Editors past and present: Margaret Cleeve
Katharina Rietzler
This blogpost is part of a series of editorial retrospectives that discuss the impact of International Affairs’ (IA’s) former editors in the context of the journal’s centenary. Katharina Rietzler reflects on the impact of Margaret Cleeve as IA’s longest serving editor from 1932 to 1957. The text is a modified extract from her introduction to an archive collection on the history of women in International Affairs.
Foreign affairs think tanks emerged in response to the perceived need to translate scientific research into practical policies after the catastrophe of the First World War. Think tanks provided a discussion forum for foreign policy elites, sponsored a significant amount of scientific research and fulfilled an educational role by publicizing this research in their own journals, such as International Affairs. Chatham House was perhaps the most important example of these new institutions, being well funded and standard-setting in its research practices. It was established as the British Institute of International Affairs in 1920 and renamed the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1926, when it received a Royal Charter. Chatham House was also remarkable among comparable institutions in Europe and North America for the extent to which it provided intellectual opportunities to women. While some scholars have previously characterized international affairs think tanks as havens for ‘the wise men of foreign affairs’, these institutions depended in significant ways on women’s intellectual labour. Women were certainly ‘present at the creation’ of Chatham House, whose first two permanent staff members were female.
In the interwar and mid-century years, Chatham House had a small minority of women members. However, membership records do not account for the significance of women’s contributions to Chatham House’s research output. Chatham House awarded research contracts to women scholars who often became respected in their fields, enabling them to produce their analyses of international politics at a time when they were under-promoted and underpaid in the academy. Others worked in the think tank’s all-female Library or the Information Department, even if they rarely received public credit. Women staffed the press clippings section, selecting and cataloguing items from the national and international press. This work fed into publications such as the Survey of International Affairs, a commercial and reputational success.
The significance of women’s intellectual labour also extended to Chatham House’s journal, International Affairs. For many years it was edited by Margaret Cleeve (1895–1967), who was the institute’s most influential female staff member until her retirement in the 1950s. Having joined as a junior secretary in 1921, Cleeve became involved in all aspects of Chatham House’s work, first as Secretary of the Library and Publications Department, and from 1932 as Editor of International Affairs. During the Second World War, she served as the Institute’s Acting and then Deputy Secretary, before heading the Research Committee and fleshing out the key themes of the wartime research programme. Unofficially, Cleeve had already assumed tasks of research direction and coordination. Arnold Toynbee, Chatham House’s Director of Studies, passed these on to her so he could focus on his own scholarship. As the Secretary of the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies, Cleeve became the key liaison to the International Studies Conference, an international federation of research institutes in the emerging academic field of International Relations. Cleeve and her successor as editor, Muriel Grindrod, shaped International Affairs in its formative years, commissioning numerous women authors, often for book reviews (the quality of which International Affairs was famous for) but also for substantive articles. A recent archive collection that I edited highlights some of these contributions. But Cleeve not only influenced who published in the journal, but also the standards that authors were expected to meet.
Despite her mostly behind-the-scenes work of correspondence, planning and research convening, Cleeve was considered a setter of benchmarks against which others could be measured. To reviewers, it was ‘Miss Cleeve’ who set ‘the high standard of accuracy’ of Chatham House’s chronology supplements to the Survey of International Affairs. Although subsequent historians have not always treated Cleeve with the consideration commanded by her labour, the note of appreciation published on the occasion of her retirement demonstrates the extent to which she shaped International Affairs and Chatham House’s intellectual reputation.
With Cleeve’s retirement, Muriel Grindrod (1904–94), a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, took over as Editor of International Affairs in 1956. Like several other Chatham House women, Grindrod had joined the Institute as Arnold Toynbee’s research assistant but moved on to other roles. Grindrod’s research for the British government during the Second World War sparked an enduring interest in Italy. She became an authority on Italian culture and current affairs, and the Republic of Italy even awarded her an order of merit in 1974. Grindrod edited International Affairs until 1962, continuing Cleeve’s vital work that underpinned this important pillar of Chatham House’s reputation.
Katharina Rietzler is Senior Lecturer in American History and Subject Head for American Studies at the University of Sussex.
This blogpost is based on an extract from her introduction to the archive collection ‘100 years of women in International Affairs’, which can be found here.
All views express are individual not institutional.
