An Active Project of Exclusion

Geertje Bol and Jan Eijking review “Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men,” by Patricia Owens.

By Geertje Bol, Jan EijkingAugust 5, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• History

IF YOU HAPPEN to have studied political theory, you may have read a bit of Plato and Aristotle, a bit of Thomas Hobbes, a bit of John Locke—and perhaps a bit of Hannah Arendt too. If you studied international relations, in turn, chances are you heard about Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, Alexander Wendt—and maybe Susan Strange. If you were really lucky, there was a week on the syllabus on “feminism and critical theory” where, suddenly, women thinkers represented the majority.

While syllabi across many disciplines now include women thinkers, this change has been largely additive rather than substantive. One still (all too easily) gets the sense that it is men who made history, men who wrote it down, men who now debate it. Sound depressing? It should. Swaths of school and university subjects—not exclusively but especially in the humanities and social science—remain hedged in by deeply gendered assumptions and approaches. We continue to reproduce, protect, and normalize male-dominated canons, keeping the myth of the white male genius not only alive but also kicking.

In her important new book Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, Patricia Owens shows just how much there is to gain from rejecting such a myth. A professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, Owens takes ready aim at the just-so story that women simply couldn’t have been foundational to the emergence of scholarly fields and ideas because they were so very excluded. It is easy to believe that women just never had the opportunity to add much of value to the history of ideas; for most of history, they did not have the right to vote or to attend university (Oxford, for instance, only began officially conferring degrees to women in 1920). You don’t have to believe in women’s natural inferiority to therefore assume their absence and consider it an unfair and unfortunate fact about the past. Yet as feminist scholars have shown over the last decades, that picture isn’t simply incomplete—it’s wrong. From ancient times to the present, women have always contributed significant and original ideas. Both the assertion and the need for it likely seem, in 2025, banal. But any scholar working on women’s thought knows that, sadly, it is not.

As with everything in history, the inclusion of women’s political thought is not a linear success story. As formidable historian Eileen O’Neill has shown in her seminal 1998 essay “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History,” women writers were in fact treated far more favorably in the early modern period than in the 19th century. Where women’s published writings were previously, as O’Neill puts it, “praised, reprinted, translated, and commented upon,” this recognition came dramatically undone during the Enlightenment. A very narrow conception of reason became associated with masculinity, whereas the so-called “irrational” kinds of philosophy were viewed as feminine. While female poets and artists of the nascent novel form remained among the best-selling writers of the period, philosophical or political women authors could now expect a nasty reception at best, utter and complete erasure at worst. Many of the early modern women thinkers were no longer read, much less discussed.

But, one might say, of course the Enlightenment was as sexist as it was racist. Of course 19th-century men were trying to erase women’s thought. It makes sense. Fast-forward more than a century: women gained the vote, were able to attend university, could even—though not until another couple decades later—obtain degrees. Surely, then, the 20th century was the best time yet to be a woman political thinker?

Erased forcefully demonstrates how gains once made were not lost but taken. Owens zooms in on the emergence of her field as a new scholarly discipline in the 20th century, urging her readers to reimagine international relations as a field not—as it has long been and often continues to be portrayed—forged, seized, and guarded by men, but rather envisioned, shaped, and developed in great part by women. The long-needed book builds on a previous multiyear project that culminated in two major edited collections on women’s international thought. As mentioned, its core intervention is to show that the contributions of a 20th-century “cohort” of 18 British women international thinkers were neither absent nor forgotten: they were actively erased.

Readers may be surprised to learn, then, that it was a woman—Florence Melian Stawell—who coined the term “international thought” in 1929. That women were in fact “some of the most active agents of the new internationalism”—as researchers and teachers, but also as journalists, philanthropists, and political activists. We encounter them not just in universities but also in “summer schools, think tanks, or advocacy organisations such as the League of Nations Union.” Based on meticulous archival research, Erased shows that two women, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, were pivotal in establishing the world’s first international relations professorship at Aberystwyth in 1919. That the most important white public intellectual in the British Empire was a woman, Margery Perham. That one of the most powerful voices on class, gendered, and racialized oppression was a woman, Claudia Jones. That the third professor to be appointed to an international relations chair at the University of Oxford in 1948 also was a woman, Agnes Headlam-Morley.

