Women and War/Where Is God Now?:
Segers, Mary C
BOOKS Women at war, women at peace Beading these two stimu-lating books together provides a comprehen-sive and complementary introduction to contemporary debates about women, war, and peace....
...In contrast, Elshtain is intent on conveying a sober, realistic assessment of gender-conditioned myths about war...
...WHEBE IS GOD NOW...
...Nuclear Terror, Feminism, and the Search For God Juliana M. Casey, I.H.M...
...This tradition of militarized citizenship (traceable to Cicero, the Roman Republic, Cincinnatus, Machiavelli, and James Harrington) was especially formative for the United States...
...they do not employ cold logic or clever, intellectual word-games to deny the terrifying realities of nuclear warfare...
...For example, the abstract, technical jargon of nuclear discourse, and the use of euphemisms to conceal rather than reveal the truth (terms such as "serendipitous fallout," "anticipatory retaliation," or calling the MX missile "peacekeeper") are by-products of a masculine logic that prevails among defense intellectuals and the scientific elite at national laboratories and think tanks...
...Juliana Casey, professor of religious studies at Mundelein College in Chicago, writes eloquently of the alternatives to warmaking and warthink-ing offered by feminist consciousness, feminine logic and language, and biblical norms...
...Women are not simply peaceful, nurtur-ant, life-giving-while men are warlike, aggressive, and mindlessly violent...
...Casey explores the work of the last twenty years on women's experience, moral development, psychology, spirituality, and literature- studies which uncover alternative world-views...
...Still, there are important differences between these two accounts of women and war...
...Casey confines herself to nuclear war...
...Elshtain contrasts her training as a doctoral candidate studying international relations during the height of sixties' protest against the Vietnam War, with her experience as a young mother raising four children...
...She thinks that traditional gender constructions of war and politics must be balanced by a realistic assessment of women's and men's abilities and by an examination of the historical record...
...These narratives of war and politics are self-perpetuating, influencing the way real-life men and women act in times of war, shaping actual policy, and overshadowing alternatives...
...Elshtain's is also a book about thinking-about how we construe and conceptualize war and the roles of women and men in war...
...The increasing presence of women in the military and in politics means that women have to begin to face the problem of' 'dirty hands'' in politics, the difficult ethical dilemmas that routinely confront policymakers...
...Finally, both books emphasize how war has changed and stress the importance of alternative ways of thinking about war and about enemies...
...Mary C Scgers movement and the emergence of new scholarship in women's studies that have led to a renewed examination of women, politics, and war...
...Unlike men, Casey contends, women do not suppress their feelings in the face of nuclear catastrophe...
...Juliana Casey's book, which makes a similar argument, is part of a long and venerable tradition...
...In the 1980s, the active participation of women in both leadership and rank-and-file positions in the American and European peace movements has been noteworthy (recall Greenham Common, the Seneca Falls Peace Camp, Peace-links, Women's Pentagon Action, the Peace Ribbon, Helen Caldicott, Frances Farley and the MX, Randall Forsberg and the Nuclear Freeze...
...Since 1980, political scientists have identified a' 'gender gap'' in voting behavior-a difference in the way male and female voters reacted to the candidacies of Reagan and Carter in the 1980 election...
...Thus, this nexus between soldiering and citizenship has traditionally excluded half of humanity-women- from public life...
...This call to conversion, to peacemaking on an individual and social level, is also God's call to renewed hope and faith in the face of the threat of nuclear annihilation and despair...
...Such stereotypical thinking, she argues, is uncritical and ahistorical, ignoring examples of female fighters, resisters, and combatants...
...Sheed & Ward, $7.95, 160 pp...
...Casey seems to be ardently feminist whereas Elshtain has a more nuanced view, and is more skeptical about human potential- male or female...
...My own consciousness of this led me to realize the tragic absence of the feminine in the most vital of our country's and our church's spheres in new and intensified ways...
...War and politics are both changing...
...Can we reconcile Casey's and Elshtain's competing accounts of women and war...
...Until that day, both Juliana Casey's attractive arguments and Jean Elshtain's cautionary caveats can be entertained without contradiction...
...Elshtain gives deliberate attention to the history of women and war in American society, highlighting the efforts of Southern and Northern women during the Civil War as well as the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and others...
...Technological innovation in weaponry-even in conventional warfare-challenges our mythical understandings of the proper roles of men and women in war...
...Good feminists both, each begins with her own experience...
