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Women's International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–1940
Abstract
This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.
... The reason why focusing attention on women's international thought pushes a revision of the concept of "thought" is that so much of their contribution is bound up with a combination of disabling and enabling conditions for women's political and professional work during the early to mid-twentieth century. These conditions operated very differently for White, middle-class women than Black and/or working-class women, but in broad terms, there were fewer opportunities for women to produce academic-style texts, and many more to reflect on and explain IR in the roles of journalist, school teacher, librarian, political activist, or think-tank researcher ( Blain 2018 ;Huber et al 2021 ;Shilliam 2021 ;Dunstan and Owens Simon and Allen on Muriel Innes Curry). As previously noted, however, the articles do more than confirm and consolidate existing scholarship; they push research agendas on women international thinkers in new directions. ...
... ; Rietzler 2022 ). Patriarchal and racist constraints on women's access to employment in higher education and to research funding, as well as expectations on the role of women as wives, resulted in them frequently playing a significant role in shaping IR knowledge production, but as an unnamed "under-labourer" or acknowledged helpmeet rather than as an acknowledged author( Huber et al 2021 ; Rietzler 2022 ), even when they cofounded major institutions in the history of international thought( Owens and Rietzler, 2023 forthcoming ).Broadening the idea of "thought" and genres of "thought" also implies revising the idea of "thinker." Traditionally, a thinker is assumed to be an individual, the sole author of ideas and theoretical paradigms. ...
This Special Issue takes forward themes and arguments from previous work on historical women's international thought, but it also points in a range of new research directions for this thriving interdisciplinary field. Notably, through its silences and aporia, as well as through its substantive content, the Special Issue as a whole speaks to the need to genuinely globalize our understanding of women's international thought, its international and transnational conditions of possibility, and its role in the coconstitution of gendered and racialized imaginaries of how international relations works.
... International Thought, Librarianship, and Gender In recent years, scholars have worked to unearth the contributions of women to the history and development of modern international thought. These studies historicize the development of the field of international relations by emphasizing the critical contributions of women who were active within the transnational networks that worked to form this discipline as a scholarly pursuit and practice (Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2021;Owens 2018;Sluga 2021;Stöckmann 2018). In the history of librarianship as an international field, the work of Mary Niles Maack made similar contributions by documenting and demonstrating the contributions of women to the internationalization and growth of librarianship. ...
This article analyzes the life of Amy Heminway Jones and her contributions to the development of international thought and the transnational networks that promoted internationalism and the international mind during the early twentieth century. Building on the work of Patricia Owens and Mary Niles Maack, the article situates analysis of Jones's work and accomplishments within attempts to overcome the exclusion of historical women from the development of international thought and internationalism. The article places Jones's work at the nexus of a vast transnational network and movement to promote new perceptions about international affairs and the world through programs such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's International Mind Alcoves and International Relations Clubs. The article demonstrates the extent to which Jones contributed to these efforts and the ways in which her position within the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provided her with privileges and authority rare for a woman of her age and educational background.
... I unpack Kamaladevi's political project through imperial sites of social work and civil society organizing in the 1920s and 1930s, where she negotiated the tensions of universalistic ideals and rooted difference, a quintessentially modern yet anticolonial political concern. I read her social organizing as a part of larger early twentieth-century transformations within "new women's professions" as set out by Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler (2019) . Social organizing is specifically the imperial site at which we see how mass political mobilization of a larger public clashed with highly idealized notions of subjecthood. ...
