Silences of Bretton Woods: gender inequality, racial discrimination and environmental degradation

Abstract

In the formal deliberations of the Bretton Woods conference, little was said about gender inequality, racial discrimination, or environmental degradation. At the time, however, the significance of these issues to international economic governance was prominently discussed elsewhere, including in other conferences planning the postwar international order. The fact that the Bretton Woods architects chose to ignore these issues, thus, was an anomaly that needs to be recognized as an important part of the content of the conference and its ‘embedded liberal’ normative framework. Explaining these silences also reveals important dimensions of the politics of Bretton Woods that have been understudied. More generally, this history highlights how efforts to encourage the Bretton Woods institutions to engage more with these three issues—and political resistance to those efforts—are not unique to the current era but were present at the founding of these bodies. It also contributes to recent calls for IPE scholars to devote more attention to the study of gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. These issues may be ‘blind spots’ in contemporary IPE, but discussions of their relevance to international economic governance have deep historical roots, including at the creation of the postwar international economic order.

Keywords:

• Bretton Woods
• gender inequality
• racial discrimination
• environmental degradation

Introduction

Although the Bretton Woods negotiations have been extensively studied, existing literature says very little about how they addressed three issues: gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. The reason is likely that these topics, in fact, were largely ignored in the formal deliberations of the July 1944 conference. In this article, I argue that these silences of Bretton Woods deserve more attention than they have received. Their study sheds important new light on this foundational moment in international economic governance and contributes to broader contemporary scholarship in international political economy (IPE).

For scholars interested in the history of Bretton Woods, I show that the silences did not reflect a broader disinterest in the relevance of these three issues to the subject of the conference during that era. On the contrary, the significance of these issues to international economic governance was widely discussed at that time, including in other conferences that were planning the postwar international order. The fact that the Bretton Woods architects chose to ignore these issues, thus, was an anomaly that needs to be recognized as an important part of the content of the 1944 conference and its ‘embedded liberal’ normative framework. Explaining these silences also reveals important dimensions of the politics of Bretton Woods that have been understudied.

In addition, this analysis of these silences of Bretton Woods contributes to contemporary IPE scholarship that is encouraging the field to devote more attention to the study of gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. Although these issues have been described as ‘blind spots’ in contemporary IPE literature (Lebaron et al., 2021), this history shows that discussions of their relevance to international economic governance have deep roots, including at the time of the creation of the postwar international economic order itself. It also highlights how efforts to encourage the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) to engage more with these issues—and political resistance to these efforts—are not unique to the current era but were present at the very founding of these bodies.

Gender inequality and racial discrimination

The silences of Bretton Woods on gender inequality and racial discrimination were particularly striking because its delegates were asked, less than two months before the conference began, to consider these issues by a high-profile body: the International Labour Organization (ILO). The request came in the important ‘Declaration of Philadelphia’ that was made by ILO delegates from 41 countries on May 10, 1944. This declaration, which was subsequently included within the ILO’s constitution, affirmed the following:

1. all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity;

2. the attainment of the conditions in which this shall be possible must constitute the central aim of national and international policy;

3. all national and international policies and measures, in particular those of an economic and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective. (ILO, 1944, p. 622; emphases added).

With the Bretton Woods conference beginning on July 1, the ILO Declaration’s emphasis on international policies and measures of ‘an economic and financial character’ was clearly aimed at its upcoming negotiations. In other words, the ILO delegates were insisting that the Bretton Woods architects explicitly judge their designs for the postwar international financial order according to the principle that ‘all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity’. This language drew a direct connection between postwar international financial planning and the cause of combating racial discrimination and gender inequality.

The ILO conference is rarely mentioned in histories of Bretton Woods, but it was not a marginal event. US President Franklin Roosevelt invited the delegates to the White House one week after the Philadelphia Declaration and praised the latter. After emphasising the need to be ‘against exploitation everywhere’, he singled out the first statement from the Declaration cited above as ‘saying roughly the same thing in better language’ and he agreed that ‘the attainment of those conditions must constitute a central aim of national and international policy’. More generally, he argued that the Declaration ‘reaffirmed principles which are the essential bulwarks of any permanent peace’ and added that he was glad to be endorsing ‘its specific terms and declarations on behalf of the United States’ and trusted that they would soon be endorsed ‘by all of the United Nations’ (Roosevelt, 1944a).

Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the Philadelphia Declaration was linked to his vision that postwar peace needed to be founded on the promotion of fundamental individual freedoms centered on the idea of universal human rights (Borgwardt, 2005). As he put it in his famous ‘four freedoms’ speech of January 1941, ‘freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere’ (Roosevelt, 1941). When outlining this vision in that speech and in the Atlantic Charter eight months later, Roosevelt did not include an explicit discussion of gender or race. But when the ILO included these issues in their endorsement of human rights, Roosevelt did not object.¹ As the US president predicted, these issues were then included in the UN Charter that was signed in mid-1945 in San Francisco. Its Article 13(b) noted that the General Assembly should initiate studies and make recommendations for ‘promoting international co-operation’ in the ‘economic’ field and ‘assisting in the realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. The charter’s preamble also highlighted a commitment to ‘the equal rights of men and women’.

The Bretton Woods conference, by contrast, made no effort to do what the ILO conference had requested: judge whether its international economic proposals promoted the rights and freedoms of all humans, ‘irrespective of race, creed or sex’. To be sure, the chair of the meeting, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau did endorse women’s equal participation in the market in an offhand way: ‘What we have done here in Bretton Woods is to devise machinery by which men and women everywhere can freely exchange, on a fair and stable basis, the goods which they produce through their labor’ (US State Department, 1948, p. 1116). Beyond that vague kind of statement, however, there was no direct discussion of the goal of promoting women’s equal rights in the detailed Bretton Woods transcripts (Schuler & Rosenberg, 2012; US State Department, 1948). In contrast to the UN’s charter (and the ILO’s constitution), references to this issue were also absent from the Articles of Agreement of the IMF and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD; subsequently the World Bank).

Issues of racial discrimination were also hardly discussed at the meeting. A few American and European delegates described the international nature of the meeting as one that brought ‘different races’ together (US State Department, 1948, pp. 110, 1104). The final speech by Brazil’s head delegate, Arthur de Souza Costa, also contrasted the Bretton Woods discussions with the racism of Nazi Germany, noting that conference’s success provided ‘evidence that human solidarity is not a result of racial unity’. He added: ‘Against the Nazi claim that a supposed racial superiority gives the right to rule the world, Bretton Woods offers a way for the guidance of human destinies through the development of human brotherhood’ (US State Department, 1948, p. 1120). Beyond these general points, however, the Bretton Woods transcripts contain little reference to race or racial discrimination and these issues received no mention in IMF’s and IBRD’s Articles of Agreement.

