War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (review)

Professor Goldstein has written an impressive and ambitious book, complete with an accompanying web site. He attempts to use research from more than a half-dozen academic disciplines to examine the question of how gender has impacted the nature of warfare and how war has in turn impacted the development of gender roles. More specifically, he asks why warfare has, with only the rarest of exceptions, been an exclusively male activity. Some societies have even been willing to perish rather than allow their women to become soldiers. Explaining this seemingly counter-productive situation is the main goal of the book. As a total product, War and Gender is both fascinating and occasionally frustrating, especially for the historian.

Goldstein correctly rejects outright the idea that women cannot be good soldiers. But if women can be competent warriors, why have they been consistently excluded, especially since the exigencies of warfare both alter normative gender perceptions and require mobilization of civilian resources? Goldstein poses five primary hypotheses for women’s exclusion from warfare: sexist discrimination despite women’s historical success as combatants; gender differences in anatomy and physiology; innate differences in group dynamics; cultural construction of tough men and tender women; and men’s sexual and economic domination of women.

Goldstein concludes that biological differences, often asserted by those who aim to keep women from combat, are in fact relatively minor. He argues that no genetic predisposition to aggression or warfare exists in males. On average, of course, men are larger, stronger, and more inclined toward rough play as adolescents. Nevertheless, some women are stronger and larger than some men and women are constitutionally stronger than men, so the biological explanation alone is obviously insufficient. He finds no evidence that biological or genetic differences either predispose men to war or predispose women to peace. Moreover, modern warfare has tended to diminish, though not eliminate, the importance of brawn in favor of brains. Logically, then, women should have become more involved in warfare over time, yet this process has occurred only very sparsely and slowly.

More important than biology, he argues, cultural molding has been remarkably consistent in using warfare to make boys into men. Culture also makes women into supporters of war, through their roles as wives, mothers, and sweethearts. Gender provides the “handy means” necessary to convince men to participate in combat by “linking attainment of manhood to performance in battle” (331). Cultural molding, plus the small innate biological differences noted above, explain the near-total exclusion of women from warfare. Goldstein also rejects explanations of “male bonding.” Small-group bonding, in and of itself, is not a gendered activity. Neither does it necessarily require the exclusion of women.

Biology and culture, he argues, are not to be seen in opposition, but as carefully linked. Thus, presumably, the consistency of cultural forms across space and time. Goldstein productively moves the discussion far beyond the distracting “nature versus nurture” debate, assuming along the way that culture can be every bit as immutable a force as biology. Biology might, he argues, tend men toward war more often than women, but it cannot explain the almost total exclusion of women from war.

War and Gender is exhaustively researched, but the depth of the research is itself a distraction. The book contains a great deal of research into animal and primate behavior, some of which illuminates Goldstein’s larger arguments, but it is hard to see how an analysis of the behavior of wrasse and cichlid fish enhances our understanding of gender and warfare in human societies. Similarly, Goldstein relies too heavily on comparisons between humans and primates like stump-tailed monkeys and bonobos. His arguments for the primacy of culture in explaining women’s exclusion from warfare stand at odds with comparisons of the biological makeup of humans and other animals.

For the historian, the book poses a few additional challenges. Goldstein is more interested in history as a set...