Bateman's Feminist Economics: A Challenge to Labour's Role in Women's Exclusion

Victoria Bateman wants to upend everything you think you know about women's economic history. The Cambridge economic historian has just published a tome arguing that trade unions and professional guilds, not capitalism, were the primary architects of women's workplace exclusion. Into this moment of sustained industrial action and Labour's employment rights bill arrives a feminist economic history that positions organised labour as the villain and market forces as the hero.

Bateman's central claim in 'Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power' rests on archival evidence from Victorian Britain. Male trade unionists, she argues, weaponised collective power to halve labour market competition by excluding women. The hatters of Stockport won their fight in 1808, bookbinders followed in 1810, and by 1820 cotton spinners in Glasgow and Manchester had secured similar victories.

This much is historically documented. What's contentious is the causal weight Bateman assigns to these exclusionary practices versus other forces shaping Victorian gender relations. Whether you find this persuasive or suspect may well depend on which economic ideology you already subscribe to.

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When guilds became gatekeepers

The pattern extended beyond factory floors. As Victorian commerce grew more complex, professional societies emerged as gatekeepers to white-collar work. Accounting bodies, legal societies, and medical colleges acquired Royal Charters granting standard-setting authority within their professions, then promptly barred women from membership until the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919.

Bateman marshals eighteenth-century business cards from the British Museum showing female shoemakers, toy makers, and printers operating across Georgian London. Priscilla Wakefield established England's first penny savings bank in Tottenham in 1798, targeting women and children. A Georgian women's pamphlet cautioned marriageable women that "none but a fool will take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by his labour and who will contribute nothing toward it herself".

One exasperated woman wrote in The Pioneer in 1834: "Surely the men might think of a better method of benefiting themselves than that of driving so many industrious women out of employment."

The Georgian-to-Victorian transition, in Bateman's telling, marks the shift from economically active women to the invention of the housewife. Male trade unionists justified exclusion as protection, claiming to shield women from exploitation and prevent child neglect. What's interesting here is the selectivity of the historical lens.

Victorian separate spheres ideology drew from multiple wellsprings: evangelical Christianity's cult of domesticity, emerging middle-class anxieties about status differentiation, medical theories about women's biological fragility, and yes, protectionist labour practices. Isolating trade unions as the primary culprit requires ignoring the religious, cultural, and pseudo-scientific movements that reinforced women's domestic confinement.

The self-employment statistics

Bateman points to contemporary developing economies as evidence for her thesis. According to her figures, 88 per cent of working women in low-income countries are self-employed, compared with just 10 per cent in high-income nations. In East Asia and South America, women own one in two businesses rather than the global average of one in three.

This data requires careful interpretation. Self-employment in low-income countries overwhelmingly means informal economy work: street vending, subsistence agriculture, domestic services performed without contracts or labour protections. Characterising this as evidence that markets "rescue" women conflates necessity-driven survivalism with choice-driven entrepreneurship.

Women in these economies often turn to self-employment precisely because formal employment structures exclude them through discrimination, lack of education access, or inadequate childcare infrastructure. The high self-employment rate is frequently a symptom of exclusion from better-paid formal sector jobs, not proof of market-driven liberation. Research published by the International Labour Organisation consistently shows that informal economy workers face lower earnings, no social protections, and higher vulnerability to economic shocks.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 killed 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women locked inside by employers who feared theft. Market forces alone hadn't rescued them.

Bateman's argument also sidesteps how unregulated capitalism exploited female labour during industrialisation. Women consistently received lower wages than men for identical work. Female-dominated industries like textiles and garment manufacturing became synonymous with dangerous conditions and starvation wages.

Rewriting feminist economics

The real challenge Bateman poses isn't to historical consensus but to contemporary left-wing feminist economics, which centres care work devaluation, persistent wage gaps, and how market structures perpetuate gender inequality. Her intervention arrives as academics and policymakers increasingly question whether traditional GDP measurements adequately value women's economic contributions.

Bateman wants to reclaim entrepreneurship and market participation as inherently feminist acts, challenging narratives that position women primarily as victims of economic systems. There's something valuable in recovering female business owners from historical obscurity and refusing the flattening of women into passive subjects of economic history.

Yet framing this as a binary choice between markets and collectives oversimplifies both history and contemporary reality. The question isn't whether trade unions excluded women (they did) or whether some women thrived as entrepreneurs (they did). The question is whether unregulated markets or collective organisation better serves women's economic interests today, and the historical record suggests the answer is neither in pure form.

Britain's employment rights bill will strengthen collective bargaining whilst maintaining market structures. Gender pay gap reporting requirements impose transparency on market outcomes. Shared parental leave policies attempt to redistribute care work responsibilities. These hybrid approaches acknowledge that both unfettered markets and exclusionary collectives have failed women at different historical moments.

Bateman's provocation will likely galvanise free-market feminists whilst infuriating those who see capitalism as structurally patriarchal. What bears watching is whether her thesis influences policy debates around labour organisation, particularly as artificial intelligence threatens another restructuring of who works where doing what. If history suggests anything, it's that women's economic participation depends less on markets versus collectives than on which institutions women themselves control.

More articles by Ross Williams