Master of Arts in Gender and Peace Building University for Peace

Linking Gender and Disarmament: Womens Nonviolent Responses to Gendered Militarization and Nuclear Proliferation

Shannon Mathieu Dr. Mary King, Thesis Advisor 15 August 2005

Abstract This Masters thesis examines gender constructions behind processes of militarization, specifically focusing on the creation and proliferation of nuclear weapons as an extreme form of militarization. It also looks at womens organized nonviolent resistance to nuclear proliferation and militarization. The research is undertaken from a feminist perspective with a basis in feminist theory, which is discussed in the literature review. Following the literature review are two case studies providing specific examples of womens nonviolent resistance and analyses of the effectiveness of these responses. The case studies include firsthand accounts of participants, with the goal of capturing the personal impact that political action has had in the lives of individual women. Following the case studies is a conclusion combining examples from the two separate cases and discussing successes and limitations in linking concepts of gender to movements for disarmament and demilitarization.

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Table of Contents
I. Introduction A. Statement of Topic B. Explanation of Research Approach II. Literature Review B. The Protector and the Protected C. Feminist Questions about the Role of Women in International Systems D. Psychological Obstacles to Change III. Case Study on Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp A. Introduction to Greenham Common B. Creative Nonviolent Action C. Women Only D. Gender, Power, and Nonviolent Action E. Questioning Old Assumptions IV. Case Study on Reaching Critical Will B. Gendered Militarism and Gendered Resistance C. Reaching Critical Will i. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ii. Conference on Disarmament iii. GA First Committee iv. UN Disarmament Commission D. Theoretical Frameworks E. Limited Applications of Gender V. Conclusion VI. References p. 41 p. 46 p. 31 A. Introduction to Womens International League for Peace and Freedom p. 21 p. 8 A. Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity, Violence and Militarism p. 1

Introduction
Since the United States first used nuclear bombs against two Japanese cities during World War II, nuclear weapons have played a powerful role in the development of foreign policies, the public discourses on security threats, both real and imagined, and the framing of our responses to such threats. With the concrete demonstration of humanitys relatively new ability to completely destroy not only itself, but also its entire planet, the collective consciousness of people around the world was altered. Today the word nuclear is used in different contexts to signify a final solution, a solution from which there is no going back. Yet the unspoken idea that the use of nuclear weapons could ever be anything resembling a solution is rarely questioned by the persons in charge of the actual weapons. With the end of the cold war, the problem of nuclear weapons has shifted and, in some ways, has become more complicated. No longer is the concern centered solely on governments that might develop and use such weapons, although that concern remains in relation to countries like North Korea and Iran, which are considered by the United States and others to be irresponsible global actors. Now there is also apprehension that nuclear weapons could be obtained and used by nonstate actors, including terrorists. In light of the changing nature of threats to global security, it is necessary to reevaluate security policies, and possibly even our understandings of the concept of security. Yet it does not seem to be happening in any significant way among the powerful governments of the world. In response to threats posed by nuclear weapons, both during and after the cold war, persons from many different parts of the world have organized resistance to and critiques of the policies of proliferation that continue to pose new aspects of the risks and threats of such uniquely destructive weapons. Within the broader resistance movement, some of the most potent and most effective responses have come from women and womens groups. Often working separately from men, such women have approached the problem of nuclear weapons, and the broader predicament of militarization that nuclear arsenals represent, from a gendered perspective that takes their critiques to a deeper level, attempting to get at the root of the insanity behind the creation of weapons capable of destroying the entire world. In doing so, they have developed powerful insights into the pathologies of militarization, as well as the problematic aspects of current gender relations, and the linkages between the two problems.

Statement of Topic Dorothy Dinnerstein, in The Mermaid and The Minotaur, describes a powerful link between uncomfortable, pathological gender relations and the potential for mass destruction at the societal level, posing the question: Does it matter, after all, whether people do see the relation between these two crises or not? It matters (apart from the sheer satisfaction of seeing, and of coming to some consensus about what we see) only insofar as our efforts toward social change may possibly still have some real effect on what will happen next. There is no way of being sure whether there is or is not time enough left for such efforts to be at all effective. But if we are going to make them, there is no point in making them blindfold. (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 255) Her writing expresses strong feelings of doubt about the future of humanity. And she argues that these feelings are common among women activists working against a system of militarization that they perceive to be nothing less than madness, while they are also struggling against confining and often dangerous gender roles, which, although outdated, still retain a prevailing hold over human psychology (Dinnerstein, 1976). For such activists, the problems of gender and questions relating to violence and militarization are inseparable. By addressing both sets of problems within the same theories and actions, they have discovered unique sources of energy, creating unique and revolutionary stages on which to rethink and re-act gender. I believe they have also discovered, at the intersection between gender re-creation and creative nonviolence, the best possible chance for success. The link between gender and the madness of militarization warrants further investigation. The creation of nuclear weapons, in particular, and the nonviolent womens movements that have arisen in response to this crisis are emblematic of a struggle between sanity and insanity in foreign policies, military policies, and understandings of the notion of security. Understanding the role of gender in structuring our world and the ways in which we think about our own lives and the lives of others becomes a useful approach to deconstructing old destructive patterns. Within this strategy women have a unique contribution to make. The traditional exclusion of women from public life and the process of shaping public policy is one manifestation of a pathological inclination toward the mass self-destruction embodied in nuclear weapons (Dinnerstein, 1976). At this point in human development, it is vital for women to bring their perspectives into public life and the process of shaping history. In this thesis, I do not intend to suggest that women are better cut out for the work of peace building because of any innate tendencies toward peace or nonviolence, and I do not intend to suggest that all women who insist on taking their share of public power do so in order to work for 2

peace. I do, however, propose to argue that women who understand the linkages between violence and gender, and between militarization and the subordination of women, are likely to fight for peace and to do so effectively. Feminists are known for highlighting the connection between the personal and the political, arguing that the two concepts are inseparable because personal experiences are political, while political events are also personal. As Casey Hayden and Mary King describe the connection, Weve talked in the movement about trying to build a society which would see basic human problems (which are now seen as private troubles) as public problems and would try to shape institutions to meet human needs rather than shaping people to meet the needs of those with power (1965). Women who organize resistance to nuclear weapons have also embraced this idea, exploring their own gendered identities in relation to nuclear weapons. Some argue from an essentialist position that as mothers, or potential mothers, they have a particular stake in the continuation of human existence. Others have asserted, from a social constructionist position, that gendered identities are currently used to fuel systems of militarization. Either way, such activists interpret their personal identities as women as having serious political ramifications, and they have taken political events related to weapons proliferation and militarization as a matter of personal life-and-death significance. Within the context of the traditionally masculine realms of military and security policy, there is something revolutionary about a woman who takes herself and her political positions seriously. Becoming involved in nonviolent political movements for many women can be a process of personal empowerment. Women who step outside of the roles prescribed for them by stereotypical ideas of femininity may be more likely than others to develop new understandings of gender, which will in turn lead to novel thinking about gendered subjects such as militarization. Such breaking of old boundaries is not only an effective political strategy, but a source of personal energy and empowerment. Under such circumstances, the problems of militarization and genderwhich are socially and psychologically linked togethercan also be addressed simultaneously. In fact, as Dinnerstein suggests, they must be addressed simultaneously. This paper is comprised of an extensive literature review, two case studies of womens peace activist organizations that illustrate past and current strategies, an evaluation of the effectiveness of the two groups methods described, and a conclusion that includes recommendations for the present and future of such resistance movements. The first case study focuses on the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp, a nonviolent protest movement located outside of Greenham Common Airbase from 1981 until 2000. The second case study looks at the activities of Reaching Critical Will, 3

a project of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom that focuses on nuclear disarmament and works within the United Nations system as a non-governmental organization. These case studies cover two projects with a common goal, that of complete nuclear disarmament, yet they employ vastly different strategies and approaches to achieving their mutual goal. Within the case studies, a number of theoretical questions will be considered in relation to topics such as the social constructions of masculinity and femininity as they relate to militarization and discourses on nuclear weapons; the role of the public/private dichotomy in determining womens roles within the context of systems of militarization, and the ways in which such womens movements challenge the dichotomy; the influence of discourses on the social roles of the protector and the protected, their political implications, and how women are transcending their traditional and confining roles; the subject of women-only organizations, the reasoning behind the decision to work separately from men, and the political ramifications of such a decision; the question of why women activists may consider gender to be central in their work, and the linkages that they have formed between problematic gender roles and dangerous levels of militarization; and the process of re-creating gender. In looking at these questions, I hope to explore the ways in which womens political actions shape and redefine gender roles, both within peace and disarmament movements and in other aspects of womens personal lives. Assumptions and Hypotheses In undertaking this research, my central assumption is that nuclear weapons exist within a relatively new category of weapons that are highly and uniquely dangerous. As David P. Barash and Charles P. Webel contend, The proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction both vertically and horizontallyposes the most serious imaginable threat to human beings and to the planet (2002, p. 109). Under the conditions of widespread proliferation in which nations representing many different ideologies, and possibly even individuals, have access to nuclear weapons, nobody will benefit from their use. From this assumption follows the conclusion that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the maintenance of already existing arsenals has uniquely horrific and catastrophic implications in which no side can win, suggesting a form of psychosis or insanity on the part of nation states and governments, as well on the part of rogue groups and individuals. My starting hypothesis is that gender is cogently involved in understanding and addressing the creation of nuclear weapons and the singular threat that they pose to humanity. The dominance of militarization and stereotypical gender roles are fundamentally linked to each other. Without 4

understanding the impact of gender on destructive human behaviors, and without understanding the role of gender in addressing and changing these behaviors that have brought the human race to the brink of nonexistence, any resistance movement is doomed to fail. I begin with the hypothesis that women have distinct and vital contributions to make to any movement for demilitarization, and that womens political mobilization creates a unique space in which women can break out of the constraints and protocols of traditionally gendered roles, experience their personal power to effect change, and release positive energies which have, until relatively recent political changes of the past few decades, been mostly confined to the private sphere and dismissed as politically unimportant. Research Methodology Overview of Methods Throughout the research process I have worked to maintain a feminist perspective and approach in addressing my topic, as outlined by Reinharz and Davidman (1992) in the conclusion to Feminist Methods in Social Research. My research is firmly grounded in feminist theory, which is reflected in the literature review. This has been important in the process of reflecting upon and developing the links between gender, militarization, and political action, as well as being important for my ultimate purpose of highlighting the historic and contemporary value of womens political activism. As Reinharz (1992) notes, Feminist social research utilizes feminist theory in part because other theoretical traditions ignore or downplay the interaction of gender and power (p. 249). In order fully to describe the connection between gender and the political movements in question, it is necessary for me to work within a feminist theoretical framework. Reinharz continues, In addition to the connection with theory, much feminist research is connected to social change and social policy questions [] This connection to social change makes much feminist research practical as well as scholarly. The practical side is evident in books and articles containing suggestions for direct action that could be taken (1992, pp. 251-252). My research further reflects a feminist perspective in its commitment to creating social change, and my conclusion is focused on analysis both of what has worked in the past and practical recommendations for what might work best in the future. Finally, my conviction that a feminist approach is essential is strengthened through the incorporation of womens voices in describing their experiences of political action and their personal stake in disarmament and demilitarization. By including the voices of the women who are the

