Making Experts of Ourselves
Laura Puffer Morgan, Pacifism, and the Logics of the Security Sector
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6147041 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Turkington (0000-0003-0433-8191, University of Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Global Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2634-3797 • E-ISSN: 2634-3797 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/isagsq/ksad016 |
| OpenAlex | W4361862859 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
For more than a century, gendered divisions between “insider” experts and “outsider” activists kept women at the margins of arms control policy, despite their long-standing disarmament advocacy. In the interwar period, when opportunities for women to influence security thinking from the inside were essentially nonexistent, lobbyist and analyst Laura Puffer Morgan educated herself in the technical knowledge of weaponry, the economics of military spending, and the bureaucratic processes that governed both. Unlike many of her colleagues in the broader peace movement, Puffer Morgan was “equipped to ‘talk army’ with generals or analyze tonnages with admirals.” She believed that women could and should become security experts who would “meet the militarists on their own ground”—a goal she advanced in her own career through voluminous written analysis and through public education about the concrete details of arms reduction. By turning to technical expertise over moral appeal, she was able to act as an advisor to civil society coalitions and delegates alike during the disarmament conferences of the 1920s and 1930s, and advance a peace agenda in quarters where many of her peers were seen as radical interlopers. She was one of a small group of women able to claim the mantle of “expert” and her career illustrates an alternative way women participated in disarmament thinking
Appeal · Arms control · Bureaucracy · Disarmament · Insider · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact · Law · Public Administration
Britain America and Arms Control, 1921–37
Women's International Thought
Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts
U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Women’s Intellectual Labor, 1920–1950
Engendering the sociology of expertise
The Transnational Dream
Finding a Cure for War
Public Opinion for Peace
A “Great Experiment” of the League of Nations Era
Geneva - the key to equality
Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals
| Highly cited | No |
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