Review

Reviewed Work(s): Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought. by

Michele A. Pujol
Review by: Nancy Folbre
Source: Contemporary Sociology , Jul., 1993, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Jul., 1993), pp. 618-619
Published by: American Sociological Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2074467

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 REVIEWS 619

on whether there should be economic compe-
tition between the sexes. Both lauded the
male pursuit of self-interest as the very basis
of an efficient market economy but rejected
the notion that women could or should be
self-interested.
Marshall, Edgeworth, and their successor
Pigou also expressed a somewhat contradic-
tory attitude toward women's unpaid work in
the home. On the one hand, they believed that
such work made an important contribution to
human capital and was therefore indispens-
able to economic growth. On the other, they
rejected early feminist arguments for the
inclusion of nonmarket work in measures of
economic output, and for the provision of
family allowances. Indeed, they were confi-
dent that providing a higher wage for men,
through a "family wage," would meet the
costs of raising the next generation.
Pujol has a gift for letting economists
reveal their own inconsistencies, simply by
juxtaposing what they say in one place with
what they say in another. Rather than
imposing some modem feminist standard
upon them, she simply asks how they
answered, or failed to answer, the feminist
critics of their own day. She goes well beyond
the most obvious, superficial criticisms,
providing a careful and detailed, though
highly opinionated, reading of the texts.
This a fairly specialized book, not one that facile reference to contemporary visual soci-
undergraduates or nonspecialists will find
very engaging. But it definitely will strengthen Becker in the later 1970s. For a book which
the emergent feminist critique of gender bias
in the social sciences. It will probably
generate more research on gender and econom-
ics. And it may, eventually, change the way
that the history of economic thought is taught. Chapter 2 explores visual content analysis,
Analyzing Visual Data, by Michael S. Ball
and Gregory W. H. Smith. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, 1991. 77 pp. $16.95 cloth. ISBN:
0-8039-3434-3. $7.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8039-
3435-1.
DOUGLAS HARPER
University of South Florida
This book explores strategies for understand-
ing visual aspects of culture. The book
derives from Simmel's observation that "the
eye has a uniquely sociological function," but
the authors assert that visual social scientists carry multiple and often inconsistent mean-
have found few ways to analyze the observed
world. When photographs have been used,
the authors assert, they have served as
evidence, rather than as the basis for analysis.
The authors turn to content analysis, symbolic
interaction, structuralism, cognitive anthropol-
ogy, and ethnomethodology to find a theory
that supports the visual study of the world.
The book begins with a discussion of how
photographs have been used in conventional
ethnographies. This analysis has been made
elsewhere, and the authors do not expand
upon ideas which are familiar to most
scholars involved with visual anthropology
and sociology. Their understanding of the
state of modern visual sociology, however, is
appallingly incomplete. For example, the
authors assert that visual sociologists "seek-
ing publication of papers employing pictorial
materials usually have to turn to specialist
journals such as the International Journal of
Sociology" (p. 9), a journal which ceased
publication in 1985; they later make reference
to publication possibilities in the Journal of
Visual Communication, which also ceased
publication in the mid-1980s. They do not
refer to current journals in the field, such as
Visual Anthropology, Visual Sociology, or the
Visual Anthropology Review. They appear to
be unaware of current debates and issues in
visual social science. Their single, rather
ology is to articles written by Howard S.
offers to speak for the "small but thriving
academic subareas of visual anthropology and
sociology" (p. 1), these omissions are
inexcusable.
a quantitative assessment of the "frequency
with which certain categories or themes
appear in the material investigated" (p. 21).
Visual content analysis may show how certain
observable phenomena (such as in fashion)
change over time; the method does not tell us
what the changes mean in their cultural
context. Thus the method seems so limited
that it is peculiar to find it as one of four
approaches explored in the book.
In a brief but useful overview of structural-
ism and symbolism, the authors explain how
symbols operate together or in clusters, how
symbols may be found in everything from
body decoration to gesture, and how symbols

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