subjects of my research, I hope to create a better understanding of the thinking behind their work, as well as to maintain the essential link between the personal and the political. Design of Research Material In developing this thesis, my research has come primarily from books and news media sources, which outline the necessary theoretical framework and the experiences of women participating in the actions described in the case studies. Wherever possible, I have tried to focus on the words and narratives of the women themselves. In the case of Reaching Critical Will, significant amounts of information were obtained from the organizations Web site and documents linked or published there. I have also designed a set of interview questions for the members of Reaching Critical Will in order to assess their perspectives on the linkages between gender and their work on nuclear disarmament. Sent through email, the questionnaire was kept brief, due to time constraints, and out of respect for the schedules of the participants. Time limitations, the workload of the two women asked to participate, and the size of the organization limited the responses, I was able to get only one of the two hoped-for responses. Research Variables and Constructs My research incorporated three variables: 1. Gender within political movements, as demonstrated by an emphasis on the participation of women and the actions of women a consciousness of gender roles when developing strategies an active effort to create changes in traditional gender structures and to rethink traditional gender roles an awareness of the destructive aspects of gender structures in shaping the problem of militarization 2. Nuclear weapons and cultures of militarization, as demonstrated by the creation and maintenance of nuclear arsenals an implied willingness to use nuclear weapons in a military strike an acceptance of violence as a method of problem solving an association between the social construction of masculine identity and violence

3. The link between problems within traditional gender structures and the predicaments associated with the dominance of militarized thinking and systems, as demonstrated by the flawed association of masculinity with violence and femininity with peace 6

the historic and current devaluation of womens contributions to political discourses, especially those on the subjects of war and militarization the overall lack of success in attempting to address the two spheres separately

In working with these variables, I have explored the various ways in which they interact with and influence each other. Understanding the complex interactions between the variables is helpful in determining effective strategies for addressing systems of militarization that rely on rigid enforcement of gendered socialization. Research Ethics Participation in my research was completely voluntary, and the subject matter of the project was explained in advance to potential participants. Most of the data collected is public. The personal experiences of individual women were also contributed willingly. None of the information presented is likely to be damaging to any individuals.

Literature Review
Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity, Violence and Militarism In order to address questions of violence and militarism, it is necessary to look at masculinity and femininity as mutually reinforcing concepts within a given cultural or societal context. Feminists have begun the work of examining the relationships between masculinity and violence from many different angles, but Cynthia Enloe stresses the importance of maintaining the analytic connection between masculinity and femininity. She writes that to be curious about men and their actions within a given context requires curiosity about women as well. For masculinity is constructed out of ideas about femininity, its alleged opposite. Men in real life learn about and accept or resist their cultures ideas about what is natural in male behavior by relying on (while still controlling) women, by fantasizing about women, and by working to separate themselves from women. Where are the women? (Enloe, 1993, pp. 19-20) By asking this question, Enloe hopes to illuminate aspects of international politics that would otherwise be deemed unimportant or go unnoticed altogether. The act of questioning the roles and actions of women, within or outside of constructions of femininity, can provide new perspectives on the roles and actions of men, within or outside of constructions of masculinity. Masculinity relies on the existence of femininity to frame its definition, an example of what it is not. This dynamic becomes extremely clear when looking at the links between masculinity, violence, and militarism, and the role that femininity plays within that construction. In order fully to understand the influence of constructions of masculinity and femininity on social trends of male violence, militarism, and warfare, it is necessary to begin by unpacking the terms. Nancy Hartsock discusses masculinity as ideologya set of cultural institutions and practices that constitutes the norms and standards of masculinity, a set of ideals to which few men can measure up (1989, p. 135). And she notes that some men refuse this ideology. That masculinity is a cultural construction rather than a matter of raging hormones is well illustrated by the fact that some women do very well at itMargaret Thatcher comes immediately to mind (Hartsock, 1989, p. 135). Yet masculinity as a concept remains directly linked to men, and R.W. Connell argues that its very existence relies on a relational concept of femininity. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/American culture (Connell, 1999, p. 68).

Connell understands masculinity and femininity as existing within a larger gender framework, which is to say that although masculinity is strongly associated with men and femininity is strongly associated with women, these gender concepts are not determined by physical bodies. Gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine the social. It marks one of those points of transition where historical process supersedes biological evolution as the form of change (Connell, 1999, pp. 71-72). If gender is cultural, then gender relations can be shaped and reshaped by the people who live them. However, this does not mean that gender is imaginary, or that it does not have a real impact on peoples lives. Ideas of masculinity and femininity have been institutionalized in policies at the national and international levels, and the power of gender as transmitted through culture places people within roles and sets of expectations from which it is very difficult to break out. Connell is careful to note the role of power imbalances within constructions of gender. He cites statistics concerning the male majority in governments around the world and the inequalities in how much men and women are paid for the work that they do, writing, Given these facts, the battle of the sexes is no joke. Social struggle must result from inequalities on such a scale. It follows that the politics of masculinity cannot concern only questions of personal life and identity. It must also concern questions of social justice (Connell, 1999, pp. 82-83). Connell argues that the inequalities between men and women give rise to violence, not only between individual men and women, but also at a societal level because violence becomes important in gender politics among men. Most episodes of major violence (counting military combat, homicide and armed assault) are transactions among men (1999, p. 83). In this context, constructions of masculinity and manhood become difficult to separate from violent actions or ideologies. Virility and violence are commonly linked together, writes Hartsock (1989, p. 134) in her essay Masculinity, Heroism, and the Making of War. Violence is considered to be an integral part of manhood, and men who do not embrace violence are considered to be somehow less than men. Hartsock cites the example of the role of masculinity in military training: Recruits learn that to be a man is to be a soldier, not a woman (1989, p.134). She argues that the cultural requirements of masculinity push men toward warfare, identifying violence as a means for proving ones manhood. Joshua Goldstein supports this view, stating that war does not come naturally to men (from biology), so warriors require intense socialization and training in order to fight effectively. Gender identity becomes a tool with which societies induce men to fight (2001, p. 252). Within this construction of masculinity linked to militarism, Hartsock argues that human anxieties over death play a central role. Noting that men have traditionally held positions of control 9

within patriarchal societies, she writes that as a result of the human knowledge of death, man has difficulty admitting that he does not stand alone, that he is not in control (Hartsock, 1989, p. 136). From this knowledge and anxiety emerges the construction of heroism, which Hartsock believes to be a solution for men attempting to deal with the problem of meaninglessness posed for them by death (1989, p. 139). Through heroic (violent) acts, men achieve new levels of meaning, as well as a type of immortality in cases when stories of heroism are passed from one generation to another. In order to function as a solution, however, this construction of heroic masculinity requires the exclusion of women. Military participation becomes more prestigious for men when they believe they are doing work that women are incapable of doing. The system of military training is based on this belief, as demonstrated by the labeling of any soldier who does not measure up as a woman (Hartsock, 1989). Women may serve a purpose as audience for the military men, but Hartsock writes that they must not be allowed to participate in the action. She notes that women continue to be excluded from politics of militarism, and that the link between heroism, masculinity, and death can be seen playing out in the politics of militarism. She writes that, as to heroic action flirting with oblivion, we need only point to the history of brinkmanship in the foreign policy of the 1950s (Hartsock, 1989, p. 147). In this context, the political manipulation of nuclear arsenals and technology can be seen as a type of madness, a topic that is addressed further through the work of Dorothy Dinnerstein. (See below) The Protector and the Protected The roles and expected behaviors that embody the concepts of masculinity and femininity often translate in very specific ways into systems of militarization. Judith Hicks Stiehm (1994) identifies one of these systems as that of the protected and the protector, a system of gendered roles in which heroic men protect the members of society who are constructed as weaker, namely women and children. Within this system the ideal protector is a man, and although he may be reluctant to take on the role, he does it because of a sense of duty or a belief in the nobility of his sacrifice. Stiehm notes that most men are reluctant to fight. Goldstein elaborates on this idea, suggesting that contrary to the idea that war thrills men, expresses innate masculinity, or gives men a fulfilling occupation, all evidence indicates that war is something that societies impose on men, who most often need to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, constantly brainwashed and disciplined once there, and rewarded and honored afterwards (2001, p. 253). When individual men do fight, it is a result of heavy training that is rooted in concepts of masculinity. Stiehm argues that in a combat situation, many soldiers fight not for the sake of ideology, but rather out of a simple desire for 10

survival or a fear of being dishonored in front of their fellow soldiers (1994). Again, the exclusion of women from active fighting roles seems to be an important element in convincing men to fight. A man who fails to take on the role of protector is viewed by other men as feminine. In order to maintain the gendered meanings of the role, it cannot be filled by women. According to this ideological structure, the protected are able to live in safety because of the sacrifices made by the protectors. Yet Stiehm remains doubtful that this idea is reflected in reality. A person who is protected may be quite safe from attack. She may be so because a protector effectively threatens or uses force on her behalf. She, however, does not use force; for that she is dependent on her protector. She is so because men have a near monopoly on the means of destruction (Stiehm, 1994, p. 582). The fact that men control these means is not an accident. Being a protector has both advantages and disadvantages. Stiehm quotes a prisoner of war who wrote in his cell, freedoma feeling the protected will never know (1994, p.585). As long as women remain as dependents within systems of patriarchy, they are denied the right of every adult to take responsibility for her or his own existence, and to be self-reliant. Under the current conditions of warfare, in which civilians are often deliberately targeted by violence, this myth of protection rings particularly hollow. Men maintain a monopoly on the means of violence, and women are frequently left defenseless, lacking a culturally mandated or recognized right to defend themselves. It is questionable, however, whether men serving in the role of protector are free themselves. Stiehm argues that most men are coerced into fighting, often through the use of images of masculinity and femininity in military training. The majority of troops in the United States army are young men who are often uncertain of what it means to be a man. If they are told by men that men do such and such, and if they are surrounded by men and only men are doing it, then they will probably believe what they are told. This should be especially likely when terms like ladies or girls are used as terms of derision (Stiehm, 1994, p. 586). In describing cold war gender politics, Enloe argues that the masculinity of the protector is directly linked to the femininity of the protected. She notes that women and men do not experience danger in identical ways. In most of the societies that were drawn into the Cold War, men were thought to be manly only insofar as they did not shy away from danger and perhaps even flirted with it as they protected the nations children and women. Women, on the other hand, were considered those most vulnerable to danger. Only a foolish woman, a woman who ignored the dictates of femininity, behaved as though she was not endangered, as though a mans protection was irrelevant. (Enloe, 1993, p. 15) Stiehm also emphasizes the link between the masculinity of the protector and the femininity of the protected, suggesting that the existence of the protected justifies, on some psychological level, the 11

