While some women acted as diplomats in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the number of cases was few and, from the eighteenth century, the official diplomatic world became a wholly male affair. From the late nineteenth century, however, women inserted themselves into public diplomacy through the formation of women's international organisations. The International Council of Women (I.C.W.) was formed in 1888 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (I.W.S.A.) was established in 1902, both with the primary purpose of lobbying for women's suffrage and gender equality.Footnote 1 In 1915, The Hague hosted the International Congress of Women, a meeting of women from different nations to consider how to end the First World War.Footnote 2 The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.) evolved from this meeting. In this developing political culture, women's lobby groups were part of the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.Footnote 3 Members of the French Women's Suffrage Union, together with members of the I.W.S.A. and the I.C.W., formed a joint delegation of the Inter-Allied Suffrage Conference (I.A.S.C.).Footnote 4 The I.A.S.C. was permitted by the ‘big four’ nations – the United States, Britain, France and Italy – to participate in peace conference commissions during the Paris Peace Conference and these delegates lobbied for women's access to decision-making positions in the League of Nations when it was established.Footnote 5
Irish women sought to participate in these international movements and, in 1913, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Louie Bennett and Margaret Dockrell attended a meeting of the I.W.S.A.Footnote 6 Two years later the British government prevented both Irish and British women from attending the International Congress of Women at The Hague.Footnote 7 In response, the Irish Women's International League (I.W.I.L.) was established.Footnote 8 In 1919, Bennett attended the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace and she was elected as Irish representative to the W.I.L.P.F. The participation of women in international organisations and their involvement at the Paris Peace Conference demonstrates women's enthusiasm for and interest in international diplomacy; however, this did not guarantee access to the male-dominated environment of diplomacy.
The topic of women and diplomacy has captured scholarly attention since the late 1980s and this has been accompanied by an increasing interest in the relationship between gender and foreign policy. Homer L. Calkin and Edward P. Crapol were at the forefront of this movement in the U.S., first locating women within the foreign policy process and later analysing whether gender assumptions and gender behaviours operate within that context.Footnote 9 More recently, scholars have analysed the effect of gender in Canadian and British foreign policy.Footnote 10 Vivien Hughes's empirical study examines the experiences of women working in Canadian foreign policy between 1909 and 2009 ‘to bring the women of the Department of External Affairs out of the shadows and show how, over the century of the Department's existence since its creation in 1909, they fought for and eventually won their place alongside the élite men who ran official Canadian foreign policy’.Footnote 11 In 2014 Helen McCarthy examined the recruitment, appointment, promotions and experiences of women working in the British Foreign Office.Footnote 12
The historiography of gender and foreign policy has found that women incorporated themselves into the structure of diplomacy and used non-traditional methods to contribute to the foreign policy process. Molly M. Wood has analysed the contribution of wives in the U.S. Foreign Service and has found that ‘a Foreign Service wife wielded considerable authority and influence as wife, mother, homemaker, hostess and role model’.Footnote 13 Women also wielded authority in foreign policy through the use of their sexuality, as Frank Costigliola observed in his analysis of Pamela Churchill, daughter-in-law of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and her affairs with prominent American men during the Second World War. Costigliola argued that Pamela Churchill ‘cultivated intimacy – in the form of overlapping networks of sexual relationships, flirtations, and paternal ties – that made her a go-between for secret information and informal negotiations’.Footnote 14 The historiography of gender and foreign policy has clearly shown that women, as both career diplomats and non-state actors, have affected international relations. Going beyond the traditional analysis of foreign policy provides a more comprehensive understanding of the conduct of diplomacy and its multifaceted nature.
Against this background there has been an almost complete absence of a gender analysis of Irish foreign policy. Michael Kennedy's article, ‘“It is a disadvantage to be represented by a woman”: the experiences of women in the Irish diplomatic service’ is the only published work which examines the role of women in Irish diplomacy between 1919 and 1980.Footnote 15 Furthermore, Máire Cruise O'Brien (nee MacEntee) is the only Irish female diplomat to have published her memoirs.Footnote 16 Women have become invisible in the mainstream discourse on Irish foreign affairs, as a result of the lack of published material on, and by, Irish female diplomats. Kennedy offers an explanation of the absence of women's role in Irish foreign policy historiography: ‘Historians of Irish foreign policy have not been very conscious of Ireland's female diplomats because, until the early 1970s, they were few and were not at the apex of the implementation of Irish foreign policy.’Footnote 17 This article challenges Kennedy's claim, as studies in other countries have shown that women affected foreign policy despite not being at the centre of power.
