 If we don't give to women the possibility to be in the labor spaces, then this is a loss for women, but also for the nation. So this is not only that we are discriminating part of the society, but this is also a loss on efficiency, because, you know, this was an important term in the progressive era, was rationality, scientific efficiency. So for Harry, it's also an argument if you want to have a better economy for the United States, you need to give more space for women. Women can help to improve the relationship in the work spaces. So I'm Rebecca Gomez with Encore, and I'm the University of Lyon, too, and I'm a researcher at Triangle. Charlotte Birkin-Gilmans was a U.S. woman, probably one of the first that wrote a book who put in the title Women and Economics, published in 1898. She's actually very well known as a novelist, as a humanist, educator, more than her words on economics. I became interested in Charlotte Birkin-Gilmans actually because of her biography, who is very interesting. She actually was very influential by her three aunts. One is a suffragist, one is a writer, another one is an educationalist. And she wrote a lot of books, and in all these books, the role of women was central. This is a period that historians would call the progressive era, and in this period, there is a big transformation on the place of women, kids, young people, also, of course, the race question. And she talked about this transformation to put and to give a more space for women in economics. She wrote a lot, and she's very well known in literature, in sociology, because she has mainly these two kind of works, literature, mainly autobiographical, as probably the best well-known is the Yellow Wall paper, in which she describes the postpartum depression. But she also has this trilogy, very important, probably the most known is Hairland, where she describes this utopian world. But she also has a lot of writings in sociology and economics, and what I try to do is to read these together, the utopian, the novels, the more psychologist books, and the economics book, and try to understand her thinking and to give her a place in the history of economics, and to do more hair stories of economics, to have more authors women in our history of economics. For me, the clearest idea that she introduced is that the necessary condition for women is to be independent, economically speaking. So women needs to go to the workplace, to the job market, to earn their life, to go outside of the home. So she really analyzed the behavior of families, women, men, kids inside of the home, and she explained the necessity for women to be independent, economically speaking. And she also related this with what we call a new ethics. She used the word moral ethics, a high-gen ethics, as many of the authors of the Progressive Era, and she said that we need to make a link between the economy of the home and the economy of the big companies and societies in the United States. So through these ethics, that actually is to pay attention to the common concern of all the members at the home and in the companies and different firms that you're going to work out. This is a research that I'm doing with some colleagues. One of them is Guillaume Vallet from the University of Grenoble. He already published a very nice article in the European Journal of the History of Economic Code on Charlotte Berking-Gildman, and we have other projects, for example, on prostitution and on race on Charlotte Berking-Gildman. But in our current research that we present in the American Economic Association at New Orleans, we focus on the notion of industrial ethics is how to be our behavior when we go and work in these big societies in the United States. So this is the period of the transformation and a big development in the United States. So how women and men and all the individuals, how they need to live, how they need to conduct it, how to be this moral and this, what we call the industrial ethics, to, you know, for the, she said for the good of the nation, for the good of the United States. But she exactly says that we really need to make a projection that what we have at home in the different companies where we're going to work. So we need to reproduce what we have at home, so our behavior with our family on our workplaces. I'm very interested in this progressive era in general, in this period, which generally speaking, we can say that started in the 80s, 80s, 80s, 19s, until the 1920s. And I used to work on a lot of men economists, as Irving Fischer, or as Edwin Walter Kemmer or Frank Tossick. But then I said I really, I need to enlarge these pictures and to do more hair stories and start to look at other characters that are absent in the history of economics. So I found Charlotte Berking-Gildmans. I found Jane Adams. She was born on the sociology and economic side of the academics, but then they were not economists. They were not professional economists. So, and this is, you know, Charlotte Berking-Gildmans was born in 8060. Then you have some years and then you have the first generation of women economists. And Hazel Kirk is one of the first economists. She studied at the University of Chicago. She wrote her dissertation with one institutionalist economist. And so she has another way to write, another sources, another style methodologies. Both are really interesting and both contributing to the history of economics. I think this is interesting to make the links and to try to make the connection