actions taken in the name of defense by the protector. She argues that men in combat situations might take extreme actions in defense of women, although they would not take the same actions in defense of a more overt ideology or in defense of themselves. The category of the protected becomes a way subtly to coerce reluctant men into fighting (Stiehm, 1994). The coercive power of linking the category of the protector with masculinity and the protected with femininity may be partly due to the effect such differentiations have of naturalizing the categories. The persistence of the belief that social roles for women and men are natural, rather than historically and socially constructed, along with the implication that soldiering is a manly duty provides the role of protector with a deep sense of legitimacy, preventing many from questioning what it is from which women need to be protected. Stiehm argues that in most cases, the protected need to be protected from the protectors. In most conflicts in which these categories are relevant, men playing the role of protectors are protecting their women from outside groups of men, or, in other words, other protectors. This largely unquestioned state of affairs has a number of disadvantages for those assigned to the role of protected. The first disadvantage is that the protector may fail in his job of protecting. Stiehm writes, since World War II civilians have had little immunity. Wars, after all, are fought where people live The hard fact is that, try as he may, a protector often cannot give protection (1994, p. 584). Although women tend to be viewed innocent victims in the context of open conflicts in which they do not participate as soldiers, this status does not provide them with any real type of protection. In fact, it may make them more vulnerable to attacks from outside men. To attack the women of one group within a conflict is a direct challenge to the masculinity of the men of that same group (Stiehm, 1994). In this way, women can be used as weapons against the men who have taken on the role of protecting them. A second disadvantage faced by women is a feeling of superiority on the part of the protectors. In societies that privilege war and combat as important adult activities, the men who fight wars are bound to feel a sense of importance placing them above the women whom they see as the protected. Stiehm writes, Just as the protector knows more about war than the protected, it is possible he also knows or at least thinks more about the protected than that largely unselfconscious group thinks about itself (1994, p. 585). This claim to more knowledge on the part of the protectors seems difficult to believe. One could make the counterargument that because of their status as a vulnerable group, women actually know more about the men supposedly protecting them than those men could ever know about the women who are the protected. Because men as a group are socialized to be dangerous to women as a group, the survival of women often requires that 12

they have knowledge of the behaviors of men. Men playing the role of protector may, however, believe they know more about the protected than women themselves. This would partially explain the exclusion of women from formal peace processes and the tendency of men to shape policies based on a belief that they know and understand the needs of women, without ever consulting the women who are the subjects of the policies. A third and extremely ominous disadvantage for women in playing the part of the protected is that they might be victimized by the same men who are supposed to be protecting them. Stiehm questions whether it is possible that the greatest threat to ones existence comes not from a vicious enemy but from ones own protector(s) who may (1) deliberately exploit one, (2) manipulate and harm one in the interests of better control or of guaranteed safety, (3) attract violence by organizing ones protection, and/or (4) turn on one (1994, p. 588). She argues that the more vulnerable women are thought to be, the more incapable they are of defending themselves, the greater the danger that they will be attacked, exploited, and oppressed by the men claiming to protect them. In other words, to label women as a group in need of protection, a group that is vulnerable, is to mark them as targets for serious mistreatment that could take a number of different forms. There are many reasons why the deconstruction of this system may benefit women, and it may in fact be women who are in the best position to begin the process of deconstruction. Due to the symbiotic nature of masculinity and femininity, and in spite of the fact that women are viewed as dependents within this dynamic, the structure of the protector and the protected relies on the cooperation of women. Stiehm writes that the protected are essential to the protector. They (ignorantly) endorse and justify. The negative power the protected have, though, is only nonviolent. It is rooted in refusal, in noncooperation, in sacrifice. It lacks the power to compel (1994, p. 585). This statement seems somewhat contradictory, for if the protected are essential to the functioning of the system, then one might argue that they do have the power to compel, simply through withdrawing consent and refusing the play their role according to the rules. This is the position taken by Enloe, who writes that womens roles in creating and sustaining international politics have been treated as if they were natural and thus not worthy of investigation. Consequently, how the conduct of international politics has depended on mens control of women has been left unexamined (1989, p. 4). Enloe argues for the importance of taking seriously womens experiences of international politics, in order to better understand the functioning of power and its relationship to gender ideologies.

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Feminist Questions about the Role of Women in International Systems Enloe is also interested in the roles of protector and protected, identifying the influence of an underlying belief that this is a dangerous world. This concept sounds familiar, gender-neutral, yet when its a patriarchal world that is dangerous, masculine men and feminine women are expected to react in opposite but complementary ways. A real man will become the protector in such a world. He will suppress his own fears, brace himself and step forward to defend the weak, women and children. In the same dangerous world women will turn gratefully and expectantly to their fathers and husbands, real or surrogate. If a woman is a mother, then she will think first of her children, protecting them not in a manly way, but as a self-sacrificing mother. (Enloe, 1989, p. 12). It is important in this context to think about the ideologies of masculinity and femininity as they play out in politics. Enloe argues that to introduce masculinity as a topic is to make men visible as men (p. 13), perhaps creating accountability within groups of men for their actions, as well as contributing to the understanding of how masculinity functions as an ideology. In conventional commentaries men who wield influence in international politics are analyzed in terms of their national identities, their class origins and their paid work. Rarely are they analyzed as men who have been taught how to be manly, how to size up the trustworthiness or competence of other men in terms of their manliness (Enloe, 1989, p. 13). Enloes strongest point, however, relates to the role of women in maintaining international systems of power. She argues that women need to recognize their role as actors within international politics, as well as recognizing the importance of their own experiences. The system as it stands needs women in order to function, a fact that gives women power to alter the system. Corporate executives and development technocrats need some women to depend on cash wages; they need some women to see a factory or plantation job as a means of delaying marriage or fulfilling daughterly obligations. Without womens own needs, values and worries, the global assembly line would grind to a halt. But many of those needs, values and worries are defined by patriarchal structures and strictures. If fathers, brothers, husbands didnt gain some privilege, however small in global terms, from womens acquiescence to those confining notions of femininity, it might be much harder for the foreign executives and their local elite allies to recruit the cheap labor they desire. Consequently, womens capacity to challenge the men in their families, their communities or their political movements, will be a key to remaking the world. (Enloe, 1989, p. 17) In order to utilize womens capacity for acting as agents of social change, it is necessary to understand their roles and their power within the context of systems of masculinity and femininity. Enloe proposes to explore womens roles in international political and economic systems by asking a series of feminist questions. She believes that such work is especially relevant to the task of reversing trends of militarization, and she notes that during recent years I have become convinced 14

that it is not enough for us to talk about militarism. We must talk about monitor, explain, challenge those multi-layered processes by which militarism gains legitimacy and popular and elite acceptance; that is, we must learn how to track militarization (Enloe, 2002, p. 23). Gender is used as an important avenue through which militarism gains legitimacy, as demonstrated by Stiehms examination of the roles of protector and protected. Such roles require the compliance of women, while promoting a system in which women inevitably lose. Enloes feminist questions illustrate some of the concrete ways in which systems of militarization privilege men over women and perpetuate their own ideologies through the domination of women. Enloe defines feminist curiosity as a curiosity that provokes serious questioning about the workings of masculinized and feminized meanings (2002, p. 24). She begins by questioning the masculinized meanings attached to military figures in public life and politics. Enloe suspects that men who can claim to be combatants gain a special political importance, in many cases including an automatic feeling of legitimacy when they step into authority roles. This system privileges men over women in political institutions and social structures because in many parts of the world women are excluded from combat roles in their nations militaries and because, even in cases where women do participate in combat, the characteristic of masculinity is importantly linked to militarism and legitimized military power (Enloe, 2002). Dinnerstein (1976) argues that this system not only reinforces the exclusion of women from public life, but also relies on it. (See below.) Enloe identifies the subject of security as another area in which men are privileged over women. Concepts such as national security, she argues, refer to systems of militarization and often have little to do with the real security concerns of women. Prioritizing the security of military structures and battlefields over other areas of society creates an incomplete, unrealistic idea of what concepts like peace and security mean. According to Enloe, For many women, the home and neighbourhood (and temporary home, a refugee camp) can be as insecure as a battlefield. In fact, a home or a neighbourhood street can be a battlefield. When postwar local and international authorities treat violence against women as a non-priority, as an issue to be put off until later, as a matter not falling within their own mandate, those same authorities perpetuate a crucial dynamic of militarization in a time of alleged peace. (Enloe, 2002, pp. 26-27) Thus the existence of violence against women, like the exclusion of women from public politics, may play an important role in reinforcing militarism. The feminist insight that the personal is political suggests that violence in the public sphere is likely to translate into violence in the private sphere, and vice versa. A thoroughly militarized society must be violent in the private aspects of life as well as the public.

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Ultimately, militarism seems to create systems of rivalry between individual men or groups of men. Enloe argues that this is particularly damaging to women, as well as to any hope of achieving gender equality, writing Rivalries between men, whether personal or bureaucratic, do not roll back either masculinization or militarization. Most often, those rivalries merely turn women into silent bystanders. Or, and this is less noticed, they turn women and ideas about proper femininity into cannon fodder for the waging of those masculinized rivalries for political turf or material resources. Being turned into someone elses cannon fodder is not a promising formula for achieving first class citizenship. (Enloe, 2002, p. 29) Demonstrating control over women, whether in a government setting, a military setting, or simply within an informal gathering of men, is an excellent method of proving ones masculinity. As a result, women or questions of womens rights are often used as tools in support of a system that privileges militarized masculinity. Approaching such problems with a feminist curiosity leads to the development of specific strategies for creating change. By highlighting the agency that women have in deciding whether or not to comply within systems of militarization, Enloe identifies an important political strategy. She argues that by altering their behaviors within traditional gender roles and concepts of femininity, women are capable of changing entire world orders. The consent of women is necessary to the operation of any international system, and women will always have the power to withdraw their consent. Psychological Obstacles to Change Unfortunately the process of altering gender roles and structures has proven to be extremely difficult. Feminist activists working on questions of womens rights, freedom, and equality have faced enormous difficultly in convincing women and men that a problem exists, in spite of overwhelming evidence in the forms of overt discrimination and violence against women. This difficulty in recognizing such problems is also a major obstacle to deconstructing systems of militarization, and through the lens of feminist curiosity it becomes clear that the two problems are linked. Dinnerstein, in her book The Mermaid and The Minotaur, undertakes the task of getting to the root of the difficulty by questioning the psychology behind gender. She writes What must be seen from the outset is that the trouble people have in thinking about our male-female symbiosis is not primarily intellectual trouble. Thought in this region (even for thinkers who are committed to the project of sexual liberty) is inevitably slowed down by fear: we are thinking about a question whose answer is bound to melt the ground under our feet. It is dangerous, uncomfortable ground, 16

