ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 addresses the relationship between gender and professional identity in the postwar Foreign Office. It presents a discursive analysis of the discussions concerning women’s entry to the Diplomatic Service in 1946, and suggests that after the war there were feminine diplomatic scripts which women could fulfil, based on Britain’s status as a liberal, egalitarian society and on women’s putatively heroic war work, but that these were not sustained. In an employment market structured to encourage married women back to work (as opposed to university graduates into continuous careers compatible with marriage), and in the cultural context of pre-second-wave feminism and 1950s social science, the diplomatic scripts available to women in the 1960s did little to persuade recruiters to change their approach.