This article tracks a paradox in elite, Third-World thinkers’ nation-building and postcolonial world-making in the early to mid-twentieth century. The tension lay in highly universalized notions of equality in imagined postcolonial worlds and the hierarchized social organizing tactics required to bring these worlds to life. The paper examines Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay—a prominent Indian social activist—and her international thought as she encountered this paradox in her social work praxis. I assess Kamaladevi's social work politics in the 1920s and 1930s at the Congress Seva Dal (a mass-based voluntary organization) as an imperial site where her universalized ideas about subjecthood clashed with practical disciplinary and hierarchical modes of political engagement. Then, I explore Kamaladevi's alienation from party politics in a newly independent India in the 1940s, which offered her an alternative pathway to leverage her social work as she built anticolonial solidarities at the substate level. Reading new archival material from Kamaladevi's travels in West Asia and parts of Africa in the 1950s–1960s, I suggest that her anti-imperial and race-conscious international thought in the “postimperial” world is a continuation rather than a breakaway from the earlier tensions of her normative and hierarchical civil–society activism. Kamaladevi's specific political trajectory that cuts across the Indian independence divide in 1947 is interesting in two ways. First, it problematizes hierarchies in historical elite Indian women's anticolonial and civil–society activism. Second, examining her social work allows for a disruptive reading of taken-for-granted binaries of the colonial/postcolonial, local/international, and social/political in historical international thought.
... 23 19 Owens et al. 2022, 6. 20 Taylor, cited in Owens and Rietzler 2021, 14. 21 Owens 2018; Huber et al. 2021;Hutchings and Owens 2021. 22 See, e.g. ...
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.
... More generally, very few works of international theory center on historical women (Cochran 2017;Hansen 2011;Hutchings 2009;Kinsella 2014;Owens 2007;Tickner and True 2018). This is mirrored in the small number of studies on the foundational role that women played in the field of IR from the early twentieth century (Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2019;Owens 2018;Owens and Rietzler 2021;Owens et al. Forthcoming;Sluga 2017;Stöckmann 2018). ...
Canons of intellectual “greats” anchor the history and scope of academic disciplines. Within international relations (IR), such a canon emerged in the mid-twentieth century and is almost entirely male. Why are women thinkers absent from IR’s canon? We show that it is not due to a lack of international thought, or that this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work that is deemed to be canonical. In contrast, we show what can be gained by reclaiming women’s international thought through analyses of three intellectuals whose work was authoritative and influential in its own time or today. Our findings question several of the basic premises underpinning IR’s existing canon and suggest the need for a new research agenda on women international thinkers as part of a fundamental rethinking of the history and scope of the discipline.
... 36 Sluga's intervention is part of a wider and timely systematic effort to write the contribution of women back into the canon of international thought. 37 Both edited volumes also address a worrying side effect of the resurgence of interest in the history of internationalism, and interwar internationalism more specifically: the tendency to idealise the 'Geneva spirit' (l'esprit de Genève) and to overemphasise the stories of international cooperation emanating from the sites of international exchange. The dynamics of internationalisation associated with the League of Nations could move in diametrically opposed directions, from anti-imperialism to authoritarianism. ...
In August 1902 the British Conservative MP for East London, William Evans-Gordon, spent two months in Eastern Europe surveying the living conditions of Jewish populations across the Russian Pale of Settlement. His reflections – and photographs – morphed into a booklet published the following year in London, entitled The Alien Immigrant . Abstracts from the manuscript were read in the commission hearings that led to the adoption of the Aliens Act in 1905, a milestone in the introduction of immigration controls across the United Kingdom and the codification of the legal right to asylum. Among the places that Evans-Gordon visited was Vilna, also known in Polish as Wilno – today's Vilnius. The city was ‘one of the most congested cities of the Jewish pale’; it lay in ‘the centre of the great Jewish drama’. Facing the misery of the Jewish ghetto Evans-Gordon ruminated on the conditions of life in the slums of east London which were populated by Jewish families during the period of the ‘Great Departure’. Eerily anticipating present-day debates across Europe, The Alien Immigrant framed the migration crisis as a ‘national question’ and warned prospective migrants that the United Kingdom could not offer them a better future. Evans-Gordon's arguments gave popular anti-Semitism a progressive veneer. ‘When altruism towards aliens leaves some of our poorest folk without homes and without work’, he noted, ‘it is time to say that the burden of solving the problems of Eastern Europe is not to be laid on them’.
