Women and Wars

Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures

Carol Cohn, Carol Cohn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745660660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars throughout history, and their participation is only increasing at the turn of the 21st century. Women experience war in multiple ways: as soldiers, as fighters, as civilians, as caregivers, as sex workers, as sexual slaves, refugees and internally displaced persons, as anti-war activists, as community peace-builders, and more. This book at once provides a glimpse into where women are in war, and gives readers the tools to understood women's (told and untold) war experiences in the greater context of the gendered nature of global social and political life.

CHAPTER 1

Women and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework

Carol Cohn

This is a book about the relationships between women and wars: the impacts wars have on women, the ways women participate in wars, the varying political stances women take toward war, and the ways in which women work to build peace.

There is an old story about war. It starts with war being conceived of as a quintessentially masculine realm: in it, it is men who make the decisions to go to war, men who do the planning, men who do the fighting and dying, men who protect their nation and their helpless women and children, and men who negotiate the peace, divide the spoils, and share power when war is over.

In this story, women are sometimes present, but remain peripheral to the war itself. They raise sons they willingly sacrifice for their country, support their men, and mourn the dead. Sometimes they have to step in and take up the load their men put down when they went off to fight; they pick up the hoe, or work in a factory producing goods crucial to the war effort – but only as long as the men are away. To the men in battle, they symbolize the alternative – a place of love, caring, and domesticity, and indeed, all that is good about the nation which their heroic fighting protects.

The gendered reality of war is far more complex than this old story portrays. War itself is more complexly gendered than this masculinized story allows, and women’s role in and experience of war is far more integral and varied. In this book, we will show that one cannot understand either women’s relation to war or war itself without understanding gender, and understanding the ways that war and gender are, in fact, mutually constitutive.

Which women? Which wars?

The starting point for thinking about women and wars must be that women’s experiences of war and their relations to war are extremely diverse. Women both try to prevent wars and instigate wars. They are politically supportive of wars, and they protest against wars. Women are raped, tortured, maimed, and murdered, they are widowed, the children they have nurtured are lost to violence; but women are also members and supporters of the militaries and armed groups that commit these acts. Women stay home, resolutely striving to sustain family and community relationships; and women are displaced, living in camps without any of the structures that they have built to make life possible. Women are empowered by taking on new roles in wartime, and disempowered by being abducted from their homes and forced into armed groups or military prostitution. When the war is over, women work to rebuild their communities, and women are ejected from their families and communities because they have been raped, or been combatants, or lost a limb to a landmine.

The diversity of women’s experiences of and relations to war is due to both diversity among women and diversity among wars. “Women,” of course, are not a monolithic group, but instead individuals whose identities, options, and experiences are shaped by factors including their age, economic class, race, clan, tribe, caste, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, physical ability, culture, geographic location, state citizenship and national identity, and their positioning in both local and global economic processes. Their relations to war are shaped by, but not reducible to, these multiple factors; they are also thinkers who make their own sense of the multiple social, cultural, economic, and political forces which structure their lives. The multiplicity of these factors and the sense women make of them gives rise to contradictory interests among women, and even within any particular woman. This means that attempts to generalize about “women and war,” while in some ways unavoidable in a book of this kind, always run the risk of doing conceptual violence to the realities of women’s lives. And that we must, at a minimum, reject comfortable assumptions such as “women are naturally more peaceful than men” or “women are war’s victims,” and instead commit to exploring the specificity of different women’s relations to wars and the multitude of factors which shape those relations.

This, in turn, requires paying attention to the specificity of wars. Wars are neither a uniform phenomenon, nor a uniformly gendered phenomenon. They vary along many dimensions including the weapons, tactics, and strategies employed, the political motivations and goals, the global economic and political relationships within which they are embedded, the kinds of militaries and armed groups engaged in the fighting, the number, range, and type of other actors involved in the conflict, and the resources available for recovering from war.

Thus, understanding that there is great breadth and diversity of women’s experiences of war is a critical first step, but we also need more than a catalogue of what women do and what happens to them. In order to understand the specificity and complexity of women’s different experiences of and actions in war, we need to start by understanding the contexts within which that experience is embedded, the series of interlocking systems, relationships, and processes which constitute the conditions under which women act. These include the gender systems within which women live; the specific kinds of wars being fought; and the wider set of actors and economic, political and social processes, from local to global, which shape both women’s lives and the societies within which they live before, during, and after war.

Our approach to thinking about gender

“Gender” is a complex term which has been employed in many different ways by scholars, policy makers and activists; unfortunately, this means that when any two people use the word “gender,” they may not be sharing a common understanding at all. For many policymakers in international institutions, for example, “gender” is often little more than a more “neutral-sounding” word for women; so when they refer to “gender issues” they really mean those things they think of as “women’s issues,” and when they talk about something like “gendering peacekeeping,” they are most likely referring to adding women to peacekeeping forces or addressing women’s needs during a peace-keeping mission. For others, however, “gender” is taken as referring to both men and women, and a “gender issue” might, for example, be the problem of how to disarm male fighters at the end of a war if their identities as men are bound up with possessing and using guns. In answering that question, a feminist economic researcher who sees “gender” as a structural, material relationship between men and women would likely come up with different solutions than a feminist sociological theorist who understands “gender” as a “situated accomplishment.” If, as this book shows, gender is a crucial factor both in how women and men experience wars and in war itself, it is critical for us, at the outset, to unpack some of the meanings of gender that will prove analytically useful to the study of women and war.

