{"id":199,"date":"2019-10-28T14:40:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T14:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=199"},"modified":"2020-05-21T10:54:47","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T09:54:47","slug":"irs-power-couples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/10\/28\/irs-power-couples\/","title":{"rendered":"IR\u2019s \u2018Power Couples\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

When an upstart discipline constructs its own identity, it tends to focus on \u201cgreat texts\u201d written by scholars whose capacious minds imagined a whole new range of fundamental questions about the world and the human beings that inhabit it. International Relations (IR) is no different. In fact, IR has been notorious for claiming the great minds of great men as its intellectual foundation. But there are costs to such narrow definitions of \u201cthought\u201d. One of them is that a focus on great minds leaves out the element of collaboration. While there are many forms of intellectual collaboration, between peers, between thought leaders and their disciples and between teachers and their students, there is one form that combines the intellectual and the romantic, the marriage of minds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twentieth-century thought has\nknown some very high-profile heterosexual couples, from Simone de Beauvoir and\nJean-Paul Sartre to Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, couples in which both partners\nachieved intellectual recognition and a public profile. Then there are the many\nunsung \u201cwives of the canon\u201d (Forestal & Philips 2018), women in traditional marriages who supported their\nhusbands\u2019 intellectual work by providing research assistance, commenting on\ndraft work, typing, entertaining visitors and keeping house. There were also\nstructural reasons why a heterosexual marriage to a scholar could be a\ndisadvantage when it came to women\u2019s intellectual production. In mid-century\nU.S. academe, women married to male faculty were often denied academic jobs\nbecause of anti-nepotism rules, an issue that affected white women more than African-American\nwomen seeking employment at historically black colleges and universities\n(Stephan & Kassis 1997, 59; Perkins 1997, 103).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet IR, a relatively young\ndiscipline that emerged out of multiple fields of intellectual inquiry as well\nas activism, seems to have an unusual number of academic \u201cpower couples\u201d,\nheterosexual unions in which both partners shared a deep interest in the\nrelations between peoples, empires and states. In these partnerships, female as\nwell as male partners attained a measure of intellectual standing, if not on an\nequal footing. Being linked to an influential man could be a way for a woman to\nattain credibility. The historians Joan Hoff-Wilson and Robert Shaffer have\nhighlighted \u201cthe importance of family connections, and male mentors, in the\nability of women to become recognized as having something to say about foreign\npolicy\u201d (Shaffer 1999, 157). Intimate ties seem to have been particularly\nimportant for women\u2019s knowledge production on international questions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many examples of\nheterosexual couples in the wider field of International Relations: Lucie and\nAlfred Zimmern, Veronica Boulter and Arnold Toynbee, Margaret and Harold Sprout,\nEslanda and Paul Robeson, Elspeth and Walt Rostow, Annette Baker Fox and\nWilliam T. R Fox, to name just a few. Gender clearly mattered in these\npartnerships. William T. R Fox coined the phrase \u201csuper-power\u201d, while his wife\nAnnette, a trailing spouse, became a specialist on the foreign policies of\nsmall and middling powers. Lucie Zimmern was probably the most reviled woman on\nthe interwar International Relations scene, resented for the access that her\nmarriage gave her to conferences and high-level meetings. And yet she was a\npublished author and specialist on the League of Nations, and, together with\nher husband, ran the Geneva School of International Studies, one of the most\nsuccessful IR education projects of the 1920s and early 1930s. Veronica Boulter\nand Arnold Toynbee enjoyed a gendered working relationship in which Toynbee\ntook public credit for Boulter\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what impact did these personal relationships have on international thought? Was IR as a field invested a heteronormative and gendered narrative about itself and the world? Is there a gendered division of labour within marriages in the formative years of the field, and were men and women assigned different roles according to perceived notions of masculinity and femininity? (As is well known, some spaces in which international affairs were discussed explicitly excluded women, for example the Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential American international relations think tank between World War I and the Vietnam War.) These are questions that have, to date, hardly been considered by historians of international thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Image Credit: Strategic Studies Institute, public domain <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ron Robin\u2019s intellectual biography of one such IR couple\nforms an exception. Promising to probe the \u201cintellectual balance of power\u201d\n(Robin 2016, 7) between his subjects, Robin analyses the thought and influence\nof Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter, a wife-and-husband team of thermonuclear\nstrategists who worked for the influential RAND Corporation