Marianne Ferber: A little giant

photo from "Engendering Economics" by Zohreh Emami and Paulette Olson

Marianne Ferber was proud to have been a Canadian economist, if only for a little while.

The "Canadian" part was due to astute planning by her father, Karl Abeles. Marianne was born in Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, in 1923. Canada was exceptionally hostile to Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 40s - we accepted by some estimates just 4,000 refugees, far fewer than Australia, Argentina, or any other remotely comparable country. But the Abeles were dairy farmers, and Canadian immigration policy was as pro-agriculture as it was anti-Semitic. The Canadian Pacific Railway representative who visited the Abeles farm liked what he saw, and fast-tracked the approval of their immigration. The 39-member Abeles-Popper clan escaped Sudetenland in the nick of time, and made their way to Hamilton, Ontario.

Canada in the 1930s was the kind of place where job advertisements in store windows might specify "British stock only", but Marianne encountered unexpected kindness. The Registrar at McMaster admitted her to the university on the basis of nothing more than a half-complete Czechoslovakian high school record and her older sister's stellar performance. It was his decision that made her choose economics. As Marianne explained in the wonderful book Engendering Economics, because she had not graduated:

I knew I'd better not major in anything that I would be expected to know from high school, like math or history. So I asked for a catalog as a sort of stall tactic and started leafing through it. In those days, McMaster was a very small university and didn't have many esoteric majors, so it didn't take me long to find economics. I was pretty sure no one took it in high school. I thought - great, I'll start out even. I also remember thinking that I would see how things went and switch later on. That's how I chose economics...And when I told my parents that my major was economics, they asked "What's that?" I told them that I would tell them as soon as I found out.

Marianne found out that economics suited her down to the ground, and went on to do a PhD at the University of Chicago. It was there that she met Bob Ferber, and lost her Canadian passport. 

At the time, Canada did not grant married women an independent right to citizenship. Thousands of War Brides were automatically granted citizenship, because they were married to Canadians. Other women, like Marianne, were stripped of theirs, because they were married to non-Canadians. Marianne described to me how a consular official not only refused to renew her passport, but actually seized it and refused to return it, as soon as he learned she was planning to marry an American. Anti-Semitism? Petty bureaucratic officiousness? In Canadian immigration policy, the two were inseparable.

Marianne had children at a time when it was practically impossible for women to balance work and family, and she didn't. When Bob Ferber took up a position at the University of Illinois, anti-nepotism rules prevented Marianne from being hired.  

In 1955, however, faced with a severe teaching shortage, the department hired Marianne as a "visiting professor". She describes her experiences in Engendering Economics:

I usually worked part-time. And they would always call me at the last minute. In fact, once or twice they didn't ask me to teach until after classes had started. It was embarrassing. How do you explain to your students why you missed the first class? Do you tell them that you weren't asked until they were desperate, or do you let them think that you were negligent? It put me in an awkward position. But I was glad to have something. It was better than being unemployed.

When Marianne finished her doctoral dissertation she put research aside. Then, when was in her late 40s, a colleague involved in the American Association of University Professors suggested she do some research on the salaries of female academics. This kick-started Marianne's career as a labour economist, and led to a long run of publications and fruitful collaborations.

She wrote many articles on women in the workforce, and especially on gender, economics and the academy. She is best known for two works: her textbook, co-authored with Francine Blau and later Anne Winkler, on The Economics of Women, Men and Work, and the collection, co-edited with Julie Nelson, Beyond Economic Man: Feminist theory and economics.

The Economics of Women, Men and Work epitomizes Marianne's strengths: it is clear, well-written, and insightful. Moreover, it shows wisdom, a deep understanding of human behaviour, and a sense of what matters and what doesn't. Beyond Economic Man demonstrates Marianne's openness, and her willingness to think about a totally new way of doing economics.

She was, at heart, a radical, fiercely committed to equality and social justice. She fought to improve women's status in the economics profession the hard way: by taking concrete action. Many women and men benefitted from her willingness to write supportive letters of reference, her sound practical advice, and her inspiring example of what can be achieved with intelligence, conscientiousness, and a complete and utter lack of strategic career planning. 

Marianne had minimal patience for the formal theorizing that is often the route to high status within the profession. She believed that formal modelling was open to abuse, to being misused to support pre-ordained conclusions, while increasing formalism risked producing a generation of "idiot savants"; formally trained but economically illiterate graduate students. I suspect that she had similar reservations about feminist flights of fanciful theorizing too. She was a practical person, looking to understand the world around her.