The purpose of this article is threefold. Firstly, by using the League of Nations and United Nations as case studies, it will locate and identify the women involved in Irish diplomacy and examine the roles they undertook in the two international organisations. Secondly, it will show the changing attitudes of external affairs officials towards women working in the Irish foreign service in the period from 1923 to 1976, and provide the context within which Irish women diplomats gained roles in the United Nations. Thirdly, this article examines whether the policies which female diplomats worked on at the U.N. were ‘gender sensitive’ and reflective of the views of senior officials within the Department of External Affairs in Iveagh House in Dublin.
I
After the establishment of the Department of Foreign Affairs by the first Dáil in 1919, Irish women were posted abroad in a diplomatic capacity. Nancy Wyse Power, Máire O'Brien, Annie Vivanti and Mairead Gavan Duffy were appointed press and propaganda agents in Berlin, Madrid, Paris and Rome respectively.Footnote 18 In the period 1915 to 1922, Irish women were making diplomatic strides in the public sphere; however this was short lived. After the signing of the Anglo–Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921, and the ensuing Irish Civil War, women no longer participated in the diplomatic workings of the Irish state. O'Brien did not support the Treaty and worked for the anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War; Vivanti returned to Italy; Gavan Duffy retreated from public life; and Wyse Power was transferred to the Department of Industry and Commerce in 1923.Footnote 19
Despite the successful work and resourcefulness of the women who were employed in Ireland's diplomatic service between 1919 and 1922, foreign affairs officials were unenthusiastic about women working in Irish diplomacy after the creation of the Irish Free State. The secretary of the newly-titled Department of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe, did not favour women working in diplomatic roles. According to Dermot Keogh, Walshe ‘held women in suspicion’ and he ‘had a strong prejudice against bringing women into the service’.Footnote 20 This attitude was reflective of the Cumann na nGaedheal government as a whole, which legislated for the marginalisation of women in the workplace, particularly in the Irish civil service. On 9 May 1924, the minister for finance, Ernest Blythe, announced that female civil servants would be required to retire upon marriage.Footnote 21 In the same year, Blythe installed a differentiated pay scheme for married and unmarried civil servants. Women were further disenfranchised in 1926 through the passing of the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act which prohibited women from sitting open competition examinations for the administrative and executive grade of the Irish civil service. It also excluded men from positions as clerks and typists.Footnote 22 The 1926 act limited women's work in the civil service to the clerical sphere as typists and stenographers. These acts were the first in a line of restrictive legislation passed by the Cumann na nGaedheal and successive Fianna Fáil governments in the 1920s and 1930s which limited women to lower-paid jobs and prioritised a woman's role in the home as a wife and mother.Footnote 23
These legislative measures were not unique to Ireland, rather they were demonstrative of the disenfranchisement of women in the workplace, and more particularly in foreign services, internationally. A regulation was introduced as part of the British Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, 1919, which declared ‘all posts in the Diplomatic Service and in the Consular Service are reserved to men’, and confined women to the lower grades as clerks and typists.Footnote 24 Likewise, the diplomatic corps of the Canadian Department of External Affairs was exclusively male until the Second World War. Even in Norway, the first European country to give women the vote in 1913, only men could apply for ‘diplomatic and consular positions’ until 1938 and Denmark did not accept female diplomats until 1934.Footnote 25 In the U.S., the first female diplomatic officer, Lucille Atcherson, was accepted in 1922. However, the progress of women career officers in the U.S. foreign service was slow, with just one woman appointed every few years.Footnote 26 The legal barriers which the Irish government put in place in the 1920s reflected a patriarchal ideology towards women also evident in other European and North American countries. Evidently, Walshe's resistance to women serving in diplomatic positions was a popular opinion internationally and by 1926 the Irish government had provided a legal justification not to employ women above the clerical grade. The D.E.A., as well as the Irish civil service as a whole, became a gendered organisation with separate roles and conditions for men and women.
