(C) U.S. State Dept
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Blazing a trail: U.S. women ambassadors mark 75 years [1]
['Noelani Kirschner']
Date: 2024-10-28 21:18:11+00:00
Seventy-five years ago Eugenie Moore Anderson was appointed to represent the United States’ diplomatic interests in Denmark, becoming the first woman to serve as a U.S. ambassador.
As an ambassador, Anderson would also serve on U.S. delegations to Bulgaria and the United Nations and develop a personal style she described as “people’s diplomacy.”
“In a profession then dominated by men, [Anderson] defied the odds to make a lasting mark on U.S.-European relations in the aftermath of World War II,” says the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
An interest in international affairs
Born and raised in Iowa, Anderson attended Carleton College in Minnesota, where she met John Anderson, whom she married in 1931. With a budding interest in international affairs, she traveled to Europe in 1937, amid Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and became “suddenly really afraid of what was happening there and of the menace that this represented for [her] country too.”
She returned home and joined the League of Women Voters in Minnesota, where she became a vocal supporter of international diplomacy and, later, the formation of the United Nations.
After President Harry Truman appointed Anderson U.S. ambassador to Denmark in October 1949, she learned Danish so she could travel the country and speak to Danish people in her self-styled “people’s diplomacy.” She established a Fulbright exchange program with Denmark to expand understanding and friendly relations between the countries.
Anderson negotiated a mutual defense agreement and signed the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the countries, becoming the first American woman to sign a treaty.
In 1960, President John F. Kennedy appointed Anderson U.S. minister to Bulgaria, where she papered the U.S. mission’s windows with pictures to show U.S. life and culture to Bulgarians who passed by. In 1965, Anderson was appointed U.S. delegate to the United Nations’ Trusteeship Council and supported newly independent countries in Africa and Asia.
Anderson’s legacy
Since Anderson’s time, hundreds of women have served as U.S. ambassadors. Today, one-third of all U.S. ambassadors are women. (The share of other countries’ top diplomats who are women is also on the rise in recent decades.)
The many women diplomats who have followed Anderson have brought “a diversity of ideas, of solution-making and a different way of connecting to audiences,” says U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie Chung.
A career U.S. foreign service officer, Chung has served in U.S. embassies in Colombia, Iraq and Vietnam. She regularly meets other women ambassadors. “We think about ways we can empower young diplomats, young entrepreneurs and Sri Lankan women,” she says. “I love my job.”
“I wouldn’t be where I am, or the person I am,” says Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, “without trailblazers like Eugenie Moore Anderson.”
Thomas-Greenfield says she also thinks often “of leaders like Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and most of all, my mother — all of whom taught [me] to step forward, be bold and dream big.”
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[1] Url:
https://share.america.gov/blazing-trail-us-women-ambassadors-mark-75-years/
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