Women of the World by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-02-12T17:08:30+00:00

Footnotes

* It was upgraded to embassy status in February 1944.

9

Ambassadors of British Women

Around lunchtime on 6 November 1941, a plump and rather drearily dressed Englishwoman rose to address the assembled press corps of New York. The setting was a conference suite in the opulent Hotel Roosevelt, which, with its Tiffany chandeliers, grand wall murals and prime location on Madison Avenue, offered a stark contrast to the portrait of austerity and universal self-sacrifice painted by the visitor from overseas. All her fellow countrywomen were doing their utmost to defeat Hitler, she assured her listeners, ‘from serving maid to the duchess’s daughter’, whilst class distinction, that British disease that Americans detested so wholeheartedly, had virtually disappeared. The British people were pulling together like never before, and none more so than the nation’s women, whose lives, as she told an exclusively female audience at the equally luxurious Hotel Biltmore a week later, had been turned upside down since September 1939. The war, she said, had meant ‘a complete readjustment of our outlook and a complete reshuffling of all the old accepted values’. In such a world, she told her listeners, who included some of America’s most powerful women, there could be ‘only one sure thing – the hand of friendship’. Her mission was to grasp this hand of friendship on behalf of all British women and to ‘tell the women of America how much this friendship means to us at the moment’.¹

So who was this middle-aged spinster, so eager to boost Britain’s cause to her neighbour across the Atlantic? In 1941, Caroline Haslett was a familiar and respected figure in British public life. An engineer by training, Haslett was best known as a champion of women’s admission to this most masculine of professions and an evangelist for the use of labour-saving technologies in the home to ease the housewife’s burden. From September 1940 she served as advisor to the Ministry of Labour with special responsibility for the recruitment and training of women, a subject which she discussed at length with industrialists and government officials during her US tour. It was through her connections to the British arm of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women that Haslett officially crossed the Atlantic in November 1941, but it was the Ministry of Information – the department which, alongside the Foreign Office, was responsible for promoting Britain’s war aims abroad – which obligingly picked up the tab, as it did for so many British visitors to America, including a significant number of women from various walks of public and professional life.²

Such women, alongside the handful who found longer-term employment in Washington or New York, contributed to the forging of the wartime alliance between Britain and the USA. As lecturers, publicists and temporary diplomats, they proved that the ‘special relationship’ which drew these two English-speaking nations into common cause, was not a solely male achievement. Nonetheless, it was striking that these women were selected to perform an unmistakeably public form of diplomacy which focused

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