Long a liberal voice in the field, Ms. Bergmann was a fierce critic of the laissez-faire policies then being advocated by the Reagan administration, and of proposed cuts to social programs that dated to the New Deal.

“We have our Scrooges, and lately the Scrooges have grown bolder in expressing themselves,” she wrote in December 1981. “But we are not a nation of Scrooges. On the contrary, we are a nation that, seeing voluntary efforts as commendable but chronically insufficient, has for almost 50 years been relieving social distress through the federal Treasury, using the coercive powers of government to collect the funds.”

Some of Ms. Bergmann’s columns turned out to be prescient, with an early warning of just how severe the recession of the early 1980s would be. She also wrote a column in May 1982 column entitled “A Threat Ahead From Word Processors.”

In that piece, she predicted that the advent of computers and an “an electronic revolution in the office” would decimate the need for typists, secretaries and clerical workers, who tended to be women.

She noted the downward pressure this might have on wages in some fields, and argued that while technological change and greater productivity might be a good thing economically, existing barriers to women in the work force might make finding new jobs difficult and worsen poverty.

“Will high-status people be willing to type their own documents in the future?” she asked. “Though the stigma runs deep, the spreading use of the computer for tasks other than word processing may succeed in removing the stain from the activity of typing on the job.”

In addition to frequent articles in academic journals, Ms. Bergmann was the author of a well-received history of women in the workplace, “The Economic Emergence of Women.” It first appeared in 1986 and was reissued in a new edition in 2005.