Broader attention to these issues

Why was so little attention devoted to gender inequality and racial discrimination at Bretton Woods? The content of the Philadelphia Declaration and the UN Charter highlight how these silences of Bretton Woods cannot be attributed to a general lack of interest at the time in the relevance of these issues to the subject of the conference. Indeed, there had been prominent discussions about the relationship of these issues to international economic governance throughout the interwar years.

In the case of gender inequality, prominent international feminist organizations such as Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) (1919, p. 11) had urged as far back as 1919 that the architects of the League of Nations support economic principles such as ‘equal pay for equal value between men and women’ and equal opportunities for women in education and employment. Issues such as these continued to be discussed in international fora throughout the interwar years, including within the ILO where they set the stage for the gender content of the ILO’s Philadelphia Declaration and the UN Charter (Lubin & Winslow, 1990; Marino, 2019; Rupp, 1997). The international activism of Latin American feminists was particularly important in promoting that content. For example, the Brazilian feminist Bertha Lutz played a key role in the drafting of the gender equality language at the ILO meeting in Philadelphia (where she was an advisor and alternate delegate for her country’s delegation) and the UN charter discussions in San Francisco (where she was an official delegate). Throughout the 1930s, Latin American feminists saw the promotion of gender equality as a key part of the fight against fascism in a context where Hitler and Mussolini were dramatically scaling back women’s rights in Germany and Italy. They worked together initially in the Pan-American context, including within the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) which had been created in 1928 as the world’s first intergovernmental organization focused on women. By the early 1940s, they were promoting this idea in a wider global context in relation to Roosevelt’s idea of four freedoms (Marino, 2019; Sikkink, 2017, pp. 80–84).

Latin American feminists also linked the goal of gender equality directly to postwar international economic planning. Take, for example, the views of Paulina Luisi from Uruguay who is described by Marino (2019, p. 8) as ‘the recognized “mother” of Latin American feminism’ during the interwar years. Luisi insisted to US authorities in May 1943 that any postwar multilateral economic institution being created had to explicitly include women’s rights because the war was being fought ‘with the effort and sacrifice of both men and women’ (Marino, 2019, p. 190). Marino (2019, p. 190) notes that, at a subsequent April 1944 meeting of the IACW in Washington, Latin American feminists also ‘connected their hopes for women’s rights with desires for equitable trade policies, protective tariffs to secure fair commodity prices, and a multilateral international body to enforce such provisions’.

Latin American feminists also often backed the kinds of anti-racist sentiments that were reflected in documents such as the ILO’s Philadelphia Declaration.² Many others also critiqued racial discrimination at this time in the context of discussions of international economic governance, including figures associated with the Pan-African movement such as the well-known American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. At the turn of the century, Du Bois had authored the famous statement from the first Pan-African Congress of 1900 that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line’ (quoted in Langley, 1979, p. 738). He remained a key figure in the Pan-African movement after World War 1 and at the time of Bretton Woods, presiding over a high-profile Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945 which demanded an end to colonialism in Africa and elsewhere (Esedebe, 1994). He also attended the UN’s San Francisco conference as a representative of the US National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In advance of the meeting, he worked with many Africans and African-Americans who urged the UN conference to promote an agenda of equal rights, including economic ones, for all (Sherwood, 1996, pp. 76–78).

Accompanying Du Bois on the NAACP delegation to San Francisco was its executive director, Walter White, who also supported the creation of international bill of rights endorsing racial equality (Lauren, 2011, p. 179). Earlier in May 1942, just after US planning for Bretton Woods had begun, White had urged Roosevelt to link the Allied wartime goals to the cause of combating racism internationally as a way of boosting support for the fight against Hitler both within the US and abroad, including in strategically important places such as India. Indeed, to discourage Indian nationalists from supporting Japan, White suggested ‘the drafting of a Pacific Charter which will assure to all the peoples of the world that the era of white domination of colored peoples is ended’ (quoted in Slate, 2012, p. 131). The case for this kind of statement was strengthened in July when Roosevelt received a warning from Mohandas Gandhi that the Allied claim to be fighting for freedom was ‘hollow, so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home’ (quoted in Slate, 2012, p. 134).

It was also strengthened by the fact that Japan and its wartime allies themselves soon highlighted the link between anti-racism and postwar international economic planning. That link was drawn in a November 1943 ‘Greater East Asia Joint Declaration’ that was endorsed at a Tokyo conference not just by the Japanese government but also by figures from the Chinese Nanjing regime, Manchukuo, Thailand, India, Philippines and Burma. Dubbed the ‘Pacific Charter’ by Japanese media and intended as a counter to the Atlantic Charter, this declaration aimed to build support for Japan’s vision of a postwar economic role for its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and to encourage Britain and the United States to end the war. Its signatories committed not just to economic cooperation, but also to ‘work for the abolition of racial discriminations’ worldwide (quoted in Yellen, 2019, p. 158). Although the latter goal was reminiscent of Japan’s (failed) effort to incorporate a racial equality clause at the 1919 Paris Peace conference, Yellen (2019, p. 160) notes the ‘lack of idealism’ behind the 1943 wording in the sense that it was mainly designed to ‘both “win public sentiment” and breed fear among the Allied powers that the war would devolve into a race war’. It was also inconsistent with the racism displayed by some Japanese officials towards populations they had conquered in the region (Peattie, 1984, p. 125; Yellen, 2019, p. 167).

In short, the lack of attention given to gender inequality and racial discrimination at Bretton Woods was not a product of an absence of broader discussion of the relevance of these issues to postwar international economic planning at the time. To explain Bretton Woods’ silences, we need to look to other factors, each of which highlights dimensions of the politics of Bretton Woods that have been understudied in existing literature on the conference.

Who was at the negotiating table and who was not?

To begin with, it mattered that the voices raising these issues in other contexts had little or no role in the Bretton Woods negotiations. These absences do not usually draw attention in existing histories which are focused on analyzing those who at the negotiating table at Bretton Woods rather than those who were not. To explain the silences of Bretton Woods on gender inequality and racial discrimination, however, a focus on the latter is particularly important.

