A valuable contribution to feminist and intellectual history.
Recovering forgotten women.
Owens, an Oxford professor of international relations, investigates the role of women in the founding of international relations as a separate academic discipline in early- to mid-20th-century Britain. Misogyny and racism, she argues convincingly, at first marginalized and later erased the contributions of women and people of color: journalists, scholars, activists, and public intellectuals. Among 18 women she discusses, the 12 she examines in most detail include Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange. All “deeply historical thinkers,” they were politically, ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse; their politics encompassed “high Tory appeasement, anticolonial Black Marxism, conservative and liberal imperialism, socialist and feminist internationalism, conservative realism, and antiracist geopolitics.” Their personal lives differed as well: Strange, an economist with a degree from the London School of Economics, was the mother of six children. “Radical journalist” Claudia Jones was a British subject born in Trinidad, with no education beyond high school. Tate was the first African American to earn a graduate degree, in diplomatic history, at Oxford. Cleeve held a lofty position as the administrator of Chatham House, Britain’s leading institution for international relations research. Drawing on oral histories, autobiographies, biographical and historical published sources, visual images, and archival material, Owens creates a detailed group portrait of an impressive cohort, recounting their involvement in international organizations, their stance on anti-colonial efforts, and their resistance to an “all-white, all-male” canon that preferred to investigate Britain’s past rather than engage with the empire’s collapse. Not until the 1970s, Owens notes, was Strange able to found the British International Studies Association, in the context of Britain’s “slow transition from an imperial to a national concept.”
A valuable contribution to feminist and intellectual history.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780691266442
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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