Gendering Peace in Europe

ABSTRACT

This introduction tracks how international and diplomatic history have, gradually, been gendered, as well as tracing the evolving interest in the role of women in peace movements. Most articles in this special issues developed from contributions to the ‘Gendering Peace in Europe’ conference held at the University of Sheffield in January, 2017, and here we consider the ways in which the category of gender can be more firmly embedded into research in the field of diplomacy and statecraft.

Acnowledgements

Deep gratitude is due colleagues who helped organise the ‘Gendering Peace in Europe’ conference at the University of Sheffield, especially Professor Benjamin Ziemann, director for the Centre for Peace Studies, University of Sheffield; Dr Liam Liburd for energy and vision as conference administrator and delegate; and to the Max Batley Legacy for Peace Research to the University of Sheffield and the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield for generous financial and institutional support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See also Glenda Sluga and Carolyn James, eds., Women, Diplomacy and International Politics Since 1500 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke, 2015); Kate Law, Gendering the Settler State: White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire in Rhodesia, 1950–1980 (New York, NY, 2016); Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, eds., Women Activists Between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–1923 (London, 2017); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1997); and Karin Aggestam and Ann E. Towns, Gendering Diplomacy and International Negotiation (Basingstoke, 2018).

2. Helen McCarthy, Women of the World. The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London, 2014); idem., “Petticoat Diplomacy: The Admission of Women to the British Foreign Service, c.1919–1946,” Twentieth Century British History 20, no. 3 (2009): 285–321; idem., “Women, Marriage and Work in the British Diplomatic Service,” Women’s History Review 23, no. 6 (2014): 853–73; Molly M. Wood, “Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the “Social Game” in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905–1941,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005): 142–65; Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (London, 2001); and Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, CT, 2004).

3. Some important contributions to this debate have been made by David Reynolds, ‘International History, the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch,” Cultural and Social History 3, no. 1 (2006): 75–91; and Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (2009): 1053–73.

4. An important contextual study is Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy; Reinventing the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2016).

5. See also H. McCarthy, Double Lives: A History Working Motherhood (London, 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie V. Gottlieb

Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She has written extensively on women and politics in modern Britain, including monographs Feminine Fascism: Women and Britain’s Fascist Movement 1923-1945 (2000, and to be reissued with a new preface by the author in 2020) and ’Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015). She organised the conference ‘Gendering Peace in Europe, c. 1918-1945ʹ in January, 2017, and upon which this special issue is based.

Gaynor Johnson

Gaynor Johnson is Professor of International History at the University of Kent, UK, and is an Honorary Researcher at Lancaster University’s Centre for War and Diplomacy. She is a member of the Peer Review College of the AHRC and is a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading international history journals. She is the author and editor of several books on British foreign policy and international history in the twentieth century, including The Berlin Embassy of Lord D’Abernon, 1920-1926 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2004) and, most recently, Lord Robert Cecil: Politician and Internationalist (London: Routledge, 2016).