War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System       and Vice Versa Joshua S. Goldstein (Cambridge University Press, September 2001)

British poster, World War I

Feminist scholarship on war Given so many men’s low interest level, most political science studies of gender roles in war come from a feminist perspective and most are written by women. In the International Studies Association, women scholars are seven times more likely than men to belong to the gender studies section, and this disparity is greater at the leadership level, even though the section welcomes men and has done organized outreach to them. The authors and editors of 25 international relations books that address war and peace from explicitly feminist perspectives consist of 21 women and one man (see Table 1.3). Nearly all the individual contributors to the edited volumes on this list are also female. Of course, many women scholars are not feminists, and a few male scholars do study gender. Yet, as Ann Tickner puts it, “there is something about this field [international relations] that renders it particularly inhospitable and unattractive to women.” Many recent signs suggest change in the discipline, and gender articles now appear occasionally in mainstream journals, but gender is still segregated conceptually from the subjects that most scholars of war study.⁶¹

Feminist scholarship on war, building on a long tradition, has grown rapidly since the late 1980s. As in other fields, feminist research often tries to bring out the role of gender, and of women, in social relationships. In doing so, however, feminist theorists follow several schools of thought, with different and sometimes incompatible assumptions and analyses about war. I will try – within the limits of this cursory review – to give a sense of how feminist theorists of different schools think about war and peace.

Strands of feminist theory “The feminist theory” of war does not exist. Rather, a number of feminist arguments provide sometimes contradictory explanations and prescriptions. Feminist political theorist Jean Elshtain describes a “polyphonic chorus of female voices… At the moment [1987], feminists are not only at war with war but with one another.” This chorus is not simple to categorize, and to cover a range of approaches I will need to oversimplify.⁶²

Most feminist approaches share a belief that gender matters in understanding war. They also share a concern with changing “masculinism” in both scholarship and political–military practice, where masculinism is defined as an ideology justifying male domination. They see women as a disadvantaged class, unjustly dominated and exploited by men. (According to 1981 data, women worldwide are half the population and a third of the paid labor force. They work two–thirds of the hours, but receive only a tenth of the income and own a hundredth of the property.)⁶³

Beyond these points of agreement, different feminist schools diverge. Various authors describe feminist theories in terms of three perspectives or schools of thought. (Similar categorizations of theories into three schools have been applied to economics, history, and international relations.) I sort feminist theories of war into three main strands, though most feminists combine elements of these approaches in various ways. They explain gendered war roles in different ways.⁶⁴

These strands roughly organize my hypotheses and thus my presentation of empirical evidence. Chapter 2 tests liberal feminism against the record of women’s participation in combat. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 test difference feminism against evidence from biology and psychology. Chapter 5 and (in part) Chapter 6 test theories about the construction of gendered war roles, against historical and cross–cultural evidence.

⁶¹ ISA headquarters, personal communication, June 13, 1997; Sylvester 1994; Pettman 1996a; Peterson 1997b; Alexandre 1989; Grant and Newland 1991; Sylvester ed. 1993; Murphy 1996; Stiehm 1982; Steans 1998; Steuernagel and Quinn 1986; Elshtain 1985; Tickner 1991, something 28; Whitworth 1994a, ix–1; Meyer and Prügl eds. 1999; Kelson and Hall 1998; Kelson 1999; cf. Ehrenreich 1997b, 21; signs: Keohane 1989; Tickner 1997; Keohane 1998; Marchand 1998; Tickner 1998; Murphy 1998, 93.

⁶² Elshtain 1987, 232–33; Flax 1990, 188; Cock 1991, 188.

⁶³ Masculinism: Brittan 1989, 4; data: Tickner 1992, 75.

⁶⁴ Harding 1986; Sylvester 1994; Whitworth 1994a, 11–23; Whitworth 1994b, 75–86; Burguieres 1990, 3, 9; Goldstein 2001, 124–39; variants: Carroll and Hall 1993; Pettman 1994; Jaggar 1983; economics: Ward 1979; history: Nelson and Olin 1979; international: Doyle 1997; Viotti and Kauppi eds. 1999; Goldstein 2001, 8–9.

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System       and Vice Versa Joshua S. Goldstein (Cambridge University Press, September 2001)