Presentation at Women and World Order conference. Global Affairs Canada, March 2019.
Diplomacy is the work not only of professional diplomat, but also that of out Canadians working for other international agencies like the United Nations and by wives and secretaries and servants and stenographers. Women, as wives, became diplomatic assets necessary to the success of men’s development work in the middle decades of the 20th century. This chapter traces episodes from the life of four women who were unconventional diplomats: Barbara Cadbury in Ceylon and Jamaica; Beatrice Keyfitz in Indonesia and Ceylon; Beatrice Harding in Indonesia and the Philippines; and Eleanor Hinder at UN headquarters and in the Soviet Union. These case studies illustrate the vital importance to diplomacy of “caring labour” and social duties, whether in national capitals or in field settings, while also revealing women’s agency and the importance of personal ties in diplomacy.
3. 3
Jakarta’s expatriate community, 1950s
“Too various in origin to form a genuine community, too different from our
surroundings to escape into local society, we found common ground only in our
grievances and frustrations. At our daily forays in the dining-room or seeking a
breeze in the garden court at dusk we swopped [sic] atrocities, adding fuel to
each other’s fires and denouncing Indonesia with all the vehemence of
thwarted love…. The Americans, of course, were the most impatient and it was
they who lost their balance most quickly in the slow-motion world of Indonesian
bureaucracy…. The Europeans on the whole were less extreme but more
pathetic. Theirs was a long-term despair, the gradual disintegration of the exile,
for many had no home to return to, no country to own them. They were the
gloomy dreamers, the vacant starers, the whisperers, the suspicious and
touchy cadgers.”
Harold Forster, Flowering Lotus: A View of Java in the 1950s (Singapore: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 21-22. Image: Kemajoran, Jakarta, 1950s (Budi Gaban).
4. 4
“The other experts wives’ … like fine
French wines, don’t travel well.”
“The foreign experts are the real blight around here. Why a country in which 80
percent of the boys who get to university are studying economics or law should
find it necessary to import still more economists I don’t know. They are a very
unhappy bunch of men, but not one of them has had the courage to say ‘I can’t
do any good here, so I’m going home.’ They sit out their terms, growling
bitterly, and hoping for a renewal.”
Beatrice Keyfitz, letters home, 1953, Nathan Keyfitz papers, Harvard University
Archives. Image: Kemayoran Baru new suburb, 1950s, Bambang Eryudhawan.
5. 5
Image: Planned Parenthood Toronto, photo
montage, from annual report 2010-11
Barbara Cadbury in
Ceylon and Jamaica
6. 6
Beatrice Harding with “Smallboy” and
settlers, Kpain, Liberia, 1960
Image: Harding family papers, University of
Regina Archives
Beatrice Harding
in Liberia
7. 7
Mr. William M. Harding,
United Nations Technical Assistance
Resident Representative
Harding as first TARR in Guyana With Somali president Siad Barre
Images: Harding family paper, U of Regina
11. 11
• Mrs Harding’s consultancy in India, Ceylon,
Afghanistan, Thailand, and Iran, 1972
UN technical assistance
diplomat
12. 12
At the site of the Kakhova Dam under
construction on the Dneiper / Miss
Eleanor Hinder OBE
Image: Indian delegation to the USSR, photo printed in
“Observations on Technical Development and Training
Opportunities in the USSR: Report of a Study Tour of
Indian Government Officials,” UN document
TAA/IND.15, 1955. This version from Eleanor Hinder
papers, University of New South Wales, Australia
Eleanor Hinder in the
Soviet Union
