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| Lady Cicely Mayhew, first woman to join the British diplomatic service, this year |
Cicely
Mayhew, the first woman to join the British diplomatic service, lives
in a handsome cottage near Blenheim Palace, on a street that once
served as a set for “Miss Marple”. Now well into her eighties, her
memory is not what it was. But she still recites long passages of
Shakespeare, chants marching songs from Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoys a
pot of vanilla ice-cream most days to make up for wartime rationing.
She
is remarkably matter-of-fact about having blazed a trail for women by
becoming the King’s first female emissary in 1947. “My attitude was,
about time too!” she says. Mayhew had already come up against the
barriers that ambitious working women faced – during her wartime
service at Bletchley Park, where the codes that protected German
communications were cracked, she received lower pay and ranked beneath
men who could not boast a first from Oxford. By comparison with that,
the diplomatic service was a step forward, albeit a touch patronising.
“Our new lamb, that’s what they called me,” Mayhew recalls. “They were
all very kind, very courteous.”
The Foreign Office had fought for
decades to keep Mayhew’s kind out, often going to great lengths to
prove women unworthy. In response to one 1930s committee investigation,
it called on every head of mission to consider the question of women in
the service, the results of which FCO historians recently reprinted in
a striking paper. Even by the standards of their era, the views are
extraordinary.
One ambassador said it was “unthinkable” for a
diplomat to “produce babies”. Our man in Berne feared that “the clever
woman would not be liked and the attractive woman would not be taken
seriously”. Then there was this from Bucharest: “The hard-bitten
Englishwoman nurtured in the London School of Economics, with a Marx
and Engels outlook; the product of Girton or Somerville, interested
chiefly in ancient Greek theatre, but wielding from time to time a
forceful hockey stick; the shires girl who breakfasts off an ether
cocktail and who will abandon the Chancery entirely for the polo field
– none of these would be suitable representatives.”
When women,
led by Mayhew, finally breached the Foreign Office ramparts, little was
changed to accommodate them. Old habits endured. New applicants were
still taken to a grand country house, plied with stiff Martinis and
tested after dinner, without warning, on administering a fictitious
island. There was no special guidance for female entrants and, in
age-old Foreign Office tradition, no training either. “You were just
flung into a department head-first and told to get on with it,” said
Rosamund Huebener, who joined the year after Mayhew. “I had no idea
what I was doing and nobody knew what to do with me. It was tremendous
fun.”
Some continents, however, remained out of bounds: the
Middle East and, more surprisingly, South America. “They thought any
young woman would suffer what was euphemistically called a fate worse
than death at the hands of some Latin lover,” says Dame Margaret
Anstee, who went on to a glittering career with the UN in Bolivia among
other places.
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| Lady Cicely Mayhew in Yugoslavia in 1948 |
For
her first posting, in the late 1940s, Mayhew asked to “have a look
behind the Iron Curtain” and embarked on an adventure to Belgrade with
her shaggy dog, Hamlet, at her side. Her next assignment was Geneva. It
didn’t last long. A dashing foreign office minister – dubbed “the
Socialists’ most eligible bachelor” – arrived on an official visit in
1949. At dinner Mayhew commended a speech the minister had delivered
earlier that day. “Then he said something about how he had another
speech to make – and proposed,” Mayhew recalls. “I was so surprised I
said yes.”
And that was the end of Cicely Mayhew’s career as a
diplomat. More than anything else, her future had depended on one
thing: staying single. Along with all female diplomats, Mayhew’s letter
of service stated that she would be “required to resign on marriage”.
Other Whitehall departments had dropped the so-called “marriage bar”
after the war. The one exception was the diplomatic service.
Very
little official explanation was offered, save that diplomats could be
sent anywhere in the world at short notice, a condition deemed
incompatible with married life. (What on earth would their husband do?)
Diplomatic Service Regulation No 5 was just “the order of things”.
Those women who left to marry were stripped of their pensions and given
a dowry, amounting to a month’s salary for every year they had served.
The marriage bar remained in place, rigorously enforced, until 1973.
For
26 years, from the moment women were admitted to the diplomatic service
to the point the marriage bar was lifted, Britain’s pioneering female
diplomats faced the starkest choice possible between their careers and
their private lives, between public service and a husband. There was no
middle way.
. . .