Over the past few years, a significant body of academic writing in International Relations (ir) has contributed to critically reflecting on the traditional narrative of ir. Most of this literature has focused on the early years of ir, questioning its supposed birth in 1919, as well as the existence of liberal idealism and the first great debate. This article seeks to contribute to such critical efforts, adding as variables women internationalists and some feminisms of the early part of the 20th century—particularly related to socialism and/or pacifism—to show important shortcomings of conventional history. Through a textual analysis of the writings of various internationalists of the early 20th century, as well as their work in building institutions related to international affairs, the article exposes five disciplinary myths of ir. It concludes that there is a diversity of contributions from various feminisms and women to the discipline before 1980, although they continue to be obscured by orthodox history. This has important implications for our historiographical understanding of ir, the roots of internationalist feminism, and the possibility of rescuing new theoretical approaches. Resumen Durante los últimos años, un número importante de escritos académicos en relaciones internacionales (rrii) ha contribuido a reflexionar críticamente sobre la narrativa tradicional de la misma. La mayor parte de esta literatura se ha concentrado en los años tempranos de rrii poniendo en tela de juicio su supuesto nacimiento en 1919, así como la existencia del idealismo liberal y del primer gran debate. El presente artículo busca contribuir a dichos esfuerzos críticos, añadiendo como variables a las mujeres internacionalistas y a algunos feminismos de la primera parte del siglo XX —particularmente relacionados con el socialismo y/o el pacifismo— para mostrar deficiencias importantes de la historia convencional. A través de un análisis textual de los escritos de diversas internacionalistas de principios del siglo XX, así como de su trabajo en la construcción de instituciones relacionadas con asuntos internacionales, el artículo expone cinco mitos disciplinarios de rrii. Se concluye que existe una multiplicidad de contribuciones de diversos feminismos y de las mujeres a la disciplina antes de 1980, pese a que continúan siendo oscurecidas por la historia ortodoxa. Esto tiene implicaciones importantes en nuestro entendimiento historiográfico de rrii, las raíces del feminismo internacionalista, y la posibilidad de rescatar nuevos enfoques teóricos.
Virtue Capitalists explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States – Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete.
Historical approaches to the study of world politics have always been a major part of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), and there has recently been a resurgence of scholarly interest in this area. This Oxford Handbook examines the past and present of the intersection between History and IR, and looks to the future by laying out new questions and directions for research. Seeking to transcend well-worn disciplinary debates between Historians and IR scholars, the Handbook asks authors from both fields to engage the central themes of 'modernity' and 'granularity'. Modernity is one of the basic organising categories of speculation about continuity and discontinuity in the history of world politics, but one that is increasingly questioned for privileging one kind of experience and marginalising others. The theme of granularity highlights the importance of how decisions about the scale and scope of historical research in IR shape what can be seen, and how one sees it. Together, these themes provide points of affinity across the wide range of topics and approaches presented here. The Handbook is organized into four parts. The first, 'Readings', gives a state of the art analysis of numerous aspects of the disciplinary encounter between Historians and IR theorists. Thereafter, sections on 'Practices', 'Locales' and 'Moments' offer a wide variety of perspectives, from the longue dur'e to the ephemeral individual moment, and challenge many conventional ways of defining the contexts of historical enquiry about international relations. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds, and present a diverse array of methodological and philosophical ideas, as well as their various historical interests.
This article examines the meaning and implications of doing epistemic justice in the study of International Relations through the prism of the recovery of the international thought of Fannie Fern Andrews and Amy Ashwood Garvey and in dialogue with feminist epistemology. It argues that doing epistemic justice involves going beyond restorative justice for excluded voices in which the historical record is set straight, inclusionary justice in which previously excluded voices are added to disciplinary conversations, and transformative justice, in which the perspectives of the marginalised and oppressed become sources of epistemic authority and new knowledge. Over and above all of these things, doing epistemic justice entails practising a particular kind of epistemic collective responsibility, which actively and reflexively recognises and engages with power-laden relations between knowers, worlds and audiences in the production of international thought, then and now.
