Lilith 16: 2007

FEATURE: A Feminist History of Violence: History as a Weapon of Liberation?

Angela Woollacott

Paper delivered at the Lilith Symposium, 10 November 2006

I was delighted by the invitation to participate in the 2006 Lilith symposium because feminist history is not only my research and teaching area; it is my passion. I like to believe that those of us who research, write and teach feminist history are changing the world, one conference paper, lecture, thesis, journal article and book at a time. Feminist theory and feminist history are modes of inquiry that analyse multiple intersecting social and cultural hierarchies, their articulations, manifestations and effects. By revealing how categories of sex, gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity, class and other constructions of difference have operated historically, we challenge their continuing operation and legacies in our world. For me, feminist history is at once about how to understand the past, and how to make a difference in the present. Nothing makes my heart gladder than to observe and participate in the work of a new generation of bright, determined and ambitious feminist historians, a mission that Lilith fulfills in the Australian context. Moreover, this year’s theme is an especially important one. ‘A Feminist History of Violence’ is a huge and challenging subject, one amenable to many different topics and approaches. My essay is organized under the following headings:

I. Violence has been integral to patriarchy and gender relations. (Feminist theory and history allow us to recognize the pervasiveness, and systemic nature, of violence against women.)

II. The relationship between war and citizenship.

III. How women have appropriated violence, and they have resisted violence.

IV. History is a weapon of liberation because it allows us to: 1) document and analyze women’s agency and resistance; 2) and build an anti-violence rhetoric and politics through feminist historical work.

I. Violence has been integral to patriarchy and gender relations

Domestic violence continues to be a major feminist concern. A recent report commissioned by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation presents a mixed picture in terms of progress.

On the one hand more people now believe that domestic violence is a crime – 97% compared to 93% in 1995. However, more people believe, wrongly, that women are as likely as men to be perpetrators of domestic violence; 20% of people now hold this misinformed opinion as opposed to 9% eleven years ago.1 Domestic violence may be more accepted as a fact, but it is a fact that our society tolerates too comfortably. It is rarely in the news, except for celebrity cases, such as the recent cause célèbre in Britain, the divorce proceedings between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney that contained allegations of recurrent domestic violence.

Historians of women know, all too well, that domestic violence has been around a long time. The common expression ‘rule of thumb’ derives from the standard in traditional English jurisprudence of how big a stick a man could use to beat his wife – no thicker than his thumb. There is also mounting evidence of wars and military service exacerbating domestic violence – returned soldiers have been more likely to injure and even kill their wives – in Australia and elsewhere.

Yet we know that domestic violence is only one part of the story, one point on the spectrum. Women are the vast majority of victims of sexual assault, kidnapping and abduction. Violence continues to be foundational to patriarchy, to a social system in which men exercise power and privileges over women. National and international news constantly reminds us of this truth. In the last three months alone we have had astonishing examples. In August 2006 in Austria, an 18 year-old woman named Natascha Kampusch finally freed herself from captivity, following her abduction in 1998 by a man who kept her prisoner in his suburban Vienna home. We still do not know much about her ordeal.2 In late September in Colorado a gunman with a petty criminal record forced his way into a high school, rounded up a group of blonde girls as hostages in a classroom, sexually assaulted some of them, killed one of them and then committed suicide.3 Only a week or so later, in rural Pennsylvania, a happily-married truck driver with no previous criminal record walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse, armed to the teeth. He let the boys and adults go and held the girls captive, chaining them in a line. After a brief siege, he executed five of the girls then killed himself.4

These recent examples of a continuing cross-cultural historic pattern of femocide remind us that misogyny is not only pathological, it is lethal. But violence against women has also been used in less lethal ways to maintain men’s privileges, including privileges in the workplace. For example, evidence abounds of hostility and violence against women during industrialization and once mechanized production became fully established. Women’s role as factory workers when industrialization became full-blown in Western countries in the 19th century was not a new development; women had participated in cottage industry for centuries, often as equal contributors to household production. But in the 19th century women lost ground to men in the expanding labour area of factory work.5

