Where is Cinderella's mother?

In international relations, how we document and thereby constitute 'the canon' of the discipline has long revolved around a story of 'founding fathers'. These are men whose thought supposedly shaped what it means to study IR, the questions we ask and what we pay attention to. I say 'supposedly' because we've now had decades of authors pointing out just how much this story leaves out, makes up and re-shapes the much messier (and intellectually interesting) disciplinary history it claims to relay. Some of that re-shaping has been explicitly gendered. The absence of founding mothers in this story is noticeable when compared with the extensive work to recover, document, and write in women's international thought. However, there is more at stake in the power move of writing women out than just leaving their work to the side. There is also the reiteration of women's silencing and the process by which we start to mistake silencing for actual silence. Seeing how women's international thought has been silenced and this silence has become invisible is a slightly different challenge than recovery. This is a challenge that fascinates me, partly because I'm interested in how a story can teach us not to notice what it is leaving out. Reading accounts of IR's disciplinary history alongside fairy tales where women have also been written out can show us what kinds of narrative mechanisms distract us from exclusions. Seeing these mechanisms can also help us to see where we may be continuing this exclusion, even while attempting to write a more inclusive disciplinary history.

In fairy tales there are often multiple iterations of similar stories. While iterations are similar, there are usually small changes between them. Is it a glass slipper or a gold ring that can be used to identify the correct foot or finger belonging only to the woman a prince is meant to marry?  These differences between otherwise similar stories often tell us a lot about the issues and priorities that contextualized a specific telling of a story. When the differences become bigger than rings and shoes, the societal shifts they signal may also be much bigger. For example, the 1970s saw an explosion in feminist fairy tale re-tellings in which heroines no longer sought marriage to their true love as the key to their 'happily ever after'. This seemingly radical period of re-writing echoes a similarly radical cache of stories from 17^th century France, where marrying for love (rather than for financial, familial, or political alliance) was a radical act of women's independence. Although authors in the '70s were reversing the emphasis on romantic love, they were also building on a radical tradition. The differences between iterations of similar stories, when looked at contextually, can help us to understand the priorities of the time and place in which they were written. However, the iterative differences between fairy tales can also offer us a parallel to other canons.  Canons, too, come about through reiterated stories. These stories tell us what our canon prioritizes and who our main thinkers are, but they also leave some subjects and voices aside.  When we start to look at the gaps between both sets of stories, we can also start to see what we've been taught not to notice and how the structure of the story distracts us from these exclusions. In this case, the reiteration of women's silence in canonical history is the mechanism we want to be able to see. However, the familiarity of these long-standing exclusions can make them seemingly invisible unless we can find ways to notice what we take for granted.

Cinderella stories tell us something about how the foundational figure of a mother has been (re)written in different times and contexts. Disney's Cinderella (and the Charles Perrault version on which it is based) kills the mother figure off early and replaces her with an entirely un-related fairy godmother. This absence of mothers in lots of European fairy tales has become familiar through reiteration, that is we expect Cinderella's mother to be absent. The fairy godmother who takes her place is one way of naturalising the absence of Cinderella's mother. It is only when comparing these stories to iterations like Yeh-Hsien that we start to notice that the mother is actively silenced by the way the story is told. In Yeh-Hsien, the mother's spirit comes back in the form of a fish. Yeh-Hsien is able to go to the fish with her problems, for advice, and nourishment.  Even when Yeh-Hsien's stepmother finds out about this and has the fish killed, Yeh-Hsien is still able to go to the fish's bones which continue to embody her mother's spirit. The writing out of the mother figure and introduction of fairy godmothers in 17^th and 18^th century European fairy tales starts to tell us something interesting when we look at the context of high maternal mortality and a period where mothers who did not embody a wholesome ideal were either vilified or rendered invisible. Of course, there are many mechanisms and contexts surrounding the absence of Cinderella's mother that we could explore.

The theme of absent mothers is a useful parallel to understanding how narrative structures in stories about IR can naturalize women's absence. Performing a close reading of Cinderella stories alongside stories about IR's disciplinary has revealed five mechanisms through which women's international thought has been systematically silenced. I want to talk about each of them briefly in turn.

