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Feminism and Militarism
Some Questions Raised by the Gulf War
INTRODUCTION
Increasing numbers of people are demanding equal rights for women. Does equal rights mean equal responsibilities, including military service for women? Should such military service include combat roles? These questions have a sharp relevance to us all in a changing South Africa. This article uses the Gulf War as a kind of peg on which to hang some of these questions.
AMERICAN WOMEN SOLDIERS IN tHE GULF WAR
The Gulf War raised new questions about gender relations. Approximately 11% of US military personnel are women and a number of military women - about 33 000 - served in the Gulf War. They were largely assigned to logistics, maintenance, intelligence, communications teams and medical units.
They were represented in very different ways. 'The Saudi government rejecting the idea of female soldiers coming to their defense, designates them as males with female features'. (Time Magazine, 25 February 1991) Other media depicted them as 'liberated women?
The Washington based Women's Research and Education Institute (WREI) emphasised the importance of the part women played in key combat-support positions. For instance in the army:
- 26 000 women were deployed to the Persian Gulf;
- army women participated in the initial invasion into Kuwait and Iraq. 'They were assigned to forward support units in the following specialties: flying helicopters to transport personnel, equipment and supplies; air defense artillery; military police; intelligence; transportation; ordinance; chemical and biological warfare; special operations; communications, medical search and rescue; and with medical facilities forward in the battle area.' (WREI, 1991:1)
- About 270 women served with U. S. Patriot missile battalions in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey.
- Two women commanded battalions - a Military Police battalion and a Material Maintenance battalion - in Operation Desert Storm. Women were also in command of companies, aircraft squadrons, and platoons and squads in a variety of units?
- Eleven army women lost their lives in Saudi Arabia. Five of the 122 US troops killed in action were Army enlisted women.
- Two women, a truck driver and a flight surgeon, were among the 25 U. S. personnel held prisoner of war by Iraq; both received the Purple Heart for combat injuries.
- Female reservists deployed by the Army performed the following functions: medical, chemical defense and decontamination, transportation, construction, maintenance, supply, communications, legal, military police, general administration etc.
Overall women make up 19% of the US army reserve (WREI, 1991) and the response of women reservists in the US specifically triggered a debate about the relation between war and women's liberation. According to one report in February 1991, '... 600 women reservists, most of them mothers, have turned in positive pregnancy tests to exempt them from the war. Before the confrontation with the ground forces of Iraq begins, feminism is confronting battlefield reality and military commanders are discovering that in many women's minds, equality ends when war starts.' (Sunday Star 24 February 1991) A number of commentators at the time maintained that women must choose between being mothers or soldiers. There was some anger in the US around the fact that women reservists have enjoyed training and benefits for which they were now refusing to pay the price.
In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on February 19 1991 Carolyn Becraft pointed out that today's US army is a married force - including not only a much higher proportion of women but a majority of dual working couples, some of whom are both in the military. She argued that whereas the mobilization and deployment of the active component appears to have gone smoothly, there have been problems in the mobilization of the reserve forces, particularly there has been public concern about the effects on children.
Becraft (WREI, 1991:5) attempted to put the issue in perspective:
There are over 500 000 US military personnel in Southwest Asia. Of these, approximately 16 000 are single parents - the majority of them men - and 1 200 are dual military couples. But it should be born in mind that most of the personnel who have been deployed are married and have children There are probably close to a million military children who are directly experiencing the trauma of having a parent involved in this war, and millions more who worry that their parent will be the next to go. These are trying times for all military families. The question before this committee is the deployment of both members of the dual military couples, and single parents, and the subsequent status of their children. It is a question that has not had to be considered in connection with previous wars.
THE INCORPORATION OF WOMEN INTO THE US ARMY
In recent years the proportion of women among US military personnel has increased to 11%. Today over 229 000 women serve in active duty in the military services of the Department of Defense: the army, navy, marine corps and air force.
In the Army there are 86 000 active duty women. Almost half of these are black women. Fully 47% of the Army's active-duty enlisted women were black in 1989. The comparable percentage for Army enlisted black men was 29%. (The New York Times 19 February 1991) This is more than double their proportion in the population?
These racial characteristics clearly reflect the constraints experienced by black women in American society? Enloe writes, 'This trend may say more about the prospects a young Black woman has in the civilian sector for a job that can pay the rent and provide health care for herself and her children than it does about the support of young Black women for militaristic values or for US foreign policies.' (Enloe, 1988:3) For them the US army may also provide valued education and training opportunities.
