Chapter 4 - When Women Counted

Summary

This chapter reads the feminist fiction of the 1970s through its interrogation of the relationship between gender and the credit economy. The first section offers a theoretical account of the ways in which the languages of credit have been deeply gendered, in both the anthropological traditions of Mauss and the critical traditions of Marx. The second section explores the ways in which these gendered languages of both money and the gift were played out through liberal and conservative feminism of the 1970s, as women were being trained to understand the limits of their own place in a system of exchange. The final two sections examine how feminist fiction offered a counter-narrative. It explores both the rejection of accounting as strategy of selfhood in the consciousness-raising fiction of the 1970s and the articulation of a more radical alternative in the feminist science fiction of the decade.