Women were not allowed to participate in politics or engage in diplomatic activities when they were not the sovereigns, but their influence through their salons and networks of friends and family was evident from the Congress of Vienna (September 18, 1814 to June 9, 1815). Prussian Wilhelmine de Sagan, the daughter of the Duke of Courland, for instance, owes her position on her close acquaintance with Metternich. “If you were a man…you would be an ambassador and I minister,” the Austrian official informed her, fully aware of the restrictions placed on women. She made it easier for him to carry out his political schemes and form an alliance against Napoleon.
According to legend, French negotiator Talleyrand consulted Wilhelmina’s younger sister Dorothée, the wife of his nephew Edmond de Talleyrand. By attending the Congress of Vienna, she reportedly contributed to the restoration of France’s good reputation.
In addition to these women of princely rank, Fanny von Arnstein, who came from a family of affluent bankers in Berlin, opened an Enlightenment-style intellectual salon in Vienna that was frequented by prominent men like Varnhagen, Wellington, Talleyrand, and Hardenberg. Diplomacy was vital to international relations after the Congress of Vienna. Ambassadors’ wives might be persuaded to take on a role in the shadow of their husbands in this situation.
For example, when their spouse was nominated as ambassador, their social skills and comfort in high society were considered. The Prince of Lieven’s wife, Dorothea von Benckendorff, meddled in English politics when her husband served as the Russian ambassador to London from 1812 to 1834.
In order to keep the peace and bolster Austrian power against Prussia during the Second Empire, Pauline de Metternich, the wife of the Austrian ambassador in Paris, attempted to develop French-Austrian ties and renewed her grandfather Metternich’s program. She was a companion of the Empress Eugénie and used her position to influence events at Compiègne or at banquets in the Tuileries. She also used her salon in the Hôtel de Matignon, which at the time housed the Austrian embassy.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Mélanie de Pourtalès, who was close to the Empress and Pauline de Metternich, tried to bring France and Germany and Austria together while maintaining Alsace’s uniqueness. She hosted notable figures from all over Europe in her château in the Robertsauneighbourhood of Strasbourg. Through their peaceful and frequent feminist involvement, women attempted to later apply pressure on diplomatic roles.
For example, Richard Nikolaus de Coudenhove-Kalergi was inspired by the Austrian radical pacifist Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), who participated in the Universal Peace Congress in Bern in 1892 and championed the idea of a union of European states. She was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for her dedication to peace, having written Bas les Armes in 1899.
Communist governments made a name for themselves after World War I by elevating women to diplomatic positions. In Hungary, suffragist Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer was named President Mihály Károlyi’s “envoy extraordinary and representative minister” in Bern on November 18, 1918. On January 18, 1919, she was recalled on demand from the US, France, and former Austro-Hungarian monarchy states. In 1924, Alexandra Kollontaï, a Bolshevik Soviet feminist revolutionary with professional credentials, was appointed as the first female ambassador to Norway.
After World War One, women were first allowed to pursue careers in diplomacy, which had previously only been available to men. In 1918, they were able to start attending classes at the “Konsularakademie” in Austria. Suzanne Grinberg and Luce Camuzet took the initiative to open up the Quai d’Orsay competitive exam to women in France. Women cannot do all duties in an embassy because they lack “citizenship rights,” and they “will be assigned to positions in central administration or auxiliary services,” according to a paragraph added to the 1828 decree on February 15, 1928. After passing the tough exam in 1929, Suzanne Borel slid “through a half-closed door,” as she subsequently described in her 1972 book of the same name.
Serving as an embassy attaché and then second-class embassy secretary in 1933, she was the sole female admitted to the Foreign Affairs office in 1930. She was unable to continue a proper consular career, however, due to her lack of full citizenship rights. Her male colleagues also appealed to the Conseil d’État, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not hire any more female ambassadors until the end of World War Two. Though a glass ceiling still hindered their advancement, women got access to the entire profession after they were granted the right to vote on April 21, 1944.
In the UK, women were officially permitted to take the Foreign Office competitive test starting in 1946 as a result of the contributions made by the civil servant Mary McGeachy in Washington or the orientalist Freya Stark in Iraq during World War Two. However, it wasn’t until 1972 that the ban on female diplomats being married was removed. Josephine McNeill became the first Irishwoman to be appointed ambassador in 1950, succeeding her predecessor as head of the diplomatic mission in the Netherlands. In Ireland, women were only allowed to pursue careers in diplomacy after the war. Although the prohibition on hiring female ambassadors was removed in Spain in 1962, it wasn’t until 1971 that the country’s first female ambassador was appointed.
