Women in Peace and War

Many who are repelled by the argument that genes determine our intelligence and abilities accept the argument that women are by nature more peace loving and gentle than men, and that the world would be more peaceful if it were run by women.

Francis Fukuyama (1998) pointed to Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brunt-land as an example of the pacific woman leader the world should seek out. But, her pacifism is equally characteristic of male Norwegian prime ministers. Her culture explains her politics more than her sex. Non-pacific women such as Sirima Bandarnaike, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir are more typical of the women who have led their countries. Margaret Thatcher insisted that a hesitant George Bush not “go wobbly” when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Cristina Kirchner of Argentina is more likely to intimidate and crush than to accommodate or work with her opponents.

Hatshepsut and Cleopatra of Egypt, Semiramis of Babylon, and Catherine the Great of Russia are among history’s warrior queens. Fu Hao, favorite consort of Shang Emperor Wu Ding (reigned c. 1220–1160 BC), led troops in battle. The Central Asian steppes produced a number of women warriors, possible in part because of the confluence of the bow and the horse, a combination that allowed a trained and experienced woman warrior to hold her own against men. Tomyris, queen of the semi-nomadic Massagetae and a heroine to her Kazakh descendants, killed Cyrus, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The Mongols produced two examples. Khutulun, a contemporary of Marco Polo, won more than ten thousand horses by defeating men in wrestling matches, and campaigned with her father, Qaidu Khan. Queen Manduhai (ruled 1470–1509) rescued the last surviving male of Genghis Khan’s line, Batu Mongke, a crippled boy of seven, whom she installed as Great Khan with the throne name Dayan Khan, and with whom she eventually had four sets of twins.

England produced Boadicea, Matilda, Elizabeth I, and Victoria (Fraser 1980). Kahina Dahinya led a tribe of (possibly Jewish) Berbers. Jinga in Angola, Rani in India, Soriyothai in Thailand, and the Trung sisters in Vietnam hardly fit the image of women as the peaceable sex. Joan of Arc functioned as the commander-in-chief of the French, finally reversing a century of defeats by the English. Molly Pitcher took over her husband’s cannon in the battle of Brandywine during the American Revolution.

Olympia almost certainly murdered her husband Philip to insure the succession of Alexander, later the Great. Zenobia of Palmyra murdered her husband because he counseled negotiation rather than war with Rome, then led Palmyra to defeat. King Ferdinand of Spain was afraid that Queen Isabella wanted to murder him. One of the more famous events leading to the French Revolution was the March of the [8000] Parisian Women who pillaged and looted their way to Versailles—no non-violent demonstrations for them. When a man satirized the march, one of the women arranged his assassination. Later, she helped lead the assault on the Bastille. Dickens’s Madame Defarge may be fictional, but she is rooted in reality.

One hundred thousand Russian women served in the front lines in World War II, many as snipers. Tito lost 25,000 women warriors killed and 40,000 wounded in his guerrilla war against Germany. Among 20,000 mainly Muslim soldiers in Bosnia, about 1000 were women, often serving as snipers. One of them, a 19-year old medical student, said, “When I liquidate an enemy soldier my heart swells. I only feel courage and the desire to kill another.” In 1845, the King of Dahomey had an army of 12,000, of whom 5,000 were women.

Anne Fulford and Mary Read were pirates (Druett). Mobsters and gangsters had their molls, most famously Bonnie Parker but also Janice Drake, Virginia Hill, Arlyne Brickman, and Dorothy Fiorenza. Half of the terrorist Red Army Faction in Germany were women. Maria Neyra succeeded Abimael Guzman as commander of the Shining Path in Peru. Women made up 5% of Kenya’s Mau-Mau. Muslim Arab women fought against the French in Algeria. Many members of ETA, the Intifada, the Red Brigade, and the Baader Meinhof Gang were women. Some 3000 Tamil Tigresses were trained as suicide bombers. Phoolan Devi, the “Bandit Queen of India,” led a gang that roamed north central India during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She took bloody revenge against men who raped her, became a voice for women’s rights, then a folk heroine, then a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

While it is true that men are much more violent than women,¹¹ the historical record does not substantiate the notion that turning the world over to women would insure peace. Would it were that simple! It is no more than a fantasy intended to advance a contemporary social agenda, as feminist Barbara Ehrenreich recognized during a 2004 commencement address at Barnard:

There is another thing that died for me in the last couple of weeks—a certain kind of feminist naivete. It saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Maybe this sort of feminism made more sense in the 1970s. There was a lot of talk about rape as an instrument of war and even war as an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some reason to believe that male sexual sadism may somehow be deeply connected to our species’ propensity for violence.

... That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.¹² It is not just the theory that was wrong.

... The implication of this assumption was that all we had to do to make the world kinder, less violent, and more just was to become the CEOs, the senators, the generals, the judges and opinion-makers. Once women gained power and authority, they would naturally work for change. The most profound thing I have to say to you today, as a group of brilliant young women poised to enter the world, is that it’s just not true.

... What we have learned, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the foundation of morality. Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world. What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral superiority on the part of women is lazy and self-indulgent. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman is by its very nature a victory for humanity. Lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle—the struggle for gender equality—when in fact we have many more. The struggles for peace, for social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

Some explain the increase in violent crimes by women as the product of increasing liberation, and see it as either encouraged or reflected (depending on your interpretation) in films such as Basic Instinct, Blue Steel, Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, La Femme Nikita, Misery, Single White Female, Terminator 2, and Thelma and Louise, to name a few.