1. Anonymize women's contributions while attributing the contributions of men

The first mechanism can be very hard to detect because we often don't realize that the lines along which a contribution's significance are measured can be gendered. It may seem 'natural' that the work of writing and preparing a curriculum isn't attributed to an author, while a theoretical treatise is authored. We learn to take for granted that one is a serious scholarly contribution, while the other is of less consequence.  Of course, women's theoretical treatises are also often not given attribution, and this isn't to say that women haven't produced work traditionally considered 'serious.' 

2. Move the 'relevant content' goalposts

How the discipline's 'focus' is conceived often conveniently skirts around areas of research where women's thought is prominent. This can seem like a 'natural' paradigmatic progression, or a shift in scholarly focus based on a changing context. However, the stories we tell about the history of the discipline play a significant role in defining IR's areas of focus and often these stories give name and voice to topics that are retrospectively considered significant. During the period when many women contributed to peace research in a variety of formats and contexts, traditional stories about IR's disciplinary history acknowledge the significance of this topic, but instead tend to focus on detailed exegeses of thinkers in Law, History and Economics that would later contribute to a nascent discipline. We know that peace research was also highly influential in the discipline's founding, but popular disciplinary histories locate the discipline's focus elsewhere. This, in turn, relegates early peace research to an area that seems less relevant than work dominated by male scholars.

3. Tell the story of one woman's exceptional contribution

Cynthia Enloe's question 'Where are the women' is an incredibly effective tool for highlighting women's absence in a variety of contexts, an absence we can then explore in more depth. It is also an invitation to expand what we consider relevant to IR to include the contexts where women are present.  However, the inclusion of a few exceptional women in disciplinary history can appear to give a satisfactory answer to Enloe's question. Why, here! Here is a woman! However, the women who are featured have often accomplished Herculean (Athenian?) feats. The threshold for being featured as a founding mother is incredibly high, but any attempt to question why more women do not feature is easily dismissed by pointing to the few women who do make it into the canon. This has two effects. First, this token inclusion distracts us from more widespread silencing. Second, it naturalizes an incredibly high bar for women's inclusion and suggest that perhaps the work other women have done simply wasn't of a high enough standard to be included. It tricks us into thinking that any woman who is exceptional enough must surely have her place in our stories.

4. Revere institutions and scholarship that excludes women

Our continued reverence for specific institutions as key sites that fostered the development of the discipline also reinforces a focus on work that came out of these institutions. If we want our canon to include previously marginalized voices, then it behoves us to look beyond esteemed institutions and to question where else scholarship and thought may be happening.

5. Focus on aspects of the discipline that establish patrilineage

One of the longstanding rallying cries in IR's stories of disciplinary history is the tale that in order for IR to be taken seriously as a 'real' discipline, it needed to become more scientific move away from sociological, anthropological, practical and pacifist literatures. While women's international thought is incredibly diverse, their work is more heavily represented in areas not deemed 'sufficiently scientific'. The very fact that we have constructed a story in which founding fathers are seen to lend IR legitimacy and a shift to focus on high politics and the (male dominated) kitchens of power instead of the politics of the everyday emphasizes patrilineage as the mark of a serious discipline.

These mechanisms are by no means exhaustive, but they encourage us to think about how the stories told about IR's disciplinary history are both shaped by and shaping a gendered story of who produces international thought and what that thought is about. Cinderella, and the context in which her story has been told and re-told has a lot to show us about absent mothers in IR's disciplinary history.

Ashworth, Lucian M. 2011. "Feminism, War and the Prospects for Peace." International Feminist Journal of Politics 13 (1): 24-43

Auyoung, Elaine. 2020. "What We Mean by Reading." New Literary History 51 (1): 93-114

Harries, Elizabeth. 2001. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stockman, Jan. 2017. "Women, Wars, and World Affairs: Recovering Feminist International Relations." Review of International Studies 44 (2): 215-35

Warner, Marina. 1994. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and Their Tellers. London: Chatto & Windus.

Image information:

William Henry Margetson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cinderella_and_the_Fairy_Godmother.jpg

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