Laura Puffer Morgan: Technical Expertise and Disarmament
In March 1932 the Geneva Disarmament Conference was in full swing. It was a last-ditch effort to slow the arms race and prevent what seemed increasingly like inevitable war in Europe. Delegates built on a decade of previous multilateral negotiations that aimed to curb the number of battleships, the size of artillery calibres, and the types of technologies nations could amass. Grappling with difficult technical questions, like how to determine whether certain types of weapons should be considered 'defensive' or 'offensive,' the chair of the League of Nations Disarmament Committee reached out to a well-known expert, Laura Puffer Morgan. She responded with a lengthy explanation on why a reduction of armored vehicles would have to be enforced by weight limit and not function, as the definition of "tank" was so broad as to be meaningless. She also reassured him that a ban on heavy artillery would not be easily circumvented by converting naval guns to land use: an analysis of the 1917 Messines attack showed the medium-calibre howitzer was the "real instrument for breaking through defenses."
How did Puffer Morgan, a 50-something American women with no military training and no formal affiliation to the Disarmament Conference become a go-to advisor to some of the most prominent disarmament policymakers of her time? Long before women were able to gain a formal foothold in the technical world of arms control policy, she was a security analyst considered "perhaps the best-informed authority in the United States about the problems of disarmament." Her success rested largely on her mastery of the technical questions of arms, budgets, and treaties. In a 1929 address to the National Council of Women Puffer Morgan challenged her audience to educate themselves on the concrete issues of disarmament, not merely the big picture ones. "You may reply that these are question for experts and statesmen," she accused, "Not so, or if they are, let us make experts of ourselves." Her own career was an example of how one could not only amass technical knowledge, but leverage that knowledge into a public reputation and professional career.
Puffer Morgan's early trajectory parallels that of many American women who built up extensive networks and political savvy through the suffrage movement then, once the 19th Amendment was secured, turned their energies to the international realm. She was born in 1874, educated at Smith and Radcliffe, and worked as a mathematics professor before moving to Washington, DC in 1908 with her journalist husband. She quickly took on a raft of voluntary positions, and by 1920 was chair of the Washington branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, and a board member of the "most powerful lobby in Washington," the Women's Joint Congressional Commission. In 1921, her husband died, and Puffer Morgan found herself in need of a new, income-generating role. Like her peers, she looked globally. New work by Megan Threlkeld, David Allen, and Katharina Rietzler excavates the central role women played in international affairs in the interwar period. Women internationalist thinkers helped developed the intellectual frameworks that shaped the interwar peace movement, existing women's organizations like the AAUW, and League of Women Voters began to take an interest in foreign policy, and newly established groups like the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations relied on women to support their research and convenings. Puffer Morgan started out in a similar role, using her previous training and networks as a legislative lobbyist for the newly-formed National Council for Prevention of War (NCPW). But when she came up against opposition to her lobbying efforts, she decided to try a different tack-turning to technical expertise, which would eventually separate her from the broader community of women educators, activists, and lobbyists.
Her biggest challenge was Big Navy-a triumvirate of shipbuilding business interests, high-ranking naval officers, and their Congressional backers- "whose professional interest" she noted, "is always enlisted on the side of expansion." Big Navy bewildered those unversed in military technology and policy by using complex-sounding processes and 'partial facts' to avoid scrutiny. Puffer Morgan was determined to learn their game, and as she wrote in a 1931 op-ed, "acquire sufficient technical information…to meet the militarists on their own ground." She pored over public data, reviewed budgets, and sat through "hours of boring meetings," so that when an Admiral or a Naval lobbyist gave misleading testimony, she could immediately release an evidence-based rebuttal to the press. As her expertise grew, so did her reputation. By the time she moved to Europe in 1930 to be closer to major disarmament conferences in London and Geneva she was able to amass a network of contacts among civil society organizations as well as the "inner circles where delegates, experts and journalists share a certain freemasonry of the initiated."