Part of what changed were the ways in which skilled tradesmen dealt with the effects of industrialization, specifically their changing attitudes towards women workers.
Industrialization – the larger-scale, factory production of goods – undermined many traditional areas of artisan production. Skilled male workers who had dominated the crafts for centuries through their guilds lost status and fought against the changes in various ways. Women had been subordinated or excluded in many skilled areas of work prior to this, but some tradesmen responded to industrialization by trying to draw even sharper lines between men’s and women’s work. In Britain between 1806 and 1811, for example, hatters, calico printers, tailors and framework knitters all went on strike in an effort to keep women out of their occupations. Shoemakers refused to allow women into their unions, and in Glasgow some male cotton spinners used physical violence to keep women from taking jobs they saw as theirs. In contrast, in some areas weavers tried to put women on the same standing as men – interestingly, weavers were more willing to accept women.6

Into the 20th century, trade unions were predominantly male, and men workers fought to keep women out of their areas of work. When British women were recruited into industrial work during the First World War they faced occasional hostility from men –in extreme instances, this could include despoliation of their tools. In my own research on women munitions factory workers, I came across instances where men, for example, poured oil on women’s tools or urinated on them. After the war, returned soldiers and men workers rioted in protest over women in industrial jobs. In the U.S. during World War II, resistance against women becoming pilots in the Air Force extended to sabotage. There is evidence that in at least one instance, men air force crew adulterated the fuel in women pilots’ planes causing them to crash, resulting in at least one woman’s death.7

Perhaps the worst way in which violence has been used systematically against women has been rape and femocide during wartime. A recent book called Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, edited by Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts and Jane Parpart, is provocative and disturbing. The fourteen essays in the volume assess issues of gender in armed conflict, post conflict resolution, and peacekeeping across a range of sites from Angola, to East Timor, Haiti and Kosovo. It is a bleak picture, one that should be seen as a clarion call to international feminist organizing. The editors’ point out that peace negotiators and peacekeeping operations overlook the systemic workings of gender and their fundamental inequities, thus failing to identify root causes of injustice and conflict. Nevertheless, the gendered and sexual dimensions to conflicts include rape, forced impregnation, forced abortion, sexual slavery, and sexually transmitted diseases. The book presents a very sobering cumulative picture. For example, the editors cite statistics from the International Organization for Migration showing that at the beginning of the 21st century between 700,000 and two million women and children were being trafficked across international borders. Trafficking is, of course, carried out by organized crime, but it is enabled by poverty and war,and related to rape, trauma, prostitution, enforced pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/ AIDS.8 One of the strengths of the book is its integration of military, diplomatic, economic and social factors in this contemporary global picture, and its insistence on the centrality of gender to the matrix. There is nothing new about women being raped, and raped then killed, in war. It is a part of war that goes back thousands of years.

Another way in which gender and sexuality have intersected with war is war-related prostitution. Like many other wars and colonial situations, prostitution was a product of the anticolonial wars in Vietnam. But it was importantly different from some other instances of colonial prostitution in that it had long-term consequences: the escalation of prostitution in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War was directly tied to the rise of the international sex trade that continues today in Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere. The sex trade grew as the combined impact of war, militarisation and foreign tourism changed the economies of Southeast Asia. It continues, in part, because of the continuing presence of US bases, as well as sex tourism with men coming from around the world. Prostitution has become central to the economies of several nations in the region: many village families now are sustained by the prostitution of daughters they sell to the sex trade.

According to Cynthia Enloe, the eminent feminist scholar of the gendered effects of militarisation, during the Vietnam War American officials militarised prostitution by degrees: ‘First bar girls, then massage parlours for the Marines at Da Nang, then a shanty town of brothels, massage parlours and dope dealers known as Dogpatch soon ringed the bases’. There were separate brothels for black and white soldiers; white soldiers didn’t want to use the same prostitutes as blacks. ‘By 1973, on the eve of the American military’s withdrawal, between 300,000 and 500,000 women were working as prostitutes in South Vietnam’.9

For some soldiers fighting in the American-led alliance, rape and prostitution were linked: Why pay when you had a gun and could get sex by force? Worse, for some, there was the practice of becoming a ‘double veteran’. That meant having sex with a woman and then killing her.10 Violence against women was related to racism, misogyny, and the brutality of war.

