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 Unveiling America: Women in war and
politics
By Piyush Mathur
Stereotypes, images, slogans, straw men,
agendas, platforms ... O, how odious all these phenomena
are, and yet how central to the political scene! The
wise anywhere care for nuance in politics - but the
wiser often refuse to hope for the same. A prime
expectation from politics is that it would live up to no
expectations. The way to approach it, then - especially
its electoral variety - is to understand the meaning of
representation, with all its implications. An abstract
concept, representation is a matter of sublimated
realities, a measurement between the material, the real
and its purportedly simplified, simplistic imagery. Rest
as it does on representation, politics is thus a stage -
whose actors are all ultimately their own
ventriloquists.
The ventriloquism currently on
display on the US stage has war drums in its background,
foreground, and center. "I'm a war president," declared
George W Bush on NBC's Meet the Press (February 8) -
thereby standing an inch above
his closest Democratic rival to date, John Kerry, a
well-publicized Vietnam War veteran. Meanwhile, Howard Dean, the
man who led the pack through much of the
early stage of the Democratic campaign - but was miserably left
behind at the start of the primaries and has
now bowed out of the race - is not a pacifist, but
someone who opposed the Iraq war. The other candidates include(d), of
course, the retired General Wesley Clark, a war
hero, no doubt; Joseph Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the
Iraq war (formerly famous as a devout Jew); John
Edwards, a gentle Southerner; and two blacks, Carol Moseley
Braun and the Reverend Al Sharpton. (That leaves us, to
put it only parenthetically, with Dennis Kucinich, whose
identity has not been advertised well enough - and so,
the students of America could safely conclude he must be
a progressive, probably a pacifist.)
Don't blame me
if I have given a flat view of the US political scene;
don't just blame the US media either. I have merely
relayed the loudest messages that the candidates have
put out on their behalves - and complemented the output
with what I believe the average American is prepared
and willing to hear and read. Messages produce identities
in politics - or so they are intended - but individuals
less "recognized" may ironically find their identities
overshadowing their messages, which are less favored.
No black has ever led the United States, nor has
a woman. The first dropout from the Democratic race this
time, ahem, was Carol Moseley Braun, one of the two
blacks and the only woman.
The United States
has a war president; it has a war election. What else is
new? Under various guises - territorial expansion,
slavery or its abolition, checks on Nazism and
communism, and concern for national security - war and
militaristic heroism have always dominated the
iconography of US politics. This time around many an
opinion poll has put out the word that unemployment, not
the decision on the Iraq war, has been the prime concern
for the Democratic voter through the ongoing primaries.
The deeper truth, however, is that the typical Democrat,
not too differently from the average American, has been
condemned to experience, and express any feelings about
the war in the language of economics ("affordability") -
even as she/he is sermonized on it in terms of national
security, patriotism and political ideals, such as
democracy and equality (especially, and more recently,
that of the sexes - invariably in the foreign lands).
The utility and futility of the American
woman
Fellow netizens must recall that in the
days leading up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, we
received unsolicited e-mails (supporting the invasion)
that pictorially contrasted skimpily clad white women
with burqa-clad women, and posed the question:
Which one do you prefer? That question captures a strong
populist undercurrent within the United States in which
the ultimate test of Western freedom is made to rest on
the contrast between the wardrobes of American women
versus those of their Middle Eastern counterparts. More
to the point, the female figure is dragged on to the
cultural and media landscapes of the United States as a
highly catchy ideological bargaining chip in favor of US
acts of international aggression in non-Western lands.
The idea that American women are freer than
Middle Eastern women, and thus that a US invasion is
particularly suited to the liberation of the latter, is
not merely a matter of unsolicited e-mails.
Rank-and-file US politicians, including a certain range
of aspiring women, also repose their trust in the above
idea and bandy it about - apparently in order to win
general goodwill and moral standing with the US voter by
showing that they are on the "right" side, which also
happens to be the patriotic side of the national
government and the dominant cultural heritage. The
argument does not rest on the ideal of the liberation of
the Middle Eastern woman, either; in fact, it aims to
universalize the image of the white American woman -
especially as seen on the beach - as the free woman of
the modern world.
