A Few Good Women

You know an article is going to warm your heart when the sub-head is “Obama ushers in a feminist revolution in foreign policy and national security.”

And warm my heart it did. A.J. Rossmiller, friend of Feministe and author of Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon discusses how women are not only the backbone of Obama’s foreign policy team, but they’re bringing in new perspectives and areas of expertise that are particularly important in a post-Cold-War world. He writes:

The diversity of their paths to power is also an encouraging sign of future egalitarianism in the national security establishment. At least a few of the major players, including Rice, Power, and Sewall, studied issues and areas that were not traditionally perceived as primary in national security, such as conflict resolution, failed states, and post-conflict management. Rice, for example, is an Africa expert succeeding a long line of predecessors who were mostly students of the Cold War and of European politics. Sewall and Power have devoted great energy to humanitarian issues, with Power’s rise to prominence sparked by her Pulitzer-winning book on genocide. Under a Cold War model, these focuses might not have been paths to prominence; but in an era of international terrorism, counter-insurgency, and failed states as a major security problem, they are vital areas of expertise.

Other women, though, took traditional paths up through politics, academia, and think tanks, working their way through the networks of old white men who have long dominated these areas. And even those who took a less conventional route hardly lack immersion in traditional “hard power” topics: Sewall is an expert in military operations and counterinsurgency, having authored the introduction to the 2007 Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and the experiences of Rice and Power in conflict zones may give them a better sense of the realities of war than the old Sovietologists ever had.

To copy his closing line: Best of all, this is just the beginning.