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INTRODUCTIONAs Blanche Wiesen Cook has pointed out, qthe most vigorousnaspects of the peace movement today are organized and staffed bynwomen.q* On those grounds alone, we have a right and a need to learnnmore about women's relation to peace, both in theory and in historicalnand contemporary practice. The study of women and peace, however,ngoes against the grain of societies which remain male-dominated andncommitted to the use of organized violence to contain and resolvenconflict. Women's ideas and activities are considered to be of secondarynor marginal interest, and war and the preparation for war are regardednas intrinsically more important and interesting than peace and thenpreparation for peace.The papers collected here stem from two academic gatheringsnorganized to counteract that orientation: the September 1984nconference at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), innToronto, on qWomen and Education for Peace and Non-Violenceq andnthe August 1985 round table at the Sixteenth International Congress ofnthe Historical Sciences, in Stuttgart, on qThe History of Women andnPeace Movements.q The contributors are all women educators,nscholars, and peace activists whose research and writing reflect only onenside of their commitment to the contemporary peace movement. Fornthis volume, the papers have been grouped into three sections: one ofntheoretical reflections, one of historical case studies, and one ofnstatements arising from contemporary practice. Where we hadntranscriptions of comments and questions from the audience of thenOISE Conference, we have appended them to the individual papernwhich they addressed.Leading off the theoretical section, indeed the entire volume,nBerenice A. Carroll examines the qHistorical and TheoreticalnConnectionsq between qFeminism and Pacifism.q She attempts tondisentangle the concept of qwomen and peaceq from that of qfeminismnand pacifismq by distinguishing between qfeminismq and qthe women'snmovement,q qpeace movementsq and qpacifism,q and qpacifismq andnqpacific behaviour.q It is powerlessness which, according to Carroll, hasnlinked women historically to peace. Nonetheless, she seeks a logicnlinking feminism to pacifism and finds it above all in the liberalnprinciple of the inalienable right to life and liberty underlying bothnideologies.While Carroll concentrates on the contemporary situation and thenrecent past, Dorothy Thompson surveys the whole of western recordednhistory in her interrogation of the relationship between gender and war.nBy means of historical qexample and counter-example,q Thompsonnadvances an argument against a mono-causal explanation for war,nparticularly the tracing of all evil to the male half of the human species.nIn contrast to the complexities and ambiguities shading Carroll's andnThompson's conceptions of human society, Micheline de Seve claimsnthat establishing qthe relationship between women and peace isnrelatively simple.q With a selection of images, she conjures up annightmare world dichotomized between militarist men and innocent,npacifist women. Her poetic, apocalyptic vision is designed to impart ansense of urgency and galvanize us into action.European and North American women have been activelynorganizing for peace for the past hundred years or so, as the nine papersncontained in Part II document. That the period covered extends nonfurther into the past than the nineteenth century can be explained innterms of another angle to the tripartite women/peace/powernrelationship. The majority of women may well have been opposed tonwar for centuries; they certainly have had their share of suffering fromnarmed conflicts. As Ursula Herrmann suggests, however, it was onlynwith the emergence of the women's movement in the last century, andnof the movement of women out of the home into the public sphere on anlarge scale, that the politicization of women became possible and, withnit, women's involvement in peace movements.n n |
