- [37:02]
New Books Network Host
And we're going to come back to this idea of prosperity and backlash and the sort of cyclical nature of them. But before we do, there's kind of two other points, particularly in the historical chronology that you cover, that I want to make sure we discuss. The first is the Black Death, which is again, a story that we're used to telling in terms of really bad immediately. But if you were a peasant, maybe there was a silver lining. If you survived because now you had more labour rights. Is that a story we can extend to thinking about women and opportunity?
- [37:37]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the silver lining comes in two forms. So firstly, obviously, with about a third to a half of your population having.
- [37:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Died off in Europe at the time.
- [37:51]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Of the Black Death, there were real shortages of workers.
- [37:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so employers, you know, whether they were landowners or workshops, had to turn to women to do the work that was perhaps previously being done by men. So shortage of workers, that means opportunities perhaps for some women that there might.
- [38:13]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Not have been beforehand. And then the second silver lining comes in the form of the fact that if you survived the Black Death, you were in the money. So incomes rise on the back of the labour shortages. And so in terms of ordinary people, you're earning more. That means that you could afford more luxuries in life. So, for example, you could afford to eat more meat and you could afford to drink more ale.
- [38:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that really pushes forward things like.
- [38:45]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
The dairy sector and the brewing sector.
- [38:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So dairymaids and brewers experience a real.
- [38:55]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Boom at this point time.
- [38:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And women become the stereotypical dairy maids.
- [39:00]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And also women are. They're there quenching the thirst of pub goers. So, you know, I mean, unsurprisingly, if you survive the Black Death and you're feeling a little bit richer than perhaps your ancestors were, you, you want to treat yourself to some good nights out. And women are there servicing the needs of these, of these medieval pub goers. By the early 15th century, for example, in London, brewers had formed their own guild and close to 40% of the members of London's brewers Guild were women. So the fact that ordinary people had more money in their pockets was feeding through to brewing boost sectors that were creating lots of jobs for women more generally. Then, as you have women out there working in the economy, becoming more financially independent, they're able to take charge of their lives, they're able to stand up to patriarchal fathers who are perhaps wanting.
- [40:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
To marry them off at a young age. They're able to go out, get a.
- [40:13]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Job and take charge of the marriage decision, decide for themselves whether when and who to marry. So what we see is that really in the centuries that follow the Black Death, that the average woman in Europe is waiting to marry, she's waiting to marry until her mid-20s and she's taking charge of that marriage decision. And the result is that we have these more, smaller, more nuclear families. So you've got people with higher wages, with smaller families. It means that they can better afford to save, that helps the economy. It means that they can better afford to pay for their children to be educated or pay for an apprenticeship because they're higher income, these families, and they've got fewer members, they're smaller. And as families themselves become more gender equal, then that actually acts as a challenge to the more patriarchal political institutions in general. Because if women are earning their own money from a young age and so they're used to having their voices heard, then they don't want to be told to shut up, they want to speak up. They're demanding of more democratic institutions, institutions in which they are, in which people are able to have their voices heard. So you know, this feed, this disruption.
- [41:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of the gender hierarchy also feeds through.
- [41:43]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
To disrupt, I would say, political hierarchies too. And all of that helps to sow the seeds of, of economic growth, ultimately sow the seeds of the industrial revolution. The fact that you have a higher saving economy, the fact that you have better political institutions, the fact that you have a more skilled economy is really setting the seen for what would be the rise of the rise of industry.
- [42:10]
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- [42:32]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
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- [42:36]
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- [43:35]
New Books Network Host
Well, and setting the scene for my next question, which is very convenient. So that helps us understand the role of women in the economy up to the Industrial Revolution. What about their role during the Industrial Revolution? And how, how might this change the story that we usually tell of this period?
- [43:52]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
The Industrial Revolution is typically seen as.
- [43:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Probably the greatest event in economic history.
- [43:59]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And you know, as we've just seen.
- [44:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It'S one for which I would certainly.
- [44:03]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Argue that women were planting many a.
- [44:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Seed to help, to help, you know, bring it on.
