ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the first generation of female entrants to the Service's prestigious administrative grade and explores how they were integrated into what had hitherto been an exclusively male profession. It also demonstrates in abundance that women were present, not absent, from early modern and modern histories of diplomacy. That presence, however, always assumed distinctive and markedly gendered forms which both shaped and were shaped by the evolving political cultures in which diplomacy took place. In line with practices in the wider Civil Service, women were first employed by the British Foreign Office in the late nineteenth century as typists, and gradually took on more responsible clerical roles both during and immediately after World War II. Women's growing presence in the British Diplomatic Service coincided with the emergence of an international women's rights agenda at the United Nations, but the relationship between these two events is ambiguous.
