Recently, I discovered a list of unfinished research projects, which I had made fifteen years ago at the end of graduate school. About ten lines down is “gender and war,” with the notation “most interesting of all; will ruin career – wait until tenure.” Fortunately, other political scientists in those years – almost all of them women – were not so timid in developing feminist scholarship on war. These pioneers laid the intellectual foundations for this project, and were often kind enough to teach me and encourage my gender interests. I am indebted to Carol Cohn, Francine D’Amico, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Simona Sharoni, Christine Sylvester, J. Ann Tickner, and others. (And, fortunately, I did get tenure.)
A second debt I owe to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which funded a research leave based on my vague idea of writing an interdisciplinary book about war. When it proved slow a-borning, the foundation staff said simply that they would leave a space on their library’s shelf of “MacArthur books.” Here it is, only seven years late.
The roots of this project – and a third debt – go back further. I grew up on the Stanford campus, with two molecular biologists for parents. I worked occasionally in my father’s lab, and picked up a feeling for the world of natural science. Only in retrospect do I appreciate what an extraordinary privilege it was to grow up inside Stanford when it was still a small town and, for me, an interdisciplinary incubator.
Science and scholarship are never entirely unbiased, since knowledge-production occurs within social and political contexts. Scientists occupy positions in social hierarchies. Arguments serve purposes and reflect political agendas. Personally, I write from a position of privilege and security, as a white, male, North American, tenured social scientist. I have never been in a war or served in the military, though I was born in the shadow of World War II and turned 18 during Vietnam – as a peace activist. My political agenda today is anti-war and pro-feminist, tempered over several decades by an appreciation of the enormous complexity and difficulty of these important changes in human society. All these perspectives, no doubt, affect the character of my book, but I would single out especially that of being a man. Men should pay more attention to gender. We learn about ourselves by doing so. I have, at least.
This book summarizes a large and complex body of evidence drawn from different research communities in a variety of academic disciplines. Bringing this material together requires some translation, but I try not to over-translate others’ voices, nor to massage the mass of sometimes contradictory material to fit a single theory or dogma. The result is a longer book, but a richer one. I have tried hard to be careful, fair, and above all honest – about where the empirical evidence leads, and about how poorly simplistic models and theories describe our complex world.
The research literatures covered here are growing exponentially. My review, with some exceptions, ends in early 1999, although new and interesting works continue to appear (notably Kurtz ed. 1999 and Bourke 1999). Many others will follow. For updates and discussions, see this book’s website, www.warandgender.com.
Exchanging ideas with scholars from other disciplines has been a special pleasure of this project. For their suggestions on a previous draft and on the project, I thank in particular John Archer, Frans de Waal, Mel and Carol Ember, Seymour and Norma Feshbach, Walter Goldschmidt, Jane Goodall, Sir Michael Howard, Paul Kennedy, Melvin Konner, Charles Lawrence, Eleanor Maccoby, Mari Matsuda, Richard Wrangham, and the late Carl Sagan.
In my own discipline I especially thank – in addition to the feminist theorists mentioned earlier – Hayward Alker, Neta Crawford, Randy Forsberg, Peter Haas, Ruth Jacobson, Sarah Johnson, Adam Jones, Stephen Krasner, Nanette Levinson, Jack Levy, Lory Manning, Jane Mansbridge, Craig Murphy, Shoon Murray, Robert North, Jim Rosenau, Bruce Russett, Cathy Schneider, Shibley Telhami, and others. Thanks also to participants in seminars and conversations at Yale, Stanford, Cornell, University of Massachusetts, American University, the University of Maryland, Rutgers, and the Peace Science Society and International Studies Association conferences. For research assistance and support, I thank the incomparable Elizabeth Kittrell, Wendy Hunter, Brook Demmerle, Briana Saunders, Teruo Iwai, Maryanne Yerkes, American University, University of Sothern California, University of Massachusetts, Yale, and Harvard. For seeing the potential of this book, I thank my editor at Cambridge University Press, John Haslam. Thanks to Reena Bernards, Cynthia Schrager, Elena Stone, and Allan Lefcowitz for writing help. For long-distance spiritual support during this long, difficult project, I appreciate Joyce Galaski, Ericka Huggins, and Reena Kling. Finally, thanks to Andra, Solomon, and Ruth for companionship and humor.
About the footnotes
The footnotes, grouped by paragraph of text, provide work and page citations for quotes and specific claims, indicated by an identifier word before the page number. A subject word followed by a colon applies to subsequent citations until the next colon. A citation without identifier or subject word refers to a discussion relevant to the paragraph but not to any particular claim or quote in it. Some authors cited for a paragraph may be dissenting arguments from the paragraph’s point. Some of the footnotes encapsulate running conversations, which the interested reader can reconstruct from the sequence of page citations given.
About the website
Discussions and updates regarding the topics raised in this book may be found at its site on the World Wide Web, www.warandgender.com. Scholarly resources include a searchable list of the References. Join an interdisciplinary conversation, check for errata (sigh), or read the first chapter.
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