- [44:09]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
But ironically, it was. The Industrial Revolution was also a time when women's opportunities in the economy were starting to narrow. So women's work was increasingly concentrated in two sectors, in just two sectors. So cloth making. So in terms of, you know, the cotton factories of Manchester and then the.
- [44:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
US's equivalent around Boston in New England.
- [44:36]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Very female dominated the cotton factories. So lots of women working there and then second to that, lots of, of women working in domestic service. So women's work is increasingly concentrated in these two sectors, important sectors of the economy, but obviously not the only sectors of the economy men come to dominate what might be seen as heavy industry. Now, the excuse has always been that women are concentrated in just, you know, cloth and domestic service because they don't have the muscle power for, for the.
- [45:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Heavy industry that's developing at this time. But what I would say is then.
- [45:21]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
How do we explain the fact that in the lucrative professions, so not just in heavy industry, but in the lucrative professions are things like medicine and law, you know, that really don't, don't rely on muscle power. Men are also dominating and monopolizing those sectors too. So if I give you a statistic, at the peak of Britain's Industrial revolution, there were 18,482 doctors, surgeons and chemists in Britain and not a single one was female.
- [45:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And then similarly, there were more than.
- [46:02]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
16,000 barristers, advocates and attorneys in Britain. Not a single one was female.
- [46:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And then, you know, looking over the other side of the Atlantic, in New.
- [46:14]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
England, in the census of 1885, that categorized people into 17,000 different occupations, but women could only be found in a third of those. So what's happening at the time of the Industrial Revolution is women are still there working hard, but they're being increasingly concentrated in just a few sectors of the economy, primarily cloth and domestic service, and being denied the richer pickings, you.
- [46:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Know, the more lucrative sectors, where you find that men are increasingly dominant.
- [46:55]
New Books Network Host
And this is a pattern, right? This is now when we can start to do some more comparison than we've been doing already, because those are some sectors that really make the picture clear. But even if we add in some of the earlier ones you mentioned, I mean, for example, making Alexis, that was very much, as you've told us, women's work. And yet, as we move towards more recent, talking about liquor, beer, those are things that in the last hundred years or so have been thought of as men's work. So clearly something has changed, even though we're still drinking beer. So under what circumstances, given that you've gone across so much space and time, do you see similarities in what sorts of factors enable women to not just work hard, but work hard in fields that their society sees as being highly respected and especially lucrative versus ones where you're working really hard, but maybe not getting that kind of recognition or financial benefit.
- [47:50]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Here's the problem that as societies and economies mature, what tends to happen is that women's ability to enter things like educational institutions and workplaces has been restricted, sadly, by men. And that can work either through guilds and professional associations, so collectives of men that try to set down the law and perhaps determine, you know, set standards and set training requirements and determine who can and cannot practice a particular profession, but then also trade unions as well. So trade unions during the 19th century.
- [48:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Were doing terrible things in terms of, you know, women's employment. So trade unions, you know, in things.
- [48:44]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Like hat making areas such as hat making and printing and spinning, trade unions were really putting pressure on employers to stop employing women. Now why were they doing this? Precisely because women are worthy competitors for men.
- [49:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so, you know, it helps men.
- [49:08]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
To lock women out of the jobs that they'd otherwise be competing with women for so that they can keep the most, you know, lucrative roles, the most lucrative jobs for themselves. You see that in areas such as med school. You see it in law. So, you know, medicine, for example, I mean, going back through history, I think the earliest recorded female physician was petershett, who lived 5,000 years ago. We even know her name. But what happened over time was medical associations, medical schools develop, and women were pushed out of the medical profession to the point that, you know, in ancient Greece, Hippocrates school of medicine barred women. And even as recently as the 19th century, most medical schools across the world were still male only. And, you know, similarly in law, to practice law, you had to be a man. So women were barred from practicing law in Britain until the Sex Disqualification removal Act of 1819. And then in terms of being in the civil service until 1946, female civil servants had to resign, had to give up their jobs if they wanted to marry. And actually in the Foreign Office, that continued until 1973. So, you know, in terms of the more lucrative professional, more middle class jobs, then men have conspired to lock women out of those jobs through things like marriage bars or restrictions on women's ability to enter into training. But then also, as I say, in more working class jobs as well, the trade unions have done precisely the equivalent, putting pressure on employers with the threat of strike action to not employ women. And, you know, what's interesting is how, you know, what is ultimately male greed. This is about men conspiring to lock women out of the workplace. You know, rather than admitting that this is about greed, what you find is a rhetoric developing in which men present themselves as being altruistic, you know, as women shouldn't be in the workplace because the workplace is exploitative and it's not fair on women having to, you know, having to suffer that, you know, the, the trials and tribulations of being in the workplace. So women, leave it to us.
