This roundtable discusses a laborious effort to write women back in the history of international thought and expand the cannon of IR in interesting new directions. But this is not only an exercise in recovery. It is also a consistent effort to understand why it is that women have been marginalized in the historiography of international thought. The aim is not to glorify women, but to place them alongside their male counterparts as equal and worthy scholars, theorists, and practitioners. This sits alongside new systematic appreciations and anthologies in adjacent fields, such as international law and political theory, published by major academic presses.[4]
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 14-30
Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds. Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108859684
31 July 2023 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt14-30 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Georgios Giannakopoulos
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Georgios Giannakopoulos, City University of London. 2
Review by Su Lin Lewis, University of Bristol 4
Review by Ann-Sophie Schoepfel, LMU Munich. 8
Review by Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge. 12
Response by Katharina Rietzler, University of Sussex, and Patricia Owens, University of Oxford 15
Introduction by Georgios Giannakopoulos, City University of London
I need only add that the author of this book was my secretary at the time of its composition…but the views expressed in the book are entirely Miss Mair’s own, and the only part I have had in has been to observe the care with which she sought to verify each statement, and to give full weight to the side of the case which she did not sympathise.[1]
This is how the British scholar and internationalist Gilbert Murray prefaces Lucy Mair’s 1923 The Protection of Minorities—one of the first systematic treatises on the League of Nation’s minority system written by one of Britain’s first female anthropologists and a largely forgotten international thinker.[2] Nobody would dare phrase an introduction to the work of an academic in such manner today. But in the 1920s, this was a different case. And, incidentally, Gilbert Murray, as Glenda Sluga reminds us in one of essays in the volume under review, was one of the key gatekeepers to a world of predominantly male experts on International Relations (IR).[3]
While much has passed since the 1920s, our world, the world of academia, international history, and international relations is full of such foreclosures. Even today, we attend big or small conferences featuring all-male panels, otherwise known as “manels.” There are still entries in our encyclopaedias and worlds of accumulated knowledge that objectify women and reproduce the most heteronormative of norms.
This roundtable discusses a laborious effort to write women back in the history of international thought and expand the cannon of IR in interesting new directions. But this is not only an exercise in recovery. It is also a consistent effort to understand why it is that women have been marginalized in the historiography of international thought. The aim is not to glorify women, but to place them alongside their male counterparts as equal and worthy scholars, theorists, and practitioners. This sits alongside new systematic appreciations and anthologies in adjacent fields, such as international law and political theory, published by major academic presses.[4]
Ann-Sophie Schoepfel offers a detailed description of the edited collection, noting its ground-breaking features. Schoepfel argues that this project opens a framework that could be expanded to consider the place and role of historical women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Su Lin Lewis applauds the merits of the volume and proposes the Middle East as another region worthy of more systematic exploration. Su Lin Lewis further argues that the absence of voices from the global south is another example of the European and North American origins of international relations as a discipline. Ayşe Zarakol, on the other hand, sees the wider project of recovering the place of women in international thought as an opportunity to reflect on her own positionality as a woman scholar of international relations.
In their response, Katharina Rietzler and Patricia Owen restate the aim of the wider project. It is not intended to offer a complete and definitive “global” narrative, but, rather, to put forth a perspective that may be pluralized and taken in different (and non-western) directions by scholars with access to different forms of local knowledge.
Participants:
Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. She is Principal Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought. With Katharina Rietzler, she co-edited Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and with Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah Dunstan, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is currently writing a gendered history of international thought in twentieth-century Britain.
Katharina Rietzler is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex. She is Co-Investigator of the multi-award winning Leverhulme Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought, and co-editor, with Patricia Owens, of Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and with Owens, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah Dunstan, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is currently completing a book on twentieth-century philanthropy, international thought, and the problem of the public.
Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor in Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. She has written on urban cosmopolitanism, transnational activism, and post-colonial internationalism, with a focus on modern Southeast Asia. Her monograph, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) won the Urban History Association’s Prize for Best Book (2015-16). She recently led an AHRC-funded collaborative research project on “Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War” <https://afroasiannetworks.com> and is currently an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow.
Ann-Sophie Schoepfel is a Historian of International Law at LMU Munich, teaching at Sciences Po Paris. Her intellectual background covers History, International Law, and Anthropology along with stops in Paris, Heidelberg, Munich, Hanoi, Kyoto, Tokyo, Washington and Harvard. Her research on the colonial dimensions of war-crimes trials in Asia, as well as on Vietnamese migration in the context of the Cold War, has earned her numerous awards and academic honors. Her new project focuses on Afro-Asian voices—jurists, writers, and anticolonial revolutionaries—from across the French former colonial empire, as they struggled to reimagine state sovereignty and international law in the Cold War crucible.
Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Most recently, she is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Review by Su Lin Lewis, University of Bristol
Women’s International Thought has the laudable, and wholly necessary, aim of destabilising a canon of intellectual history around internationalism, the foundations of International Relations (IR). It urges us, as Vivian M. May does, to “approach the gaps in our field as sites of meaning”. May’s chapter, the first in the collection, urges us to think with Anna Julia Cooper, the first Black woman to earn a PhD at the Sorbonne (and the fourth at Harvard), who wrote her dissertation on the entanglements of French imperialism and slavery in Haiti, and the birth of the French Republic.[5] Cooper’s rigorous use of archival recovery as a tactic is employed by many authors in this volume. Recovery, of course, has been a practice long practiced by feminist historians in not only filling missing gaps, but exposing the politics of exclusion.
