Profile of Eleanor Hinder (1893–1963)

By Glenda Sluga | 2025

Eleanor Hinder

Sydney-born Eleanor Hinder (1893–1963) was a social reformer, welfare officer, labour conditions specialist, and international public servant. While she cannot be need an economist, she was deeply involved in economic policy making, and economic thinking. In particular, her postwar work with the ILO and UN locates her as an important international economic thinker.

Hinder’s international career began as an observer of labor conditions in the international concessions of Shanghai on behalf of the international Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in the 1920s. She was well-acquainted with interwar international organizations. 1923, she visited Geneva en-route to a conference of industrial welfare workers.^[i] Already then, the ILO stood as the conceptually most progressive of the post-First World War IGOs, and the ideological heart of scholarly and practical interest in labour policies. Indeed, Hinder imagined the ILO as an organization ‘concerned with the economic factors which influence social conditions rather than solely with standards of employment, [which is little understood’].^[ii] Her work with and in postwar international organizations began in late 1930s Shanghai, where she was the Shanghai Municipal Council Chief of Industrial and Social Division, and began to undertake ground level statistical to provide a guide for local policy. This established her as an early advocate of ‘standard of living’ statistics, fostering local knowledge and expertise in global settings.  

For our purposes the important dimension of Hinder’s experience in the international concessions was her method of statistical collection geared towards understanding the everyday life of the city’s populations. She created a ‘cost of living index’ survey which drew on the assistance of local experts and data collectors. Even as Japanese occupation made this work increasingly difficult, the data became crucial for rationing and enforcing price control measures. Her statistics documented the local doubling of costs between 1936 and 1939, an 8-fold rise by 1941, 12-fold by the end of that same year, and 26-fold by 1942. In a self-published report, Hinder described her intent to monitor the rise and fall of the cost of staples, rent, and the shifting currency value by the ‘regular compilation, month by month, of figures to show what was happening to the standard of living of the people.’^[iii] This was the experience of adapting international economic thought to the world as it was that she believed would complement the work of the ILO. In May 1942, as Hinder prepared to flee Japanese-occupied Shanghai, she was determined to bring to the ILO her expertise. She explained she wanted ‘to project my experience of the last ten years into the future’, and to be part of a radical transformation in the purpose of a world economy:

‘Can the rest of the world which has been ready to regiment itself, to reduce its standard of living, for the winning of the war, continue to sacrifice to provide the wherewithal to finance those developments which will induce the needed rise in standards in other countries? It is in part because I wish to urge this aim that I have left the immediate task for the larger world.’^[iv]

In 1942, Hinder finally became an employee of the ILO, it was temporarily based in Montreal, as a haven from the war and ideologically antagonistic European states. Her role there was to advise on ‘social and economic reform in Asia’. She remained there until 1944 as a Special Consultant on Asian Questions, arguing that ILO employees  should go to China to work on ‘socio-economic issues’, or ‘people’s livelihoods,’ in order to understand their needs on the ground, rather than simply apply ‘the more industrial-technical aspects for which the U.S. Government has made requests to the Chinese government.’^[v] She also insisted that the ILO should collaborate with Chinese economists, rather than simply sending ‘experts’. That work too should focus on ‘food policy, nutrition, skilled work technical education, mechanical equipment etc. child care, low cost housing, labour organization policy… livelihood questions’.^[vi]  

Hinder’s international career as an economic thinker continued in a number of guises until her death: as delegate for Britain to the UNRRA, and the Technical Committee on Welfare for the Far East in Shanghai, for all U.N. activities in the Far East, and to the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE).  From the 1950s, she worked for the UN itself: as Chief of the Project Planning Division of the UN Technical Assistance Administration (1951); as Chief of the Office for Asia and the Far East (1953 to 1955); and administering Technical Assistance for Latin America. In all these positions, her international economic thinking was oriented around the UN’s growing development rationale, fostering modernization projects in water, power, agriculture, forestry, and mining. Her work often consisted of traveling to locations where these development programs were underway, or planned, or to attend the meetings of international organizations. In general, Hinder was concerned about the ways in which the UN’s economic work overlapped with the aims of the United States, rather than reflecting the ambitions of international thinking generated by bodies such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, which had been important in studying the details of China’s local finance infrastructute and the specifics of its economic development.

