{"id":207,"date":"2019-12-06T10:16:53","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T10:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=207"},"modified":"2019-12-06T11:39:45","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T11:39:45","slug":"the-gender-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/12\/06\/the-gender-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gender of Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dr. Sarah C. Dunstan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Middlemarch, <\/em>Public Domain.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Rereading George Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch<\/em>\nrecently, I was struck by the following line: ‘Young ladies don’t understand political\neconomy, you know,’ said Mr Brook, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. ‘I remember\nwhen we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book now.’[1]<\/a> The\ncontext has certainly changed \u2013 we are no longer in 19th century England – but these\nattitudes persisted well into the twentieth century, with significant\nconsequences. Through the research for the current Leverhulme Women and the\nHistory of International Thought project, it has become very clear to me that\nattitudes like this have profoundly shaped how we understand the intellectual\ngenealogies of political economy as well as all kinds of thought in and outside\nof the academy. As the activist historian Berenice Carroll put it: \u2018the class system of the intellect\nhas a long history\u2019 and \u2018its relative exclusion of women dates back to ancient\ntimes.\u2019[2]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As all of\nour project members have noted in their respective blog posts<\/a>,\nas well as in their publications<\/a>,\nwomen are notably absent from histories of international thought and the\ndiscipline of IR. This does not reflect the influence that many women had on\ninternational thought in their own time through published scholarship as well\nas teaching and public commentary. Eliot\u2019s own intellectual legacy, although\nnot in the domain of international thought, is symptomatic of this kind of\nforgetting. At her death, the historian Lord Action wrote that \u2018[i]n problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare\ndisgracefully, her touch was unfailing.\u2019[3]<\/a> She\nquickly fell out of favour thereafter, however, remembered for many decades\nonly in terms of what one critic dismissively referred to as her \u2018ponderous\nmoral aphorisms and \u2026didactic ethical influence.\u2019[4]<\/a> Such\nexclusion was very explicitly gendered \u2013 the same critic opened his essay with\na reflection on Eliot\u2019s apparently unfortunate looks. It should go without\nsaying that it is crucial that we undo this kind of exclusion and dismissal by\nrecovering the work and historical impact of women\u2019s work. Equally significant,\nhowever, is understanding how the process of forgetting women\u2019s contributions\nhas influenced how we understand knowledge formation and dissemination. As a\nnumber of scholars have noted in the case of IR, canon construction within the\ndiscipline has been so entwined with questions\nof gender and race that it can quite literally be described as an exercise in\nmapping \u2018relations of descent and influence between [white] men.\u2019[5]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quote from Middlemarch struck a particular chord with me\nbecause it was so reminiscent of the experiences of three women scholars I had\njust interviewed for our project\u2019s oral history archive: Janice Gross Stein,\nthe Canadian political scientist and security expert, Karen Mingst, the American\npolitical scientist of global governance and Margaret Hermann, the American political\npsychologist. The first, Stein, told me about her experiences doing field work\nin the late 1970s whilst she was working on the Egyptian-Israeli war of 1973.\nAs part of this research, she interviewed a number of military officials in\nCairo.  The first hurdle that she had to\novercome was that she was a \u2018Jewish woman\u2026 working in international relations\u2019\nat a time when there were few women working in the field of security.  She recalled that it took some effort for her\ninterview subjects to \u2018get over the fact that I was a woman and they were generals and\nthey\u2019d never had this kind of conversation with a woman before.\u2019[6]<\/a> When\nthey did, Stein uncovered some brilliant material that overwhelmed \u2018whatever\ndiscomforts\u2019 she experienced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\ntelling me this story, Stein noted that this attitude \u2013 the surprise at a woman\nbeing interested in and knowledgeable about security issues \u2013 was not\nparticular to Cairo. To the contrary, one of her favourite examples of this\nkind of behaviour came from an interview with a senior Canadian General who\nasked her \u2018What\u2019s a nice little girl like you doing asking these questions?\u2019[7]<\/a> Karen\nMingst met with similar incredulity during her graduate work at Wisconsin in\nthe early 1970s. In the interview, Mingst told me that she still has clear\nmemories of attending one of the core IR classes, Security, only to have the\nProfessor turn to her and say, \u2018Why are you taking this class? Women don\u2019t\nstudy this.