and it is high time we stepped off it; still, it is the ground we stand on now, the only ground we know. (Dinnerstein, 1976, pp. 23-24) Yet in spite of this intense fear, the task of altering what she terms the male-female symbiosis is vital, not only for the psychological health of individuals, but for the survival of the species. Dinnerstein identifies a pathological division of labor between the sexes that she views as extremely dangerous, and she traces the division back to early childcare practices: Under the arrangements that now prevail, a woman is the parental person who is every infants first love, first witness, and first boss, the person who presides over the infants first encounters with the natural surround and who exists for the infant as the first representative of the flesh (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 28). As a result of this arrangement, all of the terrors of infancy, as well as all of the joys, become associated with one gender. Dinnerstein argues that if these infant emotions were associated with both women and men, in other words, with all of humanity, then we would have to resolve the fears and frustrations of our childhood in order to live in the world as adults. Woman-dominated early childcare means, however, that such feelings are for most of us associated only with women. And as a result, we are able to sidestep the difficult task of resolving them simply by placing all of our negative feelings about the human condition on women, leaving men to look rational, adult, and safe by comparison (Dinnerstein, 1976). Negative feelings associated with women, which include a profound fear of female authority, have powerful implications for gender roles in adult life as well. Dinnerstein argues that because of a uniquely human ability for highly abstract thinking, bodily differences take on deep cultural meanings. This can be a positive source of meaning, but also a negative one. Traditionally, the bodily difference between men and women has carried with it a social and psychological complementarity, a division of responsibility for basic human concerns, a compartmentalization of sensibility, that makes each sex in its own way sub-human. The sub-humanity of women is proverbially obvious. What is now surfacing is a venerable underground intuition: that the sub-humanity of men may in fact be more ominous. (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 15). In a society where women are expected to be concerned with caring for the children and cleaning up the messes, while men are expected to be concerned with public life and the exercise of public power, there develops a dangerous disconnect between those who wield power and those who are concerned for the well-being of humanity. In the past, some have attempted to explain this problem by arguing that women are inherently more peaceful than men, or that men are inherently more violent. Dinnerstein disagrees with this approach, instead seeing the problem as a psychological and cultural split within humanity. 17

The fear of female authority that becomes associated with this split has important implications for the functioning and maintenance of militarist ideologies. Systems of militarization exclude women from participation in all of the roles deemed important because women have another role to play as objects of protection and as audience for male heroes. Dinnerstein argues, however, that there is also a psychological benefit to be gained from the exclusion of women. As infants, she argues, most people first encountered female will in situations when they felt completely helpless and overwhelmed by the comparatively vast powers of the mother. According to Dinnerstein: Female sentience, for this reason, carries permanently for most of us the atmosphere of that unbounded, shadowy presence toward which all our needs were originally directed. And the intentionality that resides in female sentience comes in this way to carry an atmosphere of the rampant and limitless, the alien and unknowable. It is an intentionality that needs to be conquered and tamed, corralled and subjugated, if we (men most urgently, but women too) are to feel at all safe in its neighborhood. (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 164) Excluding women from positions of authority, and allowing men to fill those positions instead, thus has the effect of making all of us feel a bit safer. Dinnerstein argues that because of psychological factors resulting from the current childcare arrangements, male authority is bound to feel cleaner and safer than female authority. People balk, brazenly or sheepishly, candidly or with fancy rationalizations, at any concrete step that is taken to break the male monopoly of formal, overt power (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 160). Even when male authority figures are behaving in irrational and dangerous ways, they are bound to feel more legitimate than the alternative imagined by the childhood consciousness that we were never forced to fully outgrow. Patriarchy, writes Dinnerstein, remains a refuge that we are afraid to dismantle (1976, p. 189). Under the current conditions, Dinnerstein describes humanity as marching out to meet death halfway (1976, p. 149). Since humanity is uniquely capable of maintaining a complex awareness of its own mortality, we are also required to imagine ways of coping with that reality. Hartsock identifies the social construction of heroism as one method used by men in coming to terms with physical mortality through an attempt to replace it with symbolic immortality. Dinnerstein agrees with this assessment, identifying overt political power and control of public life as another means for men of pushing away the knowledge of mortality. This neurotic attempt to avoid one of lifes basic realities, in combination with the necessary exclusion of women from roles of public power, lends itself well to militarism, allowing for a certain level of insanity within military practices. Until we resolve our difficulties in dealing with death and the basic fact of human limitations, Dinnerstein writes that we will continue to prey on and terrorize each other; also to

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gobble up, poison, and chop to lifeless bits the world that we nevertheless love, the world that nurtures us, the only world we have (1976, p. 114). The task at hand involves reintegrating ourselves and overcoming dangerous gendered division of labor, so that concern for public power and concern for the wellbeing of children can coexist within an individual, regardless of ones sex. This involves a process of undermining what Dinnerstein refers to as the old system by stepping out of the assigned roles. Dinnerstein believes that women are the ones who must begin the process of altering inherited systems and attitudes. Women are more aware of the problem than men, she argues, because women have been required to take on a larger share of the burden in supporting the long-standing symbiosis. Women are held responsible for all of the drawbacks of human existence by the inner infant that most people never fully outgrow, an infant who remains angry that the first parent, a woman, proved incapable of fully protecting it from all of the dangers and uncertainties of life. The rage of that discovery, that parents are fallible and cannot shape the world according to the babys desires, and the sense of who should be held responsible, is focused mainly on women. And this incomparable onusso heavy and so unjust that one must keep it out of focal awareness if one is to stay sane: this literally unspeakable and unthinkable onuskeeps a radical feeling of No! strong in every girl and woman whose core of self-affirmation is not wholly crushed by it (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 234). That deep-rooted feeling of resistance, she argues, has led women to begin to question the gender system in ways of which most men are not yet capable. The major difficultly lies in an understanding that the power structures behind both gender and militarization have always contained mechanisms for incorporating female resistance without allowing it to pose any real threat to those structures. Dinnerstein quotes Freud, who labeled woman the enemy of civilization, but argues that this comment obscures the complexity of the situation. She is the loyal opponent, the indispensable defanged and domesticated critic, of what he himself identified as the essential, and imminently lethal, sickness of civilization. Without her sabotage, civilization as it is could not go on. This sabotage is harmless to what it purports to assault. Indeed it dissipates what could be effectively explosive feeling, discharges potentially subversive emotional energy in frivolous and impotent, homey and comfortable, ways. It farts away internal pressure that would otherwise shatter the social system. She is not civilizations enemy: she is its court jester, without whose jibes the court would collapse. (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 225) How, then, in the face of these obstacles can women withdraw their consent in a way that will be truly effective, and will not ultimately serve only to reinforce the system or to increase the already pathological divisions between women and men? In order to be effective, any social criticism coming from women must simultaneously critique the existing gender order, yet this requires serious 19

personal sacrifice on the part of the women involved. Not only can they expect to be penalized for breaking gender rules, but they are also forced to face their own fears about the loss of old structures and to take on the strenuous work of imagining new ones. In a 1999 introduction to The Mermaid and The Minotaur, Ann Snitow writes of the old gender symbiosis, however much they depended on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar systems decay they have the least to lose (1999, p. xxi). For women, the fight to dismantle structures of militarism and create new definitions of rationality and security is integrally linked to the fight for personal freedom. Through the process of identifying and building on this link, women have developed innovative approaches to nonviolent resistance and critiques of militarization.

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Greenham Women
Theres really only one thing you need to ask yourself, and that is: would you pull the trigger? would you press the button? and if the answer is No, then you have to work with us and help this struggle for peace. Sarah van Veen, March 1982 (Cook & Kirk, 1983, p. 29) Nuclear weapons, according to David Barash and Charles Webel, represent a dramatic discontinuity in human history, and they offer the possibility of an even more dramatic break: a canceling of the past, an end to the present, and a negating of the future (2002, p. 85). Posing the most serious imaginable threat to human beings and to the planet (Barash & Webel, 2002, p. 109), these uniquely dangerous weapons demand a new and creative responses from peace movements. An example of one such response can be found in the actions taken by a group of women camped outside a British airbase for nearly two decades in protest of their countrys nuclear policies. The Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp, a site for nonviolent action that was planned and carried out by women, many of whom had never before participated in political movements, has come to represent many different meanings for different people. For the women who participated, either at the camp itself or in supportive demonstrations and political activities, it seems to have represented above all a process of discovering personal potential and claiming personal responsibility. Their narratives include stories of overcoming obstacles, developing political awareness, testing the traditional boundaries of gender, questioning authority, creating new approaches to old problems, and realizing the power of nonviolent direct action. Throughout these narratives also runs a deep awareness of unreasonable, manmade danger, and a firm commitment to do something about it. The women of Greenham have recognized the madness of the nuclear arms race and refused to be a part of it. In that process of refusal, they have also realized that they had a uniquely important role to play as women. That realization has perhaps led to more questions than answers, but the questions that it has raised are vitally important to understanding the impact of womens political action and its implications for efforts toward demilitarization. The peace camp began in August of 1981 as a protest march from Cardiff, in South Wales, to Greenham Common, where NATO planned to store nuclear cruise missiles at the Greenham Common Airbase (Cook & Kirk, 1983). The march was organized by a group of women and a few men, with the purpose of drawing media attention and raising public awareness about the cruise missiles. But by the end of the march, writes Ann Snitow, the media silence had become galling. Four women decided to chain themselves to the main gate to force the world to take notice (1985, 21

pp. 33-34). Still there was no immediate media response. As time went on the marchers stayed, and soon the camp had become a semi-permanent fixture outside the airbase. As some campers had to leave to return home, other women came to take their places, maintaining a constant presence of peace protesters within the small encampment (Snitow, 1985). After the initial amusement and tolerance, the missile base took alarm. Winter came but the women did not go away. On January 29, 1982, the nearby town of Newbury served notice on the camps of its intention to evict (Snitow, 1985, p. 34). The protesters had finally managed to draw attention, and now if they decided to stay they would be breaking the law. Gene Sharp defines civil disobedience as a deliberate, open and peaceful violation of particular laws, decrees, regulations, ordinances, military or police instructions, and the like which are believed to be illegitimate for some reason (1973, p. 315). For the campers at Greenham, remaining in their tents on a muddy piece of earth outside a NATO airbase meant openly disobeying orders in the form of eviction notices. According to Snitow, If ever the women had considered packing it in, this evidence that they were a real thorn in the side of the American military and its English support systems must have clinched the matter (1985, p. 34). The question they had to ask was whether they considered the eviction instructions to be legitimate. They decided to remain where they were. Sharp further notes, Modern justification for civil disobedienceis frequently based on a conviction that obedience would make one an accomplice to an immoral or unjust act or one which is seen to be, in the last analysis, itself illegal (1973, pp. 315-316). Within many of the accounts from the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp there runs a belief in the madness of the system of militarization, represented in its most extreme form by nuclear proliferation. Jane Dennett, one of the women activists at Greenham, describes her experiences in talking with average people about issues of nuclear proliferation and disarmament while working on her political campaign: Some were fatalistic (about Cruise). Well, well get it first, theyd say. I replied by asking them what about their children and grandchildren? (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 151). Rebecca Johnson, another Greenham woman running for political office, describes similar conversations with potential voters: I think we need a strong defence. I used to think defence was something to protect us, putting our lives first, now it is a strategy for killing others with an acceptance of our own mass death as an (unfortunate) by-product. We have to be realistic. What is more realistic than recognising the stupidity and danger of nuclear war and attempting to avert it not by turning to the failed prescriptions of the past and preparing for that unthinkable war in the vain hope that such a preparation will avert