Marianne Ferber was, physically, a small woman, especially in her later years. Yet she loomed so large in so many people's lives - those of her family, friends, colleagues, students, and the thousands who read and were touched by her work - that she is, to me, a little giant.

Marianne Ferber passed away on May 11, 2013, after an illness.

Comments

[Jim Sentance]

Thanks for that Frances. I have both of those books and have found them very insightful and helpful in prepping my course on the economics of women. Didn't realize she had a Canadian connection.

[Sarah]

Very sad news indeed. Marianne Ferber was my mother's dear friend and fellow profilee in Engendering Economics. With her fluent Czech she was able to contact my husband and reassure my parents when I was hospitalized in Prague soon after my marriage there.

With the possibility of one or more countries going off the euro I had just been wondering whether her Ph.D. thesis might be available online. It covers the successful transition of Czechoslovakia from a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire to an independent country, steered by the first Minister of Finance, Alois Rasin, and includes a description of the Process of separating the two currencies. I don't doubt it contains much information that would be of special interest today.

[Frances Woolley]

Sarah - thanks for writing and sharing those memories.

I looked up her thesis on Proquest, it's called "THE FINANCIAL POLICY OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR". It's hard to imagine that this, for her, would have been like the 1980s for today's PhD students - something that happened just around the time that they were born.

My guess is that if it was available on-line, it would be in Proquest or on google scholar, but I couldn't see it.

Jim - she was passionately proud of that Canadian connection! She gave a great talk at the CWEN lunch the year that the CEA meetings were in Hamilton (I think I've got that year right).

One thing I didn't mention that I should have was her passion for swimming - at every conference she would always find some pool so she could have her daily swim!

[Shangwen]

What an enjoyable read. A story about a great person and an unbelievably changed world; sounds like she spent the first half of her life working hard to get into places where no one wanted her. Thanks for this.

[genauer]

Sarah,

we actually have even the more recent example of the 1993 Velvet Divorce of Czech and Slovakia, separating not only two currencies.

A lot more to learn from our eastern european neighbors.

[Frances Woolley]

Ingrid Robeyns shares some memories on Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/17/marianne-ferber-died/.

[Donald A. Coffin]

When I was in grad school (early 1970s), I read everything by Ferber & Blau (together and separately) that I could find. What they were doing influenced my teaching and some parts of my early research agenda. I am sorry to hear that Marianne Ferber has died (and I had no idea she had done so much starting in her 40s; I always assumed she was maybe 5-10 years ahead of me, not 25...).

Don Coffin

[genauer]

Frances,

I pondered some of the questions of nepotism rules, and favourism, coming up here, and how those can cut the wrong way, and how to find better answers and rules.

I think, this question is a very worthful topic in economics and this blog, to be discussed more. Can I spark your interest?

Just some background, maybe sparking some ideas:

I am just watching 1492, when Columbus gave jobs to his brothers, because he could trust them.

I am looking at Afghanistan, where the Americans placed trust in the Karzai clan,

the only case in the history of NATO, when article 5 (an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us) was invoked.

And where we see now, with significant bitterness, fundamental disloyalty and possible betrayal.

We have in Germany some discussion, how far politicians can employ what relatives.

the need for trust as a key criteria in certain jobs vs nepotism

When I was as an expat in the US, the wifes (typically with similarly high education / abilities) got either pregnant, had maybe citizenship, or were after a year or so massively pushing for return to the fatherland, pretty understandably.

The company later organized job opportunities, wiggling some rules, with at least some of the intelligence and power of the wives employed, but it was somewhat arkward.

[Dorothee Schneider]

I was sad to hear about Marianne Ferber's passing recently. I only met her in the early 1990s, shortly before she retired in about 1991. As luck would have it she turned 68 during the last year such a mandatory retirement age could be enforced by universities! This did not stop her -- daily research at the office after an early morning swim were part of her firm schedule. She continued to mentor younger colleagues and travel widely. When she moved to a retirement home she told me that this was done for convenience. "It is closer to the airport than my old house." I invited Marianne to my history class almost every year to talk about her own life as a refugee and immigrant in the 1930s and 40s. Students were fascinated by this lively colleague with her unstoppable energy. I will miss her wisdom, straightforwardness and the ability to ask the important questions right off the bat.