Women must not only use their hands to bind up, they must use their brains to understand the causes of the European frenzy.
Mary Sheepshanks, 1915Footnote 1
Women have a point of view distinct from the point of view of men towards this matter of peace and war.
Helena Swanwick, 1915Footnote 2
Introduction
At a 1928 debate hosted by the National Peace Council in London, the feminist-pacifist Helena Swanwick and the political commentator William Arnold-Forster discussed international sanctions as a means of preventing war – one of the key topics in the study of International Relations (IR) during the inter-war period.Footnote 3 Swanwick was critical of Arnold-Forster’s endorsement of the League of Nations’ sanctions system, arguing that it risked unjustified application of force on civilians and that, besides, the League system was not democratically governed. Crucially, she lamented the limited influence of women on questions of war and peace. Male dominance in politics and diplomacy had ingrained the illusion that military action could be used to protect people. ‘As a woman’, Swanwick responded, ‘I very much resent the idea put forward that when men fight it is only to defend us. It is not true.’Footnote 4 In her analysis, Swanwick pointed to the persistent militarism in international diplomacy and its inherent injustices towards women and children. ‘I have often reflected’, she concluded, ‘how much safer women would be if men left off protecting them.’Footnote 5
Swanwick was part of a group of writers, scholars, activists, and politicians who contributed to what one might identify as the origins of feminist IR scholarship. Members of this group included women and men from across Europe, the US, and elsewhere, drawn mostly from the liberal internationalist avant-garde who were both progressive and wealthy enough to influence political and academic discourse. They organised summer schools, taught classes, generated academic publications, and gathered at conferences, clubs, and societies. Most importantly, they wrote on issues of war and peace from a genuinely feminist point of view. They paid particular attention to the interests of women and children, emphasised universal values in international politics, condemned imperialism, capitalism, and militarism. They elaborated on so-called ‘soft’ factors of diplomacy, demanded more democratic control of foreign policy, and called for mass political education. Perhaps most strikingly, they argued that women were by nature more peaceful than men. These themes contributed to an increasingly well-integrated field of feminist IR scholarship. By the end of the 1930s, women were essential to the study of IR, as educators, researchers, politicians and, importantly, as a lens through which issues of IR could be framed.
Neither the practical efforts nor the intellectual substance of early feminist IR have been duly acknowledged in disciplinary history. Today’s IR community continues to refer to a rank of ‘founding fathers’, and even revisions of IR history have largely failed to take women into account.Footnote 6 This is especially problematic against the backdrop of the long-standing male dominance in political science and IR – the 2015 conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) caused some uproar by naming all of the 18 seminar rooms after male IR scholars.Footnote 7 Perhaps most surprisingly, contemporary authors of feminist IR have ignored their ancestors, claiming that their subfield was invented in the late 1980s. However, as the individuals and ideas examined in this article reflect, there was a significant body of feminist international political thought prior to the Second World War.
Failing to recognise these efforts as genuine contributions to the study of IR, because they frequently occurred outside a formal university context, means to neglect both women’s struggle to penetrate the academic job market as well as to ignore the various non-university based modes of research that their male colleagues engaged in during that time. If men’s ventures in politics and think tanks, their newspaper articles and op-eds, their role in clubs and societies are taken into account, then so should those of women. Bringing female scholarship to light is difficult because it often remained unpublished or fed into the work of husbands without due acknowledgement – a widespread practice at the time.Footnote 8
It is important to recognise this literature as genuinely feminist, not simply written by women. In fact, several male authors wrote on feminist IR issues throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Examples include Charles Kay Ogden’s critique of militarism in Militarism versus Feminism (1915), Alfred Zimmern’s support of female suffrage as part of a general political emancipation, or Charles Roden Buxton’s demand to ‘do in the international sphere what the women’s movement demands that we shall do in the national sphere’.Footnote 9 On the other hand, female authors did not necessarily write from a feminist perspective but often took non-gendered approaches to IR. The point of this article is not to argue that there was one homogenous feminist group in IR, nor that all female authors were feminists. It is to show that these women existed, and that some of their work conveyed remarkable arguments, which anticipated many elements of what is known as feminist IR today.
Re-integrating female political thought also helps to correct the flawed chronology of traditional IR historiography, which assumes 1919, when the first professorship in IR was established, to be the ‘birthday’ of the discipline.Footnote 10 In fact, women published on international affairs from at least the beginning of the First World War, such as Agnes Maude Royden and Vernon Lee in the edited volume Towards a Lasting Settlement (1915) where they wrote alongside H. N. Brailsford, G. Lowes Dickinson, and John A. Hobson.Footnote 11 That same year, Swanwick made the case that women had a ‘distinct point of view’ on the matter of peace and war.Footnote 12 It would not be difficult, however, to cite even earlier examples such as Anna B. Eckstein’s campaign for a world petition to prevent war, launched in the 1900s.Footnote 13 Given the long-standing and systematic neglect of feminist IR, it is time to acknowledge the rich intellectual traditions hidden behind the bulk of male authors.
This article recovers a range of actors, institutions, and themes in early feminist IR, arguing that they contributed significantly to intellectual and practical developments in the field. After a brief historiography in the first section it introduces some of the individuals and institutions that advanced feminist IR during the early twentieth century. The main section then explores seven strands of thought which were particularly pronounced: (i) a feminist-humanitarian view on war; (ii) the argument that women were by nature more peaceful than men; (iii) a broad understanding of international relations with religious, emotional, and universalist undertones; (iv) anti-imperialism; (v) a socialist-inspired critique of global capitalism and its effect on international relations; (vi) the case for universal suffrage in connection with democratic control of foreign policy; and (vi) the call for mass political education and opposition to school-bread militarism. While this list is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, it captures some of the most salient themes of feminist IR thought, and it reflects the various angles from which feminist authors approached questions of war and peace.
