The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

44 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Sources for this essay include a variety of published histories of the U.S. Foreign Service and published memoirs. The piece also relies on archival research in the Foreign Service Personnel Boards State Department records at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and on interview transcripts of former Foreign Service officials and their wives, which are located in Special Collections at Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library in Washington, D.C. I am grateful to both archives for per- mission to quote from these collections. The interview transcripts fromGeorgetown Univer- sity have now been added to the extensive and ongoing Foreign Service Oral History Project directed by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The transcripts are accessible through the ADSTwebsite: www.adst.org . Another rich, new primary source for material on women in the Foreign Service is the FSJ Digital Archive, containing 100 years of diplomatic his- tory in the pages of the American Foreign Service Association’s monthly Foreign Service Journal . For a curated selection of articles on women in the Foreign Service, please see “Women in Diplomacy” and “Foreign Service Families” on the FSJ Archive’s Special Collections webpage (afsa.org/fsj-special- collections). —M.M.W. Sources and Resources for Women in the Foreign Service Charlotte S. Littell, a Foreign Service wife, tells the story of getting to post a month behind her husband only to find he has been reassigned back to Washington, D.C. In the December 1939 FSJ , she describes the ordeal of relocating, including the many challenges of going “home.” THEFOREIGNSERVICEJOURNAL/ROBERTSTEVENS about the Foreign Service when she married John Emmerson in 1934. She was given explicit instructions to “wear a long dress—with train—long sleeves, high neck, hat, gloves, no white, no black” when she was to be presented to the Imperial Family of Japan in 1935. By complying with these instructions, she communicated a message of conformity, goodwill and an understanding of diplomatic protocol. Many wives keenly felt the pressure of the spotlight, which they often referred to as living in the “goldfish bowl” where “you’ve got to be so careful” to dress correctly, to do the right thing, to not offend anyone. As Elsie Lyon added, the wives also had to avoid “close ties with people in the Embassy or you’re playing favorites.” Managing family life. Yet there was a real camaraderie inside the American diplomatic corps. Wives regularly referred to the pre–World War II Foreign Service as “one big family” where “you sort of knew everybody.” Elsie Lyon understood better than most the importance of family in the Foreign Service. She and her sisters grew up in a Foreign Service family headed by Joseph and Alice Grew. All the Grew daughters married Foreign Service officers. Lyon’s sister Lilla Grew Moffat later remarked that growing up in the