Only in 1963 were women allowed to take the competitive tests needed to pursue a career in diplomacy in Italy. The first French ambassador, Marcelle Campana, was sent to Panama in 1972 after serving as the first female consul general in Toronto in 1957. In 1974, Anna Bebrits became the first Hungarian ambassador to the Netherlands. By integrating gender into all of its policies, the European Union reserved a position for female ambassadors (gender mainstreaming). This concept was demonstrated in 2009 when the British woman Catherine Ashton was appointed as the Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security concept. Federica Mogherini, an Italian lady, took her place in 2014.
Despite this, the profession has been feminized relatively slowly. In the 1990s, women made up just 11% of ambassadors in the UK. Less than 14% of ambassadors in France are female, and the position has been officially known as ambassadrice [female ambassador] since 2002. Despite this, women still have more challenges in balancing work and family obligations, and diplomacy is still frequently a male-dominated field. The gradual establishment of a society of citizens, which replaced societies of orders and monarchies based on divine right, marked the shift from the Ancien Régime to the modern era. The electoral body’s vote represented the collective will in the representative governments that progressively arose throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. The reasoning behind the long-standing exclusion of women from citizenship, however, reveals a hierarchical perspective on gender relations. Women desired to be involved in state affairs, particularly in drafting laws that they had previously merely been bound by.
Some of them founded organizations, which led to the national and worldwide women’s suffrage movements shortly after. Depending on the national political climate, women’s voting rights were eventually granted in some European governments during the twentieth century after decades of campaigning and battle. For instance, after the French Revolution, which granted women civil equality but refused to give them political rights, most thinkers in Europe continued to deny women the right and the aptitude to vote. For the theorists of early liberalism, such as the Scottish reformer James Mill (1773-1836), women were represented by the men of their family—fathers, brothers, or husbands—a fact that reflected the census-based suffrage of the Restoration and July Monarchy by taking into consideration the fortune they provided. Yet for defenders of women’s right to vote, including James’s son John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), it was impossible for one sex to represent the interests of the other, just as it was impossible for one social class to defend the interests of another.
Women’s lack of arms, a common requirement for citizenship, was another point of contention raised by those opposed to women’s suffrage. Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), a German feminist, responded that women risked their lives every time they had a child, just as men did on the battlefield. The majority of anti-suffragists believed that women would lose their unique characteristics if they exercised their right to vote because they believed that there were “natural” boundaries between the abilities of the sexes. Therefore, granting women the rights and responsibilities of citizens would jeopardize the family and eventually the state’s ability to function properly.
Therefore, it might be argued that the European policy of gender equality faces the prospect of disintegration and even eventual extinction at the start of the twenty-first century, following decades of development. Although the change has been gradual and has been occurring without a formal decision, it has an impact on all facets of policy, including the destabilization of the public policy community that is united around this issue, the reduction of funding, grants, and legislative initiatives, and the deterioration of the various institutional structures responsible for gender equality within the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament. In the face of budgetary austerity, the institutional, interactional, financial, and normative autonomy of EU gender equality policy has been severely limited.
Nonetheless, the progressive erosion of this strategy coincides with a more forceful declaration of the significance of gender equality as a component of the EU’s core identity. There seems to be a greater chance that the symbolic affirmation will be based only on a policy that is symbolic in and of itself, lacking any tangible aspect or tangible impact.
Conclusion
Women must play a larger role in the formulation of national foreign policy in Western cultures, both strategically and morally. It is clear that more research is needed to understand how these opinions are formed, even though they can conclude that, at least in part, women’s relative mistrust of and disengagement from the Western Government’s current foreign policies largely shape their relative tendencies towards caution, skepticism, and even isolationism. The Global World needs to address a wider range of people worldwide. In addition to making government discussions more comprehensive and representative, this will help to restore confidence in and support for a bold global agenda.
In 2019 and 2020, women travelled overseas at the same rate as males, and they are much more likely than men to participate in cross-cultural activities like study abroad or exchange programs. Women’s unique views in this area probably reflect their broader sense of fear and lack of political trust in governments, politicians, and democracies. The low percentage of women in politics and important decision-making bodies has been repeatedly linked to this political mistrust among women.
Incorporating women and minorities into foreign policy, diplomacy, and decision-making processes often benefits everyone, not just women. For today’s diplomacy to be successful, it needs to be developed, negotiated and carried out by organizations that accurately reflect and represent the composition of contemporary society. For instance, since women are equally impacted by conflict, they must be represented at the table for peace talks to be successful and long-lasting. Everyone must understand and appreciate the advantages of including minorities and women in diplomatic processes.
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