...She traces the development of the tradition of armed civic virtue, then shows how Vietnam, nuclear war, and the entrance of women into the military have rendered it obsolete...
...Elshtain shows how earlier American feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Jane Addams made assumptions about women's pacific nature in their arguments for women's suffrage...
...In fact, Casey's book holds special interest because she was the only woman on the nine-member ad hoc committee that helped to draft the American bishops' pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: "I sometimes felt very lonely...
...Hers is a book for weary peace activists who need encouragement as well as for jaded defense intellectuals who need a fresh perspective on the arms race...
...First, similarities exist between their methods...
...men tended to vote for the more bellicose Reagan, women for the more pacific Carter...
...In examining the notion of citizenship in political thought, political scientists and feminist scholars have also noted that republican thinkers of the Western political tradition, who emphasized civic virtue, public spiritedness, and rational deliberation for the common good, tended to equate citizenship with the willingness and ability to defend one's country...
...Casey is correct to stress the need for women's imagination, sensitivity, perception, logic, vision, and alternative ways of conceiving power...
...Casey's two-year stint on the bishops' committee shapes her account...
...Will the increased political participation of women reform politics and eliminate war...
...We won't really know whether politics with female participants will be more sensible, compassionate, and less warlike until many more women occupy leadership positions...
...One of the more interesting explanations of this phenomenon was offered in 1982 by political scientist Kathleen Frankovic, who argued that the gender gap in the 1980 presidential election was explicable in terms of the candidates' positions on issues of war and peace...
...Women and War challenges us to move beyond rigid stereotypes of the male warrior and the female noncom-batant to an imaginative reconstruction of our history and our politics...
...Casey's book is a useful primer on the growth and development of nuclear weapons as well as an analysis of the economic, social, and psychological costs of the arms race...
...The verdict, after all, is not yet in...
...In the last two chapters of her book, Casey explores the biblical concept of shalom and the Christian notion of God's redeeming presence as sources of hope in the struggle to fulfill the requirements of peacemaking...
...Casey sees in this outlook a refusal to deny experience, a call to conversion, a movement to transform the culture away from attitudes and forms of behavior which are death-dealing...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, balances Casey's woman-as-peacemaker view by reminding us that, historically, women have often served as warriors and enthusiastic cheerleaders of war...
...For Elshtain, war is an object of discourse central to historic understandings of politics in the West ("In the beginning politics was war...
...Elshtain is right to emphasize that women are not the sole repositories of virtue nor men the sole source of vice in human history...
...The gender gap literature implies that as women's political participation increases, the content and style of military and foreign policy might change...
...Women's activism contributed to the 1963 Test Ban Treaty as well as to the 1982 Nuclear Freeze Campaign...
...Both are right in their own way...
...The books appear in the context of two developments-women's involvement in the American and worldwide peace WOMEN AMD WAR Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic Books, $19.95, 288 pp...
...In her view, war has perennially created history's greatest gender gap, casting men as "Just Warriors," the embodiment of armed civic virtue, and women as "Beautiful Souls," war's designated weepers and civic cheerleaders, who praise the heroes and condemn the cowardly...
...Second, each author gives special emphasis to history and literature of, by, and about women...
...Elshtain doubts whether the accession of more women to high public office will reform politics, and she takes exception to notions that women are intrinsically morally superior to men...
...In Vietnam the United States did not win, men were not just warriors, and women were not good homekeepers, cheering their men or giving them a hero's welcome when they came home...
...The answers of these two books are not conclusive...
...Only by drawing upon alternative images, she contends, can we begin to replace an aggressive, militaristic nationalism with a chastened, sober patriotism...
...Unlike feminine logic, it fails utterly to attend to the consequences for human beings of a nuclear exchange...
...Elshtain asks: "In a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world, can Beautiful Souls and Just Warriors retain their luster...
...Women's studies scholars now challenge the republican tradition, arguing that the problem with the tradition of civic virtue is that virtue is armed...
...Elshtain addresses war in history, conventional and nuclear...
...In nuclear warfare, there will probably be no winners...
...Women's studies specialists have also raised questions about the role of women and war...
...not because I was ignored or devalued, but because I knew my perspectives were different, my contexts other than those of everyone else...
...For Elshtain the anser is "no...
...Casey calls for an expansion of thinking, im-agination, vision, and feeling, for new conceptions of language, logic, power, and relationship in order to cope with the terrifying realities of nuclear war...
Vol. 115 • August 1988 • No. 14