from the very first generation of women who were interested in economics, but actually didn't study economics at the universities. And then this first generation of professional economists as Hazel Kirk. So she was one of the first hum economists in the United States. So this is a very important movement, a department inside some universities in the United States. They have their journal, their society. So Hazel Kirk, Jessica Peixoto and others are economists. The very, very first generation, they study chemistry, physics, another more technical careers. So Hazel Kirk is a very curious figure. She tried to make a place for women at the universities. So she fight a little bit with the economics department. So she found a refuge in the hum economics department. And four years later, she got a position as a professor of economics. So she was both professor of economics and hum economics. So this is very interesting in her story. It's very interesting to, you know, trying to complete the history of economics, trying to do this hair story of economics, because then you find key characters, key elements as Gilman, as Peixoto, as Kirk or Reed. Because Kirk, actually, she supervised nine PhD students at the University of Chicago. So she formed kind of a school of thought of women economists. So what I think for me now, until now for my research, is that I can keep some elements from Gilman, for example, the importance of this empowerment of women, the importance of this economic independence for women to have then social and political rights. And maybe for Kirk, the importance that she gave, for example, to the consumption, consumption economics, because until now, like all the 19th century, is a lot of saving and growth. And then she put a light on the consumption part of economics. And both of them gave importance to what happened inside of the home. So you know, there are some links between them, even if, you know, there are very different characters. One is a social reformer. Charlotte Perkin-Gilman have many relations with women, men, romantic relations. So there are these letters, personal journals, all the biographical aspects of her life are very, very important. And then you have Kirk, who is an economist, a professional economist. But then you can trace some links between the two, and this is fascinating. One aspect of Charlotte Perkin-Gilman ideas that I found very original is when she said that we need to connect the home with our behavior in the workplaces, is that she said women have this capacity, actually she said this natural capacity. So I criticized this a little bit because she said that this is genetical. But women has this capacity to, in the job market, in the labor spaces, to transform the relation thanks to this modern hood, this capacity to improve, to develop more solidarity, better relations among human beings. So what she said is women has this capacity to counterbalance the behavior of men that are in all the institutions, and she denounced this. She said universities are taken by men, most of the societies and the job market in general is taken by patriarchal system, and she used the term. So she denounced this and she said women have this capacity. And if we don't give to women the possibility to be in the labor spaces, then this is a loss for women, but also for the nation. So this is not only that we are discriminating part of the society, but this is also a loss on efficiency, because you know this was an important term in the progressive era, was rationality, scientific efficiency. So for her is also an argument that if you want to have a better economy for the United States, you need to give more space for women. Women can help to improve the relationship in the work spaces. The study of these two characters is very important to understand, for example, many debates that we have today between gender economics and feminist economics. We have these two soup fields of economics that are, I hope, very influential in the current debates and still very influential. And this is some scholars that are more focused on microeconomics or in the behavior inside the household, and you can do quantitative or qualitative methodologies. And then you have more macroeconomics debates, larger debates, certainly more political engaged in feminist economics. So I'm part of IAFI, International Association for Feminist Economics. So I'm historian of economics, but I'm also a feminist economics. So the study of these two characters allow me to present to my students at the University of Lyon the contribution of these women in the economic terms and in methodological terms, but also their fights as we can use also in feminist economics. When I discuss with my students at the University of Lyon, they always ask me to contextualize these contributions if this is only U.S. story or this happened in other part of the world. And it's true that the progressive era is a very American movement, but also in another institution that I'm part of and I'm currently the president of the Latin American Society for the History of Economic Thought, A Lape. We are also studying the same movement that happened at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century and still happened of the place of women in society, the place of women economists in academia and their contribution. So I hope that we can find another characters as Charlotte Perkin-Gildmans or Hazel Kirk in Latin America or in France or in other part of the world.