Add Women and Stir: Gender and the History of International Politics

The article demonstrates that women were intellectual as well as social agents in the shaping of international political norms in nineteenth-century Europe, including new concepts such as nationality and humanitarianism, and in the international practices that we think of as diplomacy. No matter what approach historians take to international history—whether focusing on the more traditional controversies of political thought and foreign policy, or the creation of international institutions—women were usually involved. In the twentieth century, women’s presence in the realm of international politics expanded along with the opportunities created by the new liberal internationalism that led to the establishment of organisations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Indeed, histories of pacifism and feminism have long recorded the engagement of European women with internationalism.