As in the wider society, women in the US army suffer from sexual harassment. According to a recent Pentagon study 64% of a sample reported having been subject to some form of sexual harassment.
There are very few women in the top levels of policy and decision making. There is a horizontal as well as a vertical sexual division of labour within the army though this is changing. Since 1972 women had been moved from their traditional confinement to health care and clerical jobs in the US army into all but 16 of the Army's 377 military occupations, with more and more jobs taken out of the 'direct combat category so women could be used.' (Friedan, 1983:177) Overall 52% of jobs are currently open to women. They fly war planes and perform combat support duties?
No statute explicitly restricts the assignment of women in the Army but it is Army policy to exclude women from positions it determines would have routine engagement in direct combat.
'Women in the US military are thoroughly integrated into combat support roles and the services depend upon the capabilities of women.' (WREI, 1991:2) Combat support positions provide operational assistance to the combat arm. Examples include direct engineering, police, communications and intelligence support.
No law prohibits women from serving in combat. Laws do prohibit the permanent assignment of Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force women to ships and aircraft engaged in a combat mission, and while there is no comparable statutory prohibition for army women, policies adopted by the Army and the other services restrict women's roles. (WREI, 1991:2)
In practice the Secretary of the Army has developed policies that exclude women from 'routine engagement in direct combat'. Before this a definition of 'close combat' was used to determine the positions that would be closed to army women. In 1978 the Department of Defense defined 'close combat' as 'engaging an enemy with individual or crew-served weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy's personnel and a substantial risk of capture.' (WREI, 1991:9)
In 1982 the Army expanded upon the definition of 'close combat' and changed the terminology to 'direct combat'. Direct combat, a term used only by the Army, is defined as 'engaging an enemy with individual or crew served weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy's personnel, and a substantial risk of capture ... Direct combat takes place while closing with the enemy by fire, maneuver or shock effect in order to destroy or capture and while repelling assault by fire, close combat or counterattack.' (WREI, 1991:9)
It has been argued that there is a connection between women's exclusion from combat and their exclusion from many opportunities in the military leading to positions of power and authority. 'Whether statutory or a matter of service policy, these prohibitions bar women in many career fields from being assigned to positions necessary or advantageous to advancement and promotion. In the US armed services overall, 50% of military jobs are open to women but the percentages vary greatly by service.' (WREI, 1991:2)
The notion of 'combat' is an increasingly ambiguous one. Combat exclusion laws fail to take account of changes in the nature of warfare which have blurred distinctions between combat and non combat roles as well as the demarcation of 'front' and 'rear'. The laws clearly do not correspond to the reality of current military doctrine, which includes a fluid front line with first strikes deep into the previously safe rear to knock out supply lines. The laws are meaningless given the highly technological nature of modern warfare - a characteristic exemplified in the precision bombing of the Gulf War and the exchanges of Scud and Patriot missiles.
Women in the Gulf War were assigned to Patriot missile batteries. (International Herald Tribune, 1 February 1991). Presumably they thus participated in the sceptic button-pushing killing that the Gulf War involved. Furthermore women were involved in operating supply lines which could have been primary enemy targets. The report of a missing female soldier raised the prospect of a captured American woman being displayed on Iraqi television, as Baghdad did with downed allied pilots.
For a while her fate was said to '...dominate US war talk. It's going to upset people. The public is not ready to see THEIR WOMEN [my emphasis] mistreated', said a retired Brigadier - General. (Sunday Times 3 February 1991). If the intention of baring women from 'routine engagement in direct combat' is to protect them from immediate physical danger and rule out the capture of women in battle, then this is not totally effective. It will be argued below that the real purpose of combat exclusion policies is to maintain the ideological structure of patriarchy.
The Women's Research and Education Institute reports some key 'firsts' about military women as
- in 1989 a double first: two women commanded army companies in a combat operation (Panama invasion);
- over 800 army women participated in the invasion of Panama;
- in 1983, 170 army women participated in the invasion of Grenada as military policy, signal and communications officers, helicopter crew chiefs, maintenance personnel and ordinance specialists.
