Her most important academic work, Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought , was the first serious and systematic examination of the development of the interaction between economic thought and feminist thinking. Other feminists have written about the androcentric nature of mainstream economic theory, but until this book, most were unaware of the extent to which the early thinkers, who shaped the discourse of the discipline, were made aware, by feminists, of the narrowness of their approaches. It was not, as is often believed, that thinking about economics was a male exercise and that these men blindly followed normal societal convention in ignoring women's reality. Mich le's critique of the origins of these ideas is extraordinarily helpful to women who are up against their reincarnation about one hundred years later. While the ideas are easy to refute when dealing with policies like equal pay, their wider role in shaping the structures of our world unravel less easily.
Market power accrues to the ruthless and the already powerful.
So, while an individual may oppress, it is the ideas that shape our society that allow this oppression to take its normalizing aspect. The main vehicle to enable oppression of any group is the organization of the economic system, at all levels of activity from the local to the international. The way the economy is structured gives some individuals economic power and by making this power part of a normal functioning of the way in which people make their daily living, oppression itself comes to be seen as inevitable or natural. This naturalizing of economic power cuts across all social divides - gender, race, age, physical conditions, come quickly to mind. The crucial insight that Kate Millet made about politics can be reasserted with economics.