The collection does an excellent job of putting what it calls “white women’s IR”[6]—both in and at the margins of the discipline of international relations—into conversation with new work on Black women both in and at the margins of Black internationalist thought. Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler’s introduction stresses the urgent need to put these histories into conversation. The exclusion of these women from the discipline of international history both past and present puts into question who is considered a “serious thinker,” and asks us to expand our field of vision to other realms in which women’s internationalist ideas were transmitted and shared (12).
The collection begins with women who are considered canonical thinkers—from Cooper to Rosa Luxemburg to Simone Weil and Eslanda Robeson—who shared a critical approach to imperialism: perhaps, as the editors suggest, this is “why so many women were subsequently marginalised” in a discipline that “erased imperialism and ‘race relations’ from the history of the field” (6). Kimberly Hutchings revisits Luxemburg’s critique of both the modern state and imperialism as a product of the bourgeois class, and her idea of spontaneous, revolutionary change moving towards the development of a genuinely universal class, transcendent of nationality.[7] As Helen M. Kinsella argues, Weil’s critique of colonialism emerges from her reading of the Yen-Bay uprising in Indochina, where the murder of six French soldiers was met with severe retaliation, alongside the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, an “unabashed celebration of French imperialism.”[8] In Imaobong Umoren’s chapter, Eslanda Robeson sees the centrality of independence movements and the birth of the post-colonial world as crucial in reshaping international relations after 1945.[9]
Other thinkers featured in the volume wavered between a tacit endorsement of imperialism and a critique of it. Barbara Wootton wrote of the need for large-scale federations and free movement of peoples, setting the foundation for the development of European integration; yet, as Or Rosenboim argues, her perspective on the inclusion of ex-colonies was “hazy.”[10] As Andrew Jewett argues, Vera Micheles Dean was a proponent of modernization, viewing countries on different timelines of progress, but believed in no-strings-attached aid to non-industrial countries.[11]
The second section focuses explicitly on “Outsiders” : women who were never in the academy, but shaped and transmitted their international thought as public intellectuals and thinkers. As founder of the Women’s International Aeronautic Association, Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen, in Tamson Pietsch’s chapter, harnessed the possibilities of aviation and saw women as crucial in making aviation safe and palatable to a wider public, and thus in spreading the cause of international peace.[12] For McQueen, an itinerant Christian scientist, aviation was a deeply spiritual activity, with the capacity to transform global thinking. As Lucian M. Ashworth shows, women’s peace and suffrage movements converged in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom after World War. Ashworth analyses four of the key thinkers in the League within the context of their debates over appeasement and the issue of “pooled security.”[13] At the end of his chapter, Ashworth poses an important methodological question for international relations: should we judge past thinkers on the basis of the value of past theories, as IR tends to do, or by how their thought informed immediate policy in the context of their time? What are the stakes of the former in terms of erasure? What role do discourses such as international feminism play in fundamental debates of the early twentieth century, and why have they been ignored? (155).
One reason, as Geoffrey Field’s piece makes clear, is that women international thinkers were actively marginalised from the discipline.[14] Though she hoped for an academic career, due to an unsupportive supervisor, Elizabeth Wiskemann never gained her PhD. She moved to Berlin as a journalist, cultivated an important network of contacts, and went on to write influential books in European relations before and after World War II including Czechs and Germans (1938) and The Rome-Berlin Axis (1949).[15] As Field notes, Wiskemann’s career is typical of women who operated in the field of international relations at a time when academia and the foreign service were closed to them; instead, they pursued their careers in journalism, broadcasting, and pressure-group activism, in Chatham House, and in intelligence or propaganda (205).
The final section of the book focuses on thinkers operating within the academy. It begins with Glenda Sluga’s chapter on F. Melian Stawell, the first person to use the term ‘international thought,’ partly because her mentor stole her idea for a book on the League of Nations.[16] Sluga situates Stawell within the context of the internationalism of the 1920s, deeply connected to both nationalism and imperialism. By contrast, her chapter ends with E. Green Balch, an erstwhile internationalist concerned with the law of the seas and international sovereignty. Catia Confortini continues the focus on Balch by delving deeper into her view of America as an immigrant society, but also as an empire, particularly given its occupation of Haiti.[17] This also informed the politics of her internationalism, which was critical of both liberalism and socialism for their attachments to the state. In the final chapter, Natasha Wheatley reflects on the place from which international law emerges and its subsequent perspective on the role of the state, seen primarily through the work of the Polish exile Krystyna Marek.[18] Throughout the collection, the primary of place and positioning of these thinkers—as exiles, as migrants, as women, as activists—feeds much of their cosmopolitanism and their belief in global community.
Chapters on African American intellectuals indicate the importance of the wider global context of decolonisation, pan-Africanism, and Afro-Asianism to Black internationalist thought. Robbie Shilliam’s chapter on Amy Ashwood Garvey shows her to be a figure constantly aware of her positioning within Black intellectual life.[19] On the streets of Harlem, she adapted her speeches and conversations for various Southern and Anglo-Caribbean Black communities and classes. This, combined with her travels to the Caribbean and the retrieval of her Ashanti heritage, made clear to her the struggles within Blackness itself, a “fractal” Pan-Africanism which distinguished her thought from that of her more famous husband, Marcus Garvey (161). Keisha Blain’s chapter on Mittie Maude Lena Gordon reveals an important component of Black public intellectual life: the “street-scholar,” who, like Amy Ashwood Garvey, disseminated ideas to crowds in parks and street corners. [20] Gordon was part of a circle of Black internationalists who were drawn to Japan after its success in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and its defiance of colonial powers, and who actively promoted Afro-Asian solidarity. Despite their overlooking of Japan’s own imperialist ambitions in East and Southeast Asia, the commitment of these internationalists, and Gordon herself, in tying the fate of America to that of Asians and Africans transmuted the importance of global anti-colonialism to audiences at home. Meanwhile, as Barbara Savage shows, the internationalist scholar Merze Tate delved into the tools and technologies of empire—armaments, railways—and the global politics of disarmament.[21] As an African American thinker, moreover, she was engaged in anti-racist geopolitics, and travelled exhaustively in Asia and the Pacific in the post-war era.