Violence against women and femocide transcend national borders but we need to remember that they are an Australian as well as a transnational issue. Murderous violence against women has been reflected in Australian creative writing stretching back at least over the last century, from Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies11, to the 2006 Australian film Jindabyne, which linked femocide to the oppression of Aboriginal people.

II. The relationship between war and citizenship

I have chosen to focus on women today. Obviously, I could equally well have chosen as a feminist area of analysis the connections between masculinity and war, masculinity and violence. If any of you are particularly interested in that topic, I wrote a chapter on Masculinity, Imperial Adventuring and War in my recent book Gender and Empire, about cultural and political dimensions to the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Joshua Goldstein describes in his book War and Gender, the time-honoured, dominant pattern of gender and war around the world has been that of men serving as soldiers and women taking support roles. Yet, as he also points out, it is crucial for us to realise that these dominant gender patterns are not driven by essential biological imperatives, rather they are cultural practices. Moreover, across the centuries there have been numerous exceptions including individual women who cross-dressed and went to war, and troops of women soldiers such as the 18th – 19th C ‘Amazon corps’ in Dahomey, West Africa. This ‘Amazon corps’ was armed with muskets and swords and the women in it were known as fierce warriors who engaged in battles with neighbouring states as well as, in the late 19th C, the French invaders.12 Not only have there always been exceptions to the dominant pattern of men serving as combatants, around the world this pattern changed significantly over the course of the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century, the armies of the major imperial powers consisted of men, although women had in the latter 19th century begun to participate as military nurses in the Crimean War 1854-56, American Civil War, and Anglo-Boer War.

Over the course of the 20th century women went from being military nurses, to paramilitary corps performing subordinate roles in combat, and then to becoming fully fledged combatants in a number of military forces. This enormous, and symbolically important, transition occurred in all of the major Western countries. Importantly, it has occurred as well in non-Western countries through women taking active roles especially in anti-colonial nationalist movements, uprisings and wars. In both western and non-western countries, women’s increased role in war over the 20th century was closely linked to their increased participation in citizenship – whether that citizenship meant voting as citizens in democratic nations, or participating as citizens-to-be in nations-in-the-making. In the 20th century, gender, citizenship and war were closely intertwined and still are.

In the major Western countries, women’s incursions into military service were largely spurred by the world wars. Such participation began in World War I in countries that were stretched to their economic, productive and person-power limits. Women’s participation typically happened on an even larger scale in World War II, when nations, spurred by women’s contributions in the First World War, quickly and actively recruited their services in multiple capacities.

World War I was a crucial turning point in women’s greater participation in military services, and this increased participation was linked to women’s struggles in countries around the world to be granted the vote, as the following list shows.

Dates women won the vote (partial listing) 1869 Wyoming, 1870 Utah, 1893 New Zealand, 1894 South Australia, 1899 Western Australia, 1902 Australia (white women only), 1906 Finland, 1907 Norway, 1915 Denmark, 1918 Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary (limited), Luxembourg, Poland, United Kingdom (limited), 1919 Netherlands, Rhodesia (limited), Sweden, 1920 Belgium (limited), Iceland, United States, 1922 Ireland, 1924 Mongolia, 1928 United Kingdom (full suffrage), 1930 South Africa (white women only), Turkey, 1931 Spain, 1935 India (limited), 1941 Indonesia, 1944 France, Jamaica, 1945 Bulgaria, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Panama, 1946 Albania, Ecuador, Malta, Romania, Yugoslavia, 1947 Argentina, Pakistan, Venezuela, 1956 Egypt (not compulsory as for men), 1958 Iraq, 1964 Afghanistan, 1971 Switzerland

