Economic Geography

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Feminist economic geographies 
Gendered identities, cultural
economies and economic change
Linda McDowell
Thinking and writing personally
It is salutary to reflect on changes in the sub-discipline, on why particular types
of work and different theoretical perspectives are important at different
moments. And, for those of us who have long argued against the notion of the
monastic, disembodied intellectual, living on thought and air alone, much like
an angel, the circumstances of everyday life that both stimulate new research
questions and constrain their exploration must also enter the story. For this reason
I have not only outlined changing approaches and research questions but linked
them to changes in my own life. Methodological debates about reflexivity 
have transformed the domain of geography from the days when ‘objectivity’ was 
paramount and the personal attributes of a scholar were regarded as irrelevant.
But feminist scholarship has challenged this assumption. And feminist theory 
and practice is what has framed my work over the years, as I was influenced by
and contributed to the exciting expansion of feminist-inspired work within and
beyond geography from the 1960s. From 1968, when I was a new and timid
undergraduate, in different ways at different times I have continued to think,
read and act within a framework largely influenced by a commitment to moving
towards greater equality between men and women in the home, in the workplace
and in other arenas of daily and political life. Over the intervening years there has
been a remarkable shift in some of these arenas. Feminist geographical scholar-
ship is, for example, now visible and vibrant and considerable numbers of
women, and men, are involved in exploring geographies of difference, of gender
relations in different parts of the world and at different times, publishing in a
range of journals as well as in the specialist journal in our discipline – Gender,
Place and Culture. 
The universities have also changed over the last three decades. In Britain in
1968, about 8 per cent of women in my age group had the opportunity of going
to university. Now over 40 per cent of the relevant age cohort enter higher educa-
tion, and this cohort consists of as many, if not more, young women than young
men, although the transfer of a large part of the costs of this education to 
individuals and their families is regrettable. Among the academic staff too, there

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is now a more equitable representation of women, although not yet among the
highest ranks. But merely counting the different numbers of men and women
and celebrating change is not sufficient. What is more important, at least for
intellectual effort, has been the transformation of academic discourses – that
wholesale critique and dismantling of the theoretical propositions that lay behind
the invisibility of women’s lives across the sciences, social sciences and the
humanities. 
As feminist scholars have argued, the ungendered notion of the rational 
individual in the social sciences and humanities (Pateman and Grosz 1986) and
unlocated theory – what Haraway (1991) termed the ‘view from nowhere’ – have
excluded women and women’s lives from academic consideration. This view from
nowhere in fact reflects the life world of the powerful and excludes daily life, the
home and the politics of reproduction from the subject matter of the social
sciences and the humanities on the assumption than these are merely trivial and
local issues, unimportant in the grander scheme of things, than is the ‘public’ worlds
of men. This critique is well known and largely accepted but has diffused into
different sub-arenas of geography at differential rates. It has perhaps been in
economic geography (and economics) that the impact of feminist scholarship and
its methodological consequences has been slowest to be felt. This is not to deny
the valiant efforts of a significant number of feminist economists in the US and
the UK (see for example Bergman 1990; Blau and Ferber 1992; Donath 2000;
Ferber and Nelson 1993; Folbre 1994; Folbre 2001; Folbre and Nelson 2000;
Gardiner 1997; Humphries 1995; Jacobsen 1994; Milkman 1987; Milkman and
Townsley 1994; Nelson 1992; Waring 1988) who have challenged the assumptions
of their discipline and added new substantive issues, such as caring, to its agenda.