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it? War has never been averted that way in history; only the anaesthetised could suppose that now it would be different. (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, pp. 152-153) Over and over again, the women of Greenham asserted that the preparations for nuclear war simply did not make sense. They argued that while the United States and United Kingdom governments spent money preparing for a war that could potentially kill the entire human race, people around the world were dying from lack of food and other basic necessities. Nuclear proliferation not only had the potential to kill, they argued, but was killing already (Cook & Kirk, 1983). In discussing their individual decisions either to stay at the camp or to join, many of the women of Greenham cited deep feelings of personal responsibility. Some framed that sense of responsibility in terms of motherhood. Susan Lamb described her feelings as follows: Ive got two young children, and Ive taken responsibility for their passage into adulthood. Everyone tells me they are my responsibility. The government tells me this. It is my responsibility to create a world fit for them to grow up in. I cant say Im responsible for my children not catching whooping cough and not responsible for doing anything about the threat of annihilation which hangs over them every minute of the day. (Cook & Kirk, 1983, p. 27). Other women framed their commitment to personal responsibility in terms of a commitment to nature. Helen Caldicott went beyond responsibility to children, saying, We are the curators of every organism on this earth. For Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, editors of Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Womens Peace Movement, the expression of personal responsibility sounds remarkably similar to a simple expression of responsible adulthood. No one will change this disastrous course for us, they write; we must do it ourselves (Cook & Kirk, 1983, p. 28). Creative Nonviolent Action The Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp became a unique forum for civil disobedience and creative nonviolent direct action. Since the camp had no central authority figures or hierarchical leaders, most of the actions within the camp were planned and carried out by small, self-governed groups of women (Snitow, 1985). The principles of individual responsibility were lived out in each of the actions. About the power structure within the camp, Cook and Kirk note that there are no directives from above, and there is a framework provided for others to join in if they want. There is no official policy beyond a shared commitment to womens actions and nonviolence (1983, p. 84). One of the most famous demonstrations at the camp, however, was a collective effort. On December 12, 1982 women gathered along the nine miles of fence surrounding the airbase in order to embrace the base. They also decorated the fence with signs, paint, and other colorful materials. It is estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 women came for the demonstration (Snitow, 1985). 23

The contrast between the colorful and energetic women and the dismal military aesthetic of the base made a strong symbolic point. The next year women returned with mirrors, holding them up facing the base with its own reflection, posing a question to the inside observers about what kind of a world they would prefer to live in (Snitow, 1985). In another simple yet symbolically powerful nonviolent action, women from the peace camp took a trip into London to buy Citadel bicycle locks. Kim Smith, one of the women who originated the idea, explains, As anyone who rides a bicycle knows, Citadel locks are completely foolproof if the key gets lost you may as well make your bike into a hatstand or some other useful ornament as they just cant be broken into (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 139). The women returned with the Citadel locks and proceeded to lock each of the gates leading into the base. Smith describes the scene that followed: The policeman inside then appeared with a pair of smallish boltcutters which cut cleanly through the rubber coating but made no impression on the lock. The policeman trotted off to get a hacksaw [] By now there were all sorts of hysterical squeals coming out of the radios about large boltcutters. Enter two policemen struggling with a pair of boltcutters which were about five feet long. They placed the jaws of these around the lock and heaved on one handle each and then looked in utter amazement at the lock which wasnt even scratched [] Three large policemen then started to charge the gate to try and break the lock off. No good so they waved in reinforcements. (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 140) Eventually the gate broke open, but not in the way the police officers had hoped. The hinges of the gate broke off, while the lock remained in place. The action made an important point about military security. If a small group of nonviolent women could cause the airbase to go into a panic, ultimately forcing them to push down their own fence, how secure were the nuclear missiles from outside sabotage? Perhaps the most powerful action, in terms of the effect it had on the women themselves, was the simple act of tearing down or cutting through sections of the fence surrounding the base. This became a severe nuisance to the military and police personnel working within the base. Snitow describes the scenes created by small groups of women with bolt cutters: Police rush over; the women rush away, laughing or ululating or singing, only to return the minute the coast is clear. Nine miles is a long front of vulnerability, and the police look and probably feel like fools as they sprint here and there, defending their barrier from women who never offer them much resistance, but never desist (1985, pp. 41-42). Destroying small sections of the fence was an easy way of disrupting business as usual within the base, forcing the military to devote constant resources and labor to repairs.

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The process of dismantling the fence, one piece at a time, also had an important psychological impact on the Greenham women. Describing her first visit to the peace camp, Snitow writes that her first impression of the fence as something final and authoritative left me entirely unprepared for the womens view of it: they have simply rejected it as a legitimate boundary (1985, p. 41). Expressing a similar understanding of the symbolic weight of the fence, Harford and Hopkins write, What we have learnt, by going inside the base, is about crossing artificial barriers. By overcoming our fear of the authority the fence represents, the fence itself becomes useless as a form of security (1984, p. 159). Tearing down the fence came to represent the removal of all sorts of barriers, and hundreds of women were arrested for such efforts over the years. The action goes to the heart of civil disobedience, demonstrating the authority behind the fence to be not only illegitimate, but also incompetent. In matters of life and death on a global scale, the women asserted, the decisions should not be left in the hands of persons with such a flawed concept of security. The very setting of the military base and surrounding peace camp seems to have made a similar point. According to Snitow, Greenham shreds the illusion of permanence and pushes those who live there into a naked, urgent present. It is hard to imagine a better intellectual forcing ground for people struggling to grasp the full reality of the nuclear threat (1985, p. 39). The military and police officers may have viewed the protesters as mad, but that was part of the point. The women deliberately created scenes of absurdity in order to draw attention to the absurd realities created by this extreme manifestation of the apparatus of militarization (Snitow, 1985). Women Only One of the most controversial aspects of the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp was the early decision that the camp should include women only. This choice involved asking the few male participants to leave the camp. Women involved in the decision, and women who later came to support it, provide a number of reasons for asking the men to depart. Some women doubted mens ability to act out the principles of nonviolence. Others felt that the presence of men would disrupt camp life and jeopardize the goal of maintaining a non-hierarchical power structure (Cook & Kirk, 1983). Based on her interviews with women at the camp about the decision, Snitow explains, Some women say the first evictions were coming and they feared that the police would be more brutal if men were among the campers, and that the male campers themselves might respond with violence in defense of their women. Others say that the women noticed the old divisions of labor creeping in [] The men were beginning to take over the meetings but not pulling their weight as far as the chores were concerned. The women feared, too, that insofar as their resistance was militant and effective, the press would assume that this power came from the few men in the camp. Once more, womens acts would be invisible. (1985, p. 44) 25

The womens fear that the presence of men might take away credit from their contributions to an effective political action was well-justified by past experience. Swanee Hunt and Cristina Posa note that traditional thinking about war and peace either ignores women or regards them as victims (2001, p. 38), exactly the roles that the Greenham women were working to reject. Asking the men to leave may have initially appeared as a way of sidestepping the problems likely to be caused by their presence, while maintaining the focus on the important issues of disarmament and demilitarization. Critics of the decision argued that the move was too divisive, or that concerns about nuclear proliferation were too important and the effects too universal for the issue to be dealt with only by women (Cook & Kirk, 1983). Many felt that men should take equal responsibility for the negative consequences of militarization, and that excluding them from the peace camp might prevent a sense of accountability from developing. Snitow describes her early misgivings about the idea of a womens peace camp: And why should demilitarization be womens special task? If theres one thing in this world that wont discriminate in mens favor, its a nuclear explosion. Since the army is a dense locale of male symbols, actions, and forms of association, let men sit in the drizzle, I thought; let them worry about the children for a change (1985, p. 32). Cook and Kirk respond to this concern by presenting another perspective, writing that some women argue that we have helped men for far too long. It is their responsibility to develop caring and sensitive ways of thinking and acting, while we as women take the lead in this fight against extinction (1983, p. 85). The point, they are careful to stress, is not to exclude men, but rather to include women. They recognize that women have an important role to play in reversing dangerous trends of militarization, and they believe that creating women-only spaces is the best way to nurture womens capacity for political action. Monhandas K. Gandhi asserts, non-violence is a power which can be wielded equally by all children, young men and women or grown up people (quoted in King, 1999, p. 293). Yet the belief that women are inherently more peaceful than men or better cut out for nonviolent action often arises when linking gender to ideas of war and peace, and discussions of gender at Greenham Common frequently come back to this question. Among the women participants, there seems to have been many different opinions on the issue. Some of the women expressed feelings that as women, they had a special connection to the task of preserving life. Others identified motherhood as their core identity, arguing that they were taking action in order to protect their children or potential children. Liz Knight, discussing the connections between gender and war, said, I dont think any of this is biologically inevitable. I dont think that all men accept the war game or that all women reject it. I do think that for thousands of years society has been dominated by men as a sex, and that this has given us a split humanity (Cook & Kirk, 1983, p. 86). 26

The question of biological determinism versus social construction of gender roles is not one that the women at Greenham set out to resolve, even among themselves. The unique and egalitarian power structure within the camp allowed for diversity among the participants, so that the women did not all have to agree on any one political ideology as long as they agreed on the core principles of the action. Adherence to the principles and methods of nonviolent struggle was one of the requirements for participation. Another seems to have been the principle of empowering women to create change. Because of their positioning as women within their society, the Greenham protesters contended that they had specific criticisms of militarization that could not come from men. Sarah Green identifies one such contribution as a critique of the dichotomy between the protector and protected. She writes, Women must come out and say We dont want this type of protection. Its this type of protection that is actually endangering our lives (Cook & Kirk, 1983, p. 88). The actions at Greenham embodied a deep rejection of the mythologies of the protector/protected dialectic. The Greenham women were no longer content to stay at home and hope everything would turn out for the best, relying on men to deal with problems and think of womens and childrens best interests. By setting up camp immediately outside of the airbase, they asserted their right to take responsibility for their own lives. They refused to continue to be dependent on the goodwill and judgment of men. Gender, Power, and Nonviolent Action In Snitows analysis of her personal experiences at Greenham, she focuses on the gendered meanings behind violence and nonviolence. She describes Greenham as being about gender and sees the camp as a feminist laboratory (Snitow, 1985, p. 44). Snitow tells the story of an evening when she witnessed a large male police officer push one of the women, knocking her over. To my utter amazement, she writes, out of my mouth comes, very loudly: Look, everyone, a huge man pushed little Janey. Arent you ashamed, a big man like? (Snitow, 1985, p. 46). Immediately after saying it she was horrified by her own reaction, placing it within the context of a very old story about gender and violence. Do I really want to repeat that only a sissy pushes a girl, that girls arent worth pushing, that its only humiliating to shove them, no contest? Do I want to waste my political time trying to make men feel ashamed? (Snitow, 1985, p. 46). The purpose of the actions at Greenham, she argues, was to show up brute force as cruel, irresponsible, and finally useless (Snitow, 1985, p. 46). But in doing so, the women at the fence did not want to ask for any of the traditional forms of protection.

