I am always intrigued by how academic books are presented to us as readers, whether it be their titles, subtitles, cover imagery, in-text images, and other features. And in the context of an edited volume, the intellectual, political, and conceptual envelope offered to readers—usually in the form of an introductory chapter—is always important. It is the mix of these into which I first immerse myself to find the intellectual heart and soul of a book. This enables me to better read the main chapters, which in this book involve the work (and lives) of 18 women and their largely lost, or rather misplaced, thinking about “the international.” Like all good books, this one has left me with many questions. The recurring question of “Why women?” is perhaps too obvious, and though it is answered in the text, I wanted more. I love the idea of the book. I also love the thought that has gone into the writing of it—and I think that “thought” is very much the intellectual and epistemological heart of the book. After briefly outlining the central themes, structure, and content of Women’s International Thought: A New History, I will return to some of the questions it has left me with and offer my overall assessment.

The book attends to the erasure of women from existing histories of international thought, most specifically in the context of international history and the discipline of international relations (IR). As noted by the editors, Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, although feminist scholarly work seems well established (certainly in IR), there has not been substantial work to remedy “women’s erasure from IR’s canon of intellectual ‘greats’ or its disciplinary history” (p. 2). This is despite the fact that the term “international thought” was first coined by a woman, Florence Melian Stawell (p. 2). A first step identified is a project of recovery—locating the recorded thoughts (and words) of women on “the international” that are simply missing from the official institutional or disciplinary record. Of course, as any feminist scholar would quickly point out, “adding women” (even if “back in”) is never enough, and indeed, this is not the editors’ main goal—although a gendered representational “recovery project” at first glance scarcely has much capacity for unsettling conventional disciplinary assumptions (p. 3) (about anything). However, ensuing questions about “what if?” do gesture toward the possibilities of radical shifting in thinking and conventional assumptions, which is part of the editors’ overall intentions. To give one example, the editors suggest that Merze Tate (chapter 12) might have been described as a “realist” (in IR’s terminology), but her “international thinking” never evaded critical questions about race and empire. The question of what a more “sophisticated [IR] realism” would have looked like if African American thinkers such as Tate had not been “systematically marginalized from the academic discipline of IR” (p. 11) is a crucial one, and one on which we might more slowly linger.

The book examines the substantive intellectual contributions of 18 women thinkers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Helpful political, intellectual, and disciplinary reasons are offered for selecting this time period, although the choice of women is inevitably more challenging. Importantly, the category of women is problematized with the editors noting that they do not assume the stability of the category of “women” (p. 10). They adopt the category of historical women to “indicate the discursive and produced character of our main object of study” (p. 10). Some of the thinkers discussed were inside the academy, several of these being “canonical” thinkers and therefore institutionally recognized to some extent. Notable here are Eslanda Robeson, Simone Weil, Rosa Luxemburg, and Anna Julia Cooper. Chapters on these thinkers open the main part of the book, “Canonical Thinkers.” However, the majority of intellectual production on “the international,” as noted, was written by thinkers positioned outside the academy—for example, social workers, journalists, and members of the anticolonial liberation, Pan-African, and women’s suffrage movements. These thinkers are discussed in Part II (“Outsiders”). Part III, “Thinking in and around the Academy,” turns back to the academy and women thinkers who gained positions in the academy, although all of them faced persistent challenges and seemingly inevitable marginalization of their thought. Each thinker’s story is fascinating and important, and I appreciate the diversity of approaches the authors used to tell the stories. I was particularly keen to see how these stories shifted “how to think” about “international thought” as well as about the disciplines to which such thinking is conventionally attached. I was also keen to see more clearly the gendered and raced layers of exclusion and marginalization that have silted up over many centuries to constitute a situation in the third decade of the twenty-first century in which recovering historical women’s international thought seems to have barely begun. On the latter issue, however, it surely depends on where one looks, and how far one might push thinking about what “international thought” could consist of. Here, I am thinking of work in the broader and abundant genre of transnational feminist thinking, much of which recovers “lost stories” around and about women. Although it is not necessarily about “the international,” given that the “personal is international,” perhaps a good deal of “recovery work” is available. I wonder if too tight a connection to conventional institutional and disciplinary frames is doing more work in the book than might be helpful (the reference to Martin/a Wight is illustrative; p. xii). I do agree that institutions matter (p. xiii), but women still “do not gather” (p. xiii) to think and speak in institutions primarily.

Of course, choosing which women to focus on was inevitably a challenge for this volume, but it was “Why women?” at all that I wanted to know more about. This is perhaps an odd question to ask, but I think it is crucial for this book. As the editors note, some of the women thinkers discussed might be described as feminist, and some not. How much does this matter? Do we care if women’s thought is recalled and belatedly recorded if it does not differ from mainstream/malestream thinking? If it is not feminist? Even though I think the editors have written the introduction very carefully and thoughtfully, I would have liked more thinking around “Why women?” in the specific institutional and disciplinary contexts. Moreover, the robust invocation and use of the traditional gender binary (even if problematized in the introduction) bears more thought. And I remain intrigued by the choice of cover image—Giovanni Bellini’s Fortune (or Melancholy). The allusion to the “historical” is clearly significant—although the overtly feminized imagery strikes me as question begging. Given the careful and reflective way in which all the chapters have been written, a concluding conversation between the editors and contributors might have afforded an opportunity to ask important though vexing epistemological, methodological, and political questions raised by the book—not to close them down but to open them up. Or a reflective discussion at the end of each section. Readers can, of course, engage with the chapters to do some of this work themselves.

There is a warm and rich array of fascinating “misplaced” stories in this volume, from which we can learn a lot. As to the book’s intellectual heart and soul—this is surely to remember forgotten thinking and to use this to push at and expose conventional boundaries about what counts as (international) thought and who counts as a believable (international) thinker. But crucially, it is also to ask “What if?” such thinking (although, crucially, if and why it is different) shaped current institutions and academic disciplines.