{"id":230,"date":"2020-03-16T11:57:07","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T11:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=230"},"modified":"2020-04-15T12:33:24","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T11:33:24","slug":"finding-women-thinkers-in-the-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2020\/03\/16\/finding-women-thinkers-in-the-record\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding women thinkers in the record"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Joanna Wood.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having been forced to return to the UK a few weeks ago, halfway through\nmy research trip to US College archives, it seemed like a good moment to\nreflect on why I was there, what I was doing and why looking in those places\nmatters, especially for marginalised and\/or neglected thinkers. As a post\nwritten in light, rather than in spite, of the current situation, I\u2019d like to\ndedicate this to the archivists who made me so welcome: you make this research\npossible. Thank you. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those researching neglected, marginalised thinkers, the official\nrecord seems to be the opposite of where you should be looking – after all,\nthese thinkers are neglected in part because they don\u2019t appear in the record\nand they don\u2019t appear in the record because they are marginalised. Precisely\nthe sort of place to omit historical women thinkers from the deeply gendered,\nraced and classed times of the 1920s-50s. Not necessarily. I look at women\npresent in, connected to or working in the US academy in the first half of the\ntwentieth century, where they are a minority in gender and a double (and\ntriple) minority when this intersects with race and\/or class. Our field until\nrecently has not expected to find them in the academy, let alone the official record.\nAnd yet, it is the official record that started to lead scholars to these\nthinkers and now, to a broader \u2018world\u2019 of women\u2019s international thought in the\nacademy. Named chairs (professorships), prizes and buildings were often the\nfirst clue that \u2018a woman was here\u2019 \n(Murphy, 2017, Vitalis, 2015). But those\nare just the tip of the iceberg. For every person \u2018named\u2019 there are pages and\npages of thinkers waiting in the records: in journal lists, institutional\nmaterial, minutes, magazines, personal papers and correspondence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting with the available reports marking every stage of a scholar\u2019s\ncareer, you work through the annual lists of doctoral dissertations in progress,\nupdates on new hires and of course obituaries. Similarly, reports of events,\nconferences and meetings are combed for mentions of women. This starts to build\nyou a list of names that you then search for individually: career path,\npublished work and of course personal papers in archives. You could stop there:\nit certainly furnished me with a significant number of thinkers to work on and\na broad perspective on women in the field. However, these published resources\nare only one part of the record – the other is found in the archives,\nspecifically the institutional archives of US Colleges and Universities.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take a trip through the catalogue or finding aids of most archives of\nUS academic institutions and, sometimes after serious digging, you will almost\ncertainly find a woman engaged in international thinking. Depending on the\ninstitution, or even despite the institution, it won\u2019t necessarily be obvious\n(a member of faculty) or even resemble what we expect international thought to\nlook like (books, credited research, named roles) but they will be there. And,\nbest of all for the scholar, you finally get more than names – you get bodies\nof work and pictures of the professional reality of women thinkers in the\nacademy. Halfway through my archival research in the US and I\u2019m delighted (and\nmore than a little relieved) to say that the theory has stood up to the\nreality. The archives have provided enough women and thought to furnish\nmultiple theses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly there are the institutional records: the lists of graduating\nstudents, incoming and exiting Faculty, course lists, Departmental records and\nminutes for every committee you can imagine, on every possible theme. Then\nthere is the official correspondence: hirings and firings, responses to press\nrequests, letters between other heads of academic institutions, individuals.\nAnd the occasional autograph hunter\u2026 Finally there is the informal\ncorrespondence between teachers and former students, scholarly colleagues,\nacademic women and non-academic friends, family and everyone in between. This\nlast category, unsurprisingly, usually proves the most enjoyable to work\nthrough, containing as it does vignettes that are wonderful regardless of how\nrelevant they are to your project (often the less relevant, the more\nenjoyable!). Correspondence runs the gamut from the formal official refusal\nletter to a women graduate seeking work to the rich informal correspondence of\ncollege women keeping in touch with former teachers and mentors, discussing the\nattempts to manage marriage, children and the desire to maintain an\nintellectual and professional life. We find contradictions to the more easily\navailable \u2018record\u2019: a complaint to a railway company reveals that a senior\nwomen\u2019s college administrator and two other women did in fact attend a\nconference even though they don\u2019t appear in the rapporteur\u2019s report; and a\nletter from a college teacher to her former student after the latter\u2019s marriage\nexhorts her to not give up her burgeoning professional intellectual career in\ninternational economics. And, even after \u2018finally\u2019, there is also that\nimpossible to categorise set of materials that can at best be loosely headed\n\u2018ephemera\u2019 – randomly kept magazines, telegram drafts, photos and odd notes\nthat give a brief glimpse into the day to day world of women in the academy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, of course, that only gets us to more names on the list and the\nprofessional reality of these women. What about their thought? We already have\nthe published work, where they are credited, from journals, books and other\npublications but this leaves many thinkers simply a name on the list. This is\nwhere the archives really come into their own: many hold the personal papers of\nformer students, Faculty and associated thinkers. These in turn contain a\nwealth of resources that, if we are willing to step beyond the traditional\ndefinition of thought as academic books and journal articles, offer a rich body\nof international thought.  This includes\nteaching materials, pedagogy, bibliographies, unpublished work, fragments,\ncontributions to husbands\u2019 work and other non-traditional genres. Not only does\nthis offer exciting new material to work with but also brings to light women\npreviously excluded as \u2018thinkers\u2019 such as teaching-only staff, librarians and\nadministrators. We finally find ourselves immersed in the world of women\u2019s\ninternational thought hinted at by the named chairs, prizes and buildings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these finds do not of course detract from the very clear\nomissions that such archives contain, whether contemporaneous (students or\nstaff prevented from attending, those who don\u2019t appear in the record) or later\n(hierarchies of whose papers were kept, whose are catalogued most thoroughly).\nLikewise, regardless of how many women we find in the record, we must never\nlose sight of the fact that there are those who do not feature, are not\nmentioned, are not visible, have been actively erased. The record and the\narchives can only ever be partial, biased, unreliable but they are a fruitful\nstarting point in a field that doesn\u2019t expect there to be any women thinkers in\nthis period, let alone recorded ones. That is an important misconception to\nchallenge and the record a significant source to use to do so, precisely\nbecause of its partial, weighted status. We should continue looking beyond both\nrecord and archives but that is another blog post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you find one and shatter the illusion of absence, finding women in\nthe record becomes addictive. Named chairs and buildings go from being part of\nthe furniture of your institution to revealing clues to a different\nintellectual history, archives from dusty official repositories to vibrant alternative\nstores of new thought and thinkers. We find a new world of international\nthought. And, so, going back to where I started, we should not be surprised to\nfind women in the most official of records. Women were in the academy, engaged\nin international thinking, throughout the 20th century. It is time we caught up\nwith these thinkers sitting – some of whom have sat for over 100 years – in\nplain sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murphy, C. N. (2017) Relocating the\npoint of IR in understanding industrial age problems. In: Dyvik, S. L., Selby,\nJ & Wilkinson, R. (eds) What\u2019s the Point of International Relations?<\/em>\nLondon, Routledge, pp.71-82.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vitalis, R. (2015) White World Order, Black\nPower Politics: the Birth of American International Relations. <\/em>NY,Cornell\nUniversity Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joanna Wood. Having been forced to return to the UK a few weeks ago, halfway through my research trip to US College archives, it seemed like a good moment to reflect on why I was there, what I was…<\/span><\/p>\n

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