‘Nonappearance is not Evidence of Absence’ Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon , by Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 776 pp., £29.99, ISBN 9781108999762

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 P. Owens and K. Rietzler (eds.), Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge U.P., 2021).2 S. Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations,” Daedalus 106, 3 (Summer, 1977), 41–60.3 Lucian M. Ashworth, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern State to academic International Relations (Routledge, London and New York, 2014); Jan Stöckmann, The Architects of International Relations: Building a Discipline and Designing a World (Cambridge U.P., 2022). Also, Lucian M. Ashworth, “Interdisciplinarity and International Relations,” European Political Science 8 (2009), 16–25.4 Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon, 5.5 Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon, Introduction; also, K. Hutchings and P. Owens, “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution,” American Political Science Review (2021) 115, 2, 347–59. For some interesting thoughts on canon revision: Christopher J. Finlay, “Purification versus Plurality: Lustration in the Canon of Political Thought,” Durham Research online Nov 26, 2021 (Contemporary Political Theory).6 In a brief review like this, and an anthology populated by so many women, it seems unreasonable to suggest someone who should have been included. I refer to Rebecca West, whose astonishing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1940) on Yugoslavia is one of the great works of travel-political reflection – international thought to appear between the wars and highly praised by contemporaries. However, at over 1100 pages and with its meandering style, creating a short excerpt would be a daunting task. Lene Hansen, “A Research Agenda on Feminist Texts and the Gendered Constitution of International Politics in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, 1 (2011), 109–28.7 Persia Campbell (1898–1974) Fabian socialist, feminist and economist, who wrote about Chinese indentured labor and later became a senior advisor on consumer affairs at the UN. Rita Hinden (1909–1974) ran the Fabian Society Colonial Bureau for many years and was a senior advisor on Labour party colonial policy. Eileen Power (1889–1940), distinguished historian, see Maxime Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge U. P., 1996); Lilian Knowles, Professor of Economic History at L.S.E. in the 1920s Lucy Mair (1901–1986) Africanist and major figure at L.S.E. Taught may of its students in courses of international affairs in the 1930s, but post-1945 switched to anthropology and continued to publish on Africa.8 Geoffrey Field, Elizabeth Wiskemann: Scholar, Journalist, Secret Agent (Oxford U.P. 2023).9 Jean Gartlan, Barbara Ward, Her Life and Letters (London: Continuum, 2010). Elizabeth Monroe, Barbara Ward, Elizabeth Wiskemann and Susan Strange all worked for The Economist under Geoffrey Crowther as chief editor. Women also found employment at The New Statesman and Nation, The Manchester Guardian, Time and Tide, The Observer and journals like Contemporary Review and The Nineteenth Century and After.10 Elisabeth Barker (1910–1986) journalist for Reuters and the BBC. Wrote ten books on the Balkans, Austria, and American British Relations. Elizabeth Monroe (1905–1986), leading journalist on Middle Eastern affairs. An excerpt from her book, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956 (1963) would have been a better example of her thinking than one included from her early work on the Mediterranean.11 The League Covenant stipulated that positions be equally open to women. In addition to Mair, Elizabeth Monroe, Enid McLeod, and Irish scholar Dorothy Macardle worked in Geneva.12 On women in the BBC’s Foreign Department in the 1930s, see: Kate Murphy, “Isa Benzie, Janet Quigley, and the BBC’s Foreign Department 1930-1938,” Feminist Media Histories 5, 3 (2019), 114–39.13 On Cleeve and Liddell, see: Katharina Rietzler, “Introduction: Archive Collection 100 Years of Women in International Affairs,” International Affairs, Dec. 2022. Online. The two journals were: International Affairs (edited by Cleeve 1932–1957 and then by Muriel Grindrod until 1963) and The World Today (edited by Grindrod). Cleeve was effectively the Director of Chatham House during World War II. Wiskemann, Monroe, Violet Connolly, Barbara Wootton, Coral Bell, Susan Strange and many others worked as researchers at Chatham House.14 Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans (London: OUP and RIIA, 1938) and Germany’s Eastern Neighbours (OUP, 1956). Elizabeth Monroe, The Mediterranean in Politics (London: OUP, 1938); Sarah Wambaugh, A Monograph on Plebiscites (New York: OUP, 1920). Doreen Warriner and Ann Lambton’s postwar books on land reform in the Middle East and landlord and peasant in Persia were also sponsored by Chatham House.15 For Toynbee’s Foreign Research and Press and Service: Field, Elizabeth Wiskemann, 82–83, 154–155. Several women mentioned here worked there for a time, for example, Wiskemann, Shiela Grant Duff, Barbara Ward, Lucy Mair.16 Wiskemann was appointed to a Chair of International Relations at Edinburgh University in 1958 (at age 59 years), while Monroe entered academia in her fifties, first as bursar at St. Anne’s, her old Oxford College; she was awarded a research grant at St. Antony’s rather than a fellowship since college’s statutes admitted men only, but then in 1963 she became the first woman Fellow. After working as editor-in-chief on the Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Margaret Lambert (1906–1995) became a lecturer first at Exeter and then at St. Andrews University in 1956–1960.17 Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives (Yale U.P., 2013).18 Louise Holborn (1989–1975), refugee