One voice with little role at Bretton Woods was the ILO itself, which was granted only observer status at the conference. Key figures in the US State Department and British government opposed the idea that the ILO should have a more significant role in postwar international economic planning, not least because of the ILO’s tripartite structure (in which not just governments but also businesses and labor were represented). The ILO’s position was also weakened by its association with the old League of Nations and by the fact that the USSR—a key partner in the Bretton Woods negotiations—was hostile to the body (which it had boycotted since 1937) (Clavin, 2013, pp. 274–78; Jensen, 2011; Van Goethem, 2010). To be sure, Roosevelt was more supportive of the ILO, but he did not take an active role in the preparations for the Bretton Woods conference or the negotiations at the conference.

The neglect of gender issues was also encouraged by the absence of the kinds of feminist voices who were involved in the drafting of the Philadelphia Declaration and UN Charter. Of the 176 official delegates at the Bretton Woods conference, only two were women. The male-dominated nature of the meeting was not, in fact, very different from the ILO’s Philadelphia conference where there was just one woman among the 125 lead delegates or the UN’s San Francisco conference where only four of the 160 delegates who signed the final Charter were women (Carr, 1944, p. 8; Wamsley, 2022, p. 137). What was different, however, was the role played by the women at these respective conferences.

As noted above, Lutz played a key role in ensuring that language relating to gender equality was included in the final documents in Philadelphia and San Francisco.³ At Bretton Woods, Lutz was not present and nor were other Latin American feminists who had been important in building support for this agenda. While Lutz and other Latin American feminists had developed strong transnational networks in the ILO and Pan-American bodies such as IACW, they had less connection to the financial policymaking circles that dominated the Bretton Woods negotiations. At a meeting of the IACW in late 1942, Latin American women had demanded that women be included on their governments’ delegations in postwar international planning conferences (and that women’s rights be incorporated into the plans) (Marino, 2019, p. 181). Although Latin America was very well represented at Bretton Woods (making up 19 of the 44 delegations), women were not included among the region’s official delegates.

What about the views of the two women who did serve as official delegates? Little is known about one of them, L.J. Gouseva from Russia. The other was Mabel Newcomer, an American professor of economics at Vassar College (and past teacher of Morgenthau’s daughter). As part of their efforts to influence postwar international planning, US women’s groups lobbied for at least one female delegate to be included in the US delegation to the Bretton Woods conference. Hoping to cultivate support for the Bretton Woods proposals among these groups, the Roosevelt administration agreed and chose Newcomer for the role (Conway, 2014, p. 209; Vassar Historian, n.d.). Newcomer did not, however, press during the formal conference deliberations for women’s rights to be inserted into the mandate of the Bretton Woods institutions.

At the end of the conference, Morgenthau (1944a, p. 11) asked Newcomer to promote the results of Bretton Woods to ‘the women of America’ and offered funding to support this. She agreed and subsequently highlighted to women’s groups how the Bretton Woods agreements would contribute to peace and prosperity in a general sense (Newcomer, 1945). When Newcomer was asked by a reporter at the conference itself how the meeting would help women specifically, she invoked the experience of the depression of the 1930s:

I was teaching at Vassar, and I remember how discouraged I’d get when the girls we were training came and asked me if I thought there would be jobs for them…. You don’t have to remind the mothers of America of unemployment and bread-lines and bank-failures. They remember only too well—and they want this conference to see that it doesn’t happen again. (Quoted in Morgenthau, 1944b, p. 257)

The fact that Newcomer did not try to raise the profile of women’s rights in the formal Bretton Woods discussion was consistent with the position of many women who were active in women’s groups close to the Roosevelt administration. Along with some of their British counterparts, these women—including Eleanor Roosevelt—were wary of promoting an equal rights agenda at this time because of longstanding concerns that it might be used to dismantle legislation designed to protect women, such as labor laws (Marino, 2019, pp. 172–7; Rupp, 1997, pp. 139–46; Wamsley, 2022, p. 132; Zimmermann, 2019). At the IACW meeting in late 1942 where Latin American women had insisted on the inclusion of women’s rights in postwar international planning, a US representative had objected to the idea. At the UN meeting in San Francisco in 1945, some British and American women were also not supportive of the efforts of Latin America feminists to include women’s equal rights into the goals of the UN (Marino, 2019, pp. 180, 196, 199, 203–6; Sikkink, 2017, pp. 81–82; Skard, 2008). The marginalization of Latin American feminists from the Bretton Woods negotiations was, thus, an important development in helping to explain the absence of any formal discussion of gender equality during the meeting.

Their marginalization also contributed to the neglect of any formal commitments to racial equality, an issue they had helped to promote in Philadelphia and San Francisco. The absence of any champions of the Pan-African cause at Bretton Woods also helps to account for this outcome. Du Bois and Walter White had no input into the Bretton Woods planning process in the US, and members of the African diaspora were not represented in any other delegation. Because of the colonized status of most of Africa at the time, the continent itself was represented only by delegations from Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. The white-run government of South Africa had no interest in critiquing racial discrimination, while the Ethiopian and Liberian delegations made few contributions to the recorded deliberations. The Egyptian delegates were more vocal, but they were more interested in other issues, including boosting the collective power of ‘Middle East countries’ at the meeting (as opposed to the pan-African cause) (Schuler & Rosenberg, 2012, p. 229).

Most other countries subject to colonial rule—and its associated racism—were also not invited to the conference. The only exceptions were India (whose delegation included both British officials and Indians) and the Philippines (which had been promised independence by the United States at the end of the war). But neither the Indian delegates nor those from the Philippines raised issues of racial discrimination in the formal deliberations. The same was true of the other delegates from Asia who represented Iran, Iraq, and China. The fact that these Asian delegates did not raise this issue was interesting given that, as noted above, it was being politicized by Japan and its Asian allies at the time. But these delegates represented governments that were opposed to the Japanese war effort and may have been wary of being perceived as supporting its talking points at this uncertain moment during the war (when the D-Day landings had just begun). Many were also keen to gain access to the new sources of development finance that a successful outcome of the Bretton Woods conference would generate. If they wanted to raise the issue of combatting racial discrimination on the postwar planning agenda, other settings may have been deemed more appropriate for that goal.⁴

Views of the delegates

If the absence of certain voices at the Bretton Woods negotiating table contributed to its silences on the question of gender inequality and racial discrimination, why was there not more interest in these issues amongst the delegates themselves? Many of the delegates were financial officials whose training and work experience did not include engagement with debates about policies attempting to promote gender and racial equality. Some also did not appear to be sympathetic to the goals of such policies.⁵ For example, the official transcripts of the meeting include no concern expressed by any delegate about the gendered division of labor at the conference itself. The latter included not just the tiny number of female negotiators but also the fact that the conference was supported by a large secretarial staff of around 200 women that worked ‘on a 24-hour basis—three shifts’ (Morgenthau, 1944b, p. 248). Many delegates no doubt considered this division of labor a natural state of affairs. Indeed, the patriarchal perspectives of some of those delegates were clearly evident in an unofficial document prepared in the hotel bar on the final night of the conference by some unnamed delegates. It outlined rules for a proposed new institution—the ‘International Ballyhoo Fun’—with provisions that included initial contributions being made in ‘gold blondes’ and ‘brunettes’ (Conway, 2014, p. 235). Racist views were also expressed privately at the conference (see, for example, Conway, 2014, p. 146).

