Reid, Margaret G. (Margaret Gilpin), 1896-

Margaret Gilpin Reid (1896-1991) was an economist whose research interests centered on household production and consumption, and later on the relationships between health, income, and productivity. Her work on the importance of non-market activities such as housework is considered to have anticipated "New Home Economics" in the 1960s.

Reid was born in Canada and completed a degree in Home Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1921. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931. She taught briefly at Connecticut College, moving on to Iowa State College (Iowa State University) where she taught and researched until 1945. Her first book, Economics of Household Production, was published in 1934. Reid, like her PhD advisor Hazel Kyrk, sought to theorize the productive contribution made by domestic activities within the household. She drew much of her data from experimental agricultural stations in the Midwest. Her attention to labour skills and technologies applied in the home led her to conclude that the household was not only a site of consumption, but of production. Feminist economists would later argue that this work was underappreciated and even ignored, pointing out its similarity to Gary Becker's 1965 Nobel-prize winning theory of time allocation.

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