Women of the World: Gender, British Diplomacy and International Politics, c.1870 to the present

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Before 1946, no British woman could officially represent her nation abroad. What power she wielded in the diplomatic arena rested on family connections, political patronage, specialist knowledge or the sheer force of personality. It was only after decades of campaigning and the heroic labours performed by women during the Second World War that diplomatic careers were finally opened to both sexes. Even so, the Foreign Service remained for many decades an unmistakeably male preserve, where the rookie woman diplomat found herself to be an object of curiosity, bemusement and, occasionally, outright hostility. By exploring the experiences of women in diplomatic life, Women of the World seeks to illuminate the broader gender dynamics of Britain's international relations in the modern period. It begins by tracing the informal and indirect influence which women could exercise as political spouses, experts and lobbyists, narrating the lives of such individuals as the writer and explorer Gertrude Bell, the journalist Flora Shaw, the humanitarian campaigner Josephine Butler and the missionary Mary Slesser. The project moves on to consider the impact of the First World War, which enabled a handful of women, including Bell in Iraq and the Scandinavian expert Bertha Philpotts in Sweden, to serve the British state overseas. The Foreign Office, however, remained staunchly opposed to the formal admission of women to the diplomatic service and successfully defended its male monopoly from the claims of feminists in the 1930s. This was despite evidence of women's success as delegates to the League of Nations and other international conferences, as well as their admission to the highest ranks of the home Civil Service. Next, the project explores the impact of the Second World War by surveying the work of women in temporary or quasi-diplomatic posts, such as Mary McGeachy and Winifred Cullis in the USA, Nancy Lambton and Freya Stark in the Middle East, and Elizabeth Wiskemann in Switzerland. The research shows how the examples of these and other women were crucial in convincing the Foreign Office to open the diplomatic service to both sexes in 1946, although women were subject to a marriage bar, an annual recruitment cap of 10 per cent and lower pay than their male colleagues. The final section of the project examines how these inequalities affected the experiences and career mobility of female diplomats after 1946. It delves into the social and educational backgrounds of the first and subsequent generations of recruits, asking why these women sought careers in diplomacy and how they dealt with the gendered expectations of marriage and motherhood, both whilst the marriage bar was in force, and after 1972, the year in which it was abolished. The research investigates how male diplomats responded to the presence of female colleagues and how, in more recent years, the Foreign Office sought to establish effective equal opportunities and diversity policies. The project also considers the ways in which women continued to wield influence informally as diplomatic spouses, and asks whether other career paths, in such sectors as international development and human rights, have in recent decades proved more inviting to women seeking to make a difference on the international stage. Drawing on letters, memoirs, personal interviews and government records, the research interweaves individual biographies with broader analyses of the gendered nature of diplomatic life and the institutional cultures of the Foreign Office and the wider civil service. In so doing, it captures lives caught up in the larger endeavours of the British imperial and post-imperial state, thus enriching our wider understanding of Britain's global history in modern times.