Despite this vital inclusion of Black internationalist thinkers and their expansive connections across the decolonizing world, there is a glaring omission of any dedicated chapters on thinkers from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The introduction does end by pointing to the need for a project of Global IR, but it is surprising that there are no references to scholars already engaged in this project,[22] nor any gesture to the women left out. Though the discipline of IR might have evolved as a Euro-American project, international thinkers and activists from the Global South were deeply involved in shaping the structures of internationalism, from both above and below; within Women’s Internationalist Thought, Jewett argues that Dean was inspired by India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s stance as both a leader and an internationalist, while Umoron points to Robeson’s interactions with Soon Ching-Ling, an internationalist in her own right. Many of the wives, sisters, and daughters of internationalist statesmen—Soon Ching-Ling, Fatimah Jinnah, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Indira Gandhi—had their own internationalist visions; Pandit, Nehru’s sister, was India’s first representative to the UN and President of the UN General Assembly, meaning that for some states women were central to international relations from the outset.[23] This testifies to new dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in international relations from the point of view of the post-colonial world that remain to be explored. Other less connected women were directly involved in pre- and post-war projects of remaking the international order. South Asian and Latin American women—Hansa Mehta, Begum Shaista Ikramullah, Lakshmi Menon, Minerva Bernardino—were directly involved in drafting the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Nehru’s cousin, Rameshwari Nehru, led international peace and Afro-Asia solidarity movements in the 1950s, and there were many other women writers, activists, and artists participating in such movements who thought and worked along internationalist lines.[24]
This oversight exposes another persistent chasm in the “canon” of international thought, even in the revisionist anthology which accompanies the book, as a site of meaning: one all too rooted in Europe and North America. If race and gender are two categories that the collection has successfully unsettled, the geographical myopia of the ‘canon’ of IR still needs urgent address. The perspective of women from the Global South offers new possibilities to further enrich the field. Perhaps one of the greatest lessons these women—and this volume—teaches us is to dispense of canons altogether and to adopt an attitude to international thought that is contingent, ‘fractal,’ critical, and inclusive.
Review by Ann-Sophie Schoepfel, LMU Munich
Women’s International Thought is an erudite interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays on the contributions of eighteen women, scholars and activists, to the emergence of international intellectual thought. From the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, women composed “some of the first and most influential textbooks on and surveys of international relations” (2). They envisioned International Relations (IR). Yet, for too long, historians and IR scholars ignored their reflections on the nation, citizenship, empire, and the international order.[25] Drawing on multilingual and multi-archival sources, including writings, PhD theses, teachings, pamphlets, autobiographies, and journal articles, Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, and their coauthors set out to reimagine the history of international thought through the lens of gendered politics of inclusions and exclusions. By reexamining histories of IR, internationalisms, and Black women’s intellectual history, this edited volume not only fits the biographies of historical women in the intellectual canon; it also expands the canon to a new spectrum of ideas and public engagement.
Women’s of International Thought opens with four canonical thinkers whose positionality served in the claims of knowledge to denounce international politics of racialization. Vivian M. May[26] examines how the diasporic experience of Anna Julia Cooper (c. 1858–1964), a former slave, influenced her epistemological commitment. Cooper wrote two seminal works: the first volume of Black feminist thought in the United States, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892),[27] and her 1925 Sorbonne dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la Révolution,[28] which offered a methodology to recover the voices of marginalized peoples of color. Drawing on those writings, May sheds light on Cooper’s critique of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and violence to reckon with a global history of inequality. Imaobong D. Umoren[29] elucidates how the African American anthropologist Eslanda Robeson (1896–1965) advocated for the recognition of women and the Third World as political actors in international politics. In a world structured by the emerging Cold War, Robeson stressed the similarities between African American, African, and Asian freedom struggles. For Umoren, Robeson’s engagement illustrates a practice of “colored cosmopolitanism” (100), which is comparable with the intellectual commitments of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Mittie Maude Lena Gordon intellectual commitment to fight against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression.
Kimberly Hutchings[30] and Helen M. Kinsella[31] explore the work of two historical women entangled in the imperial and radical politics of continental Europe: Polish economist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943). Hutchings shows that Rosa Luxemburg’s experience as a woman, Pole, and Jew shaped her place at the margins of pre-World-War-One Eastern and Central Europe, and thus her revolutionary discourse on global capitalism, Marxism, and emancipation towards an “identification with the universal class, which was constructed through imperialism” (71). Kinsella reveals how Simone Weil challenged the definition of an intellectual. Weil was a philosopher, a mystic, and a political activist who supported the workers, the trade union movement, and the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. From her experience, she advocated the reformation of labor and the obligation to set the conditions for recognizing individuals as sacred, and the introduction of spiritual belief in political practices in order to end colonialism. The first chapters reshape the canon of international thought beautifully by presenting the biographies and the intellectual productions of four women.
The second section of this book is dedicated to the so-called “marginalized thinkers-outsiders” and highlights their place in the study of internationalism. Tamson Pietsch[32] introduces us to the interwar society, at a time when women remained marginalized and excluded from politics and the public space, despite women’s mobilization during World War I.[33] Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen (1878–1958) founded not only the Women’s International Association of Aeronautics in the United States, but also reimagined an interwar society promoting technologies of modernity, women’s freedom, and thinking as a mechanism of change. As a prophet of technological utopia, she envisioned how technology shaped the new world. As Lucian M. Ashworth[34] demonstrates, international institutions framed women’s intellectual thought. At the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961), Helena Swanwick (1864–1939), Vera Brittain (1893–1970), and Mary Agnes Hamilton (1882–1966) defined feminism as a key to understand the nature of IR, to oppose masculinist discourses. They contributed to the development of the intellectual traditions of suffragism and feminist pacifism.
