The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2013 45 Molly M. Wood is a professor of history at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and a past president of the Ohio Academy of History. Her many articles about the history of the U.S. Foreign Service include “Diplomacy and Gossip: Information-Gathering in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1900-1940,” which will be published in the forthcoming book, When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in United States History; and “‘Commanding Beauty’ and ‘Gentle Charm’: American Women and Gender in the Early Twentieth Century Foreign Service”( Diplomatic History, June 2007). Her article in the June 2005 issue of the Journal of Women’s History, “Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and ‘the Social Game’ in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905-1941,” was reprinted in 2007 in Ten Best American History Essays . She is currently completing a book manuscript, The Women and Men of the U.S. Foreign Service, 1890-1940: A Social and Cultural History of Diplomatic Representation. This article is based on the recently opened Lucile Atcherson Curtis Papers at The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. A Schlesinger Library Research Grant funded her initial research in this collection, and she wishes to acknowledge the Schlesinger Library for permission to quote from those papers. War in Europe Frederick W. Atcherson tolerated his daughter’s work for the suffrage organization, up to a point. But when he con- cluded that she was becoming too involved, he decided to distract her by arranging a five-month European tour for Atch- erson and her mother, even though it was a financial strain for the family. Her father’s strategy backfired, however. Not only Smith College. It was expensive for the family, and a long way from home, but her parents accepted the recommendation. Thinking back on those years, Atcherson, who was consid- erably younger than most of the other students, recalled being homesick much of the time, but also felt that the experience at Smith “opened, in a new way,” the world to her. There she studied economics, French, German, Latin, political science and sociology, among other subjects. After graduating in 1913, at age 19, she returned to her family home in Columbus, admitting, “I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do.” Initially she considered nursing, but her father insisted that she was still too young to attend nursing school. Then, shortly after her return to Columbus, she received a call from the wife of an Oberlin College professor, Mrs. Albert S. Wolfe. Wolfe was working with other local women for woman suffrage, and had co-founded the Franklin County (Ohio) Woman Suffrage Organization. The established women of the Franklin County organiza- tion were on the lookout for younger women to engage in their work. Seeing a notice in the newspaper about Atcherson’s recent graduation from Smith College, they surmised that she might be looking for something to do. Atcherson had been exposed to the woman suffrage movement while at Smith, though she had not been especially active. However, she agreed to volunteer at the Suffrage Association in Columbus in the summer of 1913. Some of the contacts she made there would aid her immensely when she began lobbying for a Foreign Service appointment in the early 1920s. She later observed of her suffrage work that she had appreciated being in all “kinds of circles where there are all kinds of women.” Like so many of her peers, Atcherson benefitted from extensive woman-to- woman networking. Lucile Atcherson, the first female FSO, December 1922. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division