Out in the World

The past year has been a turbulent one for many academics, including us here at the Leverhulme Research Project Women and the History of International Thought. Due to the pandemic, we have had workshops and conferences cancelled, research trips interrupted, access to libraries and archives postponed indefinitely, among many other impacts on our working lives. Nonetheless, we enjoyed a positive start into 2021, with a series of publications resulting from the project. (Please see here for a full list.) Now that our published research is 'out in the world', we are looking forward to beginning new conversations with other scholars working on international intellectual and disciplinary histories as we acknowledge that this is merely a moment in an ongoing and evolving debate.

A first opportunity for such exchanges was an online event organised through the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History on 11 February 2021, where Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler introduced the edited volume Women's International Thought: A New History which includes chapters authored by Luke Ashworth, Keisha Blain, Catia Confortini, Geoffrey Field, Kim Hutchings, Andrew Jewett, Helen Kinsella, Vivian May, Tamson Pietsch, Or Rosenboim, Glenda Sluga, Robbie Shilliam, Imaobong Umoren, and Natasha Wheatley. It is the work of these scholars that has enabled us to begin to more systematically address women's radical erasure from histories of international thought and the disciplinary history of IR, an erasure that continues to obscure the contexts, scope and complexity of an entire body of thought.

Introducing this work, we suggested that the book might be considered a 'new history' in three ways. First, it brings together and analyses existing, previously disparate forays into the history of women's international thought. Second, the volume brings histories of international thought into conversation with Black women's intellectual history, which has always been internationalist but is usually considered separately owing to the racialized and gendered history of the field of international relations. Third, we see the volume as part of a 'new history' because it prompts the rethinking of the gendered history of IR, as well as a fuller consideration of the mechanisms which turned the wider 'field' of international relations into a largely Anglo-American discipline. Our decision to group the essays in the volume into three sections, 'canonical thinkers,' 'outsiders' and 'thinking in and around the academy', allowed us to stake out different fields of debate. These concern the gendered and racialized politics of the academy and its penumbra; questions of scholarly recognition and its readability across the different disciplines and scholarly traditions primarily concerned with international thought; as well as the impact of ideological and political commitments that, for some thinkers, ensured subsequent marginality.

At the event, three external speakers engaged with these themes. Matthew Specter (Berkeley) took up the question of IR's canonical thinkers via a reflection on realism and its role in the formal institutionalisation of the discipline. Realists wrote the first drafts of the history of their discipline as a 'self-congratulatory story' and constructed an all-male canon stretching from Thucydides and St. Augustine, to Machiavelli and Hobbes, Carr and Morgenthau. And yet, Specter argued, women were not only 'present at the creation' and 'major protagonists' of 'isms', their presence demands a reassessment of the paradigms themselves. In the case of realism, this applies to the geopolitical and anti-democratic thought of canonical male realists which must be contrasted with the arguments of women thinkers such as Merze Tate, an African American 'small-r' realist who shunned the 'blinkers of race and empire' donned by most 1950s realists. Taking seriously the 'sophistication, pragmatism and ideological complexity' of women's international thought, Specter concluded, was of the utmost necessity for researchers and university teachers in both intellectual history and IR.

Approaching this 'new history' from the perspective of feminist IR and gender studies, Synne Dyvik (Sussex) highlighted how the essays in the volume challenged conventional understandings and showcased the sophisticated methodology needed for the work of recovery - at times akin to a 'detective story'. Drawing links to the politics of the academy, Dyvik also reflected on the tension between activism and thought. Many women in the volume were 'not afraid of getting their hands dirty,' and 'theorized on the ground'. The intellectual histories in the volume spoke to classic feminist concerns, for example the meaning of individual freedom or the nature of human community. Thus, Dyvik suggested, the volume serves as a reminder that contemporary political movements can still draw inspiration from neglected historical interlocutors. Dyvik also raised the issue of IR's chronology, punctured not only by so-called 'great debates' but also by periodic identity crises, whether in the early 1930s or the aftermath of World War II. Where were women thinkers during these moments of crisis, and how did sudden structural shifts contribute to their erasure?

Duncan Bell (Cambridge) outlined further ways in which the history of women's international thought could reshape the ways in which intellectual history and IR are researched and taught, and highlighted the necessity of scholarly collaboration. Methodological reflection on what counts as international thought and who counts as an international thinker remains an ongoing concern in several fields, not least African American intellectual history. Black women's intellectual history provides a sophisticated model for intellectual histories that negotiate a paucity of archival evidence and engage in a sustained way with the intimate and familial bases of all intellectual production, including the female collaborators of 'great men' that are erased in canon-formation. The search for new sources across a wide variety of media and genres must be ongoing, Bell argued, as well as engagement with new professional contexts for the production of international thought. Finally, there is the question of non-textual intellectual labour, a challenging issue for a traditionally text-based field. Other questions that emerged during the Q&A concerned the geographical and temporal boundaries of women's international thought and efforts to push against the dominance of Anglophone subjects in this emerging field. While the edited volume includes mostly Anglo-American thinkers, often they did not have squarely Anglo-American concerns. The French empire and its colonies feature as prominently as the land-based empires of East-Central Europe. Nonetheless, this one of several important questions for ongoing and future research.

Project members are already responding to some of these questions in published or forthcoming publications. The issue of canons is explicitly taken up in Kimberly Hutchings' and Patricia Owens' recently published article "Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution", which scrutinises the almost entirely all-male IR canon that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. This was not due to a lack of women's international thought, or because this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it was and is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work that is deemed to be canonical. The article shows 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: Anna Julia Cooper, Bertha von Suttner and Ellen Semple.

The limits of existing sources and methodologies are addressed in Sarah C. Dunstan's article "Women's International Thought in the Twentieth‐Century Anglo‐American Academy: Autobiographical Reflection, Oral History and Scholarly Habitus". Based on oral history interviews conducted with twenty senior women International Relations scholars from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom as part of the Leverhulme Project, the article argues that oral history, as a medium for autobiographical practice, can reveal aspects of how gender, race and class shaped the scholarly practice and career trajectories of women, as well as shed light on the historical dynamics of the discipline of International Relations as such. The article makes a case for the importance of fleshing out 'scholarly habitus' and suggests the potential utility of oral history as a methodology for its reconstruction. By relating some aspects of the 'scholarly habitus' of these women to their published work, the article uncovers a new dimension of the intellectual history of International Relations in the twentieth century.

Finally, like our interlocutors at the Centre for Intellectual History, we are convinced that research on women's international thought must have an impact on teaching, both in intellectual history and IR. This is why we have dedicated many of our efforts over the last year and a half to curating and editing an anthology of women's international thought, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. It comprises 104 selections by ninety-two different thinkers, including not only selections from books and articles but also teaching materials, journalism, memoranda, funding bids, book reviews, pamphlets, letters, radio broadcasts, speeches, memoir, and poetry. We envisage that the anthology will provide an accessible resource for students and scholars, opening this new field to the next generation of researchers. As we take stock and reflect on our published research to date, we remain committed to exploring key questions raised by the Leverhulme Project: how should the history of women's international thought be recovered and evaluated? What can this thought tell us about canon formation, within the discipline of IR and beyond? And what do methodologies that go beyond conventional textual and linguistic analysis have to offer?