A History of the Institutionalization of Feminist Economics through Its Tensions and Founders

Abstract

Feminist economics was produced by the deployment of relatively diverse research under a single academic label. This article offers a global picture of the first years of feminist economics. Focusing on the heterogeneity of the approaches that coexist in the field—and the porosity among them—this article proposes an answer to the question, How does feminist economics persist as an approach and a community even though both are quite diverse? The three tensions studied were as follows: the tension between the Women's Caucus of the Union for Radical Political Economics and the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, along with the role played by the sessions organized during the ASSA conferences; the tension between the different methodologies used by feminist economists; and the tension surrounding the place of feminist economics in the discipline. We identified different elements to understand how feminist economists coexist under the same umbrella. Feminist economists' common frustration about economics' resistance to including feminist perspectives is central. The main sources for this paper are seventeen semistructured interviews we conducted in 2019 and 2020 aiming to collect the oral histories of selected feminist economists closely related to the beginning of the institutionalization process of the field.