Gender as structural power relation

Among the many different uses and meanings of the word “gender,” one common place to start is to understand that gender is a social structure which shapes individual identities and lives. It shapes how people see themselves and are seen by others. It shapes the kinds of daily activities and paid work in which people are likely to engage. It shapes the kinds of material and cultural resources to which they have access, and the kinds of power and authority they might wield.

But gender not only structures our lives as individuals; it also shapes, and is shaped by, the institutional and symbolic universe we inhabit, and the material processes – such as economic growth or decline, “globalization,” militarization, or climate change – which constitute the context and conditions within which our lives play out. This is because gender is not simply a set of ideas about male and female people and their proper relations to each other; gender is, more broadly, a way of categorizing, ordering, and symbolizing power, of hierarchically structuring relationships among different categories of people, and different human activities symbolically associated with masculinity or femininity. So, as will be shown later in this chapter and throughout the book, the institutions that are constitutive of the wider economic, political, social, and environmental processes formative of war are themselves structured in ways that both draw on and produce ideas about gender, that rely on gendered individuals in order to function, and that are permeated with symbolic associations with gender in their practices and conceptions of their missions.

In understanding the many different meanings of gender, as well as the ways they are linked, the conceptual lynchpin that holds them all together is this: gender is, at its heart, a structural power relation. Just as colonialism, slavery, class, race, and caste are all systems of power, so is gender. Each rests upon a central set of distinctions between different categories of people, valorizes some over others, and organizes access to resources, rights, responsibilities, authority, and life options along the lines demarcating those groups.

There are many different ways of talking about a system that structures power relations along the lines of gender difference. One of the first to gain prominence was the word “patriarchy.” Although the literal meaning of the word is “rule of the father,” patriarchy is generally taken to have a broader meaning. A patriarchal system is one in which not only are fathers the heads of families, with authority over their wives and children, but also where men exercise power and dominate women through control of society’s governmental, social, economic, religious, and cultural institutions. While some writers are reluctant to use the word, either due to worry that it will scare readers or because they feel that it does not adequately address the nuances of gendered power relations, others see its sustained value in its foregrounding of power, which can sometimes seem to disappear in discussions about “gender.” One of the foremost scholars on women and war, Cynthia Enloe, states, “Patriarchy allows you to talk about the relationship of constructed masculinities and constructed femininities, over time and in relationship to each other and as they relate to structures of power. If you just use ‘gender,’ then you can, in fact, never ask about the power relationships that both construct masculinity and femininity and relate them to each other unequally.”¹

Other gender analysts attempt to ensure the centrality of power to discussions of gender by talking about “gender subordination,” a term which they see as useful in pointing to the male–female gender binary, as well as to the ways in which within each category there are gendered hierarchies. Others find “gender system,” “gender order,” and “gender hierarchy” to be useful in pointing to the complexity of hierarchical gender statuses both between and among men and women. R. W. Connell (1987), for example, has focused attention on the multiplicity of masculinities that exist, finding that “hegemonic masculinity” not only helps legitimate men’s power vis-à-vis women, but also legitimates some men having greater power than other men, those with “subordinate masculinities.” Still other writers employ the concept of “masculinism,” “the ideology that justifies and naturalizes gender hierarchy by not questioning the elevation of ways of being and knowing associated with men and (hegemonic) masculinity over those associated with women and feminism” (Hooper 1998, p. 31).²

Whichever specific term is used to connote gender as a structural power relation, there are two key points to keep in mind for the purposes of this book. First, it is important to notice that in no case is gender ever reduced to a monolithic picture of one unified category of people, men, having power over another unified category of people, women. Instead, each of these terms points to the necessity of seeing that there are not only power differentials between each category, but also within each. This is because gender never stands alone as a factor structuring power in a society, but rather is inflected through, and co-constituting of, other hierarchical forms of structuring power, such as class, caste, race, ethnicity, age, and sexuality. It is the intersections of these structures that produce multiple masculinities and femininities, and concomitant power differentials, within each category.³

Second, we need to remember that the many different phenomena which the word “gender” is used to encompass become coherently linked only when they are seen as facets of the way in which gender functions as a system of power. So three key phenomena we will shortly examine in this chapter – gendered identities, gendered social structures, and gendered symbolic meanings – should not be understood in isolation, but rather as three co-constituting aspects of gender as a social system which structures hierarchical power relations.⁴ Further, the interrelations between them are critical to understanding why women’s – and men’s – experiences of war can only be understood through the lens of gender analysis.