The
Foreign Office’s decision to do away with the marriage bar was
inevitable. Debate was already under way in Britain about the need to
guarantee basic equality in the workplace and elsewhere, and in 1975,
Harold Wilson’s Labour government passed the Sex Discrimination Act. If
the Foreign Office had not removed the bar voluntarily, it would not
have been long before it was forced to do so. The mandarins knew they
would eventually have to bend with the times.
But – bizarre
anachronism though it now appears – the existence of the marriage bar
for female diplomats as recently as 36 years ago underlines both how
much has changed in the relationship between people and their jobs, and
how little. Society still agonises over trade-offs made by working
mothers and the halting progress women are making towards equal
representation, particularly in senior executive and professional
positions. The solution has been to seek – and to legislate for – the
“work-life balance”, a state of being we are all enjoined to achieve.
The
pioneering female diplomats who served in the Foreign Office between
1947 and 1973 had that balance struck for them. Their superiors
concluded that no accommodation between career and family was possible
– at least not one involving a husband or children. It was a bar that
at some point applied to professions ranging from teaching to the law (see panel below).
The tide of equality legislation swept it away, implying to the
generations who followed that no job is inherently incompatible with a
family life.
But, as any female diplomat will attest, some jobs
lend themselves less well to family responsibilities. The barriers may
have gone, but the personal trade-offs remain. Moving across continents
every three or four years takes a toll on any family or relationship.
Women remain significantly underrepresented. To this day the Foreign
Office struggles to design a system that is flexible, meets equality
legislation, is fair to both sexes, is kind to families and effective.
It may be a puzzle with no solution.
. . .
Faced
with the stark choice between professional ambition and desire for
domesticity, most of Cicely Mayhew’s contemporaries also chose a
husband over a career. Mayhew, in common with others, admits it was not
a straightforward decision to leave the job she loved. “It is silly to
pretend I didn’t have doubts, then or later,” she said. “Did I do the
right thing? Should I have stayed? Now of course I have my family, two
boys, two girls. How could I possibly wish them away?”
Departures
such as hers touched off something of a brouhaha among the male
superiors left behind. “The Foreign Office is perturbed,” declared one
newspaper article (which described Mayhew as a “glamour girl”). “Its
women diplomats are so attractive that it is losing them too fast. All
their training and experience is being lost.” In the face of this
exodus, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin apparently snapped: “We’ve
turned the Foreign Office into a matrimonial bureau!”
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| Dame Anne Warburton, our first female ambassador |
Of
course, it was not the marriage bar that was blamed so much as the fact
that women had been allowed into the service at all. Grace Gardner, who
joined in 1947, came up against similar bunkum. When she announced she
was leaving, a “rather crusty” senior colleague blurted out: “The
trouble with you women is that you will go and get married.”
“You’ve had 11 of the best years of my life,” Gardner replied. “What are you grumbling about?”
Yet
it is wrong to assume that the pioneering female diplomats saw the
marriage bar as unjust at the time. The gravity of the choice it forced
upon them certainly added an extra edge to marriage proposals (one
Foreign Office veteran admitted that it took her six years to decide).
But many took the marriage bar for granted or never thought of mixing a
family and a career, regardless of the rules. There was no push to
remove it.
Some of those who persevered came to rationalise the
direction their careers had taken as the result of never having met the
right person. One put it this way: “If you are very much in love, it is
pretty clear what you do.” Some pioneers are candid about the emotional
price of a career in diplomacy, of options narrowed, of paths chosen
“in spite of yourself”. But none admits to having forgone pure love for
a job.
“It didn’t bother me very much. If I wanted to marry, I
would have been ready to leave the service,” Anne Warburton told me as
we sat drinking coffee, looking out at her Suffolk garden. “There were
times when I enjoyed that side of life, but not to the point of wanting
to leave the service. I was enjoying life as I was.”
Warburton
became Britain’s first female ambassador, presenting her credentials to
the Danish court in 1976. Others followed, but there were no more than
a dozen senior women through the 1970s and 1980s, and until 1987, when
Veronica Sutherland took up her post in the Ivory Coast, every British
female ambassador was unmarried and childless.
