‘Add Women and Stir’ Gender and the History of International Politics

» GLENDA SLUGA

It is now nearly a quarter of a century since history, since it did not help us understand how Joan Scott famously bemoaned the absence of men and women were positioned in the past, Iwomen in the history of ‘High Politics’. In the and why they so often held such distinctive 1980s, Scott, an historian of women and class, positions. In this essay, I want to argue that was a key protagonist in the cultural turn in we should revisit the methodological value of the historical discipline, which included the the ‘add women and stir’ approach because, a accommodation of post-structuralist theory, quarter of a century after Scott’s call, and despite and pushed advocates of women’s history the ‘gender turn’, women are still missing in towards the study of gender as a ‘useful category action as agents in the history of ‘High Politics’. of historical analysis’.1 At the time, her emphasis Indeed, it can be argued that (as many feminist on gender as a category of analysis ‘was a historians long feared) the gender approach to call to disrupt the powerful pull of biology history has tended to reinforce women’s absence by opening every aspect of sexed identity to from the central events of the past as historical interrogation’, since the insistence on the ‘fixity actors, even when they have been there. of that opposition… [on the essential “truth” Despite available evidence of women of sexual difference] is itself the product of a as agents and subjects in the arena of certain history, and not one we should consider international history—whether involving war, inviolate’.2 More recently, Scott has refined peacemaking, , or foreign policy— her view, concluding that to focus on gender the core narratives of international politics ‘is about asking historical questions: it is not a remain notably depleted of women, even in the programmatic or methodological treatise’. new international history, particularly as it is Gender was the methodological mantra now focusing on international organisations. around which I formed my own historical In some recent synthetic English-language consciousness of the past. I was as eager as histories—from Paul Kennedy’s Parliament of any feminist historian to push aside what we Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United termed the ‘add women and stir’ approach, on Nations (2007) to Mark Mazower’s Governing the grounds that adding and stirring a new the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea (2012)— ingredient into our analysis of the past was less there are no women in over two hundred years sophisticated than coming up with a whole of history. And, unlike some international new recipe for writing history. Adding women, historians, Kennedy and Mazower do not even it was assumed, did not adequately shift the address gender. I say ‘even’, since the nineteenth parameters of male-dominated masculinist and twentieth centuries that they cover were

Humanities 65 coterminous not only with the ‘invention’ of international political histories through the the international, but also with the emergence nineteenth and twentieth centuries where they of what came to be known as the gendered are often assumed to be absent. This is not an separation of spheres. The template of gender argument for throwing gender aside, but a call difference that historians associate with the to remember the usefulness of adding women, rise of industrialised England was idealised, of the recovery and reintegration of women who idolised, and emulated across the European were there as political agents into the stories we continent as a new bourgeois class sought to tell of the international past, even when the distance itself from older aristocratic authority historical questions seem, at first glance, to be and power. As importantly, aristocratic and male dominated and non-gender-specific. bourgeois women were crucial agents of the * * * new ‘international’ politics as well as the new gender norms. Even a little historical research The history of Versailles and international quickly illustrates that women were intellectual peacemaking in 1919 after the end of World as well as social agents in the shaping of War One is a staple of international history. international political norms in nineteenth- ‘Versailles’ and ‘1919’ have become shorthand century , including new concepts such for the epoch-marking developments that led as nationality and humanitarianism, and in to the validation of nationality as a principle of the international practices that we think of as international politics, and the creation of the diplomacy. No matter what approach you take League of Nations as the iconic organisation to international history—whether focusing on establishing a new era of cultural and political the more traditional controversies of political internationalism. Predictably, in these histories thought and foreign policy, or the creation women are rarely mentioned as agents or of international institutions—women were subjects of significant moment. Yet, once we usually involved. In the twentieth century, begin to look for women, they seem to turn women’s presence in the realm of international up everywhere, organising peace conferences politics expanded along with the opportunities parallel to the main events from which they created by the new liberal internationalism were excluded, sending delegations demanding that led to the establishment of organisations for women the same ‘self-determination’ such as the League of Nations and the United being awarded to nations, usually through Nations. Indeed, histories of pacifism and their international organisations, such as feminism have long recorded the engagement the International Council of Women, or the of European women with internationalism. Women’s International League for Peace However, their evidence and findings are rarely and Freedom, and being rejected. However, integrated into what non-feminist historians historians who bother to examine the understand as serious international history and documents of these organisations, alongside the study of Realpolitik. Similarly, the gender more conventional archival records, will histories of international politics, many of discover that even the marginalisation of these them concentrating on the , that have women and their demands was central to how proliferated in the last decade or so have added the peacemakers understood the international little to our knowledge of the roles of individual politics in which they were engaged. They will women in these same political scenarios. also discover a story that radically alters our Instead, in international history gender understanding of the processes around which hardly ever concerns women. Recognising the forms of international politics that we take the presence of women has the potential to as normative were ‘invented’. When compelled fundamentally shift our perspective on what is to consider the political status of women in important in the past, as well as to illuminate the new world order, key political leaders the role of historians in silencing women, their and experts involved in the peace process actions, and their ideas. insisted that, except as it related to labour The following discussion draws on some legislation and the League of Nations, sexual examples of the presence of women in difference was an issue of ‘domestic’ or national

