Bureaucrats, female or male, have never been popular, a fact which may, in part, explain neglect of their role by the growing band of students of women and politics. Theories of bureaucracy predict that this will be the least promising of settings for the empowerment of women. Max Weber's classic account depicts bureaucratic activity as a routinized and sterile process of technical determinations and rules of procedure. Some feminists argue that such modes of action epitomize the masculine. Each model portrays a rational, depersonalized, technocratic sphere of activity, hierarchical in structure, rule-bound both in what is done and how. In addition, the state itself has sometimes been presented as wholly oppressive to women, adding public power to private power to create a comprehensive system of male domination.

In the 1960s, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered one night in darkness, and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (his identity then unknown) called ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote it in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

In the eighteenth century England had virtually no army and only a handful of administrators in its American colonies: the empire was held together by voluntary compliance, not coercion. One of the reasons the American colonists acquiesced in imperial decisions was that they had an effective way to influence them through London lobbies working on the Americans' behalf. London interest groups spoke and acted on behalf of their colonial correspondents before the ministry, the Privy Council, the Board of Trade and, less often, Parliament; in so doing they gave the colonists an input into imperial decision-making and provided vital information to the government.

In the United States since the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran has become known as a neglected, troubled, and even scorned individual. According to this view, the Vietnam veteran's problems began in Vietnam where he was forced to participate in a brutal and disturbing war in which he was under fire twenty-four hours a day. The enemy, the wily and tenacious Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, were not always clearly defined nor were they above hiding behind or using civilians, leading to the unintentional – and sometimes intentional – killing by American forces of noncombatants, including women and children. Due to the military's policy of limiting the tour of duty in the war zone to one year, combat groups lacked cohesion and suffered from low morale, resulting in the excessive use of marijuana and heroin and an eventual breakdown of discipline, leading to the “fragging” of officers who attempted to reimpose order.