Rocking The Ship Of State

Toward A Feminist Peace Politics

Adrienne Harris, Ynestra King, Carol Cohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000310245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers the experience of women as children and as mothers, and feminist critiques of gender as important sources of insight into the conduct, dynamics, and motivation of a feminist peace politics, examining the history, the scope, and the current condition of women's peace movements.

PART ONE
Feminist Visions

ONE
What Does Feminism Mean?

DOROTHY DINNERSTEIN

Webster¹ defines feminism as "a. the theory that women should have political, economic and social rights equal to those of men; b. the movement to win such rights for women." But in a human realm whose dictionaries define as a "theory"—i.e., a debatable idea—the notion that women should have such rights, feminism must define itself in terms far broader than this: other core changes, in such a realm, are inseparable from change in our uses of gender. Women whose energies are focussed on achieving equality within the status quo—within a short-term future, that is, in which present social reality continues otherwise essentially unaltered—are hoping for what cannot happen.

Indeed "status quo" is itself a weird misnomer for our present collective condition. The reality we inhabit—the reality within which I write this and you read it: our driven predatory depersonalized human realm, fragile and frantic, blind with passion to prevail, fanatically greedy, rigidly and mortally coercive—is surely anything but stable. We are moving fast—nosediving—toward ecological catastrophe and/or nuclear Armageddon. If we cannot pull out of this nosedive the short-term future can evaporate at any moment. And to pull out of it—to avert the death of living earthly reality—means mustering a huge, a miraculous, spurt of human growth and change: fast change: change within persons and within intimate groups, and change in the nature of the larger societal units (cultural, economic, political and regional) on whose level the developments we call historic take place.

What happens in those larger societal units happens in three-way interaction with what happens within persons and within intimate groups. It would be folly, I think, to suppose that we can mastermind the outcome, or even identify all the crucial features, of this process. An adequate overview of the changes that would make it possible for earthly life to go on now is not within our mental reach; our pooled intelligence— even with the prosthetic extensions which it has so cleverly devised for itself, and of which it is so stupidly proud—falls far short of that task.² Such an overview might well tell us that there is no chance—none at all—for this planet's organic fuzz to outlive the twentieth century. What I am discussing here, then, are some necessary conditions for a living earthly future. What the sufficient conditions are is another question, and maybe we're lucky not to know the answer to it. Without hope— open-eyed hope, which by definition embodies uncertainty and counsels action, not blind hope, which is passive and shuns available fact—we are already dead. And an equal-rights feminist stance oriented to an otherwise unchanged social reality is blind hope: hope resigned, on some silent level of feeling, to the truth of what it denies: the imminence of world murder. It is a business-as-usual strategy: a self-deceptive device for whiling away time: a blind to-do: a solemn fuss about concerns that make no sense if we have no future, as the end of earthly life (an end that is bound to come sometime, but why now? and why at human hands?) draws closer. Surely one should, at every moment, choose: fiddle frankly while Rome burns (because music is intrinsic to the moment: like love, it fulfills itself by being made: sing "I am! I am!" while bearing witness to your world's annihilation) or try to put the fire out. Business as usual, which carries intrinsic reference to a future, is blank denial: the most primitive of those defense mechanisms that Freud challenged us to outgrow.

Feminism is a living movement, I am saying, a movement honest with itself, only insofar as it embodies active radical try-to-put-the-fire-out hope: long-shot optimism, based on the widest knowledge we have— tentative, partial knowledge—and on love for the widest reality that human feeling at its mammalian core can authentically embrace—earthly life: optimism that has faced the possibility of failure, and felt through— come to terms with, and put in its proper place—the silent hatred of Mother Earth which breathes side by side with our love for her, and which, like the hate we feel for our human mothers, poisons our attachment to life.

Central to a humanly whole feminist vision is awareness that our traditional uses of gender form part of an endemic mental and societal disorder: part of the everyday psychopathology, the normal taken-for-granted mishugas, that is killing our world. Not only do our old sexual arrangements maim and exploit women, and stunt and deform men: the human way of life that they support moves, by now, toward the final matricide—the rageful, greedy murder of the planet that spawned us—and seems bent on reaching out into space for new planets to kill. In doing what we do with gender we humans not only constrict and distort ourselves; we also rape and desecrate earthly nature, and threaten to lay waste, as fast as we can get to it, to whatever may be alive in outer space. I say "we humans," not "those men," because while it is of course mainly men, not women, whose military and economic games threaten to de-create what our grandparents called Creation, they play these games with tacit female consent. Maybe we could not stop them if we tried. But so far we have not—not on the scale which could make such effort realistic rather than purely symbolic/ expressive—found ways to try.