According to Enloe some of the military women who took part in the Grenada invasion lobbied the Pentagon and Congress in order to do so, arguing that it was discriminatory for field commanders to so wield the concept of 'combat' as to exclude them. (Enloe, 1988)
The Panama campaign appears to have triggered a debate in the US on the role of women in combat. An editorial in the New York Times said that the issue 'reaches deep into the relations between the sexes and is fraught with politics and prejudice'. Officially the 800 women who were among the troops who invaded Panama on 20 December 1989 to remove General Manuel Noriega from power were only in support' positions. But some of them found themselves under fire and in seconds were shooting back. 'Captain Linda Bray, 29, Commander of the 988th Military Police company from Fort Benning, Georgia, crashed through a gate in a jeep, training a machine-gun on the enemy. Three Panamanians died in the encounter. "I joined the army for the excitement, the challenge, experience and loyalty to my country", Captain Bray said. "I haven't been let down for a moment. The sounds, the confusion and the excitement - they automatically click in combat." (Eastern Province Herald, 11 January 1990). Bray is reported to be the first woman to lead American men into combat. (Eastern Province Herald, 11 January 1990) However there have been reports that 'tearful women soldiers ignored orders which they felt would endanger their lives'. (Sunday Star 21 January 1990)
But the question must be posed: are these 'firsts' in the sense of honourable achievements which represent progress for women, or a shameful record of women's participation in criminal activities and imperialist invasions?
Should women be in the army at all? Are women in uniform an insult to the American male? This was suggested at the time of World War II. 'Opponents of the bill for establishing a female auxiliary argued that this violated the historical right of men to fight in defence of their womenfolk and homes. The traditionally conservative military mind also subconsciously resisted the idea of women in uniform because it directly challenged an exclusive male preserve. If women were once allowed to bear arms and female generals to conduct battles, it would undermine the central male rationale for war. I think it is a reflection upon the courageous manhood of the country to pass a law inviting women to join the armed forces in order to win a battle, thundered one senator. Take the women into the armed services, who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble, homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself. Think of the humiliation. What has become of the manhood of America.' (Costello, 1985:64)
In the light of this does the presence of women in the US army mark an erosion of gender roles and represent progress towards achieving gender equality? The question taps into a debate about the relation between feminism and militarism.
FEMINISM AND MILITARISM
I am not going to advise women to turn their distaff into a musket, though I sincerely wish to see the bayonet converted into a pruning hook. (Wollstonecraft, 1967:219)
In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (originally from 1792) Mary Wollstonecraft raised a question that - 200 years later - is logically at the cutting edge of contemporary feminism. She argued for equal rights for women, but emphasized that this did not imply their equal right to bear arms. She assumed that the vocation of motherhood exempted women from arms bearing.
Militarism involves more than arms bearing and the practice of war. It has been defined as 'a set of attitudes and social practices which regards war and the preparation of war as a normal and desirable social activity. This is a broader definition than is common among scholars. It qualifies people other than John Wayne as militarists. But in an age when war threatens our survival it is as well to understand any behavior, however mild in appearance, which makes war seem either natural or desirable.' (Mann, 1987: 35)
The role of women in militarisation has been largely obscured and mystified by two competing perspectives - those of sexism and feminism. Both analyses exclude women from war on the grounds that they are bearers of 'special qualities'. Sexism excludes women from the ranks of the military on the grounds of their physical inferiority and unsuitability for fighting. As the weaker sex women must be 'protected' and 'defended'. One variant of feminism similarly excludes women but on opposite grounds - that of their innate nurturing qualities, their creativity and pacifism. Another variant of feminism excludes women on the grounds that men have a monopoly on power. The outcome of these perspectives is that war is understood as a totally male affair and the military as a patriarchal institution from which women are excluded and by whom women are often victimised. The military is viewed as the last bastion of male power - war as it's last preserve.
The reality is that during this century women have increasingly been incorporated into the armed forces. This trend is related to a number of factors including the women's liberation movement.
The ideology of this movement - feminism - is complex, varied and contains contradictory perspectives. Analytically, a feminist perspective recognises gender as a significant social relation which structures our social experience so that women have distinctive and specific experiences. Of course gender is not the only or even the most significant social relation which shapes the social world. Especially in South Africa it is impossible to overlook the importance of class and race.
Politically feminism is splintered by deep divisions. The main line of cleavage is between liberal or equal rights feminists who want equality for women with men within the existing order, and those who want an alternative order. The last category has generated an intense debate between radical feminists who envisage this alternative order as based on 'female values' and Marxist and socialist feminists who see it based on socialism.
