Making Experts of Ourselves: Laura Puffer Morgan, Pacifism, and the Logics of the Security Sector

Abstract

AbstractFor more than a century, gendered divisions between “insider” experts and “outsider” activists kept women at the margins of arms control policy, despite their long-standing disarmament advocacy. In the interwar period, when opportunities for women to influence security thinking from the inside were essentially nonexistent, lobbyist and analyst Laura Puffer Morgan educated herself in the technical knowledge of weaponry, the economics of military spending, and the bureaucratic processes that governed both. Unlike many of her colleagues in the broader peace movement, Puffer Morgan was “equipped to ‘talk army’ with generals or analyze tonnages with admirals.” She believed that women could and should become security experts who would “meet the militarists on their own ground”—a goal she advanced in her own career through voluminous written analysis and through public education about the concrete details of arms reduction. By turning to technical expertise over moral appeal, she was able to act as an advisor to civil society coalitions and delegates alike during the disarmament conferences of the 1920s and 1930s, and advance a peace agenda in quarters where many of her peers were seen as radical interlopers. She was one of a small group of women able to claim the mantle of “expert” and her career illustrates an alternative way women participated in disarmament thinking.