What's in a Name? Helen Dwight Reid

Hearing that Kim Hutchings was taking up the Chair of the APSA Merze Tate Award, given annually for the best dissertation in international relations, law and politics, led me to reflect on the thinker for whom the award had previously been named - Helen Dwight Reid.[1] The re-naming for Tate was a long overdue and much needed recovery and recognition of an exceptional thinker, and a testament to the scholars who had worked to make her life and contributions visible.[2] It was also an important moment recognising and celebrating the contributions and achievements of Black women in International Relations. It appeared not much was known about Tate's predecessor nor why the latter had the prize named after her. On the surface, it seemed as if Reid had been a random choice, due more to who she knew (Evron and Jeane Kirkpatrick) rather than what she did. However, she had in fact enjoyed a significant career in the field of international relations from the 1920s until her death in 1965, with a trajectory that combined the academy, women's organisations and US post-war international reconstruction. By coincidence, I had previously worked on Reid and so, with Kim chairing the panel, it felt a timely moment to explore her story.

Reid shares the fate of the many women international thinkers in the academy with prizes and Chairs named after them who are now largely unknown, despite their contributions to international relations. This even after, like Tate, consciously seeking to write herself indelibly into the record by personally endowing such prizes. It matters that figures as visible and as established as Reid disappeared from history because it speaks as much to the gendered exclusions within IR after their lifetimes as during. It highlights how IR's self-image narrowed to preclude trajectories common to (though not exclusive to) women thinkers, reinforced masculinised canonical criteria and disconnected from interwar roots that included highpoints of women in US academe and the influence of US women's organisations. Recovering Reid's story makes a modest contribution to the ongoing project of redrawing this self-image.

Born in 1901/2, to American parents in Glasgow, Helen Dwight Reid spent her childhood in Europe before returning to the US. She was an undergraduate at Vassar, graduating in 1922, then a Carnegie Fellow in International Law at Radcliffe, gaining her MA in 1924. At Radcliffe, she worked under Harvard Professor, George Wilson, on peace treaties in International Law. Like many women, she took a college instructor role whilst completing her PhD, in her case at the University of Buffalo - the only woman in the Department of History and Government throughout her 15 years there. In 1925 she was listed as the Department Chair, an unusual feat for a woman in a co-educational institution in the 1920s. A year later she won the Penfield Scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania for the study of international law and diplomacy, enabling her to travel to Europe. She won it again the following year, both times being the only woman. She returned to Buffalo in 1928 with a promotion to assistant professor and her first publication: a co-authored book chapter on the diplomacy of Secretary of State William Evarts.[3]

Throughout, she had continued writing her dissertation: it was published in 1932 as International Servitudes in Law and Practice by the University of Chicago Press. Seeking to rehabilitate and reinstate the concept of servitudes (subservience) from Roman law in contemporary international law, something that had fallen out of fashion early in the century, the book argued that it was essential to understanding the relationships between and interdependence of nation states as well as solving current international political and economic problems. Existing international servitudes "whereby the territory of one state is made liable to permanent use by another state, for some specified purpose" were classified under "distribution" (e.g. fishing rights), "intercourse" (e.g. travel and transit) and "security" ("positive" meaning military intervention or occupation and "negative" meaning demilitarized zones).[4] The work represented a comprehensive, painstaking catalogue of these relationships and was widely and favourably reviewed in both Law and International Relations journals. It established Reid's place in the academy. The following year she lectured (in French) at the Hague Academy of International Law, one of only two Americans that year and, as of 1944, one of only two women ever invited.

Alongside her academic work, Reid started to build a related career in women's organisations: the year she gained her PhD she also became the Chairman of International Cooperation of the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs. She would speak at and chair numerous events on international relations for women's organisations over the next decade, with a reputation as one of the foremost women lecturers on national and international affairs and one of Vassar's "most famous classmates".[5] By 1939, she was given equal billing to Head of Research Vera Micheles Dean at the Foreign Policy Association's annual Armistice Institute on World Affairs and the US Assistant Secretary of State at a dinner the following year.

