Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. Foreign Service officers understood that marriage enhanced their diplomatic careers and generally considered their wives to be partners in the Service. In 1914, U.S. consul Francis Keene wrote to his wife Florence, “You and I, as a team, are, I am confidant, unexcelled in the Service.”1 Career diplomat Earl Packer explained that “the wives carry a terrific burden” in the Foreign Service, while another longtime diplomat, Willard Beaulac, declared, “I know of no field in which a wife can be more helpful.”2 Meanwhile, an outside observer of the U.S. Foreign Service in the 1930s explained that “the wife may serve as a go-between for her husband” by taking part in social interactions with other diplomats and representatives from the host country.3 At the same time, many American Foreign Service wives also spoke explicitly about their “careers” in the Foreign Service, and the U.S. State Department initiated changes that reflected the Department’s dependence on “the tradition of husband and wife teams and of wives’ participation in the representational activities of a post.”4 Specifically, the 1924 Rogers Act, which was intended to reform and professionalize the Foreign Service, resulted in administrative changes, such as allowances for rent and entertaining, that directly reflected the growing reliance on the presence of American wives overseas. Furthermore, the new Foreign Service Personnel Board, formed by the Rogers Act to evaluate each Foreign Service officer’s eligibility for promotion, explicitly discussed wives’ strengths and weaknesses when assessing each officer’s merits, noting in particular the success of officers who were “ably seconded” or “ably assisted” by their wives.5
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Notes
Earl Packer, oral history interview, Foreign Service Oral History Project, Special Collections, Launiger Library, Georgetown University, transcript, p. 23, hereafter FSHOP; and Willard Beaulac, Career Ambassador (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 181.
Graham Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 275.
See the 1972 Directive reproduced in Homer Calkin, Women in the Department of State: Their Role in Foreign Affairs (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1977)
Mary Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism, 1883–1947 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 5.
Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1991).
See, for example, Edward Crapol, ed., Women and American Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992)
Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984)
Harriet Alonso, Peace as a Woman’s Issue (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990)
Emily Rosenberg, “Gender,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 116–24
Andrew Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964,” Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994): 518–42
Emily Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999): 479–97
Frank Costigliola, “The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (1997): 163–83.
See Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire; Procida, Married to the Empire; Ann Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 1 (1989): 134–61
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
See, for example, Richard Hume Werking, The Master Architects (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1977).
John Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 6
Hilary Callen, “The Premise of Dedication: Notes towards an Ethnography of Diplomat’s Wives,” in Perceiving Women, ed. Shirley Ardener (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 89.
Arlie Hochschild, “The Role of the Ambassador’s Wife: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 31, no. 1 (1969): 76.
The literature on women and politics is voluminous. See, for example, Maureen Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1032–50
Hannah Pampanek as quoted in Eliza Pavalko and Glen Elder, “Women behind the Men,” Gender and Society 7, no. 4 (1993): 548
Beatrice Russell, Living in State (New York: D. McKay, 1959), 83–84
See, for example, Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveler (New York: Basic Books, 1991)
Beryl Smedley, Partners in Diplomacy (London: The Harley Press, 1991), 90
William Barnes and John Heath Morgan, The Foreign Service of the U.S.: Origins, Development and Functions (Washington, DC: Department of State, Historical Office, Bureau of Public Affairs, 1961), 326.
Katzman, Seven Days a Week (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 223–24.
Lucy Salmon, Domestic Service (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
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Wood, M.M. (2007). Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the “Social Game” in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905–1941. In: Jones, J. (eds) The Best American History Essays 2007. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06439-4_8
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