Women and the Making of the U.S. Foreign Policy Community

About

Speaker: David Allen, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

Who made the foreign policy community in the United States, and why does the answer matter? Scholars have traditionally looked to the men clustered around the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies, and the Ivy League faculties to find the roots of the foreign policy "elite" or "establishment" in the years after World War I.  But this seminar will show that this focus has obscured the absolute centrality of progressive white women in the making of the U.S. foreign policy community, particularly those former suffragists, trained scholars, and expert activists who helped to build what was then the most prominent internationalist institution in the country, the Foreign Policy Association. 

This seminar will explore the opportunities that the early foreign policy community offered these women, as well as their limits, and show how those opportunities wore away as the community professionalized, as the United States built a national security state to wield its global power, and as McCarthyism enforced the Cold War as the dominant frame for postwar strategy. Recovering the ways in which gender has shaped the way that U.S. foreign policy has been made — and who has done the making — matters not just for a more accurate retelling of the past, this seminar argues, but for what that retelling offers for the promise of a more inclusive, more democratic foreign policy today.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrf-2grDMtGdRFmZ5NQobCBYkvAqyvjzcJ

Contact

For more information, email the International Security Program Assistant at susan_lynch@harvard.edu.