Women's Stake in Peace - by Estelle B.

Freedman
Historically wars have affected men and women in different ways. Men once dominated as military casualties, while women faced widowhood, poverty, and the sexual violation considered to be the "spoils of war." Modern wars kill far more civilians than soldiers -- including men, women, and children and, as Anne Firth Murray shows, rape continues to characterize war zones and occupied regions. Given the gender-specific costs of war, do women have a special stake in seeking peace? Can, and should, gender make a difference in arguments against war? The association of women and pacifism runs deep in western culture, going back at least to the ancient Greek drama Lysistrata, in which women withheld sex from their husbands to pressure them to end their warfare. Since the early twentieth century women have led international peace movements, arguing that as mothers or potential mothers they favored peaceful resolution over combat. Reacting to the carnage of World War I, for example, reformers such as Jane Addams and Emily Green Balch helped create the Womens Peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Each woman won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. Since World War II, women have repeatedly protested militarism, often drawing on their maternal identities or their strategic positions as outsiders to the military establishment. In 1961, when a group called Women Strike for Peace called for a one day housewives strike to protest nuclear p roliferation, over 50,000 women in 60 U.S. cities participated. During the 1980s, dozens of womens peace camps linked feminism, spirituality, and environmentalism, starting with the Greenham Common peace encampment surrounding a U.S. missile site in England. In Denmark housewives organized a campaign that eventually gathered the signatures of half a million women on petitions to ban cruise missiles in their country. The maternal theme recurred in the 1990s, when the Israeli group "Four Mothers Leave Lebanon in Peace" protested the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon by picketing the defense ministry, writing letters to legislators, and memorializing every dead soldier. "Why should we send our children to die because our leaders cant solve our problems by talking?" asked founder Rachel Ben Dor. The desire to protect their children from the costs of militarism has also propelled mothers to protest state-sponsored violence in their own countries. Alongside movements for equal rights, Latin American women have drawn upon a tradition of self-sacrificing motherhood, or "marianismo," that contrasts to the corrupt world of machismo politics. Sonia E. Alvarez has applied the term militant motherhood to describe the ways they have demanded accountability from some of the most repressive political regimes in the region, particularly in the face of threats to their children. During the dirty war of Argentine military rule (1976-1983), for example, Las Madres del Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) formed in Buenos Aires to protest the disappearance of thousands of people, presumably killed by the military. At a time when political terror had silenced most critics and journalists, these mothers spoke out silently by demonstrating in the Plaza outside the presidential palace to demand the return of their missing children. The military junta called them Las Locas (the Crazy Ones) but the mothers continued to demand information about their lost relatives. After the restoration of democracy in 1983, Las Madres insisted on the prosecution of the killers, despite repeated threats to their lives. Feminists have had a range of reactions to maternal politics that rest upon women's identities as mothers rather than on abstract pacifist principles. Some have embraced an essentialist view that women are naturally more peaceful and less militaristic than men. According to Tatyana Mamanova, a Russian feminist who left the former Soviet Union to live in the United States, "woman is altruistic. She gives life and appreciates life. I think the woman is organically against war." Similarly, Australian physician Helen Caldicott, founder of the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and the Women's Party for Survival, believes that "a typical woman . . . innately understands the basic principles of conflict resolution" because female bodies "are built anatomically and physiologically to nurture life." Without accepting such biological arguments, feminist philosopher Sarah Ruddick suggests that

womens experiences of motherhood may lead to "maternal thinking" that is more responsive to others and more interested in resolution than in conflict. But other feminists cringe at these elaborations of sex difference. Simone de Beauvoir told an interviewer in 1983 that "women should desire peace as human beings, not as women!" If women were "being encouraged to be pacifists in the name of motherhood that's just a ruse by men who are trying to lead women back to the womb. Beside, it's quite obvious that once they are in power, women are exactly like men." In recent decades increasing numbers of women have rejected genderspecific claims to pacifism and instead seek access to, and the economic opportunities afforded by, military service. A further argument against the association of motherhood and pacifism emerges from the history of governments that have appealed to patriotic motherhood to support war, not peace. Mothers have been decorated for sacrificing their sons and rewarded for bearing more children to serve as soldiers. Mothers groups have demonstrated in favor of, as well as against, militarist and authoritarian regimes. Conversely, men have opposed both wars and dictators, so to associate pacifism primarily with women denies this aspect of men's humanity and reinforces the masculinization of war. Though strategically divergent, the maternal and the equal rights approaches to women, war, and peace have each met with strikingly similar obstacles in the form of entrenched gender ideology. Mothers in Argentina and Venezuela who protested authoritarian regimes found that with the restoration of democracy men easily dismissed mothers as private, non-political actors. Elia Borges de Tapia of Venezuela lamented that talented women and politically conscience women were "relegated to the womens organization within the parties or attending to household duties." In the U.S., women who join the military may no longer be relegated solely to house (or office) work, but they are often viewed primarily as women, rather than as soldiers, as evidenced by high rates of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military. And when women have taken up arms as part of liberation movements, from the Algerian revolution to the recent Arab uprisings, they have typically been welcomed as allies during the struggle and then, like the Latin American activists, expected to defer to male authority after the revolution. Limitations on women's capacities as peace makers or as warriors will no doubt endure wherever women lack the broader economic opportunities and political power that would enable them to achieve their goals. For those women in the world who have the least access to formal authority, maternalist arguments may continue to serve as an important form of empowerment. But when women gain political rights and resources they can begin to remedy the gender-specific costs of war, as one final example suggests. In 1997 the Womens Caucus for Gender Justice began lobbying for an international law to condemn gender-based violence in wartime. They succeeded when the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court outlawed not only rape but also wartime sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilization. The statute also required that the Court include both female and male judges with expertise on violence against women or children. In February, 2001, Justice Florence Mumba of Zambia handed down an historic guilty verdict at the World Court when she sentenced three Bosnian Serb soldiers to a total of 60 years in jail for the 1992 systematic rape, torture, and enslavement of Muslim women during the ethnic cleansing campaigns in the Balkans. Though the problem of gender violence in wartime remains formidable, in this case a women's movement enabled a woman judge to rule that mass rape in wartime is a crime against humanity, setting a precedent that such acts would be prosecuted and punished. In the future, continuing to pay attention to the gender-specific costs of war, acknowledging the insights of earlier women's peace movements, and seeking greater formal authority for women may all be necessary to protect women and to achieve a more peaceful world. Adapted from Chapter 14, Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: the History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).