Abstract

This article examines the roles played by the wives of Israeli development experts in sub-Saharan Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Literature on international development experts has attended to how ‘portability’ and cross-cultural dexterity facilitated the diffusion and implementation of specific development agendas (Moon and Mehos, 2011). Less attention, however, has been paid to the influence of experts’ spouses, children, extended families and households on motivations to take international postings or on their professional performance in situ.

Drawing on feminist insights and approaches to diplomacy and international relations, the article discusses Israeli development programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing how Israeli women navigated, exploited, and sometimes subverted roles and rules of comportment assigned to them by Israeli Foreign service officials. It presents two key arguments. First, it contends that that ‘expertise’ is as much about respectability as it was about competency, and that attaining and projecting respectability was chiefly about prescribing behaviors to women and sponsoring specific ideals regarding families and households (Skeggs, 1997). Second, it maintains that male-and knowledge-centric histories of development experts (e.g., Hodge, 2007; Ericsson, Hoffman, Kozbelt and Williams, 2006) need to be accompanied by closer attention to the work of gender and domesticity in the performance of expertise.