The Joseph Fletcher prize forum: response to reviewers

Abstract

We thank the Cambridge Review of International Affairs for organising this review and Juliette Gout, Rebecca Turkington and Lauren Wilcox for their engagement with Women’s International Thought: A New History. We were fortunate to collaborate with an exceptional interdisciplinary cast of authors to whose intellectual contributions and analyses we remain deeply indebted as they were vital for carrying out this project, and we would like to express our gratitude on their behalf, too. We would also like to acknowledge our indebtedness to the other collaborators on the Leverhulme Trust Research Project on Women and the History of International Thought, of which this edited volume is the first book-length output, namely Kimberly Hutchings, Sarah C. Dunstan, and Joanna Wood. Given the long history of disparaging women’s intellectual production and the ways in which this has, at times, forced feminist scholars to restate earlier arguments, it was important to us to make space for feminist recovery work as indispensable to the project of international intellectual and disciplinary history. We are, therefore, grateful to Wilcox for pre-empting any notion that historical recovery ‘might seem a dated gesture in 2021.’ It seems important, especially in a project focused on intellectual erasure, to recognise the ground-breaking forms of recovery work that earlier generations of feminist scholars established, even if scholars today choose to revise some of the categories and terms of earlier iterations of this work. As Dale Spender pointed out some time ago, the loss of knowledge from one generation to the next has been a formidable obstacle to both understanding women’s intellectual production and feminism as a political movement (Spender 1983a, 1983b). Even scholars who were wary of an exaggerated emphasis on recovery, calling it the ‘hunting-gathering school’ of women’s history, and who regarded it as only the first step in a wider intellectual enterprise, were adamant that recovery was necessary to any project of rewriting and reformulating the history and current practices of scholarly fields and intellectual movements, at least until the processes and structures of erasure cease to exist (Lerner 1979, 149; Marcus 1983, 242). With this volume, then, we are