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.

Reid served as an economic advisor to the Division of Statistical Standards during 1943 and 1944. She moved permanently to Washington the following year, where she served as the Head of Family Economics for the Department of Agriculture. She returned to academia in 1948, taking up a position in economics at the University of Chicago, Urbana-Champaign. She was also a member of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, reporting on price inflation and family budgets to its Committee on Postwar Agricultural Policy. Reid's tenure at Iowa State and at UIUC involved her in controversies about academic freedom: in Iowa, faculty chafed at the dairy lobby's control over the administration, while in Illinois a series of resignations protested the administration's removal of a popular Dean.

In 1951 Reid returned to the University of Chicago as a Professor of Home Economics and Economics. Although she became emeritus in 1961, she continued to research and write until her death in 1991. Her work at Chicago brought her in contact with economists such as Theodore W. Schultz (a colleague from Iowa) and Milton Friedman. She was an active member of Gary Becker's Applications of Economics Workshop. In later years her work was preoccupied with the relationship between demographic factors such as age, race, health, and income, and productivity and consumption.

The American Economic Association named Reid a Distinguished Fellow in 1980, recognizing her as a "truly tireless colleague" whose contributions to the field were complemented by a "felicitous sense of humour." In 1996 Feminist Economics devoted an issue to recognizing her research, and scholarship continues to try to restore her status as a pioneering economist.

From the guide to the Reid, Margaret G. Papers, 1904-1990, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)