Women's International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–1940

Abstract

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.

Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’

“…20 Taylor, cited in Owens and Rietzler 2021, 14. 21 Huber et al 2021;Hutchings and Owens 2021. 22 See, e.g.…”

International Political Thought and Historical International Relations

“…The interaction between intellectuals, public servants and policy-makers has also received the attention of historians, raising questions on the reception and impact of ideas in politics. Lawyers, civil servants and economists have signalled out as important links in connecting ideas to policies between the national and international spheres (Slobodian 2018;Wertheim 2020;Huber, Pietsch and Rietzler, 2019). Yet, as recent studies have shown, religious orders and their members were also significant contributors to developing and spreading ideas about world order (Moyn 2015;Erdmann 2005;Thompson 2015) What are the spatial boundaries of IPT?…”

Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution

“…More generally, very few works of international theory center on historical women (Owens, 2007;Hutchings 2009;Hansen, 2011;Kinsella 2014;Cochran 2017). This is mirrored in the small number of studies on the foundational role that women played in the field of international relations from the early twentieth-century (Sluga 2017;Stöckmann 2017;Owens, 2018;Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2019;Owens and Rietzler 2021;Owens, Rietzler, Hutchings, Dunstan, 2021).…”

“…More generally, very few works of international theory center on historical women (Cochran 2017;Hansen 2011;Hutchings 2009;Kinsella 2014;Owens 2007;Tickner and True 2018). This is mirrored in the small number of studies on the foundational role that women played in the field of IR from the early twentieth century (Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2019;Owens 2018;Owens and Rietzler 2021;Owens et al Forthcoming;Sluga 2017;Stöckmann 2018).…”