{"id":165,"date":"2019-06-14T10:45:09","date_gmt":"2019-06-14T09:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=165"},"modified":"2022-04-20T15:20:51","modified_gmt":"2022-04-20T14:20:51","slug":"womens-professions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/06\/14\/womens-professions\/","title":{"rendered":"Women’s Professions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dr. Katharina Rietzler<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is easy enough to assume that few women thought deeply about international relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyses of women\u2019s marginalization from diplomacy, academia and intellectual life invite the conclusion that women were not there, bar some exceptional figures. Environments that were conducive to international theorising, the reasoning goes, were at the same time hostile to women. However, bearing in mind recent calls for the social grounding of intellectual history, maybe it is time to begin by studying the audiences and wider publics that women were able to address. In the United States, there were several avenues for women to gain paid employment, a public profile and intellectual recognition in so-called women\u2019s professions. And, from the 1900s, some of these professions \u2018went international\u2019.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together\nwith Valeska Huber and Tamson Pietsch, I\u2019ve explored the importance of women\u2019s\nprofessions for international thought in a recent article in Modern Intellectual History<\/em> (Huber,\nPietsch, Rietzler 2019). Presenting case studies of three American women, we\nfocus on their professional formation and how it shaped their careers and\nintellectual production. We discuss Fannie Fern Andrews (1867\u20131950), a\nschoolteacher and educational reformer whose peace curriculum taught American\nchildren how to deal with foreignness at home and abroad; Mary Parker Follett\n(1868\u20131933), who originally trained in social work but used her professional\nformation to rethink international, organisational and interpersonal relations in\nthe context of organisational theory; and Florence Wilson (1884\u20131977), the\nchief librarian of the League of Nations, who merged theories of information\nmanagement with theories of international governance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These\nwomen thought about international society from distinct vantage points opened\nto them through their chosen professions. They were in active engagement with\nthe ideas of their male contemporaries and sought to write themselves into the\nearly-twentieth century conversation about international politics and\ninstitutions. At the same time, their respective professions informed their\nconceptualizations of international questions. Their ideas, and those of other\nprofessional women, we argue, remain to be explored by historians of\ninternational thought and a wider, reconceptualised disciplinary history of international\nrelations (IR). Andrews and Wilson currently remain outside the bounds of\ndisciplinary history, while Follett has received some recognition by IR\nscholars (e.g. Schmidt 1998, 168-71).\nForegrounding the professional contexts of Andrews\u2019, Follett\u2019s and Wilson\u2019s\ninternational thinking ultimately points to the gendered nature of the\ndisciplinary and discursive boundary making that has characterized IR\u2019s\nfoundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fannie Fern Andrews (Public Domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As a\nco-founder of the American School Peace League, Fannie Fern Andrews regarded the\nmodern teacher as an \u201cinternational figure\u201d who could instil \u201cthe principles of\njustice, peace and international unity\u201d in children. She argued that \u201cthese sentiments can be taught\u201d and provided\nteachers with pedagogical techniques and contexts in which emotions such as\ninternational friendship could become meaningful \u2013 a kind of do-it-yourself\ninternationalism to socialize children into what Andrews imagined as the\ninternational community. As other white American internationalists at the\ntime, Andrews believed in stark racial and civilizational hierarchies that\nstructured this community. White, native-born Americans assumed a privileged\nposition in it, setting an example to the rest of the world. Andrews\u2019 techniques\nfor encouraging world-mindedness in children and expressing it through concrete\nexperience became popular among American schoolteachers by the 1920s. By that\ntime, however, Andrews made a career change. She had always been interested in\ninternational law (in fact, her curriculum had a very legalistic bent to it)\nand in 1923, she completed a Harvard PhD on the League of Nations mandates\nregime. Andrews underlined the importance of the experience of American\ncolonialism for analysing the mandates system as a form of imperial reform because\nof the \u201ctransitionary character of the guardianship\u201d in American colonies. Her\nthesis was \u201cpioneer work\u201d, relevant to historians of US Empire today. However,\nshe could not get it published. In the end, Andrews wrote a new book. The Holy Land Under Mandate<\/em> combined the\nreproduction of government documents with autobiographical passages. It\npandered to contemporary clich\u00e9s about the Holy Land but also drew on Andrews\u2019\npedagogical work that emphasised emotion and lived experience. Scholars mocked\nthe \u201cpersonal and chatty\u201d register and denied Andrews the status of an\ninternational relations expert. As an intellectual, she remains relegated to\nthe less prestigious categories of \u2018educator\u2019 and \u2018campaigner\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mary Parker Follett (Image believed to be in the Public Domain, )<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The same does not hold true for Mary Parker Follett, who did find scholarly recognition in the field of management and organisational studies. However, her lectures and publications are also highly relevant to early twentieth-century international thought and were significantly influenced by her chosen profession, social work. Follett put forth an inherently social view of the individual that saw the group as central to politics because it was only through the group that the individual could realize freedom and be heard above the crowd. For Follett, all sorts of groups were the foundation of group relations \u2013 including international organizations. And the process of \u201crecogniz[ing] and unify[ing] difference\u201d through these groups would, Follett argued, give rise not only to a new kind of national state, but also, \u201cthrough the further working of this principle,\u201d to a \u201cworld-state.\u201d <\/sup>Follett\u2019s themes of authority, function and responsibility, the psychology of control and consent, leadership and mediation appealed to a business and management audience. This was a field that was \u201cblazing new trails\u201d that could also \u201cbe applied to government or international relations.\u201d Ultimately, Follett\u2019s approach to power grew from her understanding of human psychology \u2013 she advocated not the \u201cbalance of power\u201d but instead \u201ca jointly developing power [that] means the possibility of creating new values.\u201d In this way, she argued, human activity could be organised on a world scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Florence Wilson
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Florence\nWilson, head librarian of the League of Nations Library in Geneva, was also a\ncommitted supporter of international organisation but for her, it was the\nmechanics of information that enabled international decision making and\nexpanded participation in the international community. She was the only woman member\nof the American Peace Commission at the Paris Peace Conference and was asked to\nestablish the Library of the League of Nations in 1920. Wilson assigned a\ncentral role to expertise and information in a complex world in which knowledge\nwas constantly changing and expanding. She believed that librarians should invest\ntime in cataloguing, indexing and guiding researchers to sources, as requests\nwere \u201cfor information rather than books.\u201d After leaving Geneva in 1926, Wilson explored\nother ways of thinking about international information. She wrote The\nOrigins of the League Covenant<\/em> under the auspices of the Information\nDepartment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a work that\nemphasised process, organization, dissenting opinions and structures of power\nin the crafting of international legal frameworks. Wilson\u2019s concern with the\nindividual\u2019s relation to international information resonates with the focus on\npolitical subjectivity and the Deweyan vision of participatory experience that\ncan be found in Andrews and Follett, but Wilson emphasised accessibility. Her\nthinking about the role of information in international society prefigures not\nonly Cold War approaches to public diplomacy, but also more recent concerns\nwith networks, expertise and publicity. At the same time, the methods she\nproposed to enable access, the nature of the information she sought to\nmobilize, and the international community she imagined, exhibited the biases of\nAmerican liberal internationalism, a trait she shares with Andrews. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrews,\nFollett and Wilson were not the only professional women whose training and\nexperience outside the academic discipline of International Relations and its\ncognate disciplines in the interwar years (International Law, History, Psychology,\nEconomics and Political Science) shaped their international thought. It also\nmatters that these three women were trained in what is sometimes referred to as\n\u2018service professions\u2019. Indeed, this fact should lead us to question the\ninside\/outside dichotomy that makes it so easy to dismiss these women as\nmarginal to the history of international thought. After all, as their professions\nwere conceptualised as being \u2018for others\u2019, they matter deeply to the wider\nstructure that was international thinking in the interwar years.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Valeska Huber, Tamson Pietsch & Katharina\nRietzler, \u201cWomen\u2019s International Thought and the New Professions, 1900-1940\u201d, Modern Intellectual History <\/em>(2019) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of\nInternational Relations<\/em> (New York, 1998)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dr. Katharina Rietzler It is easy enough to assume that few women thought deeply about international relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyses of women\u2019s marginalization from diplomacy, academia and intellectual life invite the conclusion that…<\/span><\/p>\n

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