Gender and Diplomacy

Jennifer A. Cassidy, Jennifer A. Cassidy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351982986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides a detailed discussion of the role of women in diplomacy and a global narrative of their current and historical role within it.

The last century has seen the Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) experience seismic shifts in their policies concerning the entry, role and agency of women within their institutional make-up. Despite these changes, and the promise that true gender equality offers to the diplomatic craft, the role of women in the diplomatic sphere continues to remain overlooked, and placed on the fringes of diplomatic scholarship. This volume brings together established scholars and experienced diplomatic practitioners in an attempt to unveil the story of women in diplomacy, in a context which is historical, theoretical and empirical. In line with feminist critical thought, the objective of this volume is to theorize and empirically demonstrate the understanding of diplomacy as a gendered practice and study. The aims of are three-fold: 1) expose and confront the gender of diplomacy; 2) shed light on the historical involvement of women in diplomatic practice in spite of systemic barriers and restrictions, with a focus on critical junctures of diplomatic institutional formation and the diplomatic entitlements which were created for women at these junctures; 3) examine the current state of women in diplomacy and evaluate the rate of progress towards a gender-even playing field on the basis thereof.

This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy studies, gender studies, foreign policy and international relations.

Part I
Getting to the table

Historical challenges and reflections

1 Women, gender, and diplomacy

A historical survey

Helen McCarthy and James Southern

Diplomacy is as old as human society and, as with other arenas of public and political life, gender has shaped the roles which men and women have played within it. For a long time, the history of diplomacy was a story of great men — of kings, generals, envoys, and traders. More recently, however, historians have turned their attention to the place of women in this story and have begun to reconstruct the agency they exercised: as queens with political power in their own right; as consorts, wives, and mistresses with influence over high-ranking men; as explorers, writers, experts, and activists who advised or lobbied governments on matters of foreign policy; and finally as professional diplomats representing their nations. This latter development — the appointment of women to formal diplomatic posts — took place in the twentieth century and forms part of a larger, and unfinished, story of women’s political emancipation and their public and professional advance in modern times. However, it is impossible to make sense of this more recent history, or of the opportunities and challenges that women encounter in the international political arena in the twenty-first century, without looking back at the longue durée of early-modern and modern diplomacy (Sluga and James 2015: 1–12). As this chapter reveals, this is a story of continuity as well as change in the forms of agency that women were able to exercise in foreign policy decision-making processes and debates, set against a shifting backdrop of beliefs about sexual difference and its relevance in international politics. The chapter argues that recovering women’s agency is not just important for understanding the gendered nature of diplomacy as a profession and political practice, but is valuable for illuminating the locus of power and the shifting contours of political sovereignty and statecraft over time.

The chapter draws on recent research by historians, including the growing body of work on the role of queens consort and regnant, princesses, ladies-in-waiting, chamberers, and wives, which demonstrates conclusively that women were present in, not absent from, diplomacy in the era preceding their formal inclusion in national diplomatic services in the twentieth century. In geographical terms, much of the existing scholarship takes Britain, western Europe and the US for its focus, but this chapter draws on perspectives from elsewhere wherever the literature allows. It is not yet possible to write a survey chapter on the history of men, gender, and diplomacy, because few scholars have explored the gendered experiences of male diplomats or the construction of masculine identities in the diplomatic arena in any depth.¹ To date, most gender historians working on diplomacy have addressed the prior empirical task of ‘putting women back into the historical picture’. As Glenda Sluga and Carolyn James note in their recent edited collection on women and diplomacy since 1500, this approach was ‘a much more primitive phase in the development of gender history, but it was a crucial phase, and one that has been lacking in the renewal of international history’ (Sluga and James 2015: 11). This chapter follows their lead, then, by writing the history of gender and diplomacy primarily through the prism of female agency.

