7. Women at work in the League of Nations Secretariat

Susan Pedersen

When Dame Rachel Crowdy speculated, many years later, about how she came to be appointed the only woman to head a section in the Secretariat of the League of Nations, she had few illusions about how it probably happened. She could easily picture the scene, she said: a committee of tired men eager for their luncheon, a list of unfamiliar female names. Hers was near the top of the alphabet; she had a reputation for capably organizing volunteer workers in wartime; nothing certain was known against her. Why not just appoint her and go off to eat?¹

It is impossible to know whether this is indeed how Crowdy got her job, but this story does rather capture the peculiar relationship of women to the League of Nations. Women were within the League and outside it. They had to be included, but most male politicians assumed only in small numbers and only in restricted spheres. In 1919, the great international women’s organizations had pressed peacemakers to include the ‘women’s work’ of social reconstruction in the League’s mandate and to give them a full role in that work.² That pressure was successful, for the League Covenant did include the obligation to combat the traffic in women and to promote social welfare; equally importantly, it stipulated that all positions in the new organization would be open equally to men and women. In 1919, then, the women’s organizations had been given an opening, and they intended to take advantage of it, believing that the League could be a vehicle for fostering feminist reforms and feminist networks around the globe.

It would be easy to dismiss that optimism of 1919, for those hopes were only very partially fulfilled. But we would be wrong to do so, for if women remained a minority presence in Geneva, their visibility – at the Assembly, in committees and on commissions, and in the Secretariat – nonetheless marked a minor diplomatic revolution, a sea-change in the practice of international politics that could never quite be undone. That presence was a crucial aspect of what journalists at the time called ‘the spirit of Geneva’ – a spirit at once pragmatic, cosmopolitan and hopeful – that undergirded the League’s work. That spirit had two high points: the immediate post-war period, when the League was at once at its most disorganized and its most visionary, its staff and supporters intervening to address the cholera epidemic and refugee crisis in Russia and Poland and the financial collapse in Austria; and the Locarno period of the mid- to late twenties, when Germany joined the League, the United States signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and hopes for permanent peace ran high. Those two moments delimit the period of women’s greatest incorporation into the League – a period that coincided with Crowdy’s leadership of the Social Section. Matters deteriorated thereafter, but women remained a striking presence at the Palais des Nations in the 1930s, especially when we remember that women were still at that time barred from the Foreign Office in Britain and voteless in France.

Historians are now recovering the place of women in that League landscape. That work is still fragmentary – it is found mostly in dissertations and journal articles, book chapters and biographies – but it is growing. Driving that scholarship is the question of whether and how internationalism could be a vehicle for feminist progress: scholars have thus focused especially on the construction and activism of transnational feminist, humanitarian and pacifist movements and lobbies, and on the various League initiatives and offices they sought to influence.³ We know less, however, about the scope and content of women’s work as officials – as cogs in the machinery of internationalism, one might say, rather than as supplicants beating on its doors. So, while this chapter surveys women’s presence across the League landscape, it concentrates on women who became paid members of its Secretariat (and whose personnel files are available in the League archives in Geneva), and especially on that cohort of British secretaries, précis-writers, translators and typists who talked their way into its ranks in the immediate post-war years and remained in Geneva, often in vital if unobtrusive roles, for much of the following two decades. Despite their small numbers, those female officials mattered, not only because of the innovative practices a few – especially Crowdy – built into this still malleable international institution, but also for the way in which they pioneered a change in the culture of work.

Women representatives on League bodies

Before turning to those women officials, let me briefly sketch the landscape of the League, noting the occasional clusters of women within it. Although the League of Nations was much smaller, less well funded and more dominated by the European states than was the United Nations, its structure foreshadowed that later organization. At its apex were two representative bodies. One was the League Council (similar to the Security Council today), which met four times a year and was capable of swift executive action; all the great Allied powers of the First World War, apart from the United States (that is, Britain, France, Italy and Japan), were permanent, and often dominant, members. The second was the League Assembly, like the United Nations General Assembly a more outspoken, idealistic and publicity-conscious body, which met once a year for approximately three weeks in September. Each member state had one vote at the Assembly but could send up to three delegates, along with experts and substitutes. Yet the day-to-day work of the League depended less on the Council and the Assembly than on the Secretariat, a permanent civil service of some 600 officials of all nationalities, theoretically owing their allegiance to the League alone, and on the numerous technical committees and commissions established to devise and promote particular policy agendas. The International Labour Office was formally autonomous, but the League included many other specialized bodies – on trafficking, trade, transit, health, slavery, intellectual cooperation, film, disarmament, mandates and so forth – which were convened at intervals to draft conventions, assess progress, or advise the Council or the Assembly.

