Opening the Doors of Diplomacy
The Foreign Office was long a bastion of male chauvinism. Only during the Second World War did women diplomats begin to make their mark.
In her interwar classic, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf imagined the following scene. The daughter of an educated man, in the course of conversation with a brother or male acquaintance, raises the possibility that newly enfranchised women should now be admitted to all professions, including those still reserved for men:
We on our side of the table become aware at once of some ‘strong emotion’ on your side ‘arising from some motive below the level of conscious thought’... The physical symptoms are unmistakable. Nerves erect themselves; fingers automatically tighten upon spoon or cigarette; a glance at the private psychometer shows that the emotional temperature has risen from ten to twenty degrees above normal.
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