Women Against War
Throughout its history, the feminist movement has struggled for a world without war. This International Women’s Day, it’s time to reclaim that radical heritage.
Women join hands in a nine-mile chain to encircle Greenham Common in a protest for nuclear disarmament. (Mirrorpix)
In 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst decried her mother’s support for World War One as ‘a tragic betrayal of the [suffrage] movement’, while suffragists gathered at the Hague to form the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Half a century later, women activists protested escalatory Cold-War militarism on the streets of Washington and in camps around Greenham Common. At the turn of the century, feminists joined women’s blocs to demonstrate against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, especially resentful at the deployment of ‘protecting (brown) women’ narratives to justify imperial brutality.
In the US at the time, the National Women’s Studies Association, representing feminist theorists and activists, condemned the Iraqi invasion. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan made international headlines for occupying George Bush’s Texas ranch, from which she refused to move until he agreed to withdraw troops, after her son was killed on the ground. In the UK, the Act Together and Women in Black collectives vocalised resistance to occupation as well as to the Hussain regime. Citing the impact of both invasion and sanctions on ‘increased social conservatism and more restrictive gender norms’, they struggled against human rights violations across the board.
These are just a couple of Anglo-American examples of the way anti-militarism has been intertwined with feminist activism since its inception. Warnings of the impact of war on women particularly and efforts to support its victims have been a pivot-point of feminism throughout its history, but in 2022, feminist anti-militarist sensibility has been dulled, in part by the lack of perceived proximity and desensitivity to war in the Western worldview.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to shake the world this International Women’s Day, it is essential that we remember this legacy and demand de-escalation, disarmament, and diplomacy over the blind arms race currently taking place among national and international leaders and their media backers.
Between Feminism and Anti-Militarism
Feminists have long been concerned by the specific way war refines standing inequalities, including those of gender. We are already seeing these fears come to fruition in Ukraine, where men between the age of eighteen and sixty have been banned from leaving the country and urged to join the army instead, while their partners and children try to cross borders where black and migrant people are experiencing racist discrimination.
Feminist anti-militarists count among them committed socialists, anti-racists, and anti-imperialists like Angela Davies, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and Arundhati Roy. In 1917, the anarchist Goldman delivered a damning speech at Forward Hall in New York, calling conscription ‘crime and oppression and an outrage upon reason’. She concluded that ‘guns and bayonets have never solved any problems. Bloodshed has never solved a problem. Never on earth, men and women, have such methods of violence, concentrated and organized violence, ever solved a single problem.’ Goldman’s magazine, Mother Earth, vociferously opposed the US military involvement in World War One before it was banned by the US government.
In Europe, meanwhile, Rosa Luxemburg was critical in building a mass strike movement in response to war. In 1914 she was imprisoned for her anti-war speeches which exposed the links between capitalism and warmongering and asserted that ‘as long as capitalism prevails, arms and war will not cease’. In modernity, Davies and Roy’s work has maintained this criticism of the literal and ideological violence of war: Davies, building on the voice of Goldman, lays bare the links between antimilitarism and abolition in her speech ‘Palestine, G4S and the Prison Industrial Complex’, and in her damning essay ‘The Silence is the Loudest Sound’, Roy calls Kashmir ‘perhaps the most densely militarized zone in the world’, and condemns the Indian occupation in the strongest terms.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this work has also taken place beyond the page, as feminist anti-militarist groups organised to resist violence. The first of these in contemporary western history was the International Women’s Congress, later renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which formed at the Hague in 1915 in response to the beginnings of the First World War. From the outset, their goals were to develop mediation strategies to end the war and, ultimately, eradicate its root causes.
During the Cold War, women’s peace activism found home in both the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, which became an active coalition calling for US troops to withdraw from Vietnam and Korea. In the UK, an alliance was formed between the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, culminating in the Greenham Common protest which began in 1981 with thirty-six members of Welsh group Women for Life on Earth chaining themselves to the fences of Greenham Common nuclear site to demand disarmament.