Yet while for a time their names had been known and their contributions recognized, their names will be new to many reading and researching today. Putting an end to that obscurity is itself a major aim of Erased. Owens shows, sometimes painfully, that women were hardly ever simply lost from sight, but rather subjected to active, deliberate, misogynistic erasure. Owens’s ultimate eraser is the London School of Economics’ international theorist Charles Manning. Manning’s call for a more sociological, analytical discipline, when his nonsociological, nonanalytical colleagues were overwhelmingly women, was a deliberate move to exclude women. It was not by accident, then, that he framed this move as a call for scholarly “supermen.” This is what Owens refers to as the discipline’s definition against women.

Women’s erasure took place not just against the backdrop of building a more self-sufficient (and self-serious) academic field; it also intersected in crucial ways with the political project of defining international relations against the field’s own imperial and racist legacies. International thought had long been a kind of imperial thought. Well into the 1920s and ’30s, colonial administration and imperial reform were core parts of a fledgling international relations curriculum. In this context, Owens emphasizes the celebrity role of Margery Perham, the leading voice on British imperial reform at the time. Only by the 1950s and ’60s do we see the contours of a theoretical, analytical, distinctive “IR” with its own set of theories and abstractions sharpen. That shift—and its concomitant erasure of women—also entailed a neglect of empire precisely at the time of its disintegration.

Diagnosing the problem this way—as an active project of exclusion—also changes what it means to get inclusion right. One part is the recovery of the women and the crucial roles they played, in the case of Erased, in the forging of the international relations discipline. And so we turn to Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, not just David; to Lucie Zimmern, not Alfred; to Agnes Headlam-Morley, not Hedley Bull. We get to see and know and read Claudia Jones, Merze Tate, Florence Melian Stawell, Elizabeth Wiskemann, and Susan Strange.

But Owens does much more than “add women and stir.” Her intervention requires that we look in different places as well. Throughout, Erased puts treatises and journal articles, but also women’s actions, intimate lives, and what we may call “behind the scenes” contributions, in the spotlight. This is a delicate balancing act: in the past, scholars have often been more interested in women’s biographies and lives than in their actual ideas, so there is a risk here of emphasizing women’s lives at the cost of their intellectual contributions. Yet Owens successfully shows that sometimes, actions really do speak louder than words. Jones, the Trinidadian activist and theorist of the “triple oppression” of Black working-class women, left her mark entirely outside the academy. Her case underscores the importance of looking beyond the confines of a space whose emerging self-conception “could not handle” the critique of racism and empire when it came from powerful women like Jones.

To undo erasure, rather than amnesia, requires more than recovery. It means that we have to decenter, expose, and criticize “male mediocrities,” to understand the boundaries of academic disciplines—and indeed those of the political imagination more broadly—as the deeply political, gendered, racialized constructions that they are. Erased is a story told, strictly speaking, not “without men,” but rather without putting men on a pedestal. It extends to women the courtesy of that important academic principle, charitableness, that is always extended to men. Undoing erasure also means to turn—or, in this case, return—to the complex, powerful, good, and bad voices of women’s international thought. Some, like Jones, were progressive, feminist, anti-imperial. Others, like Perham, were apologist reformers of empire. Eileen Power, a pioneering economic and social historian of the Middle Ages, provincialized Europe but also medievalized “the East.”

Owens’s revisionist history is rightfully wary of making recovery conditional on feminist or otherwise progressive credentials. Breaking out of the confines of tokenistic inclusion, where women are only included for their ideas on gender and feminism, Erased is no book for that one week on feminism. Instead, Owens wants us to shake up the whole curriculum. While framed as a story primarily about the study of international relations, this book actually holds a message for any discipline—and for anyone who cares about inclusion.