Phyllis Oakley has traveled
some miles on her way to South Hadley. In fact, she has hopped a few
continents in a foreign service career that makes her esteemed
presence on the MHC campus a moment to celebrate. The first female
spokesperson for the U.S. State Department and a former assistant
secretary of state, Oakley is teaching at Mount Holyoke this semester
as the Cyrus Vance Professor in International Relations. Her course,
which focuses on American foreign policy challenges at the beginning
of a new century, combines lessons she has learned over the past
forty-plus years as an industrious and highly valued participant in
the complex business of American diplomacy.
Oakley began her State
Department career at the age of twenty-two. The following year she
married, and she and her husband, Robert B. Oakley, had their first
assignment with the State Department in the Sudan. As married women
were not allowed in the Foreign Service, she resigned and spent much
of the '60s raising two children and teaching in Louisiana while
Robert was in Vietnam. When the department's ban on married women was
lifted in 1974, Phyllis Oakley was granted reentry into the State
Department. Her assignments were primarily focused on the Middle
East, first in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs and
then, in 1976, as special assistant on the Middle East to Philip
Habib, under secretary for political affairs. Future posts included
Zaire, and she worked as the Afghanistan desk officer. It was Oakley's discussion of
Afghanistan on public television's McNeil-Lehrer News Hour
that caught the attention of Secretary of State George Shultz in the
late '80s. In 1989, he chose her as deputy to the spokesman Charles
Redmond. Frequently at the podium, she finessed the rocky road of
arms control, PanAm 103, and the "intifada" during the Reagan
Administration. In 1997, she was sworn in as assistant secretary of
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, following three years as the
assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and
Migration. On the occasion of her
retirement in 1999, after forty-two years as an American diplomat,
the New York Times characterized Oakley as one who "forged a
trail for women in a man's world." Regarding her earliest encounter
with sexism in the State Department, Oakley says, "What amazes me is
that I didn't question it." But life changed in the '60s, and when
she resumed working for the government in the '70s "it was an
advantage to be woman." Oakley notes that current Foreign Service
classes boast a female majority, but even today women resign their
posts at a higher ratio than their male counterparts--due to family
issues--and men still dominate the field. As for White House
positions, "I still think people would say there's a glass ceiling,"
she says. "Madeleine Albright broke through it, though." The confidence Oakley sees in
today's young women contrasts notably with the deference she
witnessed among her female colleagues in the '50s. She's "very
impressed with the quality of students at Mount Holyoke," while
finding it surprising that they know so little about history "from
1950 on." She attributes this deficit to America's current position
of strength in today's world and weaknesses in the educational
system, but feels the Cold War/post-Cold War period are "particularly
important" for young people to know about as they equip themselves
for participation as adults in a new century. After her teaching stint at
MHC, Oakley plans to return to Washington, DC, where she serves on
the board of several foreign-policy groups. A trip to Nigeria may be
in the offing--just a wee job of "setting up a press office for the
Nigerian Government." That's retirement Oakley-style. 
Visiting MHC professor Phyllis Oakley, a career foreign service
officer and former assistant secretary of state, will moderate the
MHC symposium "U.S. Intervention Abroad: Wanted and Unwanted
Consequences" Thursday, April 6, at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium.
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