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Snitow also wonders whether nonviolent direct action takes on new meanings when gender is added as an important political element. In asking the men at the camp to leave, some women had already made a tactical assumption that because they were women the police would be less likely to respond violently. Snitow argues that the army could do nothing to prevent the women from tearing down the fence or maintaining their camp outside the base. Or, rather, it could prevent all this, but only by becoming a visibly brutal force, and this would be another kind of defeat, since the British armed services and police want to maintain their image of patriarchal protectors: they do not want to appear to be batterers of nonviolent women (Snitow, 1985, p. 46). To a certain extent, one can speculate that the army and police were compelled to limit their traditional exploitation of male privilege and power. If the definition of legitimacy of such power is based on a supposedly benevolent protection of women, it follows that they would have felt constrained in the types of public retaliation and punishment that they can inflict on women resisting their authority. At the same time, Snitow raises concerns that womens nonviolent actions might not be taken seriously in the same way that mens nonviolent sanctions would be. She traces her concerns back to Dinnersteins passage about women as jesters who criticize societal structures without posing any real threat to them. What happens, she asks, if the women lie down in the mud and the men at the base simply ignore them? Arent they only perpetuating the stereotypical image of female passivity? At Greenham, however, she experienced nonviolent direct action as the opposite of passivity. Going to the root of the problem, she writes, The tricka hard oneis to skew the dynamics of the old male-female relationships toward new meanings, to interrupt the old conversation between overconfident kings and hysterical, powerless jesters. This will surely include an acknowledgement of our past complicity with men and war making and a dramatization of our new refusal to aid and assist. (Snitow, 1985, p. 46) The women at Greenham also went to the root of the problem. By taking personal responsibility, by moving beyond their traditional role as the protected, they were taking steps toward interrupting the old conversation. They were acting out of a recognition that no system of militarization can last without the support of women and they were refusing to give their support any longer. Questioning Old Assumptions Despite massive demonstrations and nonviolent resistance in the hope of preventing the arrival of the planned cruise missiles, the nuclear weapons were delivered to the base on November 14, 1983. By 1999, however, the missiles had been removed, and shortly afterward the base itself was closed (History of Greenham Common). The Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp closed on 28

September 5, 2000 after 19 years of nonviolent protest (Greenham Common). Evaluating the successes and failures of the womens peace camp is a difficult task. The women camped outside of Greenham Common Airbase did not prevent the arrival of NATO cruise missiles. It seems likely, however, that they did prevent rehearsals of missile transportation and deployment through their presence outside of the base (Snitow, 1985). It also seems clear that they were successful in slowing down the normal daily operations of the military base, as the military and police were forced to devote significant amounts of attention and energy simply to keeping the womens actions under their perceived control. They were indisputably successful in raising public awareness. Although many responded negatively to the idea of a womens peace camp, it seems to have provoked strong reactions, positive or negative, in those who became aware of it. Perhaps the greatest successes of the womens peace camp were the moments when observers were forced to reexamine their assumptions. The Greenham women seem to have challenged assumptions in two major areas of life. The first is the assumption that military services and governments know what is best for the security of average citizens. By deconstructing the dichotomy of protector and protected, and by proving repeatedly that military security is far from foolproof, the protesters demonstrated alternative ways of thinking about security. They questioned the rationality of creating weapons capable of destroying the entire planet in the name of protection. They refused to believe that men in uniform always tell the truth, or that military leadership always knows what is best for women or other people not wearing a uniform. They raised the question of personal responsibility within power hierarchies, refusing to accept the argument that the men at the base were only doing their jobs. They developed a model of personal responsibility in which each individual is responsible for her or his contributions to the system of militarization, and they made an active decision to withdraw their cooperation. The second major assumption that was interrogated at Greenham is the idea that women have no place in serious matters such as governance and military operations. The Greenham women insisted that their voices be heard, and they refused to allow others to ignore them. The camp was created when a small group of protesters marching from their home in Wales were initially ignored by the news media. By later designating the peace camp as a women-only space, the protesters went even further in asserting that womens voices matter. Women came to participate in the demonstrations for all sorts of different reasons, but the underlying principles remained consistent. Women understand their own best interests, they asserted, as well as the interests of humanity in general. The exclusion of women from discussions of major issues and the discourse on war and security creates a pathological split within humanity, they contend, and the inclusion of womens 29

voices and perspectives is necessary in order to regain our collective sanity. Supporting these conclusions, Amartya Sen argues that empowerment of women benefits everyoneincluding men, children, and women themselvesand she notes that the lives women save through more powerful agency will certainly include their own (1999, p. 193). The women of Greenham understood that they were struggling for their own lives as well as the lives of others, exercising the right of any human being to speak on behalf of her own well-being. Undaunted by the threat that they would not be taken seriously, the women worked to dramatize the insanity of the dangerous trends of militarization represented by the cruise missiles and to propose sane alternatives. The clearest evidence of their success, in a society that constantly belittles and dismisses women, is that they took themselves seriously.

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Reaching Critical Will

The Womens International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is a non-governmental organization that has been working on the task of uniting the two movements for peace and gender equality since World War I. Posing the question of why gender analysis is important in peace movements, Colleen Burke writes, If women want to build peace, they must also rid themselves of oppression based on gender. Similarly, if women want to gain their emancipation, they must work for a peaceful society in which to live. A gender analysis of militarism and war is essential to both these movements (Burke). Founded during an International Congress of Women at The Hague in April 1915, WILPF claims status as the oldest existing womens peace organization (WILPF International). The Congress was a meeting of women from across North America and Europe, convened for the purpose of advocating peace in response to the horrors of World War I. The women, coming from countries on both sides of the conflict, were viewed by many as traitors and were ridiculed for their commitment to working for peace. Theodore Roosevelt viewed the aims of the Congress as silly and base, referring to the womens demands as vague and hysterical (Costin, 1983, p. 308). Responding to doubts about the seriousness of the women involved, Jane Addams, who later became the first president of WILPF, stated, We do not think we can settle the war. We do not think that by raising our hands we can make the armies cease slaughter. We do think it is valuable to state a new point of view. We do think it is fitting that women should meet and take counsel to see what may be done (quoted in Costin, 1983). The Congress at The Hague produced twenty resolutions covering a range of subjects and representing a highly progressive understanding of peace. Subjects included roles of women in times of war, peace education for children, and the necessity of continuous work for peace (Costin, 1983). Returning to their home countries, participants in the Congress submitted reports to the leaders of their governments. According to Lela B. Costin, Whether these leaders were open minded to the views of the Congress representatives is doubtful, but the envoys brought an expression of opinion held by a large body of influential women, and this at least required formal attention (1983). One of the most consequential outcomes of the Congress historically was that the women advocated a new concept of continuous mediation without waiting for an armistice, in which the neutral European parties that were not combatants in the war would convene and begin immediately to mediate, even prior to an armistice (Costin, 1983). This idea is crucial to modern mediation and

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peace building practices, but is rarely acknowledged as a major contribution of womens peace activism to the processes of peace settlements. The history of women in peace movements is relatively unknown and has been obscured, leading many to question the relevance of womens perspectives and experiences to modern peace negotiations and peace processes. The views expressed by Addams at the 1915 Congress are reflective not only of the particular circumstances of her era in history, but are also reflected in the ongoing work of WILPF. Gendered Militarism and Gendered Resistance WILPF describes itself as an international organization [working] globally, with its arms in individual countries and towns (WILPF International). The organization embodies a response to one of the problems identified by Costin, the need to interpret more effectively the psychological and ideological link between the forces against peace and those that are found in other forms of aggression and exploitation of women (1983). WILPF directly links the causes of global peace and liberation of women, basing the organizations work in a critique of militarism that aims to delegitimize war and violence, as well as to highlight the importance of a gender perspective when it comes to issues relating to peace and security. WILPF works with the goal of creating a culture of peace, which the organization believes is essential to human rights and particularly womens rights (WILPF International). The idea that a culture of peace and respect for womens rights are inseparable is rooted in an understanding of the experiences of women in relation to militarism. Basing her work in the theories of Cynthia Enloe, Colleen Burke understands masculinity and femininity as socially constructed roles that are both constructed by and play an important role in constructing systems of militarization. She writes, The clich that the military makes a man out of a boy is a familiar one. But what kind of man does it create? Is it a man capable of both dominance and submission, aggression and compassion, or is it a man who values only the stereotypically masculine traits? (Burke, p. ?). The military in many societies becomes a framework for defining manhood, but, as Enloe argues, the military also relies on certain types of manhood in order to support its institutions and its authority. According to Burke, This construction of masculinity is not just incidental to militarism, but is actually essential to its preservation: militarism needs a gender ideology as much as it needs soldiers and weapons. It needs men who accept and believe in their role as warrior so much that they are willing to obey orders even unto death and women who accept their proper role in relation to men and will sacrifice their sons to their countrys