As girls, we were trained—shaped, schooled—to become the responsibly nurturant members of the human family, alert to the needs of vulnerable, dependent beings.³ Now—grown up; rejecting that old male-female division of responsibility, but equipped still with the traditional skills we were taught; demanding that men and boys must learn them too, but aware that time is short and such learning inexorably slow; knowing that the public realm, which men still rule, is in mortal trouble, and the earth itself a vulnerable being: a vitally endangered creature, needy, damaged already, and dependent on human protection from further human assault—now, at this moment, we crazy feminists may well be the most sanely conscious little part of our ailing lifeweb. From the perspective of this consciousness, what feminism most urgently means is something very much broader than the right to equal pay for equal work, or to orgasm (although such rights are of course part of it). It means withdrawing from old forms of male-female collaboration, not only because they restrict female access to some major sources of power, status, and pleasure,⁴ but now, most centrally, because they express and support the insanity that is killing the world. And it means mobilizing the wisdoms and skills with which our female history has equipped us, and focussing them upon the chance that this world-murder can be interrupted-stopped; reversed—and human life reordered: reworked into forms harmonious with those we now threaten to smash: forms as shapely as trees and stately as gorillas; as elegant as giraffes and exuberant as coral reefs; as gaily wise as elephants and whales; as loving and free as lions and housecats; as green as grass, and brave as flowers.

The core meaning of feminism, I am saying, lies, at this point, in its relation to earthly life's survival. Equal rights goals matter, first of all, because they have to do with psychic growth: fast growth: growth away from the infantilisms, male and female, which support and are supported by our old uses of gender, and toward human responsibility: responsibility for our own self-creation; for our complex and internally contradictory bodily and psychic traits; for the place we have carved out for ourselves in the earthly lifeweb; and for the life and death power over nature that has come to lie in our ingenious, unwise hands. Feminism is a crucial human project—a project worthier of adult passion than war or the manufacture of plastic bottles—only insofar as it moves us toward the outgrowing of the mental birth defect, the normal psychopathology, that makes us so deadly a danger, now, to the living realm that spawned us: the birth defect that makes us—clever inventive affectionate tool-using ape-cousins who "dreamed ourselves into existence"⁵: sociable playful mammals who laugh, weep, talk, talk, and talk—an ecological cancer, and a nuclear time bomb, in the body of the earth.

At the heart of this birth defect, I think—at the core of human malaise—is scared refusal to know that we did in fact create ourselves: that we are, in fact, collectively self-made beings, responsible for our own existence: culture-dependent two-legged primates whose crucial biological assets—our brains and our hands—are usable only insofar as we acquire, through learning, the prosthetic equipment which, over eons, we ourselves (our human and proto-human ancestors, that is) seem, collectively, to have fashioned: perishable equipment, easily lost forever: equipment upon which we so heavily rely that without it the creatures we have slowly become as we brought it slowly into being would be too disabled to reconstruct it: tools, skills, language and the concepts it carries, and pooled knowledge of earthly fact: detachable equipment, progressively elaborated, refined and extended, the beginnings of which seem apt to have taken shape in tandem—in back and forth interdependence—with the evolution of our complex central nervous systems, our upright bodies, and our subtle, versatile hands.

This human fear of facing human self-creation—this core refusal of our collective responsibility: responsibility for what we are, for the realm we have made, and for the earthly lifeweb that has nurtured our existence: all of which we now seem about to wipe out—stands face to face, at this point, with what the psychically androgynous Lewis Mumford, at eighty,⁶ begged us to mobilize: "mammalian tenderness and human love." It is a confrontation implicit in every part of world-conscious human life—and central, I think, in feminism, which is (among other things) a bid for female sharing of public power. The question for women is what kind of public power we want to share: the kind that is killing the world or the kind that is focussed on keeping the world alive.