The interwar period saw the emergence of Black historical women in international affairs. Robbie Shilliam[35] focuses on Jamaican Pan-Africanist activist Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897–1969), who co-created with her husband the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), “one of the largest and most remarkable social movements of the twentieth century” (158). To recall Black international thought and the “fullness of women’s international thought” (178), Shilliam underlines the necessity to consider the living knowledge tradition left by women and the fractal disposition to Pan-Africanism. Keisha N. Blain[36] presents the impact of the founder and president of the Peace Movement in Ethiopia (PME) in Chicago, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (1889–1961), on Afro-Asian solidarity. To challenge racism and White supremacy in the United States, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (1889–1961) called for an African American alliance with Japan, and affiliated in the 1930s with Japanese politicians as well as Japanese members of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World. She is a perfect example of a street scholar whose pamphlets and letters were read in meetings.
Many of the women international thinkers became interested in international affairs with post-World-War I liberal internationalism, and matured in the fight against Nazism and government service in World War I. Geoffrey Field[37] demonstrates how the international thought of the British “scholar-journalist” Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899–1971) was forged in the international politics of the 1930s. Wiskemann started to write on power politics and diplomacy as an ardent opponent of National Socialism in Germany.[38] She became an intelligence officer in World War II. In the 1950s, she witnessed the emergence of academic IR programs, and obtained a chair of International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. These women who experienced marginalization in the interwar period were not only thinkers, but were also activists, concerned with translating theory into practice to fight against radicalism.
The last part of the book focuses on the major contributions of women in the Western academy. The themes of race and imperialism figure prominently in the study of Florence Melian Stawell (1869–1936), Emily Greene Balch, and Merze Tate (1905–1996). Glenda Sluga[39] picks up the story of the interwar liberal internationalist Stawell to investigate the origins of international thought in classicism. Stawell’s book on the Growth of International Thought was the first to use the term “international thought.”[40] It was inspired by Gilbert Murray, Stawell’s mentor and the founder of the League of Nations. Catia C. Confortini[41] offers an insight in the transnational women’s movement of the early century. Emily Greene Balch, who received the Nobel Peace Prize, was one of WILPF’s pillars. A pacifist, she advocated for a contextual approach of women to demonstrate that wars and militarism at the primary cause of women’s devaluation in societies. Barbara D. Savage[42] shifts attention to the international thought of Merze Tate, an African American professor, scholar, and expert on international disarmament and diplomacy in the Pacific. Tate conceptualized an anti-racist and anticolonial geopolitics and searched for a just concept of international relations, based on her experience of empire in Oxford in the 1930s and in India in the 1950s.
The study of world commerce, international organizations and international law calls for the attention of three academic figures: Barbara Wootton (1897–1988), Vera Micheles Dean (1903–1972), and Krystyna Marek (1914–1993). Or Rosenboim[43] examines the complexities of the international thought of Barbara Wootton. Concerned with the tensions between capitalism and international relations, Wootton advocated for a new welfarist international order to overcome nationalism in economic policies. She defended her visions not only at Bedford College, London, the first higher education college for women in Britain, but also at the think tank Chatham House. Andrew Jewett[44] delves into the geopolitics of US Foreign Relations and the life of Vera Micheles Dean to reveal Dean’s thought on collective forms of economic organizations, pooling of sovereignty, and democratic socialism. Her thinking encompasses the criticism of the use of modernization in international relations by the leaders of postcolonial states as an excuse for dictatorial rule. In the final chapter, Natasha Wheatley[45] explores the profound thoughts of Krystyna Marek on sovereignty, the birth and death of states, and international law.[46] She convincingly shows that Marek expanded the Vienna school of law to demonstrate that sovereignty existed before states did.
Women’s International Thought is a must-have reference work for anyone interested in the history of ideas, intellectual history, and international relations. If I am to offer a critique of the volume, it is that it does not contend with the place of historical women from Central Africa, Asia, and Latin America in global discussions of world affairs. It would be thus important to recover the voices of woman thinkers in the global south, such as the Indian social reformer and freedom activist Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988),[47] or the Indian lawyer, social reformer and writer Cornelia Sorabjee (1866–1954), the first woman to graduate from Bombay University and who also studied law at Oxford, and whose writings of partition could recast completely the understanding of nations in international relations.[48] The volume could also have benefited from a closer and horizontal consideration of the fundamental ideas and beliefs involved in the conduct of world affairs, and of the values at stake. Yet these are, ultimately, minor concerns. Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, and their contributors have added tremendously to our understanding of the contribution of women in the history of international thought as a key intellectual conjecture in the inquiry into empire, international law, war, world commerce, international organization, and global civil society.
Review by Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge
That Women’s International Thought: A New History was well overdue in the various cognate fields it touches upon is evidenced by the enthusiastic reception it has received from all corners. Already lauded in venues such as Foreign Affairs[49], and International Affairs,[50] and discussed in forums hosted by International Politics Reviews[51] and now H-Diplo (and with others forthcoming), Women’s International Thought probably has one of the highest review ratios among academic books published in 2021.[52] This is no small feat for an edited collection, and should by itself give us a sense of how starved we were for a serious treatment of women international thinkers. And certainly, the book deserves all the praise it has gotten, as do the editors, Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, for setting up such a thoughtful framework for this ambitious project. It does pose problems for me as a reviewer, however, forcing me to face the difficulty of saying something new and worthwhile about a volume that has already been deeply engaged with some of our top historians of political thought and International Relations (IR) theorists. To make matters even more difficult for reviewers, the edited volume is part of a much larger project,[53] and whatever gaps one could identify in its coverage of the thinkers covered is likely already being addressed by other publications in the pipeline.
