Conclusion

Today more than ever, women and children are the casualties of deliberate and systematic violence against entire populations. However, women are not just the victims of combat and the beneficiaries of humanitarian efforts. They are also the engines of resistance and key problem-solvers in their communities.169 Such a statement reinforces what this chapter has tried to demonstrate: women have always played an integral and unmistakable part in war, not just as victims, but as active participants. Women as well as men collude in war, willingly, in many cases: ‘if there is anything fine and ennobling in war, women share the glory. If war is atrocity, women share the guilt.’170 Eileen Sowetby has argued that

Whether women’s work is merely to breed men to be killed in wars, to support and encourage their men to kill, or to sometimes actually kill “the enemy” (when it is allowed by the men), men could not have wars without women’s complicity.171

Although seen to be the preserve of men, warfare is ‘profoundly gendered’, not only because the basis of men’s participation is their ‘natural’ warlike abilities and physical strength, but because it ‘often creates dramatic alterations in gender structures, for it breaks down traditional norms of conduct.’172 Both when they have taken the place of men who have gone to war and when they take up active service near the front line in auxiliary services, such as nursing or ambulance driving, women have seen their traditional roles and mores challenged. For some, it is ‘the high point of their lives.’173 We need to adjust our conception of what ‘war’ is. ‘Total war’ to some extent is redundant, for surely all war is ‘total’. The failure or refusal to recognise the ways in which all members of society, not just generals and soldiers, are affected by armed conflict is to see war in a vacuum. War is not just about battles, strategies, politicians or men. It has social as well as military dimensions. Both of these change over time and from conflict to conflict, though gendered expectations persist. Sacrifice was and is still perceived in some quarters as the duty of the civilian and solidarity with the fighting man is woman’s ‘substitute for action in combat.’174 It would be incorrect to claim that women have traditionally been left out of the historical record of war because of outright misogyny. Rather, an unquestioned blindness has led to the neglect of women’s integral place in war. Specialised uncovering has been done and a new way of writing the history of warfare and revolution that discusses the impact of armed conflict on both sexes is developing.

Arguments about women in the military pervade much of the current discussion about women and war. There are those who argue that until women are allowed into combat, they will never gain the respect of those who put their life on the line for their country:

The whole notion of ‘allowing’ women into combat is disturbing. ‘Allowing’ women to do or not to do something is a remnant of a paternalistic society. A grown woman should go as far as talent and hard work allow her to go. By excluding women from key positions in the Armed Forces, we deny both the women the chance to further their careers in the service and, perversely, deny the military the skilled and qualified people available to help complete its mission - defending the country.175

On the opposite side there is the insistence that ‘the influx of women has been a disaster for the military. [It is] self-evident that women are not nearly as fit for war as men’.176 Furthermore, ‘in the military, as in any other institution, the influx of large numbers of women is both symptom and cause of declining social prestige.’177 For some feminists, ‘camouflaging’ women’s military service as liberation is one more step in the militarisation of their lives.178 Perhaps this is why, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has pointed out, women, as ‘a collective Beautiful Soul’, have been ‘unable - whether as liberal humanists, socialist internationalists, or feminists - to forestall state conflicts.’179 Logically, violence should not be part of a rational society and women are not different from men in their fears, their desires for survival, their hopes for future generations. Aggression is not the preserve of men, but because men have held power in politics and on the international stage, it has seemed so. Margaret Thatcher demonstrated that being female did not equate with being ‘sisterly’ or pacific. Is power, then, the deciding factor?

Courage has never been an issue either for those in the peace movement or those who took up active service. It can be argued that waiting at home is one of the most courageous acts of war, the role involving the most fortitude, commitment and sacrifice. Time and again pacifist feminists have had to confront the dilemma that

American Jane Addams articulated: ‘Even to appear to differ from those she loves in the hour of their affliction has ever been the supreme test of a woman’s conscience.’180 Although public acceptance of women warriors changed from a passive acceptance (and indeed a prurient fascination) to a qualified rejection, women of all nations in all three centuries were called upon to serve their countries in multifarious ways - and they were, more often than not, asked to return to their pre-war domesticity when the treaties were signed.

A study of the involvement of women in war from the eighteenth to the twentieth century shows that women are not inherently less warlike than men. History shows us that women could be as seduced by action and combat as men, but they were equally, if not more, vociferous in their demands for peace and diplomatic resolutions to international conflict. It has also shown us that not all men are seduced by warfare, but the idealisation of the soldier, the equation of a man’s masculinity with his ability to take part in combat means that the gendered call of nation is particularly strong. Arguments regarding women’s innate passivity, inclination to peace, succour and tenderness are complicated by examples from history that show not only women’s warlike proclivities, their desire to be active participants in warfare, to carry weapons and to fight and their bellicose pronouncements but also their sadistic and violent tendencies. For women whose lives were confined to a separate, domestic sphere, the prospect of war held an immediate attraction for publicly sanctioned activity, adventure and usefulness outside their homes and display of their love of mother country. Virginia Woolf called for women to become a ‘Society of Outsiders’ when she responded to the question of ‘How do we prevent war?’.181 But women in modern Europe, whether as ‘valiant heroines’ or ‘pacific ladies’, have never been detached from the bloodshed, sacrifices or consequences of war.