If you don’t know who feminist economist and author Victoria Bateman is, it’s time to get knowing her. Not only has she written some fantastic feminist staple reads like Naked Feminism and The Sex Factor, she is also challenging the world’s views on female sexuality and the status quo.
Bateman is all about putting women back in the conversation and I spoke to her about her upcoming book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power and what her work means for women around the world.
Firstly, addressing the elephant in the room, her several appearances in public speaking and television appearances completely naked. Her protest was twofold, to ask questions about the abject sexualisation of women’s bodies around the world and to recognise the financial value that people in the sex trade put on women’s bodies.
My own views on modesty were challenged when I questioned Bateman, asking her if she felt brave for putting everything on show and she simply responded: “I’m not sure it feels brave […] I’m just being myself. With or without clothes, just me and my body. I am my body, that’s it.”
Pointing out that clothes are a surprisingly modern concept, we segued beautifully into the topic of her upcoming novel, Economica.
This delightful book should be your new companion when you’re looking into any empire or community of the past and it feels as though its contents have been sorely missing from the narrative of the whole history of the world.
I knew nothing of the all-female Lydian community, or the neanderthal women of the past who qualified more as hunters than gatherers, Bateman has pointed out we are reading off a Western, patriarchal script when it comes to history and it should make us uncomfortable.
Actually, women did work
One of the most common misconceptions of the past is that women have always been homemakers and the men have been out winning bread. However, Bateman is knocking this right on its head.
“As my grandma said to me when I was a little girl, Victoria, working-class women have always worked.”
The idea of women being stay-at-home-wives is a 19th Century concept, because while modern day standards would suggest that households could run on one income alone, often women had to take on ‘domestic’ jobs to help ends meet. Whether it be wet nursing or a washing round, women have contributed to the economy for far longer than we credit them for.
“One of the things I really wanted to try to do with this book is to show actually, so many of these things that we assume were just done by men were also being done by women, even parts of the economy that we think of as being super male dominated today, like say brewing.”
Drawing a parallel to the values of our current era, Bateman told the story of Roman women who ran vast companies themselves and traded olive oil across the Mediteranean until they were seen as too powerful.
“In the first century AD Augustus, Emperor Augustus launches this attack on working women, very much like modern day social conservatism, this idea that the Roman Empire is becoming overrun with foreigners, that Roman women are not doing enough to produce children in order to participate in Roman culture and therefore that Roman women need to do their duty and have more children, and Emperor Augustus manipulated all kinds of laws to indirectly encourage women out of the workplace into the home.”
Sound familiar?
What’s this all got to do with trad wives?
When I drew parallels to the fall of women’s contributions in the economy in ancient Rome with our current right-leaning pro-birth society, Bateman described the idea of following ‘traditional values’ as a dangerous road.
“I mean, the tradwife thing, I mean, it’s just a myth,” she said “Some people, namely the patriarchy, didn’t much like that fact that women were working and contributing to the economy and wanted to, under a veil of protecting women, removing them from the workplace in order that men had less people to compete with.”
She described women who agree with this logic about how the home protects them from exploitative workplace practices as “pseudo-feminists”. I suddenly felt like I was speaking to the Feminine Mystique era Betty Friedan in that moment.
Referencing various practices like female genital mutilation, child marriage or women being pushed out of education, Bateman says that one way we can put a woman’s voice back into the story is by valuing her for for her “intelligence, her creativity, basically anything apart from her apart from her bodily modesty.”
It’s a simple request, but a powerful one, it’s time for men, lawmakers and employers to acknowledge and celebrate women and their careers and treat them as humans, rather than caregivers or wombs.
If anything, Economica proves that it doesn’t matter what laws or threats there are in place, women will carry on working despite the barriers, that’s just what we do.
Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power will be released on Thursday 28th August 2026.