It will not surprise anyone to learn that as we move down the ladder of institutional power and prestige, the women become thicker on the ground. The League Council remained a virtual masculine preserve. Only one woman set foot in the Council in its entire history – this was the Soviet Union’s Alexandra Kollontai – and she was there only for a single session and at a point when the Council had ceased to be a significant force. By contrast, quite a few women, more than fifty overall, served as national delegates to the Assembly, albeit often as substitutes and many only once. About 20 per cent of member states – the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, Canada, Romania, Hungary and Lithuania – routinely included one woman (it would have been unheard of to include two), but they deployed those women differently. Distant and democratic Australia and Canada regularly appointed a woman, but almost always a different one each year, clearly viewing the chance to attend the Assembly as a favour to be shared as widely as possible among activist women. Thus, although Australian and Canadian female delegates were able to use their international moment as a form of political capital back home, they had little impact on the League itself.⁴

At the other end of the spectrum were the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, which, while almost always including a woman in their delegations, tended to appoint the same very prominent woman year after year. Denmark’s Henni Forchhammer, president of the Danish National Council of Women, attended fifteen assemblies; Clasine Kluyver of the Dutch National Council of Women attended eleven; the Swedish lawyer, social reformer and feminist Anna Bugge Wicksell attended eight; after Wicksell’s death, the Swedish liberal politician Kerstin Hesselgren attended a further eight. Norway also subscribed to this pattern, sending the prominent zoology professor and women’s rights activist Kristine Bonnevie to the first five Assemblies and the medical doctor Ingeborg Aas to a further seven. These women – well educated, sometimes single, with professional positions and strong reputations – became a fixture at the assemblies, setting a standard for the competence and international spirit of both women and the Nordic countries from an early date. Also a fixture, although embodying a different tradition of titled women’s responsibility for philanthropic work and cultural life, were three long-serving Eastern European women: the Countess Apponyi of Hungary, president for three decades of the Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary and wife of its most important international politician; Sofija Čiurlionis, literary figure and wife of the Lithuanian artist M. K. Čiurlionis; and Hélène Vacaresco, the Francophone Romanian literary exile and internationalist who attended eighteen assemblies.

Revealingly, no great power allowed an individual woman to play such an important role in the formal representative structures of the League. France, Germany, Italy and Japan appointed no women to their delegations – although, admittedly, a few glamorous aristocratic salonnières like Anna de Noailles or Marthe Bibesco came to Geneva for the Assemblies and kept a kind of Francophile female influence in play. Britain trod something of a middle course. It was the only great power routinely to include women in its delegations, but its appointees were usually well-connected party women with reputations in the voluntary sector rather than – as with the Scandinavians – women who had made their name in pacifist or feminist causes. Edith Lyttelton, acolyte in the rarified coterie clustered around A. J. Balfour in the 1890s and later active in a host of women’s imperialist and philanthropic causes, was repeatedly named as a substitute delegate by the Conservatives in the 1920s; in the 1930s, good party women like Florence Horsbrugh took over this role.

All delegates and substitute delegates were named to one of the Assembly’s six committees, and it will surprise no one to learn that the women were all, as Louise Weiss put it, relegated to ‘the trifles of the fifth commission’, to discuss women, children and social problems.⁵ Their gender overrode other claims to expertise: thus, despite Helena Swanwick’s capacious knowledge of European politics and arms control, she was made responsible for questions relating to women and children when she was appointed by the 1924 Labour government. Yet even though women were a small part of the Assembly and sidelined into social issues, in that area they unquestionably made a mark, routinely speaking up in favour of what was thought of as a ‘forward policy’ by the League on humanitarian and social questions. It is true, of course, that those activist women partook – as did the League more generally – of a civilizational rhetoric that presumed it was the job of Western states and Western women to raise standards in what even Crowdy unabashedly called ‘more backward’ countries. Yet it is also true that the porous, multivalent processes of the League could be used to challenge that paternalism – as Arab women did, for example, by presenting petitions against British and French administration of their homelands or by demanding the inclusion of ‘Eastern women’ in any expert body set up to look into the legal status of women.⁶

It is when we move from the formal bodies of the League into those commissions and committees that we begin to see women exercising a more significant role.⁷ That role was made possible very largely by the decision – taken by the first Assembly – to allow the burgeoning ‘technical’ committees of the League to appoint experts or ‘assessors’ as non-voting members. It’s hard to overstate how innovative and important this was. While a few League bodies included women members as a matter of course (Marie Curie on the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, for example), most of the commissions or committees dealing with the so-called non-political or technical issues – health, transit, welfare, opium, trafficking, refugees, slavery, mandates and so forth – were composed of members appointed by specific states. Since almost no state was willing to name a woman as the sole guardian of their interests, those commissions could easily have ended up entirely male (although the Scandinavians did sometimes come to the rescue, at one point using their ‘slot’ to appoint Anna Bugge Wicksell as the sole woman on the Permanent Mandates Commission). However, by allowing those commissions to appoint ‘assessors’, the Assembly made it possible to insert not a single tame or token woman but rather a phalanx of activist and committed women into committees composed of male political appointees. Indeed, it may have been Rachel Crowdy’s irritation at the prospect of trying to mount an effective campaign against, say, the traffic in women with a committee composed of a dozen or so men appointed by states sometimes notorious for their laxity on the question that turned her into such a strong advocate for the inclusion of assessors. For it was stipulated and considered quite natural that those assessors would come from the great international organizations with long records of humanitarian intervention – from the Red Cross, Save the Children, the International Vigilance Association, the combined International Women’s Organizations and so on, some of which set up headquarters in Geneva and came to function as a sort of second-order Secretariat.

