Abstract

"Business Disinterest in Feminism: Who Pays the Price? "

Mary Yeager, University of California, Los Angeles (yeager@ucla.edu)

It has been nearly a quarter century since I first raised the question: “Will There Ever Be A Feminist Business History?” The boldness of the question masked the ambiguity and timidity underlying what I then considered a “good enough” answer. I anticipated many still-to-be identified feminist business histories. I purposefully emphasized the plural in order to de-emphasize the “feminist.” Hope springs eternal.
I now stand at a crossroads, older and wiser, perhaps, but eager to address a different but closely related question and its corollary: why have business scholars and businesses paid so little attention to feminism? Why have feminist and gender scholars continued to neglect business as sites of interrogation and knowledge? Who pays the price? The moment when T-Shirts emblazoned with the words “everyone is a feminist now” has long since passed, as has the radical thrust that brought women back into business history at the turn of the 21st century.
The question, "who pays the price” of business indifference to feminism is meant to interrogate the parallel but still largely disconnected streams of feminism, gender studies and business history. It draws attention to the questions asked and avoided by business and feminist scholars as well as the questions which need to be asked if we are to navigate this tricky terrain. To focus the conversation, the paper looks at the contested gender dynamics in the historiography and the histories of the oil industry. Rather than focus on how industry might explain gender dynamics, I use a gender frame and selected feminist theories to explain industry dynamics. A conclusion moves from industry history to the personal, highlighting dramatic episodes in the overlapping careers of two scholars intimately involved with the industry: Henrietta M. Larson, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who oversaw the publication of the first international histories of Standard Oil (New Jersey) in the early 1950s, and Anita A. Summers, an economist who worked for Standard Oil in the late 1940s. Larson was a scholarly insider who never claimed the label feminist. Summers "pushed boundaries".