Women’s participation in World War I varied from belligerent nation to nation (and empire to empire). The nation that used women most directly in the war was Russia, which fought a long and bloody struggle against Germany, and then experienced the two-staged liberal- then-Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 partly as a consequence of the Tsarist regime’s failures to control its war effort. While in the other major belligerent nations women took important and growing paramilitary, industrial, nursing and service roles in World War I, in Russia they also fought. As Joshua Goldstein notes, some Russian women dressed as men and fought as soldiers in the early stages of the war. One such woman was Maria Botchkareva, a peasant woman in her 20s who managed to enlist as a regular soldier, fought very bravely in tough battles, including saving the lives of many of her fellow soldiers, and was repeatedly wounded.
After the February 1917 Revolution (the ‘liberal’ stage of the revolution) the Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky allowed Botchkareva to form a women’s battalion, that became known as the ‘Battalion of Death’. Botchkareva claimed that the battalion’s purpose was to spur men to fight by showing them that even women could do so. The battalion began with about 2,000 women recruits but dwindled to around 300, and played a key role in a failed offensive on the front lines in mid-1917. Other women’s units were formed in the Russian army but were disbanded once the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Oct.-Nov. 1917.13

Nicolette Gullace in her book ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War has added a vital new dimension to the debate over the war and women’s suffrage.14 Gullace contends that the war shifted the whole gendered complex of meanings surrounding citizenship. The links between citizenship, combatant status, and manhood were unsettled by the war in a variety of ways. She shows how ideas of patriotic and protective manhood were used against men to shame them into volunteering for the war. The men who were perceived as shirkers, needing to be shown a white feather in order to enlist, undermined assumptions that men were naturally brave, willing combatants. The propaganda side of the voluntary enlistment campaign, with its posters and white feathers backfired, Gullace argues, by implying that men needed to be cajoled into war and that there weren’t enough volunteers. The virulence of this propaganda campaign was one reason Britain turned to conscription. But it wasn’t just men’s pacifism that undermined the links between manhood and voting. It was also women who eagerly presented men with white feathers, asserting their claims to be able to judge appropriate patriotic behaviour, and the pro-war feminists and suffragists who spent the war years advocating women’s participation in, and support for, the war. And of course a hugely important factor in renegotiating the gender of citizenship was women’s manifold, active contribution to the war.

It needs to be pointed out that, in choosing to participate in military services – whether to establish their claims to citizenship, or for financial or other reasons – women have often paid a heavy price. We have seen this in recent years. One price paid by women in the armed forces is their subjection to sexual harassment that is aimed to keep women out or keep women from promotion. In 2006 in Australia, Robin Fahy’s story was aired in the press. A former Lieutenant Commander in the navy – and indeed Australia’s first female navy officer – Fahy reported that she ‘suffered years of physical and mental abuse in the armed forces’ including that she was ‘”beaten up” daily’. She joined the navy in 1986, and was promoted to executive officer in 2000. Apparently her problems escalated after she supported the harassment claims of another woman. Naval medical staff tried to diagnose Fahy as mentally ill, and thus to marginalize her, before she was forced out.15

In the current coalition war in Iraq, American women, despite technically not being fully combat personnel, are serving in roles either close to, or actually in, combat. For the first time, the American military is studying the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder in women. A CNN report included the story of one woman veteran who lost a leg in Iraq, her mental stress centred on the fact that every time she picked up her baby she was reminded of an injured baby she saw in Iraq.16 Women are among the American troops who have died there, including, for example, 2nd Lieutenant Emily Perez, who died in September when a roadside bomb hit the platoon she was leading. Of mixed African-American and Latina descent, she was the first female West Point graduate to die in Iraq.17 Of course, it is essential to mention that many thousands of Iraqis, both men and women have died in this war.

While scholars like Enloe are important exceptions, much of the scholarly work on gender and war has focussed on rich nations like the United States, Britain and Australia. In some of this work, the cumulative narrative trajectory has been that of gradual inclusion of women in the armed forces, the changing definitions of their work such that they have approached combat roles, and their supposed greater parity of status in military organisations. While feminist scholars disagree as to whether women becoming soldiers is a good or bad thing, the emphasis on inclusion and greater parity in national armed forces has, at least at times, been seen as the removal of sex-based barriers and discrimination. Looking at the stark, harsh and violent realities of girl soldiers in poor countries is an entirely different matter.