The assessor system gave feminists too outspoken ever to have been appointed as government representatives access to the valuable networks and resources of the League: Eleanor Rathbone, although unable to win any British party’s backing for her campaign for family allowances, used her position as assessor on the Child Welfare Committee to amass information about programmes in other countries and generate support for her cause.⁸ This system also enabled key American women to take part as experts in the League’s social work, even though the US was not a League member. In 1928, the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women included not only such important feminists as Germany’s Gertrud Bäumer and France’s Avril de Sainte-Croix but also the US director of the Children’s Bureau, Grace Abbott. Abbott and Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save the Children Fund, were two of the eight women on the Advisory Committee on Child Welfare.⁹ Well versed in their subject, and with independent sources of information and support, these women could usually out-argue the national representatives, and – now with the possibility of securing American funds for particular projects as well – could sometimes force a much more activist stance on committees than would otherwise have been adopted. Abbott argued that any worthwhile inquiry into trafficking must rely not on self-reporting by governments but on information gathered by an impartial expert travelling commission. That commission, funded by the American Bureau of Social Hygiene and not by the League, produced the first landmark study of international trafficking.

Even from this brief sketch, it’s possible to see some patterns emerging. Despite being clustered in adjunct and advisory roles, women were able to take advantage of flexible League structures and pre-existing networks to maximize their impact on a few areas of League work – primarily child welfare and trafficking, but to some extent also refugees, health and opium control. The fact that the same woman often inhabited multiple roles made them more effective. Anna Bugge Wicksell was one of the Swedish delegates to the Assembly, a member of the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission and an officer in a number of Swedish and Scandinavian women’s organizations; Norway’s Kristine Bonnevie was an Assembly delegate, a member of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and an officer in various Norwegian civil and educational bodies; Uruguay’s Paulina Luisi was a key figure in League bodies aimed at suppressing trafficking and in international and national women’s organizations, and had served once as a delegate.¹⁰ Such overlapping positions meant that ideas worked out in women’s organizations flowed easily to League advisory bodies, and then on to the Assembly floor; alternatively, women could rise in the Assembly to urge the League to undertake investigations or back policies which they would then have a role in implementing.

If this web of relationships was to function effectively, however, it needed one further thing: the sympathetic support of key figures within the League administration itself. These did not have to be women, of course: in practice, however, it is striking how much of the women’s agenda at the League, especially in the first decade, depended for coordination and support on the Secretariat’s tiny, underfunded Social Section, and particularly on the imagination and capacity of one woman – its chief, Dame Rachel Crowdy. Crowdy’s role deserves special attention for she not only played a crucial if forgotten role in the establishment of perhaps the League’s most successful body, its Health Organization, but also put in place many of the mechanisms (those assessors and commissions) that helped to compensate for women’s marginal position within the formal, state-centered structure of the League.¹¹ Crowdy left the Secretariat – or rather, was forced out – in 1930, but some of the mechanisms she had put in place survive: indeed, in some small measure, the important statutory role for women’s non-governmental organizations that has continued to this day is Crowdy’s legacy. Yet Crowdy’s experience at the League, although important, was also ambiguous: although effective in feminist terms, she was marginalized bureaucratically. Her story, then, is illuminating not only for what it can tell us about women’s activism in Geneva but also for what it can tell us about a rather different subject – the struggle of women for a full place in the bureaucracy of the League itself.¹²

Women in the League Secretariat

For the half-century after the League’s demise, the League Secretariat attracted little scholarly attention. Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s standard book-length study from 1945 remained the only comprehensive account.¹³ But the personnel files of the some 3,000 men and women who worked in the Secretariat are now attracting new attention, and while these files are circumspect and indeed sometimes deceptive about political conflicts, they are deeply revealing of the work culture and gendered assumptions that structured the League’s everyday life.¹⁴ No other woman played as critical a role in that bureaucracy as Crowdy: she was the only woman ever to head a section and indeed the only woman able to influence League policy directly. However, a small number of women served in the institution’s administrative ranks and hundreds in its clerical staff, and, for several reasons, a high proportion of those women were British. How did they come to those positions, what did they do, and what might their experiences tell us about the changing culture of internationalism in this period?

