Read Adam Smith, dammit.

I can't! its proping up the middle of my desk!

seriously though, tell me the chapter you are refering to. . . guess I could get that thick bible over there to put in its place. .



OK...

I've made reading Smith's Wealth of Nations my summer heavy reading project, and it really is. I'm closing in on halfway, and I'm able to read only a chapter or so at a time--it wears me out, translating the dialect, putting it in the context of 18th Century Europe, and constantly having to juggle English monetary measures in my head--"a bushel of corn sold in Lancashire for 3 pounds, 17 shillings, 19p; in Newcastle it sold for..." ohhhh, my head. But ya gotta pay your dues if you want to be a knowledgeable advocate for free market principles.

People improving their lot is a common theme, but in Book 3, Chapter 2 (pg. 165 in my edition), Smith discusses the various socioeconomic roles that people have played over time, and how their degree of freedom has determined their natural motivation to improve their lot--slaves, serfs, tenants, leaseholders, freeholders, and on and on. Smith was absolutely convinced the maximum freedom provided maximum motivation for betterment, and he had numerous examples of the disincentives of restricted rights.

He also many times referred to education in monetary terms, as adding to the individual's capital. He would have considered it natural that women would pursue education once they had the freedom and political power to do so; and that it would have led to their economic betterment.

I tell you, Smith would be on my side in this debate!

both education and the right to vote wer brought upon by a socail movement. The war (WWI) effort that got women off being barefoot and pregnant doign housechores and into the workforce was this movement.
Ideally the education would come first.

Ahem...women got the vote in 1912, I believe it was, a couple of years before WW2, as the result of a decades-long struggle. It certainly was not an expedient result of the war. I think you're confusing your world wars--it was in WW2 that women entered the workforce in vast numbers to take the places of male factory workers drafted off to war.

--Robert