Abstract
The overrepresentation of men is striking in international diplomacy, even though the last decades have seen a gradual increase in the appointment of women. The ways in which class, gender, and race have impacted diplomatic history are, without a doubt, in need of scholarly scrutiny. These timely contributions by Susanna Erlandsson and Philip Nash provide important insights into various dimensions of gendered diplomatic cultures.
Acknowledging the overrepresentation of men in diplomatic posts during the twentieth century, Nash introduces the first six US female ambassadors who were appointed between 1933 and 1964. The author takes the reader on a journey from Ruth Bryan Owen's Denmark before the outbreak of the Second World War (she was there between 1933 and 1936); Florence Jaffray Harriman's wartime experiences in Norway (between 1937 and 1941) and Perle S. Mesta's years in Luxemburg from 1949 to 1953, which also happens to be the country where the largest number of US female ambassadors have ever been stationed. Eugenie M. Anderson's time in Denmark, between 1949 and 1953, can be seen in the context of the formerly neutral nation joining NATO (Anderson was later posted in Bulgaria between 1962 and 1964), while Clare Boothe Luce's years in Italy (1953–1956) coincided with the country becoming a US ally and receiving financial aid through the Marshall Plan. Finally, we get to Frances E. Willis, the first woman to represent the US in Asia, with postings in Switzerland (1953–1957) and Norway (1957–1961) before Ceylon (1961–1964). Apart from introducing the backgrounds and contributions of these pioneering women, Nash also elaborates on the national and international historical contexts in which they navigated, which were thoroughly marked by gendered hierarchies.
While Nash uses a broad brush to introduce the few women who reached high-ranked positions in a diplomatic corps marked by gendered and sexualized cultures, Erlandsson introduces the reader to Margaret and Eelco van Kleffens from the Netherlands, a white heterosexual diplomatic couple stationed in London and Washington DC during the postwar period. With an eye for detail, careful, and respectful writing about highly personal matters, and a reflexive and rich analysis, Erlandsson argues that if we want to fully understand Western diplomacy in the postwar period, ‘we need to pay attention not only to formal treaties and organizations but to the classed, gendered and racialized practices that governed it’ (p. 3). Drawing on insights from feminist and intersectional theory, Erlandsson shows how a microanalysis of the van Kleffens has the potential to broaden our understanding of diplomatic practices in everyday life. Erlandsson argues that such an analysis not only sheds light on what women do, which is often forgotten or dismissed as of limited political relevance. It also gives us a more nuanced picture of ‘how personal relations intermeshed with political ones’ (p. 3), and thereby important clues to how diplomacy was actually performed in the past.
Nash's book is organized around the six women introduced above, with introductory and concluding chapters where the broader contemporary and historical gender dimensions of international diplomacy are addressed. The empirical chapters are organized in a similar manner, and discussions about the female ambassador's involvement in what Nash calls ‘people's diplomacy’, an expression first used by Eugenie M. Anderson (p. 111) to describe interactions with ordinary citizens, serves as a theme throughout the book. Erlandsson's empirical analysis is thematically organized around the diplomatic couple, the diplomatic home, dinner diplomacy, and diplomatic aptitude.
In her book, Erlandsson reveals women's various, often invisible, and simultaneously undervalued, contributions to high politics. While men were involved in diplomacy due to having a diplomatic position, wives participated through their relationship vis-à-vis a male relative. At the same time, wives and other female relatives performed a myriad of tasks that were crucial for successful diplomatic relations: they oversaw the diplomatic household (including its staff), organized dinners and other representative events, and socialized and created an informal atmosphere where important relationships could evolve. Since personal relationships were considered diplomatically advantageous, and since women were considered especially well-suited for building personal relationships, the heterosexual couple, and the gendered, racialized, and classed underpinnings it relied upon, appears to have been a necessary ingredient in successful Western diplomacy. The role of spouses is also discussed by Nash, both regarding diplomatic wives (pp. 12–14) and as an important dimension of the lives of female ambassadors. Since they were not accompanied by a wife to their postings abroad, they often found themselves in a situation where they had to perform twice the workload: both their professional duties, and all those reproductive tasks that wives were expected to perform.
While both books make important contributions to our understanding of diplomatic history, there is room for further analysis. Nash's focus on the first US female ambassadors does put these women in the history books, and this is indeed an important contribution. The format of the book, however, requires what can only be described as superficial engagement with the sources. Nash's book does tell a history of both sexist cultures and gender discrimination and about privilege related to class and race. Insights from intersectional theory might have contributed to a deeper discussion about how various societal power structures interact.
Erlandsson, on the other hand, draws on feminist theory. There is a slight tension in her book, however, between treating the personal and the political as separate spaces, and an ambition to approach everyday activities as of political implication. Approaching trust as a bridge between the personal and the political, according to Erlandsson, enables an analysis of everyday activities that transcends the boundaries between ‘micro and macro, personal and political’ (p. 11). At the same time, the very distinction between the personal and the political that features throughout the book also contributes to its reconstruction. While Erlandsson convincingly shows how the personal and the political were two sides of the same coin in postwar Western diplomacy and how they depended on each other in complex ways, they are still, somehow, conceptualized as separate. In the sequel of this engaging analysis, I hope that Erlandsson will elaborate further on the co-constitutive dimensions of the private–political nexus.