Let us return to the summer of 1919, those months when the creation of the League had been agreed, but it had not yet been formally brought into being. Sir Maurice Hankey, the British Cabinet Secretary, had been approached about whether he might like to be the first League Secretary-General but had decided that coordinating the Committee on Imperial Defence was a bigger job; the position went to Sir Eric Drummond, a Foreign Office official and aristocratic younger son who had been Balfour’s personal secretary at the peace conference. Drummond was a cautious, deliberate soul, but he had his moment of daring that May, when he accepted this new post and decided that the League Secretariat should be composed not of officials seconded from national administrations (as Hankey had imagined) but of genuinely international civil servants, a group of ‘really capable men and women of broad vision and flexible mind’, who would ‘divest themselves of national preoccupations and devote themselves wholeheartedly to the service of the League’.¹⁵ Note the inclusion of women in that statement.

When it came to hiring the first Secretariat members, however, it was as if those sexually inclusive sentiments had never existed. In the summer and autumn of 1919, Drummond set up shop in temporary rooms in Sunderland House near Whitehall and began hiring staff – that is, hiring men. He turned, first of all, to those inter-allied organizations that had been set up to regulate shipping and raw materials during the war, placing the directors of those bodies, together with a number of Anglophile Allied diplomats who had spent the war years in London, at the head of the emerging League sections. Jean Monnet, the economist Arthur Salter and Norway’s Erik Colban, all of whom had worked for inter-allied coordination, became respectively Deputy Secretary-General, director of the economic section and director of the minorities section; Paul Mantoux, a professor and historian who had acted as a translator at the Peace Conference, was to head up the political section. Drummond also began hiring ‘members of section’, those officials one rung down from the directors, who were expected to do most of the responsible work of the League, and looked mostly to bright young men recommended by friends in Whitehall – thus transferring to Geneva the British civil service preference for a ‘type’ the Secretariat’s first historian aptly termed the ‘boyish master’ rather than the ‘dignified mandarin’ of continental administrations.¹⁶ Yet Drummond was also deluged by applications from women candidates and, in the end, hired some of them. Who were these women and where did they come from?

Some were the assistants and secretaries of men hired from wartime posts. Monnet, Colban, Salter and Drummond himself had come during the war to rely on their intelligent, capable English secretaries, and when they moved to Geneva they brought those women – or other women very like them – with them. In London in 1919 there was a vast pool of experienced women administrators and office workers, mostly aged between late twenties and early forties, eager for work. The wartime expansion in government services, coupled with the drive to release men for the trenches, had increased the number of women employed in the British civil service from about 60,000 to almost 230,000; at the war’s end, women made up more than 56 per cent of the British civil service. True, most of those women were confined to routine clerical work and certainly to lower official job categories, but as the war dragged on more responsible tasks necessarily fell into women’s hands. There were plenty of stenographers and typists, of course, but the female career office worker – someone more likely to be organizing the office, doing research, handling confidential correspondence or writing memoranda or reports – also emerged as a feature of wartime life.

The moment of reconstruction cut short those women’s hopes of further professional advancement. Ironically, just as the government passed the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 – an act intended to allow women into previously closed professions, but which failed to achieve much of its ostensible purpose – the Treasury began planning ways to reduce its dependence on women. Meta Zimmeck has tracked this process of constriction, showing how the Treasury’s preference for ex-servicemen, its reimposition of the marriage bar (the requirement that women resign on marriage) and its adherence to separate job categories and promotion ladders for women and men forced women out. By 1928, before the Depression hit, the number of women staff had been cut to under 75,000, and the civil service was, once again, 75 per cent per cent male.¹⁷

For some women who had found in the war years new opportunities for interesting and politically worthwhile work, this steady effort to curb their chances must have been a tremendous disappointment. For many, too, it was economically catastrophic, for the war that had scythed down potential marriage partners also halved the value of those private incomes that had enabled so many middle- or upper-class women to devote themselves to social work and voluntary organizations in the Edwardian years. More middle-class women now needed to work. Some could turn, of course, to the usual paid professions – teaching, social work – but some were drawn to politics. Women were now (if aged over thirty) voters and understandably wanted a share in building (and widening women’s place within) that ‘country for heroes’ Lloyd George and other politicians had so rashly promised. The expanding bureaucracies of the political parties drew in some of these women, and local government others, but some – the most ambitious, idealistic, multilingual and willing to move – turned to Sir Eric Drummond, sitting in Sunderland House, and asked to join the Secretariat of the League of Nations.

