The Cultural Cold War and the New Women of Power: Making a Case based on the Fulbright and Ford Foundations in Greece

Abstract

When in the 1950s C. Wright Mills was writing about the emergence of the new power elites he paid no attention to the presence of women in its midsts. He was not entirely mistaken. Yet there is a particular intertwining of the ideologies of leadership and masculinity which serves to maintain the status quo, the privilege of an elite and perpetuate preconceptions about political agency and gender. In an attempt to go beyond available models and predominantly masculine images of the postwar America the present article accounts for women’s role in the postwar American efforts for cultural hegemony. It focuses on the cases of the American archaeologist Alison Frantz and Ekaterini Myrivili, a Greek cultural administrator and their work with the Fulbright Foundation and Ford Foundation respectively. This article seeks to stress women’s role as professionals and members of status groups with great cultural capital responsible for the production and distribution of high-culture integral to the American Cold War efforts. Furthermore, the article contributes to the growing literature on the cultural Cold War in Greece.