Feminism is often portrayed as a relatively new perspective in debates about the international dimensions of political economy, but it has predecessors in ideas advanced by some prominent thinkers in the pre-1945 era. These thinkers shared– with varying levels of commitment – a broad normative goal which has echoes in contemporary feminist IPE literature: that of challenging patriarchal practices and structures in order to end women’s subordination within the world economy. There were many divisions among these thinkers, including between those who sought to promote feminist goals within an economic liberal framework (including Jane Addams, Bertha Lutz, Chrystal Macmillan, Harriet Martineau) and those more drawn to socialism and Marxism (Williama Burroughs, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Aleksandra Kollontai, Paulina Luisi, Magda Portal, Clara Zetkin). Some other thinkers also linked feminist goals to other perspectives such as neomercantilism (once again, Henry Carey), Pan-Africanism (Amy Ashwood Garvey), and anarchism (He-Yin Zhen).

This chapter returns to the foundational questions of what it means to produce international thought. What are the markers of recognition, in terms of location and genre? Amy Ashwood Garvey was a race woman, a ‘street-strolling’ Pan-Africanist and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this gifted conversationalist, public orator and rhetorician, political praxis and organizing were a way of theorizing. Although her political activism spanned the black Atlantic, it was partly due to her commitment to localized ‘women’s work’ that she understood the limits of a patriarchal Pan-Africanism. Rather than positing a unitary blackness, Garvey analyzed the intersections of race, class, sex, gender and nation in community-level struggles for self-determination. Viewed through such a lens, black patriarchy did not suppress but politicize black women. Understanding Garvey’s theorizing as fractal, accommodating struggle within struggle, resolves some of the seeming contradictions in her thought.