One possible way out of that conundrum is to use my own positionality to engage with the book, first, as a woman who makes a living producing international thoughts, and second, as a woman who makes a living producing international thoughts but who is not originally from “the West.” I know to do so is generally frowned upon in academic practice, but the very subject of this book raises question about when and how such positionality matters.
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Let’s start with womanhood. There is a good chance that I would not have been asked to review this book had I not been a woman; I am neither an intellectual historian, nor have I ever written on women (or gender) myself. In ways that the academy deems most important, therefore, I am not fully qualified to review this book, just as I am not really qualified to mark the various gender studies theses that reliably come my way each year despite that fact (marking is centrally allocated in Cambridge with presumed deference to expertise). But in a way, I am an expert on being a woman occupying a space that is not too dissimilar to the women covered in this book. I know that being a woman in the academy is to be never able to escape that fact: to be constantly asked to save this or that panel from becoming a “manel”; to represent women in this or that committee; to be constantly asked to speak to graduate students about work/life balance; to having to advocate for gender balance on appointments committees; to have it causally assumed that you work on gender or are interested in gender topics; and to have funding bodies disappointed when they find out that you are not working on women even though you are one.
Note that the above is not a litany of complaints about sexism, which is a whole other matter. What I am trying to capture rather is the ambivalence presented by everyday choices when one is a ‘woman in the academy.’ I personally welcome all of the above as a matter of general principle: it is great that people are now making effort to include women on panels and committees; we should hire more women; and it is a net positive that funding bodies now are looking for serious gender scholarship, which is interesting and worthwhile in its own right. Of course. At the same time, a part of me does wish that these were somebody else’s problems and that I too could be a brain in a vat who never had to serve on an Athena SWAN[54] committee. Perhaps I am alone in my weariness, but I doubt it.
This is probably why among all of the excellent chapters in the volume, I was most drawn to Kimberly Hutchings’s chapter on Rosa Luxemburg,[55] as it brilliantly illustrates these tensions in the life (and afterlife) of a woman international thinker (or scholar). As Hutchings notes, “Luxemburg was resistant to identifying herself with what she saw as exclusive identities: woman, Polish, Jewish” (54). She was able to make a big impact during her lifetime “as a woman revolutionary who went beyond subordinate roles and relegation to a focus on the ‘woman question’” (55). Her critics used her identity as a woman, charging her with being too emotional, but nevertheless recognised her “as a significant interlocutor” (55). After her death, however, her work and life were read through an increasingly feminized and romanticized lens (56), which led her to be remembered more as a revolutionary hero rather than a martyr. To counter all of this, Hutchings recovers Luxemburg’s international theory to convincingly argue that Luxemburg understood the international (or rather the transnational) aspects of capitalism better than most others remembered as more serious thinkers: “Luxemburg put forward the idea that geopolitical hierarchy, inequality, and difference in economic and social form were integral to capitalism as a worldwide phenomenon, and had been since its inception” (65–66).
How is it, then, that we have come to almost completely overlook Luxemburg as an IR thinker? (This is a rhetorical question.) And the excellence of Hutchings’s chapter only drives home the bittersweetness in the recovery of Luxemburg as a woman thinker; not because it did not matter in her thinking that she was a woman (it was clearly one of the aspects of her multi-layered identity that sensitised her to inequality), but because I know that her reintroduction as a woman thinker to the canon will render her suspect to some, and ghettoise her thinking for yet others. This is how it often works: women are forgotten or excluded precisely because they are women, which then forces us also to remember or include them as such‑but only the second part of the equation ever draws attention.
The continuous forgetting of women international thinkers—which this book keeps reminding us of, even as it offers us an antidote—is arguably the worst part of the sexism of the academy, and what many of us in more recent generations have been the least prepared for when starting out. When I was younger, a graduate student making her way through the world, I had a sense that I might face some sexism, but I also believed that things had just started improving and would only continue to improve. The academy presented us with an illusion of linear progress, which had been unfortunately delayed until then but would be quickly fulfilled in our lifetimes. “Sure, there are only a handful of women full professors in my department,” you told yourself, “but by the time I get to that point the field will have fixed that, now that we are finally talking about such matters.” (Spoiler alert: there are still only a handful of women full professors in most political science departments).
That docile optimism, I now realise, is only made possible by the erasure of brilliant women that came before. They were there, they faced many of the same dilemmas or worse, they even emerged more victorious than any of us could dream of, in the face of much greater structural resistance, and even so they were erased or mostly forgotten. This is quite a horrifying thing to realise as a woman scholar, existentially speaking. But maybe this volume is a sign that the tide has broken. One can hope.
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At the outset, I promised a second note of positionality in this review, having to do with my personal connections to the ‘non-West,’ so let me now turn to that theme. To its credit, this is not a project that one could accuse of ignoring intersectionality, especially of race and gender. Notions of intersectionality ring across the book, whether in Simone Weil’s thought as covered by Helen Kinsella,[56] or in Imaobong Umoren’s chapter on Eslanda Robenson,[57] or Robbie Shilliam’s chapter on Amy Ashwood Garvey,[58] all of which are excellent chapters. What I think is missing from the volume, however, even though it kept appearing as a setting in various life stories, is the world outside of the West (except for Central/East Europe), and the women from such settings. And I wonder if they have not been erased even more somehow than their Western counterparts. I think there is an argument to be made that the West may not have dominated in terms of influential women international thinkers in the time periods under investigation. The real action was elsewhere, and the West was not necessarily leading the way on this issue. It is at least worth thinking about.