At the same time, there were some key officials at Bretton Woods who were clearly more concerned about gender inequality and racial discrimination. Particularly important was Harry Dexter White who was the lead American negotiator and the figure who did more than any other to shape the agenda and outcome of the conference. As an ‘ardent New Dealer’ (Van Dormael, 1978, p. 42), White enthusiastically embraced Roosevelt’s vision of a world order based on fundamental freedoms and human rights. When he developed his initial plans for the postwar international financial order in early 1942, White not only referred to the goals of the Atlantic charter but also suggested that membership in his proposed international bank would be open only to countries who endorsed ‘a bill of rights of the peoples of the United Nations’ that outlined ‘the ideal of freedom for which most of the peoples are fighting the aggressor nations’. When justifying this latter proposal, White argued: ‘The inclusion of that provision would make clear to the peoples everywhere that these new instrumentalities which are being developed go far beyond usual commercial considerations and considerations of economic self-interest. They would be evidence of the beginning of a truly new order in the realm where it has hitherto been most lacking—international finance’ (Oliver, 1975, pp. 319–20).

White even included a draft UN bill of rights with one of his early proposals, although its content is unknown because it appears to have been lost to the historical record. If this draft included the idea that rights should be ‘irrespective of race, creed or sex’ (as the ILO’s Philadelphia Declaration put it), White’s initial plans for the postwar international financial order from early 1942 echoed the sentiment of the ILO delegates in May 1944. This scenario is certainly plausible given the views White expressed elsewhere. For example, just before his death in 1948, he passionately described his ‘American creed’ to a Congressional committee in the following anti-racist way: ‘I am opposed to discrimination in any form, whether on grounds of race, color, religions, political belief or economic status’. This passage did not refer to gender discrimination, but White’s sympathy for feminist goals was evident in the wording of another part of his creed where he highlighted his belief in ‘the right of each individual to follow the calling of his or her own choice, and the right of every individual to an opportunity to develop his or her capacity to the fullest’. (quoted in Conway, 2014, pp. 358–59).

Because of White’s deep involvement in inter-American economic diplomacy during the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was also likely very familiar with the feminist and anti-racist ideas of international human rights emerging in Latin America at that time. Whether his notion of linking postwar international financial plans to a UN bill of rights was influenced by that regional context remains unclear, but he certainly shared the left-wing, anti-fascist goals of many Latin American activists promoting these ideas. Indeed, those goals had encouraged him to pioneer new kinds of US financial diplomacy towards Latin America beginning in the late 1930s which heavily shaped his early 1942 plans (Helleiner, 2014, chs. 1–4). By the time of the 1944 conference at Bretton Woods, however, White’s ambitious ideas about linking postwar international financial plans to wider ideas of human rights had been dropped. What changed? Answering this question provides some further explanations for the silences of Bretton Woods.

Domestic and international constraints

To begin with, proposals to incorporate principles of human rights into the mandates of postwar international institutions were controversial within the Roosevelt administration at the time. Important figures involved in postwar international economic planning such as US secretary of state Cordell Hull opposed the idea. As Sikkink (2014, p. 393) puts it, ‘Hull had been willing to use human rights during the war as part of the articulation of war aims, but he opposed any efforts to promote human rights that would undermine national sovereignty’. After White developed his initial plans of early 1942, he was forced to negotiate their content with an interdepartmental committee which included Hull’s State Department. After that point, many of White’s initial ideas were abandoned, including his proposal for tying membership in the IBRD to an endorsement of an international bill of rights.

If White had tried to reinsert this idea at the time of Bretton Woods, he would have faced strong internal resistance. By this time, Sikkink notes, Hull had ‘carried the day’ on this issue within the Roosevelt administration. The US position at that moment was evident in the wider discussions about the UN’s founding at the Dunbarton Oaks conference that began just one month after the meeting at Bretton Woods had ended. At that conference, Sikkink (2014, p. 393) notes that the US delegation ‘was instructed to avoid any detailed discussion of human rights’. As she notes, even ‘the initial US drafts of the UN Charter contained no reference to human rights’.

References to human rights were incorporated into the UN Charter by the time of the 1945 San Francisco conference only because of pressure from other governments, particularly Latin American ones, as well as from non-governmental groups. As noted above, however, the specific Latin American delegates who attended Bretton Woods did not show any interest in pressing for this kind of idea. The Bretton Woods conference was also not subject to the kind of lobbying by non-governmental groups that took place later in San Francisco. One reason was that its subject—international financial reform—attracted much less public attention from groups who sought to promote the idea of international human rights. Another was that the organizers of the Bretton Woods conference deliberately tried to insulate the meeting from outside lobbying by holding it at a remote resort hotel (Conway, 2014).

There were other domestic political barriers Harry Dexter White would have faced if he had tried to press for the inclusion of explicit references to gender or racial equality at Bretton Woods. After outlining his initial proposals of early 1942, White was increasingly aware of the need to scale back his ambitions in order to secure eventual Congressional approval of the Bretton Woods agreements. As noted above, any references to equal rights for women risked generating controversy within the US women’s movement whose support the Roosevelt administration hoped to mobilize behind its postwar goals. Commitments to racial equality would also have provoked the ire of white Southern Democrats whose support had been crucial to the New Deal since the early 1930s (and who had ensured that it did not challenge institutionalized racism in their region). As Ira Katznelson (2013) has shown, those Democrats provided a key political foundation not only for the party’s Congressional majorities but also for Roosevelt’s increasingly internationalist agenda since the late 1930s.

