Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
Females, such as this Gazan woman and girl, suffer more than males from wars’ effects, modern studies show. I found this photo by Belal Khaled here.
November 27, 2023. The last thing feminists want is some old white guy telling them what to do. But these are desperate times. That’s why I urge Amia Srinivasan and other feminists to add an item to their To Do list: End War Now!
I single out Srinivasan, a philosopher at Oxford, because she just spoke via zoom to my school about her 2021 bestseller The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. With cool, hyper-rational ferocity, Srinivasan explores feminist debates over pornography, prostitution, punishment of sexual harassers and sexism’s intersection with racism and poverty.
Srinivasan raises the meta-question: What do feminists really want? Do they want more power within the current system, or do they want to abolish the system and replace it with something radically different? That is, do feminists want reform or revolution?
If the latter, what would a revolution entail? Would it mean the end of all hierarchies? Of capitalism? Of police and prison? Would women finally get fair compensation for bearing and raising kids and for “housework,” a goal sought by Silvia Federici and other feminists?
The possibility of revolution thrilled me when I was a young nomadic hippy with nothing to lose. Now that I’m an old bourgeois professor, calls for revolution scare me. I worry how abolishing capitalism might affect my retirement nest-egg. Yup, I’m that petty. But I still cling to one revolutionary dream: In my utopia, nations will no longer wage war or even threaten each other with violence. The age of militarism will be over.
That dream seems vanishingly faint now. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which are horrific in their own right, have triggered a global upsurge in arms sales, reports The New York Times. Global spending on arms reached $2.2 trillion last year, a new record, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and spending will surely surpass that record this year.
It is obscene, I hope you agree, for nations to spend billions—trillions!--on tanks and missiles when many people suffer from crushing poverty. According to Our World In Data, 84 percent of the global population lives on less than $30 a day, and 10 percent live on less than $2.15 a day, which the United Nations defines as “extreme poverty.” Women are the poorest of the poor; the UN estimates that women earn $0.51 for every dollar that men earn globally.
In The Right to Sex, Srinivasan dwells on male violence against women and police violence against people of color. But she mentions war only glancingly, pointing out that the U.S., with the approval of some feminists, has cited women’s rights as a pretext for attacking other countries, such as Afghanistan.
I wish Srinivasan had followed that thread, to see where it led. [See Postscript.] Here are points she and other feminists might consider:
Militarism and Patriarchy Have Common Roots. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others (among other books), helped me appreciate that war and patriarchy have always been intertwined. Here is how I summarize Hrdy’s views in my book The End of War:
For most of our evolution, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, with males and females enjoying roughly equal status. Violence occasionally broke out among hunter-gatherers--“it would be amazing if it did not,” Hrdy told me. But organized attacks of one armed group against another—that is, war--emerged only when humans began settling down, farming and accumulating excess food and other goods. War spread like a virus as communities began fighting over land and other resources.
The emergence of war boosted the status of males, especially males skilled at combat, and diminished the status of females. Male dominance led to other social transformations, including sharper sexual divisions of labor, father-to-son inheritance of land and other assets, male fixation on female chastity and sequestration of females. These practices, Hrdy told me, “are recipes for a society that values conquest over harmony.”
The implication of Hrdy’s analysis is clear: dismantling militarism will help dismantle patriarchy.
Men Fight, Women Suffer. The current war between Hamas and Israel, triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, is typical, in that it is being waged almost entirely by men. And yet women and children account for 70 percent of the deaths resulting from Israeli attacks on Gaza, according to the relief organization CARE.
This imbalance is also typical of modern wars. A 2022 Lancet study, “The effects of armed conflict on the health of women and children,” estimates that in 2017 wars adversely affected 630 million women and children, or more than 8 percent of the global population. Adverse effects include death and trauma resulting from sexual assault, infectious disease and physical injury; destruction of homes and infrastructure; and lack of food, water, health care and housing.
A 2023 report by Brown University’s Costs of War project documents direct and indirect effects of post-9/11 U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and other countries. The report estimates that 4.5-4.7 million people have died in these conflicts so far. “Whereas men are more likely to die in combat,” the report states, “women and children are more often killed by wars’ reverberating impacts.”
That is also the conclusion of “The Disproportionate Effects of War and Conflict on Women and Girls,” a 2023 article in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law by Hattie Phelps. “Even though women remain the minority of combatants and perpetrators of war,” Phelps writes, “they increasingly suffer the most harm.” This pattern can be seen in Ukraine, where war-related shortages of fuel and food have “had a large effect, disproportionately, on women and children.”
Phelps points out another injustice that should make feminists grit their teeth: Women are often excluded from peace talks and conflict prevention. Women accounted for only 23 percent of delegations to UN-supported peace processes in 2020, even though peace agreements made with female participation are 64 percent less likely to fail. My italics.
Feminists Are Not Innate Peacemakers. Some feminists have been leery of making war a feminist issue. They fear a feminist antiwar movement might bolster gender stereotypes, by implying that women are biologically predisposed to be peacemakers and men to be warriors. Feminist scholar bell hooks raises this issue in her 1995 essay “Feminism and Militarism: A Comment.”
This concern strikes me as weird. Throughout history and right up to the present, men have been the primary perpetrators of war, genocide, slavery and other atrocities. And yet some feminists insist, We can be just as mean as men!
Okay, I’ll concede this point. As bell hooks points out, women, and especially white, western women, have not exactly stood in the way of militarism and other nasty isms, such as imperialism, colonialism and racism.
So let me be clear: I don’t think feminists should oppose militarism because they are female. I think they should oppose militarism because war is bad, especially for females. A world without war will almost certainly be a much less patriarchal world. It will also be a much, much better world for everyone, regardless of gender. Imagine what we could do with the trillions now devoted to bullets and bombs!
Feminists, you can find my plan for ending war in my recent column on the Ukraine war. What’s your plan?
Postscript: After I posted this column, Srinivasan informed me that she has helped organize two public comments on the Israeli/Palestine war. See here and here.
Further Reading:
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
The organizations World Beyond War and Costs of War provide excellent information on the costs of war and benefits of peace.