Equal rights feminism stresses women's rights to achievement, power and opportunity (within the world as it is presently constructed) - the rights to make both money and war. Equal rights implies equal obligations and responsibilities. In this sense compulsory universal military service is tied to the concept of citizenship. Consequently some liberal or equal rights feminists claim the right of women to serve in the armed forces. They maintain that the exclusion of women from war is linked to her exclusion from economic and political affairs. They deny any linkage of women with 'peace', asserting that women are no more or less peaceful and compassionate than men. They demand the re-working of gender roles and call into question the traditional notion of 'femininity'. Equal rights feminists sometimes assert that women are as capable as men for combat roles. Access to combat roles demonstrates women's capacities for independence and action in the world.
In contrast to equal rights feminism, radical feminism asserts that women have 'special qualities'. Such qualities - rooted by some in biology, and by others in social practices - mean that women respond to war very differently to men.
This 'special qualities' thesis was eloquently argued by Virginia Woolf. In the great text of pacifist feminism, Three Guineas (published in 1937) she argues that men and women are different. Men are more drawn to bellicosity The emotions of aggressive pride and arrogant patriotism which, in her view lead to war, do not take hold of women as deeply as they do men. This is rooted in women's exclusion from male-dominated institutions and values. The rallying cry to defend 'our country' does not have the same resonance among women, precisely because women have too little stake in the country's wealth and power to consider the sacrifice of lives to be justified.
Prevention of war in Woolf's argument would require the dismantling of the entire gender system, the desegregation of male and female spheres and the depolarisation of masculinity and femininity. Men would have to emancipate themselves from the notion that war was a necessary proving ground for 'manly qualities'. (Woolf, 1966: 8). Her pacifist feminism sought equality between the sexes not through admitting women to combat but rather though liberating men from militarism.
In Woolf's argument it is fundamentally sexism - women's exclusion from access to power and resources - that generates their 'special qualities'. By contrast the biological understanding of the 'special qualities' thesis is usually anchored in women's reproductive capacity. Women are viewed as 'the mothers of the race' and therefore 'the peace-loving sex'. There is believed to be a necessary link between mothering and a tendency towards peacefulness and responsibility to others; a natural caring for creatures whose well being is at risk.
Vera Brittain promulgated such an essentialist notion of natural female pacifism. (However her diaries and letters of 1914 - 1918 show she was torn between patriotism and pacifism). Brittain endorsed Olive Schreiner's argument that, if women had political power, they would never let their children, whom they bear in anguish, go to war. She asserted that 'war violates a profound biological urge in women.'
In her Women and Labour, Olive Schreiner (1911:71) argued that the mothers of the race have a special responsibility as well as a special power to oppose combat. She characterised a callousness toward life and death as 'instinctual' in men of certain cultures. '"It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something" cries the typical male of certain races, instinctively. "There is a living thing, it will die if it is not cared for", says the average woman, almost equally instinctively.' Men and women, in her view, put a different value on human life. She was suggesting a close linkage between being a woman and pacifism. Because women give birth to life they have a special responsibility to help preserve it. Therefore there is an incompatibility between mothering and militarism.
This argument seems to imply that women have a greater sensitivity to human life and that this means a moral superiority. For example, Soper gives women a special authority on these grounds:
By virtue of their role in human reproduction, their (women's) statements are given the authority of experience that men do not have. Some of these experiences match in their crude biological vitality the crude wreck of biology that would be the experience of nuclear war. The starkness of the contrast between the event of conception and the event which irradiates the womb, between the act of giving birth and the act which evaporates the child: this is something which women owe it to the world to talk about. (Soper in Thompson, 1983: 170-171).
An irony in this kind of feminist thinking is that it may easily side with those men who would exclude women from militarism and war on the grounds of their biological capacity to "stay home, have babies, and keep the home fires burning for the boys on the border". This biological view posits women's child-bearing capacity as of over-riding importance. Reproduction is women's incomparable and unique contribution as citizens to their state. There is a biological reductionism at work in both the sexist and feminist arguments here that finds resonance in the dominant ideologies of masculinism.
But there are other grounds on which much contemporary and historical feminism asserts that there is a necessary connection between feminism and anti-militarism. It has frequently been argued that militarism is the root cause of women's oppression? 'War implies command rather than participation, obedience over agreement, hierarchy instead of equality, repression not liberation, uniformity not diversity, secrecy not candor, propaganda, not information.'. (Kopkind, 1991: 446) 'Masculinity' is said to be associated with the patriarchal values of dominance, power, aggression and violence. By contrast feminist values are said to be peace, nuturance, sensitivity, justice and equality. These qualities are not 'natural' but a product of socialisation.
