By Samuel Boscarello | 2024
Between the 1920s and 1930s, Freundlich’s major writings include:
“The Situation of the Consumers in Europe after the War”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 134: 167-73, 1927.
“Collaboration Between Cooperative Societies and Municipalities in the Development of Collective Undertakings in Austria”, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 3: 167-80, 1927.
“The Rationalisation of Trading. Private and cooperative trading”, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 8: 237-281, 1932.
“The Cooperative Movement in the Present World Order”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 180: 119-28, 1935.
Housewives Build a New World, International Co-operative Women’s Guild, 1936.
Why is Emmy Freundlich an international economic thinker?
Emmy Freundlich (née Kögler) was one of the main leaders of the international cooperative movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Although not formally an economist, she made significant contributions to economic thought and practice. Born into a well-off Bohemian family – her father was a politically engaged railroad engineer associated with the Liberal Party – Freundlich was initially sent to a girls’ boarding school, with her parents planning for her to marry into the middle class. However, the deaths of her father and mother when Emmy was 17 and 18 years old, respectively, marked a decisive turning point in her life. Dissatisfied with the frivolous environment of her school, she pursued political and economic education on her own, becoming involved with the Viennese circles of the Social Democratic Party. There, she met and married Marxist journalist Leo Freundlich, from whom she later divorced in 1912. That same year, after being active in various social democratic women’s organizations, she joined the Vienna consumer cooperative affiliated with the party, thereby complementing her economic education with practical engagement.[1]
Freundlich’s significance as a thinker is evident in at least two main aspects. First, her vision of international economic relations was heavily shaped by her experience in the cooperative movement and feminist organizations. For Freundlich, cooperation was not just a form of enterprise but a method to redesign international economic governance after World War I to ensure peace among nations. She believed that women should play a crucial role in this new global order, as their dual responsibilities of maternal care and household financial management made them particularly invested in safeguarding peace and consumer well-being.
This leads to the second reason for Freundlich’s importance: her activities within the Economic Financial Organization (EFO) of the League of Nations. Notably, Freundlich was the only woman involved in organizing the 1927 International Economic Conference in Geneva, where she also served as vice-president. She later joined the Economic Consultative Committee, established by the EFO to oversee the implementation of the Geneva Conference resolutions by member states.
Empowering housewives to democratize economy
Freundlich was not alone in believing that cooperative principles should guide global trade to foster common prosperity and peace. This idea of “pax economica,”[2] summarized in the motto “social and international peace,” was foundational to the doctrine of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the global organization of the cooperative movement where Freundlich served on the central committee. However, her unique contribution was linking this vision to feminist concerns, identifying consumer cooperation as a critical tool for representing women’s economic interests on the international stage. Freundlich recognized that tens of millions of women engaged in domestic and care work were not represented by trade unions, as they did not receive wages. Nonetheless, this did not mean they lacked specific demands. On the contrary, since women who shopped for their families were the backbone of the retail customer base, they were key to defending consumer interests. Freundlich saw consumer cooperatives as the housewives’ equivalent of workers’ trade unions.[3]
This approach characterized Freundlich’s main political initiatives, both as director of the Ministry of Supply during World War I, and as a municipal councilor in Vienna from 1917 to 1923, and later as a deputy from 1919 to 1934. However, the role that best represents her importance was her position as the first president of the International Cooperative Women’s Guild (ICWG), a position she held from 1921 until her death. Affiliated with the ICA, the ICWG was the global organization representing women within the cooperative movement. It aimed to be a true “Mothers’ International,” as its anthem proclaimed, dedicated to defending the purchasing power of families and the social rights related to motherhood and childhood.[4]
It was mainly in her capacity as president of the ICWG that Freundlich carried out her lobbying activities within the League of Nations. Her candidacy for the Preparatory Committee of the 1927 International Economic Conference was supported by Albert Thomas, the secretary of the International Labour Office, who also sat with Freundlich on the ICA Central Committee.[5] Freundlich’s economic expertise was recognized by the Austrian government, which appointed her as one of its delegates to the 1927 Conference. In Geneva, Freundlich focused on defending consumer interests in three interconnected ways: i) the gradual restoration of free international trade; ii) control over trusts and industrial cartels; iii) economic rationalization, meaning the coordination between producer and consumer organizations to align supply and demand as closely as possible, stabilize prices, and prevent market failures.
