Oregon Humanities

Women and War

The pairing of women and war brings so many other words, other ideas, to my mind. Like most who share my age, class, and nationality, my knowledge of war comes mainly through language. Newspaper or magazine articles, novels, history books, lectures. It just is not a duo I have seen in real life, but it captures my attention nonetheless. I feel a responsibility to at least bear some brief witness to world’s more brutal realities. Shortly after it was published in 2008, I read the introduction to Kimberly Jensen’s Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War, as a copy waited in my office for a week or two before being sent off to a reviewer.

The introduction is often my favorite part of a book of history. Assertions are grand, and analysis sifts through story into pithy argument. Jensen’s introduction had to do with her extensive research and analysis on the rape and domestic violence that resulted from war as well as on the ways women used opportunities afforded by a military society to push forward a civic agenda. It left me wanting more, and so recently, I began reading the rest of the book. I was surprised by the story she told in the prologue. Jensen recounts there not a narrative of World War I but of the woman suffragists’ 1913 march on Washington, an action that resulted in the women being beaten and harassed for simply requesting to be treated as adults in a democracy. Evidently, it is dangerous to make such a request.

As a feminist, as someone who pays attention to the structures that define women’s lack of power, I found Jensen’s book powerfully, sometimes heartbreakingly, familiar and revelatory. In late November, she will give a talk at History Pub at the Kennedy School in Portland on the subject of women and World War I, and I look forward to another opportunity for new understandings not only of women and war but also of how my own status as a female citizen has been gained. Unlike my knowledge concerning woman and war, I can trace a large chunk of my feminist perspective to a single, vivid interaction.

At age twenty, I spent a semester studying in New Zealand (Aotearoa to the indigenous Maori people). There was an orientation for the few dozen American students who arrived on the same program, and one of the activities was a traditional dinner on a marae, or Maori meeting place. Such events involve taking part in a greeting ceremony, and as our guides were preparing us for that interaction earlier in the day, they explained that one part could be done only by a male in our group. This discrimination upset a few righteous-minded young women, and a few of us engaged in conversation with a Maori woman that evening about equality of the sexes. She told us quite clearly that our understanding of her culture was driven by the extreme lack of power we had in our own world, a perspective that kept us from turning our minds to recognize a society in which women and men held different roles but not unequal portions of power. She explained that Maori women had not only traditionally lived without oppression by their male peers but had also been a fierce weapon in war, able to make enemies quake with fear by simply displaying in a certain manner their bodies—their sources of distinctive power gained from the ability to create human beings.

With that instruction, I began to recognize my society, all societies, for the constructions that they are. Such recognition makes me approach with skepticism arguments that rely on the so-called natural ways of the world. Perhaps that is one reason I have found historians’ work so satisfying. They refuse to accept “that’s just the way it is; always has been” as a legitimate answer for any question “why?” The stark realities in work like Kimberly Jensen’s are sometimes uncomfortable, but they are of the utmost value if we are to responsibly do our part in recreating the society that surrounds us.

About Eliza Canty-Jones

Eliza E. Canty-Jones is editor of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, published by the Oregon Historical Society, which is a cosponsor of History Pub. Kimberly Jensen will speak at History Pub on Monday, November 30, at 7 p.m. and McMenamin’s Kennedy School (5736 NE 33rd Ave, Portland). History Pub, which is always free and open to the public, is supported by a grant from Oregon Humanities.

23 November 2009 | Posted by Eliza Canty-Jones in Events Community New Ideas
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