Europe is once again the theater of a major armed conflict, the worst since the Second World War ended in 1945. Four of the belligerents possess their own nuclear weapons: the Russian Federation, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Several nato nations have U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on their territory: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Russia recently sent nuclear weapons to its ally Belarus.
One would think that a proxy war in Europe between Russia and nato—threatening the first hot conflict between nuclear-armed formations—would trigger a major upsurge in peace movements. It hasn’t. The contrast between the present decade and the twilight years of the Cold War could not be greater. That was the time of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, of Reagan and Thatcher, of Reagan and Andropov and his reformist successor Gorbachev, the time of the nato doctrine of limited nuclear war in Europe, the time when American nuclear bases across Europe attracted anti-war protesters by the thousands several times each year.
Women played a major role in the peace movements of the Eighties and in earlier opposition to the Vietnam War. They formed organizations such as the American-based Women Against War and the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. Women were influential, too, in Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Parallel organizations and movements sprang up across the Western world and the Global South. Why is there no revival of these movements today? Their absence is doubly baffling given the impact of the current war on Ukraine’s women. While their menfolk are slaughtered on the southern and eastern battlefronts, Ukrainian women have fled their country by the millions, children in tow, or remained in ever-worsening conditions at home.
It is not that women in Europe and elsewhere are silent about the war. Some denounce it and call for serious diplomacy to end it—women such as Clare Daly, an Irish member of the European Parliament; Sahra Wagenknecht and Sevim Dağdelen, members of the German Die Linke party; and the German feminist writer Alice Schwarzer. These women are vocal. They are also isolated. Politically they lack clout, and they lack allies—including female allies—in mainstream media, or in the academy, or among students, who formerly channeled anti-war sentiment.
Not even the war in Gaza has catalyzed a distinctive female voice for peace. On social media, in the street, and on university campuses, protesters of both sexes chiefly condemn only one of the parties to the conflict. Appeals for a cease-fire suggest merely a pause in hostilities, not an end to them. Slogans against “settler colonialism” and “genocide” are neither calls for lasting reconciliation of Israelis and Palestinians, nor for a settlement that would respect each side’s national interests and security.
Why have “peace women” vanished as a collective force? I will come to that. But let us first step back to recall a time, not so long ago, when the question would have been unthinkable.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cnd), once Britain’s foremost peace organization, was founded in 1957 and, in its first iteration, reached its apex during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movement had a resurgence in the early 1980s, following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The invasion killed the détente between the two Cold War superpowers and their military blocs. In both cnd and the broader British peace movement, women formed a powerful anti-militaristic constituency. Under Joan Ruddock’s chairmanship between 1981 and 1985, cnd grew exponentially. By the time she retired, it boasted 460,000 members.
During this period, I lived and taught in Coventry, a Midlands city in the United Kingdom, and was an active member of cnd. Coventry is a storied place. On November 14, 1940, the city was heavily bombed by the German Luftwaffe, aiming to take out Coventry’s military and industrial infrastructure. It was to that point the most serious airborne attack on Great Britain. Some 552 planes unloaded around 30,000 incendiary bombs on the city. Infamously, the raid prompted Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, to coin the verb Koventrieren: to reduce a city to rubble.
Coventry’s cathedral was one of the pulverized buildings. At war’s end, city officials decided to let its ruins stand in perpetuity as a monument to state violence; the new cathedral sits alongside its predecessor. Fittingly, cnd held its weekly meetings in the cathedral complex. From there we divvied up work: leafletting in residential neighborhoods, talking at trade-union meetings and at secondary schools, and the like. We also invited distinguished guests to speak at our local rallies or at large indoor venues. E. P. Thompson, the great historian of the English working class and an avid peace campaigner, visited us twice with his no less formidable wife and fellow historian, Dorothy Thompson. Julie Christie, a major film star, spoke at one of our rallies.
The female peace activists I knew best in the early to mid-1980s were, to a woman, progressives. My former wife was one of them. The women embraced left-wing causes, were feminists, read The Guardian newspaper, and, if they voted at all, typically plumped for the Labour Party. They abhorred Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s hawkish prime minister. The similarities among Coventry’s female peace activists ended there. Some of them came fresh to politics and with no religious affiliation. Others were Quakers. A few were members of the British Communist Party transitioning to cultural Marxism or were anarchists who despised Marxism of any flavor. My female colleagues, like my male ones, were in their late twenties, thirties, and early forties; the students in the movement were, of course, generally younger.
