Video Transcript

Rozanne Ridgway—One Woman’s Career Path:

When I came into the Foreign Service, which seems like eons ago – it’s now almost 50 years ago – I was one of six women in a class of 47.

And by the end of my career, I was the last of the women still in the service, and most of my 41 male colleagues had also left.  I think I had a very traditional career for a woman at the outset.  Immediately, I was sent to public information in educational exchange.  A nice, soft topic – where all my bosses and all of my colleagues were women.  They were, however, women who had served in World War II in the Office of War Information.  They were skilled, they were tough, they were terrific supervisors and they were wonderful teachers.  But it follows that I went from that to a job as a personnel officer.  Of course, what else would you do with a young woman, except send her out as a personnel officer?

I received a notice that I was being assigned to Washington as a political officer in the Office of NATO Affairs, in the Bureau of European Affairs.  I will tell you that over time I worked with 25 of the most talented men – there were no other women in the Office – the most talented men the service has ever seen.  And over time all 25 of us reached the rank of Ambassador, and some higher than that.

That sort of broke the ice with respect to how I was seen – not as a woman political officer, but as a political officer who happened to be a woman.  But my next assignment was a strange one.  I was going to be assigned to Norway as the staff aide, a very nice kind of a job, to the ambassador.  But the ambassador was a woman, a woman named Margaret Joy Tibbetts, one of the great women of the American Foreign Service, who called me and said, “Look, Roz, it’s tough enough to know that you’re probably being sent out to a token job, but to know that, as a woman, you’re being assigned as a staff aide to a woman ambassador.  I don’t want it and you shouldn’t want it, either, so I am rejecting the assignment.  But I just wanted you to know why I was refusing to take you as staff aide.”  That was fine with me.  I was having a good time in Washington.  Ms. Tibbetts then went out to Norway, and two years later, when there was an opening in the embassy in Norway for a real political officer, Ms. Tibbetts saw to it that I became a real political officer, and not a staff aide to a woman ambassador..

And in the Reagan years, obviously, I was the only woman in the room when we were discussing anything to do with the unfolding of U.S.-Soviet relations.  So much so, I should tell you by the way, that when these messages were released at the end of negotiations that the two leaders had met and that the delegations had met, the delegations list always showed me as “R. Ridgway.”  And there was no effort, since it was an English name and for an American, no effort on the part of the Soviet press to add all of the endings that would have indicated that I was a woman.  And it wasn’t until Mrs. Gorbachev came to Rekyavik with Mr. Gorbachev that she realized that the American delegate R. Ridway was in fact a woman.  The Soviets ran around looking for a senior woman in their Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they could add to the delegation to show that they, too, could field a woman of some prominence.  They couldn’t find anyone, so for those four years I was the only woman in the room.  By that time, I was well past the struggles that many women had had.