The aim of this essay is to ask what can we learn about war and peace from women international thinkers? As I will show, new and old historical evidence of women thinkers points us in directions that suggest, first, the privations women regularly faced in order to make their arguments against the background of actual war, addressing both the more conventional “women's” topic of peace and the often masculinized controversies of the nature of violence. This same history sounds out the range and changing (gendered) registers of international thought, including the diminished tones of peace as a defining objective. Then there are the diverse locations of specifically women's international thought, from manifestos to pamphlets and newspaper articles to published tomes. These lead us to the intersecting political and intellectual networks of activism and influence that colored the intertextual referentiality that thinking generated. Finally, I will argue that the evidence at hand, and the related examples it connects to, underscores the broad transnational European settings of the texts that specifically address war and peace. It even suggests, as I suggest, that the borders of that transnationalism extended not only across the Atlantic, but also through the entangled continental political histories of Western Europe and Russia. In the twenty-first century, these contours of the history of women's international thought remain relevant, not least because they pose the question for us, what difference have women thinkers made?
This article recovers the activities, international thought, and reception of Muriel Innes Currey during the formative decades of the twentieth century. As both an ardent campaigner on behalf of the League of Nations Union and a fascist sympathizer, the paper highlights the variegated beliefs and tensions encapsulated within Currey's thinking as she attempted to reconcile advocacy for the League of Nations with a peculiar mélange of High Tory conservatism, Italophilic solidarity, and fascist sympathies. The contribution of this study is two-fold. First, building on efforts to excavate the history of women's international thought from undue obscurity, this article expands the referent of analysis to the thought and activity of a hitherto neglected woman, yet one overwhelmingly pro-fascist in orientation. Second, discerning Currey's thought contributes to redressing a double erasure within the history of the discipline: the gendered elision of women's international thinking and the concurrent amnesia surrounding fascism and its place within the then-fledgling discipline of international relations. Currey may have been on the periphery of academia; however, she was nevertheless a thinker who engaged with key questions occupying, and institutions affiliated with, the emergent field.
The new field of history of women's international thought is part of, and gives further impetus to, the ongoing reckoning of international relations (IR) with the centrality of race and gender to the discipline. Scholars continue to recuperate a long inheritance of international thinkers concerned with race relations, colonial administration, and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global political economies dependent on violent exploitation of peoples classified as inferior. This inheritance underscores that the politics of colonialism, war, humanitarianism, development, and decolonization have shaped and been shaped by processes of reinforcing and contesting racialized subject positions. Despite this, little attention has been paid to whiteness in histories of women's international thought. In this article, I recover the international thought of white British antislavery advocate and humanitarian Lady Kathleen Simon. I bring feminist and critical race scholarship to bear on Simon's writings and practice. Through her efforts to rouse a twentieth-century international abolitionist movement to emancipate those remaining enslaved in so-called backwards places, Simon played a consequential role in defending Ethiopia's occupation by fascist Italy from 1936 to 1941 and in arguing for continued European administration of Ethiopia after its liberation. In light of critiques of humanitarianism and of the role of white women in reproducing racial hierarchies in colonial and development contexts, I argue that recovery and analysis of the subject positions of historical women racialized as white is inextricable from the project of international intellectual history and from IR's continuing engagement with questions of gendered and racialized hierarchy and othering.
A finales de 1939, ya iniciada la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la activista feminista francesa y funcionaria de la Oficina Internacional del Trabajo (BIT), Marguerite Thibert (1886-1982), emprendió un primer viaje de estudios por México aprovechando su participación en la Conferencia Americana del Trabajo en La Habana (noviembre de 1939). Dos años más tarde regresaría contratada por el Gobierno mexicano para realizar una investigación enfocada en el trabajo informal de menores y sus condiciones de vida. La muy especializada y poco conocida labor de Thibert permitiría a esta alta funcionaria y referente en la OIT de los derechos de las mujeres y de los menores de edad, lograr un conocimiento más acabado del proceso de institucionalización social que estaba teniendo lugar en el país a través de la nueva Secretaría del Trabajo y Previsión Social de Ignacio García Téllez, principal artífice del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (1943). Thibert tendría la oportunidad de proponer modificaciones importantes a este proyecto antes de dejar México en 1942.