It isn’t surprising that the League Secretariat looked attractive. Not only was the League – like war work – a great and idealistic cause, but it was also formally committed to the principle of gender equality. Thanks to that early feminist lobbying, all positions at the League were by statute open equally to men and women, and the Secretariat claimed (although practice was a bit murkier) to adhere to the principle of equal pay. Unlike the British civil service, the Secretariat had no marriage bar, and the League provided maternity leave and helped sustain an international school for the children of Secretariat officials. To top it off, salaries were relatively high, and for those relocating to Geneva from abroad were free of tax and supplemented by allowances for housing and travel. Moreover, while League positions were open to all nationalities, English was (with French) one of the two official languages, and the initial hiring of Secretariat staff took place in London, so Englishwomen had the edge when applying for posts. And indeed, quite a number of Englishwomen were hired. The League had a staff of over 300 by the time it moved, by special hired train, to Geneva in 1920, and within a few years the figure had climbed to over 600. Of that number, almost half were women – and, among those women, British women formed the largest national group.

This makes it all sound rather rosy; the reality was rather different. Of the hundreds of women who worked for the League Secretariat, almost all were clustered in the lower ranks. Over the course of the League’s life, only twenty-two women made it into the coveted First Division (a category that included the important leadership posts as well as those ‘members of section’ who did the core analytical, research and administrative work); the proportion of women among First Division staff never reached 10 per cent. That is not to say that most women worked in the smaller, locally recruited Third Division, the classification for the caretakers, lift and telephone operators, drivers and errand-runners responsible for physical plant. In fact, most women found themselves in the Second Division, which comprised approximately 57 per cent of all staff and was home to what was considered routine clerical and technical work – work, that is, thought to require a good educational standard and superior technical skills but not administrative ability or initiative. Unlike the First and Third Divisions, the Second Division was ‘overwhelmingly feminine’.¹⁸

But does this mean that the women who joined the Secretariat in 1919 and 1920 were confined to routine tasks? It does not. For what happened in practice is that Drummond filled as many of those desirable member of section positions as he thought he could reserve for British staff with highly recommended young men from Oxford, the Foreign Office and the liberal professions, and left his female assistant to explain apologetically to these capable women applicants that there were no more positions available – except, perhaps, temporary posts in the typing pool. Some women, sick of the war and eager for a change, took those offers, establishing from the outset the phenomenon – much noted by continental observers – that the League’s clerical staff, and especially its British contingent, was both socially more elite and educationally much better qualified than the office staff of any other national administration. (They had to be, Drummond admitted, for that bilingual secretarial staff had to work for – and sometimes cover up for – male superiors from a host of lands who not only had no experience of British administrative traditions but were sometimes not fluent in either of the League’s official languages.) Indeed, it is a sign of how many overqualified women there were in the League’s lower ranks that fully 75 per cent of the women who finally crawled their way up to member of section rank were promoted out of the Second or even the Third Division, compared to a mere 5 per cent of men who entered the First Division in this way. That some Englishwomen managed to climb this ladder is even more remarkable given Drummond’s sensitivity to complaints that the Secretariat was (as indeed it was) British- and French-dominated, and his reluctance, once in Geneva, to admit any more British and French staff to its upper ranks. Indeed, the creation in 1923 of an ‘Intermediate Class’ of better-paid but still formally Second Division positions may have been a strategy for accommodating some of those ostensible office workers doing what was quite obviously ‘administrative’ work. ¹⁹

The veneer of equal opportunity concealed, then, a rather more complex reality. All posts at the League were open to men and women, and pay was based on the rank of the job, not the sex of its holder. Yet even women with superior skills were usually first hired into the Second Division clerical ranks and had trouble advancing out of those ranks even when they found themselves doing ‘administrative’ and not ‘clerical’ work. Crowdy was well aware of these patterns. Women and men were paid equally when in positions of the same grade, she told one interlocutor, but they were not always in the grade appropriate to their skill or to the work they were doing.²⁰ She herself was a good example of this, for while she was one of the dozen or so section heads in the Secretariat, she was not given the rank of director held by many male section heads, but rather that of head of section – a rank that was, conveniently, remunerated at about 50 per cent of a director’s salary. It is a measure of just how incommensurate women’s administrative ranks were with the actual content of their jobs that often, when a woman left her post, her male replacement was unblushingly appointed at a much higher rank.

This pattern of women doing work beyond their grade holds all the way down the scale. Take the now well-known case of Mary McGeachy, a young Canadian woman who talked her way into a job with the Secretariat’s information section in 1928. McGeachy stayed at the League until 1940 and never climbed out of the Second Division, but she handled liaison work with women’s organizations and press work with Canada, attended conferences as a representative of both the League and the International Labour Organization, and made several speaking tours across Canada to explain the League’s work, in the course of which she briefed the Prime Minister and other Canadian politicians.²¹ Nor was this the most extreme case. That honour must surely go to Nancy Williams, a highly intelligent young woman with a first in classics from University College Wales, who, as a secretary to a member of parliament, had spent the war analysing secret telegrams from Russia and the Middle East and preparing briefs for the Air Minister. Williams was, she wrote in 1920 (then all of twenty-nine), ‘very keen on the idea of the League of Nations’, and when told there was no administrative post available, she accepted a position as a stenographer.²² Very quickly, and while still holding the formal rank of a Second Division clerk, Williams was running virtually the entire personnel side of the League. Only after many years did she succeed in being promoted to member of section, but when she finally left personnel, the Czech diplomat who replaced her was immediately accorded the elevated rank of director and a salary several times higher than the one she had been receiving.²³