66 Humanities Australia significance.3 All the delegates that comprised and the legitimacy of its sovereignty in terms the so-called Council of Ten—the political of how it treated its women, or the kinds of leaders of the United States, Britain, , rights women had or did not have for cultural , Japan, and the Maharaja of Bijkaner— or historical reasons in that specific nation- believed that the status of women was a state. This approach also illuminates as a question for national decision-making. How shared international principle the process of ironic then that their agreement was proof of transnational agreement that rendered women an international consensus that women’s status subject to national sovereignty. was a marker of national sovereignty. Adding women and stirring in this same Recovering or adding women to the history period also reminds us that European of 1919 and ‘stirring’ casts new light on the women were key figures in the propagation of reconstitution of the principles and norms of International Relations as a discipline. In 1919, international relations during the postwar and in the interwar years, female members peace-making, on the very definitions of of the Institut International de la Paix, the ‘sovereignty’ and the constitution of national World Congress of International Associations, politics in the realm of international politics. Institutions Internationales, the Workers It reveals that women organised to represent Educational Association, the Association their interests, and sought national rights for the Study of International Relations, the in the domain of international politics; Women’s International League for Peace and (above) that women’s ‘self-determination’ was as Freedom and other organisations, as well as Jane Addams significant (for them) a dimension of the new individual women such as Louise Weiss, editor on the platform of the Women’s international postwar order as the principle of of L’Europe Nouvelle, and Helena Swanwick, International national ‘self-determination’; that the political editor of the British Union of Democratic League for Peace marginalisation of women in the international Control’s mouthpiece Foreign Affairs, organised and Freedom, 2nd International sphere required ideological work, of a kind that summer schools throughout Europe on Congress, Zurich, reinforced the international as the domain of international politics. They recommended Switzerland 1919. masculine interests, and national sovereignty texts by women, including the English author PHOTO: SWARTHMORE COLLEGE PEACE as significantly determined by sovereignty over Lucia Ames Mead on patriotism and the new COLLECTION (JANE the status of women. That is, each male-led internationalism, and German members of the ADDAMS COLLECTION 00064). nation-state could emphasise its difference Women’s International League for Peace and

