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Women in international history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

D. Cameron Watt
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Extract

By now there is a very considerable volume of work on the general subject of women, women's rights, feminism and gender in international relations. This has both engendered and been engendered by the development of undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars on these themes. By contrast the allied discipline of international history has been slow to develop a parallel literature or courses. Courses in women's history per se have multiplied; there is a respectable literature and a number of equally respectable learned journals, not only in the Englishspeaking countries, but also in Western Europe. But their concern has been very much focused on the issues of women in each particular society; they have tended, that is, to develop the study of women within the study of the history of a particular country, political culture or linguistic region. Confronted with questions about the lack of similar courses in the history of international relations, historians drawn from both sexes have tended either to take them as a comic act or to indicate that in their view there is a lack of relevant material or issues adequate to justify any isolation of the topic from the more general themes of inter-state relations, with the great issues of peace and war with which as members of the discipline they are chiefly concerned.

Type
Review article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 431 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1996

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References

1 Marwick, Arthur C., Women at War, 1914–1918 (London, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Playne, Carolyne, Berthe Suttner and the Struggle to Avert the World War (London, 1937).Google Scholar

3 Eoff, Shirley M., Viscountess Rhondda, Equalitarian Feminist (Columbus, OH, 1991).Google Scholar

4 This is not intended to belittle the excellent study of Kollontai's early career as an active feminist in revolutionary Russia, by the American historian, Beatrice Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai, Socialism, Feminism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, CA, 1980). The work ends effectively with the year 1926 and Kollontai's transference to the Soviet diplomatic service; it does however include a final chapter dealing with Kollantai's career in the 1930s and her survival through the purge of the diplomatic service which dealt so drastically with so many of her contemporaries, sparing only Litvinov himself, his deputy, Potemkin, and Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London. This is essential reading for all historians of international relations interested in the personnel of the Soviet diplomatic service.