War

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War

The differences between biological sex identity and learned gender identity are probably nowhere so clear as in wartime cultures, which direct males and females toward their respective roles as fighting men and nurturing women. At the same time, war opens space within this categorical framework. For instance, Rosie the Riveter of American World War II propaganda as a muscular factory worker is an unconventional mother, but still a mother. The link between sex and gender is simultaneously destabilized and reinforced during wartime.

WARTIME ROLES

Since ancient times and across the globe, males have performed combat. However, many scholars agree that no compelling evidence actually proves males to be biologically predisposed to soldiering. Hormones, even size and strength, have been said to play a minimal role in successful combat. Instead, soldiering, like gender, is a learned performance. The well-documented existence of both successful female warriors and unsuccessful male combatants testifies to this understanding of soldiering and gender performance. Regardless of how the occupation itself and the definitions of masculinity and femininity have varied among cultures, soldiering is seen as a masculine performance. Entrance into the military, as a basic form of civic duty or citizenship, has provided a masculine rite of passage in many cultures. Becoming a warrior, the young man leaves the private, maternal space of the home and enters the realm of public service to the paternal state. Courage, physical strength, skilled handling of weapons, endurance of hardship and pain, and the "no guts, no glory" attitude associated with warriors have typically been celebrated as masculine traits in military and civilian life. Such a model of militant masculinity at its extreme appears in the warrior hero in Homeric epics and American Rambo films. Such masculine soldiering belongs to a gendered dichotomy between protector and protected, strong and weak, war and peace, public and private.

Warfare is often positioned as a masculine defense of the feminine, as men defend their homes, homelands, and the women in them. In fact, popular ways of speaking about war often conflate the bodies of individual women with the nation. Invading soldiers' raping of individual women becomes symbolic of the invasion itself. In turn, the rapes of individual women often represent the humiliation of entire nations and serve as a call to arms for men to defend their women and country. Not only is the homeland needing protection feminized, but often the enemy is too: They are depicted as feminine or as effeminately homosexual, as waiting and willing to be conquered.

The essentialist formulation claiming to be rooted in nature assigning masculine and feminine work during wartime is simply that women are to give birth and men to fight and kill. However, both are recognized as duties to the state, and together they constitute necessary components of any war system. In ancient Sparta (950–192 bce), only men who fell in battle and women who died during childbirth received marked gravestones. During wartime, womanhood is delegated to a sphere of peace, a refuge from war, where women undo war's damage. Men kill and get killed, whereas women replenish the population. Men wound and women bandage, men get dirty and women launder. Conceptions of war have depended on such a dichotomy between men and women, battlefield and home front. Yet scholars have noted that nurses appearing to act as peaceful and life-preserving mothers are nonetheless integral components of a war system that could not continue without them. During war, medical workers' fundamental purpose is to render men able to return to battle, where they will kill or be killed. In this sense, life-preserving women's war labor actually perpetuates a life-destroying cause, and at closer inspection, the dichotomy between the two collapses.

During wartime, the home front (if one can be distinguished from the battle zone) becomes militarized along with those who work and live there. Although motherhood is commonly thought of as antithetical to war, particularly by pacifist feminists, motherhood has been constructed as a feminine version of military service during wartime from ancient Sparta to twentieth-century Europe. This mother figure brings honor to herself as a national symbol of sacrifice by pressuring males to "be men" and fight. She functions as a cheerleader and witness of masculine performance. As early as the Second Crusade, the French Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) and other women handed out phallic-shaped weaving spindles to men they suspected of neglecting their duty as soldiers. British women did the same with white feathers during World War I.