For most of the women I knew, war represented the ugliest side of male culture. The peace camp established in September 1981 on Greenham Common, Newbury, enshrined this conviction. Adjacent to a U.S. military base that housed Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Greenham camp was originally open to both sexes but soon became an exclusively female enclave, unlike its counterpart at Molesworth in which women simply played a leading role. Feminism, communalism, and anti-militarism defined Greenham’s mission. The camp had no official leaders, but it did have women who spoke on its behalf to the media and to other campaigners. Helen John (1937–2017) was Greenham’s most imposing figure. Hardy and unbending, she never veiled her disdain for men.
The peace women of my acquaintance in Britain were militant without being military types. They deplored nato and the Warsaw Pact equally; discriminating between rival nuclear blocs seemed absurd. “Non-Violent Direct Action” was their preferred mode of pugnacity. A clock tower would be scaled and a peace banner unfurled from it. Roads would be blocked, local councils occupied, and, ubiquitously, nuclear bases barricaded. It is impossible for me to imagine any of these women inserting into their Twitter accounts, if Twitter had existed at this time, a Ukrainian or any other national flag. The sorts of symbols they chose were derived from the semaphore alphabet (cnd’s symbol), a spider web (the Greenham symbol), or the more ancient dove and olive branch.
When the Falklands War broke out in April 1982, following the invasion of the South Atlantic islands by Argentinian forces, peace activists were unmoved by patriotic feeling. With only one exception, the women I knew opposed Britain’s reconquering the islands, not because they had any love for a military junta but because of the slaughter that was bound to accompany the eviction. Their fears were quickly confirmed when a British nuclear submarine torpedoed and sank the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of around three hundred souls. The Sun newspaper, a Murdoch tabloid, hailed the Belgrano’s destruction with the triumphant headline “Gotcha!” Today The Sun, like the Murdoch empire more generally, supports the continuation of the war in Ukraine.
Within the broader peace movement, cnd operated not as a political party but as a pressure group. Its core demand was Britain’s unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons. In 1982, this became Labour’s official policy under Michael Foot, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in parliament. Divisive and a vote-loser, the policy was discarded by Foot’s successor, but not before the Conservative Party in 1987 celebrated its third consecutive general election victory in a landslide.
I left Britain in 1990, first moving to St. John’s, Newfoundland, for a decade, and then to Hong Kong for two more. I lost touch with my female former friends and colleagues in the peace movement. What happened to that cohort of women of the 1980s whose public engagement and organization for peace took a markedly gendered form? I can’t say for sure. But I doubt that any of them joined the ranks of the women I describe next.
In “Women and the Evolution of World Politics” (1998), published in Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama offered an overview of the violent proclivities of men and women. (The piece occasioned several replies by feminist scholars.) Judged by their record of war-making, looting, pogrom, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, rape, and pillage, men are the more violent sex by a long shot. All the world’s bloodiest dictators have been men. Summarizing the findings of evolutionary biology, Fukuyama concluded that genetics, rather than patriarchy, was the root cause of the male–female disparity in violent behavior. He added:
Observers have suggested various reasons why women are less willing to use military force than men, including their role as mothers, the fact that many women are feminists (that is, committed to a left-of-center agenda that is generally hostile to U.S. intervention), and partisan affiliation (more women vote Democratic than men). It is unnecessary to know the reason for the correlation between gender and antimilitarism, however, to predict that increasing female political participation will probably make the United States and other democracies less inclined to use power around the world as freely as they have in the past.
Fukuyama could not have been less clairvoyant about Democratic and left-of-center women (unless we count all his other predictions). If women peace activists of the 1980s were suspicious of the state—the organization that, as Max Weber noted, monopolizes legitimate violence within a given territory—their successors are now housed in the state in growing numbers. Their territory is the world.
