Women as Peacemakers

Women as Peacemakers

As any teacher of peace studies or conflict resolution well knows, it is usually women who are the superior students. They tend to write better papers, they dive deeper into the course texts, they keep class discussions lively, they want to read more books on peace and they hang around after class to ask more questions.

Why is this? Do women have peace genes floating around inside them? Hardly. It’s more basic than that. Women are more victimized by violence, and victims are passionate about finding solutions.

In the United States, the leading cause of injury to women is being physically harmed by a man they know: husband or boyfriend, ex-husband, ex-boyfriend. It’s no accident that we have battered women’s shelters but no battered men’s shelters. It’s much the same internationally. The United Nations Development Fund for Women reports that in Syria 25 percent of married women have been beaten by their husbands. In the world’s war zones, which number more than 40, most refugees are women. In the current patriarchal political structures, it is women who suffer economic violence. Oxfam America reports that as much as 90 percent of the world’s female workforce is not protected by labor laws.

Whether in the ranks of Code Pink, at the gates of Greenham Common or on the plazas of Buenos Aires, women peacemakers have been self reliant in their calls to action. Finally, the world is noticing. In the last 30 years, nine women have won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the previous 75, it went to only three.

If the nation’s 78,000 elementary schools and 31,000 high schools ever became centers of peace education--the good news is that some are--students would know of the heroism of the women Nobelists : Bertha von Suttner, Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Mairead Corrigan, Betty Williams, Mother Teresa, Alva Myrdal, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rigoberta Menchu, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and Wangari Maathi.

Think, too, of the women who have been honored in other ways, by carrying on their work: Jeannette Rankin, Dorothy Day, Maria Montessori, Helen Nearing, Eunice Shriver, among many others

With those sisters and their deeds as inspiration, women are taking action on the thought of sociologist Wilma Scott Heide: “We will no longer be led by that half of the population whose socialization through toys, games, values and expectations, sanctions violence as the final assertion of manhood and nationhood.”