Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

PRAISE FOR TWELVE FEMINIST LESSONS OF WAR

Once again Cynthia Enloe makes plain as day what should be, but isn’t, obvious to anyone who cares about war and conflict, namely that without a feminist lens we can never break out of the vicious cycles of violence that have held our culture in thrall for millennia. I am so grateful for Cynthia Enloe’s clarity of vision and moral compass. We are all so much richer for her long and storied work.

—ABIGAIL E. DISNEY, filmmaker, activist, and philanthropist

"Cynthia Enloe provides an unflinching feminist critique of the devastating consequences of war across time and space. She gives voice and visibility to lesser-known feminist activists and scholars, particularly in Ukraine. Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, like Enloe’s other pathbreaking scholarship, sets the standard for addressing pressing political issues with compassion, integrity, and generosity."

—AMRITA BASU, Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women’s, and Gender Studies, Amherst College

With incredible historical breadth and depth of analysis, Cynthia Enloe takes us on a worldwide exploration of the gendered dynamics of militarization and the gendered causes and consequences of war. From Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua to Fiji, Israel, and Turkey, Enloe draws from decades of research, her constant feminist curiosity, and powerful clarity and engaging writing to investigate issues from the wielding of masculinities to ensure boys and men keep joining the military, to asking searing feminist questions about the causes and consequences of sexual violence during conflict. As this inspirational book powerfully argues, staying curious about women’s (and men’s) lives means we are more realistic about war and the causes of war. And as Enloe concludes, feminist lessons are for everyone and ‘kindling to fuel a fire of thinking.’

—DANIEL CONWAY, Reader in Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster

In her usual straightforward, thoughtful, and passionate way, Enloe has reminded us about the importance of feminism to the study of war, violence, and peacebuilding in today’s complex world. The twelve lessons she articulates concisely and clearly build on conversations, curiosities, and incisive analyses of war in different registers with different histories and inter/multi-disciplinary engagements. The thirteenth feminist lesson that she suggests accepts that new imaginings, speaking, and listening is tiring and needs stamina, but can continue with building feminist solidarities. This is a book for those who are concerned about the consequences of war and peace.

—SHIRIN M. RAI, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London

Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

Cynthia Enloe

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Lawrence Grauman, Jr. Fund.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Cynthia Enloe

Originally published in the English language in the UK by Footnote Press Limited.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938720

ISBN 978-0-520-39767-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-39768-2 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

32  31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Dedicated to Ukrainian feminists

CONTENTS

PREFACE

This Is Not a Girls’ Guide to Waging Wars

ONE

Women’s Wars Are Not Men’s Wars

TWO

Every War Is Fought in Gendered History

THREE

Getting Men to Fight Isn’t So Easy

FOUR

Women as Soldiers Is Not Liberation

FIVE

Women as Armed Insurgents Offer Feminist Caveats

SIX

Wounds Matter – Wounds Are Gendered

SEVEN

Make Wartime Rape Visible

EIGHT

Feminists Organize While War Is Raging

NINE

Post-war Can Last Generations

TEN

Militarization Starts during Peacetime

ELEVEN

Ukrainian Feminists Have Lessons to Teach Us about War

TWELVE

Feminist Lessons Are for Everyone

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

This Is Not a Girls’ Guide to Waging Wars

WARS ARE LESSON FACTORIES. Out of every war – the Boer War, World War I, the Korean War, the Afghanistan War – come lessons. The lesson crafters are multiple: admirals, generals, journalists, politicians, historians and, of course, your uncle who pontificates over holiday dinner.

Napoleon famously warned that armies travel on their stomachs, but then, invading Russia, seemed to forget his own war-waging lesson. Generals are routinely accused of disastrously applying the lessons of the last war to a later, different sort of war. Lessons, dismissed and applied, are the very stuff of military academy curriculums.

Some lessons of war appear impossible for war-wagers to absorb. Despite evidence to the contrary, they persist in believing that they can bomb the enemy into submission. Failures notwithstanding, many wartime strategists simply refuse to learn that torture produces unreliable information. Beware the Greeks bearing gifts, Cassandra shouted, though the all-knowing Trojan men dismissed her as hysterical.

Other war-waging lessons have been turned into popular narratives. Often just a place name will conjure up an entire lesson. Gallipoli, the Somme, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, Fallujah. Each evokes a lesson, usually a caveat about what not to do in war.

