unworthy of the attention of a highly cultivated intellect; but this is the false estimate of a shallow mind. OEconomy…is not merely…the shabby curtailments and stinted parsimony of a little mind, operating on little concerns; but it is the exercise of a sound judgement exerted in the comprehensive outline of order, of arrangement, of distribution; of regulations by which alone well-governed societies, great and small, subsist…. A sound oeconomy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing consequences, and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies, and being prepared for them. The difference is, that to a narrow-minded vulgar oeconomist, the details are continually present…. Little events and trivial operations engross her whole soul. (VIII, 5–7)

ABSTRACT

The good domestic economist seems, on the one hand, to perceive with the kind of commanding and comprehensive grasp that distinguishes the vision of public men, from their loftier eminences. But on the other hand, within her ‘smaller circle’, she excels in her attention to detail. Her ‘survey of home scenes’, in other words, seems ambiguously ‘exact’—it seems to be true and right, in the sense that the perceptions of great men are imagined to be true, disinterested and unbiased, and it seems to be exact in the sense that it is precise, and preoccupied with detail. Those qualities, I think, can only be represented as though they were compatible, and the notion that women do not generalize their ideas ‘so much’ as men

can only be represented as though it made sense, as a result of the introduction of the contrasting figure of the vulgar economist, who as it were neutralizes the problem, by absorbing into herself what are seen as the more degrading implications of engrossment in the physical detail and menial drudgery of housekeeping.