The dual neglect
Disciplinary memory in IR has widely neglected female voices and feminist ideas. Textbooks still assume that IR was invented by a group of English and American founding fathers, and that gender did not play a role in the study of IR until the late 1980s.Footnote 14 According to these accounts, IR was created by men such as Norman Angell, E. H. Carr, C. A. W. Manning, David Mitrany, Arnold Wolfers, and Alfred Zimmern. Revisions of inter-war IR scholarship have revealed various flaws in disciplinary memory, particularly with regard to what had been popularised as a ‘first great debate’ between so called ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’, but they have largely failed to integrate female authors.Footnote 15
Even feminist IR scholars routinely omit to acknowledge the origins of their subfield during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 16 Their standard historiography locates the birth of feminist IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, referring to a wave of new research and in particular to a 1988 Special Issue of Millenium on ‘Women in International Relations’ as well as books such as Cynthia Enloe’s Beaches, Bananas & Bases (1989) or J. Ann Tickner’s Gender in International Relations (1992).Footnote 17 As an intellectual point of departure, they cite the growing interdependence of the world economy, ethnic conflict, and the lived experiences of women in global politics – the same themes, ironically, that stimulated feminist IR research 75 years earlier.Footnote 18 In fact, Laura J. Shepherd’s handbook Gender Matters in Global Politics (2015) covers precisely the same territory as early twentieth-century writers, including articles on war, militarism, sexual violence, migration, religion, nationalism, citizenship, transnational activism, emotionality, and the media.Footnote 19 If studying gender in IR means to take into account ‘everyday experiences of women as women’, to borrow Jill Steans’s definition, then early twentieth-century authors certainly belong in that field.Footnote 20 A rare deflection from the conventional story was Craig N. Murphy’s proposal to consider Berenice Carroll’s 1972 article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution as the first feminist article in a major IR journal.Footnote 21 However, recent literature continues to insist that the relationship between gender and international security has ‘seldom if ever been considered within the discipline of international relations’.Footnote 22 This reading not only underestimates the very real experiences of war and peace that women faced during the 1910s–30s, but it also neglects earlier strands of thought that anticipated feminist issues in IR that continue to shape debates today.
More recently, there have been attempts to excavate the remains of early feminist IR. Lucian M. Ashworth has revisited Helena Swanwick’s work on ‘collective security’ and the League of Nations.Footnote 23 A suffragist, author, and sometime delegate to the League of Nations, Swanwick was at the intellectual and political forefront of the feminist reformulation of international politics. Her critique of military sanctions was based on the principle of democratic control and the experiences of women in war, features that Ashworth correctly identifies as part of a forgotten inter-war feminist IR scholarship. Ashworth’s argument has subsequently been embraced by Jill Steans.Footnote 24 Julie V. Gottlieb, too, has rediscovered women of the inter-war period as ‘theorists and practitioners’ in the emerging field of IR, putting particular emphasis on their role as journalists for wider audiences.Footnote 25 Among the women who she surveys are authors such as Vera Brittain or Shiela Grant Duff, politicians such as Eleanor Rathbone or Ellen Wilkinson, and those, such as Elizabeth Wiskemann, who one might legitimately call IR scholars in a narrow sense. An historian by training, Wiskemann excelled as a political journalist and author of Czechs & Germans (1938), and eventually became Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the University of Edinburgh from 1958 to 1961.Footnote 26 Catia Cecilia Confortini’s Intelligent Compassion (2012) has offered a major reappraisal of feminist political thought at WILPF from 1945 to 1975, suggesting that a distinctly feminist IR methodology developed during that time.Footnote 27 There has also been an initiative by Katharina Rietzler and her colleagues to re-evaluate the role of women in international political thought.Footnote 28 Despite these important rediscoveries, however, we still know very little about the intellectual discourses that these women and their collaborators engaged in.
The origins of feminist IR are closely related to the history of women’s peace activism, a field that has been well explored in the works of Laura Beers, Catia Cecilia Confortini, Lela B. Costin, Madeleine Herren, Helen McCarthy, Leila J. Rupp, and Ingrid Sharp.Footnote 29 Their research covers the institutional setting, the networks and biographies of feminist pacifism – with a particular emphasis on WILPF. One of the guiding motives for women to work for peace, as Rupp has argued, was a distinctive internationalism that connected women, more than men, across borders in the pursuit of common political goals.Footnote 30 Above all of course, they connected through the struggle for universal suffrage that concerned women all over the globe regardless of their national background – a notable exception was the International Council of Women (ICW), which did not subscribe to female suffrage as a priority.Footnote 31 Once the female vote was won, attention shifted to liberal goals more broadly and international peace in particular. Operating beyond national borders, political parties, and religious denominations allowed women to build a strong internationalist identity despite being denied entry into academic circles. Pacifist networks were not only important as an infrastructure for building transnational relationships, but they provided a testing ground for ideas and policies, and served as venues for lectures and publications. As such they became a quasi-academic setting parallel to the masculine world of universities and elitist clubs.
