UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy

Book Jacket: Imperial Brotherhood" by R. D. Dean

Robert D. Dean

Analyzes how culture, class, and gender shaped American foreign policy during the Cold War

"Dean's fascinating study of Cold War foreign policy elites contributes to the movement to reconsider U.S. foreign relations history in light of recent scholarship in social and cultural history. . . . Along with shedding light on foreign policy formulation, the book breaks ground in men's history by illuminating the gender codes created by establishment men (the 'imperial brotherhood' of the title) and their detractors."

American Historical Review

"Superb. . . . An important book not only for historians of U.S. foreign relations but also for scholars interested in reexamining traditional historical questions through the lens of gender. Dean, equal parts diplomatic and gender historian, corroborates what the earlier writers had suggested: the officials who committed the United States to war in Vietnam despite the evident problems of fighting there did so at least partly to demonstrate their toughness and to avoid any taint of appeasement in the face of aggression. But Dean, drawing on prodigious research, ranges far beyond this relatively simple idea to develop a complex and compelling, if sometimes problematic, argument to explain why U.S. policymakers cared so mightily in the 1960s about demonstrating their manhood."

Reviews in American History

"A provocative examination of the origins and history of an upper-class 'ideology of masculinity' and the imperial brotherhood of American foreign policymakers it spawned. Using an analysis of the politics of gender and sexuality, Dean demonstrates that the basis for participation in the U.S. Cold War government rested not only on a devotion to masculinity, but sexual orthodoxy as well. He connects the Red Scare of the McCarthy era with a little known 'Lavender Scare,' both of which were designed to ensure that suspected commitment to manliness at home and abroad, and their participation in the Vietnam War, Dean claims, represented the final elevation of the imperial brotherhood's obsession with personal toughness to the field of foreign policy."

Choice

Robert D. Dean is assistant professor of history at Eastern Washington University.

American Studies / Cultural Studies
344 pp., 20 illus., LC 2001005553
$29.95s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-312-4
$24.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-414-5
2001 cloth, September 2003 paper

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A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

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