Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces

This compendium of 42 ‘portraits’ of women active in international law from the Middle Ages to the present is packed so full of information that it is best treated as a reference work. It would be overwhelming to read it end-to-end; much better to dip in and out, reading one essay at a time. 

Editor Immi Tallgren, a Finnish researcher and adjunct professor of international law, says that the structure for this book was suggested to her by a visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery some years ago. In her opening essay ‘Re-curating the Portrait Gallery of International Law: The Objectives, Process, and Floorplan of the Exhibition’, she discusses the importance of recognising through word portraits those women who, through their involvement in international law, mediated the efforts of ‘all humans together to care for humanity’. Tallgren’s lengthy introduction is followed by contributors’ essays about women changemakers over the centuries.

Most of the individuals portrayed were neither formally educated as lawyers nor professionally active as such; Tallgren makes the obvious point that such education and professional activity were unavailable to most women until the previous century. Her criteria for inclusion were that the person or people (there are four group portraits) must have either ‘imagined, developed, or contested’ international law, made their living by it, or changed it. Subjects include the famous (Jane Addams and Rosa Luxemburg, pictured above) and obscure (Maria van Reigersberch and Olympe de Gouges).

Portraits does not claim to trace the history of women’s involvement in international law and the episodic nature of this book of essays would not permit that. However, anyone curious about the lives and work of our mothers in the law will find these individual essays interesting and illuminating.  

Susan McFadden is a solicitor and US lawyer, retired from the London-based US immigration firm Gudeon & McFadden