Call for Recommendations: National Security Reading Lists for Women’s History Month

With the approach of March, Women’s History will be celebrated across the broad fabric of society. Our accomplishments will be celebrated across many familiar arcs. However, there are many areas of women’s accomplishments which remain too little noticed. Nowhere is this more true than in national security.* This absence from the historical record (and ignorance of what little does exist) reflects a muted voice in contemporary practice. Those ‘Hidden Figures’ at NASA, the lesser known women of the British SOE, the invisibility of Erna Risch (she was the Army CMH’s foremost historian of the Quartermaster Corps and logistics), and so on, not only indicate a gaping hole within our knowledge of our own histories and societies, it perpetuates the easy dismissal of women working in these areas. Worse, it leaves a critical gap of literary mentorship for women in the armed forces, policy, and academia.

Where knowledge is the currency of power in the 21st century, stepping up to be respected voices of recommendation illuminating rarer bits of wisdom and new perspectives correctly claims for women their position in history and contemporary practice. To that end, we would like to develop a series of reading lists to be published throughout the month, that feature the recommendations of women. While a significant emphasis is on bringing to attention women authors and subjects, this is not a limiting condition. For example, there may be sources or subjects that languish for not fitting into standard narrative lines that male scholars or practitioners tend to follow.

Along those lines, although several categories have been identified, these are inspirational, not limiting. Please do identify the genre/subject for which you are recommending a book. On the first, some sentence or two explanation would be excellent.

We will publish the reading lists at the end of March in blog form, with regular updates and additions as they are necessary.

Practitioner Recommendations, any genre: what women in the wide national security community have read that they would recommend to others; any field, this is about promoting personal reading lists

Fiction, any genre, so long as they are, as like the above, works that have informed your understanding or approach to the field or work within it

Biographies, of women primarily, but also by them as they reveal different aspects to old characters

International Relations, Strategic Studies, Military, Diplomatic, Intelligence, and other related fields of History: emphasis on but not limited to gendered subject matter and authors, any time and place, as well as those works which take their field to different niches and perspectives

Please submit recommendations to me at js_russell@hotmail.com and watch this space for lists.

Jill Sargent Russell and Miranda Summers Lowe