The best books on the connection between everyday gendered practices and political (international) power

A Room of One’s Own could be on my list of top five best books overall. Virginia Woolf delivers fierce and razor-sharp social criticism with unsurpassed eloquence. Her anger is palpable, her argument precise, calm, and rational.

Woolf never compromises with literary beauty and wit, using it instead to make her point. Showing how expectations and beliefs about who can do what in daily life underpin society’s power structures, Woolf systematically picks apart the idea of women’s intellectual inferiority to men by showing how thinking and writing require material and cultural circumstances that have been denied to women.

I find the reasoning applicable to other systemic biases, too, and though it was first published in 1928, the book is as readable and relevant today.

In 1975, Hilary Callan published a paper on diplomats’ wives using the term incorporated wife.

In this edited volume, she and Shirley Ardener applied that concept to a broader set of occupations. I find it brilliant because the term alludes to the idea of marriage as two bodies becoming one while calling out the asymmetry of this corporeality, wives being “drawn into the ‘social person’ of their husbands”, as Callan puts it in the book’s introduction.

The term also connotes the couple as a corporation, which has helped me to think about how diplomatic couples work together. With its collection of articles, the volume acknowledges differences depending on context. At the same time, it shows how one general mechanism – the incorporation of wives – has consequences far beyond the personal.

Before I read Women and States, I was familiar with the concept of like-minded states and aware that similar or different normative values could complicate or facilitate the cooperation between states.

Yet, I had never considered those norms in terms of international status. Political scientist Ann Towns convincingly argues that, like any society, international society is social. To arrange relations, whether familial, local, or global, norms are used to compare and rank.

Contrary to a society built on shared values, though, international society incorporates parallel and conflicting values in an inherently unequal system, making for the coupling of norms to international status.

I love how Towns uses this simple and elegant observation to connect the political emancipation of women in different national contexts to (changing) hierarchical norms between states. Identifying links like these between local and so-called big politics is vital for better understanding international power relations.

Roosevelt's Lost Alliances is perhaps the book that has had the most tangible influence on my own work. Seeing how Frank Costigliola highlighted and analysed the political consequences of personal preferences and relations was eye-opening.

When the book appeared, some reviewers claimed that Costigliola made leaders' personalities all-important and overlooked structural factors. Because I had read that criticism before I read the book, I was surprised to find a nuanced account of how personal and political factors intersected. I found those reviews blatantly unfair.

By carefully analysing their personal preferences and relations, Costigliola did not claim that a few powerful men determined history. Rather, he showed how emotional and cultural factors, which are surely structural, influenced them and their decision-making.

I quoted Mary Beard in the conclusion of my book, where I spoke of the position of women in the informal power structures of diplomacy.

The call for a redefinition of power in her manifesto Women & Power hit home for me. Beard points out how subjective our perception of power is, urging us to reflect on what power is for and how we measure it. Rather than just lamenting women’s lack of power through history, Beard adds another dimension by suggesting that it is not women we need to change, but rather our skewed definition of power. 

Her analysis of the relationship between women and power in the Western tradition provides a historical background of misogyny that is not only to the point but also a literary delight. Read it.