Phyllis Oakley, whose 25-year diplomatic career in the State Department almost didn’t happen because of an unwritten rule that forbade female foreign service officers from marrying, died on Jan. 22 at a hospital in Washington. She was 87.
Thomas Oakley, her only son, confirmed her death. He said that she had been in good health but “her heart just stopped.”
As the Cold War was ending, Ms. Oakley became a straight-talking, forthright woman who was often seen in the public eye. She was deputy spokesman for the State Department under President Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s. She was later appointed assistant secretary to refugees and assistant secretary of intelligence and research under President Bill Clinton.
She began her career in 1957. She was married in 1958 when the State Department required her to quit.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, as women started breaking down barriers in other professions, the handful of female officers in the foreign service challenged this and other antiquated notions that discriminated against them. In 1974, the department allowed women to marry and offered to reinstate those who had been expelled.
Many of those who had fled wanted to return by that time. Ms. Oakley, however, was determined to return. She had spent the intervening 16 years as the wife of a foreign service officer, Robert B. Oakley, carrying out the myriad social, diplomatic and managerial duties that the department expected of wives under its “two for the price of one” motto. She raised their two children.
Once she was reinstated, she and her husband became one of the foreign service’s earliest so-called tandem couples, camping and decamping all over the world — sometimes with each other, sometimes without.
Phyllis Elsa Elliott, was born in Omaha on November 23, 1934. Elsa (Kerkow) Elliott was her mother and taught high school chemistry and math. Thomas M. Elliott was her father. He was a Rawlings Sporting Goods Company salesman. His promotions brought the family to Columbus, Ohio and St. Louis.
Phyllis was always interested and involved in public affairs. She received material from the State Department when she was 12 about job opportunities. Phyllis was fascinated by history and geography during World War II.
She majored in political sciences at Northwestern University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa (in 1956). She received her master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1957 and then joined the foreign service.
While she was finishing her French language training, and waiting for her first overseas assignment, she met Bob Oakley. He was another young officer in training. They married knowing full well that their careers would end before they began.
“We accepted that discrimination without batting an eyelash,” she said in a 2000 oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
In May 1958, Mr. Oakley went to Sudan. The young couple were married in a registrar’s office in Cairo in June, then began their lives together in Khartoum.
His next assignment was to the Ivory Coast. He was then sent to Vietnam where his family was not allowed to join him. Ms. Oakley and the children spent that time in Shreveport, La., where her husband’s family lived, and she taught American history at Centenary College. Later, she said that her desire to return to the foreign service was partly due to the joy she found in teaching.
“It was nice to discover I still had a brain that I could use,” she said in the oral history.
After Mr. Oakley had left Vietnam in 1967 his family reunited, and he moved to Paris, New York, then Beirut, where he worked for the United Nations.
In Washington, Ms. Oakley was reinstituted after the State Department lifted its ban on married women. Her specialties include Arab-Israeli relations, and the Panama Canal Treaty.
Ms. Oakley accompanied her husband to Zaire when he was appointed ambassador in 1979. However, she was an employee with the United States Information Agency so she was not directly under his control. It marked the first time a wife had worked in her husband’s mission.
In 1982, he traveled to Somalia. Ms. Oakley, instead of joining him in Somalia, returned to Washington and rose to a position on the Afghan desk at a mid-level. Secretary of State George P. Shultz spotted her talking about Afghanistan on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” one night and was so impressed that when an opening arose, he named her the department’s deputy spokesperson. She was the first woman to hold the position and was instantly recognizable as a speaker at televised briefings.
From 1986 to 1989, she held the position until her husband was appointed ambassador for Pakistan. They were not ready to be divorced again so she accepted a job in Islamabad with the United States Agency for International Development. This was a controversial move.
“I think everyone acknowledged that I might know more about Afghan politics than anyone else in the mission,” she said in the oral history, “but there was the feeling that as the ambassador’s wife, I was being foisted on them.”
She retired from the State Department in 1999 and taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies at Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern, and at Northwestern.
Ms. Oakley was survived by her son, Mary Kress and five grandchildren. Her husband died in 2014.
At the end of her oral history, Ms. Oakley considered what might have happened if she had not been sidelined in the 1950s, or if she hadn’t married.
“I think I would have had a good career,” she said, “but I don’t think it would have been as rich and rewarding.”
Source: NY Times