Williams bore her anomalous status without complaint, but some did not. Take the case of Gertrude Dixon. Dixon had a DSc from King’s College, London, and had been working as a science teacher and biology lecturer when she took a job as assistant secretary to the wartime commission on wheat supplies. Before long, she found herself staffing the inter-allied wheat executive and helping with the work of the Supreme Economic Council during the Peace Conference – work which landed her the job of private secretary to Deputy Secretary-General Jean Monnet. She stayed at the League when Monnet left but found it irritating to be placed under one of those golf-playing good chaps Drummond so liked to appoint. After threatening to resign, she took over the editing of the League of Nations Official Journal and by 1922 was responsible for the final checking of a good many crucial League Council and Assembly documents.²⁴ Her protest to Drummond in 1922 that she was doing work easily as complex as that of a member of section (a claim hard to dispute) was unavailing; not until 1929, when both the head of the French précis-writing section and the Italian under-secretary at the League objected that Dixon was doing much more responsible work than most officials far outranking her, was she made a ‘Member of Section, Class B’.²⁵ She had, her supervisor pointed out:

great intelligence, an unusually keen mind; a complete mastery of Committee work, and the gift, when translating speakers’ corrections into English, of guessing what they meant to say even though they might have written in broken, chaotic French; a firm sense of method and order; extraordinary speed in thought and execution; great presence of mind in days and nights of rush.²⁶

Anyone who has used those League document series and marvelled at their accurate and literate prose has Dixon to thank – not least because she did a First Division job at Second Division rank and pay for a decade.

Or consider Constance Harris, who joined the Secretariat in 1919 as – despite her Oxford degree – a shorthand typist, and ran the office of the minorities section to the ‘entire satisfaction’ of its demanding director, Erik Colban, for many years.²⁷ Or Jean Howard, Drummond’s secretary and gate-keeper – faultless, organized, feared by the younger staff; even the imperturbable Drummond wrote that she might ‘perhaps usefully remember that no-one is always right’.²⁸ Or Phyllis Horne, hired as a stenographer but by 1924 acting as the office administrator for the entire economic section; pleas by its director, Arthur Loveday, to raise her grade were turned down.²⁹ Or Nina Spiller, French by birth, English by marriage, who joined the secretariat in 1920 as the secretary of Paul Mantoux and remained as secretary of the political section until 1934. Her position, the League under-secretary admitted, was not challenging enough for someone of her intelligence, but given her nationality (English, given the marriage laws) and the virtual freeze on promotions, she never moved to a better post.³⁰ More successful was Lady Mary Blennerhassett, who joined the Secretariat as a translator in 1919. Blennerhassett had, it seems, perfect English, French, German and Italian, capable Spanish and Portuguese, and – her deceased husband having been a political officer in India – a bit of Hindi. Within a year, her Italian supervisor protested to Drummond that since she was his best translator she should certainly be given the same rate of pay as the men, and this time Drummond (who had a soft spot for titles) agreed.³¹ Blennerhassett was promoted in 1932 to head the English interpreters’ section, in which post she raised its high standards even higher. ‘As a woman in charge of a section consisting largely of men’, her 1932 evaluation stated, ‘her success is worthy of note.’³²

Cogs in a now defunct machine, these women have been forgotten, but they led consequential lives. Although not treated equally, they worked for the League as equals and more than equals, in the process widening the roles open to women and changing – incompletely but significantly – the culture of work. Their presence made it possible for women to craft the sorts of back channels that men had always enjoyed, with women delegates and assessors relying on female officials to smooth their way in Geneva. The relative social equality of the First and Second Division staff fostered cross-sex friendships, collaborations and indeed sexual liaisons – those products of the excitement and attraction that are always generated when men and women work at high pressure together. It’s thought Crowdy had a liaison with Lord Robert Cecil’s right-hand man (and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate), Philip Noel-Baker, and McGeachy with the leftist firebrand Konni Zilliacus, but these relationships do not seem to have affected their workplace reputations. They socialized easily with men, but – like many of their male co-workers – they were in some sense married to the League.

