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introduction 1 1 Introduction An Extraordinary Galaxy of American Women Let’s simply recognize that anyone following [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton will have very big pumps to fill. —Anne-Marie Slaughter The position of women within the field of diplomacy has changed significantly in recent years. Three recent U.S. secretaries of state—Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Rodham Clinton—have been women. As evidence of the last’s worldwide influence, the so-called Hillary effect has been cited as opening doors for women as diplomats, at home and abroad, as more women serve as representatives to and for the United States than ever before. In 2010, some twenty-five female ambassadors—an all-time high—were posted in Washington, D.C. While women remain a conspicuous minority of the nearly two hundred accredited ambassadors in the nation’s capital, the five-fold increase of female ambassadors to the United States since the late 1990s is remarkable. Furthermore, more than forty women currently represent the United States to other nations. The sudden increase has been described as its own diplomatic coup.1 The world has remarked repeatedly upon the impressive trio of American women who have recently served as secretaries of state. Their individual and collective power in advancing American interests and championing women’s rights has not gone unnoticed at home or overseas, by men or women, young or old. One American teenager recently asked his reporter mother, “You mean a man can be secretary of state?” Barely a decade after Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. secretary of state, the position was described as “the women’s spot—a safe expected place for women to be.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and former director of policy planning 2 informal ambassadors for the State Department, argues that “women are particularly well-suited to nurturing relationships, marshaling cooperation and conducting tough negotiations,” thus, making them ideal for diplomatic endeavors. “Given that women are far less likely to be able to use coercive power than men are,” observes Slaughter, “we have been skilled for centuries at getting others to want what we want.”2 Thus, if we pursue the premise that truly adept diplomats are masters of the so-called art of letting you have my way, then the majority of, if not all, diplomats should be women. And yet, that Secretaries Albright, Rice, and Clinton are women still garnered considerable attention, highlighting a latent underpinning of diplomacy, to wit, that while women might be ideally suited for diplomatic work, their fitness as diplomatic leaders remains dubious. “Women’s traditional, unpaid work,” Katherine Hughes maintains, “was and is necessary to the practice of diplomacy abroad and because of this that work was coopted by the institution.”3 Until 1972, the Foreign Service forced female officers to resign their posts following matrimony; at the same time, it encouraged men to marry. Not only did marriage ostensibly make a man a more stable, dependable employee, his wife became an unofficial asset to his career.4 A woman’s work inside the home—tending to details in the alleged private sphere—made it possible for her husband to pursue the official side of diplomacy outside of the home.5 Thus, because diplomatic wives were busy performing such important, but “informal,” tasks as organizing dinners, supervising the staff and/or servants, calling on the wives of other leaders, and socializing on an unofficial level with local acquaintances, male diplomats could devote their full attentions to the formal aspect—mediation and negotiating—of their job as international liaisons. The conceptions of man/woman, public/private, and formal /informal diplomacy as opposites remained fixtures of the collective mind at the State Department well into the twentieth century. Such conceptions about the suitability of men’s abilities and women’s activities have long gone unquestioned within the diplomatic world. As Joan Scott asserts, “gender becomes a way of denoting ‘cultural constructions’—the entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men . . . [and] is a way of referring to the exclusively social origins of the subjective identities of men and women.”6 Thus, sex differences determined what role a man or woman could assume within the diplomatic world; consequently, a gendered categorization determined their respective poli-social tasks.7 Rarely have wives played such intimate roles as they have in diplomacy and foreign affairs, and yet remained so overlooked.8 Historian Catherine Allgor argues, “The...

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