For example, Umoren notes that Robeson attended the 1949 all-Asian women’s meeting in Beijing, where she met “165 delegates representing Africa, Europe and the Americas—women delegates officially representing, in all, 500 million women” (99). Who were these other women from other parts of the world? Were they not any international thinkers among them? Or even in earlier periods, were the same socialist currents that so motivated Luxemburg not home to other women thinkers in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America?
At the other end of the political spectrum, advocates of women’s emancipation around the globe tied their fortunes also to (often fascist) national liberation projects and/or pan-ethnic ideologies. For example, Halide Edip Adıvar (1884–1964) was both an advocate for Ottoman women’s rights, and also a Turkish nationalist and pan-Turkist. Her views are not entirely palatable to us today, but she was an international thinker who had a major impact on the period she lived in.[59] I am sure there are many others like her around the globe. If we are finally in the recovery business, it should be both a global and warts-and-all endeavour, capturing women’s international thought in all its moral complexity and variability.
⁂
None of the above should be taken as a criticism of the project—the editors and the contributors obviously thought about and grappled with everything I have said here. I know that these types of projects always involve trade-offs. So much ground to cover, so little time and space. And if I sounded too strong of a note of despair above about the lack of linear progress in these matters, let me also add that I am still with Weber: politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, and any progress we make is due to people who keep reaching for the impossible. I am glad the editors said ‘in spite of all!’ and launched this project. We are all better off for it.
Response by Katharina Rietzler, University of Sussex, and Patricia Owens, University of Oxford
It is a pleasure to have three reviewers with expertise in global history engage with our edited volume Women’s International Thought: A New History, and we are grateful to Su Lin Lewis, Ann-Sophie Schoepfel, and Ayşe Zarakol for their reviews. We extend these thanks also on behalf of the volume’s individual authors to whose analyses we remain indebted, and of the other collaborators on the Leverhulme Trust Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought, of which this edited volume is the first book-length output, namely Kimberly Hutchings, Sarah C. Dunstan, and Joanna Wood.
Two main themes emerge from the reviews of Lewis, Schoepfel, and Zarakol: first, a plea for the ongoing necessity of historical recovery work; and second, a critique of whom exactly we were able to recover in terms of geographical location. We welcome both in the spirit of generative critique, and as indicative of important future forays.
The first point is most explicitly articulated by Zarakol, writing as a woman academic in the field of International Relations. Zarakol recognises the long history of disparaging women’s intellectual production and how this erases women as thinkers. Crucially, it is important to locate that erasure in time, given that it often takes place long after particular thinkers were recognised as major producers of international thought in their lifetime. It is only through a process of subsequent scholarly remembering and canon formation that this contribution is either forgotten or “misfiled.”[60]
As Zarakol writes on Kimberly Hutchings’s essay on Rosa Luxemburg in the volume,[61] this “drives home the bittersweetness in the recovery of Luxemburg as a woman thinker; not because it did not matter in her thinking that she was a woman…but because I know that her reintroduction as a woman thinker to the canon will render her suspect to some and ghettoise her thinking for yet others. This is how it often works; women are forgotten or excluded precisely because they are women, which then forces us also to remember or include them as such, but only the second part of the equation ever draws attention.” This is why recovering women’s international thought as women’s international thought matters, even if such identifications can elicit discomfort among scholars today, especially if they never consciously set out to write “as women.” But this recovery work remains relevant not only to feminist historians of international thought, but to all international intellectual and disciplinary histories that seek to produce accurate analyses of past thought.
But what should be the focus of this recovery work in terms of period and location? This is where our reviewers would have liked us to cast our initial net more widely, beyond North America and Western Europe. The women thinkers in the volume worked mostly in English (with the exception of Simone Weil, Rosa Luxemburg and, for the early part of her life, Krystyna Marek) and the two thinkers who were born in what would now be considered Eastern Europe, Luxemburg and Marek, spent most of their adult lives in either Imperial Germany or in Switzerland. As a whole, and with only a few exceptions, the volume focuses on British and American locations, especially in the two core parts which examine ‘thinker outsiders’ and the academy, as this was the remit of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project.
In part, then, we were limited by the requirements of a funded research project which, for the sake of feasibility and delivering what we promised, necessarily limited our focus. We were aware that a relatively narrow geographical location could be criticised or even mistaken for an oversight, and that there were other potential ways of structuring the investigation. As we write in the introduction, “a new history is not a finished history” and “the figures analysed here are [not] the only women to take seriously as international thinkers, even in our narrow period or location.”[62]
The absence of thinkers from the Global South is thus the result of a conscious practical and intellectual decision that we did not take lightly. In the light of calls for a project of ‘Global International Relations (IR)’, they are perhaps particularly necessary if we want to prevent such a recovery project from reproducing gendered, racialized, geographic, and linguistic mechanisms of erasure. Here, it is important to apply a comparative lens and remember the distinctiveness of Britain and the United States in the intellectual and disciplinary history of International Relations. The locations chosen were distinctive not only in terms of their role in the development of International Relations as an academic field, and then a discipline, but also in the pathways and institutional access they opened to women thinkers in the early to mid-twentieth century. While there were structural barriers in British and American academe, there were also opportunities, for instance in the form of women’s colleges at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, but also including the Seven Sisters and Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States.[63] Britain and the United States also featured lavishly endowed and well-connected foreign affairs think tanks that employed a significant number of women.[64]
Anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance and forms of organising in Anglophone locations were also distinct. These factors do not preclude transnational connections and solidarities, as both Lewis and Zarakol point out, especially in the context of racial and imperial formations. Some of the thinkers discussed in the edited volume actively built such transnational movements, for example in the shape of Afro-Asian solidarity or Pan-Africanism. Moreover, many of these thinkers challenged imperialism and racism as dominant assumptions in IR as a field (Luxemburg, Weil, Merze Tate, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon). But they did so in the specific location and context of the European or North American imperial nation states that significantly impacted their intellectual production and reach.