Puffer Morgan's emphasis on expertise, and her mastery of a traditionally masculine sector of military technology and policy allowed her to do what many of her peers could not. In Geneva, she used her position at the nexus of insider and outsider circles to advance policies that reflected her own thinking on disarmament. Though she believed calls for total disarmament were out of touch with political realities, she also subscribed to a theory that later IR scholars would term the security dilemma-it was "not large navies but increasing navies" that were a menace, because expansion implied a political purpose that would be met with retaliation. In order to avoid an arms race, she advocated for policies that would slow new building, such as an extension of the life of naval battleships to twenty-six years. She lobbied for this provision at the 1935 London Naval conference using her role as convenor of a number of different civil society coalitions to convince constituent groups to pressure their national delegations by telegram. At the same time, she used her reputation as a technical expert to make an alliance with "the naval end" of her own American delegation-getting buy-in from the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Standley to cinch U.S. support. She succeeded, and the measure was adopted, though spiraling events in Europe would soon render the disarmament efforts of the 1930s null and void.
The technical knowledge that gave Puffer Morgan unique access to the "inner circles" of Geneva delegates also allowed her to leverage her advisory work into status as a policy expert. Women may have been the organizers, audiences, and hosts of new foreign policy groups across the country, but only rarely were they featured on stages, panels, or in bibliographies of scholarly work. As David Allen writes, this kind of work was often the height of women's voluntary careers, but for men, a stepping stone to greater achievements. Puffer Morgan was an exception, joining a small group of others like Vera Michales Dean, Sarah Wambaugh, and Helen Dwight Reid who became indisputable experts in their fields; enough to break into a mostly-male club. Puffer Morgan was a popular public speaker who traveled the country speaking on highly-technical topics to both general and academic audiences. She was respected by the emerging foreign policy 'elite' who were busy professionalizing the world of foreign affairs, and her writing was reviewed by leading IR scholars of her time and used as a resource by disarmament advocates and policymakers alike. Even into her eighties, she continued to provide analysis and advice to anti-nuclear groups.
Puffer Morgan's embrace of the language and logics of the security sector reflects a longstanding tension within the women's peace movement. Puffer Morgan was never able to find a way into the formal security sector-an unsuccessful 1941 draft application "for possible service to the government in its national defense program" bears witness to the insurmountable structural barriers for women-but even today, the field prioritizes specialized technical knowledge. A 2019 survey on women in American arms control policy found that they faced many of the same constraints: respondents cited "technical expertise" as the number one trait most needed for a successful career. However, this demand keeps nontraditional voices out of the conversation, maintaining a certain orthodoxy that even disarmament activists must conform to in order to be taken seriously. Further, as feminist scholars like Carol Cohn have argued, the language and logics of technical security language shape the categories of thought that are possible. They can limit a more transformative vision of disarmament to concrete technical reforms. Puffer Morgan's life and career offer an early example of how one woman navigated the politics of expertise to become a respected authority and coveted advisor on the technical and military side of the arms control debate.
References
David Allen. Every Citizen a Statesman: The Dream of a Democratic Foreign Policy in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022)
Carol Cohn. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12(4), 1987: 687-718.
Heather Hurlburt, Elizabeth Weingarten, Alexandra Stark and Elena Souris. 2019. "The 'Consensual Straightjacket': Four Decades of Women in Nuclear Security." Washington, DC: New America. <https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/the-consensual-straitjacket-four-decades-of-women-in-nuclear-security/>
"The Responsibility of Women in International Affairs," Address of Mrs. Laura Puffer Morgan at the International Dinner of the National Council of Women, November 4, 1929.
"Why Does Our Nation Build More Warships," Address delivered by Laura Puffer Morgan, Associate Secretary NCPW at Conference on Cause and Cure of War, Washington, DC, January 17, 1929.
Laura Puffer Morgan, "Shall We Leave it to the Experts?" The Christian Advocate, November 1931.
Laura Puffer Morgan to Salvador de Madariaga, March 26, 1932. Box 3, Laura Puffer Morgan and Ethel Puffer Howes Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA.
Laura Puffer Morgan. "Control of Armaments and the Atomic Bomb," The Friend, Nov 22, 1945.
Katharina Rietzler. "U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Women's Intellectual Labor, 1920-1950," Diplomatic History 46 (3), 2022: 575-601
Megan Threlkeld. Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)