Conceptualising women’s agency

The historian Emily Rosenberg has argued that efforts to uncover women’s contribution to diplomacy in the past have tended to adopt one of two approaches, both of which she regards as problematic (Rosenberg 1990). The first involves the study of ‘extraordinary’ individuals who transcended the social constraints of gender to make an impact — typically, as Rosenberg put it, ‘those exceptional, often slighted, women who influenced foreign policy’ (Rosenberg 2015: 116). The difficulty with this approach is twofold: first, it entrenches the assumption that women were marginalised and excluded from diplomacy, and second, it leads to a disproportionate focus on those who were ‘atypical’ of their sex, thus defeating the object of the exercise to look at women’s impact on international history. An example of this might be the case of Feng Liao, one of the earliest recorded examples of a female diplomat. In first century bc China, she married an influential general in the province of Wusun. When a new occupant to the throne in that region threatened to destabilise the authority of the regional governor Zheng Ji in 64 bc, he remembered Feng Liao’s knowledge of Wusun, and made her the Han Dynasty’s official envoy (Goh 1999: 71–82). Such was her success and subsequent veneration, she was celebrated in a contemporary poem by an unknown author:

A warm send-off for the royal caravan

moving westward through the pass.

Resourceful and talented,

the woman envoy

studied history and emulates

Ambassador Su Wu.

Her sage, heroic deeds will be famous

down through the ages.

(Bennett Peterson 2000, 74)

The poem demonstrates that Feng was respected and even lionised for her abilities and achievements. But in calling her ‘the woman envoy’, it also reveals that her career was very much an anomaly. The reference to her emulation of Ambassador Su Wu, a famous diplomat (140 bc–60 bc) who also represented the Han Dynasty, indicates the masculine standard against which any exceptional woman would inevitably be judged. There is no doubt that Feng deserves her place in history, but her case offers only limited insight into the wider operations of gender and power in ancient China.

The second approach Rosenberg critiques focuses on groups or communities of women who influenced international relations from outside the male-dominated world of conventional diplomacy. Examining phenomena such as women’s international peace movements, Rosenberg argues,

emphasizes that women wielded power in the international arena, not by becoming atypical of their gender, but by pressing the possibilities of the socially constructed women’s spheres to the limit, all the while helping redefine their boundaries.

(Rosenberg 1990: 118)

The problem with this approach, Rosenberg contends, is that it implies that there are ‘separate spheres’ in which men and women operate, and that by working within these gendered spaces — both physical and discursive — women campaigners for peace, suffrage, temperance, or humanitarian reform can ‘be blamed for their own restricted opportunities’ (Rosenberg 1990: 118). Though they may influence international politics, often indirectly, without compromising their femininity, these groups of women nonetheless reinforce the notion that diplomacy is a man’s world. One example of this might be the gathering of feminist pacifists at The Hague in April 1915 to debate ways of ending the war and securing a just peace founded on the values of human rights and democracy. Many of the delegates adopted a ‘maternalist’ language, emphasising the special moral qualities that women possessed as mothers or potential mothers, and defining their politics in opposition to the militarism and inhumanity of the male-controlled state. As historians have shown, The Hague Congress offers an important insight into the origins of twentieth-century feminist internationalist activism (McCarthy et al. 2015). But its significance for wider histories of gender and diplomacy is arguably unclear, given that the event had little direct impact on the progress of the war or the post-war settlement.

This problem raises a larger question of how broadly to conceptualise the diplomatic arena and actors within it. A recent trend in international history is to seek the inclusion of an increasingly diverse cast of ‘non-state actors’, who contributed to the forging of international relations as travellers, journalists, businessmen, non-governmental campaigners, and family members, including wives. This casting of the net to include actors outside the elites who traditionally formed the focus of diplomatic history offers opportunities for historians of gender, but it also poses risks. Women’s agency, like their supposed powerlessness, cannot be simply assumed. Rather, it must be carefully reconstructed and contextualised, and the factors which facilitated or inhibited it in different places and at different times must be identified and judiciously weighed. Diplomatic wives, as we will see, could be powerful figures throughout the period covered in this chapter, but the resources and opportunities available to them to exert influence changed quite significantly over time. This chapter aims to offer a brief outline of what this more nuanced history of agency might look like.