\u2019[8]<\/a>\nThe Professor in question was male: Mingst herself was one of only three women\nstudents in the international relations (IR) programme and there were no women\non faculty during her time there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nis clear that a hundred years after Middlemarch<\/em>\nwas published, the notion that a woman might not understand political issues\nstill required dismantling. The default assumption was that this kind of\nknowledge was \u2018men\u2019s business\u2019. It is an assumption that Stein also met with\nwhen she started appearing as an expert commentator on Canadian national\ntelevision. This again was \u2018a myth busting experience for lots of people\u2019\nbecause it surprised them that the public face of knowledge around war could be\na woman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nsubjects of security and war were not the only realms in which women faced\nstereotypes about appropriate areas of expertise for their gender. During my\ninterview with Margaret Hermann, she recounted a similarly illustrative\nexperience. As an adjunct at Princeton University in 1979,\nHermann was charged with coaxing thirty undergraduate students into honing\ntheir critical thinking and debating skills through Princeton\u2019s precept system.\nShe began the semester prepared for intellectual and pedagogical challenges but\nwas unprepared for the shocked silence that would greet her first overtures to\nthe all-male class. None of the students in the room had ever been taught by a\nwoman. The categories of \u201cTeacher\u201d and \u201cProfessor\u201d and, by extension, the realm\nof serious knowledge, were therefore implicitly masculine to their minds.  Many of these students would later confide to\nHermann that they had never even met a woman in their social circles who worked\noutside the home. This shock was compounded by the fact that Hermann was also\nvisibly pregnant with her first child. If her students were confounded by the\nnotion that a woman could also be a scholar, they were doubly surprised to\ndiscover that a scholar could also be a mother.[9]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously Hermann\u2019s students occupied a very particular\nelite sphere. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that for much of the\ntwentieth century \u2013 until the late 1960s and 1970s \u2013 female students were not\nadmitted to the most prestigious universities in the United States, Ivy League\ninstitutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. Women attended\nseparate or parallel, all-female institutions for their undergraduate degrees.[10]<\/a> Oxford\nand Cambridge in the United Kingdom were similarly constituted by single-sex\ncolleges that demarcated gendered boundaries in knowledge acquisition. Likewise,\nmany postgraduate programmes were reluctant to offer women bursaries if they\nwere married, on the basis that they were unlikely to pursue work other than\nmotherhood. In such a context, it is not hard to see how beliefs around\nauthority and the relationship between expertise and gender come into being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus far I have interviewed eighteen women scholars for the Leverhulme\nWomen and the History of International Thought oral history archive. The women\ncome from throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and each\nhave very different scholarly trajectories contingent upon multiplicity factors\nthat intersected with their gender. (These include national and ethnic\nidentity, religion, class and sexuality, amongst others.) Their graduate school\nexperiences range temporally from the 1940s through to the 1970s and their chosen\nareas of specialisation encompass diverse fields. Some have chosen to adopt\nexplicitly feminist analyses to counter and work through obstacles they have\nencountered by virtue of expectations around their gender and their work.\nOthers have pursued different methodological routes. All have been very\nsuccessful scholars, latterly recognised as leaders in their respective areas.\nWithout exception, however, they have all had to contend with the relationship\nbetween their expertise and their gendered identity as women. We need to take\nthis into account when we read their intellectual work and when we think about\nthe development of the field over the course of the twentieth century. The idea\nthat \u2018young ladies don\u2019t understand political economy\u2019 is hopefully a relic of\nthe past. We should not neglect, however, to weigh its impact upon knowledge\nproduction within histories of international thought and beyond.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> George Eliot, Middlemarch<\/em> (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 13. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Berenice A. Carroll, \u2018The Politics\nof “Originality”: Women and the Class System of the Intellect,\u2019\nJournal of Women’s History, Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1990, Q137.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Quoted in Roland Hill, Lord Acton <\/em>(New Haven: Yale University\nPress, 1999), 303.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> On the resurgence of Eliot studies\nin the 1960s see Ken Newton, \u2018Review of Middlemarch:\nCritical Approaches to the Novel<\/em>,\u2019 The George Eliot Review<\/em> 46 (2015): 65-66.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> Andrea Nye, Philosophia: The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and\nHannah Arendt <\/em>(London: Routledge, 1994): xiv<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> Janice Gross Stein, Interview with\nSarah C. Dunstan, 19 March, 2019, 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> Janice Gross Stein, Interview, 14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/a> Karen Mingst, Interview with Sarah\nC. Dunstan, 20 March, 2019, 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/a> Margaret Hermann, Interview with Sarah C. Dunstan, 17-18. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/a> See Nancy Weiss Malkiel, \u201cKeep the Damned Women Out\u201d: The Struggle\nfor Coeducation<\/em> (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dr. Sarah C. Dunstan Rereading George Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch recently, I was struck by the following line: ‘Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,’ said Mr Brook, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. ‘I remember when we were all reading Adam…<\/span><\/p>\n

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