This book is different.

This is not a series of lessons to make us better military strategists. Rather, this is an effort to sharpen and deepen our feminist understandings of war. That is, what follows here are lessons in making reliable, useful – that is, feminist – sense of wars.

Absorbing these feminist lessons should make us more dependable allies of those women who are enduring wartime violence. It should enable us all to hold accountable those who abuse women in wartime. Embracing these lessons should better equip us to prevent and shorten wars. Putting into practice these feminist lessons should enable us to sustain peacetimes so that post-war societies can entrench gender and racial justice.

What follow here are lessons derived from scores of feminist thinkers from all over the world – activists, researchers and scholars from myriad fields. A few have been awarded Nobel prizes, but most of these feminist thinkers are scarcely known outside their local communities. Together, feminists – including many of you who are reading these pages – have observed, listened, weighed and wondered. As feminists, you’ve then puzzled again, kept listening, looked afresh at what has caused wars, how wars have been fought over years, how wars have been seemingly concluded and yet, dismayingly, how post-war eras have rolled on for generations.

At its core, feminism is about taking the lives and ideas of women – all sorts of women – seriously. Seriously. That means as if women mattered. As feminists, we together have learned that women and girls are always worth paying close attention to, not because they are always heroic or admirable. Though often they are. All sorts of women and girls are worth paying close, sustained attention to because they are interesting, they help us to understand how the world works and why.

Put negatively, if we do not pay serious attention to the complexities of diverse women’s ideas and wartime experiences, we risk missing – or misunderstanding – the causes and consequences of wars. That is a risk that none of us can afford to take in today’s fragile, interconnected world.

The twelve lessons to follow are ones that we, together, have learned from taking women’s lives seriously. They are lessons grounded in the messy realities of vastly different women’s lives. However, these are not the twelve lessons. These are twelve lessons . . . and counting. There will be more. Feminists stay curious.

It has taken scores of feminists to keep my eyes open.

Ximena took me on a driving tour of Santiago to show me where Pinochet’s military had set up torture chambers – in ordinary apartment houses, in suburban homes. Sister Soledad described the system around US navy bases that prostituted Filipinas. Insook opened my eyes to militarism inside a pro-democracy movement. Rela introduced me to the Haifa Women in Black. Ruri showed me the brightly neon-lit shopping area where the Tokyo Women in Black stood vigil every Friday night.

Ayse introduced me to Kurdish women in south-eastern Turkey who had opened a restaurant as a way to tackle domestic violence in a war zone. Madeleine tutored me in the UN’s byzantine patriarchal ways. Nela took me on a walk up the steep hill overlooking Sarajevo so I could imagine the perches from which the snipers picked off civilians as they dashed out to run desperate errands during the Yugoslav War.

I have been lucky. So many women doing gender justice and peace activism and research have shared with me their experiences and what they have learned from those experiences. The twelve feminist lessons of war here flow directly from the grounded knowledge they have accumulated over decades.

I am happily in their debt.

ONE

Women’s Wars Are Not Men’s Wars

SVITLANA WAS WEARING HER warmest parka. She had her iPhone securely tucked into her jeans pocket and a knapsack on her back, containing her Ukrainian passport, snacks, laptop, two chargers, tampons, extra sweaters for the children and the few family photos she could grab in haste as they fled. Her youngest child was holding tightly to her right hand. Thank goodness she was now old enough to walk. With her left hand, Svitlana pulled a roller bag filled with clothes for what might be weeks, possibly months, away. Her eight-year-old daughter, trying not to lose sight of her mother and little sister on the crowded Kyiv train platform, was carrying her brightly colored school bag. Svitlana’s own mother wouldn’t leave her own farming village. It was her home, she explained, even if Russian missiles were destroying its houses and silos. Instead, she insisted Svitlana should take her granddaughters to safety. Svitlana and her partner, her daughters’ father, had said their rushed goodbyes outside the station, each avoiding mentioning her lost job or his deployment to the eastern front, reassuring each other they would phone and text daily. For now, Svitlana had become a single parent, a single wartime parent.

