Reconstructing the Peace Movement
Guest Post by Lilian Calles Barger
Lilian Calles Barger is an independent intellectual, cultural and gender historian and frequent
podcast host for New Books Network. Her book tentatively titled The World Come of Age: Religion,
Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from
Oxford University Press.
At the 2017 meeting
of the AHA/ASCH, I presented a paper entitled “Rosemary Radford Ruether:
Ruether noted that the peace movement
had moved away from the non-duality of virtue that had characterized
nineteenth-century Christian radicalism. She summarized her ideas in a 1983
essay “Feminism and Peace” published in the Christian
Century where she offered a historical foundation for what I am calling
“eco-feminist pacifism.” In the essay,
she ties peace to both ecology and the liberation of women and turns to the Garrisonian
tradition which called on both men and women to oppose slavery, the
subordination of women and to promote peace and arbitration. Ruether noted how
this radical tradition expressed no bifurcation of virtue between men and women
but rather called a common humanity to peacemaking. [1]
Subsequently, the suffrage movement
of the late nineteenth century linked women to peacemaking and receptivity. To
those who opposed votes for women due to physical incapacity or a feminine
sensibility, the martial virtues of a self-sufficient duty bound male warrior
embodied citizenship. Even as Jane Addams
offered a new basis for citizenship linking peace, feminism, and
internationalism in her book The Newer
Ideals of Peace (1906) suffragists continued to depend on a Victorian ideal
of female virtue of sympathetic cooperation and maternalism.
While peace groups moved away from
an imperial notion of worldwide Christianity to a more inclusive humanitarian
secularism, they retained a gender dualism in which women were seen as peace loving
mothers counteracting masculine warring tendencies. For Ruether, this
historical gender dualism “left an implied doctrine of split natures and split
ethics between men and women,” and
departed from the unitary vision of humanity espoused by the radical tradition.
(F&P 773).
Marian Mollin demonstrates in Radical Pacifism in Modern America:
Equalitarianism and Protest (2006) how male peace workers attempted a
counter-argument against the idea that they had lost their manly citizenship by
exhibiting a militant pacifism with a “rough and rugged style” of protest as a
display of heroic manhood. Women in the radical peace movements of the
post-WWII era, exhibiting risk-taking, continued to serve as support for the
heroics of male members. Resistance to the draft cultivated a macho image in
which women took an adoring supporting role express in the slogan “Girls say
yes, to men who say no.” The gendered ideas of manly martial virtue and
feminine receptivity remained at the heart of pacifism.
Meanwhile, a radicalized feminist
movement began to question the connection between women and peace. The rhetoric
of peace and nonviolence appeared as a tool to pacify women encountering male
violence. Ruether noted how some feminists such as Florynce Kennedy, Robin
Morgan, and Ti-Grace Atkinson espoused the need to oppose male violence with
counter-violence launching the women’s self-defense movement.
The feminist reaction against
pacifism was broad. In a 1984 issue of Off
Our Backs, The Radical Feminist Organizing Committee challenged the
maternalism of women in the peace movement and rejected the idea that women had
a special interest in preserving life or that they were especially suited for
peacemaking. Overcoming the patriarchy, they concluded, may very well involved
violent confrontation. There was no essential link between women and peace. [2]
Women in the peace movement,
Ruether argued, needed to find a higher synthesis between denouncing
patriarchal violence and militarism and an advocacy of feminist militancy not
reliant on traditional views of female virtue. Making the connection between women’s
subordination and war some women felt compelled to choose between a
male-dominated peace movement and feminism. Both militarism and the peace
movement’s rhetoric drew from the martial virtues founded on the subordination
of women. Ruether asserted, “women were the currency of male prowess, to be
protected and displayed on the one hand; to be ravished and “blown away” on the
other. The linking of male sexuality to aggression is the root of both
patriarchy and war”(F&P 775). The future of feminist pacifism lay in
overcoming the chauvinism lodged in the peace movement.
Ruether turned to Lewis Mumford’s
theme of the Megamachine offered in his two-volume study The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970) as a metaphor for the
hierarchal complex of technological, scientific and political power that
enables the dehumanized control of society. The war of opposing Megamachines,
as in nation against nation, was the means to justify its own existence. For
Ruether, the underlying alienating power dynamic of the Megamachine was “The subjugation of the female to male
is the primary psychic model for this chauvinism and its parallel expressions
in the oppressor-oppressed relationships between social classes, races and
nations…” [3]
War, as part of the machinery of power, thus reflected a drive to bring women
into subjection.
Ruther tied the subordination of
women to man’s domination of nature justified by an erroneous reading of the
Genesis mandate to “subdue the earth.” She proposed an integrated view of
society, nature, man and woman understood as part of a “single socionatural
covenant.” Sexism and ecological
destruction went hand in hand with the domination expressed in the Megamachine
of industrial society and war. [4]
For women, the feminine values of
love and sympathetic compliance in the name of peace quickly became timidity
and vulnerability that acquiesced to male violence in the home and society. A
feminist pacifism, Ruether contended, must be based on a fundamental rejection
of “domination and subjugation” between men and women and between nations to a
recognition of the interconnected of all life on earth. The radical religion of
the nineteenth-century provided an alternative vision of authentic co-existence
between the self and the community toward a final “peaceable kingdom.” This
alternative vision,“ must be clear that we are children of one mother, the
earth, part of one interdependent community of life,” (F&P, 776).
Throughout her many writings, Ruether
tied her commitment to pacifism, women’s liberation and ecology together and
offered a new foundation for pacifism. Writing in The National Catholic Reporter in 2002 she reiterated her thinking,
“feminism is integrally linked to anti-racism, ecology and peace because all
these movements have to do with changing the patterns of relationship from
exploitative abuse of some by others to just and harmonious mutuality.” [5]
An effective pacifism that recovered the widely egalitarian sensibility of
radical religion, and went beyond opposing hot wars, required confronting the
sexism that had infiltrated its heart. Ruether is one of many feminist
theologians in the late twentieth century whose thought and influence remained
under examined by historians.
[1] Rosemary Radford Ruether “Feminism and Peace” The Christian Century (August
31-September 7, 1983): 771-776.
[2] Radical Feminist Organizing Committee, “Obliteration
is a Feminist Issue” Off Our Backs (March
1984): 16-17.
[3] Rosemary Radford Ruther, “Mother Earth and the
Megamachine: A Theology of Liberation in a Feminine, Somatic, and Ecological
Perspective” in Liberation Theology:
Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power (New York: Paulist
Press, 1972), 118.
[4] Rosemary Radford Ruether, “New Woman and New Earth:
Women, Ecology and Social Revolution” in New
Women New Earth: Sexist Ideologies & Human Liberation (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1975), 186.
[5] Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Feminism Must Recover its
Pacifist Roots” National Catholic
Reporter (December 20, 2002): 2-3.
Comments