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.
In 1918, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) partnered with libraries to develop International Mind Alcove collections in the United States and abroad. These collections aimed to help put an end to war by encouraging international understanding and developing cosmopolitan perspectives across the globe. During the programme's forty-year history, the alcoves grew from a group of small informal collections to a well-funded and highly organized operation. As the programme evolved, it utilized libraries, books, and the media to advocate for internationalism, educate the public about other nations, and instil cross-cultural understanding in children before they became embroiled in political controversy. The Mind Alcove programme and the work of librarians in its creation represents a significant episode in library history, placing the library profession within the early twentieth-century development of international organizations and global information networks that are the forerunners of contemporary international non-governmental organizations and global social movements.
This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: (1) the importance of definitions; (2) the role of the body; (3) questions of representation; and (4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.
Mary P. Follett (1868–1933) brought new dimensions to the theory and practice of management and was one of America's pre-eminent thinkers about democracy and social organization. The ideas Follett developed in the early twentieth century continue even today to challenge thinking about business and civic concerns. This biography of Follett illuminates the life of this intriguing woman and reveals how she developed her farsighted theories about the organization of human relations. Out of twenty years of civic work in Boston's immigrant neighborhoods, Follett developed ideas about the group basis of democracy and the foundations of social interaction that placed her among leading progressive intellectuals. Later in her career, she delivered influential lectures on business management that form the basis of our contemporary discourse about collaborative leadership, worker empowerment, self-managed teams, conflict resolution, the value of inclusivity and diversity, and corporate social responsibility.
One of the world's leading historians examines the great Indian liberal tradition, stretching from Rammohan Roy in the 1820s, through Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1880s to G. K. Gokhale in the 1900s. This powerful new study shows how the ideas of constitutional, and later 'communitarian' liberals influenced, but were also rejected by their opponents and successors, including Nehru, Gandhi, Indian socialists, radical democrats and proponents of Hindu nationalism. Equally, Recovering Liberties contributes to the rapidly developing field of global intellectual history, demonstrating that the ideas we associate with major Western thinkers – Mills, Comte, Spencer and Marx – were received and transformed by Indian intellectuals in the light of their own traditions to demand justice, racial equality and political representation. In doing so, Christopher Bayly throws fresh light on the nature and limitations of European political thought and re-examines the origins of Indian democracy.
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa.
Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as one of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment.
In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
This book tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. The book describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and it introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, the book documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party. A unique history of the American conservative movement, this book shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.
Existing surveys and anthologies wrongly convey the impression that women in the past did not think seriously about international politics. This article provides evidence of the magnitude of the exclusion of historical women from the field by analyzing sixty texts in the history of international thought and disciplinary history. It also begins the process of remedying this exclusion. I map a new agenda for research on the history of women's international thought. Work in feminist historiography, as well as new archival research, suggests that a diverse array of historical women thought deeply about international relations, but their intellectual contributions have been obscured—and even actively erased. To illustrate what international studies can gain by pursuing a research agenda on historical women's international thought, I discuss a neglected, but at the time extremely important figure, in what might be called “white women's international relations,” the influential scholar of colonial administration, Lucy Philip Mair.
This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study.
This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.
