Women in international history

Abstract

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.