Book Review, Writing Women's History in Portraits of Women in International Law

Aoife O'Donoghue, Radical Remembering, reviewing Immi Tallgren, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (Oxford Press 2023), 38(2) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 228–233 (2025).

Why do we forget those who contribute to our collective knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking? This is a complicated question to answer, partially because maintaining that forgetfulness may be important for canon creation and partially because it is so considerable as to be inexplicable. Yet, it remains an important question to ask and attempt to respond to. For to answer that question opens the possibility of remedy, and critically to not repeat our forgetting. For forgetting creates a void, an empty space where others, and their knowledge, skills and, perhaps – scholarly, diplomatic, or societal ways to be – should properly be. This space where others should be is desolate because it has been constructed as such. We have intentionally forgotten, there is an aphasia that has produced these silences which is not accidental (Murphy Citation2006, 65; Thompson Citation2013, 133, 135). Even where we might still have the international legal, political or philosophical ideas that they brought with them, without knowing where those ideas came from and, critically, why they came from where they did, we are lesser. And because we have lost both the individual and collective memory of how transformations occurred, we are reduced in our self-understanding of transformation itself. We are lesser because we have forgotten.

Women, and particularly non-white women, are often those most likely to be forgotten, and this remains as true today as it ever was. Mary Astell (Citation2013), writing in the early 1700s, stated that as men in general write our histories, they rarely bother to chronical what women do, and this is especially true when women act against their sex and do men’s work. This wilful omission becomes worse when those same women act against their race, disability or gender identity. Feminism has long understood this, and from the outset feminist activism has been careful to create its own archives, maintain its own histories and tell its own stories, because it knew that otherwise it would not be done.Footnote¹ Immi Tallgren’s Portraits of Women in International Law is part of that tradition, part of maintaining women’s histories, stories and actions because there has been a distinct failure in international law to do so. Even the much lauded ‘turn to history’ within international law a moment if there ever was one to undertake such acts of retrieval, has up to this point decisively failed to undertake this work. This book is an act of feminist redress. The book places itself in this feminist tradition, carefully naming and citing these fellow examples of acts of radical remembering, itself an act of feminist academic activism. Naming those we act with, not compete against in these acts of feminist historical radical remembering.