While the history of U.S. immigration policy has traditionally been directed “inward,” toward questions of American law, institutions, policy regimes, and modes of national belonging, an emerging historical scholarship is asking how U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by U.S. foreign relations. This essay draws together, builds on, and transforms this literature by foregrounding new questions of transnational, imperial, and global inequality in the making of U.S. immigration politics and policy, and by problematizing not only closures and exclusions, but selective openings in the U.S. immigration regime. Despite conventional claims that immigration is and has been a matter of “domestic” politics, in fact, U.S. immigration policy has long been self-consciously engaged with transnational realities. Indeed, as the essay argues, while serving as a way that Americans could define the nation against an “outside,” U.S. immigration policy has simultaneously been instrumentalized to project U.S. national-imperial power out into the world. This geopolitics of mobility has taken wide-ranging, overlapping, and often contradictory forms: the pursuit of labor power, the management of overseas colonies, the diffusion of U.S. goods, practices, and values, the building of legitimacy, the containment of enemies, and the rescue of friends. An imperial history of U.S. immigration control has the capacity both to frame new historical inquiries and to draw attention to the crucial ways that many migrants to the United States have already been enmeshed in U.S.-centered fields of power long before they approach the recognized boundaries of the U.S. state.
This edited volume is the first to discuss the methodological implications of the ‘emotional turn’ in International Relations. While emotions have become of increasing interest to IR theory, methodological challenges have yet to receive proper attention. Acknowledging the plurality
of ontological positions, concepts and theories about the role of emotions in world politics, this volume presents and discusses various ways to research emotions empirically. Based on concrete research projects, the chapters demonstrate how social-scientific and humanitiesoriented methodological approaches can be successfully adapted to the study of emotions in IR. The volume covers a diverse set of both well-established and innovative methods, including discourse analysis, ethnography, narrative, and visual analysis. Through a hands-on approach, each chapter sheds light on practical challenges and opportunities, as well as lessons learnt for future research. The volume is an invaluable resource for advanced graduate and postgraduate students as well as scholars interested in developing their own empirical research on the role of emotions.
Coming from a long tradition of Quaker beliefs, Mary Parker Follett advocated for an integrative unity in the organization or state where members work together, consensus is built, and power is shared. She applied her process of integration to management practices in both business and government. Parker Follettʼns communitarian ideas and philosophy of smaller more participative government have often run counter to administration and managementsʼn focus on regulation and centralized power. This has contributed to the benign neglect of Parker Follettʼns work in the administrative and management literature. Parker Follettʼns work has been lost and found repeatedly over the past half century. In the rapidly changing and uncertain times of the new millennium we need once again to rediscover her holistic and healing approach to administration and management.
Fannie Fern Andrews, a Boston educator and reformer, started the American School Peace League (ASPL) in 1908 in order to educate schoolchildren in the principles of what she called “world citizenship.” Through its curriculum, A Course in Citizenship , the ASPL taught students about cooperation, tolerance, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. At the same time, however, they were preparing white, native-born US children to lead the new world and to judge others’ capacity for membership in it—their fitness for world citizenship—according to “civilized,” white American standards. I argue that while Andrews and the ASPL professed a desire for internationalism, theirs was very much a US-dominated internationalism. A Course in Citizenship calibrated the standards of progress and civilization by which children were to measure not only themselves but others around the world. Education for peace was also education for the new American empire.
The academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.
The discipline of International Relations [IR] is experiencing a pragmatist turn. Here I will argue that this is a critical moment to take stock and reflect on where it is heading. First, in order to understand what pragmatism might bring to IR as a social science today, it is important to examine the history of IR and explain why pragmatism appears not to have registered in its past. Why have the contributions of Wiliam James and, especially, John Dewey apparently disappeared from the early history of the field? Secondly, having examined what the problem was before, I go on to argue that the opportunity that exists today for pragmatism to influence the field is constructed upon its critique of empiricist epistemology, its scope for bridging plural methods, and the broadening of our understanding of what international relations is, opening the range of possible ontological claims which the discipline finds necessary at this time.
education;teacher education;women's colleges;black illiteracy;missionary society
The desire to educate future citizens stimulated the foundation of public schools in the United States. The resulting American public school system was one of the most extensive in the world during the period from 1870 to 1930, as measured by the proportion of children attending and public funds spent. Yet the transformations in the racial and religious composition of the eligible school population created tensions over the goals of public education and access to it. During this era, the changing national definitions of citizenship, including attempts to integrate African Americans and newer immigrant populations, led to a broadening of the citizenry that was often at odds with some Americans’ idealised vision of their country. Debates over American citizenship, while national in scope, were thus played out locally — and overtly — in the public schools. Public schools educated the heterogeneous population for American citizenship, and their uneven and contested rise represented the, at times ambiguous, development of a unified sense of nationhood.
