{"id":213,"date":"2020-01-10T07:14:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T07:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=213"},"modified":"2020-01-10T07:15:05","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T07:15:05","slug":"now-you-see-them-now-you-dont-women-in-the-inquiry-1917-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2020\/01\/10\/now-you-see-them-now-you-dont-women-in-the-inquiry-1917-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Now You See Them, Now You Don\u2019t: Women in the Inquiry 1917-19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Professor Kimberly Hutchings<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cynthia Enloe encourages us to ask the question \u2018where\nare the women?\u2019, not only because we should acknowledge women\u2019s role in\ninternational politics, but also because the question opens up new angles of\ninquiry and generates insights that we might not otherwise have (Enloe 2014:\n1-36). Women\u2019s presence and women\u2019s absence always tells us something, not only\nabout the gender politics of particular places and times, but about the matrix\nof material and ideological forces and conditions that shape and are shaped by\ninternational politics.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent work in the history of international thought and in international theory has become increasingly aware of the role of research networks, think tanks and conferences in the development of International Relations as a discipline (Guilhot 2011; Parmar 2015; McCourt 2017). In this respect, historians of IR have become more interested in the role of organizations involved in the emergence of IR as a distinct academic field of study by the middle of the twentieth century, as well as in individuals that were prominent within them. This includes organizations such as the US Council on Foreign Relations or the British Royal Institute of International Affairs, set up in the aftermath of WWI, and figures such as the geographer, Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950), who played an influential role in the former (Smith 2003: 192-200; Ashworth 2013). Bowman also played a major role in the committee that preceded the setting up of the Council on Foreign Relations, the deliberately neutrally labelled \u2018Inquiry\u2019 (1917-19), set up by Woodrow Wilson to prepare the US recommendations for the peace settlement (Smith 2003: 113-138). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Isaiah Bowman,
1878-1950.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Most accounts of the Inquiry stress the role of particular men, such as Bowman or James T. Shotwell (1874-1965). As far as we know, there was only woman member of the Inquiry that went to Versailles, the librarian Florence Wilson, who organized resources for the Inquiry and later became the Head Librarian of the League of Nations Library in Geneva (Huber, Pietsch and Rietzler 2019). For this reason, we may be left with the impression that women had little significant involvement in the Inquiry\u2019s work at all (McCourt 1917). Interestingly, however, according to records from the Inquiry for 1918 although the personnel were male dominated, over and above Wilson, there were at least 28 \u00a0other white women involved in working for it during the course of that year (Gelfand 1963: 337-342). I was surprised to find this out, by chance, when following a trail researching into Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932), a prominent geopolitical thinker, who was invited onto the Inquiry by Bowman (Keighren 2010). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Ellen Churchill Semple,
1863-1932<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So, what does finding women working for the Inquiry\ntell us? Much more research would have to be done to answer this question\nproperly, but here are two suggestions. First, it tells us about the\nopportunities opened to a particular class of educated white women, offspring\nof the Progressive era, in a field that had yet to be defined and\nprofessionalised. It shows that women played a role in laying the groundwork\nfor disciplinary IR, and how that groundwork was tied up with the world of\npractitioners and policy-making. Second, in drawing attention to women\u2019s\npresence it also draws attention to women\u2019s absence. Two kinds of absence are potentially\nsignificant here: women with relevant expertise whose application to the\nInquiry were refused on grounds of ideology, like Emily Greene Balch\n(1867-1961), who was too sympathetic to the Russian Revolution to be\nconsidered. But there is also the significance of the disappearance of women\nfrom representation of the Inquiry at Versailles, and their explicit exclusion\nfrom the Inquiry\u2019s successor organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women\u2019s involvement in the Inquiry reflects a peculiar\nmix of professionalism and amateurism in the approach to understanding\ninternational relations at the time. The