Women’s efforts in IR scholarship were also linked with their increasing success at penetrating high-politics and diplomacy. Many of the women who worked on IR issues from the 1910s–30s were among the first female parliamentarians, diplomats, or high-ranking officials. The Hungarian Rosika Schwimmer was one of the first female ambassadors; Rachel Crowdy headed the League of Nations’ Social Section; and Louise Weiss was an editor and one of the first French female politicians. The rediscovery of such figures in the works of Sandi E. Cooper, Madeleine Herren, and Helen McCarthy shows not only how women grappled with male dominance in these professions but also, as often neglected, how they prepared intellectually for a field that they were denied training for.Footnote 32
This article argues that women and feminist thinking played a significant role in the origins of IR as an academic discipline during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, their work was not only sidelined by contemporaries but has been largely forgotten in IR disciplinary history, too, leaving the origins of feminist IR scholarship neglected twice.
Women in academia and diplomacy
In order to understand how women operated in the field of IR it is important to realise the overwhelming dominance of men in universities, research institutes, political offices, and publishing houses at the time. All of the new professorships in IR were held by men, and so were most of the junior academic positions. The presidents of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris, the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, and the Konsularakademie in Vienna were all men. The number of female representatives in parliaments and foreign offices rarely amounted to more than 10 per cent. Also, men ran most of, and certainly the most influential, newspapers and publishing houses. Although female student numbers, including those in IR, were increasing there was little prospect for a woman to secure a top position in academia, diplomacy, or politics. A 1931 letter by the director of the Vienna Konsularakademie bluntly discouraged a young woman from applying because the job prospects for women upon graduation were ‘very poor [sehr schlecht]’.Footnote 33
What is more, the entire discourse in IR was shaped by masculine rhetoric, and replicated the assumption that women had no place in the art of politics. The International Studies Conference, the field’s first global academic gathering, which was held annually from 1928 to 1939, viewed itself as a ‘gathering of men of science’ and invited contributions from scholars on topics ‘on which he is an authority’ – despite the fact that several women were listed among the delegates.Footnote 34 Meanwhile, the press mocked female efforts in the field as ‘irresponsibly feminine, and at the same time boldly unwomanly’.Footnote 35 Even women from well-off social backgrounds were often excluded from research in the field of IR because they were expected to marry and to fulfil ‘their job as wives [ihren Beruf als Weib]’, rather than to pursue professional careers.Footnote 36 Disillusioned about the prospects for women in academia and diplomacy Rosika Schwimmer described the situation as ‘crazier than “Alice in Wonderland”, but less funny’.Footnote 37 As a result of these conditions women took their own routes and approaches in the study of IR, at times imitating male counterparts, in other cases pioneering original ideas.
Swanwick’s career was characteristic for many female IR authors at the time. Raised in a cultured family and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, she worked as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian and became involved in the women’s suffrage cause in the 1900s.Footnote 38 After the outbreak of the war, she became a founding member of WILPF and the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), where she wrote pamphlets and edited the house journal Foreign Affairs – published since 1919, three years before the Council on Foreign Relations launched their namesake journal.Footnote 39 In 1924 she served as a British delegate to the League of Nations Assembly alongside Arthur Henderson, Gilbert Murray, and Charles Roden Buxton. Here, as on so many other occasions, she was faced with the flagrant sexism in diplomacy. In her memoirs I Have Been Young (1935) she remembered: ‘A woman, it appeared, was assumed to be well-informed about Opium, Refugees, Protection of Children, Relief after Earthquakes, Prison Reform, Municipal Cooperation, Alcoholism, Traffic in Women.’Footnote 40 Swanwick’s interests and expertise went far beyond these ‘soft factors’ of diplomacy, but gender stereotypes prevented her from gaining more influence. In the end, her role was confined to observing and commenting on political events, leaving her profoundly depressed. Swanwick committed suicide shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War.
Despite the systematic marginalisation of women in diplomacy and academia, they managed to create institutions similar to and connected with their male counterparts. They organised summer schools for girls and young women, held annually across Europe and the US.Footnote 41 Like men, they formed social clubs and associations.Footnote 42 They encouraged exchanges for professors and students, initiated travelling scholarships, and pressed for the standardisation of degrees.Footnote 43 They wrote for national newspapers, such as Margaret Bryant for the Observer, and published their own journals, such as French politician Louise Weiss’s political review L’Europe Nouvelle since 1918.Footnote 44 The feminist teacher Gertrud Bäumer helped to establish one of the first institutions for the study of IR, the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP) founded in Berlin in 1920, arguing that politics was ‘teachable [lehrbar]’.Footnote 45 Perhaps most remarkably, they also established contacts to senior political decision-makers, such as Rosika Schwimmer’s interview with President Wilson in September 1914 or via the envoys sent to governments after the 1915 meeting in The Hague.Footnote 46 However, to some extent women also used male-dominated institutions. They published in leading academic journals, such as International Affairs (then the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs), and gave classes at Alfred Zimmern’s popular Geneva Summer Schools.Footnote 47 As university students they accounted for up to 40 per cent of total enrolment at institutions such as the London School of Economics, the Geneva Graduate Institute, and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.Footnote 48
One of the most important platforms for women to meet and exchange views on international politics was WILPF. Founded after the April 1915 congress in The Hague, WILPF gathered hundreds of women for substantial debate on the Great War, the coming peace, and foreign policy more generally.Footnote 49 By 1924, the British section of WILPF alone counted some 3,500 members across 27 local groups.Footnote 50 The 1926 WILPF Congress in Dublin was attended by 148 delegates from 20 countries, including men.Footnote 51 Three years later in Prague, there were 171 delegates from 26 countries.Footnote 52 Seeking to be truly global, WILPF also welcomed a few non-Europeans, such as Begum Shareefah Hamid Ali from India or Tano Jodai from Japan. Other organisations, such as the ICW or the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) enjoyed participation from Chile, Brazil, Egypt, Jamaica, Palestine, Turkey, Mexico, and South West Africa. Yet, as Leila Rupp has shown, feminist pacifism was dominated by Western women from privileged backgrounds.Footnote 53
