There are few topics today more pressing than feminism, and few topics today more timely than war. This October, Women’s and Gender Studies Professor Emeritus Cynthia Enloe gave a talk at Clark sharing how her academic work combines these two subjects. 

For decades, Professor Enloe’s work has focused largely on feminism in the context of international relations. She has conducted work not only here at Clark, but internationally. Her career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland. Professor Enloe is the author of 15 books including her most recent novel, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War. 

“It’s in the best of Clarkie traditions to care about the world, to try and seek out and think about the world, to try and make a difference in the world and try and learn more about it,” Professor Enloe said. 

She began her talk with two questions for the audience: “What do feminists do during war that their country is involved in? What do feminists do when their country is at war?”

“I’m asking, not why is it hard? But what makes it so hard? So that you’ll actually follow the breadcrumbs back to who’s trying to silence them in war,” says Professor Enloe. “It’s a tough question, but it’s a Clarkie question. Because it’s a question that means you investigate. One of the things that I’ve always admired about the Clark intellectual and political environment is that you investigate. That you try to actually find answers.” 

Professor Enloe then spoke about a meeting she recently attended in Geneva, Switzerland, where she spoke with two Syrian feminists. 

“In my village, I get together with women and we try to take down roadblocks by convincing the opposing militias to dismantle the roadblocks for an hour so that the humanitarian aid convoy can come through,” one of the women explained. 

Professor Enloe said of this, “That’s feminist work.” 

“I run an informal, nonstate, small daycare center that’s open to children and their mothers up to the age of twelve because the government doesn’t see that as dangerous,” the other Syrian woman explained. “We spend time working on reading and math skills, on why it’s important not to be recruited into anybody’s armed militia. And we try to help mothers, especially of boys, to come up with their own thinking and their own strategies to keep their ten-year-old sons out of militias.”

Such women are motivated in their feminist work by the ways in which, due to sexism, women are harmed by war disproportionately. 

“Women are the most impacted during these wars. They often feel the consequences of it the most, and so women are going to try to do what they can to try and at least decrease the negative impacts and the harm of it, which probably means the war ending sooner and disrupting war plans,” an audience member said. “That gets pesky, that gets in the way, where women are supposed to be seen in just this very passive role, the victims. They’re supposed to help men, but when they get in the way of men, that becomes an issue.”

“Militarism is gendered,” Professor Enloe added. “It doesn’t mean that all men benefit from war: they don’t. Ask any Russian man who’s trying to escape Putin’s conscription. Militarism isn’t good for most men either, but it’s really bad for any expression of women’s rights.” 

According to Professor Enloe, in countries at war, war effort is prioritized over women’s rights. The platitude, “we’ll get to that later,” is too often spoken towards feminists during war by typically male leaders. 

“But later never comes,” explains Professor Enloe. “By the time you are ‘allowed’ to raise reproductive rights, you’re allowed to raise women’s economic autonomy, you’re allowed to call out domestic violence abusers, by the time you’re allowed to raise these issues the patriarchal power system is even deeper than it was when you first wanted to raise them.”

Though women even in war are capable of speaking for themselves, because sexism is so ingrained, their voices too often go unheard, Professor Enloe explained. In any given war, without the voices of women experiencing it, without the voices of feminists, the dominant narrative surrounding it will be incomplete. 

“What I found if I don’t find out something about what it’s like to be a feminist in any warzone I’m interested in, I will not know the reality of that war, for men, for women, for girls, for boys,” Professor Enloe said. “I will not actually be realistic about what that war is.” 

“We’re not all specialists, we’re certainly not all experts, but we all can be curious,” she continued. “We can all wonder.”