Britain and the United States as the key locations for the assumed “birth” of the academic field of international relations need to be provincialized, their specificity elucidated, as well as the subsequent erasure of women’s international thought in those locations. And while we are enthusiastic about further research in other locations, we would not want to assume that it would be possible to simply map our chosen analytical frameworks onto histories of international thought in other parts of the world. We would expect such research to be deeply grounded in local knowledges, including linguistic competence in multiple languages, to be sensitive to the current imbalance when it comes to research on Europe itself, which tends to focus on Western Europe to the detriment of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, and to span all the major world regions, and the relations between them.
Projecting frameworks that fit the specific conditions for intellectual production in Anglophone locations would defeat the purpose of “Global IR.” If, as Andrew Hurrell argues, it is the case that “current frameworks for understanding global order have been shaped by, and constrained within, fundamentals of a social science that were created in the age of the European nation-state,”[65] then the analysis of these frameworks, which, until now, has not systematically included women thinkers, has to acknowledge their provinciality. It would be challenging to provide a truly global account within the confines of an edited volume but we certainly hope to see such analyses of women’s international thought and look forward to engaging with other scholars who share this hope for the future.
[1] Lucy Mair, The Protection of Minorities (London: Christophers, 1923), ix.
[2] Patricia Owens, “Women and the History of International Thought,” International Studies Quarterly 62:3 (2018), 567-81.
[3] Glenda Sluga, “From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and Internationalist Thinking at the Gender Margins, 1919-1947,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A new history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 223-25.
[4] Immi Tallgren, Portrait of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). See also the recent Cambridge Elements Women in the History of Philosophy series (https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/elements/cambridge-elements-series/women-in-the-history-of-philosophy)
[5] Vivian M. May, “Anna Julia Cooper on Slavery’s Afterlife: Can International Thought ‘Hear’ Her ‘Muffled’ Voice and Ideas,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 29-51. Hereafter Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought.
[6] Owens and Rietzler, “Introduction: Toward a History of Women’s International Thought,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 1-28.
[7] Kimberly Hutchings, “Revolutionary Thinking: Luxemburg’s Socialist International Theory,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 52-71.
[8] Helen M. Kinsella, “Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 72-92.
[9] Imaobong D. Umoren, “Ideas in Action: Eslanda Robeson’s International Thought after 1945,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 93-111.
[10] Or Rosenboim, “A Plan for Plenty: The International Thought of Barbara Wootton,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought, 286-305.
[11] Andrew Jewett, “Collective Security for Common Men and Women: Vera Micheles Dean and US Foreign Relations,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought, 306-326.
[12] Tamson Pietsch, “Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen: Thinking International Peace in an Air-Minded Age,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 115-135.
[13] Lucian M. Ashworth, “Women of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: the WILPF”, in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 136-157; here, 141.
[14] Geoffrey Field, “Elizabeth Wiskemann, Scholar-Journalist, and the Study of International Relations,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 198-220.
[15] Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans; A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (London: Oxford University Press, 1938); Wiskemann, The Rome-Berlin axis, a History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).
[16] Glenda Sluga, “From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and Internationalist Thinking at the Gender Margins, 1919-1947,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 223-243.
[17] Catia C. Confortini, “Race, Gender, and Empire in the International Thought of Emily Green Balch,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 244-265.
[18] Natasha Wheatley, “What Can We (She) Know about Sovereignty?: Krystyna Marek and the Worldedness of International Law,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 327-344.
[19] Robbie Shilliam, “Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey”, Women’s International Thought, 158-178.
[20] Keisha Blain, “’The Dark-Sin[ned] People of the Eastern World’: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon’s Vision of Afro-Asian Solidarity,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 179-197.
[21] Barbara D. Savage, “Beyond Illusions: Imperialism, Race, and Technology in Merze Tate’s International Thought,” in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: 266-285.
[22] See for instance Amitav Acharya, “Advancing Global IR: Challenges, Contentions, and Contributions’, International Studies Review 18:1 (2016): 4-15 ; Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur, and Peter Vale, eds., The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (London: Pluto, 2020).
[23] I thank Elisabeth Leake for our general discussion of this omission, and for this point in particular. See also Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (London: Palgrave, 2012).
[24] See Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis, The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2022).
[25] See for example: David Armitage, “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 232–252; Mathias Delori, “Relations internationales,” in Catherine Achin, ed., Dictionnaire. Genre et science politique. Concepts, objets, problèmes (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013), 444–456; Françoise Gaspard, “Les Femmes Dans Les Relations Internationales,” Politique Étrangère 65-3/4 (2000): 731–741 ; Kimberly Hutchings and Patricia Owens, “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution,” The American Political Science Review 115-2 (2021), 347–359, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000969.
[26] Vivian M. May, “Anna Julia Cooper on Slavery’s Afterlife: Can International Thought “Hear” Her “Muffled” Voice and Ideas?,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) [hereafter Women’s International Thought]: 29–51.
[27] Anna J. Cooper, Charles Lemert, and Esme Bhan, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (Lanham, MD: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 1998).
[28] Anna Julia Cooper, L’Attitude de La France à L’égard de l’Esclavage Pendant La Révolution. (Paris, Ile-de-France: Imprimerie de la Cour d’Appel, 1925).
