“War is a contagion,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said, just four years before he led the United States into one that changed the course of history. But what is war today? For contemporary feminists, war is neither contagion nor geopolitical reality. War is simply the ultimate breakdown in communication. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” the novelist Barbara Kingsolver opined recently in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt.”
Feminist organizations, most notably the Feminist Majority Foundation, urged the destruction of Afghanistan’s repressive Taliban regime for years. But when presented with the opportunity to do just that, they flinched from what was required: war. Peace and women’s rights activist Hibaaq Osman, who heads the Center for Strategic Initiatives of Women in Washington, once advocated the use of force against the Taliban. But when war actually broke out, she took it back, confessing to the Village Voice: “I said it, but I was just making a point. War is not okay under any circumstances. The whole thing simply breaks my heart.”
Feminists offer tepid support for the government’s response to terrorism on an abstract level but querulously criticize the practice of the war. The National Organization for Women even used the terrorist attacks to flak its own domestic agenda, declaring that “in this time of national and global turmoil, the reasons we celebrate ‘Coming Out Day’ are more visible and more important than ever,” and proceeded to call for a permanent lifting of the ban on gays in the military.
Feminists have a split personality when it comes to war. On the one hand, heroism, patriotism, and war- making are all linked to something with which feminists have always had a problem: men. War, in their eyes, is the ultimate expression of the violent, the masculine, the patriarchal. On the other hand, if there is going to be war, they want in on the power grab. Their agenda includes allowing women in combat, which they regard as a way to increase feminist political power (imagine the stump speech Hillary might have given if she’d been able to boast of a PT boat episode).
This schizophrenia was personified during the Gulf War by then-NOW president Molly Yard. Yard publicly opposed the war (NOW was a sponsor of the anti-war demonstration staged in Washington in January 1991) but, at the same time, argued that women in the military should see combat.
A feminist perspective on war may be gleaned from Patriarchy: A State of War by theorist Barbara Zanotti. Zanotti argued that violence and patriarchy are “mirror images” and that the only way to “end the state of war” is to free women from “the rule of fathers.” In this spirit, Nation magazine’s petulant Katha Pollitt complained that “9/11 and its sequelae have definitely rehabilitated such traditional masculine values as physical courage, upper-body strength, toughness, resolve.”
Feminists have surprised even the most jaded observers with their inability to grasp what is at stake. Pollitt famously lamented her daughter’s desire to display an American flag, telling the child that “going to war would reinforce the worst elements in our own society—the flag wavers and bigots and militarists.” The Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War released a statement entitled “Not in Our Name,” decrying U.S. military retaliation; the signatories were a who’s who of the feminist establishment: Gloria Steinem, The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, writer Robin Morgan, and Alice Walker.
Barbara Ehrenreich is perplexed by the war; she confessed to the Village Voice : “I don’t know how you wage war against one person; it doesn’t make sense.” Evidently what does make sense to Ehrenreich is the capitalistic target of the terrorists’ rage: “What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist,” she said, “is that the strongest response to corporate globalization and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology.”
Feminist ambivalence about war is part of a larger geopolitical naiveté that has long hobbled the movement, and whose most misguided impulse is a view of all wars as preventable evils. This was obvious in a symposium sponsored by the National Women’s Studies Association Journal on “Civil Society, Feminism, and the Gendered Politics of War and Peace” that was held shortly before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Contributors called for “a process of negotiation and conflict resolution where both sides come out as winners” and for the creation of “peacemaking forums” that “can tolerate more sexes than two,” as if negotiating with terrorists like bin Laden would benefit from the unique contributions of the transgendered. Gordana Rabrenovic and Laura Roskos describe “destabilizing definitions” of war and peace in order to “undermine the hegemony of war as a popular human activity.” Post-September 11, in a world where “destabilization” became a fact of life, in the form of anthrax spores and terrorism alerts, such rhetoric seems radically out of touch with reality.
In viewing women as “natural” communicators, negotiators, and peacemakers, feminists flirt with the idea that women are intrinsically different from men—a “girls will be girls” theory of war, if you will, though they claim such feminine attributes aren’t biological. As Elise Boulding, a retired Dartmouth professor, noted in the symposium, “The skills for these negotiations are women’s skills, not for biological reasons, but because they have developed in our experience-world.” In a recent interview with CNN, Swanee Hunt, founder of the Women Waging Peace project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, dismissed the question of whether women are naturally more peace-loving than men. But she seemed to think that women have better skills for ending war. The real solution to war, Hunt said, is “in the everyday lives and common sense” that women can bring to the negotiating table.
Whether one calls it empathetic communication skills or estrogen, the distinction is semantic. Most feminists appear to agree with the group Women in Black, a loosely-knit coalition of women who stage periodic peace demonstrations around the world and who argue that “a feminist view [of war] sees masculine cultures as especially prone to violence, and so feminist women tend to have a particular perspective on security and something unique to say about war.”
Whatever you think about the difference between men and women, it is clear that feminist intellectuals don’t have the heart to use manly force. Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments, for example, told the Village Voice that “force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not retribution,” while Gloria Steinem wanted to answer the annihilation of thousands of Americans with a volley of antibiotics: “We need an act as positive as the terrorists were negative,” Steinem said, “for example, a massive airlift of food and medicine into Afghanistan.”
Other feminists are more concerned about the enemy within than the enemy abroad. Marcia Gillespie, editor of Ms. magazine, urged Americans to ferret out internal enemies such as the religious right. “No, they’re not the Taliban,” she said, “but like the Taliban…many of them use religion to justify their words and actions.” Her advice? The country should take “a close look at the actions of our government and our corporations, our banks and lending institutions, our foreign policies that have and are contributing to the problem.” Novelist Alice Walker also alerted the public to the enemy within; having completed a ten-day, post-September 11 fast, she was moved to decree, “Just as we need to examine the contents of our colons, we need to examine the contents of our government.”
Alice Walker’s colon-gazing creed is of a piece with feminism’s view of war as a breakdown of communication—something preventable by ceaseless and hectoring global “conversations” among nations. But an understanding of war as preventable suggests a world where almost nothing is worth fighting for.
Watching the unfolding American Civil War from across the Atlantic, the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” Mill was right. Feminists would do well to remember that it is often only by the use of force—not womanish conversation—that our freedoms and privileges are protected.