Humanities Australia 67 focused on the United Nations and on the conceptualisation of ‘human rights’, is also told as a story without women, even though women were prominently there. In mid-life, Alva Myrdal trod the road chosen by so many men who have come to stand for the international idealism of the mid-twentieth century. As an employee of the United Nations (UN) Social Affairs secretariat in New York from 1949 to 1950, Myrdal was a bureaucratic cog with the title of (acting) ‘Top-Ranking Director’ and then, from 1950 until 1955, lower down the pecking order, as Director of Social Sciences at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in Paris. In both these Freedom, Lidia Auersperg and Gustava positions she remained the most senior woman Heymann on psychological perspectives on in that whole labyrinthine organisation. internationalism.4 They nurtured an idealist Her high level appointment was completely view of International Relations that by the uncharacteristic of trends until then in the 1930s was superseded by that of realists who new international world order: she was a hardened the study of International Relations woman and a feminist. At the same time, she into a masculine discipline (channelled through represented that sector of international civil the Royal Institute of International Affairs and servants, in the early post-World War Two years the Geneva Graduate Institute of International of the UN and UNESCO, who had no education Studies). Just as earlier women’s efforts to in the service of European empires, as well as (above) influence the peace of 1919 were excised from the aspirations of women for a political voice Fourth Session of the historical record, women’s texts and their and a place in the politics of the world, as the United Nations preferred subject areas were eliminated from novels of Frank Moorhouse have reminded us.6 Commission on the Status of itineraries of international studies. In the 1940s, Alva Myrdal stood at the nexus Women, May 1950. Once we start looking before and after of a dense web of international networks built Before opening 1919, it is clear too that women’s international around her interests in education, pedagogy, meeting, from left to right, are: organisations have a long history, as does their social psychology and social welfare. It was Alva Mrs Alva Myrdal, interest in international politics. What we Myrdal, along with her husband Gunnar, who Principal-Director, might call an emerging international public had helped bring into existence the Swedish UN Department of Social Affairs, sphere, comprising not only international social welfare model, a symbol of modernisation Representative relations, but international organisations, was under the aegis of social democracy. At the of UN Secretary- crucial to the demands women made for the close of World War Two, she understood the General; Mrs Hannah Sen, same national, state or even imperial rights challenge to world peace and security as the of India, Vice- exercised by men and denied them. It is little alarming economic and social inequalities Chairman; Madame wonder then, as Virginia Woolf noted in Three between European and colonised societies. Marie Helene Lefaucheux, of Guineas (1938), that so many women became During her short tenure, she brought to the UN France, Chairman; advocates of a new liberal internationalism and its agencies a perspective informed by her Madame Lina or sought to involve themselves in the new feminism and interest in social welfare. She was P. Tsaldaris, of 5 Greece; and Mrs international organisations. convinced that the Swedish model of progress Olive Remington from a rural to modern society could be Goldman, of the * * * adapted to colonial settings through ‘planned United States. The end of World War Two, and the emergence social development’. The Swedish precedent PHOTO: UN PHOTO of a new and more enduring internationalism had shown, she claimed, that giving women as

