The foreign office’s long war on women
Ifaltered during the preface to this account of the rise of the female ( British) diplomat. Helen McCarthy, a historian at London University’s Queen Mary College, describes herself as being drawn to this subject by meeting diplomats ( male) who were “bloody brilliant”. I feared a breathlessly deferential narrative. Then, as I started reading the text itself, I found myself getting scratchy at minor errors — titles and the like — and had I not promised to write a review, I should have switched to a thriller on my Kindle. However, I plugged on, and was glad I had persevered, although I found the book patchy. Some parts are fascinating; others, especially the early stages of the story, a bit laboured.
At the beginning there is simply not much of relevance to say, though the author has largely avoided trudging through the myriad difficulties women encountered in playing their part in developing Britain’s foreign policy and in representing it overseas. Their progress was so slow, so regularly thwarted, that a crawl through it all would have been unbearable.
Instead, McCarthy has divided her history into four manageable chunks, each illuminated by stories of individual women. The first, “Unofficial Envoys”, describes some — rather slight — female influence on diplomacy from the Congress of Berlin ( 1878) to the end of the first world war. It was largely splendidly loyal work by wives and daughters in support of their husbands and fathers. The war, with its acute need for bureaucrats, administrators and clerks, as well as substitutes for men in many other jobs, sucked a smattering of women into lowly posts in the foreign office on a strictly temporary basis.
A startling exception to the very limited role allowed to women was Gertrude Bell. With an established reputation as an expert on what was, before the war, the Ottoman empire, she strode confidently off to a post in Cairo for the Arab Bureau, which was trying to co- ordinate intelligence, political and propaganda work in West Asia. What she achieved was widely admired at the time, but she was never actually a member of the foreign office; rather a semi- detached and useful wartime extra.
The second section is dramatically, but not inaccurately, headed, “The Battle for the Foreign Office”. McCarthy starts with the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles and speculates unconvincingly on how women might have had a minimal effect on its conclusions. The “battle”, in contrast, is a fascinating account of the manoeuvres of the leaders of the foreign office to prevent the admission of women to its diplomatic and consular services. They showed skill and tenacity in marshalling largely spurious arguments defending the status quo.
The spectre of an uncertain future must have been raised by the Women’s Emancipation Bill of 1919, unsuccessfully introduced by the Labour party. That bill recognised that the war had demonstrated that women could fill — and fill well — posts previously denied them. It sought suffrage for all women, the admission of women to the House of Lords and the outlawing of sex discrimination in all judicial and civil appointments. ( The last of these strange notions did not reach the statute book for another 56 years with the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975.)
The foreign office held aloof from the debate on the role of women in public service until 1933 when it became clear that it needed ammunition to address the Royal Commission on the Civil Service. Arguments, which recurred for years, included the limitations on countries suitable for a women diplomat, the impracticality of dealing, as a consul, with, for example, a drunken British sailor and the problems of marital status — whether of spinsters, who could not conduct business in unofficial settings, or of married women with superfluous spouses. It was considered that the role of women should be to act as gracious spouses themselves. Sir Warren Fisher, permanent secretary to the treasury, took a prescient stand, to no effect. He told the commissioners: “There is still a lot of prejudice, and that prejudice is based on fear… it is quite premature yet for anybody even to try to prophesy or put any limit on what women may do in the future. If I had to hazard a guess, I should say that, when they have got the experience they would give the men a very good run for their money.”
The foreign office then created an ad hoc committee, with carefully selected members and equally carefully selected evidence which, after a stately pantomime, recommended that nothing should change. The examples of Soviet and American women who were heads of mission were used to illustrate why Britain
This time, the objections failed and the committee recommended that women should be admitted to the foreign office. But there was a cruel condition which lasted for another 27 years. If they had the temerity to marry, they would have to resign.
should not follow suit.
McCarthy then skips on to the Second World War in a chapter entitled “Lady Diplomatists at War”. The range of jobs women filled in wartime expanded considerably. In the foreign office women spread through the lower ranks and overseas. The foreign secretary conceded that they might rise to higher positions on a temporary basis — the implication being that they would revert to lower status or be evicted from their roles when the war ended. This section describes some colourful figures. Freya Stark was familiar to me but not Nancy Lambton, a Persian scholar who became press attachée in Tehran soon after the outbreak of war.
Then there was Caroline Haslett, who travelled extensively in the US in 1941, promoting, for the ministry of information, friendship between the women of Britain and the women of America. Cleverly she wore no make- up and a utilitarian dress, bought with ration coupons, at balls where the other women wore tiaras and ball gowns. With the end of the war, the question arose yet again of whether women should be admitted to the foreign office.
A committee, in good Whitehall style, was convened to consider the question, as in 1933. Its chair was Sir Ernest Gowers ( whose Plain Words should be re- issued to all public servants). When a committee member suggested that the investigation should answer the question, “Did women have ability suited to the foreign office?”, Gowers countered that the question ought to be, “Is the foreign office of such a special nature that it denies the fundamental principle accepted by Parliament that men and women are equal in the civil service?”
The same old arguments were trotted out. Women were “spectacularly ill- adapted to diplomatic life”. This time, though, the objections failed and the committee recommended that women should be admitted to the foreign office. But there was a cruel condition which lasted for another 27 years. If they had the temerity to marry, they would have to resign.
The last quarter of the book, “Equal Colleagues?”, describes the gradual move into formal diplomacy of talented women. Some hostility lingered, but most were warmly welcomed by male colleagues and soon proved their worth. Progress was steady, although hampered by the marriage bar, by their being refused permission to learn certain languages and by preconceptions about what overseas posts might suit them. These prejudices, reflected elsewhere in British society, took time to fade. ( I was nominated for the British embassy in Washington in 1980 but the senior MI5 officer there objected strongly. The FBI would not stomach it and, as a single woman, how could I entertain?)
But the foreign office has made determined efforts to draw on the widest spectrum of talent and to reflect better the society it serves, not only by recruiting more women but by working to attract to its ranks people from ethnic minorities. It has changed; dealing with the crisis in Ukraine as the UK’s representative to Nato is Dame Mariot Leslie.
In her epilogue, McCarthy concludes that “the woman diplomat has struggled to resolve a fundamental and existential tension between being a representative of her country and being herself.” She believes that remains true today.
I think she is wrong.