think tank in the\n1950s and 60s. If an intellectual marriage is a thought collective of two, with\na distinctive thought style (pace Mannheim), then, according to Robin, Roberta\nset the Denkstil <\/em>of this formidable couple. It was her seminal history\nof Pearl Harbor as a paradigmatic surprise attack that shaped their world view\nand created the foundation for the Wohlstetter Doctrine which argued that\nstatesmen must assume that the enemy is irrational, and therefore needed to be\ndeterred as much as possible. Although influential, the doctrine led the\nWohlstetters to misinterpret the Cuban Missile Crisis. The disciples they\nrecruited included Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard Perle. They\nresurrected Roberta\u2019s analysis of Pearl Harbor after 9\/11, with momentous\nresults in Iraq and elsewhere. Derided as \u201cMr. and Mrs. Fearmonger\u201d (Bacevich\n2017), the Wohlstetters have few fans among critics of U.S. foreign policy but\nreading Robin, it is impossible to dismiss Roberta, the Bancroft Prize-winning\nhistorian who produced usable pasts, as a mere sidekick to her more famous\nhusband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Robin provides little detail on the working,\nemotional, and marital partnership between Roberta and Albert, there are\nglimpses of their intellectual life together. Both Wohlstetters were failed\nacademics. Neither completed a PhD and they were employed in various\nnon-academic jobs in the 1930s and 1940s. They had very different backgrounds \u2013\nRoberta\u2019s was much more genteel than Albert\u2019s \u2013 but theirs truly was a meeting\nof two adventurous if slightly undisciplined minds. It was Roberta, who via a\npart-time assignment as a book reviewer for the RAND Corporation secured a\nprofessional \u201cin\u201d for her husband in Southern California. There they conducted\nan outwardly conventional heterosexual marriage, with Albert becoming the\nparadigmatic defense intellectual and Roberta playing hostess in their stylish\nmodernist home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to Robin\u2019s question about the \u201cintellectual\nbalance of power\u201d within their marriage, I wonder if such an adversarial,\n\u201cbattle of the sexes\u201d metaphor is appropriate. Roberta and Albert were a team,\nand both benefitted from the operations of gender in the context of their intellectual\nproduction. Roberta\u2019s initial analysis made Albert\u2019s hyper-masculine and\naggressive take on the Cold War possible. And the delightful contrast between\nRoberta\u2019s role as elegant Southern Californian housewife and her tough stance\non confronting the Soviet enemy as a part-time RAND consultant may have helped\nher long writing career. Publicly, the couple only disagreed once, when Roberta\nimplied in her final article, published in 1991, that the United States should\nseek to de-escalate conflicts instead of pushing for regime change abroad\n(Robin, 199). What happened privately, in the Wohlstetter\u2019s domestic life,\nremains to be analysed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can the story of the Wohlstetters tell us about women\nand the writing of disciplinary history? The access and credibility that a male\npartner could provide to a female companion certainly remains important.\nIntellectual biographies of intellectual couples have the potential to offer\nmore than a calculus of which partner had the more important and influential\nideas. And finally, I think, to be wary of facile assumptions about male\nwarmongers and female pacifists, dominant husbands and submissive wives, and\nthe ways in which a gendered division of labour in a marriage maps onto\nintellectual production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Andrew Bacevich, \u201cMr. and Mrs. Fearmonger\u201d, First Things<\/em>\n(June 2017) https:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/article\/2017\/06\/mr-and-mrs-fearmonger<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips \u201cGender and the \u2018Great\nMan\u2019: Recovering Philosophy\u2019s \u2018Wives of the Canon\u2019\u201d, Hypatia<\/em>, 33, 4\n(2018): 587-592.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linda M. Perkins, \u201cFor the Good of the Race: Married\nAfrican-American Academics, a Historical Perspective,\u201d in Marianne A. Ferber\nand Jane W. Loeb., eds., Academic Couples: Problems and Promises<\/em>\n(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 80-105.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ron Robin, The Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy\nof Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter <\/em>(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University\nPress, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robert Shaffer, \u201cWomen and International Relations: Pearl S.\nBuck\u2019s Critique of the Cold War\u201d, Journal of Women\u2019s History<\/em> 11,\n3 (1999): 151-75.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paula E. Stephan and Mary Mathewes Kassis, \u201cThe History of\nWomen and Couples in Academe,\u201d in Marianne A. Ferber and Jane W. Loeb., eds., Academic\nCouples: Problems and Promises<\/em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,\n1997), 44-79.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr. Katharina Rietzler When an upstart discipline constructs its own identity, it tends to focus on \u201cgreat texts\u201d written by scholars whose capacious minds imagined a whole new range of fundamental questions about the world and the human beings…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[123513],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}