Meanwhile, no rank-and-file US
politician has the courage or decency to declare or
admit to his or her voters, or even mention in general,
that - according to data compiled by the
Inter-Parliamentary Union - the United States (at No 57)
falls far behind Rwanda (No 1), Cuba (7), Costa Rica
(9), Mozambique (14), South Africa (15), Seychelles
(16), Vietnam (18) and Pakistan (31) in terms of the
percentage of women in national parliaments. The US also
lags way behind the Nordic and many former communist
countries of Europe - in addition to the following
elsewhere: Grenada, Namibia, Timor-Leste, Uganda, the
Lao People's Democratic Republic, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines, Mexico, Eritrea, Tanzania, Monaco,
Nicaragua, China, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago,
Guinea, Senegal, Dominica, Estonia, Burundi, Peru, the
Philippines, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, San
Marino, Ecuador, Singapore, Angola and Sierra Leone.
As of December 30, Rwanda, topping the list of
nations in terms of the percentage of women in the lower
or single House, had 48.8 percent female members in its
Lower House and 30 percent in its Upper House - compared
with the United States' 14.3 percent and 13 percent,
respectively. As such, the US also falls behind the
world average of female membership for both houses
combined, which is 15.1 percent. According to the New
Jersey-based Center for American Women and Politics, in
2004, the 108th US Congress - the sum total of the 100
seats in the Senate and 435 seats in the House of
Representatives - welcomed women to only 13.5 percent of
its total strength.
When it comes to women of color,
the facts are even more outrageous: In its entire history,
the US Congress has had only 29 women of color -
20 African-Americans, two Asian-American/Pacific Islanders,
and seven Latinas. Incidentally, Carol Moseley
Braun, the first contender to bow out of the
ongoing Democratic primaries, is also the first woman of
color ever to serve in the US Senate (all the rest have
served in the House of Representatives).
On the
whole, going by the data compiled by the Center for
American Women and Politics, 11,699 people have served
in the House or Senate since the first Congress, of
which only 215 - less than 2 percent - have been women.
In 2004, women hold only 13.6 percent of the
congressional seats - even though the number of female
voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every
presidential election since 1964. (There have been 10
elections through 1964-2000.)
Beyond the
frat-boy monotone
The upcoming presidential
election has to be viewed against the above backdrop -
if we wish to vocalize those features of US politics
that the US press, political class, and even the
(admittedly motley) constituency of women have so far
suppressed because of their self-interest, ignorance, or
tired fatalism (the last one is revealed, for example,
in the age-old argument of "winnability" of the
candidate - typically a tall white male - against his
Republican or Democratic rival). Approaching the
election in light of the position of women in the US
political imagination would, in the least, help us get
beyond the frenzied monotony of the frat-boy-speak that
thuds around the electoral stages and television
studios. Finally, and quite frankly, the overwhelming
evidence condemns us to understand the US presidential
election as a sexist exercise aimed at reinforcing the
electability of the (non-Catholic) Christian white male
- for which the clouds of war and militarism provide a
highly favorable atmosphere, a shade par
excellence.
Consider this: As George W Bush
was declaring himself a war president - clearly in order
to gather more ground with voters by numbing them into
something other than normal democratic rationality -
another narrative had already begun to unfold at the
Pentagon. Three days before Bush's declaration - on
February 5 - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had
ordered an investigation into reports of US male troops'
sexual assaults on their female counterparts in Iraq and
Kuwait: Some 37 women had reported the assaults to the
Miles Foundation, a Connecticut-based organization that
provides assistance to victims of sexual or family
violence connected to the US military. (The actual
number of assault cases is feared to be much larger.)
The reports of sexual assaults did not come as a
surprise to the careful observer of women's affairs in
the United States; they should not have come as a
surprise to the careful observer of America's military
affairs either. What nevertheless stands uncommented on
so far, even by the most careful of observers, is how
this other narrative - an eerie mix of militarism,
women's sexploitation, and the gradual entry of women
into the military - colors the political and electoral
horizons of the US, what with its marginalization of
women in domestic politics coupled with the rhetoric of
women's freedom and equality in the international
domain. The conspicuousness of this narrative should be
even more obvious to the residents of Japan and South
Korea, nations that have seen several alarming incidents
of sexual misconduct against native females by errant US
soldiers stationed on their soils.