The 2004 book Where are the Girls? by Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana was commissioned by the Canadian International Development Agency and seeks to draw the attention of the United Nations and other policy makers to the plight of girls in armed conflict and post- war reconstruction, especially in Africa. McKay and Mazurana argue that girls have been overlooked in international debate about child soldiers, and that they are not only forcibly conscripted, but particularly affected: ‘armed conflict and militarism intensify sexism through extreme violence perpetrated by boys and men against girls and women, especially sexual violence’.18 The book focuses on armed conflicts in recent decades in Mozambique, Uganda and Sierra Leone, and is based on fieldwork in 2001 and 2002. It contains many startling tables, not least one showing that girls (defined as under 18) have been part of fighting forces in 55 countries between 1990 and 2003, including in many developed nations such as Canada, the United States, Israel, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden, Britain, Australia and Japan. But if in those nations there is some choice involved in girls’ recruitment, in conflicts such as in Mozambique, northern Uganda (and southern Sudan) and Sierra Leone, girls are abducted, trafficked or born into armed forces. Girls have suffered in specific ways in such conflicts through, for example, being raped, and giving birth and having to take care of children in fraught circumstances. As the authors stress, an important issue for reconstruction is the reintegration into their communities of girls with children of non-community fathers. Such girls can be at risk of being forced into prostitution. Violence against women in war takes many forms, and destroys their lives in a range of ways.

III. Women have appropriated violence, and they have resisted violence

In my recent book Gender and Empire, I included a chapter on women, gender and anti- colonial nationalist movements.19] In the section on women and Indian nationalism, I sought to address the movement’s contradictions in relation to women and pacifism, women and violence. Significantly, the Indian nationalist movement generated powerful contradictory understandings of femininity, which can perhaps be linked to the simultaneous and contradictory invocation of different female Hindu deities. On the one hand there was Sita, the Hindu deity whom Gandhi preferred, the mythical, loyal and self-sacrificing wife of Rama. But from the late nineteenth century, Hindu nationalists had also increasingly celebrated Durga, the demon-slaying mother, and Kali, the punitive and destructive mother.
Notions and invocations of ‘Mother India’, then, carried implications of a feminised use of violence against the colonial oppressor.20 Thus while Gandhi saw the masses of Indian women who participated in civil disobedience movements as exemplifying non-violent ideals of self-sacrificing femininity based on Hindu tradition, other nationalists embraced violent action on the part of women. Tanika Sarkar has argued that, on the one hand, the nationalist movement, because of its roots in religion and tradition, sought to limit the gender transgression of women’s involvement in nationalist acts even when violent.21 Yet Sarkar has further argued that the highly important non-violent participation of masses of women in the nationalist movement, as well as women’s publicly political actions, demonstrations, arrests and imprisonment, made ‘a mockery of the language of traditionalism’.22

The story of the Indian nationalist movement includes numerous women who undertook violent and terrorist actions. For example, in December 1931 two 16 and 17-year old school girls, Shanti Ghose and Suniti Choudhury, walked into the office of a British magistrate on the pretext of obtaining his permission for a swimming competition, and shot him dead. Apparently their motivation lay in a pattern of sexual abuse of Bengali girls by British magistrates. Then, in September 1932, a 21 year-old teacher Preetilata Wadedar, whose father had lost his job for complaining about the behaviour of a British officer, led a raid on the Pahartali Railway Officers’ Club in Chittagong in eastern Bengal. Wadedar led a group of fifteen young men in their attack on the club on a Saturday night when it was crowded with British officers and their wives. In the shooting one woman was killed and others were wounded. The young men raiders escaped, but Wadedar took potassium cyanide and her body, in men’s clothing, was found outside the club. She had earlier told a friend that only when she was ready to take her own life in the nationalist cause, would she be willing to kill someone else.23

