Gender and Foreign Policy

The author of this very interesting book writes with flair, and the subject is important; but Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones has produced a series of essays, not a tightly knit volume with a theme. The reason, to be sure, is that the literature with which he deals is sparse in secondary works and scattered in manuscript collections. Moreover, the women who have made large contributions to American foreign policy, as Emily S. Rosenberg wrote some years ago, are few in number. ¹ The burden of the essays is to remind readers of what might have happened had more women taken part. The detail of the essays seeks to explain the reasons why they did not.

Along the way the author delivers a few opinions that may not read well outside his classroom and tutorials at the University of Edinburgh. Jeffreys-Jones refers to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “persistent philandering” (p. 101) and notes that “Mrs. Roosevelt may have enjoyed at least subliminal lesbian attachments” (p. 223)—his source is Shelley Ross’s Fall from Grace: Sex, Scandal, and Corruption in American Politics from 1702 to the Present (1988). Then there is the author’s dislike of the Vietnam War, which he assumes everyone should have been against, and of the Cold War, which he credits to male domination of foreign policy: “The end of East-West confrontation does owe something to the millions of deflating conversations in which women have told men exactly what they thought of their macho war games” (p. 196). A few pages earlier, he theorizes about “the intriguing possibility that the foreign policy gender gap will end with the demise of the male-driven Cold War” (p. 188). In a comment that will offend hundreds of students of Harvard’s late William L. Langer, an outstanding scholar of European imperialism, Jeffreys-Jones writes, “Led by William Langer and Everett Gleason, the war apologists saw the [Nye] inquiry and its exposure of World War I munitions-lobbying tactics as dangerous nonsense” (p. 81). ²

Nor is this all. The author criticizes Carrie Chapman Catt for going over to the interventionists during World War I. “But if her character was weak . . .” he writes; and the point seems to be that if one disagrees with the author it is a sign of weak character (p. 100). On another issue, we learn why “World War II was not morally attractive to women”: the explanation, Jeffreys-Jones informs us, is that “Most of them supported it, but only out of loyalty to their country and their men, and because of the weakness of the [gender] opposition” (p. 97).

Besides these offhand judgments, the essays unfortunately offer analysis that is troubling. Some of it is commonplace or unimportant, some tendentious. The opening essays relate the peace movement from 1917 into the 1930s in a way that books on the movement have done over the last two generations since the end of World War II. The opening of papers in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection made possible studies of the movement to abolish or ameliorate war. One chapter points out President Hoover’s interest in the female vote in 1932, which is a modest contribution. The president’s speech of October 7, in which he sought the female vote, basically failed because Hoover could not demonstrate ability to deal with the Great Depression. Thereafter the book confronts its subject by considering personalities, with a chapter on Dorothy Detzer, whose activities, like those of the peace movement of which she was a part, have long been known. There is a chapter entitled “A Tale of Two Women: Harriet Elliott, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Changing Differences.” Elliott entered the Roosevelt administration as a member of the National Defense Advisory Council (predecessor of the Office of Price Administration) and rebelled against the president over a coffee quota—this in the summer of 1940, at the very moment of the huge European crisis over the...