Kyrk’s Students : Measuring the Distribution of Income and Taxes

In this paper, I consider the role women economists played in the production of U.S. income and tax distribution studies over three decades beginning in the 1920s. Although related to and clearly influenced by consumption economics, these studies evolved along the boundaries of three distinct fields: home economics, Keynesian macroeconomics/fiscal policy, and public finance. Compared to the earlier segmentation of women economists into the areas concerning women’s wages and/or the economics of women and children, their work mapping family income, savings, and consumption placed them at the center of economic policy making throughout the 1930s and Second World War. Their work also had a significant impact on economics practice, as topics which had long been considered theoretical – such as tax incidence – were reconceived as empirical questions. The approach is prosopographic, as the intent is to surface the breadth and depth of the contributions of women economists to income and tax distribution studies. In the end, women’s success in this niche proved temporary – a function of specialized skills and abundant time in the 1930s and of the unique employment opportunities produced by the Second World War