ERASED

Recovering forgotten women.

Owens, an Oxford professor of international relations, investigates the role of women in the founding of international relations as a separate academic discipline in early- to mid-20th-century Britain. Misogyny and racism, she argues convincingly, at first marginalized and later erased the contributions of women and people of color: journalists, scholars, activists, and public intellectuals. Among 18 women she discusses, the 12 she examines in most detail include Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange. All “deeply historical thinkers,” they were politically, ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse; their politics encompassed “high Tory appeasement, anticolonial Black Marxism, conservative and liberal imperialism, socialist and feminist internationalism, conservative realism, and antiracist geopolitics.” Their personal lives differed as well: Strange, an economist with a degree from the London School of Economics, was the mother of six children. “Radical journalist” Claudia Jones was a British subject born in Trinidad, with no education beyond high school. Tate was the first African American to earn a graduate degree, in diplomatic history, at Oxford. Cleeve held a lofty position as the administrator of Chatham House, Britain’s leading institution for international relations research. Drawing on oral histories, autobiographies, biographical and historical published sources, visual images, and archival material, Owens creates a detailed group portrait of an impressive cohort, recounting their involvement in international organizations, their stance on anti-colonial efforts, and their resistance to an “all-white, all-male” canon that preferred to investigate Britain’s past rather than engage with the empire’s collapse. Not until the 1970s, Owens notes, was Strange able to found the British International Studies Association, in the context of Britain’s “slow transition from an imperial to a national concept.”

A valuable contribution to feminist and intellectual history.