When our daughters were small, they used to read stories about Pippi Longstocking. She was a nine-year old girl with ginger plaits. She was unconventional and assertive with no respect for authority. She also had superhuman strength, being able to lift her horse with one hand. Our daughters learnt that girls can achieve anything if they want to.
Pippi Longstocking was also Swedish. And another Swede with superhuman diplomatic strength is the Swedish Ambassador to Jordan, Charlotta Sparre who is leaving Amman this month after five years. If the number of farewell parties is a measure of popularity, there is no doubt that she will be greatly missed.
Charlotta has shown that women are excellent diplomats. In the past diplomacy has struggled with women. The British Foreign Office refused to employ women as diplomats until 1946. Before then, there were only “necessary women” (actually, housekeepers) and “lady typewriters” to produce the documents dictated by the men.
In the 1930s a proposal to employ women was dismissed on the grounds that women wouldn’t be able to develop the necessary contacts. The review judged that women physically couldn’t bear the strain of hot and unhealthy climates. Whether the men who wrote that report were being kind, patronising or protecting their own careers from new competition isn’t recorded.
Yet this conclusion had already been comprehensively rubbished by one of the most famous British women in the Middle East, Gertrude Bell. At the outset of the 20th century, she showed that women could survive in hot climates by camping with the bedu in Jordan, Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. She went on to live for years in Baghdad and Basra in the 1920s.
There, despite the hostility of her male colleagues, she proved her value as a political officer, speaking the local language, understanding the local culture and manoeuvring behind the scenes to do her job. She was the only female political officer, but she refused to let her gender hold her back.
A testament to her success is that she is one of the only British colonial administrators who is looked upon in the region with affection. History might well look back on her as a colonialist, but she was also a scientist, archaeologist, photographer, mountaineer and a women with a real taste for adventure.
Now the British Foreign Office actively encourages women Ambassadors, as do most other countries. Offering equal opportunities is seen as smart use of skills and expertise.
Charlotta has displayed those skills in full. I will miss her warm personality and ability to evaluate a situation with great understanding and honesty. But I will also miss her implacable pursuit of women’s issues. Whenever EU Ambassadors met a senior Jordanian, we could rely on Charlotta to raise a question about the paltry or non-existent number of women in the Council of Ministers or in other senior positions.
This was not a personal campaign that she pursued in a dogmatic and blinkered way.
Equal opportunities is a fundamental principle of human rights law that we all adhere to. And we know that there is no shortage among the female population in Jordan. Indeed, I met many of them at Charlotta’s house: politicians, businesswomen, film producers, journalists and others.
What we want to see is recognition by the wider population of the value of these women, the fact that they have a high – often better – level of education and that if Jordan harnessed this talent, it would grow and benefit from it.
So Pippi Longstocking might have been a fictional character. But she showed girls that they had strength. My daughters learnt that could have confidence in their ability and go out and show the world what they could do.
After all, if someone tells you that God made man before woman, just remember that you always create a rough draft before the final masterpiece!