Military training is a crucial agency of this socialisation. Men are socialised into a conception of masculinity that is violent. 'Military training is socialisation into masculinity carried to extremes.' (Roberts, 1984: 197). The notion of 'combat' is the fulcrum of this process.
'Combat' is the key dimension in the development of the masculinity\militarism nexus. Combat is presented as fundamental to the development of manhood and male superiority. (Enloe, 1983) Only in combat lies the ultimate test of a man's masculinity. The image of manhood inculcated through combat training hinges on aggression and dominance; it involves an emotional disconnection and an impacted sexuality. (Eisenhart, 1983) Through combat the man affirms his role as protector, and defender. In this sense the exclusion of women from combat roles is essential for maintaining the ideological structure of patriarchy.
It has been documented how military combat training may use woman-hating as part of its method of tuning men into soldiers, a process in which the individual must learn to dehumanize other people and make them into targets. (Eisenhart, 1983; Cock, 1989(b)) According to this view there is a necessary connection between feminism and anti-militarism.
The experience of Nazi Germany is relevant to this debate about feminism and militarism. Recent scholarship suggests that women were not a major force against the militarisation of German society. Koonz (1987) argues that there were elements of Nazi ideology that were attractive to some aspects of feminist sensibility. She demonstrates that in reality women contributed to the horrors of the Third Reich. Nazi women 'resolutely turned their heads away from assaults against socialists, Jews, religious dissenters, the handicapped, and "degenerates". They gazed instead at their own cradles, children and "Aryan" families.' Mothers and wives made a vital contribution to Nazi power by preserving the illusion of love in an environment of hatred, just as men sustained the image of order in the utter disarray of conflicting bureaucratic and military priorities and commands.' (Koonz, 1987:17)
This is a crucial insight. Koonz's study means the loss of 'the idea that there is something about femaleness that can insulate us from Nazism and its like. For 200 years, one strain of feminism has emphasized the moral superiority of women. This is not necessarily a biologistic view; many modern feminists believe that women have been made different from men, but that these differences are nevertheless deep and thorough. Women have been acculturated, they argue, to be more nurturing, less violent, less aggressive, more co-operative than men. The history of Nazi women belies or at least limits such views: there were many women responsible for substantial brutality, and many more enthusiastically supported men's brutality.' (Gordon, 1987:100).
The debate about the relation between feminism and militarism must be informed by such historical evidence. Whether one's interest in this debate is to prevent war or to achieve gender equality the question revolves around how to deconstruct masculinity; how to break the militarism-masculinity nexus?
The answer hinges on two more concrete questions:
- Should women be conscripted?
- Should women serve in combat roles?
A number of contemporary feminists and anti-militarists have argued that women should be conscripted. For example Ruddick (1983) writing as a feminist and an anti-militarist, proposes conscripting women in the interests of peace, partly to break the connection between masculinity and militarism. She views women as 'different', as having pacific qualities. Hence her argument hinges on the assumption that women soldiers would behave differently to men and would alter the nature of armies and wars. Similarly Reardon has argued that militarism in general is expressive of a masculine ideology. Therefore, if women were included in the policy making process, feminine notions of defense and national security could bring about a more peaceful and less militarised world. Also it is suggested that the presence of women in combat units blurs and decreases the harshness of military life. It perhaps lessens the brutalization of young men thrown into an all male society for months on end. One could thus argue for women soldiers as an agency of degendering the military and loosening the militarism/masculinity connection. The function of the military and combat as a masculine proving ground will be eroded if women are fully integrated into the military. A man cannot prove he is a man by doing something that a woman can do.
