The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

64 NOVEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FEATURE BY METTE O. BEECROF T Mette Beecroft joined the State Department as a spouse in 1971. She began volunteering for the Association of American Foreign Service Women (AAFSW, now renamed Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide), as part of a movement to open an office focusing on family member is- sues—the Family Liaison Office. Her first paid job with the State Department began in 1978, when she was selected as the first deputy director of the newly established FLO. Mette has worked as a community liaison office coordinator in Bonn, Cairo, Oua- gadougou, Amman and Brussels, where she received a Superior Honor Award for her work. She also worked for 16 years as a program officer in the department’s division of travel and trans- portation. As a retiree, she continues to volunteer with AAFSW. O n March 1, the Family Liaison Office celebrated its 40th anniversary as a full-fledged operational component of the Department of State. The occasion is noteworthy on several counts. Designed to provide much- needed support to Foreign Service family members, FLO established an entirely new and vital function at the The Family Liaison Office Making a World of Difference for 40 Years U.S. Department of State. As significant, it was arguably the only time that a volunteer organization (in this case the Association of American Foreign Service Women, or AAFSW) succeeded in changing the structure of the State bureaucracy. More recent Foreign Service entrants may understandably assume that the Family Liaison Office has always existed. They may find it difficult to believe that at the outset, there was con- siderable opposition to establishing it at all. My husband became a Foreign Service officer in 1971, so I still remember life before the FLO and can only marvel at what the office has become. FLO’s current capacity and effectiveness are the achievement of generations of FLO employees, each building on the achieve- ments of their predecessors’ work on behalf of the Foreign Ser- vice community. Here is some of that less-well-known history. The “Old” Foreign Service Prior to the 1970s, little attention was paid to the welfare of Foreign Service family members. The role of the wife was specifi- cally and narrowly defined. A passage in The Diplomat’s Wife , a book of helpful advice for wives of American Foreign Service officers written by Richard Fyfe Boyce in 1956, sums up the old order: “One of the wife’s most constant preoccupations should be to assist the wife of her chief (sic) at all times and in every way possible. They may ask you to take part in charitable benefits,