In this sense, the silences of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements on the question of gender and racial equality also reflected the distinctive politics of the New Deal itself with respect to these issues. Scholars sometimes quote Morgenthau’s claim that the early US proposals for Bretton Woods represented a ‘New Deal in international economics’ (Van Dormael 1978, p. 52). The phrase invoked the way in which the proposals sought to create a novel international economic framework that was supportive of the New Deal ideals of government economic activism. In the context of these two silences of the final 1944 Bretton Woods agreements, however, the phrase can also conjure up these other dimensions of New Deal politics that have received much less attention in IPE scholarship on Bretton Woods.

Harry Dexter White would also have faced international opposition if he tried to bring these two issues into the Bretton Woods negotiations. Commitments to racial equality would have antagonized many European countries whose colonial empires were legitimized with racist ideology. Analyses of Bretton Woods usually say little about the place of colonialism in the negotiations. During the conference, however, American officials made clear privately their fear that the whole meeting might be undermined if they raised questions about the legitimacy and future of European colonialism. These fears were expressed strongly in the context of a discussion about whether Dutch officials should be allowed to claim the trade of their Dutch East Indies colony as a basis for a larger quota within the IMF. To avoid the appearance of endorsing European colonial rule, some US officials initially wondered whether separate quotas should be created for the Dutch and their colony or whether provisions should be made for quotas to be divided when colonies became independent. But these ideas were dropped when others warned that they would ‘really be stirring up a hornets’ nest’ and would ‘raise hell’ at the conference by questioning European colonial rule (Morgenthau, 1944c, pp. 283–84). Indeed, Morgenthau was so worried about that risk that he insisted that the private discussion they had had on the issue not be repeated to anyone else.

More generally, it was also clear that other governments—including two of the other great powers involved in the negotiations, the UK and the USSR—shared Hull’s concern that national sovereignty would be undermined if human rights became part of the mandate of postwar international bodies (Lauren, 2011, pp. 145–63). As Martin (2022, p. 19) notes, a similar concern had generated opposition to international discussions of women’s rights and racial equality as far back as the Paris Peace conference of 1919. It was particularly salient to the Bretton Woods conference given that the meeting was establishing international institutions that would have considerable economic power. It was one thing for these goals to be endorsed by the relatively toothless ILO in Philadelphia or in a very general way in the UN Charter at San Francisco. It was quite another for the powerful BWIs to be given a mandate to promote them.

When Harry Dexter White had first raised the idea of tying IBRD membership to the endorsement of a UN bill of rights, he had acknowledged that he did so ‘with trepidation’ and noted ‘that there are a number of countries which in their practices do not now give, and have not given, evidence that they subscribe to the principles’ in such a bill of rights. He had added hopefully, however, that ‘no country would probably wish to admit that they were not, however, willing to abide by those principles as soon as it was feasible and insofar as it was possible’ (Oliver, 1975, p. 319). White’s optimism on this point overlooked the concerns that many governments, including his own, had about diluting their sovereignty over political and social issues of this kind.

These concerns even found formal expression in the IMF’s formal Articles of Agreement. In provisions relating to approval of a country’s decision to change the par value of its exchange rate, the IMF’s Article 4(5f) noted very clearly that the institution ‘shall not object to a proposed change because of the domestic social or political policies of the member proposing the change’. Historians have noted that the wording was inserted to placate British and Soviet concerns, but it no doubt also reflected the concerns of others (Boughton, 2019, pp. 83–84; Martin, 2022, pp. 233–34). The importance of this clause was evident from the fact that it was featured in a brief media document prepared by the conference organizers at the end of conference which explained that the provision ensured that ‘the member countries’ autonomy in domestic affairs is not threatened’ (US State Department, 1948, p. 1212).

During the conference, this precise meaning of this clause was the subject of some interesting conversation, as one US delegate, Emanuel Goldenweiser, later explained: ‘There was a lot of discussion as to what was meant, but it was put in partly because it would not do for the Fund to say “You are Communists—we cannot let you have a change” or “You are Tories, and you cannot do this.” Reasons of that sort cannot be used for refusing a change’. In addition to these political concerns, Goldenweiser himself also had in mind that the clause might relate to domestic social policies relating specifically to women: ‘What is meant by “social” is not altogether clear, but it probably means that if a country has legislation relating to women or child labor, or social security, or safety devices, the Fund cannot say, “These things are undesirable, and therefore, we won’t let you make a change.” In political and social issues, countries must have the say, and must handle these things as they see fit’. (quoted in Martin, 2022, p. 234; emphasis added).

Goldenweiser’s comment highlights how the commitment of Bretton Woods negotiators to policy autonomy helped to undermine any effort to incorporate goals relating to gender or racial equality within the mandate of the BWIs. In existing IPE literature, the commitment to policy autonomy is usually cited as evidence that the Bretton Woods agreements were committed to a new kind of international economic liberalism that was more ‘embedded’ in social priorities and the goal of ‘social protection’. That idea was at the center of Ruggie’s (1982, pp. 385, 388, 399) well-known analysis of the ‘normative framework’ of Bretton Woods, for which he coined the phrase ‘embedded liberalism’. Left unspoken in Ruggie’s analysis, however, was the fact that the commitment to policy autonomy at Bretton Woods also thwarted those, such as the ILO and Harry Dexter White, who raised the idea of ‘embedding’ emerging conceptions of international human rights into international economic governance.

What about environmental degradation?

The silences of Bretton Woods on the issues of gender inequality and racial discrimination were accompanied by another concerning environmental degradation. This latter issue was not addressed in the ILO’s Philadelphia Declaration nor in the UN Charter. Perhaps, then, this was a case where the silence simply reflected the absence of environmentalist thinking in debates about international economic governance at the time? Once again, this potential explanation does not hold water since environmentalist ideas informed other dimensions of postwar international plans.

Broader attention to these issues

Take, for example, the first United Nations conference devoted to postwar international planning that took place in 1943 in Hot Springs, Virginia, and that was focussed on food and agricultural issues. Its final report highlighted the need to address environmental problems ranging from soil erosion and water conservation to the protection of forests and wildlife across the globe (US State Department, 1943). The promotion of ‘the conservation of natural resources’ was even included prominently in the constitution of the Food and Agricultural Organization that was subsequently created in 1945 (Article 1(2c)). After Bretton Woods, the negotiators of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) also made a special point of allowing trade measures ‘necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health’ and those ‘relating to the conservation of exhaustible natural resources’ (quoted in Charnovitz, 1991, p. 38). Those clauses built upon earlier discussions within the League about the need to create exemptions from international free trade rules for conservation purposes. For example, when the League hosted the world’s first large-scale multilateral trade negotiation, the resulting 1927 treaty (which was never ratified) allowed for such exemptions for ‘the protection of animals or plants against disease, insects and harmful parasites’ (quoted in Charnovitz, 1991, p. 41).

