Humanities at Stanford

Women Caught in Conflict and Refugee Situations

by Anne Firth Murray

Women's Stake in Peace

by Estelle Freedman

A Rwandan widow describes her agony about keeping the baby of her rapist: “After the genocide, I went for an HIV test and found that I was negative but I had conceived due to the killers. The child was born, but most of the time I am not happy about him, especially because he reminds me of the bad images of the people who raped me. I lost seven children [in the war] and I am now bringing up a child of bad luck….It is very hard for me….The pain never goes away….I cannot love this child….It’s hell on earth and the genocide continues to live with me.” (According to the New York Times, in 1996, “by conservative estimates there [were] 2,000 to 5,000 unwanted children in Rwanda whose mothers were raped during the civil war and mass killings.”)

War affects women intensely and disastrously. In addition to the complications of caring for a family during wartime, women may face displacement from home, separation from loved ones, and extreme abuse, including rape, torture, and death. The gender bias that fuels violence against women during peacetime boils over and intensifies in conflict situations as military officials ignore or sanction gross violations of human rights. Though war is perceived as a male activity—and indeed those involved in militaristic actions are overwhelmingly men—it is largely civilian women and children who bear the costs in the many civil wars of our time.

The majority of the conflicts occurring now around the world are fought within the borders of countries, often fueled by religious, ethnic and tribal, economic, and political differences. These conflicts precipitate humanitarian crises, like those in regions around Afghanistan, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan, where thousands of people have been displaced, affecting the social and economic situations of neighboring countries.  Since 1991, such conflicts have become more numerous and more deadly, and the nature of warfare has changed. Nowadays war often involves the deliberate targeting of civilians, noncombatants, and their livelihoods. The “goal of modern civil wars usually is not so much to eliminate the opponents as to destroy their culture and the very fabric of society,” according to a 2002 Save the Children report, The State of the World’s Mothers. As a result, said United Nations military adviser Major General Patrick Cammaert in 2008, “It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.”

Historically wars have affected men and women in different ways. Men once dominated as military casualties, while women faced widowhood, poverty, and the sexual violation considered to be the "spoils of war." Modern wars kill far more civilians than soldiers -- including men, women, and children – and, as Anne Firth Murray shows, rape continues to characterize war zones and occupied regions. Given the gender-specific costs of war, do women have a special stake in seeking peace? Can, and should, gender make a difference in arguments against war?

The association of women and pacifism runs deep in western culture, going back at least to the ancient Greek drama Lysistrata, in which women withheld sex from their husbands to pressure them to end their warfare. Since the early twentieth century women have led international peace movements, arguing that as mothers or potential mothers they favored peaceful resolution over combat. Reacting to the carnage of World War I, for example, reformers such as Jane Addams and Emily Green Balch helped create the Women’s Peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Each woman won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.

Since World War II, women have repeatedly protested militarism, often drawing on their maternal identities or their strategic positions as outsiders to the military establishment. In 1961, when a group called Women Strike for Peace called for a one day housewives’ strike to protest nuclear proliferation, over 50,000 women in 60 U.S. cities participated. During the 1980s, dozens of women’s peace camps linked feminism, spirituality, and environmentalism, starting with the Greenham Common peace encampment surrounding a U.S. missile site in England. In Denmark housewives organized a campaign that eventually gathered the signatures of half a million women on petitions to ban cruise missiles in their country. The maternal theme recurred in the 1990s, when the Israeli group "Four Mothers – Leave Lebanon in Peace" protested the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon by picketing the defense ministry, writing letters to legislators, and memorializing every dead soldier. "Why should we send our children to die because our leaders can’t solve our problems by talking?" asked founder Rachel Ben Dor.

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