Finally, it is important to note that recovering women’s voices often relies on a creative use of source material. Women are frequently invisible or silent in the standard sources deployed by diplomatic historians, which tend to neglect female letter-writing (women’s correspondence is often filed separately from that of male rulers and politicians), the records of women’s organisations, or oral histories (only a handful of the c.150 interviews in the British Diplomatic Oral History Project, for instance, are with women). In addition, the conventions of female epistolary networks and autobiography have meant that letters, memoirs, and tracts produced by women have often been regarded as appropriate source material for social and cultural history, but not for the study of politics and diplomacy. In all these ways, women have appeared to stand outside the major narratives of diplomatic history, although recent scholarship is now changing that picture significantly.

Women, gender, and diplomacy before 1800

The starting place for most histories of women and diplomacy in the pre-1800 era is the role of medieval and early modern queens.² Queens regnant, consort and regent had to deal with international affairs and shape foreign policy, as Elena Woodacre puts it, ‘in a male-dominated and highly gendered political sphere’ (Woodacre 2013: 6). Case studies of queens help to illuminate how gender placed constraints upon the possibilities for women to exercise diplomatic influence in different eras. During the Crusades, for example, Alice of Antioch’s bold attempt to seize power in her region after the death of her husband Bohemond II continues to provoke debate among historians as to the skill and nature of her diplomatic efforts. According to twelfth-century chronicler William of Tyre, Alice was ‘an extremely malicious and wily woman’ whose crimes included seeking an alliance with the Muslims, attempting to bribe her foreign enemies to curry favour, and an audacious demand that she be allowed to choose her own husband (Asbridge 2003: 29). Historian Thomas Asbridge, however, contests William of Tyre’s account, calling Alice’s influence ‘quite startling’ and labelling her ‘one of the most powerful figures in the principality’s history’ (Asbridge 2003: 39, 41). She eventually failed, Asbridge argues, not because of clumsy or devious diplomacy, but simply because when ‘presented with an adult male of high birth’, Raymond of Poitiers, as her contender, the population of Antioch turned against Alice (Asbridge 2003: 44). Here, then, is an example of a contemporary chronicler and a twenty-first century historian revealing the nature and limitations of female power in a twelfth-century society through commentaries on a remarkable and diplomatically influential woman.

Through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the power of queenship offered opportunities for a handful of women to engage in foreign affairs. The best-known example, of course, is Elizabeth I, whose diplomatic skill has attracted extensive attention from historians.³ Regina Schulte has argued that Elizabeth had both a natural, female body and a political, monarchical body, and ‘in her initiation into her status as sovereign and into absolute rule … succeeded in maintaining a high degree of self-determination by continually playing the two sides of the royal body against each other’ (Schulte 2006: 4). Above all else, though, it was her education and intellectual and cultural resources that enabled her to engage in diplomacy effectively. When writing to the Russian Tsar Ivan ‘the Terrible’ in 1561, for example, Elizabeth deliberately wrote in Latin — a language she knew Ivan could not understand — to assert her authority (Sowerby 2015). From an early age, the education that Catherine Parr took care to emphasise and arrange for Elizabeth gave her access to a network of noble and royal families across Europe. As Karen Britland explains:

International royalty patronised and shared foreign tutors: Elizabeth I was trained in Italian by Baldassare Castiglione; Queen Anna patronized the Anglo-Italian John Florio; Prince Charles in England and Henrietta Maria in France shared the same French dancing master. Noblewomen’s education and their cultural and religious awareness, far from being ornamental, were important social and political networking tools.

(Britland 2009: 126)

This network of elites enabled Elizabeth to circulate gifts and letters around the courts of Europe in order to exert political influence. She wrote in French to Catherine de Medici expressing her condolences for the loss of the latter’s son, and she wrote a passionate letter, also in French, to Henri IV informing him of her disappointment at his conversion to Catholicism (Britland 2009: 127). Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria of France both also made use of such networks to influence diplomatic relations through their letter-writing, and the former was particularly skilful at using her proximity to the king, her husband James VI and I, to conduct his diplomatic affairs on his behalf while leaving him free from implication.⁴ Women often practised these negotiating skills when facilitating royal marriages, which could have major diplomatic im...