Women’s International Thought: A New History

According to international-law scholar Thomas Baty (1869–1954), the state is an idea (Baty, 1930). So is the corporation (Baty, 1920). Presumably then, the conceptual (and physical) contours of states, federations, corporations and empires are constantly redrawn through ongoing reflection, rhetoric and civic engagement. Baty’s mere question ‘Do ideas have rights?’ points to the perplexity of designing states and empires through intellectual reflection (Baty, 1920). Conceiving of states and empires in this contingent and instrumental way appears both liberating and frightening. If nothing is set in stone, an ongoing, more inclusive and democratic process of redefining various forms of association is made possible. And if the state is an idea, a whole range of expressions can be subsumed under thought about the state, including revolutionary and secession acts, pamphleteering, advocacy, journalism, dinner-table conversations, diary entries and so on. In a sense, we all inevitably have thoughts about the nature of states, corporations and empires, and may express them in a whole range of ways and fora. But not everyone’s thoughts count equally in the ultimate design and operation of states and empires. States are both human creations and the production of a few minds selected through arbitrary, discriminatory and often violent processes. Oftentimes, the selection process of whose views ‘count’ is made through a loose but consequential distinction between thoughts and thought. The former is supposed to identify a range of individual ideas, possibly unarticulated and contradictory, whereas the latter suggests a more structured and consistent way of thinking about these concepts (p. 306). This loose distinction between thoughts and thought often ends up being coupled with distinctions between genres and fora, which are thought more conducive to one or the other. Dinner-table conversations and pamphleteering are often understood as ways of expressing different disorganised thoughts, whereas academic writing and government memoranda are conducive to ‘serious’ thought on the matter (pp. 133–135). One is labelled trivial and therefore easily ignored, and the other one is celebrated and supported. All of these distinctions are familiar to feminists who have long fought against labelling women as emotional, rather than rational, or as prone to distortions of thought and memory when giving testimony in court, or as unworthy to access institutions where the only recognised form of thought gains political salience. This feminist insight has already contributed to a process of discovering unknown or forgotten female figures in various areas of the humanities. However, in international law and international relations (IR), it led primarily to the production of feminist schools of thought, rather than feminist history. Recently, both fields are beginning to ask where female actors might be found in the history of their fields. Immi Tallgren’s forthcoming edited collection Portraits of Women in International Law (2021) contains portraits of several dozen women in the history of international law. Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler’s Women’s International Thought: A New History catalogues fifteen women’s incredibly rich engagement with international matters, bringing questions of race, domination and colonial subjugation to the fore in a powerful and inspiring way. This volume represents a wonderful invitation to rethink the politics of the distinctions between thoughts and thought, and