Besides women’s organisations, female IR writers were also members of other networks, such as the Central Organisation for a Durable Peace (CODP), a loose group of professors, peace activists, and politicians whose 1915 Minimum Program became an influential document in the debate on postwar international cooperation. By 1916, 10 per cent of the CODP’s members were women. Perhaps even more importantly, the Minimum Program made an explicit case for the role that women should have to play in the coming diplomatic order. It was unacceptable, said the CODP, that the lives of millions of women and men lay in the hands of a dozen men. ‘We believe especially’, the Minimum Program went on, ‘that the assistance of women will be of the highest importance in the orientation of international policy in the direction of a system of durable peace’.Footnote 54 It was only fitting that one of the earliest accounts of the CODP’s work was written by a woman, the US educationalist Fannie Fern Andrews.Footnote 55
When women tried to become involved in official diplomacy they were usually rejected as not qualified or, at best, treated as a nuisance. On several occasions, officers at the League of Nations thought it would be unwise to spend too much time to address women’s enquiries. Upon a request from the Pan-Pacific Women’s Congress in 1928, Werner Picht, head of university relations at the IIIC, told his colleague that he did not think ‘it would add to the prestige of the Institute if it would mechanically answer questions of this kind’.Footnote 56 When two representatives of the Chilean branch of WILPF introduced themselves to the League headquarters in 1931, they were put off with a pile of information leaflets.Footnote 57
Despite considerable opposition, women managed to establish themselves professionally in academia, diplomacy, politics, journalism, and publishing. Lucy Mair, a social anthropologist by training, was one of the first women to hold an academic position at an IR department. Her first book, The Protection of Minorities (1928), received the endorsement of Gilbert Murray for whom she had worked as a secretary.Footnote 58 Mair embarked on various field trips for ethnographic research – except for Raymond Leslie Buell she was probably the first IR scholar to conduct fieldwork in Africa.Footnote 59 She started to lecture at the London School of Economics alongside S. H. Bailey and L. G. Robinson in the early 1930s.Footnote 60 Mair published in leading journals of the field, such as International Affairs, she contributed to a volume on ‘peaceful change’ edited by C. A. W. Manning in 1937, and delivered talks at conferences and summer schools.Footnote 61
Another example of a successful female academic career was Margery Perham. Educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, she first taught at the University of Sheffield before embarking on several extended field research trips and eventually securing a lectureship in Colonial Administration at Oxford. In 1939 she became the first female professor at Nuffield College, Oxford. A colleague and close friend of Frederick Lugard, the British representative on the League’s Permanent Mandate Commission, Perham lectured and published extensively on imperial relations with a particular focus on the lives of native people in various African countries.Footnote 62 In July 1937, she co-organised (with historian Reginald Coupland) a summer school on colonial administration gathering a range of prominent speakers, including Harold Laski, Philip Kerr, and Alfred Zimmern alongside Lucy Mair, Agnes Headlam-Morley, and Hilda Matheson.Footnote 63
Agnes Headlam-Morley was perhaps the most prominent female, though not feminist, IR scholar of her time. She was the daughter of historian and government advisor James Headlam-Morley and the German composer Elizabeth Sonntag, allowing her from a young age to study ‘contemporary affairs at first hand’, as Arnold Toynbee later wrote in a testimonial for her.Footnote 64 Having read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, Agnes Headlam-Morley embarked on graduate research that led to her book The New Democratic Constitutions of Europe (1928), before taking up a tutorship in history and politics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Similar to many of her male colleagues, Headlam-Morley also had a distinct interest in active politics, to the extent that her college felt she was not satisfactorily fulfilling her academic duties.Footnote 65 She supported her cousin, the Conservative politician Cuthbert Headlam, in the 1931 general election and she was preparing to run herself in 1936 for the Barnard Castle seat, though the election was eventually not held.Footnote 66 After the Second World War, in 1948, Headlam-Morley became Montague Burton Professor of IR, and thus one of the first female chair holders at Oxford.
By the late 1930s women were involved in a number of capacities in the wider field of IR research and practice. Their publications were cited by male colleagues and caused ‘a good deal of discussion’.Footnote 67 They had built an impressive infrastructure situated at the intersection of academia, diplomacy, and civil activism. A 1938 brochure by the Peace and Disarmament Committee of the Women’s International Organizations, a group originally formed to influence the World Disarmament Conference, specified the range of activities that its members were encouraged to employ: ‘read bulletins of International Affairs, subscribe to a journal of International Relations, write letters to the press, start an advocacy group, hold luncheons, learn foreign languages, glorify for your children the heroes of peace, etc.’.Footnote 68 Through the collaboration with a dozen women’s organisations operating in 56 countries, the Peace and Disarmament Committee claimed to speak for forty-five million women worldwide. Thanks to Swanwick, Mair, Perham, Headlam-Morley, and many others – including Anita Augspurg, Kathleen Courtney, Mary Agnes Hamilton, Lida Gustava Heymann, Clara Ragaz, Elisabeth Rotten, Agnes Maude Royden, and Lucie Zimmern – women managed to circumnavigate the male-dominated world of diplomacy and academia.
Increasingly, this was also recognised by their male counterparts. When looking for a new committee officer at the British League of Nations Union in 1938, for example, Lord Cecil recommended the suffragist and WILPF official Kathleen Courtney with highest praise: ‘Miss Courtney has the immense advantage of really knowing the subject and the working of the League extremely well, and she is, I think, a very impartially-minded person with a good presence in the Chair.’Footnote 69 Despite Cecil’s flattering comment and other female IR pioneers, it is important to remember the systematic disadvantages under which women worked during the early twentieth century and which influenced their scholarship.
