Women and War

WOMEN AND WAR Madeleine Bunting GUARDIAN September 20, 2001 While the media's response to the destruction in America has been deafening , the voices ofwomen have grown strangely quiet. Not for over a generation has an event so transfixed the world. Everywhere, on buses, at corner shops, offices, school gates, and hairdressers , men andwomen seem able to think and talk ofonlyone thing— the terrorist attacks on America. Yet, what is rapidly becoming clear is that in a crisis like this, many ofthe gender differences between men and women are thrown into sharp relief. The most striking ofthese is the different attitudes towards a military attack on Afghanistan as revealed in recentpolls. The Guardian's icm poll on Tuesday showed a remarkable consistency ofattitudes across age and political affiliation; the one big gap was between men and women: 74% ofmen supportair strikes and only 58% ofwomen. Whereas 55% ofmen were prepared to contemplate war, 32% ofwomen opposed any military action ifit meant war. This isn't a one-off. Polls in both the 1990 Gulf war and the 1999 Kosovo war showed the same gap. In 1990, 61% ofmen and only 39% of women thought Britain should agree to using British troops to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait; nearly half of women (49%) opposed military action. In Kosovo, the gap between men and women narrowed after atrocities against Kosovan Albanians were broadcast: 76% ofmen were in favour ofair strikes and 62% ofwomen. A few days later, after nato mistakenly bombed a convoy ofrefugees, women's supportforair strikes fell sharply to 56% while men's held steady. Equally intriguing is how women have been wiped off many newspaper pages and television screens. Despite significant advances in the number ofwomen in the media, the crisis has exposed how many ofthem are in the "softer" areas [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 309-11]©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 309 ofnews such as features and domestic stories. In a major crisis such as this, virtually all the reporters have been men. An analysis of the first five pages of five newspapers (the Sun, Daily Mail, Guardian, Daily Telearaph, and Times) on Thursday and Friday, September 14 and 15, bore this out. The Sun had no women writing on the crisis on either day compared to their writing abouta third ofthe front of the paper on the previous Friday. Likewise, the Mail on the Thursday, but by the Friday, it had shifted to roughly 50/50 across the front pages and comment with a strong human interest emphasis. This was still a steep decline; in comparison the previous Friday was dominated by women reporters (2,703 words to men's 874) and comment pages were written entirely by women. TheTimesand the Guardian showed a similar sharp drop in womenwriting ; the former had no women in the first five pages or on the comment page on Friday and the Guardian had only one (1,215 words) which represented a sharp drop from the previous week, when women wrote 5,850 words. Only the Telecjraph recorded little change in the number ofarticles —it was consistently low—although the word count doubled, almost all ofwhich was accounted for by men. This rough snapshot confirms what editors were becoming increasinglyaware of, but attempts to find women to write were often frustrated. It wasn't just a shortage of female diplomatic correspondents—it was across the board. One female novelist, when approached to write a piece, said she was too upset to do so, but male novelists had no such hesitations . The consequence is a curious, lopsided, mutated version of the event in which men have dominated the debate, shaping our understanding ofwhat happened, how it happened, and what should happen next. Women have been marginalised in a waywhich would have seemed barely possible only two weeks ago. This is reinforced by the impression thatvirtuallyall the people involved in handling this crisis are men. Itis men who perpetrated this violence and men who organise the response. The power structure is exposed at such times, as the token women slide into the background, leaving war to men. Condoleezza Rice seems to be the...