The study of the gendered aspects of intellectual history does not enjoy the dubious blessing of being a distinct and well-developed discipline, or even sub-discipline. Perhaps this is as it should be: there are so many aspects of intellectual history which demand gendered attention that it would be unhelpful and reductive to try to unify the field. The range of the work currently being done which might in some way be categorised as gendered intellectual history, or the intellectual history of gender, is staggering. Yet I think there is something to gain here from considering some issues in this range of work under one heading; and this chapter may also point up the fact that, even within this great range of work, there are areas where there is still much to be done.
In the early 1920s, the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, under the leadership of Ernestine Rose, played a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance movement. By drawing on the resources of the community, the library staff facilitated connections between writers and their readers with literary gatherings; between artists and their viewers with art exhibitions; and between playwrights, performers, and their audiences with theatrical productions. But the library's most significant legacy was its book collection, now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which has provided a permanent connection between a people and their history.
This book traces changes in ideas and policies of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF-the longest-living international women's peace organization) over a thirty-year period, from 1945 to 1975. Focusing on three areas of the organization's work (namely disarmament, decolonization, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine), the book addresses the agent-structure problem in international relations, specifically asking to what extent activists can transcend the practices of their era given that they are also shaped by them. Inspired by a feminist tradition that sees activists as theorists, this book finds answers to this question in the theoretical practices of WILPF. Through a cross-disciplinary approach involving peace studies, feminist studies, international relations, social movement theory, and history, this book shows that WILPF's early understandings of peace were grounded in liberal modern principles and inscribed in the postwar international order. Gradually, WILPF began identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations and the international liberal order and formulating policies based on this critique. A detailed examination of the primary economic and security issues of the time as well as WILPF's internal debates and normative struggles highlights how its theoretical practice made these policy and ideological shifts possible. The women of WILPF practiced a theoretically informed critical methodology to challenge the political, economic, and social milieu in which they operated. They thus moved away from a postwar liberal zeitgeist toward a more emancipatory vision of peace.
International thought is the product of major political changes over the last few centuries, especially the development of the modern state and the industrialisation of the world economy. While the question of how to deal with strangers from other communities has been a constant throughout human history, it is only in recent centuries that the question of ‘foreign relations’ (and especially imperialism and war) have become a matter of urgency for all sectors of society throughout the world. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the evolution of Western international thought, and charts how this evolved into the predominantly Anglophone field of International Relations. Along the way several myths of the origins of International Relations are explored and exposed: the myth of the peace of Westphalia, the myths of Versailles and the nature of the League of Nations, the realist-idealist ‘Great Debate’ myth, and the myth of appeasement. Major approaches to the study of international affairs are discussed within their context and on their own terms, rather than being shoe-horned into anachronistic ‘paradigms’. Written in a clear and accessible style, Ashworth's analysis reveals how historical myths have been used as gatekeeping devices, and how a critical re-evaluation of the history of international thought can affect how we see international affairs today.
John Hobson claims that throughout its history most international theory has been embedded within various forms of Eurocentrism. Rather than producing value-free and universalist theories of inter-state relations, international theory instead provides provincial analyses that celebrate and defend Western civilization as the subject of, and ideal normative referent in, world politics. Hobson also provides a sympathetic critique of Edward Said's conceptions of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, revealing how Eurocentrism takes different forms, which can be imperialist or anti-imperialist, and showing how these have played out in international theory since 1760. The book thus speaks to scholars of international relations and also to all those interested in understanding Eurocentrism in the disciplines of political science/political theory, political economy/international political economy, geography, cultural and literary studies, sociology and, not least, anthropology.
