Taking Gender Seriously

Abstract

All historians of American foreign relations know that, to date, women have had little, if any, measurable impact on the making and formulation of foreign policy. This historical reality was confirmed emphatically and unequivocally by former Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, who emphasized in a recent interview that in the realm of diplomacy “there has been very, very, very little participation by women at the really top policy levels of our government.”1 To rectify this gender imbalance at the institutional and bureaucratic level, American women—feminist and non-feminist alike—over the past two decades have mounted a serious challenge to the male-dominated foreign policy establishment. The two agencies that have been most responsible for the creation and implementation of the nation's foreign policy in the post-World War II era, the Department of State and the Department of Defense, are confronting societal and legal pressures to abandon their ethos of...