II
As a result of the Paris Peace Conference, the League of Nations was established on 10 January 1920. Three years later, on 10 September 1923, the Irish Free State became a member of the organisation. The League of Nations signified the beginning of a ‘new diplomacy’ which Herren has argued was ‘a marked departure’ from the old diplomacy of ‘diplomatic secrecy and an accountable use of intelligence services’.Footnote 27 The international female lobbyists, discussed above, successfully argued for the inclusion of women in the decision-making process of the League of Nations and article seven of the Covenant of the League of Nations prescribed that ‘All positions under or in connection with the League, including the Secretariat, shall be open equally to men and women.’Footnote 28 Within this era of ‘new diplomacy’, it appeared that women would have equal opportunities to engage in the diplomatic process. Article seven represented the League of Nations leadership's promotion of women's involvement in public life and, as an institution, it provided women with the first opportunity to work in international diplomacy. Immediately, female citizens of member states applied for work in the secretariat, and some women shaped prominent careers there, including British-born Rachel Crowdy, chief of the Social Questions Section, and Lithuanian Princess Gabrielle Radziwill, who was responsible for liaising with voluntary organisations.Footnote 29
The employment opportunities provided by the League of Nations proved attractive to many Irish women, particularly those who were educated and who could speak a second language. Between 1928 and 1929 twelve Irish women worked in the league secretariat, the majority of whom worked as secretaries and shorthand typists.Footnote 30 Just two Irish women worked outside of the clerical grade, Miss R. N. Figgis, secretary of the Social Questions and Opium Traffic Section, and Miss M. Long, a member of section, class a of the Editorial and Translation Section. In comparison, six Irish men worked in the league secretariat in the same period, none of whom worked in a clerical or secretarial capacity.Footnote 31
Despite the availability of opportunities for women to work in the secretariat, league member states were reluctant to include women in their delegations, which was inconsistent with the league's ‘acceptance of women as international civil servants’.Footnote 32 Despite the decision to exclude women from diplomatic and consular positions, the British Foreign Office included at least one woman on its delegation to the League of Nations between 1922 and 1938.Footnote 33 Edith Lyttelton, author and widow of British member of parliament, Alfred Lyttelton, served on the British delegation to the League of Nations as a substitute delegate in 1923, 1926 to 1928 and 1931. Suffragist Helena Swanwick served on the delegation in 1924 and from 1928 until 1931.Footnote 34 Between 1920 and 1938 a total of sixteen women were appointed delegates to the League of Nations and 160 as substitute-delegates.Footnote 35 Carol Miller found that ‘British women were most frequently present at the Assembly in the capacity of delegate or substitute-delegate, with a total of nineteen for the entire period, followed by Norway and Romania, each with eighteen, Australia with seventeen, Sweden and Denmark, each with sixteen and the Netherlands with thirteen.’Footnote 36 Despite the progressive attitudes of these countries, however, female delegates remained in a minority, and in 1938 just 6 percent of League of Nations delegates were women.Footnote 37
Pressure was placed on W. T. Cosgrave, president of the executive council, to include women diplomats on the Irish delegations to the League of Nations. In a letter to Cosgrave in 1926, the International Council of Women argued that ‘the co-operation of women in the deliberation of the Assembly and its Committees not only gave added strength to the decisions of that body but also was an encouragement to the womanhood of all countries to do their part in the constructive propaganda in support of peace’.Footnote 38 While the D.E.A. did not employ women at the diplomatic level in the department who could be included on the Irish delegation to the League of Nations, there were women who could have worked as non-career diplomatists, such as Louie Bennett, who were interested in Ireland's international objectives and who had experience in international diplomacy. The British case provides a striking parallel. Like Ireland, Britain did not have women working at the diplomatic level in its foreign service, but it included women in its delegation each year, setting a precedent of appointing non-career female diplomats. Ireland did not follow suit, confirming the D.E.A.’s refusal to permit women to work in any official diplomatic capacity. Despite the League of Nations’ approval of female diplomats and the pressure of the International Council of Women, Irish women remained on the periphery of international relations and the Irish delegations remained an all-male preserve during the lifetime of the League of Nations.
In Iveagh House, the D.E.A.’s headquarters, however, Rosita Austin handled much of the department's work at the League of Nations, primarily translating League of Nations documents from French to English. Austin, a former British civil servant who could speak five languages, was employed by George Gavan Duffy, minister for foreign affairs, as a translator in the department in 1922.Footnote 39 With few foreign language speakers in the department, Austin was instrumental in keeping the D.E.A. informed of league developments during the Irish Free State's application for membership. She continued in this role after membership of the League of Nations was secured and she had access to all league documents. In 1926 Walshe provided a summary of Austin's work: ‘Her experience in the Department enables her to keep us supplied with references to international – especially League – documents, reviews, newspapers British and foreign which constitute the main section of our documentation.’Footnote 40 Although Austin was not at the forefront of league policy formation, without her translation skills the department would not have had the ability to formulate and implement policy at the League of Nations.
