Annette Baker Fox

Annette May Baker was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. She attended the Buffalo Seminary, an all-girls preparatory school. She continued on to graduate school there, studying with leading political scientists such as Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam. both born in the 1940s. In a two-career couple, she was what later would become known as the trailing spouse. While both were still working on their dissertations, he was an instructor at Temple University from 1936 to 1941, while she did graduate school work at Bryn Mawr College during 1936–37, then was a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania during 1937–38 and taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. At Bryn Mawr, she was appointed a reader in politics during 1940–41. But Fox was known most for her research and writing. In 1959, she published her book The Power of Small States: Diplomacy in World War II, which examined the role that small powers play in international relations by looking at how several small European countries conducted diplomacy during the war. It was a departure from the usual focus in the field on the interactions that take place between great powers. The book has been termed a "pioneering" study by several subsequent scholars as well as a "classic". In related published work, she examined the Cold War prospects of small states and the role that the United Nations could play with respect to them. Fox's work also addressed the characteristics of middle powers, and her 1977 book, The Politics of Attraction: Four Middle Powers and the United States, discussed U.S. relations with Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. The book argued that the relationships between middle powers and great powers reveal more intricate behaviors and bargaining schemes than previous literature had assumed. One reviewer praised her "careful analysis" in the work. It was one of the few works outside the circle of Brazilian scholars and Latin Americanists to examine the international relations of Brazil beyond just those with the U.S. In addition to her books, she published over thirty articles in scholarly journals. Despite the level of her scholarship, Fox suffered from building an academic career as a married woman with children in the 1940s and 1950s, when such a path was not at all the norm. She was, however, director of the institute's Canadian Studies Program from 1977 to 1984. In addition to her own works, Fox served with Richard Howard as co-translators from the French for Raymond Aron's Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, published in 1966. She also wrote an internal history of the institute's first thirty-five years. Anne Fox (as she was informally known) and her husband were residents of the Riverside neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut from 1950 on and she was active in the First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich. She was active in the League of Women Voters and as a Democrat in local politics, serving three terms on Greenwich's representative town meeting and serving on the town's charter revision committee while in her early nineties. She died at her home in Riverside on December 26, 2011, at age 99. ==Published works==