ABSTRACT
Women have always worked and have always played significant roles in what we now call ‘the economy’ – for which there was no Greek or Latin word. Yet, in the modern West, popular and academic media continually address, and thereby problematize, women’s place in corporate cultures and ways of assessing their unpaid contributions to subsistence economies or the voluntary sector. If women are still so alien to our dominant economic categories, how do we determine their impact on the classical equivalents? In this chapter, which is necessarily restricted to a narrow selection of sample activities and institutions, I suggest some possibilities but they involve a re-think of our own presumptions, both about what we can expect from the surviving sources and how we might define the economy and women’s influence on it.2
