Book Review: A Herstory of Economics by Edith Kuiper: (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. 214 pp. ISBN: 9781509538423)

A herstory is a more than welcome complement to the standard male-dominated encyclopedia and handbooks of economists of the past. A Herstory of Economics, enjoyably written by Edith Kuiper, is a comprehensive treasure box including many more women economic writers and women economists than one would expect given its relatively limited size (173 pages of main text, excluding the index and bibliography). To be precise, the book includes ninety-eight women authors. Some writing about economic topics without having an academic status, others as trained economists, although this distinction is less clear the further one goes back into history because the academic discipline of economics is much younger than its subject. It is probably for that reason that Kuiper does not bother much with analyzing the distinction, and rightly so, I think. What matters is that these women wrote about economic life, economic ideas, and economic policy. And some of the women, as Kuiper reveals from her detailed archival work and wide reading, had important economic roles themselves, as investors, entrepreneurs, employers, bankers, and traders. [...]