American Businesswomen, Globalization, and the Politics of Trade

Gracia Lee, Yale University

This paper examines the selection of foreign markets by two groups of elite American businesswomen engaged in international trade between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Using a comparative analysis of trade mission documents, it seeks to understand how foreign policy goals and political identity shaped women's motivations, mission objectives and other patterns of opportunity identification. Contextualized against the final years of the Cold War, this paper demonstrates how women envisioned their professional selves as agents of national and global development through information gathering strategies and post-trip reports on the economic, political and cultural landscape of different countries. The analysis primarily relies on archival materials from two collections comprising extensive "country folders" that document the efforts of BEHRS International and the Texas Women's Alliance in planning for and conducting trade missions across Spain, Japan, Kuwait, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, among other countries. These materials are triangulated with primary sources traced across other archives and relevant secondary literature.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 2. States, Politics and Society