Women and War: New Views for a New Century

In early December, noted author- educators Sayre Sheldon and Cynthia Enloe were the featured presenters at a Women's Action for New Directions (WAND)-sponsored forum, “Women & War: New Views for a New Century,” at the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century. The focus for the evening was the impact of militarism on women.

Sayre Sheldon—WAND president emerita, NGO representative, and professor of courses on war and peace at Boston University—addressed some of the issues she highlighted in her new anthology of women's writings on war, Her War Story: Twentieth-Century Women Write about War. How, she asked, has war changed women and how have women changed war? She pointed to the extraordinary reversal that has occurred between the First and Second World War. In the so-called Great War, 10 percent of the casualties were citizens whereas, in the Second World War, 90 percent of the casualties were citizens. Today the trend which marks citizens as targets continues.

As a consequence of war, Dr. Sheldon explained, women developed new skills and responsibilities. Between the two wars, women worked very hard to prevent another war. By the Second World War, when air attacks made citizens so much more vulnerable, women began to confront horrors that were once set aside as “unthinkable.” Today, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the founder of WAND continued, we see increasing numbers of armed populations, civilian victims, massive use of rape as a weapon of war, and whole countries reduced to the status of refugees. We see mutilation used as a weapon of war and we see biological warfare.

Within the book are descriptions of the Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared who demonstrated in the plaza every Thursday until, at last, their tenacity wore down government denials and changed what governments could get away with doing to their citizens. Such efforts had a major impact on the definition of war crimes and the international will to punish such crimes. There is hope, Dr. Sheldon suggested, in the new processes and thinking that have evolved about people's basic entitlement to security and human rights.

Cynthia Enloe, Fulbright scholar, professor at Clark University, and author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics; The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War; and the new Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, began her remarks with a simple proposition, “I've been thinking about how women get militarized. Militarization depends on the militarization of women. Women have quite a powerful lever because they have something to withhold.”

Dr. Enloe used an episode that occurred in peacetime Okinawa in September of 1995 as the centerpiece around which she positioned her arguments for countering militarism. Three young American servicemen kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 12-year-old Japanese school girl. Because of the specifications of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in effect at the time, the Japanese held jurisdiction for the investigation and prosecution of the crime. This crime had political ramifications because of allegations of racial bias against the African American men charged with the assault, and because of the then-recent Tailhook investigations in the United States.

The issues Dr. Enloe raised included the American military's tendency to treat women as if they are commodities, a tendency highlighted in Admiral John Macke's remark about the assault, “For the same amount of money [the cost of the car they rented to abduct the girl], they could have had a prostitute.” The author pointed out that Senators Boxer and Feinstein, in particular, led a protest against such attitudes, one of the consequences of their highly visible protest being to force Admiral Macke into early retirement.

In addition, the author of Maneuvers asserted that a dichotomy was being established in the way that the press was treating the assault, implying that it is not all right to prey upon the young and innocent but that there is a class of women, namely prostitutes, upon whom one may prey because they are not “good women.” There was an implication that prostitutes serve the military as a kind of line of defense for the protection of respectable women and that it is legitimate for the military to expect to be serviced by these women. Dr. Enloe suggested that the impact of a significant presence of military bases on women has yet to be adequately analyzed. She praised the women of the American Friends Service Committee for their ongoing work in countering the impact of militarism.

In the discussion segment of the program, emphasis was placed on the fact that, particularly in war-torn Mozambique and Somalia, women have enabled communities to survive. They have often assumed power to stabilize their communities and help to bring peace. There was criticism tendered against the United Nations because it has failed to address issues like child prostitution and a warning was offered that the emergence of the Junior ROTC program in this country, which is not funded by the Defense Department and siphons money away from other curriculum needs, is an alarming phenomenon.

Ambivalence was expressed about the kind of difference women can make as they participate in the military. Will they have an impact on a different kind of soldiering, say, peacemaking? The issue of sexual assault as a weapon of war was again addressed in the question and answer forum. In Kosovo, one member of the audience explained, some 20,000 women were sexually abused as a means of destroying their identity and their place in their society. There are 1,000 children who have been born as a result of these assaults. What will happen to them?

Susan Shaer, president of WAND, suggested that all of us need to address federal spending priorities as part of our resistance to militarism and we must elect more women like Feinstein and Boxer to the Senate to raise these issues which we wish to see addressed.