In the United States, such women include Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence and previously, with John Brennan, a policy advisor on extra-judicial drone killings; the color revolutionist Samantha Power, Administrator of usaid, a cia front organization; the Ukrainian putschist Victoria Nuland, Acting Deputy Secretary of State; and her colleague Elizabeth Horst, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Pakistan, who recently gave the nod to the ouster of Imran Khan. The doyenne of these officials is Hillary Clinton. When Fukuyama published an earlier article on women and politics, a short review in 1994, Bill Clinton had only recently been installed as president, and Hillary as first lady. After her healthcare plan failed to pass Congress, she launched other initiatives relating to children and foster care. Today, she is a super-hawk for whom the war in Ukraine is an expeditious vehicle with which to topple the Putin regime, break Russia as a great power once and for all, and restructure the Russian Federation on lines consistent with the dream of American unipolarity. Apropos of these officials and their male colleagues, one is reminded of Montesquieu’s comment about the rulers of an earlier violent republic: “Their custom was always to address other nations as though Rome were their master.”
These Lilliputian counterparts are flourishing. The Trudeau deputy Chrystia Freeland and Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly are two such political warriors; President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission and Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of Estonia, two more. Sanna Marin, till September 2023 the prime minister of Finland, successfully renounced her country’s former neutrality, while nato’s summit in July 2023 in Vilnius was hosted by Lithuania’s prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė. All are supporting nato’s war against Russia, as is Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s firebrand prime minister. None of them has ever cowered under the storm of artillery fire or emerged from combat with limbs lost and minds unhinged. Save the occasional mercenary, none of their citizens is dying on the battlefronts of Ukraine. The women of Greenham Common would be particularly floored, however, by Germany’s minister for foreign affairs, the bellicose Annalena Baerbock. She belongs to the Green Party. When founded in 1980, Die Grünen were stridently anti-war. Today they are proxy-war champions.
The most obvious answer to the question of where the peace women went, and by no means a trivial one, is that they aged and died (thankfully, some of my old comrades are still hearty). With the United States and Russia temporarily at peace, a new generation of political women immersed itself in other causes: lgbtq, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, environmentalism, and so forth. Furthermore, women do not enter political activity only, or even mainly, as women but first and foremost as members of the broader society. What affects that society necessarily affects women as citizens. And since the Cold War ended, Western citizens of both sexes have been blitzed by a plethora of fears that have pushed the prospect of nuclear war far into the background.
Long gone are the days when citizens were enjoined to “fear only fear itself.” Instead, we are told to fear without respite. In the past decade alone, Westerners have been deluged by panics over Brexit, Donald J. Trump (ongoing), covid, Russia (ongoing). Today we are told that, without draconian action planned and executed by experts, the planet is in danger of a climate apocalypse. A fear that arises spontaneously is, usually, a natural response to the perception of danger; fears that follow in quick succession are almost always orchestrated. Philosophers dispute whether zero is a number, and mathematicians say that it can be treated as a number, but when politicians invoke it, zero is neither a number nor a non-number: it is a portent that life is about to get a lot nastier. The most obvious results of such alarums—Net Zero, Zero covid, Year Zero—are suspended parliaments, rule by decree, internet censorship, skewed data, corrupted science, and a poorer society, especially for the already poor.
Perhaps psychologists can tell us how many fears it is possible for a person to entertain at any one time. Are fears separable in the mind of an individual, or does one fear flow out of, or into, another? Are fears compoundable? If fears are plural, is one fear more likely to have greater salience than the rest? I do not know the answers to these questions. I do know, and so do readers, of the media’s role in amplifying some risks and minimizing others. Between the Sixties and the end of the Cold War, the risks of nuclear confrontation were abundantly debated, pro and con. Academic conferences, special issues of journals, newspaper columns, and television broadcasts aimed to educate citizens about nuclear deterrence, nuclear winter, and the differences among battlefield, tactical, and strategic nuclear weapons. Cinema and television dramatized the effects, both imagined and real, of nuclear war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occasioned yearly, highly publicized vigils across the world. The vigils continue. The publicity does not.
I have been suggesting that the issue of international peace did not so much vanish from the minds of the post-Eighties generation as it was displaced by new fears that beset men and women alike. But peace politics among women is, today, also supplanted by developments within feminism, by currents that divide it, make it more inward-looking, and threaten to overwhelm it. No cultural movement is more dangerous to feminism, and to women in general, than fissionism.