It is difficult to assess the impact of Hinder’s earlier thinking on her UN work in her first decade there – on repeated contracts. However, in 1958, she returned to statistics, organizing and administering a special programme to assist ‘governments in Asia in their preparations for and carrying out their censuses of population and agriculture to be taken in 1960 or 1961 or proximate years’. Her partner, Viola Smith would explain to family and friends in letters that as ‘statistical development has become a Major concern of most governments’, ‘the many new Members of the United Nations [are] keenly aware that sound planning for their economic and social development of their countries depends on adequate statistics’. It was in this context that ‘Eleanor has felt that to be associated with providing assistance to governments in the fundamental function of helping to develop national statistics is a great satisfaction.’^[vii] 

General histories of the importance of statistics at the UN explain that the early decades were its most creative from the perspective of opening up statistical studies.  While we still do not know enough about the diverse roles and conceptions promoted by the ILO and other offices in contrast to the World Bank and IMF which came to dominate the production of statistics, we do know that Hinder’s work at the UN Statistics Office reinforced, rather than reassessed, a conception of statistics as a means of measuring ‘the well-being of national economies’ rather than ‘the quality of the individual’s life.’^[viii] The UN Statistical Office contributed to ‘systems of national accounts, trade statistics, demographic data’, and only eventually, the global gender issues that Boserup’s own work highlighted. From this perspective, Hinder became instrumental to a different prioritization of statistics as an instrument of nation-building. Through the postwar decades Hinder moved into and out of international organizations, and with distinctive sets of experience that also connected the national and international. The outlook and experience Hinder brought with her to the ILO and then the rest of the UN also suggests that international women at times anticipated later social concerns in their work – this was an arc that that would return to its end point after Hinder’s death, when ‘Human Security’ became the new standard for international programs.^[ix]

^[i] Hinder participated in numerous Australian contingents to related internationalist organizations, attending the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu (1928), and the Institute of Pacific Relations conference in Kyoto (1929).

^[ii] International Labor Office. ‘Some papers prepared during service of the International Labour Office 1943-44. Office then in Montreal.’ January 26, 1943 To ‘The Acting Director’, MLMSS770/4 Eleanor M. Hinder - papers, 1837-1963, together with the papers of A. Viola Smith, ca. 1850-1975, SLNSW. 

^[iii] The study of local conditions and industrial welfare was published in 1942, only after censoring ‘a few references to recent British efforts in the British West Indies and some other industrially backward areas. They had missed the statements in the body of the book which are of economic and social significance, challenging the basis of employment of industrial workers in Shanghai… I took out these references, and all mention of the Institute of Pacific Relations. It was then permitted to be published as a Council document.’ Hinder letter August 12, 1942, MLMSS770/ Box 1.

^[iv]  ‘Life and Labour in Shaghai’s International Settlement,’ September 1942. MLMSS770.

^[v] Sept 1942, ILO Office letterhead, Montreal. E.J. Phelan, Acting director to Hinder. MLMSS770/Box14 

^[vi]  Hinder to Phelan, March 11 1943. MLMSS770/Box 4

^[vii] Viola Smith, 28 October 1961. MLMSS 770/Box 1

^[viii] Robert J. Berg, 'The UN Intellectual History Project: Review of a Literature,' Global Governance 12, no. 3 (2006): 325–41.

^[ix] Glenda Sluga, “The Human Story of Development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1949–1955,” in International Organizations and Development, 1945-1990, ed. Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 46–74.

Reference anything from this site as:

Sluga, Glenda (2025) 'International Economic Thinkers-Profile:Eleanor Hinder', ECOINT IET Profile #14, available at: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-eleanor-hinder-1893-1963