Economica by Victoria Bateman: Need a plumber in Ancient Rome? Call a woman!

In 1929, a group of Nigerian Igbo women pulled up their skirts and showed their bottoms to shocked British officials.

They were tired of their imperial rulers trying to exclude them from their well-paid employment as market traders.

This naked protest worked a treat: the authorities hurriedly restored the ‘market queens’ to their former economic prosperity.

How fitting that this use of nudity as a campaign strategy should appear in a book by Dr Victoria Bateman, a Cambridge economist who is famous for getting her kit off.

In 2019 she challenged Jacob Rees-Mogg to a naked debate on the economic consequences of Brexit. Dr Bateman appeared in her birthday suit on the Today programme interviewed by a startled John Humphrys.

This makes Bateman sound like an edgy performance artist. In fact, she is a lecturer who researches the way that women’s financial lives have been ‘written out’ of history. Now she is setting out to put them back in.

Bateman tells us about Priscilla Wakefield, the Quaker who set up the first English savings bank for women

and children in 1798, and about Ching Shih, a brothel-keeper turned pirate who amassed a fleet of ships that controlled trade in the South China Seas during the Qing dynasty.

In the 20th century, Helen Walton grew her ‘five and dime’ store into the US Walmart empire.

Although Bateman’s approach is broadbrush, some striking patterns emerge, such as the fact that many ancient civilisations operated as matriarchies with women as the main providers.

Long before the Founding Fathers signed modern America into existence in 1776, the native women of the Mohawk, Oneida and Seneca clans oversaw all the land and government in their nations.

In Ancient Egypt, around a fifth of the economic elite was female, with women holding positions as government administrators and managers of royal households.

In Ancient Rome it was quite normal to call for a female plumber to fix the drains. Fast forward to medieval London, it was the women who made a fortune brewing beer.

So where did it all go wrong? Globally, women today earn only 57 per cent of what men earn. There are no easy solutions, warns Bateman, but making sure that women have equal access to fairly-paid work is a good place to start.

That requires raising wages in low-status sectors that depend on female labour, especially the care sector. There also needs to be a dismantling of the barriers that discourage girls from entering the lucrative professions of engineering and tech. Finally, says Bateman, we need to work towards an equal division of family responsibilities.

The World Bank calculated that eliminating the gender gap would double the rate at which the global economy grows. This would raise personal incomes by 20 per cent. Will it require women to get naked to achieve this? Let’s hope not.