The interpretation of women's increasing incorporation into armies by the leading exponent of equal rights feminism to-day, Betty Friedan, is interesting. Friedan defines feminism as 'a conscious campaign against sex discrimination culminating in a sex-role revolution, redefining the roles of men and women, that would lead to restructuring of work and home.' (Friedan, 1983:298-299) According to her the experience of integration of women at the bastion of militarist masculinity, West Point, has been positive. 'When the women entered West Point four years ago, there was a sense of ... outrage ... it was the ultimate threat to male superiority, the breaching of that last sacred fortress of masculinity. There was outrage, fear that women would lower the standards of courage, discipline, physical prowess that were the ethos of West Point.' (Friedan, 1983:165) But the process has contributed, in Friedan's view, to the erosion of gender roles, and to 'the possibility of a new model of what it is to be a man, a new kind of male hero in America, as men begin to share the care of the children and home with their wives, as women share the burdens and responsibilities of earning - even the hardships and dangers and glories of military careers.' (Friedan, 1983:171) She suggested the initial 'hostility at women masked something more fundamental going on among the men themselves. After all, the image of what it is to be a man in America - all powerful, all dominant, superior to the whole world, tight-lipped, big-muscled, without fear or feeling, napalming the babies in Vietnam and Cambodia and the green leaves off the trees - had begun to change, after we lost the war in Vietnam.' (Friedan, 1983:171)
Some erosion of gender roles does seems to have happened in the US Army. According to a West Point major, 'our own research shows the whole process of male identity is changing - male bonding, the question of physical prowess is not so all-important.' (Friedan, 1983:180) 'There's a change in the male identity', another officer said. 'Before women came here the way they solved this was the stereotype masks - stalwart, strapping, square-jawed John Wayne. Since the women came, the experience of male identity has become more heterogeneous; the men are not all giants roaming the plains any longer.' (Friedan, 1983:183)
At the same time Friedan reports that women at West Point are competent but feminine. They have not 'succumbed to the machismo role model ...[Friedan] came away from West Point feeling very good about those women cadets. No, they did not turn into imitation jocks, feeble or super tough imitations of machismo.' (Friedan, 1983:189+194) Instead they impressed Friedan as strong and healthy.
There are, paradoxically, elements of the radical feminist notion of women as the bearers of 'special qualities' in Friedan's argument. In her view women soldiers would, as women, have more sensitive concern for life than do male soldiers, hence would be a force for caution and against brutality in any future war. Elshtain comments caustically that 'such sentimentalism strains credulity? Women soldiers do not speak that way. They are soldiers. Period.' (Elshtain, 1987:243) Elshtain sees the increasing incorporation of women into the US army as 'a male-forged identity being homogenized more widely. Yet in light of the fact that all too many women are still prepared to have men think and act politically on their behalf, the woman soldier, if that is the way the woman has defined herself, seems not the worst possible alternative among those now available to us ... I have reluctantly come to the position that women should be granted no automatic exemption from this feature of civil life (the draft). Involuntary, unreflective pacifism is no pacifism at all.' (Elshtain, 1987:243)
In 1981 the National Organisation of Women (NOW) filed a legal brief as part of a challenge to all-male military registration. Beginning with the claim that compulsory, universal military service is central to the concept of citizenship, in a democracy, NOW supported an ideal of armed civic virtue: If women are to gain 'first -class citizenship', they too, must have the right to fight. Laws excluding women from draft registration and combat duty perpetuate 'archaic notions' of women's capabilities; moreover, 'devastating long-term psychological and political repercussions' are visited upon women because of their exclusion from the military of their country. (Elshtain, 1987: 239)
We want all the privileges of first-class citizenship and all the responsibilities. (NOW President, cited in The Star 5 February 1991)
But this is a controversial stand. According to one critic, NOW's brand of equal-opportunity feminism functions to reinforce 'the military as an institution and militarism as an ideology' by perpetuating the notion that the military is so central to the entire social order that it is only when women gain access to its core that they can hope to fulfill their hopes and aspirations.' (Elshtain, 1987:239)
Enloe has pointed out that the NOW position implies that the military defines citizenship. She writes, 'It's true that many American women in the military do see themselves as feminists, breaking down formidable sexist barriers. For them, the Persian Gulf operation is not part of the Middle East's political evolution; it is part of a political struggle that began with the American women in Vietnam, and was carried into the US invasions of Grenada and Panama. Each US military intervention has provided women with a chance to hone their bureaucratic skills, perfect end runs around chauvinist field commanders, and turn up the heat on these Pentagon officials still dragging their feet in opening up military career opportunities to women soldiers. If, however, winning 'first-class citizenship' depends on American women gaining full acceptance in the military, what does that mean for the very meaning of citizenship? In all the coverage of American women soldiers' advances, there is the implication that the military defines citizenship.' (Enloe, 1990:3) Should they do so? Does equal rights mean equal responsibilities including the responsibility for military service? The question taps deep into our different understandings of the relation between feminism and militarism.
Both Friedan and Woolf, writing 50 years earlier, advocated the dismantling of the entire gender system and the desegregation of male and female spheres. Woolf wanted to prevent war and achieve equality between the sexes, not through admitting women to combat but rather through liberating men from militarism. Friedan believes that female combatants are the best means of achieving this.