[29] Imaobong D. Umoren, “Ideas in Action: Eslanda Robeson’s International Thought after 1945,” in Women’s International Thought: 93–112.
[30] Kimberly Hutchings, “Revolutionary Thinking: Luxemburg’s Socialist International Theory,” in Women’s International Thought: 52–71.
[31] Helen M. Kinsella, “Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force,” in Women’s International Thought: 72–92.
[32] Tamson Pietsch, “Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen: Thinking International Peace in an Air-Minded Age,” in Women’s International Thought: 115–135.
[33] Kimyongür Kershaw, and Angela Kimyongür, eds.,Women in Europe Between the Wars : Politics, Culture and Society (Aldershot, England:Ashgate, 2007); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Helmut Gruberand Pamela M Graves, Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women : Europe Between the Two World Wars(New York: Berghahn Books, 1998); Geoff Read, The Republic of Men(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014).
[34] Lucian M. Ashworth, “Women of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Problem of Collective Security,” in Women’s International Thought: 136–157.
[35] Robbie Shilliam, “Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey,” in Women’s International Thought: 158–178.
[36] Keisha N. Blain, “‘The Dark Skin[Ned] People of the Eastern World’: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon’s Vision of Afro-Asian Solidarity,” in Women’s International Thought: 179–197.
[37] Geoffrey Field, “Elizabeth Wiskemann, Scholar-Journalist, and the Study of International Relations,” in Women’s International Thought: 198–220.
[38] See her book published in the 1930s: Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans : a Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).
[39] Glenda Sluga, “From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and Internationalist Thinking at the Gender Margins, 1919–1947,” in Women’s International Thought: 223–243.
[40] Florence Melian Stawell, The Growth of International Thought (New York: H. Holt and company; T. Butterworth, ltd., 1930).
[41] Catia C. Confortini, “Race, Gender, Empire, and War in the International Thought of Emily Greene Balch,” in Women’s International Thought: 244–265.
[42] Barbara D. Savage, “Beyond Illusions: Imperialism, Race, and Technology in Merze Tate’s International Thought,” in Women’s International Thought: 266–285.
[43] Or Rosenboim, “A Plan for Plenty: The International Thought of Barbara Wootton,” in Women’s International Thought: 286–305.
[44] Andrew Jewett, “Collective Security for Common Men and Women: Vera Micheles Dean and US Foreign Relations,” in Women’s International Thought: 306–326.
[45] Natasha Wheatley, “What Can We (She) Know about Sovereignty?: Krystyna Marek and the Worldedness of International Law,” in Women’s International Thought: 327–344.
[46] See her study published by 1954 in Geneva: Krystyna Marek, Identity and Continuity of States in Public International Law (Genève: Libr. E. Droz, 1954)
[47] On Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, see her biography: Reena Nanda, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya : a Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[48] On Cornelia Sorabji, see: Mary Jane Mossman,, “Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954): a Pioneer Woman Lawyer in Britain and India,” Women’s History Review 29:4 (2020): 737–47, DOI: DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2019.1702791
[49] John G. Ikenberry, “A Review of Women’s International Thought: A New History,” Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2021. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-10-19/womens-international-thought-new-history
[50] Jan Stockmann, “Review: Women’s International Thought: A New History,, International Affairs 97.4 (2021): 1249-50.
[51] International Politics Reviews 9.2 (2021).
[52] See also Kathryn Starnes, “Review—Women’s International Thought,” e-International Relations. https://www.e-ir.info/2022/06/09/review-womens-international-thought/
[53] The Women and the History of International Thought project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, headed by Patricia Owens, with Katharina Rietzler and Kimberly Hutchings as co-investigators. (https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/project/women-and-history-international-thought)
[54] For non-UK readers: this is an accreditation scheme that ranks institutions of higher education in terms of their advancement toward gender equality.
[55] Kimberly Hutchings, “Revolutionary Thinking: Luxemburg’s Socialist International Theory,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) [hereafter Owens and Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought]: 52-71.
[56] Helen Kinsella, “Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force,” in Owens and Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: 72-92.
[57] Imaobong D. Umoren, “Ideas in Action: Eslanda Robeson’s International Thought after 1945,” in Owens and Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: 93-112.
[58] Robbie Shilliam, “Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey,” in Owens and Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: 158-178.
[59] There is not much written about Halide Edip in English, but for a glimpse see, for example, Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment (New York: Random House, 2017) and Didem Havlıoğlu, “The Writing Subjects: Halide Edip and Assia Djebar,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12:2 (2016): 291-5.
[60] On canon-formation, see Kimberly Hutchings and Patricia Owens, “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution,” American Political Science Review 115:2 (2021): 347-359.
[61] Kimberly Hutchings, “Revolutionary Thinking: Luxemburg’s Socialist International Theory,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) [hereafter Owens and Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: 52-71.
[62] Owens and Katharina Rietzler, ‘Introduction: Toward a History of Women’s International Thought,’ in Owens and Rietzler, Women’s International Thought: A New History, 25.
[63] Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995); Susan J. Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Nancy Weiss Malkiel, “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Stephanie Y. Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); on women’s international thought in US academe see Joanna Wood, D.Phil. thesis in progress, University of Oxford.
[64] Rietzler, “U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Women’s Intellectual Labor, 1920–1950,” Diplomatic History 46:3 (2022): 575-601; Rietzler, ‘Introduction: 100 Years of Women in International Affairs’ in Rietzler, ed., Archive Collection: 100 Years of Women in International Affairs, publ. online December 2022, 1-15, https://academic.oup.com/ia/pages/archive-collection-100-years-of-women-in-international-affairs [accessed 7 December 2022].
[65] Andrew Hurrell, “Beyond Critique: How to Study Global IR?” International Studies Review 18:1 (2016), 151.