The point at which the gendered story of Indian nationalist violence intersects most with that of Western women’s participation in the two world wars is the formation of the Rani of Jhansi Women’s Regiment. During World War II radical Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose formed the Indian National Army to fight the British for India’s freedom. In October 1943, a women’s regiment of the Indian National Army was formed, and named for the royal woman warrior who had led a military campaign during India’s Rebellion or ‘First War of Independence’, often called the ‘Indian Mutiny’, of 1857-58. The Rani of Jhansi regiment was formed in Singapore under the leadership of Dr. Lakshmi Swaminathan, mostly of young women, and at its greatest extent consisted of a thousand women based in three camps in Singapore, Bangkok and Rangoon. The regiment consisted of two divisions, one trained primarily for fighting, and the other for nursing. All of the women in the regiment wore soldiers’ uniforms including jodhpurs, and many cut their hair short. Although some were keen to fight, they did not see active service; by the time they were sent into Burma in 1945, the Indian National Army was in retreat.24 The regiment, nevertheless, was a powerful counterpoint to the Gandhian equation between femininity and non-violence, despite the crucial role of women in the non-violent movement which played such a large role in the Indian nationalist movement’s eventual success.

There are many significant historical and recent episodes in which women have resisted violence. Across the twentieth century, feminist activists and writers linked issues of gender to war and violence, and peace movements sought hope in ideas of gender difference, especially notions of feminine pacifism. Cynthia Cockburn’s recent book The Line is a participant- observer’s account of women trying to make peace across the ethnic partition in Cyprus. The majority Greek Cypriot and the minority Turkish Cypriot communities had lived alongside each other, but in the 1960s ethnic tensions forced the consolidation of Turkish Cypriots into enclaves. After a failed coup attempt by Greek Cypriot extremists in 1974, Turkey intervened militarily to defend the Turkish Cypriots. The result was the division of Cyprus into a Turkish north and Greek south, separated by a buffer zone patrolled by UN peacekeepers. Until 2003 the partition was a closed border that was not easy to cross. Then suddenly, the northern Turkish republic opened the border. In 2001-02 Cockburn, a British sociologist well-known for her work on gender in organizations, studied the women’s organization Hands Across the Divide (HAD). The result of feminist organizing in the 1990s, HAD is a small group of women drawn from the two communities who seek ‘to work for co-operation between women in Cyprus’.25 Interestingly, Cockburn’s role included facilitation and fundraising, hence her self-positioning as a participant-observer. HAD combines a feminist with a pacifist and bi-communal agenda – although, as with other feminist groups elsewhere, there is some debate as to what the ‘feminism’ means.

The book relies on interviews with individual women in the organization from both ethnic groups, and tells a narrative of HAD’s emergence. Both the larger political situation in Cyprus, and HAD, are stories in progress, so the book is necessarily open-ended at both levels. Yet the overwhelming tone that Cockburn strikes is that of hope, her emphasis firmly on the bravery and vision of the women in the group. It is not coincidental that there are resonances here of women’s peace protests such as in Ireland, and the Women in Black groups from Palestine and Israel, and the former Yugoslavia. At Cockburn’s suggestion, these examples were considered in HAD’s planning stages. Thus, it is possible to see these Cypriot women within a global genealogy of feminist pacifism.

IV. History is a weapon of liberation

My last point is in support of our symposium’s subtitle: that history is indeed a weapon of liberation. It allows us to 1) uncover and analyze women’s agency and resistance, and 2) to build an anti-violence rhetoric and politics through feminist historical work. Work on the historical episodes and issues I have mentioned, and many others I have not, allows us to display the connections between gender and war, and gender and violence. We can see how violence against women has been integral to patriarchy, and how citizenship in the liberal democratic constitutional state has been, and is, tied to war participation. We can see how women have suffered from violence, and at times used it.

Importantly, we also know about episodes and organisations through which women have resisted and spoken out against violence. There is a well-established history of women’s pacifist work – through movements such as the non-violent resistance movement in late colonial India; and more recent groups such as the Cypriot women’s Hands Across the Divide. The feminist pacifist group Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in April 1915 by feminists associated with the International Suffrage Alliance to bring together women from belligerent nations to oppose World War I, still exists and continues to campaign for peace. It is a feminist legacy that should be more celebrated.

