This article explores Thomas Popkewitz's and Kwame Appiah's discussion of cosmopolitanism by looking at practices, spaces and subjectivities in the work of three little-known women, Amelie Arato, Amni Hallsten-Kallia and Rachel Gampert. It examines cosmopolitanism through systems of knowledge, unpacks cosmopolitanism and gender at particular historical moments, and looks at national as well as international narratives. Arato provides a starting point to look at practices, at challenges and tensions of cosmopolitanism as modes of enquiry, at conversations across borders through the scientisation of knowledge, and at categories that locate women in in-between spaces that both include and exclude. With Hallsten-Kallia, the challenges and tensions of cosmopolitanism as movement through social space for women form the focus. Here, conversations across borders from her insider/outsider position illuminate gender, positionality and opportunities, and limitations on agency within the making of the woman cosmopolitan. Gampert's concern with the married woman teacher becomes a springboard to think about subjectivities, challenges and tensions for cosmopolitanism in holding together divergent national narratives and a universal frame. (Contains 86 footnotes.)