I am a historian with a doctorate and years of experience in diplomatic history. While researching a foreign minister’s policy decisions, I stumbled across his wife’s diaries. Later, I went back to read them. What started as sheer curiosity turned into a mission when I realised how vital diplomats’ wives were to the functioning of twentieth-century diplomacy. Yet I had spent years in the field without reading about the influence of gender. I wrote a book to bridge the gap and challenge the idea that diplomatic history can disregard gender if its focus is political. The books on my list show how everyday gendered practices are connected to political power.
I wrote
Personal Politics in the Postwar World: Western Diplomacy Behind the Scenes
A Room of One’s Own could be on my list of top five best books overall. Virginia Woolf delivers fierce and razor-sharp social criticism with unsurpassed eloquence. Her anger is palpable, her argument precise, calm, and rational.
Woolf never compromises with literary beauty and wit, using it instead to make her point. Showing how expectations and beliefs about who can do what in daily life underpin society’s power structures, Woolf systematically picks apart the idea of women’s intellectual inferiority to men by showing how thinking and writing require material and cultural circumstances that have been denied to women.
I find the reasoning applicable to other systemic biases, too, and though it was first published in 1928, the book is as readable and relevant today.
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In 1975, Hilary Callan published a paper on diplomats’ wives using the term incorporated wife.
In this edited volume, she and Shirley Ardener applied that concept to a broader set of occupations. I find it brilliant because the term alludes to the idea of marriage as two bodies becoming one while calling out the asymmetry of this corporeality, wives being “drawn into the ‘social person’ of their husbands”, as Callan puts it in the book’s introduction.
The term also connotes the couple as a corporation, which has helped me to think about how diplomatic couples work together. With its collection of articles, the volume acknowledges differences depending on context. At the same time, it shows how one general mechanism – the incorporation of wives – has consequences far beyond the personal.
Before I read Women and States, I was familiar with the concept of like-minded states and aware that similar or different normative values could complicate or facilitate the cooperation between states.
Yet, I had never considered those norms in terms of international status. Political scientist Ann Towns convincingly argues that, like any society, international society is social. To arrange relations, whether familial, local, or global, norms are used to compare and rank.
Contrary to a society built on shared values, though, international society incorporates parallel and conflicting values in an inherently unequal system, making for the coupling of norms to international status.
I love how Towns uses this simple and elegant observation to connect the political emancipation of women in different national contexts to (changing) hierarchical norms between states. Identifying links like these between local and so-called big politics is vital for better understanding international power relations.
Momentous changes in the relation between women and the state have advanced women's status around the globe. Women were barred from public affairs a century ago, yet almost every state now recognizes equal voting rights and exhibits a national policy bureau for the advancement of women. Sex quotas for national legislatures are increasingly common. Ann E. Towns explains these changes by providing a novel account of how norms work in international society. She argues that norms don't just provide standards for states, they rank them, providing comparative judgments which place states in hierarchical social orders. This focus on the link…
Roosevelt's Lost Alliances is perhaps the book that has had the most tangible influence on my own work. Seeing how Frank Costigliola highlighted and analysed the political consequences of personal preferences and relations was eye-opening.
When the book appeared, some reviewers claimed that Costigliola made leaders' personalities all-important and overlooked structural factors. Because I had read that criticism before I read the book, I was surprised to find a nuanced account of how personal and political factors intersected. I found those reviews blatantly unfair.
By carefully analysing their personal preferences and relations, Costigliola did not claim that a few powerful men determined history. Rather, he showed how emotional and cultural factors, which are surely structural, influenced them and their decision-making.
In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. "Roosevelt's Lost Alliances" captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters. Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate…
I quoted Mary Beard in the conclusion of my book, where I spoke of the position of women in the informal power structures of diplomacy.
The call for a redefinition of power in her manifesto Women & Power hit home for me. Beard points out how subjective our perception of power is, urging us to reflect on what power is for and how we measure it. Rather than just lamenting women’s lack of power through history, Beard adds another dimension by suggesting that it is not women we need to change, but rather our skewed definition of power.
Her analysis of the relationship between women and power in the Western tradition provides a historical background of misogyny that is not only to the point but also a literary delight. Read it.
At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer's Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren…
My book follows one diplomatic couple, the Dutch Eelco and Margaret van Kleffens, on their postings from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through a micro study of their daily habits and networks, the reader gets a detailed peek into everyday diplomatic life and an analysis of its influence on international relations.
Mid-20th-century diplomatic practices relied heavily on the norm of couples working together according to a gendered division of tasks. The book shows how the position of diplomats’ wives influenced diplomatic careers and how personal and political relations could become deeply entangled. Exploring the role of the diplomatic home, dinners, appearances and even romantic love in the functioning of diplomacy, it offers a new perspective on how non-officials and personal politics shaped the postwar world.
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure
It is no wonder the ancient city of St. Augustine is steeped in secrets. St. Johns, the oldest continuously occupied county in America celebrated its 450th birthday on September 4, 2015. More like a European enclave than an urban landscape, it is a place of cannon fire, street parties, historical reenactments, concerts, and more. From admiring replicas of fine art at Ripley’s Believe or Not, to hunting haunts in restaurants and museums, to eating ice cream from a recipe originated by World War II bombardiers, St. Augustine has it all from beaches, gourmet dining, festivals, and attractions. A young and…