We have a huge feminist intellectual inheritance to explore and mull over. For example, the Russian-born American anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman had this to say in 1911, three years before the bloodbath of World War I erupted: ‘Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others’.26 Goldman saw and indicted the ways in which patriotism and nationalism fed belligerence, and used her stringent feminist analysis to attack it.

As well-trained feminist theorists, of course, we know better than to accept essentialism uncritically. Yet I think the work of early 20th century Bengali Muslim feminist Rokaya Sakhawat Hossain is worth considering. In 1905, in an English-language women’s magazine based in Madras, Hossain published her story ‘Sultana’s Dream’. ‘Sultana’s Dream’ is a feminist utopia, a short story that conjured a magical world. In it, two women’s universities have come up with inventions and plans that changed the country from top to bottom. Through their interventions at a time of war and crisis, the country had achieved peace, stability, productivity and a complete absence of crime. They had abolished zenanas – the secluded spaces for keeping women in purdah – and instead established mardanas – places for the seclusion and sequestration of men. Men were now confined to domestic spaces, where they did the cooking, child-minding and other domestic work, leaving the women to run the country, industry and research. Perhaps most wonderfully, there was no more war. Instead, the country was peaceful and productive, the men had become used to their new roles, and the women, who ran all offices and business so efficiently compared to men’s old work practices, only needed to work two hours a day.27 A feminist utopia indeed.

Given the realities of violence and war that we face, perhaps we need a bit of feminist utopian thinking. In the meantime, our work as feminist historians will help reveal the gendered dimensions of violence and war; the role of violence in supporting patriarchal systems; the problematic effects of linking citizenship to military service – and the many other issues that the essays in this volume explore.

Angela Woollacott
Macquarie University

Endnotes

Adele Horin, ‘More Believe That Women Bash Men’, Sydney Morning Herald (27 October 2006): 2.
Kate Connolly, ‘Freed Girl Remains Captive to Lost Childhood’, Sydney Morning Herald (28 August 2006): 9.
Catherine Tsai, ‘Gunman Apparently Picked Blondes’, San Francisco Chronicle (29 September 2006): A8.
Mark Scolforo, ‘Police: Killer of Amish Longed to Molest’, San Francisco Chronicle (3 October 2006).
Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanisation and the Early Phases of Industrialisation in England’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Anna Clark, Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Ch 7 ‘The Struggle over the Gender Division of Labour, 1780-1826’.
Molly Merryman, Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Dyan Mazurana et al., ‘Introduction’, in Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 7.
Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pandora, 1988), 33.
Ibid, 34.
Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies: Classic Australian Short Stories (first published 1902; London: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1983).
Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 60-64.
Ibid, 72-76.
Nicoletta F. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
‘My Years of Abuse, Tells Woman’, Sydney Morning Herald (16 May 2006).
Amy Cox, ‘Women at War: Mental Health Toll Unknown’, CNN.com 26 May 2006.
Cara Anna, ‘West Point buries ‘9/11’ Cadet Killed in Iraq’, San Francisco Chronicle (Wednesday, 27 September, 2006): A13.
Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana, Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War (Montreal: Rights & Democracy, 2004), 17.
Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990 (London: Verso, 1993), 44-49.
Tanika Sarkar, “Bengali Women in Politics – The 1920s and 1930s,” in Women and Culture, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Bombay: SNDT Women’s University, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Working Paper No. 1, 1994), 121-4.
Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001,: 267.
Kumar, The History of Doing, 85-7; Rozina Visram, Women in India and Pakistan: The Struggle for Independence from British Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 41.
Visram, Women in India and Pakistan, 46-7.
Cynthia Cockburn, The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London: Zed Books, 2004), 3.
Emma Goldman, ‘Patriotism as a “Menace to Liberty”, in Women on War: An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Daniela Gioseffi (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003), 4.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Selections from The Secluded Ones (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1988).