Opening the Doors of Diplomacy
In her interwar classic, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf imagined the following scene. The daughter of an educated man, in the course of conversation with a brother or male acquaintance, raises the possibility that newly enfranchised women should now be admitted to all professions, including those still reserved for men:
We on our side of the table become aware at once of some ‘strong emotion’ on your side ‘arising from some motive below the level of conscious thought’…; a glance at the private psychometer shows that the emotional temperature has risen from ten to twenty degrees above normal.
Woolf was not present at the proceedings of the departmental committee convened by the British Foreign Office in 1934 to consider women’s suitability for diplomatic careers. Had she been, she would have felt little need to reconsider her analysis of the masculine instinct to preserve its professional privileges.
The strength of feeling on the part of men in the Foreign Office stemmed from the perceived threat posed by women diplomats to the social and sexual order underpinning the modern diplomatic profession. In the 19th century, diplomacy evolved into a well-defined career for elite men accompanied by dutiful and loyal spouses. By the interwar years, women were employed as typists and in lower-grade clerical roles in embassies, but never as the professional equals of men.
This state of affairs clearly suited Foreign Office authorities, who only reluctantly agreed to consider the possibility of appointing female diplomats following pressure from feminists and professional women’s societies. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, made his position clear. Such a move ‘would not be in the interests of the women themselves, nor in the interest of His Majesty’s Service; and it would be damaging to the prestige of His Majesty’s Government in foreign countries’. In 1933, Vansittart handed the task of preparing the Foreign Office case to an assistant under-secretary, Charles Howard Smith, who swiftly pledged to gather ‘all the ammunition I can get’.
This did not prove difficult. Of 51 ambassadors canvassed for their opinions, only three were in favour of employing women. The heads of the Consular Service, whose officers worked in less salubrious surroundings in remote outposts or port towns, were even more emphatically opposed.
Their combined evidence advanced three main arguments. The first dwelt on the practical difficulties of posting women to countries where their status was low.
In Vansittart’s words: ‘It is a false argument to say that, because women are treated as equals in this country, an Englishwoman abroad will be so treated by foreigners. She will not.’ The Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, reinforced the point, noting that Nazi officials ‘would probably feel that they themselves were not being taken sufficiently seriously for being asked to receive her’.
The second argument centred on the rough and tumble of ports, where consular officers could be called upon to placate violent and inebriated sailors, deal with outbreaks of venereal disease on merchant ships, or investigate allegations of ‘homosexual crime’ at sea. Such tasks were ‘obviously’ unsuitable for women.
The third argument focused on marital status. A single woman, it was suggested, was of dramatically lower value than a male diplomat, who came with a spouse in tow. The Ambassador to Buenos Aires, Sir Henry Chilton, speculated that ‘a femme sole as Ambassadress would do no more than 50 per cent of the work done by my wife and myself ’. Conversely, a married woman presented the thorny problem of the diplomatic husband: if he shunned the part of trailing spouse, then her resignation became inevitable but, if he accompanied her en poste, the chances were he would quickly make himself a nuisance to the work of the embassy.
In 1934 the committee found in favour of maintaining the status quo, yet just over a decade later women were representing Britain as diplomats in their own right. What happened to effect this dramatic reversal? Put simply, the answer was the war. Manpower shortages forced the Foreign Office, alongside other Whitehall departments, to post women overseas to carry out responsible political work. Their professional competence destroyed much of the Foreign Office case against women, while the sacrifices of ordinary women on the home front made it impossible to deny renewed feminist demands for equality in all areas of public life, including that of diplomacy.
Woolf ’s psychometer, however, still ran high even after 1946. Alongside a marriage bar, which stayed in place until 1973, postwar female recruits encountered hostile department heads in London and were denied overseas postings by sceptical ambassadors. The Foreign Office today is a far more welcoming place, yet women remain outnumbered by men in the most senior grades to the level of three to one. The battle for the Foreign Office may be over, but it is not yet history.
Helen McCarthy, History Today