Think Tank Women

Thinking about locations forms an important part of the recovery and analysis of women’s international thought, and it has done so for some time in the IR canon. In chapter 1 of her 1990 book Bananas, Beaches and Bases Cynthia Enloe asked readers to ponder the all-important question: ‘Where are the women?’, a question which is specifically about place. And given that the early international affairs think tanks such as Chatham House in London or the Council on Foreign Relations in New York play such a prominent role in Anglophone IR’s disciplinary history and the wider history of international thought, women’s presence in these locations must be carefully excavated.

This is what I have sought to do in a recent open access article in Diplomatic History. While I’m not the first to acknowledge the importance of women’s presence in Anglo-American think tanks – historian David Allen has researched women’s contributions in the New York-based Foreign Policy Association which features in his forthcoming book – I have tried to think methodically about the different ways in which women engaged with the think tank as a location, as employees in both clerical and research positions, as communications specialists, intellectuals, diplomats and as public speakers. In this way, I wanted to shift the focus from women’s exclusion from the membership rosters of think tanks (for example the Council on Foreign Relations which famously did not admit female members until the 1960s) to other locations, and perhaps also ways of ‘think-tanking’ that did not involve public interventions or policy-relevant reports.

Of course, think tanks provided opportunities to women who became public intellectuals or respected scholars. These include the Russian-born American liberal internationalist Vera Micheles Dean, who worked for the Foreign Policy Association for two-and-a-half decades. Dean’s publications sold to a broad audience and she was a regular on the US foreign policy lecture circuit. Other notable intellectuals who worked for think tanks include the journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann, Sovietologist Violet Conolly, and Middle East expert Elizabeth Monroe (Chatham House); Mildred Wertheimer, a specialist on Nazi Germany, and Helen Howell Moorhead who researched international drug regulation (Foreign Policy Association); and Ellen Hammer, who, after a stint as a research assistant at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote several highly-regarded and widely read books on Indochina and Vietnam. Women diplomats also used think tanks as public platforms, for instance India’s former ambassador to the United States, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who became the first woman to give a formal speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1952. But not all intellectual production at international affairs think tanks resulted in written or spoken analyses of international politics.

As a former library assistant, I was particularly interested in the less visible ‘information work’ that went on in think tanks. The production of objective and reliable facts about international affairs was central to the reputational and commercial success of think tanks before the 1970s information revolution. In the early and mid-twentieth century, there were no electronic databases but there were systematic ways of accessing, storing and retrieving information, from bibliographies, document collections, chronologies to press clippings. All of these relied on the labour of information specialists. Chatham House was a pioneer when it came to establishing a functioning press clippings department, staffed by women who collected news from the international press that would then be catalogued and stored for easy retrieval. This was no easy task: workers in the clippings department had to be multi-lingual and possess a keen sense for the news that mattered before they could manually cut out the news items that delivered the raw material for publications. The mostly male authors who published Chatham House’s many surveys and books on international affairs could not have completed their work without this crucial process of mining the ‘raw facts’.

The Chatham House press clippings department, with permission from Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs

Both Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations also maintained specialist libraries. The Council’s librarian, Ruth Savord, is another woman whose work is worthy of recovery, not least because it illuminates the gendered nature of international affairs librarianship. Savord was hired in 1930, when the Council moved offices and asked her to set up a professional research library. Taking on this task, she proceeded to assume a central role in the think tank’s research environment and stayed at the Council for thirty years. She also secured leadership positions in professional organizations and on high-profile external projects, such as setting up the Library of the United Nations in New York. For Savord, specialist librarianship was a distinct women’s profession. In the 1930s and 1940s, when employment opportunities for women were scarce due to the Great Depression, Savord highlighted special librarianship in businesses, law firms and think tanks as a suitable profession for educated women with highly developed analytical skills. The special library, she wrote, was “one of the few places in the business world where a woman is free to build and earn her place on her own merits practically secure from direct competition with men”, sheltered by the gender conventions that reserved these opportunities for women.[1]

Ruth Savord, Council on Foreign Relations librarian, Wikimedia Commons

This exclusivity did not last, due to economic, legal and demographic developments after the Second World War. The increased status of both special librarianship and international relations as a field of intellectual inquiry meant that think tank library work no longer functioned as a niche for women. Savord’s successor at the Council on Foreign Relations after she retired in 1960 was a man. Nonetheless, it was Savord who had shaped the information economy of the United States’ most well-connected and influential foreign policy think tank at the dawn of the ‘American Century’ – and she was very aware of the importance of her own contribution.

There is also a wider dimension to women’s information work in think tanks, as the production of reliable facts spoke to a theoretical and practical problem in interwar and mid-twentieth-century international thought: how to make foreign policy in modern mass democracies that existed in a world in which international relations were becoming ever more functionally differentiated. Only an informed public, with ample access to information on international politics, could be expected to make sensible choices when it came to foreign policy. Therefore, this work was a practical way of dealing with a problem in international democratic theory – and it was carried out predominantly by women.