bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, pp. 29–30
WOMAN OF THE WORLD: MARY
McGEACHY AND INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION by Mary Kinnear,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004,
327 pp. ISBN 0-8020-8988-7
Ah, the great names of Canadian diplomacy — Lester Pearson, Norman Robertson, Marcel Cadieux, Mary McGeachy. “Mary who?” you may ask. You would be forgiven for not knowing that a Canadian was among the few women to achieve senior rank at the League of Nations and was the first woman to be given a diplomatic rank in the British foreign service. I first came across Mary McGeachy quite by chance, as one of the real people who makes a fleeting appearance amongst the fictional characters in Frank Moorehouse’s novel set at the League of Nations, Dark Palace.
Intrigued by this reference to a Canadian woman who reached high rank in the world of inter-war multilateral diplomacy, who only died in 1991, and yet seemed to be totally unknown in Canadian diplomatic circles, I went in search of Mary McGeachy. I soon discovered that University of Manitoba historian Mary Kinnear had just brought out her biography. Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation sheds light on a fascinating and complex woman who deserves to be recorded as a Canadian pioneer of diplomacy.
Why is so little known of Mary McGeachy? In part it’s because, although she was a Canadian, she was not a pioneer of Canadian diplomacy. In the inter-war years, she forged a career for herself in the League of Nations. During the Second World War, she worked for the British government. In 1944, she joined an allied wartime agency (linked to the League’s successor, the United Nations), where she worked for two years. Both her career and her personal life took her outside Canada.
Despite this, McGeachy’s roots and family ties were firmly in Canada. These included a direct, if brief, connection with Lester Pearson. He was teaching history at University College in the University of Toronto when McGeachy was a student there. Mary McGeachy graduated in 1924. After a brief stint teaching at Hamilton Collegiate Institute, she went on spec to Geneva, where she soon found work with the League of Nations.
During the 12 years she worked in the Information Section she took on growing responsibilities for publicizing the League and its work, including in Canada. A combination of factors — undoubtedly sexism, but also bad luck and a lack of Canadian influence at the League — meant she was passed over for senior promotion until the dying days of the League of Nations. In 1940, as war engulfed Europe and League staff slipped away, Mary McGeachy found herself acting as Head of Division. In this post she showed considerable bravery and resourcefulness, organizing the evacuation of League staff and dependents. The final chapter of this evacuation, in which she marshalled a busload of British and American women holding expired travel papers across Switzerland and through France to the port of Lisbon, skirting advancing armies, is only briefly described by Kinnear. One is left feeling that it has the makings of a book — or, better, a film – of its own.
Evacuated to Britain, McGeachy joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and in 1942 was posted as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. She was the first woman ever to be given a formal diplomatic rank by the Foreign Office. Her main task was to undertake a crucial piece of public diplomacy, encour-
Allied war effort and countering the strong isolationist trend then current in the USA. Here again, her path crossed that of Lester Pearson, who was Minister in the Canadian Embassy in Washington at the time.
In 1944, as the war was drawing to a close, McGeachy returned to her internationalist interests by joining the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. There she worked for two years on the crucial job of assisting the repatriation of millions of refugees, as the only woman executive in UNRRA.
From such a beginning one might have expected a solid international career, culminating in a senior diplomatic or UN rank. Instead, McGeachy abruptly moved in 1946 to work in the voluntary sector. Although she had a respectable career there, including a term as President of the International Council of Women, she largely vanished from the public eye. The reason was a simple one, common to many educated working women of her generation – she married.
In spite of that conventional ending, McGeachy was in many ways ahead of her time. She was a committed multilateralist at a time when the government of Canada was most decidedly not. She understood the importance of economic factors in international cooperation and in foreign policy. She believed that international aid was a two-way street, that self-help and democratization were key elements of economic development and post-conflict reconstruction, and that non-governmental organizations played an important role. She was concerned in her work for UNRRA to ensure a proper transition from emergency aid to long-term development. One could say Mary McGeachy had all the intellectual qualifications to be, say, an Ambassador to the UN in the 1990s.
It is a great credit to Kinnear that she has tracked down this fascinating woman and rescued her mixed but ground-breaking career from obscurity on the basis of patchy records. (McGeachy destroyed many of her own and her husband’s personal papers in later life.) From these Kinnear has produced not so much a traditional life history as a thematic biography. Elements of historical context and gender analysis are woven in so that they clarify without overwhelming the reader. While the prose is sometimes dry — it would be hard for any writer to make the details of the League of Nations or the International Council of Women structures exciting reading — it is always clear and intelligent. The one real drawback to the thematic approach is that it requires some repetition. This is further exacerbated by Kinnear’s tendency to underestimate the retentive powers of her reader, providing unnecessary references to events already described or to commonly known historic events.
These are minor criticisms, however, of a book that paints an interesting picture not only of McGeachy’s life, but also of the times she lived in. For those interested in Canadian foreign policy, Canada’s inter-war ambivalence towards international engagement may come as a surprise. Kinnear draws a convincing link between the emergence of Canadian nationalism and the activist stance we now associate with Canadian foreign policy.
More generally, the description of international cooperation in the inter-war years and in the immediate aftermath of World War II shows striking parallels with post- Cold War diplomacy. Issues typical of the “new” international agenda of the 1990s, such as trafficking in women, children’s rights and the illicit drug trade, were all high on the agenda of the League of Nations. Moreover, the League was, on paper at least, one of the first international equal opportunity employers. Its numerous women staffers received equal pay and the right to maternity leave, and were not required to resign if they married
– the latter a right only granted by the Department of External Affairs in the 1970s. At the same time, the League was very much of its era in that many capable women, McGeachy among them, were passed over for promotion in favour of male colleagues. Other aspects of McGeachy’s career also have resonance today. The debate within UNRRA about local versus American approaches to post-war reconstruction has eerie echoes in the situation in Iraq. The inter-war years saw great activism by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interested in international issues, similar to the current similar surge in NGO activity. Kinnear is able, through the prism of McGeachy’s career, to throw light in particular on the development of the international women’s movement and its role in international politics, including the disarmament and peace movements. This is more easily traced because of the gender-based discrimination that held sway in many NGOs at that time. The Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the Association of Canadian Clubs, for example, did not admit women in the inter-war years, so women of an internationalist bent had to join or form their own associations. The International Council of Women, where McGeachy worked latterly, sprang from this tradition of all-female internationalist organizations. Both the social conservativism of the 1950s, and the feminist movement of the 1970s, however, served to make groups like the ICW less influential over time. It is a sad irony that, having left her professional career for married life, McGeachy was far less successful in the latter than in the former. Her husband committed suicide in 1967 and her relationship with her two adopted children was difficult. Although she rose to the presidency of the ICW from 1963 to 1973, one cannot help wondering what her later life and career would have been like if she had remained at the UN. Perhaps then we would indeed be citing her name alongside that of other notables as a pioneer of multilateralism and of international economic cooperation. As it is, we have Mary Kinnear to thank for bringing to light a fascinating figure from the early days of Canada’s internationalist vocation.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, pp. 29–30. Read the rest of this issue →