All female delegates to the League of Nations were appointed to the Fifth Committee, which dealt with social and humanitarian questions such as prostitution and slavery. Member states of the League of Nations had separated work along gendered lines. Women were given responsibility for the issues thought to be more suited to women's philanthropic duties, while men worked on issues such as economic and financial affairs, and disarmament. Helen McCarthy has argued that it must have been ‘irritating [for the women delegates] to be side-lined with questions deemed of a “feminine” nature and kept away from the problems of security and disarmament – what most saw as the “real” business of the League’.Footnote 41 However the problem goes beyond ‘irritation’; diplomacy at the League of Nations was clearly shaped by masculine values and opinions. Ideological conceptions of masculinity and femininity became woven into the fabric of League of Nations’ policy. Masculinity had long been connected with strength, protection and dominance and it is no coincidence that such issues as security and disarmament were debated by male-only committees. This is not to argue that the issues dealt with in the Fifth Committee were insignificant; Rachel Crowdy, chief of the Social Questions Section, argued that the humanitarian activities of the League of Nations were inextricably linked to the maintenance of peace: ‘You may disarm the world, you may reduce your troops or abolish your battleships, but unless you introduce better economic conditions, better social conditions and better health conditions into the world, you will not be able to maintain peace even if you obtain it.’Footnote 42 The women delegates sitting on this committee evidently viewed their work as central to the League of Nations’ overarching objective to maintain peace in the world. However, by clustering men and women in specific policy areas, policy making became a gendered affair with no consideration for the skills and qualities of individual people. It was assumed that male diplomats were more suited to debate issues of security and protection while women would be more successful in dealing with humanitarian issues. Nonetheless, despite this gendered division of employment, for the first time women were given the opportunity to work in international relations which should not be dismissed, particularly in light of the reluctance of native foreign services to employ women.
III
In 1946, after twenty-three years at the helm of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe was appointed Ireland's first ambassador to the Holy See. Frederick Boland, employed in the department since 1928, was appointed as Walshe's successor. This change in leadership signalled a significant development in opportunities for women wanting a diplomatic career. In the same year as Walshe's departure Sheila Murphy became the first Irish woman to be given a diplomatic role when she was appointed second secretary in the Political and Treaty Section of the D.E.A. Murphy began her career in the Department of External Affairs in 1922. The following year she was appointed private secretary to the high commissioner in London, James McNeill. In 1926, she was transferred back to Dublin and was appointed as Walshe's private secretary. She remained in this position until Walshe's appointment to the Holy See in 1946.Footnote 43 In her role as Walshe's private secretary, Murphy became a central figure in the D.E.A. She built a close working relationship with Walshe and was regarded as one of the few officials he trusted. In his memoirs, Conor Cruise O'Brien supported this view of the relationship between Murphy and Walshe. He recalled that the D.E.A. was run ‘by a very small, tightly-knit confidential group of officials’ consisting of Joseph Walshe, Frederick Boland, Michael Rynne and Sheila Murphy.Footnote 44 Murphy's promotion to second secretary may have been due to the close relationship she had with Boland who, as assistant secretary between 1938 and 1946, had worked closely with Murphy, and had sometimes sought her opinions on policy despite her official status as a clerical officer. Murphy's promotion demonstrates Boland's ability to see past gender and promote people on the basis of merit and skill. Indeed, Murphy's promotion was an indication that women would now be accepted in the Irish diplomatic service.Footnote 45
The year 1947 saw the opening up of competitive examinations for the post of third secretary to women. Between 1947 and 1948 three women were recruited to the diplomatic level: Máire MacEntee, Roisin O'Doherty and Mary Tinney.Footnote 46 Thus, from 1947 women began entering the Irish diplomatic service in small numbers, and though the marriage bar remained in place and resulted in the majority of women retiring upon marriage and cutting careers short, some women remained in the service and made successful diplomatic careers. Opportunities for women continued to increase and, in 1950, the D.E.A. appointed its first female head of mission, Josephine McNeill, to The Hague.Footnote 47 The appointment of a woman to head a foreign mission demonstrated the immediate change in attitudes towards women working in Irish diplomacy.
McNeill's appointment reflects the changing role of women in Irish diplomacy and, indeed, the advancement of women working in foreign affairs internationally. Since 1933 the U.S. had appointed women as chiefs of mission and, by 1955, three women had served abroad as official representatives of the United States: Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence Jaffray Harriman and Perle Mesta. The U.S. was not the first to appoint female heads of mission, however. Rosika Schwimmer was the first woman appointed to this role in 1918 as Hungarian minister to Switzerland, and in 1924 Aleksandra Kollontai was appointed Soviet minister to Norway. The appointment of female chiefs of mission and the employment of women in diplomatic roles in foreign services increased from the 1930s and this slow yet growing number of female diplomats resulted in a strong female presence at the United Nations.
From its inception in 1945, women were involved at the diplomatic level in the United Nations. At the U.N.’s founding conference, held in San Francisco in 1945, ten women served as delegates for their native countries: Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic), Amália Caballero de Castillo Ledón (Mexico), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), Isabel P. de Vidal (Uruguay), Cora T. Casselman (Canada), Jessie Street (Australia), Wu Yi-Fang (China), Virginia Gildersleeve (United States), and Ellen Wilkinson and Florence Horsbrugh (United Kingdom). In addition, other women were included in delegations as advisers.Footnote 48 Comparable with article seven of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which provided for equal eligibility for positions among men and women, article eight of the United Nations’ Charter declared that ‘The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs.’Footnote 49 Although article seven failed to make a significant difference to the position of women at the League of Nations, the inclusion of women at the diplomatic level at the founding conference of the U.N. endorsed the ideal of equality of opportunity between the sexes.