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interests and exhort them to fight an submissively fulfill the sexual needs of men in the military. It is this construction of gender that WILPF works to critique as a supporting ideology behind militarism and war. War, writes WILPF member Felicity Hill, is a gendered activity. After childbirth war-making has possibly been the most segregated of activities along gender lines. The vast majority of fighters are men (Hill). Women, in contrast, are generally not seen as active participants in war, but are used as a symbol of justification for war. Women need protection as they are the nations (sic) most valuable possession, the principle vehicle for transmitting national values, bearers of future generations, are most vulnerable to defilement and are most susceptible to assimilation (Hill). What role, then, do women have in peace movements? According to Emily Schroeder, There is no consensus on the assertion sometimes made that women are by nature more peaceful than men. Just as many men have organized for peace, there are numerous examples of women supporting arms build-ups and actively participating in wars (Schroeder). Others consider the identity of motherhood as one motivating factor in womens resistance to wars and militarization. Burke does not fully subscribe to the view that women as mothers have some inborn resistance to the idea of war, though she acknowledges that the strength of this argument has been that it is very successful in mobilizing women, especially those who may not otherwise be politically active (Burke). A negative aspect of this approach, however, is its inherent essentialism, the assumption that social behavior is rooted in unchanging or natural inborn characteristics. This approach is likely to limit the extent to which traditional gender roles can be altered and deconstructed. Yet to say that gender differences are not completely rooted in biology does not deny the reality of biological differences that can be observed in men and women. Womens perspectives on peace and war may not arise from biology, but they do often seem to be different from mens, according to Burke. Men and women are socialized to have different attitudes towards war and aggression, and this is reinforced by social, economic and political structures. Women are far less likely than men to gain social status or political power through participation in war-related activities. At the same time, ideas of womanhood generally demand that women be excluded from war activities, while ideas of manhood often demand the direct participation of men. Such differences in societal power and privilege result in women and men having different perspectives on events such as conflicts or wars. Burke also suggests that womens perspectives may be particularly useful in deconstructing systems of militarization. Since womens gender identities tend to be less directly involved than 33

mens in systems of militarization, they may also be more free to be critical of the military and the processes leading up to war (Burke). Certain women may be motivated to take part in peace movements because they understand the connections between militarization in their societies and the oppression that they face in their daily lives. Womens organizations have often argued that peace is more than the absence of war, notes Schroeder. They have linked various phenomena of violence, such as violations of human rights, violence against women, and structural violence in economic disparities, to the violence seen during wars (Schroeder). WILPF subscribes to this understanding of peace, linking the concept of peace to the concept of freedom embodied in the organizations title. A peaceful society requires a number of conditions, including gender equality, and gender equality also requires the existence of a peaceful society. Reaching Critical Will One of the central goals of WILPF is total and universal disarmament, an issue which the organization views as linked to other social issues such as the achievement of peace, the strengthening of international law, the promotion of social equality, and the move toward environmentally sustainable development. The WILPF International website states, Only when governments will pursue the path to genuine disarmament will we also see a change in approaching the other global problems (WILPF International). It is within this framework that the project Reaching Critical Will (RCW) was developed. Something is wrong with the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime, according to Rhianna Tyson, project associate of RCW, in her article Reframing the Debate Against Nuclear Weapons. According to Tyson, Progress made in recent years has been all but negated; consensus-based agreements are rejected just a few years after being reached. Despite the threats posed by State or non-State proliferation, an increasing likelihood of a return to nuclear testing and the development of new nuclear weapons, a handful of powerful people continue to view these weapons as a legitimate source of security. (2005) The RCW approach to the problem of nuclear proliferation is fundamentally different from that of Greenham. The women of RCW are not women taking political action in their spare time, but are paid employees of a well-established and well-recognized non-governmental organization. Rather than camping outside, they work from inside of United Nations Headquarters in New York City, interacting directly with policymakers in their advocacy for change. Instead of focusing on the 34

military establishments that use and attempt to secure nuclear weapons, they focus on the global policy makers who are debating the very existence of the weapons. The Reaching Critical Will project began in 1999, with the goal of increasing the quality and quantity of civil society at international disarmament fora (Reaching Critical Will). Three central beliefs form the core of the organizations conceptualizations: 1. Nuclear disarmament is inevitable. 2. Nuclear disarmament is democracy. 3. Nuclear disarmament will require coordinated and sustained effort. (Reaching Critical Will) The project is founded on the idea that the majority of the worlds people, and even the majority of governments, desire a world free of nuclear weapons. Based on this majority in support of disarmament, RCW believes that abolition of nuclear weapons is both democratic and inevitable. Reaching this goal, however, will require the existence of an ongoing and organized movement. RCW focuses on the roles played by concerned individuals, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations (Reaching Critical Will). In contrast with the Greenham Common Peace Camp, Reaching Critical Will focuses much of its efforts on facilitating activism among other NGOs and advocacy groups. The website describes the RCW project as WILPFs initiative to encourage people to act and contribute to a variety of international fora. For non-governmental organizations, and concerned individuals to act, they need information, primary documents and analysis (Reaching Critical Will). The project began with an initial focus on NGO participation in the 2000 Review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as a result of a larger push within disarmament movements to put pressure on governments participating in the meeting, in hopes of achieving positive and productive outcomes (Reaching Critical Will). Maintaining its focus on the UN and the roles played by civil society within the UN system, RCW now centers its work around a number of different UN bodies and conferences, disseminating information and documents produced within the meetings and playing an important role in organizing advocacy for nuclear disarmament. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by 188 governments, has been a legally binding document since 1970 and is reviewed every five years by the Member States that are party to the treaty (Reaching Critical Will). Although the NPT was originally intended to be a temporary document, it was extended indefinitely in 1995. RCW helps to organize a strong NGO presence at the NPT review conferences, the most recent of which took place in May 2005, as well as at the 35

preparatory committee, which meets two weeks per year in the three years leading up to the review conference (Reaching Critical Will). The work of RCW involves providing fact sheets on the NPT and information on the registration process for NGOs, as well as links to official documents and other NGO resources. RCW also provides its own analysis of the proceedings of the review conference and preparatory committee, and an analysis of the overall strength of the Treaty. Currently RCW views the NPT as being in a state of crisis, as a result of recent world events and the declining commitment to nuclear disarmament. According to WILPF representative Merav Datan, Developments since January 2001 (that is, the first George W. Bush administration) appear to be undermining the pro-disarmament norms, reversing post-Cold War progress towards disarmament as well as incorporating new nuclear weapons and policies (Datan, 2005). Conference on Disarmament RCW has also produced a guide to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) for NGOs working on initial involvement. The CD is a body mandated to develop multilateral disarmament treaties through a process of consensus. In the past it has negotiated treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, success which, according to RCW, depended largely upon the tireless efforts of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which serve an immensely important role in an advisory or technical capacity, and in awareness building and public education roles during the negotiations (Reaching Critical Will Guide, 2004). The CD meets for three sessions per year, but since 1996 it has not been able to agree on a program of activity. This stalemate threatens the continued existence of the CD as a consensus-based negotiation body (Reaching Critical Will Guide, 2004). The RCW guide includes practical steps that can be taken by NGOs to strengthen the work of the CD, as well as information about the history of the CD and the topics it addresses. RCWs website offers links to official documents, dates that the Conference meets, and links to analysis on the work of the CD from RCW and other sources. GA First Committee The General Assembly First Committee is one of six committees, each of which focus on a specific subject area. The First Committee works on Disarmament and International Security, meeting in October for four or five weeks (Reaching Critical Will). Each year the Committee passes a series of resolutions, many of which remain the same or have minor updates from one year to the next. RCW

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views the First Committee as an important preparatory stage for meetings relating to the NPT because, [t]he First Committee is one of the best opportunities for outreach, education and advocacy efforts on disarmament and nonproliferation issues. All of the disarmament-focused diplomats normally based in Geneva will be working in New York throughout the five weeks of the Committee, and much of the ground work for the spring NPT Review Conference will be laid out at this time. (Reaching Critical Will) RCW monitors statements and votes in the First Committee, creating a Disarmament Index that keeps track of what each Member State says on issues of disarmament. RCW also publishes the First Committee Monitor in collaboration with other New York-based NGOs, providing weekly summaries and analysis of the Committee proceedings. The Monitor can be found on the RCW website, but is also given out in hard copy to delegates participating in the Committee. UN Disarmament Commission The UN Disarmament Commission was established through a General Assembly resolution in 1952, to consider disarmament questions. According to RCW, The Disarmament Commission was created as a deliberative body, with the function of considering and making recommendations on various problems in the field of disarmament and of following up on the relevant decisions and recommendations of the special sessions (Reaching Critical Will). It meets yearly in the spring for three weeks and submits an annual report to the General Assembly. RCW provides general information on the background and work of the Disarmament Commission. Although it does not focus as much energy on the Commission as on other disarmament-related bodies or committees, it provides information on meetings and links to official documents. Theoretical Frameworks In addition to its work in organizing and encouraging the participation of other NGOs in UN deliberations on disarmament, RCW also advocates a specific theoretical approach to disarmament and related issues. The essays and speeches of RCW and WILPF members consistently show a security-based analysis of the need for total and universal disarmament. RCW argues for a human security perspective, one that focuses on the security of individuals rather than the security of nation states. This outlook proposes a deconstruction of conventional understandings of security as a concrete goal that can be perfectly achieved, and it also delegitimizes traditional linkages between concepts of security and processes of militarization. Datan points out that security is a highly 37

subjective notion. In fact, it is difficult for me to imagine a concept more subjective and more personal than security, yet defense planners tent to present security as if it is an absolute and objective concept (2005). Gender is an entry point for Datans critique, suggesting that men and women do not experience security in the same way. It is a generalization but probably a safe one to say that women are accustomed to security as a relative notion. We do not expect absolute personal security, ever. We weigh the risks every time we put our personal security in danger. I know from riding the subways in New York at all hours that there are certain hours when there are almost no women on the trains. This is a direct result of personal calculations regarding security and risk. Extending this example, it is easy enough to see that all human beings at some level recognize security as relative. (Datan, 2005) If none of us expect to be absolutely secure at all times in our personal lives, Datan asks, why do we allow our political leaders to speak of security in absolute terms? (2005). Human security informs Tysons perspective, as this approach entails a more comprehensive and therefore more effective method to assessing and addressing security needs (2004). Yet in spite of its potential for increasing the effectiveness of security practices, the human security approach has rarely if ever been a framework for discussion of nuclear weapons and disarmament (Tyson, 2004). Like Datan, Tyson uses gender as a tool for deconstructing traditional perspectives and developing new ones. She argues that a gender perspective can be used to promote a human security perspective, citing the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs Gender Mainstreaming Action Plan, which states, Gender analysis begins with people, their experiences and their lives, rather than with notions of state security (quoted in Tyson, 2004). This statement reflects the basic principle of human security, that individual people experience security differently from states, and that the security of individual people is necessary to the achievement of true security at any level. Tyson connects this theoretical approach to disarmament and demilitarization, saying, Gender perspectives will enable us to move away from militarized notions of security thereby facilitating disarmament processes of weapons both large and small (2004). Looked at from a human security perspective, it becomes apparent that nuclear weapons are counterproductive to the cause of security. Yet it is important to understand why these weapons exist. Again, a gender perspective can be useful. As Tyson writes, It enables us to understand why people pick up arms in the first place. And if we can understand why they pick them up, we are better situated to figure out how to put them down (2004). Focusing on individual people as well as governments leads to the question of why people participate in wars and militarization that often cause destruction and pain in their personal lives. While wars are often waged by governments, 38

