Economic Geography

On models, Marxism and men
There are several reasons why economic geographers have, by and large, tended
to neglect feminist arguments. First, like economics, the discourse and methods
of economic geography are highly contested. In the 1960s, the proponents of
what was then seen as a revolutionary approach – spatial science – turned against
the earlier largely descriptive work on regional development – to argue for an
understanding of economic landscapes based in abstract flows, best analysed by
mathematical modelling, in which transportation costs and friction of distance
loomed large and the resulting spatial patterns might be explained by network
algebra. These disembodied, a-historical, placeless explanations had a logical
elegance and a conceptual attraction that mirrors neo-classical models in econom-
ics but denied the existence of real actors, limited knowledge, vested interest and
power. A response to these criticisms lay in the turn to the explanatory power of
geo-historical materialism, largely stimulated by David Harvey’s (1973, 1982,
1985, 1989, 1996) work and by others writing outside geography but influencing
its debates. Castells’ (1977) work on collective consumption and Lipietz’s (1987)
development of regulation theory, for example, had a huge impact on urban
and economic geography respectively. Marxism, itself a contested and diverse
Feminist economic geographies
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approach, led to different emphases: on the circulation of capital, on the accu-
mulation process, on class divisions and class struggle, providing a welcome correc-
tion to some of the absences in neo-classical and modelling approaches. But, of
course, each of these approaches depends on an entirely different conception of
the world, on an unbridgeable epistemological divide, still reflected in the current
divisions between those who draw on versions of political economy and those 
who have turned to the mathematical elegance of the ‘new economic geography’
with its parallels in economics with the work of inter alia Krugman (1991) and
Venables (1998). Secure within their disciplinary camps, few scholars have been
prepared to redefine their theoretical or empirical work in the face of feminist
critiques. Too much might be lost by giving ground in an academic environment
increasingly defined by individualistic notions of competition and success. 
The second reason why economic geography has been reluctant to embrace
feminism is connected to the first: each of the two approaches above neglect
gender relations. In the first, people seldom appear at all and in the latter, when
they do figure, they are ungendered capitalists, entrepreneurs, financiers or work-
ers and class struggle is seen as the motor of resistance. In both Castells’s and
Lipietz’s work, for example, women’s unpaid domestic labours are excluded: in
the former by Castells’s definition of collective consumption – the provision by the
state of the services necessary to reproduce the working class – and in the latter
the exclusion of women and the home from the social relations of capitalism
erased the family and the home and its division of labour from examination 
(see McDowell 1991). 
But the reasons for this neglect lie deeper in the structure of modern social
thought and its distinction between the public highly regulated worlds of the
economy and polity, of government, labour markets, trade and commerce and the
private world of the home, constructed as a space of leisure and affection, unreg-
ulated and largely untouched by the competitive world of industrial capitalism,
at least as an ideal, if seldom in practice. This division, as many feminist scholars
have argued, is one that is paralleled by a gender division – the public world is 
a world of men, the private world that of women, based on ‘natural’ associations
of love and care, untainted by the cash nexus. Its very naturalness needs no theo-
retical explanation. Here too there is a well-known critique, now generally
uncontested but still ignored in ‘mainstream’ work. Feminist economists and
geographers, however, have carefully explored the reasons for and the consequences
of the absence of the private worlds of domestic labour, reproduction, caring for
others, from the very definition of what is ‘economic’ and what activities constitute
the ‘economy’ (Massey 1997; McDowell 1999, 2000a). Despite these arguments,
some of the most thoughtful economic geographers writing today – often precisely
on the contested definition of the economic (Castree 2004; Hudson 2004) and/or
on the changing nature of work (Castree et al. 2004) – still ignore the gendered
construction of these concepts, so neglecting large areas of unpaid and voluntary
labour, largely undertaken by women.
Despite the continued neglect of these theoretical arguments by too many
economic geographers, the material world has changed in recent decades in ways
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