Changing Differences
294 pages, 6 x 9
10
Paperback
Release Date:01 Mar 1997
ISBN:9780813524498
Changing Differences
Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994
Rutgers University Press
There are more than fifty women in the United States Congress and nearly one-fourth of foreign service posts are held by women. Nevertheless, the United States has yet to entrust a senior foreign policy job, outside of the United Nations, to a woman. Beneath these statistics lurk central myths that Jeffreys-Jones cogently identifies and describes: the "Iron Lady"--too masculine; the "lover of peace"--too "pink"; the weak or the promiscuous. These are to name only a few. With an eye to the feminist foreign policy leaders of the future, the author traces the successes and failures of collectivities such as Women Strike for Peace and individuals who were influential in international politics since World War I, including Alice Paul, Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, Dorothy Detzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Chase Smith, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Bella Abzug, Margaret Thatcher, and many others. These women often found ways to employ the myths to their own and to their country's benefit, and more recently have had the freedom to defy the stereotypes altogether.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones offers the first comprehensive overview of women's influence on US foreign policy since the First World War... It is an important contribution to international historical literature.
Jeffreys-Jones is to be applauded for his pioneering efforts to bring together women's history and the history of foreign policy.
The strength of Mr. Jeffreys-Jones's provocative history is that it is sufficiently expansive to be able to include figures as diverse as Margaret Chase Smith and Bella Abzug... Rather than explaining the 'why' of women's foreign policy tradition, Changing Differences explores the 'what,' and does so with considerable originality.
Explores a subject that has been ignored too long - the important role that women have played in shaping American foreign policy. Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones has opened the door to a subject that will draw considerably more attention in the future.
RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has published several books, including The CIA and American Democracy.
Preface
1. Introduction
2. A Momentary Silence: The Survival of Gender Distinction in World War I
3. From Peace to Prices in the Tariff Decade
4. Presidential Recognition of the Female Vote, 1932
5. Dorothy Detzer and the Merchants of Death
6. A Tale of Two Women: Harriet Elliott, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Changing Differences
7. Margaret Chase Smith and the Female Quest for Security
8. Bella Abzug: Signpost to the Future
9. The Myth of the Iron Lady: An International Comparison
10. American Women and Contemporary Foreign Policy
11. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1. Introduction
2. A Momentary Silence: The Survival of Gender Distinction in World War I
3. From Peace to Prices in the Tariff Decade
4. Presidential Recognition of the Female Vote, 1932
5. Dorothy Detzer and the Merchants of Death
6. A Tale of Two Women: Harriet Elliott, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Changing Differences
7. Margaret Chase Smith and the Female Quest for Security
8. Bella Abzug: Signpost to the Future
9. The Myth of the Iron Lady: An International Comparison
10. American Women and Contemporary Foreign Policy
11. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