Some have questioned the masculine nature of soldiering by noting many of the ideals in a soldier are actually stereotypically feminine. Equal-opportunity feminists in favor of female combatants in the military argue militaries are not built upon essentialized masculinity. Rather, females and males with feminine traits belong there too. If military science is concerned with training numbers of individuals to act as one body, or corps, then a successful military unit depends on its soldiers' strict discipline and submission to authority, their willingness to work with others and cohere into a group, and their senses of duty, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. These are all stereotypical feminine characteristics. In contrast to the popular Rambo image, combatants must be as willing to die as to kill. Not courage or blood-thirst, but devotion to the group and an unwillingness to abandon it may compel soldiers to fight rather than flee from combat. The question remains, however, whether such feminine traits are protected and framed within a culture of masculinity and articulated within the context of a tightly bound brotherhood. Some hold that women introduced into this brotherhood threaten its cohesion and masculine character, and make such carefully framed feminine traits difficult to sustain. Scientific studies of group cohesion among mixed sex military units in the United States have been inconclusive, and are complicated by women's official designation as noncombatants, which might interfere with group cohesion more than gender or sex.

Since the 1990s, women comprise up to 15 percent of modern industrial militaries. Despite formal distinctions banning women from combat, male and female soldiers are difficult to classify simply as combatants or noncombatants during wartime. In the U.S. military, noncombatants are still trained for combat and carry guns. Females in support positions in the military often come under fire, they are taken as prisoners of war, and they are wounded or killed just as male combat soldiers might be.

Certainly, females' performance as combat soldiers has been constant throughout human history, though historical records of female warriors have emphasized the cultural anomaly of their performance, and they constitute a minority of all warriors historically. Accounts of women who have fought as soldiers disguised as men are innumerable, particularly because many never revealed their disguise. But female leaders from ancient times also fought in battle openly as women. Cleopatra of Egypt (69 bce–30 bce), Zenobia of Palmyra (r. 268–272 ce), and Matilda, Countess of Tuscany (1046–1115) were all political leaders who led their armies into battle and fought side-by-side with men. The Assyrian queen Sammuramat (r. 811–808 bce), who conquered Babylon, emphasized the gendered performance of her combat on the memorial she erected in honor of herself: "Nature made me a woman, yet I have raised myself to rival the greatest man" (De Pauw 1998, p. 41).

Examples of all-female military units also exist. Though reports of ancient communities of female warriors or Amazons in ancient Libya, Scythia, and Sarmatia are widely contested, it is well-documented that the Amazons of the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) served in their own units in a mixed military. Like Sammuramat, they reportedly saw their occupations as masculine: "We are men, not women" (De Pauw 1998, p. 181). Women around the world have always participated in combat with men in guerilla operations, terrorist attacks, and civil wars. Women have also been reserved as last lines of defense in particularly critical or bleak situations. For example, Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union formed all-female units during World War I and World War II. Women always defended town walls by throwing rocks or boiling liquid at invaders when their men were absent or short-numbered. Particularly celebrated are accounts of women, like Molly Pitcher (the historical figure based on Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley) of the American Revolutionary War, who, supporting and supplying soldiers with water and supplies, took over their husbands' posts when they were wounded or killed. These last examples point to the proximity between "combatant" and "noncombatant" roles. Except in the case of wars fought far away from home or at sea, women are rarely as isolated from combat as is typically represented.

In practice, an exclusively masculine or male space where war is waged has been only an imagined ideal. Throughout history, wherever men were soldiers, women were camp-followers or victims of invasion. Camp followers provided food to soldiers, laundered, and sold supplies. They provided medical care, dug ditches, and loaded weapons. Though some were married to soldiers, as a group they were negatively characterized as prostitutes with low morals and poor hygiene, who slowed the mobility of military units. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), German camp followers were subject to military law and were regulated by their own male military administrator. But beginning in the eighteenth century, European and North American militaries began to limit and eventually abolish camp followers. Instead they sought to provide such services within the military organization itself. This arrangement was quickly supplemented by the formation of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and American Civil War (1861–1865). These groups strictly regulated the types of females they employed and their behavior to avoid "camp follower" or "prostitute" status. Women had to be celibate and unmarried, and were often framed as "sisters" or "daughters" to the soldiers. In contrast to the traditional camp follower, whose relationship with the military was chiefly economic, Red Cross women were generally unpaid volunteers who could afford to give their time and labor.