On a Warsaw train platform that same day, Agnieszka was working with volunteer women drivers. As Ukrainian refugee women had begun to pour into Poland, Agnieszka and other Polish feminists had become alarmed at the prospect of sex traffickers seizing on the chaotic conditions to masquerade as welcomers in order to abduct girls and women. Painfully aware of the shared conservative stance toward women by their own populist government and Catholic clergy, Polish feminists had quickly organized volunteer women drivers to provide safe transport to the frightened, exhausted Ukrainian women and their children soon to disembark from the trains.

Both women were trying to think, strategize and take action at the outbreak of a war. Their conditions were not identical, but both had to navigate complex gendered expectations with unequal gendered resources.

At the outbreak of the same war . . .

Alexandra had been too young to join Pussy Riot in their earlier outrageous public performances designed to challenge the Russian government’s political alliance with the socially conservative Russian Orthodox clergy. But she had admired their courage. In the wake of the Putin regime’s military invasion of Ukraine, Alexandra decided it was her turn to act. Bundled up in her winter coat, she joined others on the streets of St Petersburg in late February. She was politically cautious enough not to mention by name the man whose imperial dreams she opposed. She just held up her hand-painted sign: No to War! The security forces’ brutal response to their peaceful demonstration shocked her. She dropped her sign and ran. Afterwards, talking privately with her twenty-something women friends, all of whom had come of age in post-Cold War Russia, she wondered aloud what kind of future her country held for her.

Lepa had survived her own violent war. A life-long resident of Belgrade, the 1990s bloody conflict had shattered her former country into ethnically charged, post-war Balkan autocratic states. With other local activists, Lepa had spent the Yugoslav War organizing a rape crisis center and feminist anti-war protests, defying the masculinized Serbian political elite’s efforts to fuel popular militarized nationalism. When the latest regional conflagration erupted, Lepa’s immediate response was to re-commit herself to feminist anti-militarism. But that was not the sentiment that she was hearing from some of her Ukrainian feminist colleagues. They told her that they wanted weapons, heavy weapons. Was sending artillery the new form of transnational feminist solidarity?

Alexandra and Lepa, living their gendered lives in wartime Russia and post-war Serbia, were determined to put the lessons they had learned from feminism to work in their own wartime activism. What that meant in practice for each woman was not immediately obvious.

Continents away, the same war was reshaping other women’s lives . . .

Climate change had deepened the drought, making Evelyne’s work all the more stressful. As a Kenyan staff member of a grassroots organization, she was working to empower rural Kenyan girls and women. Food insecurity was not an abstract concept to Evelyne. She witnessed how, even as women were chiefly responsible for supplying water and firewood and preparing food for their families, the conventional privileging of boys and men translated into fewer calories consumed by girls and women. Drought had only worsened those inequities. Now came the new shortages of imported grain on which Kenyans depended. Evelyne hadn’t had much reason to think about Ukraine. When she thought about war, she thought about the conflicts in neighboring Somalia and Sudan, which for years had sent refugee women and their dependent children fleeing into Kenya. Today, though, she listened closely to the BBC reports explaining how the Russian military invasion of Ukraine was a principal cause of global grain shortages in African countries such as Kenya. Food insecurity, Evelyne knew, soon would become even more acute for rural girls and women.

At first, Lucile wasn’t sure she should feel happy about landing a job with an arms manufacturer. Her nephew was in the army, but she never had been a military cheerleader. She did know, however, that, as an African American woman and single mother trying to make a decent living in Orlando, Florida, she should be pleased that she wasn’t working in the region’s Disney World-dominated tourist industry, where wages were low and racialized sexism rife. Still, did working for Raytheon match her personal values? Then the war in Ukraine began making headlines. Lucile started to feel pride in the weapons she was helping to produce: Javelin anti-tank missiles. She heard Javelins celebrated on the evening news. There was even a meme making the rounds on social media, Saint Javelin, who looked a bit like the Madonna. Lucile wondered if being a skilled wiring technician in a factory producing Javelins connected her to Ukrainian women.

One war, intersecting countless women’s lives, a global web of gendered politics.

Most descriptions of war blot out complex gender dynamics: war is so bloody that gender doesn’t matter. Or wartime strategic calculations are portrayed as so bloodless that gender politics are irrelevant.

There is a third wartime narrative. It features women. It is billed as human interest, a story or a photograph intended to make a complex violent conflict – in Syria, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Ukraine – understandable to distracted viewers. The women featured are usually crying. They are crying over the dead body of a husband or son. Or they are standing stunned in front of rubble that was their home. Rarely are they portrayed as having full lives. Even more rarely are they interviewed and asked for their ideas about the war. Displaced women grieve over fallen men and lost homes. That is presumed to be the chief role for women in war. Their wartime feminine tears convey the editors’ message. Too often, we, the viewers, absorb that simplistic message.

