Bowman, Mary Jean.

Mary Jean Bowman (1908-2002) University of Chicago economist best known for her work on the economics of education. The Mary Jean Bowman papers contain published work by Bowman as well as manuscript drafts, notes, and research and teaching materials. The collection also includes reprints and manuscripts by other scholars, correspondence, and some personal files.

Mary Jean Bowman was born in New York City in 1908 and raised in Newton Center, Massachusetts. She received a B.A. in economics from Vassar College in 1930, an M.A. in economics from Radcliffe College in 1932, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1938. During the 1930s Bowman did casework and research at the Massachusetts Women’s State Prison and began teaching at Iowa State College. In 1943 Bowman, along with her husband C. Arnold Anderson, Theodore Schultz. D. Gale Johnson and others left Iowa State during the “oleomargarine controversy.” (During World War II, Iowa State College faculty published a pamphlet recommending the use of oleomargarine during wartime. Under pressure from the state dairy industry, the college president urged the faculty to revise the pamphlet.) Bowman then worked as a price economist for the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Chicago with her husband in 1949. Because C. Arnold Anderson was a faculty member in the Education department at the University of Chicago, Bowman was not awarded a faculty appointment in the Economics department until 1958 after the University relaxed nepotism rules. She did, however, teach as an Associate Professor in the Economics department prior to 1958. In 1969 she was awarded a joint appointment in the Economics and Education departments.

Bowman was best known for applying human capital theory to the study of education. She published six books and more than seventy five articles over the course of her career. With George Leland Bach, she co-authored the textbook Economic Analysis and Public Policy, which was the most widely used college economics textbook in the 1940s and 1950s. She published influential research on income distribution in the 1950s and produced a major study of the economics of poverty-stricken Eastern Kentucky in the 1960s. She also researched internationally, and published books on the Ivory Coast and Japan as well as numerous articles on economics and education in developing countries. She collaborated with her husband (who directed the University’s Comparative Education Center) to publish work on economics and education based on both domestic and international research.

Mary Jean Bowman died in Chicago in 2002 at age 93.