At the same time, by World War I most militaries also began providing their soldiers with regulated brothels. Feminists have offered the criticism that militaries not only encourage the sexual and economic exploitation of women, but also promote the belief that sexual exploitation of women is manly and that sexual virility is related to successful combat performance. Though feminists do not form a uniform position on prostitution, some feminists have identified a link between military policy sanctioning prostitution and violence against women. They argue that rape does not have an inherent place in war as a facet of natural male aggression but it is institutionalized through direct policy or lack thereof. For instance, the Japanese government enslaved foreign women to provide sexual services to their troops during World War II, which amounted to institutionalized rape. The wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s also demonstrated that rape can belong to systematic military policy; rape became an official war crime according to the United Nations in 1998.

WAR'S LONG-TERM IMPACT

Particularly in the twentieth century, mass mobilization of men into the military has necessitated women's entrance into the public sphere. In turn, new career opportunities for women made possible by war have been praised as a step forward for women's rights. But feminist scholars have pointed out that leaving the home for the factory or office did not automatically translate into gender equality. Women's status remained subordinate to the status of male workers and male soldiers especially. Women's work in factories and other sectors was repeatedly highlighted by policymakers as a temporary arrangement and framed within a context of traditional gender roles. Once men returned home, so did women, a movement enforced by public policy and postwar propaganda. In other words, while men's and women's roles changed, their positions in relation to one another did not.

It has been argued that women proved themselves worthy of full citizenship through their patriotic wartime service to the state. Whether voting rights were a direct consequence of wartime activity has, however, been disputed. It is difficult to imagine voting rights would have been granted without the suffrage movement. Regardless, after World War I, women gained the vote in Canada, Estonia, Great Britain, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War II, French and Italian women also won suffrage rights. Still, voting equality, though an important step, should not be mistaken for social, political, and economic equality.

Wars in which men fight away from home and women stay at home have also often alienated male combatants and female civilians from one another. The traumatic experience of battle has left combatants emotionally and physically damaged. Though war has been represented as a test of manhood, in which men have the opportunity to be "real men," it has also always threatened to unman soldiers. Men under fire often behave in "unmanly" or "cowardly" ways (such as crying, hiding, or failing to fire back), and physical and psychological wounds are often symbolically recognized as castrations. The castrated soldier stands in symbolic opposition to the woman who seems to have gained economic and political power during the war. Integration back into civilian and family life is often difficult if not impossible. The American experience of the Vietnam War and the German experience of World War I have involved a soldier class that felt betrayed by the home front, widely perceived as women who did not adequately support their men and the war effort. In other words, when a nation suffers a humiliating defeat and the soldiers as a group fail the "test of manhood" posed by the war, women may be blamed.

FEMINIST RESPONSES TO WAR

Feminists have been unable to form a uniform position on war. The World War I division of the women's movement into supporters of their respective governments and opponents, who formed international alliances of women against war, remains emblematic of the two camps. Many suffragists believed that if they rallied behind their governments and subordinated their own needs to that of their governments, they might eventually win the vote. Women have also been mobilized into supporting war in the name of defending other women. British and American women responded to reports of German atrocities against Belgian women, just as American and European women supported the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan as a means of liberating women from the repressive Taliban government. Northern feminists supported the American Civil War because they believed the fight to abolish slavery was a just cause. Feminists in support of a war often appeal to just-war theory. In the twenty-first century, it is clear that women have not only supported war, but have directed its policy. Condoleezza Rice of the George W. Bush administration and Pat Schroeder of the Senate Arms Committee have been powerful government and military policymakers. Just as they have proposed elsewhere, many equal-opportunity feminists also advocate the full integration of women into all sectors of the military, including combat positions, so that they might also eventually constitute a higher percentage of military and political policymakers.

Pacifist feminists have sometimes designated women as fundamentally different from men. As mothers, they hold women have a particular and natural duty to oppose war and to protect life. They hold that only women can end war, since men are either naturally predisposed or socially encouraged towards it. For this reason pacifist feminists question whether military careers are a step forward or a step backward for women, insofar as their careers support and advance a patriarchal institution that may perpetuate sexism and dichotomous and sometimes destructive gender roles. Pacifist feminists often form international coalitions and recognize women across the world as victims of war.

see also Rosie the Riveter.