Harbingers of Peace? Women and American Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American foreign Policy, 1917-1994

Abstract

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's Changing Differences documents the roles that women, both as insiders and outsiders, have played in shaping American foreign policy since the early years of this century. The tone of the study is optimistic: The author claims that women are, in his words, “the emergent gender” (p. 170) whose “untapped talent” is, in spite of struggle, experiencing “a measurable degree of success” (p. 197). We are left with the sense that women are likely to increase their influence over American foreign policy in coming years and that this will have a beneficial effect due to women's more peaceful nature.1 The association of women with peace is one of the major theses of the book, a claim the author supports both in his discussion of individual women, inside and outside policy circles, and by documenting a consistent gender gap in American public opinion with women being more likely to support peace initiatives and peace candidates than men. Beginning with pre-World War I women's peace movements, Jeffreys-Jones describes the role women have played in working for peace throughout the twentieth century. His discussion of women's groups lobbying for free trade during the 1930s, a movement that explicitly linked its ideas to a nineteenth-century liberal ideology that connected trade with peace, adds a dimension to women's peace activities that has hitherto not received much attention.