Abstract
This piece responds to the Women and the History of International Thought Project from the perspective of a historian working in British imperial history. The article highlights some of the ways that this project might be useful for historians in this field, including the inclusion of pertinent writers in the anthology of women′s IR writing. It also discusses the construction of the ‘canon’ and makes a case for the inclusion within it of an additional writer, Rita Hinden; the article examines what further questions are raised by the inclusion of Hinden within this group of female writers and thinkers.
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Notes
In actual fact, Hart was trained as a sociologist and briefly worked as a sociology lecturer, although she later wrote a great deal of important material on the economics of aid, such as Hart (1973).
One notable recent exception is Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), which has running through it a clear exploration of the intellectual history of imperialism and how this relates to ideas of refugees, citizenship and statelessness, and explicitly places female thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Dorothy Thompson alongside their male counterparts. This work is continued in this anthology, not least through the inclusion of Weil’s writing on French colonialism.
Having read some of the research that comprised this Ph.D., I am not sure if it is written more like a woman or like an economist. See Pugh (2021).
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Riley, C.L. Writing like a woman: Rita Hinden and recovering the imperial in international thought. Int Polit Rev 9, 264–271 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41312-021-00127-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41312-021-00127-9