ABSTRACT
The postmodern commitment to the idea that knowledge is socially constructed encourages attention to the specific arguments that – at different points in time – have been considered valuable contributions to the developing body of knowledge in a given field. Especially in disciplines that make claim to be scientific, and here we must include economics, we want to understand what makes arguments ‘scientific’ and ‘true’ to the community of knowers. To gain an understanding of what has been included in the canon, and why, it may be useful to look at work that has been excluded and try to understand what distinguishes the accepted from the rejected. Hence we want to seek out practitioners whose ideas and intellectual contributions have not made it into the corpus of the official history of ideas of the discipline. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898) is a text that has been excluded from the canon in economics, and this chapter will examine some of the reasons for this neglect from a feminist, postmodernist perspective.