In this
context, it is useful to reminisce that America's war
president, via his magician-of-a-strategist Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, allowed the charter on the
Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services
(DACOWITS) to expire in February 2002. That was done
apparently in response to anti-feminist reactionary
groups' claims that the panel was fostering radical
feminism and was no longer needed because a full
integration of women into the military had already been
accomplished. Past that expiry, however, Rumsfeld
reduced the committee's membership from 22 to 13,
mandated that the new members had some prior military
affiliation, refocused the committee on "military
readiness" (rather than on women's issues within the
military) and handed down theme-tracks to the committee
rather than letting it find its own themes. Of course,
sexual assault or coercive behavior was not one of the
assigned themes; looking at the reports that DACOWITS
has produced since its reconstitution, sexual coercion
has at best had a marginal presence as an issue.
Meanwhile, roughly five months past the expiry
of DACOWITS - as the plan for attacking Iraq was brewing
in Washington - Terri Spahr Nelson, a mental-health
therapist from Oxford, Ohio, was fielding questions from
journalists on her newly published book exposing the
epidemic proportions of "sexual harassment and sexual
assault in the US military". Titled For Love of
Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the
US Military (September 2002), Nelson's book
documents many kinds of statistics, contemporary and
otherwise, related to sexual violence against women (but
also among men) and its consistent bureaucratic neglect
within the US military. One 1995 study by the Department
of Defense that Nelson cites tells us that 47 percent of
women and 30 percent of men had received "unwanted
sexual attention" from men in the armed forces. She also
notes that in a single year, "9 percent of women in the
Marines, 8 percent of women in the Army, 6 percent of
women in the Navy, and 4 percent of women in the Air
Force and Coast Guard were victims of rape or attempted
rape".
That, of course, is the tip of the
iceberg - even in historical terms. The Air Force
Academy, for example, was investigated for the pervasive
problem of rape in 1993. It then set up an "amnesty
system" to encourage victims of sexual assaults to
report them without fearing punishment for associated
offenses such as under-age drinking or even fraternizing
with a superior (which may include their alleged
violators). In fact, recommendations made by DACOWITS in
regard to the above problems were one of the reasons
Rumsfeld let its charter expire.
At any rate, in
February 2003 - six months after the publication of
Nelson's book and 10 years after the above investigation
- the Pentagon had to launch another investigation. A
news-piece by Denver's 7NEWS had reported that rape and
sexual assault victims who had filed complaints were
disciplined, sometimes forced to quit, by the Air Force
Academy and ostracized by their peers. As it turned out,
the academy had investigated only 20 of the 96 reports
of sexual assaults it had received on its rape hotline
between 1996 and 2003. In the wake of the exposure of
the scandal by 7NEWS, the academy received many more
complaints of sexual assaults and mishandling of
standing complaints. (Among the fallouts of the expose
was the forced retirement of the superintendent of the
Air Force Academy last June.)
Militaristic
horizons for society: America misleads the way
In
her book, Nelson gives policy suggestions to check the
problem of sexual abuse within the services; more
important, however, she puts the issue of sexual
coercion within the larger context of the relationship
between (the culture of militaristic) violence and
aggression. "Of all types of abuse," Nelson writes, "the
incidents of family violence in the military are
particularly high. For example, a 1996 study by the
Pentagon found that from 1991 to 1995, more than 50,000
active-duty service members had hit or physically hurt
their spouses."
Data collected by the Miles
Foundation from various other research resources also
indicate that rates of "marital aggression" within
military families "are considerably higher than civilian
rates". In the fiscal year 2001, for example, 18,000
cases of spousal abuse involving military personnel were
reported, out of which 11,000 were substantiated. A 2001
report by the US Department Defense also tells us that
in the fiscal year of 1999, domestic violence homicides
in the US military community included 12 in the Navy or
Marine Corps, 32 in the Army, and four in the Air Force.