Feminists among us, however, have learned that in the midst of both massacres and elite strategizing, it is crucial to stay curious about the full range of women’s gritty wartime lived realities. By crucial, women’s advocates mean that attentiveness to diverse women’s lives and ideas is essential if we are to accurately understand the causes of war, the dynamics in waging war and the prolonged consequences of war.

Put more boldly, feminists from scores of countries, including our own, have taught us that if we don’t pay careful attention to women, all sorts of women, we won’t be realistic about war. We will mistake the causes of war; we will be superficial in our descriptions of how wars are waged – and we are bound to woefully undercount the true costs of war.

All three errors are dangerous. Perpetuating those errors makes the outbreak of a next war more likely.

Becoming feminist in our attentiveness does not require us to claim that the politics of gender explain everything. Though, to be honest, on the darkest days the effects of militarized masculinities do seem to explain a lot of what is deadly, wasteful and unjust. In calmer moments, what feminists from scores of countries – that is, all of us together – have learned from each other is that when we pay serious attention to diverse women and girls, we are less likely to shrink them down into mere passive sobbing wartime victims or, just as risky, blow them up into unreal super-heroines.

Our collective feminist lesson: shrinking or inflating either women or ideas about femininity will make us dangerously unrealistic about war.

By staying attentive to the complex, multi-layered lives of women and girls, we are more likely to see how war-wagers strategically wield certain ideas about femininity – the real woman, the good woman, the patriotic woman, the fallen woman, the traitorous woman – in order to stoke militarism among both women and men. Stoking distorted ideas about femininities fuels and perpetuates wars.

By paying attention to all kinds of women, we begin to see men-as-men – in men’s own class, sexual, racial and political (often rival) diversities. That awareness enables us to assess when and how distorted ideas about manliness – the good buddy, the warrior, the fallen hero, the coward, the brilliant strategist, the scientific genius – are manipulated to promote and justify war.

Women’s wars are not men’s wars. Start with marriage. Laws and practices of heterosexual marriage in most societies impose different roles during wartime: a husband is expected to act differently in a war than is his wife; in some societies, a husband is expected to leave his family and take up arms; under those same laws, his wife cannot sell property or travel without her husband’s consent. Or take parenting. Women’s wars are not men’s wars because the laws and practices of parenting in most countries impose different roles: a mother is presumed to have greater responsibilities for children in wartime than does a father, even though she may need her husband’s consent to take her children to safety.

Food and hunger are gendered even in patriarchal peacetime. It’s not simply that in most households women are responsible for gathering food and cooking it for their families. Women also are expected not to eat as much as men in their households because it is men who are the chief income earners. Women in many societies eat last and consume fewer calories and nutritionally less protein. When wartime exacerbates food scarcity, the caloric inequalities between women and men widen.

Family structure shapes women’s wars. Woman-headed households – conventionally defined as those households without an able-bodied, working-age adult male – are more likely to be poor than are households headed by an adult male. Thus, when thinking about women’s wars, it is useful to know that, in 2020, on the brink of the Russian invasion, a remarkable 50% of households in Ukraine were woman-headed. That same year in Nigeria, 18% of households were headed by women; in Colombia, 36%; in Ethiopia, 22%. ¹

Women’s wars are not the same as men’s wars because it is women – and girls – who can become pregnant during any war. Currently, women in Ukraine have broad legal access to contraception and abortions. Just next door, however, Polish women’s rights activists have mounted public demonstrations to protest their rightwing populist government expanding bans on abortions. Facing a disastrous drought on top of outbreak of civil war, women in Ethiopia in 2022 have won legal access to abortion, but in practice face limited reproductive healthcare in part because of the imposition of US foreign aid restrictions. ²

Women’s wars are not men’s wars, moreover, because in most countries women’s work – in factories, in services and, importantly, in farming – is more likely to be unpaid than men’s work. If women do acquire paid jobs, their labor is valued less and paid less than men’s work. ³

During wartime, women are expected to take on added unpaid labor – to keep the farm going with fewer workers and less equipment, to care for children and elderly relatives, to feed the household despite food and