68 Humanities Australia well as men a greater stake in the improvement of quality of life had, in half a century, led that country out of its feudal past into a more democratic and modern future. Myrdal was intent on putting the ‘social’ into the UN, in a way that would radicalise what she saw as the exciting international social welfare potential of ‘Technical Assistance’, the concept that institutionally predated ‘development’ in this period. From 1949, by which time development was being backed by the United States as a Cold War strategy, she was determined to bring to the programme an agenda of balanced modernisation, built out of her repertoire of accumulated social welfare expertise, concentrating specifically on questions of housing, the maintenance of standards of living, social welfare services, the prevention of crime, social care of immigrants, and the status of women. After her year at the UN, Myrdal worked for five years as Director of Social Sciences at UNESCO, where she brought her feminist agenda to bear on the organisation as much as she could and became involved in the conceptualisation of development in the social sciences. In 1956 Myrdal gave up on international organisations, feeling they had become caught up in their own bureaucracy and that it was too hard to effect change ‘on the ground’. Although she had been able to introduce a more women-centred policy, something the first UNESCO Director- General, Julian Huxley, had resisted despite action and success. These became the rationale repeated requests from the UN, she had for the continued relevance of the UN and become increasingly disillusioned with international institutions we know as Human developmentalism. In 1964 Myrdal told a Security. Myrdal can, in effect, be added to this reporter that the Western world did not have history as the ‘mother’ of Human Security.7 the right to impose modernity elsewhere. If we add Myrdal, how does international Her argument was in effect a product of her history as we currently understand it change? frustration at the level of influence of new Myrdal’s story incorporates the significance American non-governmental organisations such of feminism as an ideology in this period. as the Ford Foundation, offering debt-intensive That history also reminds us that in this versions of modernisation, on the UN’s work international schema the demands of feminism in India. Half a century later the UN fully took were often placed in opposition to the demands (above) up her emphases on the importance of working of anti-racism. That is, women felt they had to Anne Louise with local communities rather than imposing compete with other forms of incommensurate Germaine de Staël-Holstein, development from on high, of listening to differences that hinder opportunities and 1766–1817. the women in those local communities, and rights. This was particularly so after 1948, when SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA of working with the standard of living rather the new international discourse of ‘human COMMONS, PUBLIC DOMAIN than gross domestic product as a measure of rights’ again focused on ‘self-determination’ of

Humanities Australia 69 a national/cultural kind, and women’s rights ‘liberalism’, ‘culture’, and ‘nationality’ are were sectioned off to the Committee on the attributed to her influence.10 Status of Women.8 The story of Staël as ‘thinker’ requires Adding Myrdal also links us to the role of reincorporation of Staël’s ‘diplomatic’ roles. women in the history of diplomacy and foreign The period that most interests me begins while policy. When Myrdal decided to give up on she was in exile, fleeing to Russia, then Sweden, UNESCO she became the first Swedish female then England, at the heart of her movable ambassador, and eventually a crucial advocate for salon, knitting together a European culture local solutions to the challenges of development, of ideas and politics through her networks, funded directly by wealthy national governments correspondence and writings.11 By 1813, as such as Sweden. Stirring women back into Napoleon’s forces were in increasing retreat, European history connects us to a longer common parlance in England and on the European story of women’s often ‘informal’ continent had it that there were three powers yet conventionalised roles in the history of in Europe: Britain, Russia, and Germaine de diplomacy—whether as monarchs, dynastic Staël. Her celebrity had been carried across networkers, or spousal ambassadrices—from the the Continent and Atlantic by her open and early modern period to the modern age.9 unforgiving opposition to Napoleon and the popularity of her novels and her original studies * * * of national literatures and cultures (categorised Sceptics might argue it is much easier to by some of her contemporaries as a form of add women to the international history of ‘political science’). Even in an age when women the twentieth century, a period when the were tolerated as novelists, Staël’s status as a democratisation of politics and rise of social female ‘genius’ was exceptional. She was among

EVEN IN AN AGE WHEN WOMEN WERE TOLERATED AS NOVELISTS, STAËL’S STATUS AS A FEMALE ‘GENIUS’ WAS EXCEPTIONAL.

movements gave more women the opportunity the prominent elaborators of the practical to participate in international political life. terms of liberty that became the conceptual Yet this modern history merely illuminates axis of political debate in the post-Napoleonic the absence of women in a longue durée world, a consequence not only of her ideas and narrative where they were in fact also present, discussions, but also of the influence she exerted as historical actors in the ideological as well through her salon and her political interventions. as political constitution of a modern Europe. At this crucial juncture in European history, Which brings me to my last example, the end we find Staël at the centre of diplomatic of the Napoleonic wars, 1814, and the influence negotiations, working her networks, her of Germaine de Staël on what I think of as the correspondence and publications, and her invention of the international as a political celebrity, in St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, space. In taking Staël as my subject, my and Paris, in the interests of forging and intention is to also to reflect on the possibilities maintaining a coalition against Napoleon, and in of both historical ‘recovery’ of women as favour of a new liberal European order to replace political agents, and the relevance of that his rule. In the context of the larger political history for understanding the place of gender in shift that historians have identified, in the ‘sense ‘High Politics’. of inherent limits, acceptance of mutual rules Germaine de Staël’s major writings traverse and restraints, common responsibility to certain the period of the French Revolution, the standards of conduct and loyalty beyond the Napoleonic wars, and the early Restoration. aims of one’s own state’,12 Staël insisted on the Her studies of Italy and Germany are still relevance of liberal principles to the domain of regarded as prototypes of a new cultural international peacemaking that would follow , just as the specific terms Napoleon’s defeat. Included in her political