Seven themes in early feminist IR
Gender mattered in early IR scholarship, not simply because women worked on IR topics, but because their approach was genuinely feminist. In other words, the substance of their thinking was shaped by an awareness of the concerns of women, children, and others who were normally marginalised in the study and conduct of foreign policy. The following ‘themes’ – or discourses – are an attempt to describe this body of thought.
A feminist-humanitarian lens on war and peace
One immediate concern for feminist IR scholarship, as it emerged during the First World War, was the effect of war on civilians, particularly women and children. As a corrective to the male-dominated literature on military and geo-strategic questions, this discourse covered aspects such as the home front, the effects of blockades, food security, famines, refugees, prisoners of war (POWs), enemy aliens, human trafficking, prostitution, disaster relief, and humanitarian aid. At the heart of these considerations was the conviction that, as British suffragist-pacifist Agnes Maude Royden put it, ‘women know the sufferings of war without its glory’.Footnote 70 The experiences of giving life and being a mother were central to this strand of thought.Footnote 71 South African author Olive Schreiner lamented that women ‘have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part’.Footnote 72 In their capacity as wives and mothers, they sent their husbands and sons to war, often without seeing them return. They looked after widows and orphans, treated the wounded, cared for refugees and POWs, all the while replacing men in their regular jobs to earn a sufficient income for the household. One of the most disturbing war crimes, Jane Addams noted in 1922, was the ‘the compulsory establishment of brothels for foreign soldiers’.Footnote 73 In another instance, she insisted that food security would make people more peaceful.Footnote 74 It was this emphasis on the essentials of human life, rather than on the interests of governments, that set these authors apart from mainstream IR.
Feminist IR authors processed these experiences by researching and writing on them, resulting in a range of noteworthy publications such as Margot Hentze’s work on migration, Maude E. Miner’s book Slavery of Prostitution (1916), or Helena Swanwick’s criticism of blockades.Footnote 75 Meanwhile, they devised and circulated concrete policy demands. At the 1919 WILPF congress in Zurich, the delegates declared their strong opposition to blockades, which they thought both failed to achieve their goal of exercising pressure on governments, and unnecessarily harmed the civilian population.Footnote 76 Like economic sanctions, so their argument, they were bound to breed further hatred between the peoples. In 1920, WILPF passed a resolution on the ‘protection of women and children’.Footnote 77 Four years later, at the Washington congress, WILPF member Gertrude Baer presented a comprehensive programme to encourage children and the young to organise themselves with IR issues.Footnote 78 In 1929, WILPF organised a conference on chemical warfare.Footnote 79 Meanwhile, the ICW protested for the protection of stateless people as well as for Russian and Armenian refugees.Footnote 80 All of these efforts were underscored by the idea that women were able, moreso than men, to understand the evils of violent conflict, and that they should play an active role in finding solutions.
The peaceful nature of women
One of the most prevalent, yet controversial, claims was that women are by nature more peaceful than men – today known as the essentialist argument.Footnote 81 Women as the ‘guardians of life’, so Maude Royden argued, were naturally more sensitive to the effects of war.Footnote 82 The experience of giving birth to and raising children, as well as losing children and husbands in the battlefield, generated a profound awareness of the value of each life, regardless of national origin. The suffering ‘mother-heart of women’ could see what men failed to recognise, Aletta Jacobs said in her opening remarks to the 1915 women’s meeting in The Hague.Footnote 83
The argument about the peaceful nature of women was echoed by a whole range of international IR authors throughout the first half of the twentieth century, both men and women. As early as 1915, British polymath Charles Kay Ogden argued that militarism had been the curse of women.Footnote 84 Ogden drew on Swanwick’s argument that militarism directly involved the subjection of women.Footnote 85 British welfare worker Edith Waterworth stressed the ‘mother instinct’ of women that created a natural connection between women of all countries.Footnote 86 That was because women knew existential human struggles better than men, argued Olive Schreiner. In fact, said Schreiner, ‘the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man’.Footnote 87 The International Cooperative Women’s Guild (ICWG), too, affirmed that ‘as mothers … who give life’, they were not prepared to allow the artificial destruction of it.Footnote 88
If there was an inherent relationship between being a woman and being peaceful then the inverse would be true about men. Accordingly, Swanwick argued, history had proven that men did not succeed in understanding each other.Footnote 89 German pacifist Frida Perlen agreed and declared that men had sufficiently demonstrated their incompetence to devise a peaceful international order, and that they were responsible for militarism and recurring wars.Footnote 90 Male jingoism, Swanwick argued, was the real menace of international relations. At the 1928 discussion with William Arnold-Forster quoted in the introduction, she made the case that women were better off taking part in government themselves rather than being ‘protected’ by men.Footnote 91
The upshot of this argument was that women should replace men as political leaders and diplomats. One of WILPF’s earliest policy demands was that women should be entrusted with negotiating the 1919 peace treaty, a demand that was completely ignored. Instead, women were often faced with sexist stereotypes. For example, when the Vienna Konsularakademie started to train female diplomats in the 1920s, one journalist cynically argued that women were especially suitable for diplomatic service.Footnote 92 They were clever, affectionate, and possessed the skill to delude if needed. What is more, the article went on, they were not receptive to female spies. Slightly less sexist, another journalist suggested that female diplomats would be specially suited to deal with the interests of migrants, women and children, social policy, and international cooperation.Footnote 93 Gender stereotypes dominated the political rhetoric as much as career prospects for women.