Warburton is
still regarded inside the diplomatic service with some awe. But she is
unassuming and modest to a fault. If there were barriers in her way
because of her sex, she bears no grudges. She recalls the odd case of
discrimination. (Our ambassador in Helsinki once turned down a woman
for a posting, claiming “policy is so often made in the sauna”.) But
Warburton was never seriously put out. “If you arrive as the herald of
other people, maybe you feel that that’s good, that’s progress and you
don’t start complaining.”
Some pioneers acknowledge that later
generations may find it odd that they did not protest more. “If the
Service has changed its attitudes, so too have the women who belong to
it,” explained Juliet Campbell, the former ambassador to Luxembourg and
probably the first to lead a majority-female mission overseas. “In
retrospect, I am struck by how those of us among my contemporaries who
thought of ourselves as feminists felt we had to prove ourselves,
without concessions. To have suggested that any special allowance be
made was a tacit admission of inferiority.”
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| Juliet Campbell, former ambassador to Luxembourg |
Campbell
married in her mid-forties, long after the marriage bar had gone. Had
she come close to leaving? “I did have moments. But, to be honest, I
used to ask myself why I didn’t get married, and I think maybe
belonging to the Foreign Office was part of it,” she said. “You had
this life, you moved on every two or three years or whatever, and you
didn’t form quite the same forms of relationship.”
It is a common
gripe. Diplomacy is a peripatetic business that leaves little time for
blossoming romances or ageing parents. Every diplomat’s contract
includes a mobility clause, meaning they can be sent anywhere at any
time. “There was an assumption that you couldn’t expect to spend all
your time in green pastures,” said Campbell. “I remember being told
that it was time to go and get my knees brown. You couldn’t expect
because you had children or, as I later discovered, elderly parents, to
think that this was a reason you could stay in easy touch, because you
would be told, rather briskly, ‘we all do at this stage of life’.”
A
stint as a single woman in Bangkok was particularly hard. “Society
moved in certain sorts of groups and circles and as a relatively senior
woman you were neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring,” she said.
“There were the wives, there were what were then known as dolly-birds,
the pretty secretaries, and there were lots of gorgeous Thai girls all
over the place. I somehow felt I didn’t belong. That’s probably the
biggest price, at times: you can gather I’ve had a pretty good life and
I’m not fussing, but I would say I had periods of being acutely lonely.”
. . .
There
was no party to say goodbye to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones when she
left the Foreign Office. It was Christmas 1995 and she was a 32-year
veteran, the most senior woman diplomat of her time and arguably the
most influential the service has ever had. But there was no card, no
carriage clock, no leaving do. “You must be joking,” she told me as we
sat in her small Chelsea house. “I just left. It was not very nice.
Everybody had a sense it was a failure, which it was, in a way.”
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| Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, whose glittering Foreign Office career ended in regret |
Too
much time has passed to unpick properly the rights and wrongs of why
she resigned. One fact stands out: she is the only political director
in living memory not to move on to a top ambassadorial post. She wanted
Paris, the plum appointment, and asked not to return to Bonn, where she
had just served. In the event, a man six years her junior was given
Paris, while she was only offered a ticket to Germany. She walked.
Neville-Jones
admits playing her hand badly. But she is still smarting at the sniping
that followed her exit. Anonymous diplomats were quoted saying her mind
was not up to scratch, that she was “strong-willed and abrasive”, not
“sufficiently emollient for the niceties of diplomatic life”, a touch
heartless. “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?” she said, jumping forward in
her chair. “That is not something that you would ever hear about a
man.”
Who did she confide in during this difficult period?
“Well that’s one of the hard things about not being married, because
you’ve nobody else to talk to. I talk a bit with my brother, my
brother’s very supportive,” she said. “My mother couldn’t begin to
understand what was happening. Though, interestingly enough, she said
to me afterwards, ‘I sensed you were unhappy in that job.’ So it must
have shown.”
She pressed on in business, and recently joined the
Conservatives as David Cameron’s national security adviser. But almost
15 years on, her premature departure still splits opinion. The
controversy survives, in part, because the women’s diplomatic
revolution is unfinished. Not long after Neville-Jones, another senior
woman fell at the Paris hurdle. And a woman has yet to hold one of the
seven top Foreign Office jobs.