The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was only disbanded in 2000. In the time since, many of the same feminists in the UK and around the world have campaigned against imperial and militarist occupations from Palestine to Guatemala to Bosnia. Some of these collectives have taken the name Women in Black.
This feminist antimilitarist history has rarely called on an abstract biological essentialism that reifies archaic notions of women’s supposed ‘natural peacefulness’. Instead, it has demanded an end to the colonial and patriarchal structures that foment further violence, and that see women experience war differently from men, and women of colour differently from white women, at that. Peace activism has often come alongside anti-imperial resistance—for example, in Syria and Liberia, where local women’s activists fought to be included around the table of peace talks, with limited success. What these feminists share is a belief that there are alternative ways to resist and resolve conflict.
Feminism Captured
Despite this long and illustrious history of anti-war activism, the co-option of feminist demands by liberal politics, at least in the West, has seen antimilitarism widely superseded. Of the many criticisms of the 2016 Women’s Marches, theorist and writer Cynthia Enloe recounts that ‘militarism was not an explicit concern voiced by most of the participants,’ and suggests that the ‘withdrawal of most of their own countries’ NATO-commanded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan had somewhat dulled protestors’ awareness of militarism in its most immediately bloody forms.’
You only have to open Twitter to see how far feminism is from its radical roots, with liberal pundits of all genders and political persuasions advocating No-Fly Zones and pontificating about World War III. Sweden, home of the so-called Feminist Foreign Policy, has broken with a long tradition of disengagement and sent military equipment to Ukraine. So how do we find our way back to practical feminist anti-militarist solutions in these desperate times?
First, it’s important to note that, contrary to the positions of the mainstream media and the contemporary Labour Party, it is both possible and crucial to condemn the unjustifiable violence orchestrated from the Kremlin and maintain an anti-militarist stance. We can do that by listening to those with history and experience of mobilising for peace in Russia, in Ukraine, and around the world.
On the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the London division of Women in Black wrote to Boris Johnson demanding that he invest every effort in diplomacy, stop all arms sales, ‘challenge NATO’s aggressive rhetoric’, and invite women from all sides ‘to mediate a diplomatic resolution to the conflict and an agreement for lasting peace’. In Russia, feminists under the banner of ‘Feminist Anti-War Resistance’ have protested the Putin regime, releasing a statement via Telegram calling on women to ‘unite forces to actively oppose the war and the government that started it’. They are defiant in their position: ‘We are the opposition to war, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and militarism. We are the future that will prevail.’
Meanwhile, Georgian activist Nino Ugrekhelidze, who experienced Russia’s invasion in 2008, and her colleagues Daniel Voskoboynik, Sonaksha Iyengar, and Azar Causevic, who survived war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are working to direct donations towards feminist and LGBTQI organisations ‘on the frontline of providing humanitarian aid and evacuation support to people across Ukraine’. Ugrekhelidze explains to me that feminists in Ukraine have built communities and support systems since the beginning of war in 2014, and are therefore ‘highly effective in their response to the ongoing crisis.’
Madeleine Rees, Secretary-General of WILPF, is under no illusions about the challenge ahead of feminist anti-militarists today. ‘We need to rethink our entire approach, and reorientate ourselves away from the default militarism which causes crises in the first place,’ she says. ‘The problem is the sabre-rattling and heroic masculinity being portrayed now.’ Practically speaking, she tells me WILPF is calling for an ‘immediate cessation’ and for the multilateral system to get its act together and do its job: we need a ceasefire now, she writes; then we can see what can be put on the table. ‘In the end there must be peace, so why can’t we do that now?’
It is not always easy, especially in times like these, to continue to imagine a better world. It is harder still when your home is being destroyed and your loved ones are at risk—and easier to idealise from the safety of London. But mobilising for feminist peace this International Women’s Day is both an ideological imperative and a practical reality. It is our challenge to channel the defiance of previous generations of feminists, who did not give into militarism, even in the gravest of times, and to offer up practical, powerful alternative action. We cannot afford to do otherwise.