However, feminist IR literature did not naïvely imply that women were always more peaceful than men. Of course, there was such a thing as ‘jingo women’, admitted Margaret Hills.Footnote 94 ‘A woman in a bombing aeroplane can fly her machine and drop her bombs with as shattering an effect as a man’, Maude Royden argued.Footnote 95 The belief that women were ‘innately more pacific’ had been severely shaken, Royden went on. They could be ‘as virulently militarist, as blindly partisan’ as men, and they might, when they have the power, vote no more against war than men did.Footnote 96 In fact, only a minority of women’s organisations were outspokenly pacifist, and the Bund Deutscher Frauen (German Women’s Association) even refused to participate at the 1915 congress in The Hague.Footnote 97
Religion, emotion, and universalism
A third, though related, feature of feminist IR scholarship was its holistic interpretation of international politics, often featuring religious, emotional, or universalist language. Issues of war and peace were often framed in terms of a particular way to view the world, and policy proposals were justified by recourse to spiritual arguments. The Society of Friends boasted a whole range of prominent authors on issues of IR, both women and men. As the British Quaker and pacifist Anna Ruth Fry explained at the 1924 WILPF congress, their political principles had an ‘ethical and religious’ basis that was incompatible with war.Footnote 98 Her German colleague Elisabeth Rotten, herself a committed Quaker, educationalist, and pacifist, described her work to Gilbert Murray as one of a ‘spiritual kind’.Footnote 99
Religious or spiritual rhetoric also appeared in the work of Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, Marcelle Cape, and Agnes Maude Royden. Addams’s trips in the early 1920s to lobby with various governments were called ‘pilgrimages’ in the ‘spiritual struggle’ for women and peace.Footnote 100 A particularly elaborate version was developed by the German educationalist and pacifist writer Anna B. Eckstein. Her theory of religious and political ‘perfection [Vollkommmenheit]’ served as the basis of her ‘global petition for the prevention of war [Weltpetition zur Verhütung des Krieges zwischen den Staaten]’, one of the most elaborate programmes of international cooperation, circulated from 1907 and published in revised form after the war.Footnote 101 Inspired by the biblical call for perfection – ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48) – Eckstein derived that political institutions should put people in a position to pursue their respective ends.Footnote 102
Several authors employed emotional arguments in their IR writings, and some explicitly acknowledged this. At the 1926 WILPF congress Swanwick was convinced that it was ‘on the emotional plane’ that problems of international politics generated momentum and that it was here that ‘women have a great task to perform’.Footnote 103 At the same congress, Addams spoke of an ‘emotional glow’, which would hopefully give a new impulse to reform their ‘beloved League’.Footnote 104 Unsurprisingly, critics discredited women’s work as too emotional and not rigorous enough. Even those in favour to the pacifist cause did not always grant women their due attention – Carl von Ossietzky famously ridiculed Bertha von Suttner’s work as ‘unmanly’.Footnote 105 However, adopting a broad approach to IR did not imply that feminist scholarship was necessarily ‘unscientific’, whatever that may mean. In some cases men actually employed precisely the same language. Alfred Zimmern gave a lecture on ‘spiritual values and world affairs’ in 1939.Footnote 106 Maurice Bourquin, a leading international lawyer and participant at the International Studies Conferences, thought that ‘harmony’ was essential to the solving of international problems.Footnote 107 And even a stern diplomat, such as Harold Nicolson, once spoke of ‘mysterious, fantastic formula’ in international politics, and expressed ‘most heartfelt sympathy for the sufferings of the German people’.Footnote 108
Far from being ‘effeminate’, this body of literature triggered important discourses, based on a universalist perspective on world affairs. In 1937, Austrian feminist Olgar Misar presented a programme for the protection of ‘human rights’, built on her conviction of ‘equal rights of all peoples and races’.Footnote 109 This was not emotional talk but rested on a well-reasoned case for universal rights – more than a decade before the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Anti-imperialism
Many feminist IR authors advocated anti-imperial positions, condemning both the idea of racial hierarchy per se as well as its ramifications in international politics. They were appalled how Western governments systematically ignored the interests of colonised peoples and, what is more, how they deliberately played power politics at their cost. The basic demand was that ‘subject nations must be freed’, as Marie Johnson put it at the 1924 WILPF congress.Footnote 110 At the 1926 meeting, Addams was full of praise for Gandhi’s doctrine of passive resistance against British rule in India.Footnote 111 British suffragist-pacifist Ethel Williams thought it was fear that had delayed the granting of home rule to British colonies.Footnote 112 A decade later, in the context of the debate on ‘peaceful change’ and ‘colonial revision’, LSE lecturer Lucy Mair urged to take into account the interests of ‘native inhabitants’ of the respective territories, at a time when European governments were exclusively concerned with their own security.Footnote 113 Mandates expert Freda White argued that reallocating territories between so called ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ was ‘very silly’ because these terms presupposed a mistaken imperialist view of the world.Footnote 114 If anything, India and China should be considered ‘have-nots’, rather than Italy and Germany. By the late 1930s, feminist IR writers were beginning to be careful in their use of language and refrained from using the then common attribute ‘backward’ peoples.Footnote 115
Highlighting the rights of colonised people was extremely rare in 1920s and 1930s IR scholarship.Footnote 116 Although women did not present a comprehensive programme for decolonisation, their arguments were often much more progressive than those of their male colleagues. During the Abyssinian crisis, Margery Perham sent several letters to the editor of The Times in which she pointed out the moral and political inconsistency of bombing a people about whom it is then claimed that they need help from the ‘civilised world’.Footnote 117 In her lectures Perham presented an African-oriented perspective on international relations and drew attention to the ‘interests of natives’.Footnote 118
