Margaret Jane Anstee was born on 25 June 1926 in Writtle, England. The first woman appointed Under-Secretary-General, she became the UN’s primary trouble-shooter in conflict zones. Lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast in 1948, she subsequently joined the Foreign Office as Third Secretary. In 1952, she worked for the UN’s Technical Assistance Board in Manila, and then represented the UN in Uruguay, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Chile. In 1987, After secondments to the UK Civil Service, she took up senior roles at UN Headquarters namely Under-Secretary-General and Head of the Centre for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs.
Awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Essex, Westminster, and Cambridge, Anstee was conferred official honours from Morocco, Bolivia, Austria, and Chile, and made DCMG in 1994. Notable works include The Administration of International Development Aid (1969), Gate of the Sun (1970), Orphan of the Cold War (1996), Never Learn to Type (2003), The House on the Sacred Lake and Other Bolivian Dreams—and Nightmares (2009), and a biography of J. B. Trend, the first Professor of Spanish at Cambridge (2013).
