Did Women's Freedom Build the Modern Economy? | IEA Podcast

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Dr Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. Bateman has taught economics at both Cambridge and Oxford, and her earlier books include The Sex Factor and Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe. The conversation traces the economic role of women from the Palaeolithic to the present day, and sets out Bateman’s central argument: that across history, the most successful civilisations have been those where women were freest to take part in the economy, and that civilisational collapses have tended to follow a rolling back of women’s rights. Bateman explains how economic historians find evidence of women’s work before written records, drawing on burials and human remains, and points to the finding that around 40% of big game hunters in the Stone Age Americas were women. The discussion moves through the five economic hotspots of the Bronze Age, the contrast between ancient Athens and Rome, and the case of Hortensia, the Roman woman who challenged a tax levied on women without political representation. Bateman argues that women’s relative freedom tracked economic prosperity in each period, and that the erosion of those freedoms helped drain the lifeblood from economies such as Rome. The second half turns to Britain and the origins of modern economic growth. Bateman sets out the Northwest European marriage pattern, under which women married in their mid-twenties rather than as children, earned their own wages and built independent households, and explains how this supported higher wages, later fertility and the conditions for the Industrial Revolution. The conversation also covers the backlash against working women in the late 19th century, the shift from brawn to brains in the 20th, and what the historical record suggests about women, freedom and economic growth today. Economica is a Financial Times Best Book of 2025, and there is a link to order a copy in the description. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.