The current global situation is that 75 countries worldwide practice conscription, including all Warsaw Pact and most NATO countries. Despite assertions of equality in only three countries - Mali, Guinea and Israel - are women conscripted. Only five nations have no combat exclusion laws or policies - Canada, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Portugal. However, nowhere are women routinely utilised in combat roles.
Everywhere women are in the minority of armed forces. '... in no contemporary army, be it a liberation army, a national army or a professional army, do women participate in percentage terms to an extent even approaching that of men.' (Yuval-Davis, 1981:33)
In many societies, apart from the US, the increasing incorporation of women as a minority of the armed forces has not seriously breached the ideology of gender roles or the sexual division of labour in the wider society. The most common function women fulfill in militaries are clerical, administrative and servicing. These are jobs highly similar to those held by women in the wider labour market. They do not contaminate the ideology of femininity which reinforces the sexual division of labour. It is therefore difficult to see how the increasing use of women as a military resource can be hailed as advancing equality between the sexes.
... women's participation in the military has failed to challenge traditional and very basic sexist ideologies. It reinforces a sexual division of labour sharper and more rigid in the armed forces than in civilian life. (Stiehm, 1982:371)
This echoes Yuval-Davis's comment on the Israeli case. This 'suggests that the incorporation of women into the military may change the nature of, rather than eliminate, the subordination of women. Women's formal inclusion in the military does not guarantee their equality, either in terms of the actual tasks they fulfill or in terms of the power they exercise. On the contrary as the Israeli case illustrates, the extremely hierarchical and bureaucratic nature of the modern army can contribute to a gender differentiation and gender inequality even more institutionalized and extreme than in the civilian labour market.' (Yuval-Davis, 1985:648).
The South African case illustrates the same process. Women constitute 14% of the Permanent Force of the SADF but their subordination is evident in the sexual division of labour which means that most women serve in subordinate and supportive roles and in their absence from the higher ranks.
FEMINISM AND MILITARISM IN SOUTH AFRICA
Woolf's and Friedan's ideas have a special relevance to us in South Africa. However in our context the different understandings of the relation between feminism and militarism cannot be pegged very easily for three main reasons. Firstly there is here a widespread suspicion of feminism as bourgeoisie and divisive, as essentially concerned with entrenching and extending privilege. This is often true in a third world context where issues of survival are paramount. As Kimble and Unterhalter write, 'Women of the ex-colonial world have seen much of the substance of (feminist) struggles as irrelevant to them. Women struggling to liberate themselves from the burden of oppression by imperialism -a burden which manifests itself in extreme ways through poverty, disease, genocide - appear to find little point of comparison between their own goals and the concerns of Western women. For them Western women represent a privileged middle class elite fighting for sectarian aims, while women in national liberation struggles are fighting on behalf of their whole people.' (Kimble and Unterhalter, 1982:12)
The notion of 'equal rights' for women has had an important place in many national liberation struggle. This is true of the South African struggle and in our context 'equal rights for women' is a revolutionary call. It is revolutionary because it involves the transformation of the existing order. The idea is thus quite different to the liberal variant of feminism of advanced industrial societies which is essentially conservative and concerned with equality between men and women within the existing order. In a third world context this 'revolutionary feminism' is frequently militarist. It asserts women's equal right with men to take up arms against repression and injustice.
The third peculiar ingredient in the South African context is thus the militarisation of the national liberation struggle since 1961. The armed struggle was launched in that year as a response to increasing state violence and the shrinking space for non-violent political activity by the ANC. MK included women as well as men, and they trained together. A commitment to 'equal rights for women', as well as the widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the armed struggle and the notion of a 'just war' means that the western connection between feminism and pacifism is loosened in the South African context. In fact the female soldier, the MK guerrilla, is a popular mass image of the strong, liberated woman. No thread of strong, well articulated pacifist -feminism has yet emerged.
In South Africa different positions on the relation between feminism and militarism depend on broader understandings of the nature of political conflict in South Africa. Attitudes towards conscription, armies and war are embedded in much larger constellations of beliefs and values.