point of the Inquiry was to do what we\nwould now call \u2018evidence-based\u2019 policy-making. That is to say, to produce reports\nand recommendations based on expert research on key international regions and\nissues. Inquiry researchers in 1918 were classified according to functions\nincluding working on Africa; Austria-Hungary; Far East; Italy; Latin America;\nPacific Islands; Russia; Western Asia; Western Europe; Diplomatic History;\nEconomics; General Research; International Law; Maps-Cartography; Reference and\nArchives. As historians have noted, Maps-Cartography, formed a particularly key\nfunction, since much of the Inquiry was concerned with making recommendations\nfor the drawing of new national boundaries and imperial domains in a world\nafter Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German empires (Gelfand 1963; Crampton\n2006; Sluga 2006). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Hetty Goldman,
1881-1972<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry drew on academic expertise primarily in\nHistory and Geography. These disciplines had become increasingly professionalised\nsince the 1870s in the US, consolidating their academic identity though\nprofessional organisations and university departments, which became forums for\ntheoretical and methodological debate, including between history and geography\n(Koelsch 2014). It turned out, however, that the East Coast colleges, from\nwhich the majority of Inquiry personnel were recruited, lacked specific\nexpertise in modern history, international law and Europe (including modern\nEuropean languages) and were over-populated by classicists and medievalists.\nAmongst this population, in a war context in which younger men were often\nserving in the armed forces, Bowman and Shotwell extended their recruiting efforts\nto women they knew with academic expertise. This included those with obviously\nrelevant knowledge, such as Semple or Mary E. Townsend (b. 1884), who became a\nleading expert on German colonialism (Townsend 1928). It also included less\nobviously qualified candidates such as Hetty Goldman (1881-1972), an\narchaeologist, who, for the Inquiry, worked mainly on the issue of\nAlsace-Lorraine (Gelfand 1963: 54) or Ellen Scott Davison (1864-1921), a medieval\nhistorian, who was assigned to the diplomatic history section of the Inquiry\n(Gelfand 1963: 340). Dorothy Kenyon (1888-1972), a recently qualified lawyer\nwith no previous experience of international law, ended up working on Siam,\nIndia and the Philippines (Gelfand 1963: 64). In his Foreword to Davison\u2019s\nposthumously published Forerunners of St\nFrancis and Other Studies<\/em> (1927), Shotwell comments: \u201cHere the reader has\nthe full benefit of the strictly scientific method, which always based its\ndetail on original sources and not upon the secondary texts of other\nhistorians\u201d (Davison 1927: xv). Where substantive expertise was missing, it\nseems that the Inquiry put its faith in rigorous method, and expected its\nmembers to catch up on relevant knowledge (Gelfand 1963: 32-78).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Ellen Scott Davison,
1864-1921.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Women were included in the Inquiry then for a mixture\nof reasons. They were included because they had already broken through into the\nacademic world and were part of elite university networks, because there were\nnot enough experts to do the work that the Inquiry required, because of\npersonal connections with particular influential men, such as Bowman and\nShotwell, because of their expertise as researchers. For some of them, such as Goldman,\nthe work appears to have been effectively a brief summer job, part of various\nkinds of war work and essentially a distraction from her work as an\narchaeologist (Mellink and Quinn 2006). For others, the work fed into a\nfeminist internationalist agenda that structured their later career, as with\nKenyon\u2019s subsequent activism and her work on the status of women for both the\nLeague of Nations and the UN (Weigand and Horowitz 2002).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The presence of elite white women in the Inquiry,\nreflecting their presence also in liberal elite networks of the time, suggests\na decisive shift towards (some) women\u2019s inclusion in communities of\ninternational relations research and policy. Yet when the Inquiry moved to\nVersailles, and when the Council on Foreign Relations was set up, in part as a\nresponse to disappointment with the peace settlement, the women involved in the\nInquiry largely disappear. Now you see them, now you don\u2019t. Why? Here one would\nhave to go more deeply into the gendered and racialized assumptions of leading\nAnglophone analysts of international politics in the early twentieth century,\nincluding assumptions of many of the women analysts themselves (Gelfand 1963,\nSmith 2003, Sluga 2006; Vitalis 2015). As Sluga has shown, in spite of\nincreased visibility of women activists at the Versailles conference, the\ndominant