Economic Geography

Conclusions: forwards not back?
The expansion of new theoretical and empirical work about gender and employ-
ment in the last few years has been exceptionally exciting and has, in my view,
had a hugely beneficial impact on economic geography. As Ash Amin and Nigel
Thrift (2000) have argued, economic geography used to have something of an
‘anorak’ image, in its tendency to dismiss power, people, difficult and contradic-
tory lives from its remit. The desire by many economists/economic geographers
to maintain their ‘hard science’ image has meant a continued adherence, by
many, to particular rational ways of seeing the world. But in other parts of the
subject, including parts of economic geography, new theoretical relationships
have proved provocative and productive – with economic sociology and anthro-
pology for example, with the cultural turn in other parts of the social sciences
and the humanities as the discursive construction of identities and organisations
has been explored. New issues with a wide appeal have become of a new cultur-
ally-inflected economic geography, including fashion, finance, food and sex (Amin
and Thrift 2004). 
I find myself, however, increasingly interested in re-thinking the past, both in
a substantive empirical sense and theoretically. I have become fascinated with
questions about my own past and that of other women of my own age. This seems

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to be a not-uncommon phenomenon as several scholars and commentators from
the ‘sixties’ generation, including Lorna Sage (2000), Terry Eagleton (2003),
Linda Grant (2002) and others, have published autobiographies or memoirs of
their own upbringing and/or of their parents lives in the immediately postwar
years. I too have turned to the 1940s and 1950s in a study of migrant women’s
working lives – in this case not of my own family but based on oral histories
undertaken with Latvian women who came to Britain between 1946 and 1949
as ‘volunteer’ workers in the postwar reconstruction effort (McDowell 2005b).
The women whom I interviewed for this study challenged my assumptions and
theoretical arguments about hybridity, about multiple identities and the multiple
and relational construction of the self in their insistence on the importance of an
essentialised sense of national identity, as well as their position within the rigid
class and gender structures of mid twentieth century Britain that constrained
their lives. This work raised in a real way that set of debates that has assumed
recent importance within economic geography – about how to hold together
new understandings about the cultural construction of self, identity, and work-
place practices with an insistence on the importance of material inequalities. 
As Lyn Segal (1999) has argued this debate also seems to her to be the key 
question in contemporary feminist scholarship. 
The nature and content of economic geography have changed immeasurably
since the 1960s, as has the representation of women in the labour market 
and women’s assumptions about their future lives. New class divisions between
women, and between men, have opened up in service-dominated economies as
educational credentials assume growing significance in the prospects for occupa-
tional mobility and well-educated women now have more opportunities than
ever before. And yet, as I have documented in my work, the structures and 
practices of economic institutions remain suffused with gendered assumptions
and the gender divisions of labour in the home remain stubbornly inequitable,
despite work/life balance policies and growing state acceptance that childcare
provision is an economic issue. It may be that the enormously stimulating and
challenging new research agenda in economic geography has outrun the material
changes needed for a ‘post-gender’ world.