The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased, Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.
Recent popular works such as Hessel’s The Story of Art without Men and Lipscomb’s The Women are Up to Something suggest that feminist recovery projects and women’s intellectual history have wide appeal. What’s different or singular about the story in Erased?
PO: Erased tells a more paradoxical story of gendered power, knowledge, and erasure. Women were major intellectuals in this new field of ‘international relations’ from the start and only later erased. In fact, across the middle four decades of the twentieth century, women were arguably the leading international thinkers of their generation in Britain. For a time at least, this was a less-male dominated field than some of the older professions such as philosophy, history, and law. It relied on women’s intellectual labours, and many of these figures were extremely influential and well-known in their own time. This book encompasses the greatest expansion and contraction of the British Empire, so Erased also speaks to the intellectual and political struggle over the legacy and teaching of empire and the conflicts over decolonising the institutions of British life.
At one point in Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, you say that you were not, in the end, able to write this story ‘without men’. Can you say more about that?
PO: That’s right. I intended to write a recovery history of a cohort of women, to rewrite the history of an intellectual field without centring the usual cast of white men and the same old patrilineal stories. But to account for how women were erased, I had to account for the men who used their institutional power to create personal fiefdoms, to marry or begin affairs with students or assistants, who bullied a woman out of her job for having too many children, and so on. I had to write a gendered rather than just a recovery history. Obviously not all the men in the story were misogynists and bullies. Some were good mentors and tried to support their intellectual partners. A few men recognized some of the most exceptional women as their intellectual equals. I think I’ve been fair to the men, and I haven’t written a hagiography of the women! In the end, if we want to understand any kind of intellectual history, then we need to understand how it was gendered, racialised and classed, which means going beyond recovery history.
Were any of the main characters more personally affecting than others? Do you feel more connected with any of them?
PO: That is a difficult question. All the main figures in the story were twentieth century intellectuals born in imperial metropoles or colonies and spent a considerable amount of their intellectual life in Britain. But they’re an intellectually and socially diverse group. Their politics, commitments, and professional contexts were wide-ranging, as was their personal and racialized identities. Most, but not all, were white, never married or had children. Some lived queer lives. I tried very hard to write empathically about some of the most vilified women and whose politics I do not remotely share. Several died prematurely and a couple in extremely tragic circumstances. One of them, Claudia Jones, is quite well known. Another, Rachel Wall, was hardly known at all, but her niece, Cathie Wilson, held onto her papers for decades and shared them with me. A woman of the ‘new left’, she was a reformer at Oxford in the 1960s but was pushed out on grounds of her mental health in a way that would be illegal today. I was fortunate, and moved, to be able to tell her story for the first time.
You’ve written a book about the history of the field in which you were trained. Did writing this story make you think differently about your own intellectual trajectory?
PO: Yes, it did. When I was coming up as a young scholar in the early 2000s, I was assigned an all-white male canon. I had some training in political theory, and I noticed that there just wasn’t the same depth in the twentieth century IR canon. In retrospect, this was likely why I was drawn to political theorist Hannah Arendt. She is so flawed as a thinker, but there’s no doubt about her brilliance, and the importance of her work, including for thinking about international relations. I wrote my first book on Arendt’s writing on war. At the same time, scholars were lamenting that IR had failed as an intellectual project, complaining that it constantly borrowed from but was unable to export original ideas to other fields. As I researched the ideas and the lives of my cohort in Erased, I came to realise that their story revealed the gendered, racialised, and methodological roots of IR’s failure. I had been taught that women and people of colour from the past had nothing important to say about international relations. But, as I try to show in the book, the IR that failed was white, male and mediocre. That was hardly a coincidence, but closely related to the project of a small number of white men in the 1950s to forge a separate disciplinary identity for IR.
Early reviewers have suggested that Erased could be a model for how to rewrite intellectual and disciplinary histories in other fields. What do you think is the broader and contemporary relevance of this story?
PO: With Erased, I tried to write a new kind of critical disciplinary history that showed the significance of personal, domestic and intimate life to the development of an intellectual field. In the case of international relations, the erasure of women and people of colour, the marginalisation of their methods and approaches, had devastating consequences for the field’s intellectual standing and quality. In other intellectual fields, I wonder what subjects and methods, as well as classes of people, got pushed out in the effort to forge a separate disciplinary identity? There is obviously a broader story here about the relation between gender and knowledge, about legacies of misogyny and racism, but also class, and the power politics of inclusion and exclusion from intellectual fields.
About the Author
Patricia Owens is professor of international relations at Oxford University and a fellow of Somerville College. She is also the author of Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt and Economy of Force, and the co-editor of Women’s International Thought: A New History, Women’s International Thought: Toward a New Canon, and The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations.