Hidden from International Relations: Women and the International Arena

Abstract

Over the last two and a half decades questions of gender, and particularly those concerning the place and role of women, have acquired much greater importance within the social sciences as a whole. In response to the rise of a women’s movement in some Western societies, and to the production of a growing body of analytic literature pertaining to women’s position, there has been a marked development in the agenda and concepts studied in a range of academic disciplines. If this has been especially noticeable in history and sociology, it has also been evident in political science, economics and anthropology, and has acquired great importance in the most ideologically constitutive of the humanities, literature.¹ Until the very end of the 1980s there was, however, one outstanding exception to this growing awareness of gender issues, namely International Relations.