people carry them out, generally good people with very defined gendered behavior, acting in accordance to what they believe is appropriate for their gender (Tyson, 2004). As noted earlier, militarism and masculinity are linked to power in most societies, so that men may feel it is necessary to take on a protector role in order to preserve their masculine identities. Weapons thus become an extension of masculinity, so that demands for the elimination of nuclear weapons directly challenge the notion of nuclear weapons as a symbol of power (Datan, 2005). Acknowledging the difficulty posed by these powerful gender constructions, Tyson writes, So long as these perceptions of strength and masculinity remain affixed to nuclear weapons, it will be difficult if not impossible to persuade governments to relinquish them. No government wants to be viewed as the regime which emasculated their people (2004). This observation goes directly to the heart of the problem in applying a gender perspective, confirming Dorothy Dinnersteins observation that the stone walls that activism runs into have buried foundations (1976). Limited Applications of Gender Arguing the importance of a gender perspective in relation to nuclear disarmament, Tyson writes, Understanding the motives of those who seek nuclear weapons will help us as disarmament advocates adjust our approaches and strategies to better argue for disarmament (2004). The application of gender as a tool of analysis can be seen in the links that RCW draws between gender and human security, as well as the connections between gender and the legitimization of certain types of power and militarism. However, RCWs application of gender as a tool for developing more effective strategies ultimately seems limiting, and the strategic changes resulting from a gender analysis are not elaborated consistently in the work of RCW. While the women of the Greenham Common Peace Camp remained consistently vocal about their identities as women and the influence of such identities on the politics they were proposing, RCW appears to be less consistent in speaking as a group of women committed to nuclear disarmament as an issue of importance to women. Mary Ann McGivern admits the dilemma. She notes, I suspect policy makers discount women somewhat at the UN and elsewhere. So, insofar as my being a woman has been an influence, I fear it has reduced the impact of my interactions. HoweverReaching Critical Will does such an excellent job and has such a history of quality analysis and intervention, that the diplomats perceptions of gender seem to have very little impact on how they assess and use the policy approaches made by RCW. (McGivern, 2005). RCW presents itself as an organization capable of making its own unique and valuable analysis, yet not specifically as a group of women, while nevertheless requiring policymakers to take the 39

organization seriously in spite of the fact that they are women. Instead of treating disarmament as a gendered issue on which women can make contributions different from those of men, RCW offers an analysis that often includes a gender perspective, but is not deliberately defined as a womens perspective. This seems to be a more complicated gender strategy than that of Greenham, perhaps better suited to the environment in which RCW works. Current understandings of gender within the UN may also constrain RCW. The argument that gender can be a useful tool for creating more effective policies seems to be effective in this setting, and it may be important for an organization like RCW to present some analysis that does not explicitly reference gender in order to be taken seriously in the first place. The women at Greenham, working from outside the fence and cut off from the policymakers who were one of the targets for their messages, were more free to frame their politics and identities in the ways that best suited them. Working from the inside, in direct and frequent contact with policymakers, the majority of them male, the women of RCW frame their language in terms of what they hope the policymakers will understand and find acceptable. The likelihood that persons in positions of formal power are unlikely to see the importance of gender, or to take gender analysis seriously, creates a tension within political organizations or movements based in gender analyses. In such settings, perhaps it becomes necessary to find a balance between speaking in a language to which policymakers will listen and maintaining the gender standpoint that is so fundamental to successful strategies and policy recommendations. It seems most likely that RCWs inconsistent application of gender analysis reflects not an inconsistency within the organizations underlying philosophy or commitment to gender equality, but rather it reflects the fact that questions of strategy in relation to the presentation of gender analysis remain unresolved. RCWs ambiguity may thus reflect a balancing process, which may have implications for the future of movements for disarmament and demilitarization, as well as for movements for gender equality.

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Conclusion
Questions and Strategies The proliferation of nuclear weapons is the result of deeply ingrained gender ideologies related to power and militarism, and the movements that have been created in resistance to these weapons are also profoundly gendered. While women who step outside of traditional ideas of femininity in order to participate in the process of defining questions of public power and security are rarely taken seriously, the issue of disarmament itself is often not taken seriously, possibly in part because advocates of disarmament tend to be feminized in comparison with advocates of weapons proliferation and militarization. Describing the task of working for disarmament, Felicity Hill writes that if your aim is the pursuing of peace and taking apart the tools of war [] then you are sometimes judged as soft in the head working toward a noble but impossible dream. This is testament to how embedded militarism and weapons are, however, wars are not mysterious eruptions of human nature, but are planned for, created, and we can see them coming from a long way off. (Hill) As Hill notes, women working on issues of disarmament have frequently been judged soft in the head, overly idealistic, or simply unrealistic. They have responded in ways that while at times are highly creative and nontraditional, are also deeply serious. The women of Greenham Common and the women of Reaching Critical Will, in spite of their different approaches, represent a number of common principles. They believe that the existence of nuclear weapons is not only dangerous, but also demonstrates a failure on the part of the leaders who claim to be protecting their countries through the maintenance and creation of nuclear arsenals. They are both groups of women working independently from men, and they believe strongly in the importance of gender ideologies both in creating and deconstructing militarism. And they both have, at the root of their work, a basic critique of the use of violence as both unethical and ineffective. However, these common principles and the common goal of nuclear disarmament, and ultimately demilitarization, lead to multiple strategies and approaches to the central problem. The women at Greenham, although representing a large and highly diverse group of women, seem to have been relatively consistent in politicizing their identities as women, insisting that their voices be heard, not in spite of the fact that they are women, but because they are women with something important to contribute. RCW has taken a more muted approach, downplaying the outsider status of women to some extent, while still including a gender perspective in much of their work. One 41

group has chosen to work outside of formal power structures, allowing them more freedom to openly criticize those structures and their perpetuation of militarization and weapons proliferation, while the other group has chosen to work from the inside, allowing them more direct contact with the people in positions of power and perhaps affording them more direct, if more subtle, influence on weapons policy. Examining these two different approaches leads to a number of questions about the roles of women in traditionally masculine politics, as well as having some implications for future strategies. Women Leading Many authors and activists have noted the links between traditional conceptions of masculinity, the use of violence, and the legitimization of power. Enloe describes the connection between mens status as former combatants and the achievement of public political office as evidence of militarization within a society (2002). Datan writes, We need our governments to adopt new and more realistic notions of the symbols of power and the structures of power (2005). Yet this leads to one of the basic problems within movements for both gender equality and demilitarization, that those who are likely to be in positions of power are also those who are least likely to see the need for change. For this reason I believe it is important for women, whenever possible, to maintain their outsider perspective in relation to militarization. Although the ultimate goal of gender equality is to allow women and men to work together within the same frameworks of legitimate power, in order to reach that goal women must refuse to remain complicit with existing systems related to weapons, violence, and militarism. Because of their historical exclusion from existing structures of public power, women now find themselves in a better position to critique those structures, to see the inherent flaws and to insist on radical changes. Dinnerstein, recognizing the basic psychological differences in men and women under the current gender arrangements, writes that it is unreasonable to expect men to act as our brothers in the task of changing the sexual arrangements; this is too much to ask, even of those men who know that such change will benefit everybody, and whose outlook is in other respects humane (1976, p. 90). She argues that while women have to some extent been crippled by gender structures in their ability to see themselves as capable and deserving of public adult responsibilities, men have, to some extent, been crippled in their ability to criticize the gendered power structures that provide them with a psychological sense of security. The existence of nuclear weapons represents a basic instability within the psychology of men, who have until very recently monopolized the

42

governmental power that allows them to develop such weapons. Dinnerstein believes this instability will continue to exist as long as our current gender patterns exist. If Dinnerstein is correct that men are to some extent blinded by the dangerous divisions within the human race based on gender, then it follows that women must take the lead in working against systems of militarization and violence. At this point in human development, at which we are seeing the beginnings of a fundamental shift in gender structures, it seems beneficial for women to work separately from men when possible. Both the women at Greenham and RCW have utilized this strategy, although in different ways. At Greenham the women spoke always as women, with separate perspectives and separate goals from the men whose policies they were fighting against. RCW often speaks in the language of policymakers, yet the simple presence of a competent and highly respected organization made up solely of women must have positive consequences in shifting notions of gender and the roles of women in public life. Whenever women are able to prove that they have important contributions to make, separate from the support or assistance of men, the old systems based in patriarchal power and the exclusion of women lose a fundamental piece of their claim to legitimacy. Strategies of Nonviolence Within this process of transforming traditional power structures away from gender inequalities and away from dangerous militarization, the use of nonviolence is essential to success. The Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp demonstrated in multiple creative ways the ineffectiveness of violence and notions of military security. The actions of the women outside the fence dramatized the fallacy of the protector/protected dichotomy, which is based on the helplessness of protected members of society. By refusing their traditional roles of helplessness and vulnerability, the women also refused to be controlled by the dominant ideology, demonstrating new possibilities for gender constructions. Likewise, the women of RCW refuse to accept the traditional position of women. They refuse the notion that women know little about matters of militarization and security, or the notion that women have little to contribute and should leave these subjects to those (men) who know better. They pose a powerful critique of violence as a solution, presenting analysis rooted in human security and the security concerns of individual women and men, showing the historical and current failures of approaches based in violence or use of force. Again, on the question of violence, I believe it is essential for women to maintain their outsider perspective in order to deconstruct the existing systems. Centuries of history and the historical framing of past events tell us that violence is a legitimate tool for achieving a variety of 43

goals related to power and security. Yet many women know from their personal experiences that violence is not a solution and is not ultimately effective in achieving the goals of those who employ it as a tactic. Historically defined as a vulnerable group in need of the protection of men, women can in this area use their past status as victims to create new types of agency. Women are now in a position to assert their own knowledge of the results of violence and to speak with authority on the subject to men who have not experienced violence in the same ways as women. For many women, violence is experienced not only in public life at the level of national security, but also in private life at the level of personal security. By actively linking personal experiences related to gender to the realms of public power and public policy, I believe women are beginning to learn to tap into a powerful source of energy. As the links between experiences of the private and the public, the personal and the political, become more clearly identified and elaborated, I believe women in larger numbers will begin to see the connections between their individual experiences of oppression and the collective problems of militarization and violence. In this way the problems of womens oppression and violence, and the goals of gender equality and demilitarization, are fundamentally linked. The expanding participation of women in collective efforts to address their individual problems and concerns has the potential to be revolutionary in creating new ways of defining security, as well as in creating new ways of living gender. Dorothy Dinnerstein, writing in 1976, expressed her deep uncertainty about the future of humanity. For her, the question of whether we are capable of acting fast enough to avert catastrophe was not resolved, and I believe it remains unanswered today. The current state of global politics and the current stance of the main global powers toward nuclear disarmament are reasons for pessimism. At the same time, I believe there are many positive developments in moving toward the goal of gender equality. As women become more independent in all parts of the world, insisting on their right to play active roles in shaping the politics of their countries and their communities, the global power structures based in violence and militarization will become less and less stable, less and less easy to maintain. The task of altering gender roles and power structures remains one of the most difficult tasks that humanity has ever faced, and women have so far proven to be the main actors in creating the necessary changes. Because of the inherent psychological and physical dangers of the process, Dinnerstein writes that our hearts must to some degree fail us (1976, p. 13). Setbacks, failures, and painful compromises are to some extent inevitable. Yet she goes on to suggest that addressing the contradictions within the project of gender equality is a matter of mustering courage and beginning 44

to outgrow the pathology; for it is only in the process of melting down the neurotic patterns in which our deepest energies are now constrained, expressed, released, that we can start to feel out the new forms of expression, of release, that are possible (Dinnerstein, 1976, p. 16). The more we achieve in creating new patterns of gender, the more free and energized we will become. The farther we go in rejecting the old patterns of violence, the more new possibilities will become available to us. And if we manage to avert the threat of self-destruction, it will be in large part the result of the individual contributions and the collective struggles of women.

45

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