Political economy’s name was coined to distance it from household economics

Evidence

The term was initially used by the nineteenth-century political economist Richard Whately in an attempt to free the new science of political economy from its association with the less than elevated concerns of the household. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 692

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to debates about the gendered separation of economics from domestic labor, and echoes feminist economics critiques raised in other readings.
• CANDY: A fun trivia fact: the word ‘economy’ was deliberately renamed by Whately to sever ties with housekeeping.
• QUESTION: What exactly did Whately reject about the household association, and how did the renaming shift the discipline’s object of study?