From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and Internationalist Thinking at the Gender Margins, 1919–1947

Abstract

Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at Cambridge working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’ This chapter offers the first close reading of the text itself and of its major influences and context, challenging the (gendered) distinction between international and internationalist thought. Indeed, it argues that it was interwar internationalist international thought that inspired some contemporary IR academics to write for broader audiences, and women to engage with international politics. Overall, the essay both makes a case for including a range of genres in histories of international thought, whether work that had a primarily pedagogic or political rather than scholarly function.