Officials additionally attempted to discourage females from signing up to the provider by emphasizing

Officials additionally attempted to discourage females from signing up to the provider by emphasizing

That also very qualified women, through no fault of one’s own, could be frustrated, even “hopelessly handicapped” in a diplomatic or career that is consular. Other people proposed that ladies will be further challenged, much more than guys, by the specific hardships of life abroad, particularly at those places where females would face “many peculiar climactic, social and racial conditions.”21 Nobody explained precisely why they believed it will be tougher for a lady compared to a person to serve in “peculiar conditions,” and concern for women’s convenience at difficulty articles is barely a convincing argument given the fact spouses had been motivated to come with their diplomat husbands to also “hardship” articles and therefore female clerks, in rising figures, had been sent abroad. “Safety” ended up being assumed to become a concern that is primary. Assistant Secretary of State J. Butler Wright had succeeded in dissuading lots of feminine applicants “by painting a lurid image of a number of the jobs they may are in.” First, he would guarantee the prospect that “there had been no discrimination whatever against ladies because of their intercourse,”22 but he’d then ask the prospect to assume a situation for which “a young woman” serving as the official agent “should need to turn to some urgent matter on a bachelor colleague through the night.” As another colleague noted, “all sorts of hypothetical circumstances of the many embarrassing nature can easily be imagined,” though no body publicly articulated the “embarrassing” sexual “situations” which may arise if an individual girl had been provided for a man’s apartment in the middle of the night.23

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