Historians largely recognize the implications of gender on foreign relations. Many acknowledge and critique the limited variety of actors within the narrative of US foreign policy, recognizing that it is a topic dominated by white, male elites. These identities mark foreign relations and therefore leave implications on the implementation and interpretation of policy. According to Philip E. Muehlenbeck, this understanding of identity as central is unsurprising considering that “gender and sexuality reside at the center of human relations, identities, and practices” (Muehlenbeck 3).

Gender as a factor of foreign relations has been little studied in recent decades, but important contributions have been made. Kirsten Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood is a defining work in the field that understands gender as a motivational force in foreign relations. The text argues that US conceptions of manhood in the early twentieth century contributed to a militant US foreign policy and the cause of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. Conceptions of “chivalry” and “honor” were deployed to encourage American men to participate in the conflicts. Hoganson also highlights the role of paternalism in shaping American perceptions of their relationship to both Cuba and the Philippines. Hoganson’s account demonstrates how gender roles affect multiple facets of US foreign relationships, including policy creation, deployment, and in the interpretation by the public.

Other scholars have noted the role of the male gender and paternalism in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, Mary A. Renda’s Taking Haiti emphasizes paternalism as a tool of US policy toward Haiti. Conceptions of gender within Haiti and paternalistic sentiments in the US military marked the US occupation of the nation through the interwar period. While these types of analyses are not widely used, these historians demonstrate the significance of gender in the formation of foreign relations.

Historians of the Cold War call for a greater examination of gender within their own field with little literature on the topic. Domestic understandings of gender have been researched within the context of social roles and sexuality in the early Cold War. According to Helen Laville, the status of women in society became a point of contention between the US and USSR. While Soviet women’s ability to work acted as an example of their economic and political equality, the US championed the “domesticity” and “consumerism” of American housewives (Laville 524). In addition, these conceptions of the female gender affected American understandings of sexuality, something widely discussed in David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare.

Robert D. Dean, while advocating for greater study of gender in foreign relations, puts this into practice. In Imperial Brotherhood, Dean examines how “highly educated men, who prided themselves on their hard-headed pragmatism, men who shunned ‘fuzzy-mined’ idealism,” led the United States into a “futile” war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. For Dean, the “magnitude of the disaster […] raises questions about reason and decision making among the elite men who made policy” (Dean, 1). The decisions that policymakers make are not made in an “abstract realm of reasoned calculation of ‘national interest’”, according to Dean. We should instead assume that “the men who make the decisions are complex, socially constructed beings, who act from a repertoire of possibilities that area product of their experience.” It is important to understand that “[f]oreign policy reason too, is thus culturally constructed and reproduced” (Dean, 3). In calling for a more nuanced approach to analyzing gender in foreign relations, Dean acknowledges that there are biographies, memoirs, and analyses of political culture that depict an “obsession with ‘toughness’ and the use of a sexualized language of competition and dominance among men who contended for power within the American electoral system and within the foreign policy bureaucracy” (Dean, 3-4). But despite decades of feminist scholarship, gendered policy has still not been systematically explored (Dean, 4).

Dean importantly points out the historical dynamic within the State Department, but particularly in the early postwar period. An “establishment” that dominated US foreign policy in this period was composed of “men who shared strikingly similar patterns of education, socialization, and, in many cases, class background.” A masculine political identity that was based on so-called “toughness”, brotherhood, and their power and privilege shaped Cold War relations (Dean 4-5). While Dean provides a critical analysis of how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations policies toward Vietnam were marked with gendered understandings, this project similarly analyzes officials’ understandings of gender toward Latin America. Through this case study, we shall see how these social constructs are only one part of the limitations of this research project.

This project is situated at the intersection of the recent emphasis on gender in foreign relations and the accelerating interest in textual analysis in the digital humanities. Whereas these previous works have relied on close readings of official documents, personal writings, and more, this work relies on distant reading. While this project utilizes very traditional diplomatic sources, it incorporates recent shifts in both fields to provide a new look at policymakers’ perceptions of Cold War relations.

Pleas see this page to read more on how I analyze gender in the FRUS corpus, which is based on word vector models created with this code.