Master Sgt. Renee Baldwin fires a .50-caliber machine gun during a training session. Credit: Creative Commons/Joint Base Lewis McChord.
Alongside horrifying pictures from the New York Times showing very young boys being trained to fire assault rifles (“Selling a New Generation on Guns“) comes the news, welcome in some quarters, that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the military to admit women to full combat roles. I believe that this is not the way to equality.
Some years ago the philosopher Mary Midgley, unconsciously echoing a position Gandhi had articulated decades before, wrote that life “is the whole of which we are parts, and its other parts concern us for that reason. But the language of rights is rather ill-suited for expressing this.”
Over and over again, liberal-minded people have, I believe, been fooled by arguments about “rights” and equality into accepting things that will compromise both. Case in point: cigarette smoking was originally considered inappropriate for women, but in 1929, Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations” (aka advertising and propaganda – Goebbels imitated his work zealously) staged a public relations event in which women at a New York parade lit up their “torches of freedom” and made it just as OK for women to smoke. Yes, we’ve come a long way – but not always in the right direction.
When groups differ we should judge whether the difference is a kind of diversity and cherish it as such, or, if it’s a real disparity we can try to help the worse-off party move “up,” leaving us all better off. But with smoking, and now with militarism, we did the reverse and we will all suffer to that extent. Ironically, given the often-noted connection between violence and the oppression of women, to the extent that we have just added legitimacy to militarism we added to that oppression – in the name of equality. This is what happens when, in our zeal to benefit a given group, we sacrifice the well-being of humanity as a whole – in which that group is of course included.
We could so easily have gone the other way. For whatever reason, women have been by long tradition more associated with the power that comes from compassion than the power that comes from threat and violence; as Mme. Jehan Sadat, the first lady of a happier Egypt, said in 1978, “Women are war’s natural enemies.” Whether that difference came from nature or nurture (I happen to think it was both, but that’s beside the point of this argument), it was an opportunity to decrease, rather than increase the frightening militarization of our culture.
Famous women like Bertha von Suttner, Maria Montessori, Dorothy Day, Aung San Suu Kyi, Leemah Gbowee, and many more women unknown to history – the women who defied the Gestapo and saved their Jewish husbands at Rosenstraße, the Women of Soldiers who boldly took their sons right out of Russian military camps more recently – have shown what power women in particular can mobilize in the cause of life. It is not that this capacity is absent in men – why else would thousands of our combat troops be committing suicide today as the wrongness of our destructive wars comes home to them. But if we were to mine the inspiring examples of these women, tell their stories, celebrate their courage the way we do that of military personnel, and imitate them – finally, if we were to institutionalize the nonviolence they exhibit the way we have institutionalized violence, we’d be heading in a direction that would uplift humanity.
Recently a female Marine officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan (and wrecked her body in the process) observed that “there are female servicemembers who have proven themselves to be physically, mentally, and morally capable of leading and executing combat-type operations.” I’m sorry, what does it mean to be morally capable of killing your fellow human beings in a manifestly unjust war?
In 1909, writing his famous tract Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi found himself confronting a call to violence by some of his more hot-headed countrymen. If you throw off the British yoke by violence, he argued, you will have thrown off the essential character of India to do so. You will only create “Englistan” on Indian soil. I’m afraid we have done something very similar by giving women the “right” to kill directly in combat.
Women and children are terribly often the victims of modern conflict. Do we really think it will help to make them perpetrators?
Michael N. Nagler is professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and President of the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
Hi Michael, I agree that wars fueled by imperalist and capitalist imperatives are fundamentally at odds with progressive and feminist politics, and because of this I would not ever choose to sink activist energy or resources into fighting for the particular cause of granting women the right to take on full combat roles — especially when there are so many other much less ambivalent employment discrimination battles to be fought still.
Nevertheless, I strongly disagree with the idea that progressives should support gender discrimination in instances where the activity that women are barred from is a bad one. To do so lends power to a pernicious paternalistic logic about society needing to protect women from immoral and unhealthy activities — it’s a logic that has been used time and time again over history to justify denying women the right to make basic choices (and that necessarily involves the ability to make bad choices too) about our lives. When we accept gender discrimination in some areas but not others, it undermines the public’s acceptance of the core idea of gender equality and reinforces the public’s acceptance of the paternalistic logic that says basic choices such as what sort of work to do or whether to smoke a cigarette are choices that women shouldn’t be allowed to make for ourselves. This is particularly apparent in cases such as the smoking ban that you mentioned because it is not a moral issue but a health one. The violence that women suffer from living in a world where they are fundamentally not respected as equals (and thus able to make choices about how to treat their own bodies) so grossly outweighs the negative health effects of smoking.
This seems like a classic “two wrongs don’t make a right” situation to me. If we want to end war, let’s focus directly on doing that, rather than imagine that supporting gender discrimination in military employment will move us toward that goal.
Alana, what about was fueled by Islamic extremists who imperil woman rights. I was thinking of the Taliban, Hamas, AQ and Hezbollah?
Your points would be good ones if women going into the military did so as informed, educated, economically secure individuals. We all know they are not, anymore than the 17 to 25 year old males that fuel the death machine. So does it really serve the goal of equal rights for women to grant them the “right” to be trained killers too?
A feminist perspective could argue for a position opposite yours. All children should be protected from predation by the state/military. Visit a high school that has ROTC. You want the girls to be subjected to the same brainwashing? Rather than thinking about “discrimination” think about protection….. for both genders.
It’s a fuzzy point, tough to put one’s mind around. The issue comes down to: does militarization of our society harm our society more than equal combat rights for women improves our society.
We are really insane, far from the love of God, to believe more killers are what this world needs now. 1
Encouraging queers to join the military and now women gives us the illusion of equality and creates an image of the military that it is some how more liberal now because they welcome and encourage these disenfranchised minorities in gaining access to the American mainstream and ultimately the American dream. But really, this is an insult to these minorities who would be supporting the very system that oppresses them and the entire planet. If minorities want true equality they would remove their support from the state and advocate for the end of military rule and the investment of education and social services.
This PR move looks like the war machine wanted to tidy up their ‘invisible war’ of rape problem in the military and say “hey ladies now the military can provide you with a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain the same kind of power, strength, and prestige as all those really cool misogynistic colonial rapists”. In all fairness, after hundreds of years of American Indian genocide and slavery, could we expect anything else from this violent state apparatus? It also just looks like the machine is pitching to another group of warm bodies willing to fight and die to preserve our imperialist-capitalist-‘democratic’ system under the promise and false notion of equality. Which then begs the question- who wants an equal slice of that rancid pie?
IF we want equality- we’re going about it all wrong. Great-now we all have access to oppressing people, taking human lives, and destroying the planet with our immoral Euro/US- centric notion of freedom and democracy- now we can really step up our hegemonic game!
My solidarity and love for all living things across the globe- people and planet- tells me that equality is not the goal- who wants an equal right to the kind of power and greed that causes untold suffering? The goal is liberation from this habitual oppression, so that we can preserve our planet and allow human enlightenment to flourish.
Thanks for inspiring us to think about and discuss these important issues Michael!