Gendered power relations and the relation of sex and gender

A system which empowers some categories of people at the expense of others requires political, social, economic, cultural, legal, and educational institutions which actualize and undergird this distribution of power. It also requires an ideology that justifies that unequal access; it has in some way to “make sense” or to appear legitimate that some people have access to resources, or even to rights over their own bodies, which others do not. Typically, this involves a set of beliefs about what each category of person is like. Both colonialism and slavery, for example, have relied on racism, a system of belief which posits supposedly “biologically” distinct racial categories (with, at the most, only marginal relation to physiological fact), and attributes different characteristics as inherent in people in each category. The characteristics belonging to each are not only seen as distinct but also distinctly coded as opposites, one inferior and one superior, and as less and more suited to different kinds of work, different life options, and different access to power. So the arrangement of power in which colonizers have the right to govern the colonized and to exploit and expropriate both their natural resources and labor only appears legitimate if the people who are colonized are understood as racially inferior – primitive, childlike, heathen, uncivilized, ignorant, and thus unfit for governing themselves – and the people who colonize are understood as their racial superiors with an “opposite” set of characteristics – advanced, mature, god-fearing, civilized, intellectually superior, and beneficent, and thus well-suited for having power over others “for their own good.”

In a parallel manner, men’s greater access to power and resources than women’s has long relied for its justification on a set of beliefs about men’s and women’s reputedly biologically based characteristics. If men are believed to be stronger, more rational, more in control of their emotions, smarter, independent, tougher, better able to make and stick to a decision, courageous, more aggressive and thus willing to fight when necessary, more active, better at math and science, more oriented toward achievement and changing the world in which they live, while women are believed to be weaker, irrational, governed by their emotions, less intelligent, dependent, soft, indecisive, timid, passive, bad at math and science, and much more interested in domestic relationships than in public life, then it might appear to make the most sense for men to be in charge. These beliefs would suggest that in the public sphere of industrialized states, men would be better skilled than women at running governments, corporations, factories, religious and educational institutions; in the family they would be better suited to make the decisions, control the finances, and control and protect women and children (who are both seen as unable to protect themselves).

There are two key things to highlight in thinking about this system. First, that blatant inequality – that is, men’s and women’s unequal access to power, authority, and resources – is not only legitimated, but also made to appear natural and unremarkable, by a belief system that divides humans into two categories, male and female, and then sees a huge range of different characteristics as residing within the individuals in each group. This way, men’s dominance of political, economic, and social institutions is seen as simply a result of their inherent individual capacities (and women’s lack of those capacities), rather than as a result of social structures which systematically advantage men and disadvantage women.

Second, it is critical that the different characteristics attributed to males and females are seen to be based in their respective bodies, for if the differences are seen as biological, then male dominance is seen not only as “natural” but also unchangeable. Although feminist theorists have challenged the belief that the body is somehow a simple biological given, independent of culture, and unchanging, it remains true that for many people, that which is seen as biologically based is seen as “natural” and immutable.

It was in response to this set of social beliefs underlying male dominance – that it is legitimate because it derives from biologically based differences between males and females – that the concept of gender (in its nongrammatical usage) was first developed. Feminist social scientists and historians observed that, although male and female biological difference is relatively consistent, what societies believe about what men and women are “naturally” like varies substantially across cultures and through history. So the term “gender” was used to mark and make visible a distinction between the biological differences between males and females (or “sex” difference) and the socially constructed meanings ascribed to those differences (“gender”). Gender is constructed through a process in which humans are divided into categories (male and female) and a multiplicity of dichotomously conceived traits, characteristics, and meanings are associated with each category, which is then conceived as the opposite of the other (masculinity and femininity). Critically, the meanings attached to each category are not neutral; rather, those coded as masculine are consistently valorized over those coded as feminine, and those individuals and activities marked as masculine are considered to have more status and value than those seen as feminine. So if before the concept of gender was developed it was widely taken for granted that what we expect men and women to be like – their personalities, the kind of work they do, the roles they take in family and community life – flows directly from their biological sex, the concept of “gender” interrupts that (too) easy equation. Gender insists that, however much is biologically given, societies construct a much greater set of differences than biology dictates, and that those socially constructed differences, in turn, legitimate a social order based on the domination of men over women, and some men over other men.

This distinction between “sex” and “gender” – between what appear to be unvarying biological sex differences and the far more varied social constructions of masculinity and femininity – is pivotally useful, but has also been somewhat complicated in recent years. Although it has been true throughout history that most (although not all) societies have understood people to be either “male” or “female” on the basis of a set of biological characteristics including appearance, reproductive anatomy, and reproductive capacity, we now know that sex categories are not that simple. In fact, it is estimated that in at least 1 percent of births there are morphological features which make it difficult to see the infant as clearly a member of either biological sex category (Chase 1998; Diamond & Sigmundson 1997; Fausto-Sterling 2000); instead, they are biologically intersex. So the idea that there are only two biological sexes must it...