70 Humanities Australia repertoire of liberal ideas were anti-colonialism Since then, the ‘problem’ of Staël’s gender and anti-slavery. has persisted, as is apparent when one considers In the last years of her life, as Staël railed synthetic accounts of liberalism, and other against the limitations of the Restoration ‘recovery’ projects. In the new Cambridge established by the powers that had defeated Companion to Benjamin Constant, which, as its Napoleon, she wrote Considérations sur la editor Helena Rosenblatt explains, is intended Révolution Francaise, a defining text of liberal to salvage Staël’s companion Constant from ideology, the first conceptual history of the the margins of liberalism, one author makes Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and the point that it is impossible to discuss the the culmination of her thinking about political influences on Constant without touching on liberty. Liberty of person, belief, religion, Staël, although he does it in a specific manner: required and guaranteed the representation of ‘And leave aside’, says Gauchet, ‘Madame de Staël, public opinion and mitigation of the arbitrary with whom he [Constant] collaborated too closely exercise of power. In effect, political power to permit attribution of responsibility for specific required regulation through the practices of ideas. Nevertheless, Constant’s answer was still ‘public liberty’ and ‘the protection of individual fundamentally new, if only in the sharpness of rights by establishing a regime limited by its formulation.’ This new answer, it is explained, fundamental laws and a constitution’. The was the view that the details of liberty are text elaborated this applied view of liberty, inspired by the need for ways of preventing its history, and its universal applicability. She arbitrariness or tyranny in political power. wrote in Considérations: In a very recent and separate history of political thought in France since the eighteenth Is the question the abolition of the slave century, Jeremy Jennings follows a long trade, or the liberty of the press, or religious description of Constant’s ideas with a footnote toleration? Jefferson thinks as La Fayette, in which he adds that the argument for which as Wilberforce […] Is it then from the Constant is best known—the distinction calculations of interest, is it from bad between the ‘liberty which was offered to men motives that men so superior, in situations at the end of the last century […] borrowed from and countries so different, should be in such the ancient republics’ and a modern ‘private’ harmony in their political opinions?13 conception of liberty—was first advanced ‘by Madame de Staël in her Circonstances actuelles The story of Staël’s effacement and qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, a text written marginalisation is as instructive for in 1796, but published almost two hundred exposing the implicitly gendered character of years later’. The point for Jennings is that international liberal theory and its lineages. Constant was the more ardent advocate of this Staël’s biographers have persistently pondered view and therefore the focus of discussion. whether she was more the prompter of Ironically, if Staël’s work was more seriously liberalism than the maker of a ‘liberal age’. considered, it would be difficult to ignore women Other assessments suggest that the greatest as the subject of liberalism and political thought, impact of her work occurred after her since she herself singled women out as having death, during the revolutions of the 1830s, a specific kind of subjectivity and role in the the Risorgimento and national liberation constitution of a liberal society and state. For movements of the mid-nineteenth century.14 example, when Staël evoked the dystopia of Few have pondered the significance of her arbitrary government, she used as her example ‘womanhood’ to her precarious intellectual women exerting influence in the public sphere position, even though in her own lifetime for personal advantage, compared with the it was that fact that caused her the most situation ‘in free countries [… where] the true difficulties. The relevance of Staël’s gender character of a woman and the true character of was obvious to her contemporaries who a man can be known and admired’, since there simultaneously reviled and celebrated her work was no need to learn to manipulate individuals and her political persona. when institutions objectively and transparently