I wondered if Neville-Jones
sacrificed anything to the marriage bar. “Well, I’m not married,” she
said, after a moment’s pause. Over the years she rejected a few
suitors, but only came close to accepting one proposal, and even then
never really “agonised about it”. She admits the marriage bar played a
part. “Do I regret it?” she went on, anticipating my question. “It
would be nice to be married. But do I look back and say, this is a
fearful regret? No, I don’t. The one thing I do think about my life is
– for God’s sake – don’t complain. You choose to do something, you take
what goes with the territory.”
. . .
Yet
there is little doubt that, from a woman’s perspective, what goes with
the territory is changing. The marriage bar is long gone. Our man in
Havana is now our woman. The number of women in senior management
remains woefully low – 21 per cent of the total and just four out of
the top 29 jobs – but compared even with a decade ago, when the
proportion was 6 per cent, it is a small triumph.
The new
watchword is flexibility. Sir Peter Ricketts, the well-regarded head of
the Foreign Office, has introduced schemes to help balance family and
career. A “mobility clause” still appears in every contract, but it is
far less strictly enforced. Job shares are more common: a husband and
wife team now head the mission to Zambia. So is remote working. So the
schemes are in place – the real battle is to change the culture. A
Foreign Office survey found that more than 40 per cent of staff still
feel issues of work-life balance and flexible working cannot be openly
discussed.
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| Anne Pringle, ‘rock chick’ and Britain’s first female ambassador to Moscow |
One
symbol of the new female-friendly service is Anne Pringle, the first
female ambassador to Moscow since diplomatic links were established 450
years ago. A self-described “rock chick”, she joined the service four
years after the marriage bar was lifted and benefited from the new
regime. Early on, she still sensed that “people didn’t hear the message
till a bloke had said it”. But once she started being noticed, she was
supported.
As a man who has just married a diplomat, I’m
understandably concerned about the peripatetic lifestyle. Moving
countries every four years – kids and careers in tow – sounds like the
opposite of settling down. Pringle spoke to me with some trepidation –
knowing my wedding was just a few weeks away. “I hope I don’t put you
off,” she said.
She didn’t. But her lifestyle would not suit
everyone. Since they married 20 years ago, her Moscow posting is the
first time she has worked in the same country as her husband. “I don’t
think anyone would pretend it’s easy. I’d say my husband and I are past
masters at shuttle diplomacy,” she told me. For a while it was Paris
and Brussels, then Singapore and London. “It is quite a long haul. But
it’s worked for us. We have barely missed a beat and certainly barely
ever missed a weekend,” she said.
At this point, she must have
noticed the wobble in my voice. “Most people find it slightly bizarre
that we are still very, very together. But you have just got to find
what works for you. The joy of nowadays is that you are not in a
straitjacket. Spouses 30 years ago were in quite a straitjacket in
terms of not having many choices for what to do. Now things are a bit
more flexible and that helps both sides.” I do hope she is right.
Alex Barker is an FT political correspondent
...............................................................
A brief history of the marriage bar
Airline stewardesses
c. 1930-1968
Boeing
Air Transport’s hire of eight young nurses as flight attendants in 1930
set the precedent for employing only attractive, unattached women, writes Sonia Van Gilder Cooke.
In the 1960s, stewardesses challenged the industry’s tacit marriage bar
and in 1968, airlines dropped the policy along with forced retirement
at the age of 32.
Postal workers
1875-1946
In
the early 1870s, the Post Office opened the doors of its Returned
Letter Office and Savings Bank to women workers. In 1875, however, the
Office introduced a marriage bar that stayed in place for seven
decades, until 1946.
Bank workers: Barclays
c.1915-1961
Women
first joined Barclays during the first world war, yet had to wait until
1961 to retain their positions after marriage. The Bank of England and
Lloyds Bank had abolished their marriage bars by 1952, but Barclays
continued the policy, with its chairman suggesting as late as 1964 that
“family commitments” rather than career should be the priority of young
female employees.
Broadcasters: BBC
1932-1944
Despite
the eminence of many married female employees in its early years, the
BBC adopted a marriage bar in 1932. The bar was jettisoned in 1944, the
same year the BBC reporter Audrey Russell became the nation’s first
accredited female war correspondent. Gender discrimination persisted,
however: women could not become general trainees or newsreaders until
1960.
Teachers
1923-1935
In
1923, London County Council banned the hiring of married women
teachers; it was followed by educational authorities nationwide. The
National Union of Women Teachers argued that marriage brought “human
understanding” to the classroom and won the right to continue working
after marriage in 1935.