Ireland became a member state of the United Nations on 14 December 1955. The Department of External Affairs established a permanent mission to the United Nations and Frederick Boland was appointed permanent representative, Eamonn Kennedy as counsellor and Paul Keating as second secretary. The first Irish delegation to the U.N., in 1956, consisted of seasoned and talented diplomats, including Sean Murphy, secretary of the D.E.A., John J. Hearne, ambassador to the U.S., Conor Cruise O'Brien, counsellor in the International Organisations Section, Sheila Murphy, counsellor in the Political Section, Sean Morrissey, legal adviser, and Joseph Shields, counsellor in the Irish embassy, Washington D.C. The delegation was led by the minister for external affairs, Liam Cosgrave.Footnote 50 The inclusion of Sheila Murphy in the delegation was significant, for this marked the first occasion on which the Department of External Affairs had appointed a woman on a delegation to an international organisation. Within two years of her appointment as second secretary to the Political and Treaty Section in 1946, Murphy had been promoted to first secretary and, between 1952 and 1955, she was posted to Paris as a first secretary in the Irish embassy.Footnote 51 Murphy's career in the Department of External Affairs is unique. Firstly, no other woman serving in a clerical position was promoted to a diplomatic role and, secondly, no other official, male or female, took thirty years to reach the position of first secretary within the department. The slow progression of Murphy's career can be attributed to Walshe's disregard of women's ability to work in diplomacy as he never would, or could, view Murphy, or any other woman, as a diplomat.Footnote 52 By 1956 Murphy had attained the position of counsellor in the Political Section making her the highest ranking female diplomat in the department. Through her work in the Political Section she had regular involvement in U.N. affairs prior to Irish membership, therefore she was duly qualified to serve on the first Irish delegation to the U.N.Footnote 53
Murphy's appointment to the Irish delegation to the U.N. arose in conjunction with other women's appointments to higher roles in the civil service. The Department of Industry and Commerce led the vanguard in the appointment of women, and both Bridget Stafford and Nancy Wyse Power became the first women to be appointed to the position of principal officer. In 1959 the Irish civil service obtained its first female secretary when Thekla Beere was appointed secretary to the Department of Transport and Power. Beere began her civil service career in 1924 in the statistics branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce. She remained in the department and secured a promotion in 1941 to superintending officer; six months later she was promoted again to assistant principal officer. Anna Bryson has commented that ‘Beere's appointment [to secretary] was an inspiration to a new generation of female civil servants’ and perhaps it was. However, barriers, both legal and prejudicial, remained rigidly in place for women in the civil service.Footnote 54 Firstly, the marriage bar was still in place. Beere accepted that to progress in her career she would have to remain unmarried. Writing to her parents in 1927, she revealed that she would ‘settle down as a permanent and spinsterish Civil Servant’.Footnote 55 Secondly, it took women far longer to climb the professional ladder and Beere's career mirrored Murphy's job progression in the D.E.A. Beere had worked in the service for over thirty years before she reached the top level of decision-making. In comparison, Frederick Boland reached secretary level after just seventeen years of service in the Department of External Affairs. Lastly, the women making advances in the Irish civil service were viewed by their colleagues as markedly better than the male contenders for the same roles. Speaking in 1955, Nancy Wyse Power declared that ‘any woman who is promoted must be greatly superior to her male competitors. It is not enough for her to be as good as them … she must be so outstandingly good that her claim cannot be ignored.’Footnote 56 These sentiments were echoed by Orben Litchfield, an American acquaintance of Beere's when he wrote that she got the appointment to secretary because ‘you are ten times better than the best man considered for it’.Footnote 57 The legal barrier of the marriage bar, combined with the gendered prejudice towards promoting women to positions for which they were duly qualified, meant that the advancement of women to the higher positions of the Irish civil service was slow and gradual. In this way the progress of Sheila Murphy, in particular, was similar to other areas of the civil service, and therefore the experiences of women in the D.E.A. were not unique. Furthermore, the limitations placed on women and the roles they worked in were felt internationally.
IV
The work undertaken by female diplomats at the United Nations can be compared to that which the earlier generation engaged in at the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the encouraging number of women included in drafting the Charter of the United Nations, the gendered appointments of the League of Nations continued into the U.N. and the majority of women delegates to the U.N. served in the Third Committee which managed social, cultural and humanitarian issues. Former U.S. first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was appointed to the latter committee at the U.N.’s first General Assembly in 1945, when she served on the U.S. delegation to the U.N. She recalled that the Third Committee was viewed by other delegates as ‘unimportant’, but she ‘began to realize that Committee 3 might be much more important than had been expected. And, in time, this proved to be true.’Footnote 58 It was in this committee that she began work in 1948 on drafting the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.
