ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that men trying to invalidate any discussion of gender in international politics tend to quote a litany of militaristic women leaders. Women's roles in creating and sustaining international politics have been treated as if they were 'natural' and thus not worthy of investigation. Perhaps international politics has been impervious to feminist ideas precisely because for so many centuries in so many cultures it has been thought of as a typically 'masculine' sphere of life. Marriages between elite men and patriotic wives are a building block holding up the international political system. Women working as domestic servants must be willing to leave their husband and children to service other families and, in the process, their country's foreign debt. Some women watching the Iran/Contra hearings found it useful to speculate about how the politics of masculinity shape foreign-policy debates. They considered the verbal rituals that public men use to blunt the edges of their mutual antagonism.
