Women’s work, family, and economic development in Europe and East Asia

Scholars seeking explanations of the differences in East Asian and Western European development have often focused on family structure and gender roles. The earlier literature, dating back at least to the nineteenth century classics of Western social theory, argued that psychological differences caused in part by kinship organization inhibited capitalist development in Asia. These theories have now been largely discarded, undermined by both the success of various East Asian economies since the 1960s and a growing historical literature showing how various nonWestern ideas could serve as functional equivalents of the “Protestant ethic.”