Books
BOOKS
ECONOMICA: A global history of women, wealth and power (august 2025)
ECONOMICA will be published by Headline Press in August 2025. Pre-order the book here.
The journey of humanity from poverty to prosperity is filled with men who have become household names: from Giovanni de Medici, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford to Warren Buffet, Mike Bloomberg, Lakshmi Mittal and Jack Ma. But how many female entrepreneurs, merchants and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until very recently, there were none at all. After all, even today, if we gathered in one room all those who have gone from rags to riches, it would be a room full to the brim with men: less than three per cent of the world's self-made billionaires are women.
But what about Phryne, the richest woman in Ancient Athens, who offered to pay to rebuild the walls of Thebes after the city was razed to the ground by Alexander the Great? Or the canny businesswoman Khadijah, better known as the first wife of Muhammad, who, after employing him to look after her troop of trading caravans, proposed to the prophet-to-be? Or Ching Shih, a sex-worker turned pirate who amassed a fleet of ships that controlled trade in the South China Sea?
And, just as importantly, what about the everyday women who, paid only a pittance, laboured for the profit of others - the silk 'draw girls' of seventeenth-century Lyon, the bare-breasted female coal miners of the British Industrial Revolution, the 'convict maids' who laid the foundations of modern-day Australia, the female market-traders of Senegal, and the women who have toiled in many a sweatshop or paddy-field in South and East Asia?
Women have never been 'missing' from economic life - they were simply hidden from view by those writing the history books. In ECONOMICA: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WOMEN, WEALTH AND POWER, feminist historian Victoria Bateman rescues them from obscurity in a thrilling narrative that retells the economic history of the world from a female perspective.
Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty (2023)
Order Naked Feminism here or here.
Find out more at NakedFeminism.com
Is it right that, despite the promises of feminism, women’s bodies remain at the mercy of state, society and religion? Should a scantily-clad woman, or a promiscuous one, be worth less than a fully-covered woman, or a chaste one? Are being sexy, and being smart, really mutually exclusive? Can a woman be both body and brain? Victoria Bateman has confronted these questions with actions as well as words. She has appeared naked on national television, on stage, in art, and at protests - using her body, as well as her brain, to deliver her message.
In Naked Feminism, Bateman makes a compelling case for women’s bodily freedom, and explains why the current puritanical revival is so dangerous for women. She takes us on a journey, illustrating the swinging pendulum of bodily modesty through the ages, from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon through to the birth of Christianity and Islam, to the lax morals of the medieval period and the bawdiness of Chaucer and Shakespeare, to the clampdowns of the Puritans and later the Victorians, and, more recently, to the re-veiling of the Middle East and the purity pledges of modern day America. She ends with a plea: feminists must unite to challenge the repression of the female body, as only then can women be truly free.
“Brilliant. Revolutionary. Revealing.”
“I love this book and the world needs it. Without preaching and with the perfect combo of heaviness and humor, our heroic author explains why nakedness – and how we think about it – is a critical topic worth laying bare.”
“Outstanding, controversial and important. This is a book with its finger so firmly on the pulse of feminist activism that its timing could hardly be more perfect.”
“Naked Feminism does not require you to strip off to engage with her ideas, but it does challenge you to cast off your judgements about women’s bodies.”
The Sex Factor: How Women made the West Rich (2019)
FT and GQ Magazine Summer Read and The Guardian Book of the Day
Buy The Sex Factor here or here
Why did the West become so rich? Why is inequality rising? How ‘free’ should markets be? And what does sex have to do with it? In this book, Victoria Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender – ‘the sex factor’ – at the heart of the picture. Spanning the globe and drawing on thousands of years of history, Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity. Genuine female empowerment requires us not only to recognize the liberating potential of markets and smart government policies but also to challenge the double-standard of many modern feminists when they celebrate the brain while denigrating the body.
Listen to Victoria speak about The Sex Factor at the Hay Literary Festival here.
Praise for The Sex Factor
“A spirited exposure of the way that economics neglects gender, enlivened by the author’s own experiences and beliefs.”
“It always was insane to think of markets and the public sphere as independent of domestic life and the private sphere, as male economists did for centuries. In her crystal-clear book, Victoria Bateman provides a sane alternative. Read it and you’ll know how we all became free and rich and, we hope, a little bit saner.”
Victoria Bateman speaking at the Way with Words Literary Festival at Dartington (2019)
“Ever controversial, Victoria Bateman’s new book will cause a stir. While fun and engaging, it also packs a serious punch and explodes the myth that economics is gender neutral. If you are passionate about economics and feminism, this is well worth a read.”
“A fascinating argument…it certainly has originality on its side.”
“Leading feminist Victoria Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender – ‘the sex factor’ – at the heart of the picture. Scouring the globe and drawing on thousands of years of history, Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity.”
“She’s right.”
Reviews of The Sex Factor
For much of history, life was ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, and people could not look forward to a better life for their children and grandchildren. One of the most important questions that economic historians therefore seek to answer, is: How did we go from a situation in which for centuries the average level of economic growth was close to zero, to a new era from the early nineteenth century onwards in which incomes rose year on year? And, related to this, why was Europe the first region to see this process of ‘modern economic growth’? One particularly popular answer to the question of what created long-run economic growth is the development of markets. This book aims to assess the validity of this assertion. It tracks the development of markets in different parts of Europe from the fourteenth through to the nineteenth century, explores the causes of market integration and disintegration (including geography, state formation and war), and considers the relationship between markets and economic growth. It finds that the most economically successful parts of Europe, including the UK and the Netherlands, were those in which markets developed early on, but that these markets were not sufficient to place them on the path to success. If they had been, the Industrial Revolution would have taken place centuries before it did. In addition to markets, this book finds that a well functioning state and the Enlightenment also mattered for economic growth. In The Sex Factor, Victoria digs deeper, exploring how women’s freedoms sowed the seeds for both better markets and a better state, creating a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.
An extract from the book can be found on Google Books, and summaries of the book include those from the University of Cambridge and CapX.