- [51:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Let us look after you. You stay in the home, you look after the children, let us, you know, earn the money. You focus on your much more important job, the children.
- [52:09]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And so, you know, we're, we're sold snake oil time and time again. And this rhetoric develops that, you know, women should be in the home to, to protect children from neglect, to look after their husbands, that we can depend on men to earn the money. And sadly, the only way that you.
- [52:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can be truly independent in life is.
- [52:32]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
To have, you know, cash in your own, in your own pocket.
- [52:37]
New Books Network Host
And that's really Quite consistent when we look at all of these histories and stories across time. So thank you for taking us on a tour or a very, very fast tour of it. But obviously the book has more details. But before I release listeners to go read it, is there any particular story or woman that we haven't mentioned yet that you want to make sure we include from the book?
- [53:02]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Yes. So Priscilla Wakefield and Maggie Lena Walker. So these are two female bankers, they're the equivalents of the JP Morgans.
- [53:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So Priscilla Wakefield in 1798 set up.
- [53:13]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
The first English bank for women and children, extending banking to women and children. And then Maggie Lena Walker, who in the US opened up banking to ordinary Americans and in particular the underserved black population with her St. Luke penny savings Bank. She was the first woman to charter.
- [53:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
A bank in the us.
- [53:38]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
So the female equivalents of JP Morgan. You know, for every Henry Ford or.
- [53:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
JP Morgan, there are female equivalents out.
- [53:45]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
There that we could equally be talking about.
- [53:50]
New Books Network Host
That's a great way, I think, to end our conversation. But before I let you go, is there anything about upcoming worker projects that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of now that this book is off your desk?
- [54:02]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
So I think for the moment I'm going to keep banging the drum for.
- [54:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The women of Economica.
- [54:08]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And that's in part because earlier this year I was watching the news and I saw a clip of a commentator claiming that there's never been a successful business woman in history and that modern day prosperity was built pretty much entirely on the historic efforts of men. And the really sad thing was not that he made these claims, but that no one in the studio could challenge him on these claims because no one could actually name a female entrepreneur or.
- [54:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Banker or merchant from the past.
- [54:48]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
And so, you know, I think it's more important than ever that we show that the economy has never been just for men. And particularly at a time when the idea that a woman's natural place is in the home is becoming increasingly politicised and repopularised. You know, with the trad wife trend.
- [55:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That everyone's talking about, you know, I.
- [55:19]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
Think there is, there's still a kind of belief in popular culture that women only entered the economy in the 20th century. And I think a lot of people would say in large part because of the wars, when, you know, they started to do men's work. And if you believe that women only entered the workforce in the 20th century, then in a sense you believe that we women's involvement in the economy could just be a flash in the pan, you know, just a passing fad, one that, you know, will revert to norm, will revert back to the practice of women being these supposed housewives, you know.
- [55:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Women'S natural place, being in the home.
- [56:02]
Dr. Victoria Bateman
So I think if we want to really confront that, if we really want to stand up to this, you know, sadly growing idea that a woman's natural place is in the home, we really need to show that, no, a woman's natural place has always been at the heart of the economy.
- [56:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So until everyone can name at least five women from economic history, you know, five female equivalents of Henry Ford and JP Morgan, I'm going to keep banging the drum for the women of Economica.
- [56:39]
New Books Network Host
Well, the book, if anyone wants to start learning those now, a Global History of Women, wealth and Power, published by headline in the UK and Seal Press in the US in 2025, is available to be read to. Victoria, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about it.
- [56:56]
It's been a pleasure.