Women officials under pressure

All marriages have their tensions, however. Women had secured a place in Geneva at a moment of transnational enthusiasm for peace and progress, but they held that ground through administrative capacity, not idealism. That was to be expected: the problem was that, once the Depression hit and liberal internationalism was forced on the defensive, feminism (or even femaleness) began to be viewed in Geneva almost as a liability. The international women’s organizations were formally affiliated to the League, and the Secretariat routinely dispatched a liaison to some feminist international meetings. (This was often Gabrielle Radziwill, a well-connected, multilingual officer in the press section who, as the only nominal Lithuanian in the Secretariat and pleasingly a princess to boot, could be promoted to a rank commensurate with her duties.) But could an international official be a feminist and a social reformer – or did a fervent commitment to sexual equality or ‘progress’ transgress the requirement of political impartiality? Drummond, who had the thankless task of trying to keep in check the progressive ‘Fascistization’ of the Italians within the Secretariat, pragmatically (but, for women, very unfortunately) increasingly saw the League as a tool of inter-state diplomacy, rather than of Covenant-driven activism, and looked askance at political enthusiasms of all kinds.³³ Thus in 1933, when Nina Spiller asked to be allowed to attend the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance as a delegate for the Women’s Freedom League rather than as an observer, Drummond wondered anxiously whether the position of delegate was ‘consistent with membership of the Secretariat’. Only after consulting with the legal section and securing a promise that she not discuss any matters under consideration by the League did he allow it.³⁴

Not surprisingly, though, it was Rachel Crowdy herself who transgressed Drummond’s increasingly conservative view of the international official’s role the most, and paid the price for it. Crowdy had always conceived of her role as to promote the League Covenant, not simply to reconcile various governments’ opinions, and her forceful presence and innovative practices could not but discomfit Drummond. Crowdy’s personnel file at the League contains not only Drummond’s schoolmasterly reprimands about the faulty drafting of some Social Section documents but also explicit warnings to Crowdy not to try to force ‘a forward policy … on Governments or Delegations which are opposed to it’.³⁵ Crowdy was not willing to take such criticisms lying down. In a remarkable letter written in July 1929, she insisted that, while she was certainly trying to educate public opinion in ‘the most backward countries’, the most she could be accused of was of not working to retard progress, which some of the national delegates clearly wished her to do. She also criticized Drummond directly. During the war in France, she pointed out, she had been responsible for some 4,000 to 5,000 nurses organized in 170 units, had hired and supervised a capable staff, and had enjoyed the complete support and confidence of her chief; at the League, by contrast, her hopes of running her own show had been ‘bitterly disappointed’. Initially, she had been given no staff, and then only incompetent assistants who for political reasons she had not been allowed to fire; not until 1928 did she have, finally, an adequate deputy and a loyal, competent staff.³⁶

By that point, however, Drummond had already decided to let her go. Her formal contract, agreed in the summer of 1922, was for a seven-year term, and in August 1928 Drummond told Crowdy it would not be renewed. His letter included a long rationalization of what was, essentially, a sacking. It was in the interests of the League for top positions to turn over, he wrote, and while he had prolonged the contracts of a few senior officials he considered essential, in her case ‘I fear … both the nature of the duties and the nationality favour a termination’.³⁷ Crowdy was shocked, and the international women’s and humanitarian organizations for whom she was a critical liaison were outraged. They deluged the League with telegrams and letters pleading to extend her contract – or at least to replace her with another woman.³⁸ If anyone thought such tactics likely to soften Drummond’s heart, they could not have been more wrong. In a conciliatory gesture, he extended Crowdy’s contract for a single year, then replaced her (at higher rank and salary) with a Swedish diplomat not noted for his enthusiasm.

Crowdy’s departure was a serious blow to the international women’s organizations, who had found in her a ready collaborator. After her departure, Secretariat officials would work to limit their access and sever those ties, in particular by curbing the powers and number of ‘assessors’ on the social committees, the position through which philanthropic and humanitarian women had most influenced League policy.³⁹ Crowdy’s dismissal also diminished women’s standing in the Secretariat itself, for no woman would hold such a high office again. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, women’s position in Geneva steadily deteriorated. All the trends of the 1930s were against them. The pioneers of 1919 were ageing; increasingly right-wing governments had little interest in progressive causes and even less in appointing women; and considerable pressure was put on the Secretariat not to favour the appointment of British officials. Women officials who retired or resigned were not replaced by women.

Drummond, however, did not simply purge his female staff – unlike his indolent French successor as Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, who, living with his English mistress in the Secretary-General’s opulent mansion, exercised his animus against those professional, energetic, very competent and now middle-aged British women who were the administrative backbone of the League. Avenol bore grudges and never forgot a slight, and he appears to have taken pleasure in cutting the number of women in the First Division sharply in the first five years of his disastrous reign.⁴⁰ In quick succession he told the formidable Jean Howard she was now redundant,⁴¹ put through a staff reorganization that made the outspoken feminist Nina Spiller’s position obsolete,⁴² terminated the contract (it seems) of the brilliant and dedicated Nancy Williams on grounds of ill health⁴³ and sacked Gertrude Dixon in an economy drive.⁴⁴ Not even Lady Blennerhassett survived.⁴⁵ Well before the massive lay-offs of 1939–40 that reduced the League Secretariat to a shadow of itself, many of the senior women officials were gone. They went quietly: certainly, none threatened – as the left-wing socialist and League official Konni Zilliacus did – to expose Avenol’s mismanagement of the League in a British election campaign.⁴⁶