By “fissionism” I refer to a movement that is antithetical to the foundational feminist enterprise, namely, that of promoting the independence, life-chances, and safety of girls and women and of creating a peaceful world for men and women alike. Fissionists, by contrast, are shapeshifters of both sexes whose most conspicuous feature is their aggressive denial of stable sexual identities: everything is deemed fungible, including the category of “woman.” The charity Stonewall is fissionism’s Manhattan Project.
Fissionist declarations are as unmoored from biological reality as they are from historical experience and inherited wisdom. Words are considered mere power pragma: they mean what fissionists want them to mean, today, tomorrow, and whenever. Translating them back into recognizable form requires patience. What fissionists call a trans woman is really a man pretending to be a woman, whereas a trans man is really a woman pretending to be a man. The success of fissionism in capturing modern institutions—hospitals, Congress, the courts, advertising agencies, the entertainment industry, official media, the police—is nothing short of momentous. A woman who enters a hospital to deliver a child might find herself classified as a “birthing person,” as if her sex had nothing to do with the medical care she and her child need. An aspirant Supreme Court justice declares, under questioning from senators, that the definition of woman is beyond her competence because she is not a physician. Miss Netherlands 2023 is a man. So is the college-champion American swimmer who goes by the name of Lia Thomas. “The destructive character,” observed the culture critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, “knows only one watchword: make room.” Fissionism is the destructive character writ large.
The peace women of the Eighties identified themselves as women, heterosexual or lesbian. They focused their efforts on peace. They mobilized for peace as women, united as women. They marched in alliances with men. They would have been astonished to learn that lesbians can possess a penis, as fissionists insist they can, or that men pretending to be women are entitled to occupy prison cells or shelters that were once sexually segregated for the safety of women. Peace women of the Eighties would have been equally bewildered at being called “sexual racists” for opposing these extraordinary ideas. Fissionists have no time for peace when they are constantly warring with women. One cannot expect non-fissionist feminists to make international peace a priority when they are daily embattled by people who libel and assault them. A peace movement powered by a significant female constituency cannot be expected to arise when the descriptor “female” is a more visceral bone of contention than the risk of a nuclear war in Europe.
Irony shadows all human projects. For decades, Western feminists claimed that reality is a “construct,” a metaphor which implies that social relations are as malleable as putty, or as easily assembled as Legos, and that the human person can, in effect, be fabricated and re-engineered. Fissionists simply extended this idea to biology. For decades, too, radical feminists have attacked masculinity, deriding it, denying it, and socializing boys to be a caricature of girls. Unmanly men do not make strong allies. They are just the sort of men to pivot to fissionism.
It was a basic intuition of peace women that the ultimate disgrace of war is that the people who provoke, fund, and vaunt it typically take no responsibility for the carnage they sow. Often, in the disastrous aftermath, they move up to more lucrative and prestigious positions. The organs that should call these people to account and to shame rarely do. More often they do the reverse: provide cover. Karl Kraus (1874–1936), the Viennese author of The Last Days of Mankind (1922), once took the measure of these distortive instruments when he coined the term Journaille, a hybrid of the German word Journalismus and the French canaille (rabble), to describe the reporters of the Neue Freie Presse, Austria’s paper of record. The paper’s editors and reporters, Kraus lamented, hid significant facts from public view, ignored or libeled dissident perspectives, avoided complexity, wrote in platitudes, and channeled, instead of interrogating, war propaganda. They were the avatars and servants, not the critics, of the powerful.
Like the war in Ukraine today, the First World War was one of artillery and attrition, a meat-grinding war. Kraus saw its shattered remnants begging on the streets of Vienna. In his poem “Kriegswelt,” he records the moral stature of those politicians and media pundits who sent—and cheered and lied—soldiers to their doom, and their families to ruin:
They spent their lives in laughter and play
While ours were put on the line.
They got themselves drunk with blood in the day
And chased it at night with wine.
They feasted and threw their weight about,
Considering boredom a crime;
And when their supply of people ran out,
They turned to killing time.
Peace movements cannot make peace. Only states can do that. The best that peace movements can do is to alert the world to the horrors of war and to demand that all reasonable efforts be made to avoid it and, if begun, to stop it. Time and again, women have been at the forefront of these efforts. Their disappearance as a cohesive force is not just women’s loss but the world’s.
