‘Trading Boots for Dancing Shoes’: Women and the Military Expression of the American Century in France, 1917–1967

Abstract

This article examines the role of women in public diplomacy operations on and around U.S. military bases in France, especially during the Cold War. It aims to illustrate the diplomatic role of military officers’ wives in France and shows the vested interest of the military establishment in cooperating with civilian offices of public diplomacy. The more the United States demonstrated its leadership on the global scene, manifested by a wave of unprecedented military incursions into foreign territories, the more tight government control gave way to a strategy focusing on informal contacts between women of both countries at the local level. This article argues that military wives, often considered a traditional instrument of America’s effort to engage with foreign populations, contributed to the ‘parabellicist’ approach in U.S. public diplomacy, a strategy which aimed to generate ‘a nation in arms’, as has been suggested. The article contends that women’s social and cultural initiatives intended not to influence French women by pushing American values, but to support the U.S. national security effort from the bottom up, which was the most critical challenge underlying the ‘American Century’ in France.