As women are often overlooked in textbooks (in this case, swedish historic economist Lennart Schöns book "en modern svensk ekonomisk historia - tillväxt och omvandling under två sekel"), I'm trying to find examples of female individuals who have played a part in economic history. Women are rarely given names, individuals are overlooked and instead "women" are talked about as a group or masse.
Beatrice Potter Webb is one, but who else?
Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism is certainly worth considering.
The laissez-faire she implemented and the mass privatization of British industry is unparalleled. Thatcher and Regan were the founders of neoliberal economics, and the rise of finance capitalism.
Also she also quoted a long list of economic influences such as Freidrich Hayek, Adam Smith and Gladstone's Free Trade policies.
She is a good example of contemporary economic theory in action, and arguably to rather adverse affects.
If you are considering Swedish economic parallels, perhaps it is worth mentioning that Thatcher was a major force to be reckoned with in the 1980s on the international scene. The Swedish Social Democrats under Palme began to make concessions from their state controlled economic decisions and slowly began to allow less regulation in accordance with what was going on in the UK and US. Sweden in the 1980s as a 'Third Way' between Capitalism and Communism shifted closer towards Thatcherism and neoliberalism as it witnessed the short-term gains that both the US and UK seemed to be making in an economically disastrous decade.