The Downstairs of Diplomacy: A Transnational History of Servants´ Roles in Foreign Relations (c. 1935–1965)

The role of domestic staff has so far been surprisingly absent in studies of mid-twentieth-century diplomacy. Cooks, cleaners, chauffeurs, and other servants were not only indispensable for day-to-day diplomatic practices.

The staff also had a symbolic value, quite often tied to gender, race or nationality, which reflected back on the status of those performing international relations.

Several Washington embassies had French chefs, for instance, and they all had male butlers but female parlour maids – who were often lighter-skinned than laundresses and cleaners. This project aims to analyse these patterns in relation to shifting global power and diplomatic relations.

The cross-cultural work force that specialized in serving diplomats can help us to understand how transnational classed, gendered, and racialized power relations were upheld and (re)shaped through war, decolonisation, and Cold War.

With methods inspired by the history of everyday life and research on trust and reliance in social relations, the study scrutinizes newspapers, photographs, letters, diaries, and embassy records from London and Washington, D.C., two crucial hubs for Western diplomatic relations during and after World War II, to identify practical and symbolic uses of diplomatic servants.

Drawing on feminist and intersectional theories, the study anchors a conceptual analysis of diplomatic hierarchies at the macro level in a comparison of embassies’ concrete household hierarchies at the micro level.