Edified, but saddened by Ehrenreich

Catholic New Times, Nov 21, 2004 by Anna Jarvis

In the October 10th issue of CNT, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how the photographs of female U.S. military personnel abusing Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison signified for her "the end of naive feminism." While I agree with much of what she said, her article also raised many questions. I would like to counter Ehrenreich's assertion that the naivete of feminism has been in assuming that women are somehow morally superior to men: I would suggest, instead, that naive feminism is believing that, as women, we can gain meaningful equality with men without addressing the issue of war.

I was saddened, but not surprised, to read that Ehrenreich supported the participation of women in the military. A writer of her experience is clearly aware that, throughout history, rape has been used as an instrument of war. She must know about the 12-year-old Japanese girl killed by a soldier from a U.S. army base several years ago. She must know that burgeoning local prostitution accompanies present day "peacekeeping" forces in whichever countries they are deployed. She must know about the continuous stream of rape allegations by the ever-growing numbers of women in the military, as well as the higher rates of domestic violence and domestic murder that occur in military families.

Ehrenreich, someone who has written so extensively on women's economic condition, must know that over half the U.S. military budget goes to pay for war. She must be aware of the lineups at soup kitchens in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore, along with the crumbling sidewalks, decaying neighbourhoods and pothole-filled streets, to name just a few symptoms of poverty in the U.S. today.

Jim Douglass has written that shortly before he died, Martin Luther King had begun to make a clear link between race, poverty and war--a fact tragically overshadowed by today's icon makers who keep him locked into history as a figure famous only for his achievements in civil rights. Douglass suggests that it was when King's focus turned towards war and poverty that he became the greatest threat to the American establishment: he was murdered shortly before he was to lead a march on Washington in which thousands planned to shut down the nation's administration through non-violent resistance to force the government to address the issue of poverty--black and white poverty.

Why, as feminists, are we not as clear as Martin Luther King about exposing the links between war and poverty, and demanding an end to the institution of war? Why can we not say, as Virginia Woolf did to all men, "If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood ... that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country." Why does our solidarity with other women of the world not automatically preclude any support for any war whatsoever, because it means other women's lives will necessarily be shattered by the effects of war: hatred, violence, rape, torture, injury, disease, and death; loss of children, husbands, and other loved ones; severe economic hardship; dislocation and loss of homes and property; destruction of communities, cities and states?

Ehrenreich writes that she was shocked and saddened by the participation of women in the atrocities in Iraq: Sabrina Harman, Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl, Janis Karpinski, Barbara Fast and Condoleezza Rice. But what about another woman she very clearly must have known about, who was at the helm of the first Iraq war? Surely Ehrenreich must have known that, when asked if she thought the sanctions were worth the lives of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children throughout the 1990s, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, "We think it's worth it."

To me the surprise is not that, faced with military service in an imperialist war, women begin to act like male soldiers and abuse the "enemy" in a sexually degrading manner. To me the surprise is that feminists somehow expect women to go into a hierarchical, patriarchal, imperialistic institution based on killing--the U.S. military--and retain some aspects of it--the hierarchy, the blind following of orders, the use of weapons rather than the tools of nonviolence, the killing and the focus on victory--and somehow get rid of other aspects--the sexism, the sexual violence, the abuse of those considered inferior.

This to me is the real naivete--to believe that we don't have to engage in these questions, that women's equality within society can be achieved without making a choice between the force of weapons, violence and killing, and the force of gospel nonviolence which Martin Luther King called soul force.

Ehrenreich writes that it is not enough to change institutions simply by having a certain number of women infiltrate them. Yet, in Scandinavian countries, where women's numbers in Parliament have reached the 40 per cent mark (as opposed to 12 per cent in Canada and less in the U.S.), societies are more geared towards the needs of women and children and less towards military priorities. As a new mother myself, I have also come to a clearer definition of feminism: I now believe that as women, our goal should not be to compete with men in the workplace, including the military, but to help transform society so that it accommodates the needs of the most vulnerable, from new mothers and babies to the ill, the elderly, the physically disabled and the developmentally delayed.