One month before the Bretton Woods conference began, Roosevelt was also lobbied to hold a world conference on conservation issues. The lobbyist was Gifford Pinchot, an influential American forester who had promoted ideas about environmental conservation for many decades. As far back as 1909, Pinchot had organized a North American Conservation Congress and encouraged then-US President, Theodore Roosevelt, to convene a wider international conference of this kind (an initiative that was cancelled when Roosevelt left office) (McCormick, 1989, pp. 13–16). In 1944, the younger Roosevelt also appeared very sympathetic to Pinchot’s ideas. As he wrote to Hull at the time, ‘conservation is a basis of permanent peace’ (quoted in McCormick, 1989, p. 25).⁶

At the time, environmentalist views had gained considerable political prominence within the United States, not least because of the experience of the dust bowl, which Jundt (2014, p. 54) describes as the ‘greatest environmental disaster in the nation’s history’. Indeed, Conkin (2008, p. 72) notes that ‘soil conservation became a national obsession in the 1930s’. After becoming US president, Franklin Roosevelt had supported a number of initiatives to address it, including the Soil Conservation Act of 1935. In 1939, he had also urged US Congress to take other conservation issues more seriously through measures to combat water pollution and secure the nation’s energy (New York Times, 1939).

By the time of Bretton Woods, American activist groups such as ‘Friends of the Land’—which included prominent environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold—were also working to promote a conservationist message across the US and were attracting a great deal of national media attention (Beeman, 1995). Some American environmentalists were writing about international economic governance as well, such as Lewis Mumford (1934, p. 255) whose earlier book Technics and Civilization had critiqued Western economic growth for generating ‘the widespread perversion and destruction of environment’. In the same year as the Bretton Woods conference, Mumford published The Condition of Man which warned that environmental problems would intensify if postwar international economic cooperation promoted ‘vast armadas of airplanes plying back and forth across the continents and seas’ with the goal of ‘making the standards of Paris and Hollywood, New York and Moscow, prevail throughout the planet’. In his view, ‘such mechanical intercourse would merely continue the irrational and irregional [sic] expansion of the past: a blind automatism that must result in a final destruction of the civilization’ (Mumford, 1944, p. 403).

For IPE scholars today, even more striking were the environmental themes in another book published in the United States during the year of Bretton Woods: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. When Ruggie pioneered the term embedded liberalism in 1982, he drew direct inspiration from Polanyi (1944, p. 57) who had argued that the postwar world economy needed to be more ‘embedded in social relations’. But Ruggie did not mention the fact that Polanyi (1944, pp. 132, 73) had insisted that ‘the principle of social protection’ include ‘the conservation of man and nature’ and that Polanyi had expressed concern about how unregulated markets resulted in ‘landscapes defiled, rivers polluted…[and] the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed’. As part of his case that embeddedness had an environmental dimension, Polanyi (1944, pp. 131, 184) worried that ‘leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them’ and that ‘even the climate of the country might suffer from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dust bowls’. Despite Ruggie’s drawing of a parallel between Polanyi’s work and the ideas of Bretton Woods, none of these environmental concerns of Polanyi were raised by the Bretton Woods negotiators themselves.

In the other leading economic power at the conference, Britain, there were also prominent environmentalist perspectives on international economic governance being advanced at this time. A particularly important example was a 1943 best-selling book titled The Living Soil by Eve Balfour, an organic farmer whose family had deep connections to the British Conservative party. Balfour’s book engaged directly in Anglo-American debates about the plans for the postwar international economic order at the time. Opposing the efforts to rebuild a more open international trading system, Balfour ([1943]1975, pp. 193, 13) called for a more inward-looking British economy that would support local organic farming and embrace broader principles of ‘human ecology’. She also tied her environmentalist vision to the anti-fascist wartime mission: ‘As Europe is in revolt against the tyrant, so is nature in revolt against the exploitation of man…. If he is to survive, he must learn to co-operate with the forces which govern nature as well as with his fellow man’. Balfour’s book was widely discussed in Britain during the spring of 1944 when the final preparations for Bretton Woods were taking place. It also gained an international audience at this time, including when the BBC’s Africa service broadcast a ten-part radio series about it (Gill, 2010, pp. 103–6).

Balfour’s arguments drew heavily on another British source: Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte’s 1939 book The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion. Citing the US dust bowl experience and other regions’ experiences, the chapters written by Jacks warned of a threat to ‘the whole future of the human race’ arising from the ‘destruction’ of the soil, which was ‘proceeding at a rate and on a scale unparalleled in history’ because of practices such as overgrazing, monocrop agriculture, and deforestation (Jacks & Whyte, 1939, pp. 27, 18). Jacks blamed those practices on the growth of international trade and capital flows that had encouraged countries to specialize in specific commodity exports produced in unsustainable ways. He also applauded how the economic nationalism of the 1930s had enabled the restoration of more ecologically sustainable land use by replacing ‘large-scale monoculture and plantation agriculture which form the basis of international trade in food’ with ‘mixed farming, rotational agriculture, “conservation cropping” and suchlike practices’ (Jacks & Whyte, 1939, p. 216).

Environmental silence and its explanation

In contrast to these various figures, the Bretton Woods delegates displayed little interest in environmental issues in their formal deliberations. One can find occasional mentions of conservationist ideas in Anglo-American discussions leading up the conference. For example, when highlighting potential roles for the proposed IBRD, Federal Reserve Board official Arthur Bloomfield noted that it would be able to support projects that did not interest private lenders such as those devoted ‘conservation of natural resources’ (quoted in Helleiner, 2014, p. 119). At the conference itself, however, environmental issues received almost no mention.

The only exception came in a report submitted to the conference by the institution created by the Hot Springs conference as a precursor to the FAO: the UN Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture. In the context of urging the IBRD to improve the supply of agricultural credit across the world, the report briefly mentioned development projects supporting ‘water conservation’ and ‘soil conservation’ as examples of the kinds of activity that should be supported (US State Department, 1943, p. 478). This sole mention of environmental conservation in the entire conference proceedings was made by a body that—like the ILO—had only been granted observer status at the meeting. The conference transcripts also do not record any official delegates engaging with this suggestion.

