Historians of International Relations have long challenged the discipline’s conventional origin myths and started to recover forgotten, suppressed, and alternative beginnings. Erased is a landmark contribution to this effort. Through a compelling reconstruction of the academic biographies of 12 women, Patricia Owens tells a different history of early twentieth-century IR. Although this is no history “without men,” it demonstrates that the classic feminist curiosity question—“where are the women?”—remains radical and essential in IR historiography.
Erased steers clear of hagiography as it recovers a complex range of intellectual lives—careers that resulted in both fame and failure, contributions that were promising, problematic, and sometimes both. Owens’ project is not to canonize her “cohort” nor is it primarily about their erasure as individual thinkers; it is to foreground the erasure of a strand of international thought that was more historically grounded and attentive to imperial, colonial, and to some extent gender, relations. The book therefore offers not only recovery and new beginnings but also a pointed critique of how gendered disciplinary boundaries obscured the field’s more pluralistic intellectual foundations.
Despite reading the “cohort” into a larger story about IR, a book revolving around 12 individuals inevitably flirts with a somewhat individualist view on who, where, and how international thought is produced—and erased for that matter. Historical methodologies exacerbate this tendency. “The archive” often invites us to think of international thought in terms of individual oeuvres: Lucie Zimmern’s papers, Eileen Power’s papers, and so on. The same goes for the erasers. One of the main drivers of erasure, and the villain of Erased, is Charles Manning. The LSE Montague Burton professor held white supremacist and sexist views, erased female intellectual labour, denied women academic positions, and also advocated for a more sociological and less historical IR that, in Owens’ narrative, excluded (female) historians from IR. Other canonical men are not spared, including E. H. Carr, who had a “reputation for spousal abuse”; Hedley Bull’s involvement in pushing Rachel Wall out from Oxford; and Georg Schwarzenberger’s harassment of Susan Strange (p. 36). “Much of the history of ‘British IR,’” as Owens states, “is a story of men who hated women” (p. 11).
Erased demonstrates that misogyny was central to “much of” the story of why British IR took the turn it did. But as to why that turn looked the way it did—away from historical methods and empire/race as subject—it remains a partial story. There is a risk of overstating the impact of individuals on the course of (British) IR, overlooking how the marginalization of the historical-imperial strand of international thought was enabled by wider sociological and political forces—e.g. wider trends in academia like behavioralism, university politics, or the zeitgeist of British society at large—that were also not conducive to historical work or a reckoning with empire.
While Erased is not designed as a sociological study of how erasure operates—and can hardly be blamed for not doing that diagnostic work—the book does lay the groundwork for further work on how masculinity structured an emerging field like IR. There are of course blatant cases of erasure, such as outright intellectual appropriation and plagiarism. Erased opens with the case of Florence Stawell whose book proposal was appropriated by her male mentor, Gilbert Murray. There are also plenty of cases of erasure through gendered discourses. Women thinkers were described in dismissive gendered terms (e.g., as “spinsters,” “nervous,” “difficult,” a “nasty woman”, or “terrible witch”), undermining their intellectual authority. Beyond such cases of blatant sexism, however, Erased covers a number of sociological mechanisms.
One such mechanism is institutional erasure: the structural discrimination of women by men through the wielding of institutional power. This is a double erasure: denying women the conducive working conditions of a permanent academic position and promotions and the visibility such positions confer for subsequent historiographies. Owens documents examples of abuse, harassment, and bullying, excessive teaching loads, and biased hiring and promotion practices, which created institutional environments hostile to women’s advancement. She explores how gendered expectations concerning marriage and motherhood led to women being viewed as less serious scholars or forced to choose between family life and academic careers. Erased shows how women who defied these norms—by remaining unmarried, forming same-sex partnerships, or rejecting feminine roles—were marginalized or pathologized. This work deserves to be extended to explore the role of institutionalized masculinities in more aspects of the field, be it the gendered nature of academic network formation or gendered norms concerning academic competition and authorship.
Another mechanism of erasure is intellectual boundary work: the attempt to delineate IR as a separate academic discipline in the mid-twentieth century by deliberately redefining the field to exclude specific genres, methods, and cognate disciplines. Regardless of where one stands on the question of IR’s disciplinarity, Erased convincingly shows that these happened to also be genres, methods, and disciplines in which women international thinkers excelled, especially historical but also journalistic and culturally inclined work. Owens’ central argument is that IR would have been better off had it not been so sharply separated from history as the so-called “LSE men,” especially Manning, advocated. Historically inclined readers will likely agree, and approvingly read the chapters on the diplomatic history of Agnes Headlam-Morley, the social and economic history of Eileen Power, or the contemporary world history of Rachel Wall as promising roads-not-taken for IR. For non-historians, the chapters on Lucie Zimmern’s culturally inclined “polyphonic internationalism” or Merze Tate’s approach to race and empire may represent more appealing pathways.
A third mechanism is the devaluation of feminized labor—what Owens catchingly calls “white women’s housework in IR’s backroom” (p. 63). Erased shows how female labor made Chatham House go round and how male IR scholars relied heavily on feminized labor in compiling data, managing information, searching for literature, and teaching. Yet, these contributions were systematically devalued or uncredited, and in that sense erased. Women were reduced to “assistants,” not recognized as intellectual contributors. Erased provides the methods for uninvisibilizing this labor, e.g., by comparing early drafts with published versions, by recovering handwritten notes and artifacts from the research process, or by scrutinizing acknowledgements and the lack thereof. These methodological triangulations allow us to once again see this female research labor.
Spousal erasure, though related to devaluation, constitutes a distinct category whereby women’s international thought is rendered invisible by, or reduced to, their husbands’ thinking. One of the book’s most fascinating chapters is on Lucie Zimmern—a scholar in her own right yet often viewed as an appendix to her husband, Sir Alfred Zimmern. To the Zimmerns, one could add another interwar power couple, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and later also Kenneth and Huddie Waltz. Although spousal labor is sometimes acknowledged in prefaces, there is a politics to these acknowledgements. In the reward triangle of authorship, citation, and acknowledgment, the latter is the least valuable currency. Acknowledgements will not get you tenure. Acknowledgments serve to express appreciation for assistance, and thus renders work partly visible but also devalues it as insufficient to warrant authorship. The boundary between what constitutes active participation in research versus research assistance is historically contingent, but Erased also shows us how it is gendered.
A final mechanism is historiographical erasure. Some of the women covered in Erased were central to the development of the field and had successful, though not unimpeded, academic careers in their time, but nevertheless are now absent from disciplinary histories. For instance, Lucie Zimmern, who co-founded the Geneva School of International Studies, or Agnes Headlam-Morley, who was Montague Burton professor and not exactly erased in her time, play little to no role in IR histories or textbooks. These historiographical erasures are the condition of possibility for the narrative of IR as a historically exclusively male domain. But who erased these women thinkers—their contemporary peers, or subsequent intellectual historians? Erased focuses most of its energy on erasures by contemporaries. Yet it also presents a powerful historiographical challenge to today’s textbook authors and disciplinary historians. Historiographical erasure is related to all the mechanisms above, e.g. if women thinkers never obtained a prominent academic position or are viewed as working outside the boundaries of IR, they are less likely to be included in histories. Historiographical erasure can also result from archival erasure. As Owens demonstrates, many women’s papers were never archived, were misfiled in their husbands’ or fathers’ archives, or were simply lost, reducing the historical visibility of their contributions. All the more reason to engage in the painstaking reconstructive work that Erased has paved the way for.