Humanities Australia 71 protected, and balanced out, the interests of all. 4. See Glenda Sluga, ‘Gender’, in Palgrave Advances When she wanted to understand the structures in International History, ed. by Patrick Finney (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 300–19. that supported those same freedoms in England, 5. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The she pointed to the separation of spheres that Hogarth Press, 1938). maintained the social order. Ironically, over the 6. See Frank Moorhouse, Grand Days course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, (Chippendale, New South Wales: Pan Staël’s own place in this narrative (which she Macmillan, 1993); Dark Palace: the Companion would have expected to be itself separate from Novel to Grand Days (Milsons Point, New South Wales: Random House Australia, 2000); and the fate of ordinary women) was held hostage to Cold Light (North Sydney, New South Wales: the conventions of gendered separate spheres. Random House Australia, 2011). 7. Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, ‘New * * * Histories of the United Nations’, Journal of Adding women and stirring is not a project that World History, 19, 3 (2008), 251–74, and Glenda Sluga, ‘A Genealogy of Human Security: Alva demands we abandon gender as a critical tool Myrdal at the UN (1949–1956)’, in International of historical analysis. But it does prompt the Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, ed. historian, and the humanities scholar more by Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel and Corinna R. generally, to remember that women were there, Unger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). even in the High Politics of international history, 8. Glenda Sluga, ‘National Sovereignty and Female Equality: Gender, Peacemaking and and that historians have been responsible for the New World Orders of 1919 and 1945’, in eliding them from our memory of the past each Frieden—Gewalt—Geschlecht, ed. by Jennifer A. time they have failed to remember to look for Davy, Karen Hagemann and Ute Katzel (Essen: them. The project of adding women and stirring is Klartext Verlag, 2005), pp. 166–83. about exposing the processes by which they were 9. Women, Diplomacy, and International Politics since 1500, ed. by Carolyn James, Glenda Sluga made absent; about forcing state, non-state and and Giulia Calvi (London: Routledge, 2015). personal, national and international archives into 10. Staël’s oeuvre included studies of political conversation; and about integrating the evidence events and the recent past, including De of women’s presence into the narratives we have l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus of international history, politics, and ideas. ¶ et des nations (1796), Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France (1796) GLENDA SLUGA FAHA is and Considérations sur les principaux événements Professor of International de la Révolution française (1816), although the History at the University of latter two were only published posthumously. Sydney, and the Australian 11. I discuss this period more fully in Glenda Sluga, Research Council Kathleen ‘Madame de Staël and the Transformation of Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow. Her European Politics’, International History Review most recent book is Internationalism in the Age of (published online 2014). Nationalism (2013). She is currently researching the 12. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of international history of cosmopolitanism through a European Politics 1763–1848, The Oxford History study of women at the Congress of Vienna. In 2002 of Modern Europe series (Oxford: Clarendon she was awarded the Max Crawford Medal by the Press, 1994), pp. vii–viii. Australian Academy of the Humanities. 13. Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, newly revised translation of the 1818 English edition, 1. Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category ed. by Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Fund, 2008), p. 755. Review, 91, 5 (1986), 1053–75; and ‘Unanswered 14. In terms of the canon of liberal thinkers, Staël’s Questions’, contribution to American Historical exclusion or perhaps, more appropriately, her Review Forum, ‘Revisiting “Gender: A Useful marginality has been defined around the fact Category of Historical Analysis”’, American that her ‘republicanism’ was not absolute, as Historical Review, 113, 5 (2008), 1422–30. well as the fact that she belonged to a French- 2. Scott, ‘Unanswered Questions’, p. 1427. speaking cohort of intellectuals, and to an era of liberal thought that has been of less interest 3. See Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and to historians than the late eighteenth century. International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

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