Predictably, Sheila Murphy was appointed Irish delegate to the Third Committee in 1956. Issues surrounding refugees, human rights, the nationality of married women and freedom of information were debated within the Third Committee at the eleventh General Assembly.Footnote 59 Regarding Ireland's position on the draft convention on the nationality of married women, which would recognise the right of a woman's nationality regardless of her marital status, Murphy delivered a speech to the Third Committee on 6 December 1956: ‘In Ireland, the position of women is particularly favourable … Since the establishment of the State, Ireland has always stressed the position of women in relation to the derivation of citizenship.’Footnote 60 In the absence of personal papers or memoirs, it is difficult to ascertain Murphy's personal opinion on the convention or indeed towards the general status of women in Ireland. Not only did article 41.2 of the Irish constitution primarily define women's role in Irish society ‘by her life within the home’, but conservative Catholic mores proscribed women's rights more generally in 1950s Ireland.Footnote 61 It may have been that the Department of External Affairs, now led by Frank Aiken, wished to associate Ireland with a progressive policy, at least on the international stage. The Irish delegation voted in favour of the convention which was passed by the U.N. General Assembly on 20 February 1957.Footnote 62 Boland acknowledged the work conducted by the Irish delegation at the eleventh assembly. He praised each delegate on their performance and he formally acknowledged Sheila Murphy's abilities: ‘we were exceptionally fortune in the choice of the personnel of the delegation to the Eleventh Assembly. Miss Murphy and Mr Morrissey were extremely effective representatives on the Third and Sixth Committees respectively and were very popular with their colleagues.’Footnote 63
V
Frederick Boland, Eamonn Kennedy, Paul Keating and Conor Cruise O'Brien remained on the Irish delegation to the U.N. General Assembly in 1957. Máire MacEntee, first secretary in the International Organisations Section, replaced Sheila Murphy. MacEntee, daughter of former minister for finance and Fianna Fáil T.D., Seán MacEntee, joined the Department of External Affairs in 1947 and declared in her memoirs that she was ‘the first woman administrative officer to be recruited to the department by competitive examination’.Footnote 64 Between 1948 and 1951 MacEntee served as third secretary at the Irish embassy in Madrid. The following year she was seconded to the Department of Education, and upon her return to External Affairs, in 1956, MacEntee received a promotion to first secretary in the International Organisations Section.Footnote 65
MacEntee's experience in various sections of the D.E.A., combined with her foreign posting and respective promotions, undoubtedly qualified her to be included on the delegation to the U.N. Furthermore, her position in the International Organisations Section meant that she was well informed on developments and policy issues debated in the eleventh General Assembly. However, rather self-deprecatingly, MacEntee proclaimed that her seat on the delegation was due to her romantic relationship with Conor Cruise O'Brien who was in charge of appointing delegates to the U.N.: ‘It is not entirely surprising, in view of what I have remembered … about my changed feelings for Conor and his for me that I was a member of the Irish delegation to New York … Conor was free to pick his own team.’Footnote 66 She also described herself as the ‘token woman’ of the Irish delegation: ‘in those days every delegation to the United Nations included at least a “token” woman. It was a part I had played often and did not resent at all’.Footnote 67 MacEntee's comments are unsurprising when viewed in the context of her opinions on women's rights in general. In her autobiography, MacEntee concluded that in the 1940s and 1950s ‘My generation did not feel we had to fight for women's rights; we regarded them as established. It did not occur to us that our freedoms were in any way limited, except by the facts of life, which we regarded as unjust, but irreversible’.Footnote 68 MacEntee, like Murphy, was placed on the Third Committee which she remembered as ‘considered [by male delegates] a particularly appropriate sphere of activity for women’.Footnote 69
Following on from the eleventh General Assembly, the issues considered by the Third Committee at the twelfth General Assembly included the problem of refugees, human rights, and the right to education. The most politically charged debate in 1957 surrounded the right of states to self-determination.Footnote 70 MacEntee found that the Third Committee's debates on these matters could be ‘as intensely political as any of the other committees’.Footnote 71 Despite MacEntee's proven speaking ability, on the basis of previous speeches to the Third Committee, Conor Cruise O'Brien took responsibility for presenting Ireland's position on self-determination. MacEntee defended this decision: ‘It would still be normal today for a senior delegate to take over the Irish seat in any U.N. committee for the discussion of a particular, important issue. I presume nowadays that senior delegate might well be a woman’.Footnote 72 At the deliberations in 1958, however, MacEntee was permitted to intervene in the debate on self-determination. She reinforced Ireland's position in an eloquent fashion: ‘We regard the principle of the self-determination of peoples … as the “great master-principle” of the [U.N.] Charter [on Human Rights]. We are convinced that it is intimately connected with the free exercise of individual rights and with the enjoyment of the fundamental human freedom.’Footnote 73 Despite her self-deprecation, it is clear that MacEntee was now regarded as a senior member of the Irish delegation to the U.N. In subsequent debates she spoke on issues relating to education and the right to be educated.Footnote 74 Her speaking ability was recognised by headquarters and resulted in Minister Frank Aiken instructing both MacEntee and Cruise O'Brien to remain in the U.S. after the conclusion of the twelfth General Assembly, to give speeches at various universities.Footnote 75 MacEntee's capability was evidently looked on favourably by External Affairs and she was included on every Irish delegation to the U.N. until her resignation in 1961.Footnote 76
