Not About Doves

In Little Women (or at least the 1994 film version), there's a scene where Jo gets into an argument with a man who believes women should have the right to vote because they would be a good moral influence. The timelessly kickass Jo March responds: "I find it poor logic to say that women should vote because they are good. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country."

I spent today working on notes for a R is giving on women and international security and came up with an almost parallel theme. Throughout most of the 20th century, the desire to invovle women in foreign policy or security decisions stemmed from the fact that people believed that women would be a force for peace. It's a fairly archetypal story, stemming back at least to the sex strike against the Peloponnesian War in the Greek play Lysistrata. There was Jeanette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against World War II who commented that commented that “As a woman, I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”Most of the feminist IR theory I read in college claimed that war (and particularly the military industrial complex) was a singularly masculine construction and the male-dominated nature of the defense establishment contributed to an unhealthy separation between conflict and emotion.

I think a couple of factors have changed this argument in the last fifteen years. First, as more women have held high positions within security-oriented institutions, the idea that women are inclined towards pacifism has been challenged in practice. Within the United States, Albright advocated for US military commitment in Kosovo. Rice has been active in the execution of the War on Terror. Hillary Clinton strongly supported the 2003 Iraq War. One explanation is that there are few inherent psychological differences between men and women, and women are as disposed to conflict as men. Another theory is that in order to gain power and respect, women must present themselves as men present themselves, taking care not to seem “weak on security.”I can buy either, and they could both work if we argue that women are socialized to be more uncomfortable with confrontation, but the women who gain power are the ones less affected by this.

I also think that the painful prevalence of gender based violence (the slaughter of thousands of men in Srebrenica, the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim victims, the propaganda about Tutsi women and the ensuing sexual violence) in ethnic cleansing campaigns in the 1990s forced organizations like the UN to reevaluate their predominantly male peace-keeping structure for different reasons. Because gender can play a huge role in the execution of conflict and the affected populations are both male and female, it seems short-sighted to have security decisions made and executed by men alone. I think this is the rationale the UN was moving towards with resolution 1325, and it's a way to argue that gender integration is essential without being, err, essentializing.