Feminist scholars have long undertaken the labor of (re)writing women’s intellectual histories. Time and again, these works have had to confront two enduring intellectual challenges. First, how do we write histories of women’s ideas in relation to—but without being subsumed by—their personal and intellectual relationships with men? Second, how do we take seriously the full spectrum of political questions with which women engaged, including, but not limited to, “women’s questions”? In Erased, Patricia Owens offers a compelling, ground-breaking response to these challenges. She does so by examining the “gendered politics of memorialisation and non-memorialisation” (p. 17) through an intergenerational narrative of the rise and fall of British International Relations and its intellectual impoverishments. Key themes, such as the effects of marriage and intimacy on the intellectual trajectories of women scholars (Lucie Zimmern, Agnes Headlam-Morley); the significance of disciplinary training and the price paid by those who crossed IR’s epistemological and methodological boundaries (Lucy Philip Mair, Merze Tate); and the sexist, often misogynistic treatment of individuals (Susan Strange, Rachel Wall), highlight enduring patterns of devaluation, neglect, and erasure of women intellectuals in IR. Throughout, the book contends that these erasures hinged on the twin elisions of race and empire as serious subjects of international thought, as well as the gender identities of the thinkers themselves.
Erased’s painstaking intellectual labor lies in building its narrative from the ground up by drawing on everyday accounts, thereby eschewing both a deterministic structural account of women’s erasure and hagiographic depictions of “exceptional” women. The book upends foundational assumptions within political science and IR about the value and role of archival work. Consider the sheer breadth of source material: personal papers, lecture titles and notes, medical records, oral interviews, photographs, political speeches, and private correspondence. The decision to reject a totalizing power-knowledge account of women’s marginalization is significant as the reader is compelled to confront how the personal and the intimate are not incidental to, but constitutive of, the international and the imperial, whether in the lives and work of Claudia Jones, Merze Tate, Rachel Wall, or Susan Strange.
The title may sound bleak, but it is never passive. Erased, the word, assigns agency to the men who erased and to the women who endured. It holds up a mirror to a discipline that has been in crisis since its inception, refracting stories of power (Chapters 6 and 9), prestige (Chapter 1), personal animosities (Chapter 11), and intellectual theft (Chapters 3 and 10). Yet, the book does more than “call out” the racialized and gendered origins of IR. It curates and builds the resources necessary to imagine new ways of theorizing international politics. Two particularly promising possibilities emerge. First, it centers race, gender, sexuality, and ability as core dimensions along which the intellectual architecture of IR developed. Second, it provides a foundation for thinking beyond what Barry Buzan and Richard Little have, in their 2001 Millennium article, termed the failure of International Relations as “an intellectual project” by setting the agenda for an interdisciplinary, historically grounded vantage point from which to reimagine the international.
One way for future scholars to extend Owens’ call for collaborative historical research attuned to racialized and gendered patterns of exclusion is by bridging methods from Global Intellectual History (GIH) to the study of women’s international thought. The recent turn to GIH emphasizes encounters, flows, connections, networks, and the movement of ideas through mobile actors across the imperial world. In their edited volume Global Intellectual History (2013), Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori advocate for the study of alternative and competing “universals,” the comparative treatment of non-Western thinkers with the same depth and rigor as their Western counterparts, and the tracing of circulations, intermediaries, and networks within a holistic framework of connected imperial worlds. Reading Erased through the GIH lens deepens Owens’ crucial argument that British universities and think tanks functioned as imperial sites of knowledge production at the heart of the colonial metropole. Leading figures, such as Lucy Philip Mair, Eileen Power, and Margery Perham, cultivated knowledge on colonial administration and imperial formations in a world-historical perspective. Yet, these same institutions incubated seeds of anti-colonial dissent. Cities like London, Paris, and Berlin emerged as key nodes of solidarity, resistance, and coalition-building for activists, poets, and political leaders from across the colonized world.
One of Owens’ central figures, Eileen Power, is portrayed as instrumental in advancing critical thinking about the historical forces shaping imperial dominance and anti-imperial resistance. In fact, “Power’s world” (Chapter 5) is even wider than Owens’ account reveals. Her intellectual influence extended to figures like Renuka Ray, a woman political leader and social reformer in British India. Ray, in her autobiography My Reminiscences: Social development during Gandhian era and after (Stree Publications, 2005), recalls the formative mentorship she received from Power. The two families were close, and Power served as Ray’s local guardian after her parents returned to British India. It was Power who ultimately helped Ray secure admission to the London School of Economics (LSE), an institution she claimed in My Reminiscences to be “the centre of progressive and socialist thought not only in England but throughout the world” (p. 33). As a student of economics, Ray contrasted Power’s teachings with those of British economic historian Lilian Knowles, who was one of LSE’s first women professors. Ray noted that while Knowles “sang glories of the empire on which the sun never set,” Power offered a far more critical account of British imperialism and its world-historical context (pp. 33–34). Ray credits Power, along with figures like Harold Laski and George Lansbury, for inspiring her return to India to join the independence movement under M. K. Gandhi’s leadership. Placing Third World anti-colonial thinkers and White British intellectuals on the same analytical plane reveals a more stratified and interconnected imperial world, one in which the cascading (and often unintended) effects of pedagogical and intellectual choices made by thinkers like Power become stark. Thus, institutions such as the LSE and Oxbridge emerge not only as imperial engines of knowledge production but also, paradoxically, as sites of critical reflection and anti-colonial awakening.
Erased offers one of the most intellectually provocative responses to Cynthia Enloe’s field-defining feminist provocation, “Where are the women?,” and her enduring claim that “the personal is political is international” (Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, University of California Press, 2014). It is difficult not to wonder how different the landscape of British International Relations might have looked had the figures examined in Erased been accorded the same status as its “all-white, all-male” canon (p. 4). While we cannot know for certain, the book stands as a cautionary tale: individual and institutional decisions about which thinkers to study or exclude, which genres of writing matter, and how syllabi are constructed all shape the foundations of what counts as the history, politics, and sociology of the “international.” For these reasons, Erased is a work of rare courage and is essential reading for all serious knowledge producers of International Relations.