VI
After Máire MacEntee's resignation from the Irish foreign service in 1961, following her marriage to Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish delegation to the U.N. remained exclusively male until 1966 when Carmel Heaney, Irish consul-general in Boston, was appointed Irish delegate to the Third Committee. Heaney remained Irish delegate to the Third Committee until 1972 when Marie Cross, third secretary in the Political Division, was appointed Irish delegate to the Special Political Committee dealing with peacekeeping and Arab–Israeli problems.Footnote 77 This was the first time an Irish woman was appointed to a U.N. committee other than the Third Committee. In the early 1970s, the department considerably expanded its diplomatic staff, largely due to Ireland's admission to the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) in 1973 and the need to engage with a wider range of foreign policy issues at bilateral as well as regional and international levels.Footnote 78 In 1970, seven women held diplomatic positions in the department and by 1980 there were twenty-four.Footnote 79 The gradual increase in the number of Irish female diplomats throughout the 1970s meant that women were found at almost every diplomatic level within the department. As a result of this, the presence of Irish female diplomats concurrently increased at the United Nations.
In 1976 three women were assigned to the Irish delegation to the U.N.: Margaret Cawley, Margaret Hennessy and Isolde Moylan. Cawley, a third secretary in the embassy in Washington D.C., held the formal position of ‘observer’ to the General Assembly and reported to the department's headquarters on the proceedings. Hennessy, first secretary in the embassy in Denmark, replaced Heaney on the Third Committee, while Moylan, first secretary in the Permanent Mission to the U.N., was assigned to the Fourth Committee, primarily dealing with decolonisation.Footnote 80 Incidentally, Moylan was also the first woman to be appointed to the Permanent Mission to the U.N. in New York in 1976.Footnote 81
It is no coincidence that women moved into other policy areas and U.N. commissions in the 1970s. The decade witnessed a considerable shift with regard to women's rights and their roles in society, both in Ireland and internationally. Globally, women's issues came to the fore through various commissions on the status of women and the second-wave feminist movement calling for, among other issues, equal rights in the workplace.Footnote 82 Women's issues and the subject of equality had been fermenting since the early 1960s and the promotion of equal rights and opportunities were internationally recognised by the U.N.’s ‘Decade for Women’, 1975–85.Footnote 83
In Ireland, the government also established a Commission on the Status of Women in 1970, with Thekla Beere as chairperson. The Commission found that women's participation in public life was limited by ‘the stereotyped role that is assigned to women, the inculcation of attitudes in both boys and girls … that there are definite and separate roles for the sexes and that a woman's life pattern must be predominantly home-centred while the man's life pattern will be predominantly centred on employment’.Footnote 84 In other words, masculine values and viewpoints became normative, thus limiting women's place to the home. The commission's recommendations centred on the removal of the marriage bar and equal pay for equal work, thereby providing opportunities, both financially and career-wise, to Irish women. In addition to the commission's recommendations, Ireland's membership of the E.E.C. impacted on the issue of women's equality and the marriage bar was legally removed from the civil service in 1973 by the Civil Service (Employment of Married Women) Act and the following year equal pay for equal work was enacted by the Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act.Footnote 85
The Irish women's movement and the appointment of Irish women to U.N. committees other than the Third Committee reflected the changing attitudes in the Department of Foreign Affairs (D.F.A.).Footnote 86 The opening up of diplomatic examinations to women in the 1940s, combined with Ireland's engagement in multilateral diplomacy at the U.N. and E.E.C., and the lifting of the marriage bar meant that by the early 1970s women were found at almost every level in the D.F.A., from clerical positions up to assistant secretary level and more women were serving in diplomatic capacities. In 1962 Sheila Murphy was appointed assistant secretary, making her the most senior ranking female diplomat in Ireland. Women gradually inserted themselves into the centre of the decision-making process in Irish foreign policy and by the 1970s women's engagement with Irish foreign policy was entering the mainstream.
