In 1989, I participated in a course at the London School of Economics taught by the late Fred Halliday, entitled “Women and International Relations.” It was the first time such a course had been taught at LSE, and interest was high—it was the largest graduate seminar offered that term. We were unable to find many women authors to assign, so we relied on guest lectures by women, most of whom worked for international organizations. Prior to that, I had been teaching International Relations courses with little reflection on the fact that the canon I was required to teach was populated entirely by white men.
While thankfully that is no longer the case, we owe enormous gratitude to Patricia Owens, whose painstaking research—this book contains 90 pages of footnotes—has uncovered the scholarship of early and mid-twentieth-century British and Commonwealth women whose voices have been completely silenced in the field. These women were brilliant thinkers and researchers who, if they were offered teaching positions at all, were subject to misogyny, heavy teaching loads and a lack of recognition. Some even suffered breakdowns due to their treatment by a profession that, historically, has been very masculinist and heavily focused on national security. Had their voices not been erased, the discipline might have looked quite different. As Owens tells us, when those who have been erased are reintroduced, new themes emerge, such as culture and an emphasis on everyday peoples’ lives—themes which were considered marginal to IR’s statist focus. As feminists well know, knowledge is power, and whose knowledge is heard and respected is a matter of power politics.
When I started teaching in the 1980s, I was struck by the fact that the “canon” made little reference to imperialism or to the decolonial movements, arguably the most significant phenomena that remade the world order of the twentieth century. However, as Owens tells us, women IR scholars were centrally concerned with colonialism and its demise, although most of the figures detailed here exhibited a somewhat patronizing attitude to colonial people. And, in the 1920s and 1930s, women like Mary Gwladys Jones and Lucy Philip Mair taught many courses about the League of Nations and colonial administration, but their writings have been completely erased from the IR canon. Jones’ course at Cambridge was cancelled in 1940 because it was not “technical” enough.
Marjorie Perham was the leading white thinker on the British Empire, with a career that spanned the 1930s to the 1970s. She was a mentor to Martin Wight, who is well known in IR circles—yet I had never heard of her before reading Owens’ book. One of four students in her year to receive a first-class degree in modern history from Oxford, Perham was not awarded the degree because she was a woman! Yet she became one of the leading thinkers on colonial governance and travelled extensively in Africa. (Notably, overseas travel is not considered necessary by IR scholars today!) I mention Perham as one example of the many fine scholars who researched and wrote about Africa in the early twentieth century, whose work has been completely forgotten. Owens tells us the field of IR was originally formed to understand, manage and oversee the decline of empire, yet, by the 1950s, writings about empire and colonial administration had been completely erased.
Owens claims that, since its inception, IR has always had a difficult time defining its methodological preferences. Yet these silenced women had a lot to say about methodology, and the discipline could have been much enriched by listening to their voices. Most of the women under discussion were historians, although many favored a multidisciplinary approach. Eileen Power was one of the few historians admired by her male peers because she was said to ‘think like a man’! She integrated sociology into a world-historical approach, focusing on non-European polities and the lives of ordinary people—something that has generally been disregarded by the discipline with its heavy statist focus.
Owens also tells us about the Geneva School of International Studies, one of the most innovative IR schools in the 1920s and 1930s. Founded by Alfred and Lucie Zimmern after they were forced to leave Aberystwyth because they married, the Geneva School—thanks to Lucie—taught what she called “polyphonic internationalism”, an exciting approach to international studies that focused on learning about many cultures. Cultural diplomacy is a field that only recently has been reintroduced into the field, and even then at the margins; such scholarship would have been much enriched by Lucie’s innovative approach. While Owens admits most of her subjects were white women, she does introduce Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian citizen, who she positions as one of the most significant IR thinkers of her time. Jones discussed class, gender, and racial oppression in her work, introducing intersectionality as an analytical framework long before it became a concern taken up by feminist and critical race scholars today.
Sadly, IR has now been subsumed almost entirely into the field of political science, especially in the US. Quantitative and rational-choice theories continue to dominate the mainstream of the discipline. It leads one to ask how much richer would IR have been had these methodological innovations been admitted to the canon? And could this kind of erasure happen today?
One would hope not. However, I was struck by a 2014 review article marking the 100th anniversary of World War I, written by John Vasquez in International Studies Review. In this review essay, only 8 of the 73 articles cited had been written by women, and there was no mention of what women were doing around the era of World War I. In response, a more recent feminist investigation of women’s activities at that time suggests that many were thinking and writing about the war and coming up with original ideas about constructing a post-war order. But, perhaps expectedly, their voices were completely silenced in the disciplinary canon, and many of their ideas were adopted but never attributed to them. Women who write about war and security are rarely taken seriously, even today.
In conclusion, let me say that I hope that the many fine women scholars writing today will not be forgotten. While I think it is less likely, it is disturbing that after 35 years, feminist and postcolonial studies—fields that address issues that these women in Erased first brought to light a hundred years ago—remain on the margins of IR as a discipline. The dismantling of women’s studies departments and the hostility to diversity and inclusion in the broader political landscape do not bode well for learning about those figures pushed to the margins—or the critical problems and questions they explored.