Theoretically, Freundlich argued that the instability of the international economy after World War I would inevitably push commercial actors to reorganize. To her, the proliferation of trusts and cartels indicated that industrialists were beginning to emulate what workers had been doing for nearly a century: associating to defend themselves against market threats.[6] Therefore, Freundlich believed that the crucial issue was not to prevent the formation of such industrial agreements but to establish effective oversight bodies to protect consumer interests from potential unfair trade practices. Only in this way could the reorganization of the international economy be inspired by democratic principles. However, such antitrust supervision should not be exercised by government agencies but by mixed national commissions composed of industry, union, and cooperative members, with the latter representing consumer interests. The League of Nations would play a coordinating and information-exchange role among these national commissions.
This was the main proposal put forward by Freundlich at the 1927 International Economic Conference, alongside another social democratic cooperator, the Finnish Jaakko Keto.[7] The model of mixed commissions composed of representatives of various market interests was a hallmark of Freundlich’s vision of economic governance. We see it again in another proposal she presented at the Conference with some representatives of women’s organizations, who participated as independent experts: once again, the initiative called for the establishment of joint committees composed of consumer and producer organizations to rationalize the trade of household goods. This latter proposal was absorbed into a more general draft resolution advanced by Francesco Mauro, president of the International Institute for the Scientific Organization of Labor, which retained only a generic reference to the need to disseminate ‘the positive consequences’ of rationalization ‘for the organization and conveniences of household life’.[8]
Certainly, the idea of harmonizing the interests of economic actors through negotiation among social parties had gained significant traction in the decade following World War I, a period well-documented in historiography as the moment of “corporatist stabilization” in Europe.[9] However, Freundlich’s positions were deeply rooted in the municipalist experience of “Red Vienna,” which was governed by a social democratic administration after the war. First and foremost, she observed how the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fragmented a unified economic space into a multitude of new borders, each constituting an obstacle to the free movement of goods to the detriment of consumers. Moreover, in Vienna, the municipal administration had succeeded in setting extraordinarily low tariffs for public services through negotiations between unions and user representatives. This was the prototype Freundlich intended to replicate for the rationalization of the economy and the control of large industrial groups.[10]
The issue of oversight on trusts and cartels was one of the most contentious during the 1927 International Economic Conference. Despite the efforts of some delegates, including Freundlich, the final text did not provide any mechanism for controlling industrial concentrations, merely establishing an obligation to inform governments about the content of such agreements. The cooperative movement achieved its most notable success in the agricultural section of the Conference, as the final text provided for the establishment of a Joint Committee between agricultural and consumer cooperatives to promote the trade of food products.[11] Although Freundlich did not personally work on this resolution, she campaigned within the Economic Consultative Committee in the years following the 1927 Conference to see the Joint Committee realized. Freundlich faced staunch opposition in her efforts, particularly from the International Chamber of Commerce and Clemens Lammers, a centrist politician and lobbyist for German industrialists within the ECC. Ultimately, the EFO never implemented the Joint Committee, and it was the ICA that autonomously organized one in 1931, with the decisive help of Albert Thomas.[12]
Freundlich’s hope for a democratically governed international economic order did not immediately come to fruition. After the 1929 crisis and the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, protectionist spirals intensified, and the EFO achieved only limited successes in monetary and fiscal policy, while control over industrial concentrations and economic rationalization remained in the background. Freundlich herself was imprisoned in 1934 after Engelbert Dollfuss’s coup due to her major role in the Social Democratic Party. As the Austrian cooperative movement faced political repression, the General Secretary of ICA, Henry May, went to Vienna and negotiated a compromise with Dollfuss: economic activities of cooperatives would be tolerated, but without any political involvement. As part of the agreement, Freundlich was released on the condition that she resign from the Central Committee of the ICA.[13] Nevertheless, she retained her position as president of the ICWG and, after the 1938 Anschluss, managed to join her fellow cooperators in London. Despite her political misfortune, Freundlich remained a prominent member of the transnational epistemic community that would later shape the architecture of the United Nations. In the 1930s she collaborated extensively with the International Labour Office on issues of women’s labor and nutrition, and in 1946-47 she participated in UNESCO’s plenary assemblies and served as an advisor to ECOSOC, representing the women’s cooperative movement.[14]
Above all, Freundlich was particularly effective in linking consumer interests with women’s economic agency. Through the cooperative movement, not only did women engaged in domestic work gain representation for their concerns, but they could also play a leading role in building a free and fair international economic order. The spirit of this movement can be effectively summarized by the title of an ICWG publication curated by Emmy Freundlich in 1936: “Housewives Build a New World.” This grand project of emancipation was, in many ways, a precursor to the growing role of women’s organizations within the United Nations, which culminated in the 2010 institution of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
As most recent historiography has underlined, international organizations became increasingly attractive terrains for institutional activity for women in the early 20th century, as their careers in academia and national bureaucracy were usually precluded. Nonetheless, the contribution of women to international economic thinking often remained in the shadows, impoverishing our understanding of the alternative projects that confronted each other in shaping a global economic order.[15]
Emmy Freundlich symbolizes the peculiarities of such gendered production of economic knowledge. Her key interests, such as consumers’ rights and trust control, largely drew on social democratic and cooperative thought. However, she originally reframed these ideas in light of her practical experience with housewives and her contacts with feminist movements. Freundlich’s economic thinking provides us with a more nuanced perspective on interwar Austria as the cradle of new globalist projects, which stemmed from observing the economic consequences of the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire.[16] She traced a divergent path for the international economic order compared to the neoliberal masters of the Vienna School.
