Dundurn Press

Envoys Extraordinary:
Women of the Canadian Foreign Service

by Margaret K. Weiers

Many books have detailed the careers of men in Canada's diplomatic service but women's roles have been essentially ignored. The one exception to this generalization is the redoubtable Kathryn Agnes McCloskey, who joined External Affairs in 1909 when the entire department consisted of less than 10 employees. McCloskey went on to become the department's chief accountant and the first woman with a diplomatic posting abroad.

Other women had a more difficult path. By the Second World War women still couldn't be hired as officers within External Affairs, so they joined as clerks and secretaries but soon did officers' work - without the benefit of officers' pay. Finally, they did become officers, and one of them, Margaret Meagher, went on to become the first Canadian woman ambassador.

In Envoys Extraordinary, these women relate their stories in interviews with the author. All told, 11 have become ambassadors, two have been deputy ministers - women who made it in a man's world. The book also looks ahead to the aspirations of a new generation of upwardly mobile young women in an era of instant communication, where the computer modem and the fax machine have replaced the diplomatic courier.

Margaret K. Weiers, who worked for nearly 40 years in daily journalism at the Regina Leader-Post and the Toronto Star, was a foreign service officer for two years in the mid-1950s.

288 pages, 40 illustrations, 150 x 230 mm
$29.99 (US$26.50/£16.75) (cloth)
1-55002-241-5
September 1995

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