5 - Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen: Thinking International Peace in an Air-Minded Age

Summary

This essay on Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen analyses the ways in which gender intersected with international thought-as-spirituality. McQueen can hardly be regarded as a conventional intellectual: she was a charismatic entrepreneur thriving on a localized form of techno-optimist internationalism in 1930s Southern California. Her religious formation as a Christian Scientist inclined her to understand and experience the act of thinking as a practice that could change the world. McQueen’s conversion-like encounter with aviation prompted her to transfer a spiritual model to a political project - the promotion of world peace and Anglo-American liberal empire. She strategically drew on gendered notions of sociability and spirituality, and developed her gospel of aviation during a time when women were integral to the rise of a new technology. Once commercial aviation was securely established in the United States, women were relegated to service tasks, in a move that eerily resembles the formation of IR as a discipline.