from Nazi Germany, taught international relations at Connecticut College for many years, an authority on migration and the politics of refugees, also a government and UN advisor.19 Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Nehru’s sister and the Indian Ambassador to the U.S.) in 1952 and Golda Meir (Israel’s Foreign Minister) in 1956. Katharina Rietzler, “U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Women’s Intellectual Labor, 1920-1950,” Diplomatic History 46, 3 (June 2022). Rietzler writes that Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, deeply opposed female membership and was “distraught” when they were admitted (7). And yet he eagerly solicited articles from Elizabeth Wiskemann in 1938 and in later years and was very helpful when she visited the U.S. on a book tour in 1938.20 2/3rds of the FPA’s members in the 1920s were women (Rietzler, 8).21 For the US: Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell U.P., 2015).22 C. Brad Faught, Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (London: Taurus, 2011); also, the articles on Perham in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19, 3 (1991). Lillian Penson (1896–1963) was trained as a diplomatic historian, held a Chair of History at Bedford College, London. and was an authority on colonial education. A useful addition to the anthology from outside academia would have been Rita Hinden, a journalist who for a decade ran the Fabian Society Colonial Bureau and worked valiantly within the Labour Party on decolonization and anti-apartheid, campaigning in 1942, for example, to get the Labour Conference to adopt a Colonial Charter on lines of the Atlantic Charter. Charlotte Lydia Riley, “Writing Like A Woman: Rita Hinden and recovering the imperial in international thought,” International Politics Reviews (2021) forthcoming. Also, Kenneth O, Morgan, Labour People (Oxford University Press, 1987), 239–45.23 Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill (eds.), To Turn The Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).24 See Robbie Shilliam, “Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey” in Woman’s International Thought: A New History, 158–78.25 See the essays by Vivian M. May, “Anna Julia Cooper on Slavery’s Afterlife: Can International Thought “Hear” Her “Muffled” Voice and Ideas?”; Barbara D. Savage, “Beyond Illusions: Imperialism, Race and Technology in Merz Tate’s International Thought,” in Women’s International Thought: A New History, 29–51, 266–85.26 For the tortuous process whereby her doctorate, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutions, was published, see K. Hutchings and P. Owens, “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution,” 354–55.27 Linda M. Perkins, “Merze Tate and the Quest for Gender Equity at Howard University, 1942–1977,” History of Education Quarterly 54, 4 (Nov. 2014).28 A reading by Claudia Jones in 1943 argues that India’s full participation in the fight against the Axis powers required that its population see the war as a struggle for their liberation. She criticized the British crackdown on Indian independence leaders and called for Roosevelt to intervene.29 Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000); Sarah Dunstan and Patricia Owens, “Claudia Jones, International Thinker,” Modern Intellectual History 19, 2 (June 2022), 551–74.30 J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True, “A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women’s Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda," International Studies Quarterly 62, 2 (June 2018), 221–33.31 Peace is central to many other readings in the anthology by Eileen Power, Fanny Fern Andrews, Merze Tate, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen, and others.32 On the WILPF see: Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Stanford U.P., 1997); Catia C. Confortini, Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (New York: OUP, 2012); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton U.P., 1997).33 On debates within the WILPF: Lucian C. Ashworth, “Women of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Problem of Collective Security,” Women’s International Thought: A New History, 136–57.34 In addition to Ashworth, “Women of the Twenty Years’ Crisis”, Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).35 Vera Brittain papers, cited by R. Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 247.36 Vera Brittain, One Voice. Pacifist Writings from the Second World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).37 By a detailed analysis and survey of IR texts Patricia Owens shows the magnitude of women’s exclusion : Owens, “Women and the History of International Thought,” International Studies Quarterly 62 (2018), 467–81.38 Barry Buzan and Richard Little, “Why International Relations has failed as an intellectual project and what to do about it,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, 1 (2001), 19–39.39 E-International Relations, Interview Patricia Owens Jan 31, 2015; Lucian Ashworth, “How We Should Approach the History of International Thought?” in B.C. Schmidt and N. Guilhot (eds.), Historiographical Investigations in International Relations (Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2019), 79–95.40 Bradley W. Hart, “The Journal of Contemporary History: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity,” Journal of Contemporary History, 50, 4 (Oct. 2015); also, the articles by Jan Palmowski, Kristina Spohr Readman, Jan Werner Mueller, and Geoff Eley in Journal of Contemporary History 46, 3 (July, 2011); Pieter Lagrou, “De l’histoire du temps présent a l’histoire des autres. Comment une discipline critique devint complaisante,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 118 (April–June 2013). Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present and the Contemporary (Chicago U.P. 2016).