January-February 1999:
Kosova: Prospects for Peace
Breaking the Culture of Fear
Critical Resistance
Activist Reviews
Activist Letters/WRL News/Activist News
Homepages:
War Resisters League
Nonviolent Activist
Mothers & Others
The Women and War Reader. Edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York University Press, 1998, 382 pp., paper, $22.95
Feminism in the 1990s strives to respect the cultural and other differences
among women, both within and between countries, and thus many feminists hesitate
to make general claims about women and war based on maternal thinking.
-April Carter, "Should Women Be Soldiers or Pacifists?"
Most of us in the peace movement today, male or female, would probably agree that generalizations about women's natural propensity for peacemaking do not apply universally. Yet within living memory the women's peace movement claimed just that propensity. During the Vietnam War, we wore pins or pendants saying "war is not healthy for children and other living things," the logo of a California-based national antiwar mothers' group. Later, Dr. Helen Caldicott charged women to engage in peace work because of our special understanding of the "genesis of life." But when we stepped back from those energizing rallies, marches and demonstrations, to examine coolly the examples set by world leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, we were forced to shed our naiveté.
I was forced to shed mine one fall afternoon in the late '60s. I was engaged in he most all-American activity imaginable: making apple pies with other Boy Scout mothers. (Yes, I objected to the Scouts' militarism, but my son told me to forget "all that stuff"-he had joined solely for the purpose of going to camp with his friends.) As a Scout mother, I was required to play my part in the annual fundraising effort: the preparation of dozens of apple pies, the sales of which would benefit the troop's summer-camp fund. In a model suburban kitchen, mothers formed an assembly line around a harvest table. Some peeled and cut apples while others prepared the crust for the mass production of the pies. Never one to keep my mouth shut-especially in the realm of politics-I broke the spell of happy chitchat during that gala pie-making afternoon by introducing the subject foremost on my mind: Vietnam.
The first reaction to my impolite intrusion was an uncomfortable silence. I had taken it for granted that by then everybody agreed on the futility of the war-these were, after all, mothers of sons who would be called upon to register for the draft in a few years. Yet almost immediately, these polite, cheery, Leave-It-to-Beaver mothers-of-sons were embroiled in a heated debate. I was both amazed and depressed to discover myself in the tiny minority who rejected the popular line being pitched from Washington: The government had information that was unavailable to the public-and protests only endangered the lives of "our boys."
The "motherist" position was relied upon to a great extent by Women Strike for Peace and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and in general has been favored by a mostly white, middle-class U.S. women's peace movement during this century and before. In the essay "The Truth about Women and Peace" in The Women and War Reader, Jodi York recounts the familiar argument put forth by cultural feminists: "[W]omen's psychosocial development prepares them to be connected caretakers. Men's psychosocial development prepares them to be individuated competitors." As she says, it was feminist reasoning-favoring cooperation over competition and consensus decision-making over majority rule, and rejecting hierarchical structures-that led to women's peace encampments.
Yet, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes notes in her essay, "Maternal Thinking and the Politics of War,"
[M]aternal identity has no essential position; instead it may be used ambiguously to structure very different, even antagonistic, political positions-from promoting peace to advancing war to mobilizing political resistance.
In the succinct but wide-ranging essay that serves to introduce this superlative collection of women's voices, York touches on women's roles; cultural challenges; women leaders who "out-hawk" men; the price paid by women in war; rape; refugeeism; and finally the merits of the ecofeminist perspective that "all oppression is essentially the same." She admits it may be a cliché, but still she concludes that "peace remains a ?women's issue,' not for reasons of motherhood, or biological difference, but for reasons of justice."
The book moves on from there with 37 thoughtful, carefully researched and well-sourced essays on subjects encompassing such diverse areas as: liberation struggles; theoretical debates on nationalism, victimization, ethnicity and war culture; women in the military; resistance movements and literature; motherhood; parenting and war; peace culture; and policy-making and peace action. The authors include April Carter, Cynthia Enloe, Vesna Nicolic-Ristanovic, Betty Reardon, Gwyn Kirk and Gail Svirsky. It is impossible in the space available to do more than hint at the scope and depth of the array of material in this impressive selection. I cite York's essay as an example only because it places in context the progression followed by so many women in the U.S. peace movement. The editors, Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, whose work also appears, have resented us with a valuable resource for years to come.
Because the writers represent a variety of disciplines, many will probably be new to non-academic readers. Anyone in search of a "global perspective" may be disappointed or overwhelmed by the multidimensional aspects put forth. In the end, there is nothing to do but to place women within their individual cultural contexts and to face the reality that these differences cannot be easily subsumed under a huge "every woman wants peace" banner. The reality, as documented by women scholars and activists from several continents whose viewpoints differ (sometimes quite radically), is what makes this book so provocative and valuable.
No one will agree with all that is here, but no one will come away without "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-myself?" insights. Women and War explores new territory, discards old truisms that often turn out not to be true, while at the same time refining truths that stand. Don't expect answers, but do expect to dig deep into the subject through the thinking of serious political scientists, law professors, sociologists, historians, psychologists, conservationists, criminologists, political philosophers, writer-activists and specialists in women's studies, peace and justice-all women and all eminently readable.
