The Foreign Office's long war on women

I faltered 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 the Middle East.