The issue of inequality has come to the forefront of political debate in recent years, as the gap between the 1% and the rest of us has grown substantially. The crisis produced by the Covid-19 pandemic has compounded these differential effects—the very rich have managed their financial investments so as to increase their wealth, while the vast majority of the population (as well as national budgets) have suffered crushing economic losses. But well before the current crisis, and at least partly as a result of the Great Recession of 2008, economists and economic historians were exploring the reasons for and the effects of the increasingly wide gap between rich and poor. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century [2013] is probably the most widely read of these studies—he theorized that rapid returns on capital investment coupled with slow economic growth created the vast discrepancies of wealth in our time. Other scholars added to the mix, identifying such processes as neo-liberalism and financialization as drivers of the recent history of capitalism.

Noticeably lacking in this outpouring of scholarly attention to inequality is the question of gender, as the authors of this intelligently argued and richly documented book point out. Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac have assembled a trove of family monographs, collected in France over some twenty years. Along with statistical data and interviews with notaries and lawyers, they document in detail what they call “intimate transactions,” particularly those that have to do with inheritance and divorce and that reveal the way in which processes of economic decision-making are informed by moral and sentimental values based on gendered “principles of justice.” Their message to economists is that the family is not simply an affective unit; it is an economic institution whose practices of capital transmission reproduce hierarchies across the boundaries of race and class, even as they reinforce gender inequalities within these categories. At whatever level one looks—from the top to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder—women are systematically disadvantaged—and that matters for thinking about policies that can successfully address the problem of inequality.

The book begins with a striking set of examples: first there is the case of a woman who became a leader of the Yellow Vests movement in 2018. The divorced mother of two who could never afford to finish training as a nurse, she became a health aide, barely managing to get by on her earnings. Her experience was typical of the many women who joined the movement and who spoke of unemployment, of part-time work, or of being retired; they are often widows, with pensions insufficient to support them. Their plight demonstrates that “For the popular classes, the problems of money are women’s problems” [6]. The second example comes from another universe: it is the divorce settlement secured by MacKenzie Bezos, a woman with ample supplies of both financial and cultural capital. Yet as the details of her settlement emerge, it becomes clear that, however important her contribution, her husband Jeff retains full control of Amazon (the company she had helped found and direct when they were married). “He is still the richest man in the world. For the rich, and a fortiori the ultra-rich, capital remains an affair of men” [9].

Divorce is one moment where the control of economic resources in the family becomes apparent; death and the issue of inheritance is another. The authors explore these moments with many examples, attending to the complexities of family dynamics. Ruptures of marriage, they point out, “reveal the economic inequalities of gender woven into the heterosexual conjugal relationship. A conjugal rupture in itself amplifies these pre-existing inequalities. The price of this rupture is still today dearly paid for by women” [44]. And decisions about inheritance always seem to favor a son—usually the oldest. Moreover, even before a parent’s death, material and cultural resources are dispersed differentially, with daughters receiving less than their brothers, even if there seems to be fair monetary compensation for everyone. “Whatever the social milieu, women have more difficulty defending their patrimonial interests than do men” [131].

These private decisions often contradict legal prescriptions mandating the equal division of resources for divorcing couples and among the children of the deceased. In what I found the most compelling chapter in the book, the authors turn to the practices of lawyers and notaries to discover the ways in which the formal requirements of the law are contravened by the practices of these professionals who consistently produce “sexist patrimonial arrangements.” [134] They explore a number of cases in which lawyers or notaries (predominantly male, but sometimes female) help families arrive at settlements that privilege the men in the family. “In the imaginary of many notaries, a good heir is a male heir and a family succession is a priori a transmission from father to son” [152]. This is not, Bessière and Gollac conclude, a matter of bad intentions on the part of these professionals; indeed it is not a question of intentionality at all. Rather, following Pierre Bourdieu, they point to a “logic of practice,” that orients notarial and legal action “in a manner that is at once unconscious and systematic” [165]. “Economic transfers among related persons are imprinted with unthought sexism, incorporated in the very accounting of notaries and lawyers and, as a result, concealed and legitimized by the law” [166].

The assembled family monographs and extended interviews with lawyers and notaries, as well as with the family members they advise, allow the authors to document this “logic of practice” in a detailed and compelling way. It offers an ethnographic perspective on statistical accounts that can’t possibly attend to the complexities of decision-making at the level of the family or the couple. When inequality is made simply a matter of class, race, or measured as differences among households, the power relations sustained by gender are invisible, hiding “relations of domination within families and the inequalities produced by family strategies of reproduction, notably those of gender and rank among siblings”[275]. By using gender to study these family strategies of reproduction, the authors develop a feminist Bourdieusian methodology that challenges not only the thinking of economists, but also of the noted sociologist whose theory they usefully employ.

For those of us who have been doing feminist work over the years, this book documents in fine detail what we’ve known for a long time. Its case studies will, one hopes, make it easier for those who have neglected or resisted its conclusions to grasp their import for thinking about inequality. Quite simply, Bessière and Gollac demonstrate incontrovertibly that gender is an indispensable tool of social, political, and economic analysis. They are eloquent and articulate on this. So it seems fitting to give them the last word: “The reproduction of the gender order plays out in the processes of the conservation and transmission of wealth which are at the heart of different social classes. Reciprocally, the reproduction of the class order rests on processes of the enrichment of men and the impoverishment of women. At a moment when family wealth increasingly determines the social status of individuals, inequalities between men and women can’t be addressed without attacking inequalities of class, but the society of class will not be abolished without reversing the order of gender” [280].