The extension of conscription to white women was seriously considered by the SADF in the 1970's. In 1990, introducing the debate on the defence vote in parliament, the Minister of Defence suggested that it was time to give consideration to drawing national servicemen from men and EVEN WOMEN (my emphasis) of all population groups. A debate has begun about the integration of the SADF, the homeland armies and MK into a new South African army. There has been no public mention of the place of women in this new army. The experience of Namibia is disturbing in this respect. It has been reported that no women who had served in Swapo's military wing (Plan) or in the South West African Territorial Force have been incorporated into the new integrated Namibian Defence Force. (The Namibian 26 April 1990)
CONCLUSION
Because war affects everyone, many feminists do not see it as a women's issue. Charlotte Bunch is one feminist who has argued that we need to work as feminists on all kinds of issues, not just those traditionally considered 'women's issues' like reproductive rights, child care, rape and women-battering. (Bunch, 1987)
Feminist analysis is increasingly focusing on gender - on the power relations between men and women. The focus on gender rather than on women is important. It means a shift away from an exclusive emphasis on women's disadvantage and difference to the organisation of gender in all social structures and processes.
War and militarisation are gendering activities. They both use and maintain the ideological construction of gender in the definitions of 'masculinity' and 'femininity'. The military mobilises particular gender identities and this process is sharpened in times of war. Therefore a complete understanding of war generally and the Gulf War specifically, requires a feminist analysis.
The Gulf War has been a boon for the right-wing in many parts of the world; it supposedly legitimates continued high military expenditure and further intervention in the third world to maintain Bush's conception of a 'new world order'. It has been described as a 'criminal war ... designed to establish and make clear to all, that the United States remains the world's hegemony. Because that is valued for its own sake, mere considerations of cost, human and economic, have been thrown out of the window to the detriment of US power in the long term, and to the detriment of the people of the Middle East, and the United States in the short term.' (Brenner, 1991:15)
The war should not also be a boon for right-wing feminism in the sense of confirming the image of the woman soldier participant in 'Operation Desert Storm' as the model of the liberated woman. Right-wing feminism involves women joining the masculine hierarchy and cultivating a masculine sense of self.
Men and women relate to war very differently. War does not challenge women to prove that they are women, whereas war has always been the great touchstone of 'manliness'. The notion of war as this proving ground of manliness has centered on the notion of combat. Combat is understood to be the ultimate test of masculinity and thus crucial to the ideological structure of patriarchy. But modern military technology has transformed the nature of war. Warfare has become distant and impersonal. Soldiers sit behind computers or push buttons? 'Combat' has become increasingly ambiguous and difficult to define. Modern war does not always involve hand-to-hand fighting. It does not provide the same unproblematic validation of masculinity. But 'the myth of combat dies hard'. (Enloe, 1983:13)
This paper used the Gulf War as a peg to argue that militarisation involves gender relations and that makes it a feminist issue. We have to confront some difficult questions?
- Will the incorporation of women into armies serve the cause of peace by loosening the connection between militarism and masculinity?
- Will the incorporation of women into armies serve the cause of equal rights by demonstrating women's strength and competence?
OR
- Will the incorporation of women into armies mean that a male-forged identity and violent style is spread more widely and thus cements both militarist and patriarchal relations?
There is the possibility that even posing these questions reinforces the conception of the military as a social institution which is central to the entire society. There have been sociologists - notably Max Weber - who argued that the military influences all other major social institutions including the state, the organisation of work, the labour process and the family. (Weber, 1968:1153-1155) If this is the case then perhaps it is the military - rather than war - which is the central problem
In her Thoughts on peace in an air-raid, Virginia Woolf (1966) posed the question, 'Mustn't our next task be the emancipation of men? How can we alter the crest and spur of the fighting cock?' She argued that women in the future must try to help men to emancipate themselves from their need to identify masculinity with aggression and domination. 'We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun ... we must give him access to the creative feelings ... we must free him from the machine.' (Woolf, 1942:4) But in order to do this women must also free themselves from gender stereotypes. 'If we could free ourselves from slavery we could free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.' (Woolf, ibid.).
At present gender stereotypes link femininity with nuturance. But the differences between men and women in nurturing, violence and other forms of behavior, are not innate and fixed. They are primarily the result of social conditioning. ' ... the fact is that everyone has the capacity to nurture. That women have been socialised to do so is a reality, and it's an asset we have going for us.' (Warnock, 1989:191)
It is an asset which could be eroded if women continue to be incorporated into aggressive armies and are subject to the same processes of military training which has stripped many young men of their individuality in the process of moulding them into soldiers. But if we conceive of a different army which defends the people against violent attempts to overthrow a new democratic South African government; an army which is subordinate to civilian authority and prepared to contribute to national reconstruction, it seems to me that there are no good grounds for excluding women from participating, or for restricting the roles in which they do so.
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