These differing modes of power—life-hostile power, bent on damaging what it cannot kill or control (polluting, maiming, reducing it; desecrating or degrading it; boxing it in) and nurturant power, which cherishes the freedom and integrity and health of what it loves—seeem to have coexisted, till this century, in fragile balance.⁷ World War I, followed in my lifetime by Hitler, Hiroshima, and the steadily growing weight of world-killing machinery since Hiroshima—the stockpiled thunderbolts of a crazed and dimwitted Jove: enough of them by now to denude the

Box A

Some people—these days probably most—shut the world out. Partly or wholly, they even now deny the real probability of earthly life's destruction, and in that way—on some dark split-off mental level, maybe willingly—increase that possibility: being alive and human can get to feel like more trouble than it's worth. Others, maddened by assault on their need to prevail, seem wholly and overtly willing to wipe the world out. Anger at reality's refusal to confirm infantile omnipotence can be either active or passive, that is: it can be either assaultive or withdrawing. In this respect the quiet apathy of the apolitical masses and the reckless bellicosity of an active Reaganite have much in common.

(As I write—mid-April '86—the leaders of a large nation and a small one stand poised to provoke the U.S.-USSR confrontation that could in fact wipe the world out: the mighty and crazy Reagan and the punier and equally crazy Khadafi, each cheered on by countless puffed up little followers.* We watch them play planetary chicken, try to believe it's true, and can't quite do so: if I really believed it, could I sit here writing? Still, if we survive this moment's crisis—as we will have done if the book of which this chapter is part is printed and you, reader, sit breathing as you read it—our descent into nothingness remains in principle reversible.)

*Wall stickers reading "U.S. #1" materialize hourly, like dandelions, and I grope for the words of the song whose melody floats in my head. I catch them: "Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles."

earth of life how many times over?—heralded a fateful tipping of that fragile balance.

Can this tipping conceivably still be righted? reversed? The runaway societal-technologic trends that underlie it are of course fueled in large part by malignant human impulses, impulses to realize the old enraged eye-closing thumb-sucking infantile-omnipotent dream of making the world go away: of shutting it out or wiping it out, since it refuses to obey the baby's wishes (see Box A).

Still, what fuels a trend need not wholly steer history. Clearly, "amazing inventions for death"⁸ are metastasizing, and international political machinery is moving us—heavily; steadily—toward extinction. But human impulses toward the protection of life, impulses more volatile than political machinery, more flexible and agile, can—may?—at the same time be gathering momentum; we may yet mobilize Eros, put Thanatos in its proper psychic place⁹ and turn the deathly tide.

Feminism has bearing on this gathering of momentum—feminism is a vital part, that is, of current history—only insofar as feminism spells out, and embodies in its practice, the links between change in our uses of gender and reversal of our descent into nuclear and/or ecological hell. Maybe—who knows?—we can still manage this reversal. But doing so means outgrowing normal human psychopathology: surmounting, in other words, ordinary moral cowardice and mental sloth. It means repudiating violence, active and passive, and renouncing coercive exploitative lifeways: using our rage, like our shit, not for ammunition as our monkey cousins do, but humanly: to fertilize green growth. It means mobilizing the core interest and empathy which (alongside anger, fear and cannibalistic cravings) we feel toward each other: our impulse to understand and comfort and forgive each other: our built-in attraction to the humanly created human realm (the realm to whose presence our large brains, upright posture and clever hands refer, just as our eyes refer to light and our ears to sound): and our protective filial concern for earthly nature.

Such mobilization would take all the strengths we could muster. It would draw on the traditional talents which women and men, respectively, now embody: talents whose exercise in our present extremity might hasten their merging (and thereby deepening) inside each human skin. It would call forth the energy we need—all of us, in all the earth's nations—to start changing our old uses of gender, uses that now support the infantile violence and greed, the infantile fusion of irresponsibility and felt omnipotence, that are killing our world. And it would foster those new strengths, those new forms of resourcefulness, which would start to take shape as we worked out new modes of community and primary-group life. (See Box B).

Men for example—far more, on balance, tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 FEMINIST VISIONS
• PART 2 FEMINISM CHALLENGES MILITARISM
• PART 3 WOMEN ORGANIZING FOR PEACE: TRIUMPHS AND TROUBLES
• Afterword: If I Can't Dance in Your Revolution, I'm Not Coming
• About the Editors and Contributors