Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Women played a critical (and, let's be honest, largely overlooked) role in steering international relations towards quantitative analysis.

How so?

[THREAD]

The pioneering work seeking to bring large-n data to the study of international relations and war is Quincy Wright's "A Study of War"

https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1085229601448751108

Wright explains how that book was the outcome of "The Causes of War Project at the University of Chicago", which started in 1926 with funding from @UChicagoSSD's Social Science Research Committee

This allowed Wright to hire research assistants, who became...

...@UChicagoCIR

cir.uchicago.edu

As Wright explains in Appendix I of "A Study of War", the funds allowed for the production of some sixty-six studies

Wright then took on the task of "digesting" the information found in these manuscripts

That "digesting" led to a series of lectures at @UChicago and then @IHEID, which were then preliminarily summarized in a 1938 @asr_journal piece

jstor.org/stable/2083894…

Which, once the data were added, @UChicagoPress published as "A Study of War"

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

But let's go back.

What were those 66 studies and who produced them?

Well, Wright lists them!

...and lists them...

...and lists them!

When I show this list in class, students immediately note the number of women listed.

It's not a majority of the names, but it's a notable proportion.

Moreover a number of the studies produced by women (indicated with a * or a ✝️) were MA or PhD theses.

For instance, the following produced PhD dissertations that contributed to the project

- Lula Caine
- Marion Boggs
- Helen Moats
- Janice Simpson

What happened to their studies? What happened to them? Why don't we know about their work?

Is the answer similar to Merze Tate, whose work was largely overlooked (despite eventually becoming a professor at @HowardU)?

The students and I would like to know.

But what we can say is that their work was notable and critical to Quincy Wright creating research that would define the field and set the stage for the Correlates of War, @PeaceScienceSoc, @UCDP, & @PRIOUpdates.

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