VII
By using the League of Nations and United Nations as case studies, this article has analysed how attitudes towards women working in Irish diplomacy changed over time and has examined the policies that women worked on in the period from 1923 to 1976. The analysis furthers the argument that although women have remained invisible in the mainstream discourse, this does not mean that they were absent. From the inception of an independent Irish foreign policy in 1919, up to the present day, women have contributed to Ireland's foreign policy landscape. They were not at the forefront of policy-making but that does not mean that their contributions were insignificant. Without Rosita Austin's translation skills, the Department of External Affairs would have struggled to remain informed on League of Nations policy in the 1920s and 1930s. Sheila Murphy also carved out a central role for herself, debating and discussing policy with senior department officials, despite her official clerical status. These were exceptional women who possessed talents which allowed them to excel in a male-dominated environment.
The departure of Walshe from the helm of External Affairs and the promotion of Boland to secretary assisted the advancement of women in Irish diplomacy, but this was a slow development. The marriage bar hindered the progression of women up the diplomatic ladder, but the policy areas attributed to women have also slowed this progress. As we have seen, when women were appointed to the Irish delegation to the U.N., they remained, in Máire MacEntee's words, a ‘token woman’. Moreover, the confinement of women to the Fifth Committee in the League of Nations and the Third Committee in the United Nations revealed that senior diplomats viewed international affairs through the gender lens, with women appointed to committees which dealt with ‘women's issues’. However it can be argued that all foreign policy is gender sensitive and diplomats are gendered actors. Men and women were appointed to specific policy areas not because they were right for the job (although that might be true), but because of the assumption that men were more capable with security and disarmament matters and women were better suited to philanthropic and humanitarian issues. In the 1970s the D.F.A. appointed women to other policy areas, for example, the Fourth, Fifth and Special Political Committees at the U.N. Yet, an Irish woman was not appointed to the politically-charged First Committee which is responsible for disarmament and security; this committee remained the preserve of men.
Former female diplomats whose experience extended from 1970 to 2012, interviewed for a broader study of this topic, shared the view that they had not experienced discrimination in the Department of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 87 However, the gendered appointments at the League of Nations and United Nations continued at headquarters and there was a feeling that ‘women were steered in the direction of administrative rather than policy jobs’.Footnote 88 The women argued that this was a subconscious decision on the part of senior, mostly male, officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs. As Kathleen White, former chief of protocol (2005–2012), put it: ‘If you've never seen a woman in a position it doesn't automatically pop in to somebody's head that it would be good to have a woman in that position. They have to make conscious decisions and to do that you have to be aware of what the subconscious prejudices might be’.Footnote 89 These ‘subconscious decisions’, however, had been happening since the department's inception. Firstly, women were solely appointed to clerical jobs, and when women began to climb the diplomatic ladder they were appointed to less significant missions or committees which were felt appropriate for women. Even when women reached the higher echelons of the department, as with Sheila Murphy's promotion to assistant secretary, it did not result in women achieving equality with men in the appointment to decision-making roles, and another woman did not achieve assistant secretary status until Anne Anderson's appointment in 1991.Footnote 90 There continues to be room for improvement with regard to women's appointments in the department. To date no woman has been appointed to head the Anglo–Irish Division, nor has there been a female secretary-general. Anne Anderson's appointments as permanent representative to the European Union, 2001–05, Irish ambassador to France, 2005–09, permanent representative to the United Nations, 2009–13, and Irish ambassador to the U.S., 2013–17, were the first significant positions abroad to be held by a woman. There is yet to be an Irish female ambassador to the Court of St. James.Footnote 91
More research is necessary on how women incorporated themselves into Irish foreign policy, as wives, lobbyists and, indeed, as diplomats. By fully engaging with the relationship between gender and Irish foreign policy, we will obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the formulation and conduct of Irish diplomacy. This article is the first step to filling the gaps in this aspect of the history of Irish foreign policy. It is clear that the status of women and official views towards the ‘ideal’ diplomat changed over time, most markedly after the Second World War when the role of women was evolving on a global scale. In Ireland, the turning point coincided with Boland's appointment as secretary of the Department of External Affairs when he opened the doors for female third secretaries.
This article has demonstrated that foreign policy is not gender neutral, rather gendered assumptions and gendered practices have a role in the appointment and promotion of women, and indeed men. By ignoring women's contribution to Irish foreign policy, masculine notions will continue to underpin the conduct of Irish foreign policy. Equality in the recruitment, appointments and promotions of women needs to be addressed within the department. In 2012 the Department of Foreign Affairs Management Advisory Committee appointed a sub-committee to carry out a gender equality audit within the department to ‘develop a gender equality strategy for the Department’.Footnote 92 Although this demonstrates a proactive response to the issue of gender equality, it also reveals that the goal has not yet been reached.