As with the issues of gender inequality and racial discrimination, the neglect of environmental degradation at Bretton Woods was partly a function of the absence of certain voices from the negotiations. In addition to the marginal role of the UN Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture, Roosevelt’s limited engagement with Bretton Woods has already been noted. The various environmental thinkers noted above were also not involved at all in the negotiations. Since most had no experience or expertise in international financial policymaking (with the exception of Polanyi who was knowledgeable on the topic), they were unlikely candidates for inclusion. Many also opposed the conference’s overall goal of rebuilding an open world economy.

Why did the delegates themselves not show more interest in environmental issues? Once again, the narrow financial focus and expertise of many of the delegates did not prepare them well to engage with these issues. Most also placed a high priority on the goal of boosting economic growth after the war. The way that this goal was usually expressed without any sense of environmental constraints was highlighted well by Morgenthau’s opening comments to the conference. Setting the agenda for the meeting, he urged the delegates to focus on the idea that ‘prosperity has no fixed limits’ and ‘poverty, wherever it exists, is menacing to us all and undermines the well-being of each of us’. Drawing on these two ‘elementary economic axioms’, Morgenthau argued that the objective of the conference was to create ‘a dynamic world economy’ in which people everywhere could ‘raise their own standards of living and enjoy, increasingly, the fruits of material progress on an earth infinitely blessed with natural riches’ (US State Department, 1948, pp. 80–81; emphasis added).

Morgenthau‘s views were shared by other delegates, including those from lower income regions of the world who were intent on promoting the rapid industrialization and economic development of their countries. Delegates from these countries looked to the IBRD as an institution that would support their ambitious development goals (Helleiner, 2014, chs. 6, 7, 9). They had little interest in seeing it promote a conservation agenda if that might constrain their ability to pursue those goals.⁷ When describing the discussions about the design of the IBRD, one US delegate, Jesse Wolcott, summed up their mood as follows: ‘I sense in our conversations with all of these countries that they have a vision of their country being just covered with smokestacks’. When Wolcott asked his colleagues ‘what is going to happen when the Arabian desert is covered with factories?’, Harry Dexter White’s disregard for a long-term environmental vision was also evident in his reply: ‘some of us are going to be dead a long time’. (quoted in Helleiner, 2014, p. 130).

It is important to note, however, that there were some British delegates who had expressed some sympathy for environmentalist ideas in the past. One was Dennis Robertson, a well-known economist who had highlighted some environmental costs of international economic integration in a 1938 lead article published in the high-profile Economic Journal. Titled ‘The Future of International Trade’, the article had noted the following costs borne by commodity exporting regions in the pre-1930 era of growing international trade and specialization: ‘their vast specialisations of the late nineteenth century were to a certain extent bogus specialisations, founded on reckless mining of the soil, on natural but disastrous ignorance of the cyclical misbehaviour of sun and cloud, on improvident sacrifice of the leisurely tree to the crop which is here to-day and gone to-morrow…we have here a factor tending…to limit the advantage of international specialisation and the growth of international trade’ (Robertson, 1938, p. 4).

Even more important were the views of John Maynard Keynes, the lead British negotiator at Bretton Woods. At the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, he had famously turned his back on his previous (and subsequent) support for an open international economy, noting that ‘we all need to be as free as possible of interference from economic changes elsewhere, in order to make our own favorite experiments towards the ideal social republic of the future’. As part of this case for ‘national self-sufficiency’, Keynes (1933, pp. 763–64) critiqued nineteenth century classical liberals for being too focused on ‘financial results’ at the expense of other values, including environmental ones: ‘We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value’. Like Balfour and Jacks, Keynes’ inference seemed to be that a policy of greater national self-sufficiency would enable governments to give greater priority to environmental values.

At Bretton Woods, however, neither Robertson nor Keynes reiterated these environmental concerns. Since the representatives of commodity-exporting countries at Bretton Woods seemed so intent on industrializing, Robertson may have felt that his critique was less relevant. In Keynes’ case, his brief 1933 comments about the need to preserve ‘the unappropriated splendours of nature’ had been made at a moment when his disillusionment with liberal economics reached its peak in the context of the collapse of market economies. By the time of Bretton Woods, he was much more optimistic about the capacity of a well-regulated and managed market economy—at both the international and national level—to generate prosperity and broader positive outcomes for humanity. When chairing the committee drafting the IBRD’s charter, his changed mood was evident as he celebrated how the new institution would help to ‘develop the resources and productive capacity of the world’ (quoted in Helleiner, 2014, p. 220).

Conclusion

Given how much has been written about the Bretton Woods conference, is there really anything more to say on the subject? Indeed, there is. A key gap in existing literature is the study of the silences of Bretton Woods regarding gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. The neglect of this topic may simply reflect a widespread assumption that few people at the time saw these three issues as relevant to the subject of the conference. This paper has argued that the story is more complicated.

I have shown that there were, in fact, active discussions about the importance of each of these topics to international economic governance around the time of Bretton Woods, including in other international settings that were involved in postwar planning. The silences of Bretton Woods on these issues were, thus, an anomaly. This anomaly deserves more recognition within IPE literature since it sheds important light on the content of the normative framework of Bretton Woods. That framework has been described most famously by Ruggie as an ‘embedded liberal’ one that widened the focus of liberal conceptions of international economic governance in innovative ways. But its innovations had limits. Those seeking to embed explicit commitments to address gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation within international economic governance were left disappointed. Indeed, by prioritizing policy autonomy, the Bretton Woods delegates insulated national policymakers from emerging international conceptions of human rights relating to gender and racial equality as well as of environmental sustainability. Ruggie (1982, p. 393) highlights how the new prioritization of policy autonomy helped to socially embed the economy by enabling ‘domestic interventionism’ through national policies supporting social security and economic stability. But to those interested in these emerging international conceptions of human rights and environmental sustainability, the defense of policy autonomy looked less progressive.

What explains the silences of Bretton Woods surrounding the issues of gender inequality, racial discrimination and environmental degradation? One key factor was the composition of the delegates involved in the Bretton Woods negotiations. Certain voices raising these issues in other contexts relating to debates about the Allies’ postwar planning had little or no role at the conference. They included Roosevelt, the ILO, and the UN Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture as well as larger categories of people such as women (particularly Latin American feminists), Africans and the African diaspora (particularly Pan-African thinkers), other colonized peoples, and environmentalists. Because they had little impact on the negotiations, most of these voices receive very little attention in histories of Bretton Woods. To explain the content of the Bretton Woods agreements, however, it is important to recognize not just those who were at the negotiating table, but also those who were uninvited or marginalized.