Media reports suggest that cases of military
personnel-induced civilian violence, including suicides
and homicides, have only increased through the ongoing
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Given the
constraints of space and time, justice cannot be done to
the sheer diversity of the statistics relating to US
military men's violent behavior in domestic,
institutional and civilian situations. Suffice it to add
here that a 1996 study by the Pentagon found that more
than 50,000 active-duty service members had physically
abused their spouses through 1991-95; another recent
survey of female veterans reveals that 30 percent of
those surveyed were raped or molested during active duty
(out of which 37 percent reported having been raped more
than once, and 14 percent were gang-raped). The
Preliminary Findings of the Veterans' Millennium Health
Care Act also tells us that the number of cases treated
at Veterans Administration Sexual Trauma Centers include
more than 22,000 male victims (of fellow male
aggression) and more than 19,000 female victims.
The above details easily belie the US claims,
articulate and otherwise, that US military intervention
would free Muslims, especially the women, from the
claustrophobia and repression of Islamic fundamentalism.
The fact of the matter is that US society itself lacks
the civic maturity required to ensure and to celebrate
the effective political equality of sexes, races, and
even religions on its home turf. In looking for their
political representative, as in the ongoing electoral
activity, Americans still hope for a militaristic
father-figure with a hovering presence; they squabble
over details related to military experience that the
candidate may or may not have - and are prone to prefer
the candidate who does. As such, the US political space
is overseen, as it were, by the controlling character of
militarism, with its promise of patriarchal security for
all, but also benign neglect - and not-so-benign
repression - of women.
Meanwhile, as if to trace
a counter-history of sorts within the grand US electoral
narrative, the first woman elected to the US House of
Representatives, Jeanette Rankin, a Republican from
Montana, was a pacifist - and also the only person to
vote against US entry into both the World Wars. The only
parliamentarian to oppose the authorization of the
president for the use of military force against "those
respons[ible] for the [September 11, 2001] attacks" was
also a woman, a black one: Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a
Democrat representing the 9th District of California,
voted against Senate Joint Resolution 23 - and was thus
the lone voice of dissent through the decision to invade
Afghanistan.
Lee advocated exploring diplomatic
means further; cautioned against responding "in a
conventional manner" to the "unconventional threat" at
hand; and, reminiscing the Vietnam War, also alerted
against going "on an open-ended war with neither an exit
strategy nor a focused target". Virtually every word of
Lee's statement on her vote against SJ Res 23 rings true
today; it rings even truer through the occupation of
Iraq, which she also opposed.
A roadmap for
America?
The plight of American servicewomen and
the stinginess of political space for women and
minorities, on one hand, and the preponderance and
predominance of militarism and veteran heroism in the
political subconscious of the United States, on the
other, put a very different spin on Bush's
self-identification as a war president. This war
president was able to raise more than $30 million in the
same amount of time - July-September, 1999 - that
Elizabeth Dole was able to raise only $1 million.
Not a war president then, Bush had several other
advantages - but the biggest one he had against Dole was
the systemic and historical inability of Americans to
visualize a woman leading them (or themselves being led
by one). George W Bush was not exactly a celebrated
veteran, but he was the son of a former president, a war
president; as such, he was predestined to do better than
a lady who was only a veteran's wife.
The
British author and feminist pioneer Virginia Woolf noted
in her classic A Room of One's Own (1929) that
"it is worse perhaps to be locked in [than] to be locked
out". The figure of the American woman is in a more
precarious situation: it is not locked within the home -
it is out there, even in the hostile foreign lands - but
it is locked into the "domestic territories" of the
United States, such as the barracks. On a different
plane of thought, the American woman is pretty much
locked out of mainstream politics - even though she can
be a (harassed) foot soldier (in the military/politics).
As the United States goes to the polls once
again, taking the road it has always traveled by, one is
apt to ask: When will it grow up enough to play catch-up
with Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nicaragua
and the Philippines - all of which have long
distinguished themselves by being led by female heads of
state?
Piyush Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, and Virginia Polytechnic and
State University, USA, is an independent observer of
world affairs, the environment, science and technology
policy, and literature.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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