A Missing Piece: Women's Higher Education

The most essential step in writing histories of women's international thought is simply knowing where to find thinkers and the form they are likely to take. It is the difference between missing the women who were there and identifying a genuine absence. Disciplinary histories of IR have consistently missed historical women thinkers in the academy because they have neglected the locations where women were most likely to be found, namely women's colleges. However, those same histories have also frequently missed women when they did feature in the already well-known, well-researched, male-dominated locations of research universities. Therefore, this absence goes deeper than some unexplored sites. What is missing is an understanding of the worlds of women's higher education and what results is an expectation of absence.  In the case of the US, understanding women's presence in higher education, the avenues open to them at all levels of education and employment, how sex-segregated institutions interacted with co-educational and male-dominated universities, and how racially segregated higher education related to the predominantly white academy, is essential to knowing where women international thinkers were likely to reside, what roles they could occupy, and therefore, to finding them and their work. Looking only at faculty members in research universities misses women graduate students and partners of faculty who acted as research assistants and informal researchers. Focusing only on research universities obscures women as leaders, researchers and faculty in women's colleges. And considering only predominantly white institutions misses Black women faculty and leaders in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

However, this work has also already been done, for decades, by historians of women's higher education. The failure of IR to engage with this literature means that it has missed content, tools, methodologies, and discussions of issues that are fundamental to recovering women's international thought. The discipline's ignorance of the wider context of women in the academy means that where the expectation of absence has given way at all, it has usually been replaced by an assumption of exceptionalism. This has produced a pattern of focusing on individuals rather than attempts to map the scale and scope of the broad, networked, organized, and consistent presence of women international thinkers in the academy (or even the thought that such a presence might exist). Therefore, the history of women's higher education represents a missing piece in the history of international thought.

For an overview of women's careers in the US academy, at scale, the classics of Margaret Rossiter's panoramic two volume Women Scientists, Geraldine Clifford's Lone Voyagers and Jessie Bernard's Academic Women remain good starting points.[1] New classics include the volumes edited by Margaret Nash on Women's Higher Education in the United States and Ann Mari May on The 'Woman Question', along with Mary Ann Dzuback's "Gender and the Politics of Knowledge" and Linda Perkins' "Race, Gender, Philanthropy and the Politics of Knowledge,".[2] All lay out the varied locations, roles and trajectories historical women took through the academy, the barriers they faced and the solutions they created. The locations of women's colleges have, unsurprisingly, received the most attention, with the Northeastern elite 'Seven Sisters' by far the most documented. Whether the "Adamless Eden" of Wellesley explored by Patricia Ann Palmieri, or the pioneering social research hub of Bryn Mawr revealed by Dzuback, all shared a general pattern of women's academic lives and opportunities, whilst representing highly individual environments.[3] Women of colour faced the greatest barriers to accessing a graduate education and even more so to gaining academic employment, especially Black women, who were restricted to HBCU faculties. Stephanie Y. Evans' Black Women in the Ivory Tower, Julia Des Jardins' Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, and Linda Perkins' project on Black Women's Higher Education, recover the paths Black women took through the academy, the landscape of racially segregated higher education and the specific effects of the intersection of gender and race for Black women scholars.[4]

The importance of women's colleges is further underlined by their presidents. Five of the Seven Sisters - Radcliffe, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley and Mount Holyoke - had women presidents in the interwar period (though the latter would controversially replace the retiring Mary Woolley with a man in 1937), as did other women's colleges such as Mills, Spelman and Rollins, and the co-educational Bethune-Cookman.[5] Almost all engaged in international affairs: they were Presidentially-appointed delegates and envoys to major international conferences including the 1932 Geneva Conference and the 1945 founding of the UN in San Francisco, held key positions in international relations institutions such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, and made public addresses on international issues. They represent the connection between the histories of women's internationalism we already have and the histories of women thinkers in the academy we are working towards.

The extensive work of historians of higher education on women economists, historians, and social and political scientists is particularly pertinent to IR, not only providing a model but often the first insight into thinkers we need to explore, as well as parallel work. For example, Beverly B. Cook's "Support for Academic Women in Political Science" and Dzuback's project on Women Social Scientists, highlight numerous international thinkers, including M. Margaret Ball.[6] Merze Tate appears in Des Jardins and Evans, and in detail in Linda Perkins' "Merze Tate and the Quest for Gender Equity at Howard".[7] However, the most compelling argument for the importance of this literature has to be the example of the Bureau of International Research, which ran at Harvard and Radcliffe from 1924-1942. Aside from a couple of brief mentions in histories of the discipline, the only detailed engagement with this key site is in the work of Mary Ann Dzuback.[8] Not only does she recover the history of the Bureau, but she is also the only person to recognise the key role women played in its founding and the number and significance of the women researchers who worked there. It is in her work that one will find an engagement with key international thinkers who are only now starting to gain attention in IR, such as the international economist Eleanor Lansing Dulles.

There undoubtedly remains a lot to do on the history of women's international thought in the academy, but it is vital to acknowledge the work that has already been done, outside of the discipline and field, by historians of women's higher education. It is also worth reflecting on why this literature remains such a clear absence in the disciplinary history and what it tells us about the position of histories of education relative to histories of thought. What is clear though, is that IR and the history of the discipline could learn a lot, and go a long way to recovering women thinkers, simply by engaging with this missing history. Its historians certainly deserve the belated recognition.