Several factors contributed to this anti-imperial approach to IR. Part of it was rooted in the religious-spiritual universalism, outlined above, which substantiated the idea of equality between people all over the world. Many women, in particular those at the WILPF, were united in their struggle against militarism and oppression. Other authors blamed the exploitation of classes, nations, and races more generally, arguing that human relations had been corrupted by the forces of imperialism and capitalism.Footnote 119 As the ICWG pointed out in 1930, the struggle of non-European peoples confronted international capitalists with the danger of losing control over raw materials, hence threatening their profits and, in turn, leading to war.Footnote 120 From a strategic point of view, it would be ill-advised for Europeans to continue the old-fashioned system of imperial control. Instead they should try to turn their colonies into allies, suggested a group of WILPF delegates in 1937.Footnote 121
Anti-capitalism
Women were among the strongest critics of financial capitalism as a facilitator of militarism and war. As Balch explained at the 1924 WILPF congress, ‘the alliance between business in pursuit of profit, and nationalist policies in pursuit of power’ was the most dangerous peculiarity in the international order.Footnote 122 Financial and industrial capitalism had ‘divided the world up for individual profit’, as another delegate put it.Footnote 123 A world in which the conduct of international relations was essentially in the hands of businessmen and military commanders was bound to be determined by greed. That is why the original 1915 programme of the WILPF demanded that no private profits should be made from arms production or trade.Footnote 124 Austrian feminist-pacifist Yella Hertzka went so far to claim that the ‘real, controlling power’ in international relations was ‘financial’.Footnote 125 The US section of WILPF amended its constitution in 1934 to officially condemn the ‘present system of exploitation, privilege and profit’ to be replaced by social, economic [sic], and political equality.Footnote 126 In short, her French colleague Gabrielle Duchêne argued, the main causes of war were economic.Footnote 127
Again, the underlying rationale was that women were capable, more than men, to appreciate the living conditions of ordinary people, especially during wartime. At the 1937 WILPF congress, German economist and jurist Grete Stoffel outlined the process by which workers and small merchants had been thrown out of their jobs while ‘big employers, bankers, etc.’ accumulated an enormous amount of capital.Footnote 128 Socialist thought underpinned the concern for the working population in all countries and helped to build bridges of transnational cooperation. It was the ‘spirit of selfish materialism’, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence argued, which corrupted people’s minds and which led to wars which no ordinary citizen, least of all a woman, could possibly subscribe to.Footnote 129 Therefore the forces of capitalism became one of the core concerns for feminist IR scholarship, especially in the ways that they empowered aggressive nationalist foreign policy and the armament industry.
The democratic control of foreign policy
A key concern for feminist IR scholarship was the democratic control of foreign policy, with particular emphasis on the representation of women in government and diplomacy. A world in which women were unable to vote, while men waged war, was dually unjust. The demand for foreign policy control therefore provided a direct link between suffragists and pacifists, united in their common struggle for democratic reform.Footnote 130 If electing a government was the right of all people, then so should the branch of foreign policy be subject to democratic scrutiny – thus simultaneously extending the electoral range and the thematic scope of democratic governance. How the two causes went hand-in-hand is reflected in numerous feminist works, such as Vernon Lee’s essay The Democratic Principle and International Relations (1915).Footnote 131 Margaret Hills’s Foreign Policy and the People (1917) provided a brilliant analysis of the historical conditions of ‘autocratic’ diplomatic practice.Footnote 132 Drawing on the Liberal statesman John Bright, she lamented that British noblemen were scattered across the globe on behalf of the Foreign Office, yet one never knew what they were doing. She criticised the aristocratic and elitist milieu from which diplomats were recruited. During the years from 1908 to 1913, some 67 per cent of Foreign Office recruits had been educated at Eton and nearly all the rest at other expensive public boys schools. The result of these conditions, according to Hills, was that:
issues of life and death for millions of men, women, and children are in the hands of a small group of men … of limited class, by upbringing and tradition totally out of touch with popular sentiment.Footnote 133
Earlier traces of this notion can be found in Anna B. Eckstein’s 1911 ‘global petition for the prevention of war [Weltpetition zur Verhütung des Krieges zwischen den Staaten]’, where she argued that modifications of borders should only be allowed after the voluntary consent of the people.Footnote 134
By the end of the First World War democratic control had become a key demand for feminist IR authors. It ranked among the five original demands of WILPF, passed in 1915 at The Hague, and reiterated at Zurich in 1919.Footnote 135 And it was a genuinely feminist argument. As Dutch WILPF co-founder Cornelia Ramondt-Hirschmann argued: ‘no real woman, no real mother, if she had the right to vote, would declare in favour of war’.Footnote 136
On a practical level, democratic control meant female representation in high-politics and diplomacy. Feminist IR authors and women’s organisations campaigned for this cause from the outbreak of the First World War. In 1919, the ICW requested the peacemakers in Paris to receive ‘a deputation to present women’s views on the Covenant’ – unsuccessfully of course.Footnote 137 As the newly-established League of Nations organs were being staffed, WILPF pressed for female representation on various committees. In the case of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in 1922, for example, they welcomed the appointment of Marie Curie and Norwegian biologist Kristine Bonnevie but regretted that another of their suggested candidates, Scottish geologist Maria (Ogilvie) Gordon, had not been considered.Footnote 138 In 1927, the ICW urged to have more women representatives at the Assembly, the International Labour Office (ILO), as well as the League’s Committee for the Codification of International Law.Footnote 139 At the same time, women’s organisations were open to the participation of men at their congresses, as letters to League secretary-general Joseph Avenol reveal.Footnote 140
Education
Having often been denied the desired training themselves, feminist authors articulated the need for mass political education. They set up courses, organised summer schools, lectured, and wrote educational leaflets. If foreign policy was to be democratically controlled, then the electorate had to be informed and trained in the issues at stake. Hitherto women had been excluded from relevant education because it was assumed that only men could become diplomats, and only the warriors required training.Footnote 141 This prejudice was now dissolving.
