.ltAmbassador for peace

The Times,
29 April 1963

THERE must be many women who would like to be in a position to make a positive contribution to the future of the world's peace. Among the very few who are able to is Mrs. Alva Myrdal, head of the Swedish delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva so much in the news at the moment.
  
Trim, young-looking, blue-eyed and serene, she has no illusions about the difficulty of her job. She sees it - and this is probably true of most if not all of the non-nuclear or neutral powers at the conference - as one of continually searching for a breakthrough, for some compromise on the long drawn out discussions between the great powers in their efforts to reach agreement on the nuclear test ban treaty, and on the even more formidable problems that confront them in reaching agreement on disarmament itself.
  
VALUE OF NEUTRALS  

"One is always searching for the unknown factor that will provide the answer, always trying to project the known or rearrange it to find a balance."
  
It is not always rewarding work in the political sense, in that the representatives of Russia and the United States listen politely and still tend to go their own way. Even so, Mrs. Myrdal is convinced that the conference would have achieved less than it has if the right neutral countries had not been present to act as audience and sounding board in the negotiations.
  
As she emphasizes, all the delegations in Geneva want some form of agreement on test bans and disarmament. Their struggle is to find the practical and technical means that will help to make this possible.  A study of Mrs. Myrdal's own speeches to the conference show that, though she does not choose to speak often, when she does her views are always imaginative, constructive, and very much to the technical point.
  
A remarkable woman, who must have held more important diplomatic posts for her country than perhaps any other woman in the world with the exception of Mrs. Pandit. Mrs. Myrdal was born in Stockholm in 1902. After taking her degree, she made a deep study of population problems and the economic conditions of the family. Two of her books, Nation and Family and Women's Two Roles (written in cooperation with Viola Klein), have been published in English. Throughout the main emphasis has been the need for reform of the general economic standing of the family, so that having children should not automatically entail lower living standards.
  
In 1936 Mrs. Myrdal became Director of the Social Pedagogical Institute in Stockholm, where she stayed until after the war. In 1949 she went to New York as Principal Director of the Department of Social Affairs, and later to a similar position at Unesco in Paris as Principal Director of Social Sciences, in both cases being the senior woman of the International Civil Service.
  
In 1955 she was asked to start an entirely new career as Sweden's ambassador to India and Ceylon. The first woman ambassador Sweden has had, she was away for five years, but found them years of immense interest as her lifelong studies helped towards an understanding of Indian problems.
  
In 1961 she asked to return to Europe and undertook different assignments for the Swedish Foreign Office until, one day, the Foreign Secretary asked her to write him a paper on what contribution Sweden could make to the next General Assembly of the United Nations when the question of disarmament was to be considered. She asked him not to mention the subject again for two weeks so that she could have time to think about it. Once started she became so absorbed, however, that she took on the assignment and has never stopped reading and working on it since.
  
It was natural, therefore, that when the disarmament negotiations opened in Geneva in March of last year, and Sweden was appointed one of the "non-aligned" or neutral nations to make up the 18-Nation Committee, she should be appointed to head the Swedish delegation.
  
In addition, last year she was elected a member of Sweden's Upper House for Stockholm and holds office there for eight years. During this period in the Senate she intends, among other things, to concentrate especially on educational reform.
  
Mrs. Myrdal married Gunnar Myrdal, the famous economist, just on 40 years ago when both were students. She has three grown-up children and several grandchildren now.
  
FAMILY AND CAREER  

To the inevitable question - how had she managed so successfully to combine a public career with married life, the reply was that there have necessarily been times when the family has had to live apart for varying periods, though she and her husband have tried to arrange their work so that these periods were as short as possible. But perhaps the true secret has lain in that both husband and wife have, throughout their lives, done truly absorbing and creative work and have mutually recognized and respected each other for it.
  
And, as Mrs. Myrdal says, their different and yet converging interests have ensured that in nearly 40 years "we never found anybody else so interesting to talk to".
  
Does Mrs. Myrdal feel there is any particular contribution that women can make towards promoting disarmament? During the disarmament talks of the 1920s and 1930s women's organizations were particularly active in organizing petitions and delegations to Geneva. Is there the same point today?
  
Mrs. Myrdal thought not. She stressed again that at Geneva now there is no doubt that the delegations want agreement - they have been working hard for it for the past year. The problem now is how to get it in hard, practical, political, and technical terms. Delegations urging peace are received politely in public, but. . . . In her opinion women can play a much more constructive role by trying to ensure that their own governments at home put forward the kind of practical proposal to break the deadlock that, for instance, the neutrals were trying to do. A powerful public opinion is needed for that; but it must also be an informed public opinion.
  
Maybe this has less glamour than a delegation to Geneva but in the end, she thinks, it could bear more effective fruit.  


.lcAmong the many international peace prizes awarded to Alva Myrdal was the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize. She died in 1986, aged 84.
.llWar and Peace: Peace protests
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