ABSTRACT
An Ambassador's Ball captures the gender anxiety of turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. As women began agitating for the vote, many men worried about an upheaval in gender relations, and some undoubtedly laughed nervously at such visions of the public sphere, perhaps even the crucial business of international relations, falling into the hands of women. But they need not have fretted because the founders of the modern US Foreign Service, the 'Old Hands' who dominated America's diplomacy as it emerged as a world power, inhabited the same world of elite masculinity. American women broke into the ranks of chiefs of missions in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Ruth Bryan Owen Minister to Denmark. Women made few additional gains in the Foreign Service in the 1930s. In 2010, as in 1896, women dominated international relations only in fantasy, indeed now not even to satirize women's equality, but rather to hawk expensive couture.
