Customer Reviews

If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics

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I see many pleas among the reviews of this book for a reprint. This book was originally published in New Zealand under the title "Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth". When the book was published in North America this title was deemed too controversial and was changed to "If Women Counted". Time has passed, but the book is still available under its original title. I heard Marilyn Waring speak last night. She's an amazing woman and is doing incredible work researching and promoting the New Feminist Economics.

For those of you who are interested, Marilyn Waring's thoughts on politics, environment etc. are available on video. I have a series on three video cassettes, available from the Canadian National Film Board. The NFB can be found on the internet, if you want to know more... Perhaps it is available in the States. It is a good introductory series for schools, businesses...The video series consist of selected excerpts from the book. I am not sure how it compares to the book, but her wit, humor, eloquence are amply evident on film.

I was dismayed to see this book is out of print. I have colleagues acting as consultants in the development cooperation business to whom I wished to give a copy!!! This is a seminal book moving toward changing the way we count and value things in Western economies.

Marilyn Waring is a former member of parliament in NewZealand. She has an international point of view and a horror of the current pattern of resource management. The book is an important link between feminist and environmental thinking/ theorizing. It should be reprinted.

This book is one that I would consider core curriculum for feminists and enviromentalists. It is an economics book about the exclusion of women's work from the GDP and of natural resources from the balance of any country's assets and how this detrimentally affects world economics. It is extensive, well researched, important, thorough, and perceptive. A must read.

It's a pity to see this book lumbered with the "feminist" label, as the alternative economic analysis that's laid out doesn't merely pertain to the failure of classical economics to recognize women's unpaid work. At least half of the book concerns the need to account for environmental degradation in calculating the total wealth produced by a country - an idea that Redefining Progress borrowed from Marilyn in 1995, when they proposed replacing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as the official measurement.

As Marilyn outlines in her first chapter, she drew on her experience working for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in writing If Women Counted. She was shocked to learn that in many third world countries, women account for a major portion of the productive economy by providing the essentials of life (growing vegetable, making soap and candles, collecting firewood and water) that people in the first world typically purchase. Yet because no money changes hands, these activities are not formally counted as part of a nation's productive economy. Of course she also writes at length about the unpaid work first world woman do (child care, elder care, housework and food preparation).

To my knowledge she is also the first economist to point out the tragedy of counting the costs of war and environmental degradation as part of the productive economy (environmental degradation adds to the GDP because of the money spent to correct the damage) - because they actually lessen humanity's ability to supply our basic survival needs.

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE

Marilyn Waring's If Women Counted is one of those books that says all the things that you somehow 'know' are 'right'. The amount of time, effort and money she has obviously expended in researching the topic of economics-as-we-know-it lends a large dose of credibility to her analysis of the current system -and tends to make her theory of time use look like a good theory. But where is the critical analysis of Marilyn's work happening? It would appear that she would have an almost cult following and the devotees, as the name would suggest, seem to have accepted in total Marilyn's view of the world. I would like to hear from anyone who has tested, or is testing out her theories, or who sees that some of what she says has value and some could be flawed on the basis of XYZ???