Work for women outside of the home was once thought to be the basis of women's equality and liberation. And it still may be. But the quality of that work is certainly of great importance, too. How have women fared with respect to the quality of the work that they have done in the past century? What consequences, if any, follow from globalization for the lives of female workers around the world? Is a distinctly feminist model of economics necessary for understanding women's lives or will classical economic models suffice? Drucilla Barker and Susan Feiner pursue all three of these questions very seriously and with considerable success in Liberating Economics.

Barker and Feiner claim that since the prevailing (neoclassical) models of the economy construe individuals as purely rational seekers of maximum utility, they obscure both the larger value system of the community and crucial social and political differences that exist among community members. According to the authors, if we want to understand the lives of particular individuals and to grasp how they fare within particular economic systems, we cannot employ economic models that view race, gender, ethnicity, and nation status as mere descriptions attached to rational actors. Instead, we have to employ economic models that take these traits to be central to both the lives of particular actors and the economy as a whole.

In their book, Barker and Feiner develop such a model of their own both by taking group identity seriously and by expanding the criteria that we use to evaluate particular economic systems. They claim that in order for an economic system to be acceptable, it must, first of all, be fair with respect to both opportunity and outcomes; for example, it must pay individuals according to their contribution to the community, rather than according to a system of status hierarchies. Second, it must provide an improved quality of life over time that encompasses not just goods and services but also health, education, safety, and leisure. Third, it must provide financial security over a lifetime for families. Fourth, it must avoid wastefulness. Fifth, it must provide work to citizens that validates their dignity as human beings.

How do economies around the world fare according to these criteria? What about the situation of women in particular? As many feminists have pointed out over the years, the patriarchal structure of family life in general has always gendered child care and housekeeping, and it has rendered them especially burdensome for women who also work outside of the home. According to Barker and Feiner, we cannot make women's lives better by simply fighting for equality within the prevailing system. Instead, we need to rethink the nature of work itself, as well as the notion of skillfulness associated with it, by showing, among other things, that women's work in the home is skilled and not a mere result of their “natural inclinations.”

Not surprisingly, the oppressiveness of women's work increases as we go down the economic ladder. While middle-class and professional women suffer from the gendered structure of task hierarchies, the segregation of occupations by gender, and glass ceilings, poorer women confront both poverty and exploitation as well. Barker and Feiner are particularly concerned in their analysis with the situation of poor women who are paid to care for the children of the affluent. According to them, four aspects of these women's lives are key to understanding their economic lives: their low pay, their (situational) inability to take care of their own children, their subsequent perpetuation of poverty, and their lack of protection from abuse in the workplace.

Poorer women also suffer from globalization. Globalization, which the authors acknowledge has some potential for good, has meant so far that income, wealth, health, and education have become concentrated in a small group of people while the majority of the world's population is consigned to poverty, disease, and illiteracy. Women and girls experience far more than their share of this deprivation. Three-fifths of the world's billion poor people are now women and girls. Two-thirds of the one billion people who cannot read are female, and more than 80% of the world's refugees are women and children. The trafficking in sex made possible by globalization is now expanding at a staggering rate.

Barker and Feiner are in many respects most informative when demonstrating how international development policies, which are often presented in gender-neutral language, have affected women and men differently. The case of agricultural policy is a good example. Women's status in the agricultural societies of Africa and many other countries is generally determined by their contribution to food production. Hence, when international development agencies institute a change in these countries from female to male farming systems, with men taking over the ownership of both animals and machines, if not the actual work, women lose status, as well as freedom and personal well-being.

What are we to do in this context? How, if at all, can we reverse these trends? Barker and Feiner argue that any solution to the above difficulties requires the restructuring of work along both nonsexist and democratic lines. Their recommendations here are for the most part abstract. The improvement of women's situation “requires a sea change in the way we value and compensate caring labor” (p. 57). But they do recommend the institution of various state policies that pay for care and that give men incentives to take on caring tasks in the home as well as in state-sponsored institutions, and they do lay down the social and political, if not the economic, conditions that would have to prevail if these policies were to work.

In the end, Liberating Economics does not provide us with a detailed blueprint for how we are to achieve the kinds of work policies that Barker and Feiner consider to be necessary. Nor, for that matter, does it uncover a completely new set of facts. Instead, it does two things to shift our understanding of economics itself. The first is to demonstrate the importance of understanding economic systems from the perspective of the particular groups who experience them. The second is to make sure that the race-based and gendered aspects of these groups' identities becomes part of economic analysis itself. Both of these things are crucial to the institution of a fair and humane economy.