Book Reviews
Abstract
Victor R. Fuchs, Women's Quest for Economic Equality, London: Harvard University Press, 1988, 15.25, ix + 171 pp. This is the kind of book that gives economists a bad name. The author's ostensible project is to chart the progress of 'women's quest for economic equality' in the quarter century which followed the passing of the Equal Pay Act by the US Congress in 1963. Ultimately, however, the book addresses, and indeed appears part of, something approaching a moral panic about the decline of traditional American marriage and family life, and the evident unwillingness of current generations of American women to produce sufficient children to maintain a steady population. In the rather curious odyssey from his opening question 'what is the nature and extent of gender inequality in economic life?' (p. 2), to the closing assertion that 'we do need to arrest and reverse the fragmentation and fragility of family life' (p. 151), Fuchs deploys a range of evidence. He acknowledges the need to take account of other perspectives and values, but within 'the economic perspective' which he explores the analysis is disturbingly single-, and simple-, minded. The values implicit in the neoclassical paradigm which the author adopts pass