Feminism, peace, and international politics: An examination of women organizing internationally for peace and security

This dissertation examines feminist claims about the relationship between women and peace and men and war against the backdrop of women's roles in organizing for peace and participating in wars in a historical, contemporary, and international context. It argues, through an analysis of feminist theory, peace research, and praxis, that we must move beyond both androcentric and gynocentric constructions of reality, which are both products of patriarchal ideologies and relations that give rise to the dualistic, polemical, and intransigent politics of war and peace. The first three chapters make the case that past and contemporary feminist attempts to idealize women's roles in the private or reproductive realm as a basis for a unified feminist politics, which counters men's "armed civic virtue" with women's "feminine civic virtue," are problematic with respect to the struggles for women's liberation and peace. The next two chapters offer a case study of women's international peace conference held in Halifax, Canada just prior to the final UN Decade for Women events in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. In exploring the Halifax conference process, which involved over 1,000 women from thirty-three countries, it is found that women do not have homogeneous views on peace and security. In fact, it is shown that women's political identities and priorities in the struggle for peace vary with class, race, culture, and nationality, giving rise to varying, and, sometimes, conflicting "practical" and "strategic" gender interests. However, the conference process did reveal that all women suffer to some degree from the social, economic, and political priorities of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and militarism which depend upon women's undervalued and unremunerated reproductive labor under increasingly oppressive and repressive conditions. The final chapter calls for a feminist political process that enlarges the scope of political change and embraces women's multiple identities, feminisms, and struggles for peace. Such a process opens up the possibility for women to forge more liberatory solidarities with other women and with men to break through the polemics, in discourse and praxis, of women and peace and men and war.