When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors told us he wished he had a “do over” every year in which he could invite back all of his previous students to update them on the mistakes and inaccuracies he had inadvertently conveyed to them in his introductory lectures. This was a large psychology class, and his specific focus was vision research—an evolving area that apparently required, by his account, near annual discipline-disrupting corrections.
In my own subsequent experience in over 30 years of teaching International Relations courses, I cannot say I regularly thought I should invite my students back for the same kind of do-over. Corrections of fact, or history, the introduction of new insights or theoretical perspectives were, of course, incorporated into classes, but very few world events (even startling ones) or disciplinary discussions ever made me rethink the field as a whole or decide the time had come to call back thousands of students to issue my own mea culpa. Until I read Patricia Owens’ Erased.
Owens’ book is a project of recovery, first to find and then to examine in detail the contributions of women who formed part of the early emerging field of International Relations in Britain. Owens explores the lives and work of 12 women in detail: Lucie Barbier Zimmern, Margery Perham, Eileen Power, Lucy Philip Mail, Lilian Friedlӓnder Vránek, Merze Tate, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Claudia Jones, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, Rachel Wall, and Susan Strange. An additional six are also discussed: F. Melian Stawell, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Gwaladys Jones, Sibyl Crowe, Lilian Knowles, and Betty Behrens. As Owens writes in the book’s introduction, the cohort was limited to “the eighteen most important for understanding the gendered and racialized history of international thinking in twentieth-century Britain” (p. 9), but many dozens of erased scholars could also have been included in the book.
Owens shows how the women of this cohort carved out careers both inside and outside academic institutions and were actively involved in thinking about, theorizing, and analyzing international relations. They often did this as the men around them—colleagues, supervisors, husbands, and lovers—worked to either keep them out of the field entirely, or failing that, at its margins. There is more than one instance in which scholarship and research ideas are stolen by the men in proximity to these women, and there are many instances in which those men expend considerable effort to make the professional lives of these women unbearable.
This is not the first work to reveal “the field” is not what our training told us it was, following as it does the same spirit of recovery of Robert Vitalis’ critically important White World Order, Black Power Politics (Cornell 2017), which examined the racist foundations of US-based IR and the systematic efforts to exclude Black scholars and scholarship from the field. There are ways in which I found Owens’ work more unsettling. Not because the systematic exclusion of women from British IR is in any way more important than what Vitalis reveals about the racist origins of US IR; rather, I think it is because, for critical scholars at least, it was not completely surprising to learn that US IR was so fundamentally grounded in shoring up White supremacy. What we learned through Vitalis’ extensive research was the details about how this was and continues to be accomplished, but as Vitalis commented in an interview after White World Order’s publication: “My book ‘discovers’ exactly what we would expect.”
Owens’ book, by contrast, completely surprised me. Or more accurately, it surprised me (mortified me would not be an exaggeration) to discover I’d spent my entire career teaching International Relations as someone associated with feminist IR and yet knew nothing about most of these women scholars and thinkers who had contributed to the early field within Britain. What is worse, it had not occurred to me to even question their absence, so effective was their erasure, and thus I went on to reproduce the “leading man” account of early IR for my own many students.
The research Owens has conducted in support of Erased is stunning. Simply to find these women required an extraordinary amount of careful, patient scholarly labor involving reviews of multiple university curricula, research center reports, and staff memos, to name just a few of the archival sources she consulted. Having found these erased intellectuals, her recovery then involved exploring both the intellectual contributions and personal lives of her cohort via reports, published scholarly work, memoirs, biographies, letters, and meeting minutes. The result is a book in which each of these women comes alive for the reader. Their ideas and scholarly contributions are not presented in isolation from the rest of their lives; they are interwoven into those lives.
Owens’ research is equally careful in exploring the men in her cohort’s lives. As she notes in one of the most important recurring themes from the book, “I could not write the story of British IR without the men who were dependent on a racialized and heterosexual gender order that pushed out women and elevated white male mediocrities” (p. 11). Any of us who have faced those White male mediocrities in our own professional lives will recognize the continuity.
The discipline of International Relations might have looked very different, Owens argues, if these scholars’ ideas had not been systematically excluded. Much as the women in Owens’ cohort do not share a single scholarly or political perspective, and many were certainly not what we would now call critical scholars, the types of questions they explored and the methods they adopted would have made IR a radically interdisciplinary field that, from its earliest days, would have included analyses of race and empire, imperialism and capitalism, as well as historical analysis and attention to arts and cultural practices.
However, other than a lament for a field that might have been, or prompting mea culpas to our students (most of whom, let us be honest, have no memory of what we said to them about the field of International Relations), does this type of disciplinary recovery matter? I think Owens makes a compelling case that it does. In the first instance, she argues, the discipline itself forms part of Britain’s colonial history: “It is part of the intellectual and political struggle over the legacy of the British Empire,” (p. 294), and understanding that role is critical to contemporary anti-colonial struggles.
Erasure is also an ongoing political project both inside and outside of the academy. We see it in IR where, as Owens notes, the dominance of empirical political science sanitizes and sidesteps the bloody realities of empire and international politics via strict empiricism and hypothesis testing. We see it in government policies that seek to erase discussions of class, race, gender, and sexuality from university curricula. We see via Owens’ work how easy, ultimately, it is to erase individuals and ideas and how very difficult the work of recovering those erasures is. We also see why an ongoing attention to all of the spaces in which erasure is being enacted is politically and intellectually of paramount importance.
