Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men

by Patricia Owens

How a field built on the intellectual labor and expertise of women erased them

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased, Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional and intellectual narratives, Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell and Susan Strange, Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Feminism, Womens, Politics, Academic, International Relations

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 2025

Reviews

[Prez]

loved the book although sometimes I wonder if we spend too much time thinking that only the west was capable of having women who produced any knowledge

[Elsary]

This book assumes you know your IR history, which makes sense - it is written for the academic who has learned the "traditional" story and has noted that it is incredibly male and incredibly white. Owens retells the story with more women, most of whom I had never heard of. She also addresses the white part and does the work to lift up and bring into spotlight also women of colour. Despite this it is very clear it is still majorly a white story we are told.

I think the fact this is about British IR has something to do with it, and I was deeply interested in the accounts of how the women Owens focuses on dealt with the question of the British Empire. I don't think it is a surprise to hear that they were more and less racist, justifying the colonial rule and seeing it as something to preserve. In some ways I think the time and culture you live in and what you are used to can explain a lot of how you think and act, but still, you'd always hope people in the past had been "better".

That is true especially when you look at these women through a feminist lens. Many if not all of them are a class-A example of how being a woman is not enough to make you a feminist. While these women struggled to be taken seriously and respected because of their gender, and were later on largely written out of the IR history, during their lifetime they did little to change the system. They worked to make their mark, to stretch the playing rules for their own good, but only rarely did they use the power they gained to help other women and minorities reach the same.

And of course, there is only so much one person really can do. You have to pick your battles. You have to accept you can't change everything, and sometimes you can only really "make a difference" on a very small scale.

I did appreciate Owens' book for telling me about these women, for showing how they have been ignored and erased, for not idolising them. At the same time I did question the decision of the structure of a woman per a chapter sometimes - while it helped to get to know the women as persons and as real beings beyond just their academic legacy, it did also at times blurry the bigger picture and made the experience a bit sporadic.

[Krystal Diane]

I went into Erased expecting the usual story. Women written out of history, their work ignored, their contributions dismissed. And yes, that is here. Women were sidelined, their intellectual labor treated like background work while men got to define what counted as “real” knowledge. But what actually stayed with me is something less comfortable.

These women were not just erased. They were also, in many ways, helping maintain the system that erased them. That is the tension this book keeps returning to.

On one hand, women are pushed into the margins. They are doing what the book calls the “housework” of international thought. Teaching, organizing knowledge, shaping how people understand politics. And yet, that work is labeled as educational, moral, secondary. Not theory. Not serious. Not authoritative.

On the other hand, when you look at what they were actually writing, you start to see that they were not outside the system. They were operating within it. And often reinforcing it. Especially when it comes to empire.

And it is also worth being clear about who these “women” are. This book is not talking about all women. It is largely about white women, often from specific social and educational backgrounds, who had access to these spaces in the first place. So even within a book about erasure, there is already a layer of selection. Some women are being recovered, while others were never included to begin with.

There is a pattern where they can recognize that something is wrong. Colonial violence, inequality, the limits of governance. But they stop just short of questioning the system itself. It becomes “mistakes were made,” not “this should not exist.”

And when colonized people resist, the framing shifts. Suddenly it is irrational. Emotional. A breakdown. Which is strange. Because if a group of people is being controlled, exploited, and denied autonomy, rebellion is not surprising. It is expected. It is probably the most logical outcome.

But the framework they are working within does not allow that conclusion. Because once you accept that resistance is justified, you also have to accept that the system producing it is illegitimate. And that line is rarely crossed.

Instead, empire gets rebranded to make it easier to accept. Same system. Better language. Better PR. Not domination, but responsibility. Not exploitation, but development. Not inequality, but difference in “stages.” You are not being held back. You are just behind. You will get there eventually. And that logic feels familiar. It is the same promise you see in other systems. If you follow the path, if you develop enough, if you wait, you will eventually be included.

At some point, it starts to resemble a power dynamic where control is framed as care, almost to the point where domination is mistaken for guidance. What in the daddy kink chz lol

But what the book exposes is how convenient that narrative is. It turns structural inequality into something that looks temporary. It makes it seem like no one is being held down, just that some are still catching up. When in reality, part of why some are ahead is because others were made to be behind.

And this is where the feminism in the book becomes harder to sit with. These women are pushing for change. But often that change is about access. Education. Participation. Recognition. It is not about dismantling the system. It is about having a place within it. Which raises a question that is hard to ignore. If the system already excludes you, why fight for a seat at the table instead of questioning the table itself?

The book does not give a clean answer. But it shows the constraints. Credibility was not neutral. To be taken seriously, you had to work within the rules already set by the same structures you were trying to enter. So there is exclusion. There is also negotiation. And sometimes that negotiation starts to look like complicity.

By the end, Erased does something that I think matters more than just “recovering” forgotten women. It does not turn them into easy heroes. It shows them as they were. Complex, constrained, sometimes insightful, sometimes limited, and deeply shaped by the system they were part of. They were erased. But they were also participants.

And that is what makes the book uncomfortable in a way that actually feels honest. Because it refuses the simple narrative. It does not let you sit with “women were excluded” and leave it there. It asks you to deal with something harder. What does it mean when the people that are marginalized by a system still help sustain it?

[Natalie Bennett]

Having had extensive exposure over the past year to a range of the academic field broadly called International Relations (IR), it has been striking how traditionalist, how narrow, how limited its understanding, and practitioners, largely remain. Which was why this book leapt out at me on the library shelves.
It is more than a lively account of ivory tower conflict. It helps us see why so much thinking – which still guides international policy - has failed to engage with 20th-century realities, let alone 21st, has sought to maintain failed, broken models of relationships between states. And why, in many years of exposure to history, sociology and political economy, I’ve encountered few texts and writers labelled as IR scholars who seem to have made an impact outside their field.
I wrote a Substackwith more reflections.

[Carolyn Fitzpatrick]

This book aims to revise the traditional history of 20th century British international relations as an academic discipline.

It assumes that the reader already knows that traditional history, and does not provide much of an entry point for readers who have never studied IR before.

[Kalei]

An interesting look at the early players behind International Relations as a scholarship, but not IR in itself.

[notabattlechick]

DNF only because it was an ebook and my eyes couldn’t handle it at the time - I want to come back to it

[Wuttipol✨]

Kind of ironic