One of the first and most eloquent authors to express this point was Helena Swanwick. She stressed the general sense in the wake of the Great War ‘that the peoples in any country in the world want to study foreign affairs’.Footnote 142 It was high time to ban all sorts of militarism in schools, as Australian pacifist Eleanor M. Moore demanded in 1919.Footnote 143 Instead, the ICW wanted to train children in ‘international goodwill’.Footnote 144 Women would be especially suited as ‘peace educators’, agreed WILPF, citing their role in organising exchange programmes, summer schools, and efforts for a universal language.Footnote 145 Edith Waterworth also thought that ‘proper teaching’ of children in the field of ‘war and peace’ would account for better international relations.Footnote 146 In 1930, the ICW issued a brochure on How Women can Promote Good International Understanding Between the Nations. Footnote 147 Besides changing the substance of political education, feminist IR authors were convinced that they should increase its scope and outreach. Swanwick and her colleagues wanted all generations of school children, university students, and adults to benefit from the study of war and peace. Crucially, political education had to reach out to all classes of society. This included the use of broadcasting among colonial populations, as radio pioneer Hilda Matheson proposed at a 1937 Oxford conference.Footnote 148
First and foremost, however, feminist IR scholars were concerned about lectures, summer schools, and grassroots work for the sake of international cooperation. Programmes included summer schools in Hungary, and study circles in Japan.Footnote 149 Besides female-specific ventures, young women increasingly participated in male-led summer schools and education programmes, such as Alfred Zimmern’s Geneva Summer Schools. Women were also at the forefront of international intellectual cooperation. The final document of the 1919 WILPF meeting in Zurich called for an ‘International Commission on Education’, a body intended to coordinate the exchange of students and teachers, to facilitate scientific communication, to advance the plans for an auxiliary language and an international university, and to promote the teaching of what was later called IR.Footnote 150 Their proposal was ignored until three years later when the League of Nations installed the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva which, together with the Paris-based International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, formed the League’s predecessor of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Most striking for the disciplinary history of IR in this respect was a resolution, passed in 1924 by WILPF, which may be interpreted as the founding declaration of feminist IR. Building on the 1919 proposal, it explicitly called for the creation of university chairs in IR, arguing that it would advance the interests of feminists and pacifists. It read:
We urge that the Universities, Colleges, and University Extension Courses of the world establish special Departments and Chairs for International Relations and World Peace, in addition to and apart from the existing courses in international law.Footnote 151
Conclusion
Towards the late 1930s, it became unmistakably clear that the feminist critique of masculine foreign policy had a point. Militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and racism dominated international affairs to an extent that left female concerns almost entirely ignored. Chauvinist leaders prepared aggressive foreign policies in the name of ‘protecting’ their nation. In 1937, a worried Emily Balch noted that international politics had been hijacked by ‘an ethic of violence, a cult of tyranny, a narrow nationalism and racism, a scorn of discussion and reasonableness’.Footnote 152 Having been denied access to senior positions in academia and diplomacy, it was particularly bitter for women to witness the recurrence of nationalist politics and war mongering. What is even worse, from an historian’s point of view, is how their intellectual and political efforts have been subsequently ignored.
It is time to remember the role of women in the formation of IR scholarship. Despite all obstacles, Swanwick and her colleagues built a transnational network of women who taught, discussed, and campaigned in the field of IR. Above all, this article has argued, they generated an impressive range of feminist scholarship that went beyond mainstream, male-dominated political thought. Rediscovering feminist IR scholarship is important in highlighting these discourses – the role of women and children in war, the peaceful nature of women, the spiritual-universalist approach to international politics, anti-imperialism, the socialist critique of militarism, female suffrage and democratic control of foreign policy, and mass political education. At the same time, this history reveals the systematic discrimination against women in academia and diplomacy, as well as the strategies that female actors employed to circumnavigate male dominance. Throughout the First World War and the inter-war period, feminist thinkers in the field of IR collaborated internationally, launched educational programmes, conducted original research, published in academic and popular press, campaigned for democratic change, and sought political responsibility.
Yet, it took another five decades for feminism and gender in IR to become widely recognised as an academic (sub)field. The Second World War and the subsequent division of the world into military super power blocs were far from ideal terrain for feminist IR thought. Realist theorists dominated the field with their insistence on national self-interest and military power. Although women’s concerns were not on the agenda during that time, their underlying problems continued to exist. Towards the late 1980s, decades after feminist approaches had been integrated in other social sciences, IR scholars finally managed to establish these topics in major publications and university curricula. Issues such as sexual violence in war, migration, militarism, religion, emotionality, or the role of women in diplomacy are now standard textbook material. But their origins, both the phenomena themselves as well as their academic study, lie in early twentieth-century feminist-pacifist history.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank for their helpful comments the participants of the ‘Gendering Peace in Europe’ conference, organised by Julie V. Gottlieb at the University of Sheffield, and the ‘Gender, Women and Culture’ seminar series, organised by Senia Paseta at the University of Oxford, as well as the two anonymous referees of this journal.
