ABSTRACT
The chancelleries of Europe between the wars might seem unpromising terrain for gender analysis. But to stop short because those who sat round the conference tables at Versailles or staffed France’s embassies abroad were almost all men, is to close one’s eyes to the possibility that international history, like political history ‘has been enacted on a field of gender’ (Scott 1988:49).1 Examples are easy to find. Nationality, for example, is not gender-free: married women’s nationality was long construed as that of their husbands in international law, and in most countries they had no right to separate passports. Or take war and peace: gender is built into the structures of warfare. For much of history, young male troops have been mobilized, leaving behind or defending a civilian population of adult women, with the children and elderly of both sexes. And the figurative use of metaphors of marriage and sexuality (courtship, alliance, divorce) is commonplace in international relations. France is regularly allegorized as a female figure.2 There is nothing ‘natural’ or fixed about these examples. Neither nationality laws nor the military draft have resisted change in the twentieth century; even linguistic agendas shift over time. But they are part of the shared culture that has shaped our perceptions of diplomacy and contact between nations: we readily assume them to be ‘the product of consensus rather than of conflict’ (Scott 1988:53).