psychological and civilizational terms of the political imagination of\nnationality at the time reinforced an international hierarchical race\/gender\/class\norder. Whether or not women shared this imagination, which many but not all of\nthem did, it enabled playing off factors of race, gender and class against each\nother at the discretion of elite white men. Within this order, women\u2019s active\nparticipation in knowledge production and political action was permissible to\nthe extent it conformed with racial and class privilege. However, this\npermission was conditional on the interests of dominant actors, who were also\nhappy to use the trump card of the attitudes to women of racially \u2018backward\u2019\ncultures to deflect demands for an international investigation on women\u2019s\nsuffrage (Sluga 2006: 118). Women could work at the Inquiry, even in the\ncontext of prevailing assumptions about the lack of rational capacity of women,\nbecause of their position of privilege and because they had the patronage and permission\nof men. But those prevailing assumptions meant that permission could be withdrawn\nas easily as it was given. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Florence Wilson,
1884-1977<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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

Ashworth, Lucien\nM. 2013. \u2018Mapping a New World: Geography and the Interwar Study of IR\u2019, International Studies Quarterly<\/em>, 57,\n138-49.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crampton, Jeremy W. 2006. \u2018The Cartographic\nCalculation of Space: race mapping and the Balkans at the Paris Peace\nConference of 1919\u2019, Social and Cultural\nGeography<\/em>, 7(5): 731-52<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Davison, Ellen Scott. 1927, Forerunners of St Francis and Other Studies<\/em>. Edited Gertrude R. B.\nRichards. Foreword, James T. Shotwell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enloe, Cynthia 2014. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: making feminist sense of international\npolitics<\/em> Berkeley & LA: University of California Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gelfand, Lawrence E. 1963 The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-19<\/em>. New Haven\nand London: Yale University Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guilhot, Nicolas (ed.) 2011. The Invention of International Relations\nTheory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory.\n<\/em>New York: Columbia University Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huber, Valeska, Pietsch, Tamson &\nRietzler, Katharina. 2019. \u2018Women\u2019s International Thought and the New\nProfessions, 1900-1940\u2019, Modern\nIntellectual History<\/em> 2019 Online First: doi:10.1017\/S1479244319000131.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keighren, Innes. 2010. Bringing Geography to Book: Ellen Semple and the Reception of\nGeographical Knowledge<\/em>. London: I.B. Tauris<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Koelsch, William A. 2014. \u2018Miss Semple meets\nthe Historians: the failed AHA 1907 Conference on Geography and History and\nWhat Happened Afterwards\u2019, Journal of\nHistorical Geography<\/em> 45: 50-58.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCourt, David M. 2017. \u2018The Inquiry and the Birth of\nInternational Relations 1917-19\u2019, Australian\nJournal of Politics and History<\/em>, 63(3), 394-405<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mellink, Machteld T. and Quinn, Kathleen M. 2006.\n\u201cHetty Goldman 1881-1972\u201d in Getzel M. Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky (eds) Breaking the Ground: pioneering women\narchaeologists<\/em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sluga, Glenda. 2006. The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics 1870-1919<\/em>.\nBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smith, Neil. 2003. American\nEmpire: Roosevelt\u2019s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization<\/em>. Berkeley:\nUniversity of California Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Townsend, Mary E. 1928. \u201cContemporary Colonial\nMovement in Germany\u201d, Political Science\nQuarterly<\/em> 43 (1): 64-75.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vitalis, Robert. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American\nInternational Relations<\/em>. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weigand, Kate and Horowitz, Daniel. 2002. \u201cDorothy\nKenyon: Feminist Organizing, 1919-1963\u201d, Journal\nof Women\u2019s History<\/em>, 14 (2): 126-131.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Professor Kimberly Hutchings Cynthia Enloe encourages us to ask the question \u2018where are the women?\u2019, not only because we should acknowledge women\u2019s role in international politics, but also because the question opens up new angles of inquiry and generates…<\/span><\/p>\n

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