-Virginia Baron
KID's Initiatives
The Kid's Guide to Social Action. By Barbara A. Lewis, Pamela Espeland and Caryn Pernu. Free Spirit Press, 1998, 208 pp., paper, $16.95
The enormous potential of children and young adults in the political arena is often overlooked. "The Kid's Guide to Social Action" is a handbook for mobilizing youth toward positive solutions to social problems of local, national and international concern. It is also an effective effort to do away with the belief that children should be seen and not heard, encouraging adults to take kids seriously and helping kids develop their political awareness and activism.
Divided into five parts, the guide takes the reader step-by-step through the process of choosing an issue and developing and finally executing a social action project. It provides essential information on methods of organizing people, cutting through government red tape and publicizing one's cause. In fact, although the intended readership appears to be from elementary to junior high school, as a high school senior I found more than a few useful tips and interesting tidbits.
The book's layout is a perky, easy-to-read textbook format, peppered with boxes displaying advice, important addresses and inspirational quotes from historic figures. After each section explaining a type of action (such as a petition, resolution or grassroots community project), a true story entitled "Kids in Action" describes the successful efforts of young people using that particular action to bring about social change. This feature gives the young reader concrete examples of political activism among peers that has influenced society from a community, environmental or global perspective.
The authors do a thorough job of helping kids tap all the resources available to them, from legislative documents to the local news to the Internet. It also advises the reader on checking the credibility of information as well as working responsibly and effectively with legislators and other prospective supporters. Its tone is never commanding or restrictive, and one senses that theauthor was careful not to underestimate a young person's competence or creativity when given the opportunity to pursue an important goal. The examples of letters to politicians, proposals and surveys are mostly drawn from actual successful social actions executed by kids, and the guide emphasizes the reader's own initiative. The underlying theme is looking "beyond the classroom"-challenging youth to take advantage of their opportunities, think critically about the world around them, and realize their aspirations. Those are actions that, for young and old, transcend politics and promote a compassionate and individualistic outlook on society as a whole.
- Michelle Chen
Revisiting
the Classics
By John M. Miller
"Civil Disobedience." By Henry David
Thoreau. Available from WRL as a pamphlet in the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute
Essay Series, 26 pp, paper, $1.00.
"When I meet a government which says to me, ?Your money or your life,' why should I be in haste to give it my money?"
It's 150 years since Henry David Thoreau, the United States' archetypal tax resister, first delivered the essay that has influenced thousands of activists-including this writer-at a Concord, MA, lecture in January 1848. Originally printed two years later as "On the Relation of the Individual to the State," the proto-anarchist, pacifist, antislavery essay has since had many titles, including "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" and, more simply, "Civil Disobedience."
Thoreau had been arrested two years earlier for refusing to pay his state poll tax, a practice he began six years earlier in protest against slavery and maintained as a protest against the war of aggression against neighboring Mexico. He spent oe night in the local jail, when, he says, "some one interfered, and paid that tax." His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had bailed him out.
I was 14 when I first read "Civil Disobedience," preparing to graduate from Sunday school (in Reformed Judaism). Uninspired by organized religion-and inspired by the media's daily accounts of acts of resistance against the war in Vietnam-I decided to speak on the right to commit nonviolent civil disobedience in the face of injustice. In my brief talk, I cited two examples of actions by people who followed their consciences and took risks to challenge the prosecution of unjust wars: Thoreau's tax resistance and the burning of draft files by the Berrigan brothers. The rabbi, then in his last year at the synagogue, didn't object when I failed to link the subject to Jewish tradition.
Thoreau's often reprinted essay (the 1970 War Resisters League calendar consisted of "Civil Disobedience" illustrated by photos of contemporary nonviolent actions) has been cited by some of the most important figures in nonviolence, from Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. Its description and justification of Thoreau's individual act of resistance has inspired mass civil disobedience to injustice in India, the U.S. South and elsewhere. King, who said he read the essay as a student and was "fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system," reread it just before launching the Montgomery bus boycott.
But Thoreau's essay does not point straight toward mass movements or Gandhi's and King's huge protests. "Civil Disobedience" dismisses government as a benign inconvenience at best and sometimes finds legal channels for change as not worth the bother: "As for adopting the ways the State has provided for remedying the evil," Thoreau writes, "I know not of such ways. ... I have other affairs to attend to." Voting is a game: "...like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions."
Government, he says, can have no power over one who is sure of his or her conscience and acts on it, he argues. After all, the state can only seize the body not the mind. If the consequence be prison, then "[t]he true place for a just man is also a prison," he writes, and unjust laws must not be obeyed. He is prepared to act individually and argues that should be enough: "I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name-if ten honest men only-ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America." Yet at other moments he appears to wish that many would act with him: "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."
Indeed he spends a good portion of the essay berating his well-meaning neighbors for not risking much, if anything: "There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them. ... They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect."
Thoreau's style
of civil disobedience as described in his essay survives today, in the refusal
by many to pay war taxes. But civil disobedience comes in a wider range of practices
now. Actions tend to be en masse, parts of broader campaigns that involve a range
of legal tactics an are often aimed at influencing government policies and only
occasionally at making personal statements of non-cooperation. Thoreau's spirit
survives most of all in his vigorous appeal to individuals to act on their conscience.
Almost all modern civil disobedience, whether by an individual or a group, begins
with the decision he describes in the essay: to cease to cooperate with injustice.
WAR
RESISTERS LEAGUE