Reid was still pursuing her academic career with vigour. She had been promoted again to associate professor at Buffalo and reviewed books for APSA's Political Science Quarterly and the American Society of International Law's (ASIL) American Journal of International Law. She left Buffalo in 1939 for Washington DC but was quickly recruited to lecture at Bryn Mawr, replacing the Chair in Political Science, Charles Fenwick, whilst he was in Rio de Janeiro for the Inter-American Neutrality Commission. A member of ASIL since 1931, she joined its Executive Council in 1942 for three years, becoming one of a handful of women to hold executive positions in learned societies related to international relations before the 1960s. However, the onset of World War Two brought urgency and non-academic collaborations to her work, publishing on Danzig with the Institute on World Organization.[6] Like so many other women thinkers in the academy, the war and its aftermath would prove a watershed, pulling Reid away to work on international relations for NGOs and the US Government for 15 years.  

1944 saw her join the national staff of the American Association of University Women in DC as an associate in international education. Reid had a clear vision for how college women should engage in international relations - an understanding of the whole, not a focus on single countries. She set about educating AAUW members on the one hand and lobbying Government to include women in international relations on the other. In 1945, in collaboration with other women's organisations, the AAUW presented the collective US Government departments with a 'Roster of Qualified Women' - 260 women with expertise in international and governmental affairs.[7] Six months into her job, Reid was able to triumphantly announce to the New York Times that Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College, had been appointed as a US delegate to the United Nations conference in San Francisco and that women had been appointed as advisors to the US delegation for the conference on Inter-American Co-operation, committees on cultural co-operation and had served at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944.[8] She herself would attend the San Francisco conference as a consultant before testifying at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to urge the ratification of the UN Charter, speaking on behalf of 7 million women members of various women's organisations.

After three years at the AAUW, Reid moved into government service, becoming Chief of European Educational Relations for the U.S. Office of Education. She also became Chairman of the Board of Editors of World Affairs, a policy-focused international affairs journal, where she wrote on the UN, regularly reviewed books and later became the Editor in Chief. However, the academy - and her enduring interest in Latin America - remained: in 1951 she took leave to be Visiting Professor of International Relations and Latin American Government at the University of Florida. She then transferred to become the assistant regional education officer for Europe, the Near East, and Africa, before taking up her final government position as the adviser on higher education with the US mission to Indonesia in 1957. Three years later she returned to DC and a Professorship of Political Science at George Washington University. Thirty years after first being made assistant professor at Buffalo, it remained unusual for a woman to be a professor of international relations at a co-educational University.  

However, none of this - the careers in the academy, women's organisations or government - are directly how she ended up a somewhat mysterious name on an award. There are two missing pieces. Firstly, Reid was a committed philanthropist: in 1956, she founded the Helen Dwight Reid Foundation which aimed to advance international understanding through funding education projects. From 1958 the Foundation funded an annual fellowship for graduate study in international relations at Vassar, which continues to this day; two years later, it gave a grant to the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program. Secondly, and sadly, on the eve of an APSA tour of South America in August 1965, Reid died in a traffic accident, aged 63. On her death, most of her assets went to the Foundation, the leadership of which passed to the Kirkpatricks. A month to the day of her death, Evron Kirkpatrick addressed the Annual Meeting of APSA announcing the creation of the Helen Dwight Reid Award, funded by the Foundation. It was a testament to Reid's philanthropy, passion for international relations and contributions to the field but it was also a heartfelt memorial to a friend who had been taken suddenly and too soon. The Foundation continued for almost fifty years, funding the APSA award and Vassar fellowship, among other initiatives, until it closed in 2010.

Along with the scores of awardees, Reid's legacy continues: the publications arm of the Foundation, founded in the 1970s and sold to Taylor & Francis in 2009, continues to publish under Heldref. But there is another legacy and a lighter note: by 1954, DC real estate developer Matthew Mezzanotte had acquired part of the historic Warburton Manor site. One of the first homes he built was for a major benefactor: 13507 Reid Circle, is a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired mid-century modern designed home and a designated Historic Site. You can visit Helen Dwight Reid House, stroll around Reid Circle, Reid Lane and Reid Terrace and enjoy the fact that, whilst IR might have forgotten this international thinker, she is still a tangible presence and showing no signs of going anywhere.