This difference is partly explained by the nature of her economic training, as a self-taught social democrat cooperator. However, there are distinct peculiarities of female economic thinking in interwar Vienna that characterize even some disciples of the neoliberal school, such as Gertrud Lovasy. Though belonging to radically different intellectual circles, both Freundlich and Lovasy shared an interest in economic rationalization – Freundlich pursued it through cooperative bodies, while Lovasy focused on buffer stock programs for primary commodities and compensatory finance.[17]
Uncovering the contributions of Austrian female economic thinkers challenges the consolidated beliefs about economic globalism and anti-globalism in the 20th century. Between these polarities, there were numerous alternative projects of internationalism. Female economic thought decisively contributed to this variety, especially on key issues such as peace, labor rights, and distribution. In her life, Freundlich addressed all these questions with an original vision of economic democracy. This is the ultimate reason why her ideas are worth rediscovering.
[1] John Haag, «Freundlich, Emmy (1878-1948)», in Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, a c. di Anne Commire e Deborah Klezmer (Woodbridge: Gale, 1999), 784–85.
[2] Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton: Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024).
[3] Jelena Tešija, «“Millions of Working Housewives”: The International Co-operative Women’s Guild and Household Labour in the Interwar Period», Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 31, 2 (2023): 321–38.
[4] Sarah Hellawell, «‘A Strong International Spirit’: The Influence of Internationalism on the Women’s Co-Operative Guild», Twentieth Century British History 32, 1 (2021): 93–118.
[5] United Nations Archives, League of Nations Secretariat (hereafter UNA, LoNS), File R532/10C/47277/46893, Albert Thomas to Sir Arthur Salter, October 27th, 1925.
[6] UNA, LoNS, File R531/10C/59579/46431/Jacket2, Rapport et actes de la Conférence Économique Internationale, Vol. II, 145.
[7] UNA, Official Documents (League of Nations), Item S-C-E--II-4_FR, Proposition sur l'organisation du Contrôle des Cartels, May 11th, 1927.
[8] UNA, LoNS, File R531/10C/59579/46431/Jacket2, Rapport et actes de la Conférence Économique Internationale, Vol. II, 176.
[9] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[10] UNA, LoNS, File R531/10C/59579/46431/Jacket2, Rapport et actes de la Conférence Économique Internationale, Vol. II, 156.
[11] UNA, LoNS, File R531/10C/59579/46431/Jacket2, Rapport et actes de la Conférence Économique Internationale, Vol. I, 50–54.
[12] William P. Watkins, The International Co-operative Alliance, 1895-1970 (London: International Co-operative Alliance, 1970), 186–87.
[13] Watkins, The International Co-operative Alliance, 180–81.
[14] Haag, «Freundlich, Emmy (1878-1948)», 786–87.
[15] Glenda Sluga, «Women, Feminisms and Twentieth-Century Internationalisms», in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, a c. di Glenda Sluga e Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 61–84.
[16] See Tara Zahra, «Against the World: The Collapse of Empire and the Deglobalization of Interwar Austria», Austrian History Yearbook 52 (2021): 1–10; Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Janek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
[17] See the Profile of Gertud Lovasy (1900/1902-1974) written by Troy Vettese for ECOINT: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-gertrud-lovasy-1900-1902-1974.
Reference anything from this site as:
Biscarello, Samuel (2024) 'International Economic Thinkers-Profile: Emmy Freundlich', ECOINT IET Profile #8, available at: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-emmy-freundlich-1878-1948