Nina Banks

Nina Banks is an Associate Professor in Economics at Bucknell University in the US. She has links with several Feminist Economics associations and publications, including the IAFFE, and is on the editorial board of both the Feminist Economics and The Review of Black Political Economy journals. She focuses particularly on the often under-counted and under-appreciated value-building contributions of Black and migrant women.

She has written much on intersectionality, both its roots in Black feminist work, and its current incorporation within the Feminist Economics discipline. She points out that many black feminists in the 19th and early 20th century understood their oppression primarily through the axes of race and class, not gender. Even in the late 20th century, struggles and discrimination experienced as women are inseparable from that of race – leading to Kimberly Crenshaw’s influential coining of the term ‘intersectionality’; the simultaneity of multiple forms of oppression. This means women are gendered varyingly according to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and caste and that power relations amongst different groups are an important facet of positionality and often ignored in much feminist (inc. feminist economic) analysis. Intersectional work also holds that methodologically lived experience is both an important valid source of knowledge and should not be discounted or excluded (Banks, 2021).

A Racially-blind analysis is a serious problem for the Feminist Economics field, where many theories centre around the domesticity of women and the idea of recent feminisation of labour forces – both of which ignore the underpinning role that Black women have played firstly, in that they have long been part of the labour force and secondly, that in many cases they have alleviated the reproductive burden of white women by performing cheap, or forced household labour – something that still continues on today and is visible along class lines of ‘career’ women who are able to have it all by passing off household burdens to other groups of women, including migrant women instead of shifting allocation to men (Banks, 2006, 2021).

One of her main contributions to the Feminist Economics field is her work on the third layer of work many Black women do - community activism and collective action – for years considered political work, not economic, just as unpaid household work has long been considered just that – household, not economic, by mainstream economics (Banks, 2020). Banks, however, points out that activism and community service which provides people access to food, shelter and betters their surrounding environment is in many cases considered as contributing to the economy and is remunerated.

As part of her work tracing the paid and unpaid household and community work of Black Women throughout history, Nina Banks has written about the life and works of Sadie Alexander – the pioneering economist who was the first African-American women to receive a doctoral degree in Economics in 1921 (Banks, 2005). She is currently writing a biography of Sadie Alexander.

Reading List:

Banks, N. (2005). Black Women and Racial Advancement: The Economics of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander. The Review of Black Political Economy, 33(1), 9–24.

Banks, N. (2006). Uplifting the Race Through Domesticity: Capitalism, African-American Migration, and the Household Economy in the Great Migration Era of 1916—1930. Feminist Economics, 12(4), 599–624.

Banks, N. (2020). Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production. The Review of Black Political Economy, 47(4), 343–362.

Banks, N. (2021). Intersectional Identities and Analysis. In G. Berik & E. Kongar, The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics. Routledge.