The women in the Second Division, flying below the radar, survived the travails of the Avenol years better, their professionalism and corporate spirit proving one of the League’s strongest resources in the dark days after 1933. Unlike the politically sensitive First Division, the largely female Second Division never came under the same pressure from states eager to claim their share of highly paid posts or (worse) to insert informants into internationalism’s citadel. In the 1920s, Mussolini’s government had forced Drummond to appoint a fascist under-secretary in Geneva who then ensured that all Italian Secretariat officials reported directly to him; as authoritarian governments proliferated in the 1930s, the number of officials who could not be trusted with confidential matters grew. In this situation, the unimpeachably loyal Second Division staff became ever more critical: high officials charged with confidential negotiations knew they could trust their secretaries and stenographers to hold their tongues. When Japanese agents offered large sums to be given a copy of the highly sensitive Lytton Report on the Manchuria crisis before its official publication, they found no takers. What problems the League had with leaks and spying – and by the 1930s, they were serious – did not come from the clerical ranks.⁴⁷

Throughout its existence, and thanks in large part to its overqualified and largely female Second Division staff, the Secretariat retained its high reputation for dedication, efficiency and impartiality. The behaviour of these secretaries and translators, press analysts and stenographers, helps us understand what it means to work – even as a secretary – for a cause. These women believed fervently in the League and were committed to its ideals. They knew they were working beyond their rank and their pay but accepted their treatment not willingly but philosophically, aware that the opportunities they had found in Geneva, however constricted, were greater than those available to them in their home countries. The romance of the internationalist cause sustained them. As Mary McGeachy explained to the novelist Frank Moorhouse (who based his historical novel Grand Days on her experiences):

Everything in my life was connected – there was no separation of work and life. Every waking moment went to the League … It was an experiment. There were no precedents. We were all intense, and we had a sense of mission. Especially the British.⁴⁸

This ‘sense of mission’ stayed with them. In 1946 Lady Blennerhassett, who had been forced to retire in 1937 (at the age of sixty-one), wrote to Valentin Stencek, the League’s last head of personnel, and to Sean Lester, its last secretary-general. The two had spent the war years supervising a skeleton staff in London and Geneva; with the founding of the United Nations, all that now remained was a final Assembly to turn the assets over. Blennerhassett wanted to be there, to interpret. ‘Mainly for sentimental reasons I am extremely anxious to be present at the end,’ she wrote, ‘sad though it is for those of us who believed in the League and served it with conviction.’ She wasn’t out of practice, she assured Lester, for although then seventy she had spent the war years translating for the Ministry of Information.⁴⁹ Lady Blennerhassett was back at her post when the delegates arrived to wind the League of Nations up.

Conclusion

The League of Nations is often thought of as a byword for political failure, but in many ways it was an agent of transformation, recasting international politics in ways that could never quite be undone. As much a political arena and set of practices as a legal compact, the League turned matters previously dealt with through private diplomacy into subjects for lobbying, press comment and transnational mobilization. Journalists, reformers and appointed or self-appointed spokesmen for would-be nations and causes converged on Geneva. Politicians came to engage in back-room bargaining and to play to the crowd.

‘Women’ – a distinct and recognized interest with a formidable transnational representative structure – were well poised to take advantage of the relative openness of the League system. Although only weakly established (if at all) in national legislatures and bureaucracies, women were able to use their position in humanitarian and internationalist causes to win representation on important League committees and hence some influence over key policy areas. We can see the legacy of this system today in the statutory role for NGOs in the United Nations and in the growth of UNICEF, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other humanitarian branches.

Yet the history of women in Geneva had another side as well – less visible, more pragmatic, but important nevertheless. This was their role in the Secretariat. As this chapter has shown, that position was fragile: women were hired mostly into low-grade posts often out of keeping with their qualifications; they were promoted only grudgingly; and while they were to carry out the policies of the League, any sign of zeal in doing so tended to be repressed rather than rewarded. And yet, for all that, through their competence and loyalty they made a difference. Just as it proved impossible in 1919 to imagine international activism on refugees or trafficking without women workers in the field, so too it would be impossible after 1939 to envisage international administration without women on the staff.⁵⁰ Geneva was in the forefront of this change: when national politicians visited the League headquarters, most went away astounded by the visibility and responsibility of its women officials. Loyal to a bureaucratic ethos of impartial and anonymous service, few of these women campaigned openly for women’s rights. Instead, by embodying women’s capacities, they made equality imaginable.