Erased : A History of International Thought Without Men / Patricia Owens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Owens, Patricia.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (433 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2025

Summary:

How a field built on the intellectual labor and expertise of women erased them 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. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women's ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Gender of International Thought

The History of International Thought without Women

Women (and White Men)?

Methods and Outline

1. Aberystwyth 1919: A Love Story

IR's First Power Couple

'Nasty Woman'

Polyphony in Geneva

Lucie Zimmern v. Nicholas Spykman

Racialised Polyphony in Geneva

Another Marriage Story

Conclusion

2. This White, English, Self-Loved, Cultivated Self

Margery Perham and her Motorbike

'The Most Wanted Critic of West Africans'

Women's Intellectual Life as Sexual Displacement

3. The House that Margaret Built: White Women's Housework in IR's Backroom

Kitchens and Pianos v. Big Guns: The Science of IR versus Popular Pedagogy

Then Being a Woman

Chatham Cathouse

4. No International Relations without Women

Colonial Administration as IR: 'I'm not a Margery Perham'

Towards IR as a Separate Subject

Erasing Women and Colonial Administration, Re-Defining IR

'What Manner of Man is this Teacher?'

Towards IR's Failure as an Intellectual Project

Conclusion

5. Power's World: International Relations as World Social and Economic History

Relativising Western Progress

Medievalising the East

Interregnum: Power's Plea for the Middle Ages

Medievalising India

Social History and Sociological Method

World History as Social and Economic History

6. Oxford's Failures: From Diplomatic History to Critical Histories of International Relations

'A Credit to My Race and My Sorority'

'I Guess They Went Liberal That Year'

Merze Tate and Her Bicycle

'I Have Failed'

A Permanent Place Among American Historians

7. The 'Spinsters' and Diplomats' Daughters

From Comparative Politics to Popular Colonial Internationalism

How is Policy Made? Diplomatic and Contemporary History

'Great causes, great events-and how dull they are!'

'She Could be Given Satisfaction in Africa': Tory Appeaser

8. 'The Restraint to Efface Ourselves': Assimilating Decolonisation

A Cautious, Respectable Radical

Mistakes Were Made: On Mau Mau

Explaining Anticolonial Critique at Empire's End

'Three-quarters of our problems today are psychological'

The 'Balance Sheet': On Britain's Wounded Dignity

9. Is British International Thought White?

Organising Black Britain, Schooling White Marxists

The International Thought and Pedagogy of the West Indian Gazette

Critiquing the 'Sociology of Race Relations'

A Different Polyphonic Internationalism

Another Federalist of the Black Atlantic

10. 'This is No Witch-Hunt'

A Very Useful Person

History Just Waiting to be Written

Preferably a Male

Wall's Century: Towards IR as Contemporary World History

Reforming Oxford IR

Notes:

Making Herself Awkward

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780691266824

OCLC:

1472980192