The silences of Bretton Woods were also partly a product of the fact that many of the conference delegates were financial officials with little training or experience engaging with debates about policies designed to address these issues. Some may also have had little sympathy for such policies either because of their patriarchal or racist views, or, in the case of the environmental cause, because of their prioritization of economic growth and industrialization. Those who were more sympathetic faced important political constraints, including the general wariness of many policymakers to accept infringements on their country’s policy autonomy in these areas. In the all-important US case, other key constraints were the distinctive racial and gender politics of the New Deal as well as US concerns about antagonizing European colonial powers at the conference. Once again, many of these aspects of the politics of Bretton Woods are overlooked in existing analyses of the conference.

Was the normative framework of embedded liberalism inherently prejudicial to the causes of addressing gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation? Building on Harry Dexter White’s initial ideas from early 1942, membership within the BWIs could have been made conditional on member countries respecting international commitments to address these issues. Alternatively, the formal purposes of the BWIs themselves could have been widened to include mandates to promote gender and racial equality as well as environmental sustainability. These kinds of initiatives would have been consistent with the embedded liberal normative framework but in a manner that assigned the international level a greater role in the ‘embedding’ of economic life than that endorsed at Bretton Woods conference (where that task was assigned more to the nation-state).⁸

Whether those initiatives would have addressed these three issues in an adequate fashion is, of course, a larger question. The Bretton Woods arrangements would still have been constrained by broader structures that many analysts in that era held responsible for gender inequality, racial discrimination and/or environmental degradation. For example, socialist and Marxist feminists had long argued that gender inequality could not be adequately without a more radical overturning of the capitalist system (e.g. Becchio, 2020; Marino, 2019). In his earlier work, Du Bois (1915) had also linked racism to the deep dynamics of capitalism and its drive for imperial expansion in his time. Polanyi argued that serious environmental conservation required a socialist economy, while thinkers such as Mumford, Balfour, and Jacks did not think environmental values were compatible with the kind of open international economy that Bretton Woods sought to build. These kinds of analyses pointed to potential inherent structural limitations in any reformist agenda of an embedded liberal kind towards these issues. They also highlighted structural factors that help to explain the silences of Bretton Woods, including the absences of certain voices at the meeting, such as those of most colonized peoples in an age of imperialism.

In addition to contributing to IPE literature about Bretton Woods, this analysis may be useful to scholars interested in more recent initiatives of the BWIs to devote attention to gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation.⁹ It provides a reminder that efforts to encourage these institutions to do so date back to their very origins. It also reveals political barriers to these kinds of efforts, many of which may still be relevant in the contemporary age. In addition to general resistance to feminist, anti-racist, and environmentalist ideas, these barriers included governments’ concerns about national policy autonomy as well as the relative lack of diversity of those involved in international financial policymaking, their narrow economic and financial focus and expertise, and the considerable insularity of this policy realm from wider civil society. Many of these features of international financial policymaking endure in the current era. So do the broader structural issues identified by earlier thinkers that may shape and limit the ways in which these issues are addressed by the BWIs as well as the voices allowed to participate in BWI analyses of them.¹⁰

Finally, and more generally, this study also contributes to recent efforts to encourage IPE scholars to devote more attention to the study of gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. These issues may be ‘blind spots’ in contemporary IPE scholarship, but discussions of their relevance to international economic governance have deep historical roots. This paper highlights some of those roots at the foundational moment of the postwar international economic order itself. This deep history reinforces a point made by Tickner and True (2018, p. 231) in their recent analysis of the long history of feminist engagement with international relations: ‘Feminism is not a recent development in international relations; rather, it is the field of international relations that has come late to feminism’. The same could be said of IPE vis-à-vis not just feminism, but also anti-racist, and environmentalist perspectives (Helleiner, 2023).

The task of shedding light on the silences of Bretton Woods may be particularly important for those hoping to correct for these blind spots in contemporary IPE scholarship. Because of the 1944 conference’s centrality to much IPE analysis and teaching, its silences have likely cast a long shadow, contributing to the low profile of these issues in the field. By highlighting and explaining those silences at the time, this paper may help IPE scholars and students to recognize that debates about gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation have long been part of the politics of world economy. Correcting a blind spot in the literature on Bretton Woods, in other words, may help address its wider counterparts in the IPE field as a whole.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for excellent comments and suggestions I received from anonymous reviewers and the editors as well as from Jennifer Clapp, Marc Flandreau, Harold James, and other participants in the workshop on “International Monetary Cooperation in History” at Institut d’Histoire Economique Paul Bairoch, Université de Genève.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Killam Research Fellowship program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant number 435-2015-0571).

Notes on contributors

Eric Helleiner

Eric Helleiner is Professor and University Research Chair in the Department of Political Science and Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. His most recent books include: The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Notes

1 Roosevelt (1944b) referred to race in January 1944 when he called for ‘a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed’.

2 Marino (2019). While many Latin American feminists insisted on anti-racist politics, Marino (2019, p. 211) highlights how Lutz was less supportive of them, although she publicly backed them.

3 At Philadelphia, she was supported by other women who served as advisors to their delegations (Lubin & Winslow, 1990, pp. 66–67). At San Francisco, Lutz also worked with other women, particularly from Latin America and Australia (Marino, 2019; Skard, 2008).

4 At the UN San Francisco conference a year later, delegates from China and the Philippines did press for statements against racial discrimination (Sikkink, 2017, pp. 67–8). For Chinese delegates’ interest in securing development finance at Bretton Woods, see Helleiner (2014, pp. 186–200).

5 That was certainly true of some officials involved in international financial diplomacy earlier in the twentieth century (Martin, 2022, p. 84; Rosenberg, 2003). For the broader gendered nature of embedded liberal financial order, see Brassett and Rethel (2015).

6 After Roosevelt’s death, Truman supported a UN conference on the subject that took place in the late 1949 (Jundt 2014).

7 Martin (2022, ch. 5) highlights controversies surrounding interwar international schemes to influence domestic resource and agricultural management.

8 In later writings, Ruggie (2003) referred to this general idea as taking embedded liberalism in a more ‘global’ direction.

9 For recent examples of this attention from BWI staff, see Chateau et al. (2022), IMF (2022), and Čihák et al. (2020).

10 For recent analyses of some of these limits, see Coburn (2019), Prügl (2017), and Reinhold (2017).