Traces the career between 1900 and 1941 of the Progressive peace activist Fannie Ferns Andrews, who was a leader of women's pacifist organizations before World War I, but who after 1918 turned away from gender-specific pressure groups and worked, instead, to shape government policy from within. Chosen by Woodrow Wilson to attend the 1918 Paris Peace Conference, Andrews in subsequent years lobbied federal officials to create a permanent peace education program for schoolchildren. Her main ally in Washington was Philander Claxton, commissioner of education in the Wilson administration, who put Andrews on his staff and helped promote her idea of an international education bureau. The creation of the League of Nations marked the high point of American idealism in those years, and the Republicans of the 1920's who removed Claxton from office were unsympathetic to Andrews's aims. In 1946, she professed satisfaction with US involvement in the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization.
This article traces the influence of international networks in three Middle Eastern universities from the 1920s onwards: the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It shows how American, internationalist, imperial and religious actors competed and how the universities were placed in these often overlapping or interconnected networks. It illustrates the complicated process of institutionalizing the new universities, for instance in financing them or validating degrees. The article also looks at the role the universities played in the attempt to transform local societies, as they devised outreach programmes and language policies that aimed to spread English, to simplify Arabic, or to modernize Hebrew.
The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry‐ and government‐sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline.
The history of foreign policy and especially the Munich Crisis of 1938–1939 have been viewed from various angles but never from the points of view of gender and feminism. This has been a significant oversight in the scholarship, especially as there were many prominent women politicians who were heavily invested in the appeasement debate, and because the majority of feminist organisations became increasingly preoccupied with foreign affairs and the specific effect of dictatorship on women. This article explores how British feminists responded to the policy and the fallout of appeasement in the late 1930s; how the British branch of the most prominent transnational feminist pacifist organisation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) made the transition from peace, to Crisis, to war; before focusing on two intertwined biographical case studies of Kathleen Courtney and Maude Royden. There were various responses and dramatic fluctuations in positioning in the years leading to the world war, with many feminists struggling to come to terms with the intellectual, emotional and psychological shift from feminist-informed internationalism and pacifism to a rejection of appeasement and support for the war effort. Both Courtney and Royden had spent the two preceding decades in the forefront of the feminist pacifist movement, and the rise of Nazi Germany, the international crisis and then the Second World War itself forced each to resituate herself and make psychologically and ideologically wrenching decisions.
This article explores the tension between social control and democratic participation in the first American peace education curriculum, A Course in Citizenship (1914). Previously, this Course has been read as a case study of progressive era peace education, during which the call to teach democratically increased in volume. Building on this critical history, the Course can also offer historical perspective on the high value of discipline and obedience to law inscribed in some teachers’ views of citizenship education. Read alongside archival transcripts from the American peace movement before World War I, the warrants for predicting future peace in the Course in Citizenship suggest that peace education requires innovative methods of constituting classroom authority on the basis of representation.
It is generally accepted in IR that before the 1980s there was little or no feminist theory in IR. Yet, there were feminists in IR prior to the 1940s who had their own particular take on global politics. This article seeks to reassess the ideas and impact of IR's first-wave feminism by concentrating on the works of one particular writer: Helena Swanwick. While not the only feminist writing on international affairs in the period, Swanwick is interesting both because of her earlier involvement in the feminist and suffragette movements, and because she constructed a clear analysis of the problems of security that was based on her suffragette experience. In the 1920s she gave sound reasons for opposing ‘League wars’ against aggressor states, but in the late 1930s this led her to support appeasement. Despite this, her criticisms of both collective security and the pre-1914 international anarchy are an interesting corrective to both the realist approach that emerged after the 1940s and the supporters of a tighter League system in the 1920s and early 1930s. It is also an indication of the extent to which a feminist agenda had been part of mainstream IR before 1939.