Malthus and gender

Abstract

This article re-reads Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population for his explicit discussion of men and women, masculinity and femininity. A feminist reading is possible, but not undertaken here. Rather, the purpose is simply to demonstrate how ‘gender’ was Malthus's own object of inquiry. Historical actors, perhaps especially economic thinkers, often considered gender far more fully and explicitly than almost all subsequent analysts of them. It therefore remains not just insufficient, but empirically erroneous not to inquire into how ‘men’ and ‘women’ were considered, constructed, instructed, symbolised or valued by the historical actors we study, including those in the political economy canon.