In Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Cynthia Enloe explores the gendered impacts of militarisation and war, arguing for the need to adopt a feminist lens on international relations and conflict studies. The book shines vital light on the often-erased experiences of women in conflict and its aftermaths, though it lacks a deeper analysis of the systemic forces shaping militarism and gender inequality, writes Elaine Coburn.

Twelve Feminist Lessons of War. Cynthia Enloe. University of California Press. 2023.

In her fifteenth book, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, the American political theorist Cynthia Enloe continues to explore her lifelong concern, the militarisation of men and women. She asks her usual, still necessary, question: “Where are the women?”. 

Enloe’s answers are wide-ranging because “militarisation” is a phenomenon that “intertwines ideas, relationships and practices” (136). Militarisation includes war, but it begins before wartime and continues after a conflict is over. The use of military metaphors for sports games, in defence funding for academic research and in the idea of soldiering as exciting and attractive, even glamourous, are all examples of militarisation. Militarisation affects women and men, normalising conflict and war, but in different ways.

We must change our understanding of who is worth listening to during wartime by carefully attending to what women have to say about their experiences.

The experiences of conflict and war are gendered, too. In wartime, Enloe observes, women who are at home are expected to take on more unpaid labour, whether family farming or learning to make meals with less access to food and fuel. Men in wartime are more likely to be paid for their work, whether directly employed in the military or not. Women who suffer wounds from exploding mines are counted as civilian casualties, while men who are maimed while actively serving may be given medals and celebrated as heroes. 

“War is hell” (32, italics in original), Enloe insists, but it is a gendered hell. This may now seem self-evident, but that is only because Enloe’s scholarship has, for decades, been at the forefront of feminist efforts to take up conflict, war and international relations (IR), as if women matter. Since her pathbreaking, Bananas, Beaches and Bases Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, published in 1990, Enloe has insisted that we understand the world better and more completely when we apply a feminist lens that makes women visible, not least in conflict.

There is little prestige in centring women, in IR scholarship – or in journalism, policy and activism – since a feature of patriarchal relations is that what men do and think matters, but women’s actions and ideas do not. Countering such persistent, if contested, tendencies to associate prestige with a focus on men and their lives, Enloe invites us, once more, to mobilise our “feminist curiosity”. We must change our understanding of “who is worth listening to during wartime” (100), by carefully attending to what women have to say about their experiences.

In contexts as different as post-war England and Kuwait, women have fought against the reassertion of patriarchy […] They have carved out spaces, often small and badly funded, to have their experiences of war remembered

International relations are made vivid, in Enloe’s account, in and through descriptions of women’s everyday experiences in conflict. We learn about Algerian women peasants who, in the fight for independence from France in the 1950s and early 1960s, played a critical role: “Guiding, hiding, feeding, carrying messages, buying arms, watching the French army moves and taking arms from those who had died” (71).

We hear about Iraqi women, in 2003, in a neighbourhood beauty salon, who talk about how they will protect their daughters during the American invasion (100). We learn about a Syrian mother in a refugee camp in Jordan in 2016, who laments her daughters being married off while still children, and her unsuccessful efforts to challenge her husband – and her daughters – in that decision.

We must “pa[y] close attention” to women, Enloe urges us, because their stories tell us about “how the world works” before, during and after wartime (2). The telling is not easy, because women’s experiences have been euphemised. When Korean women were described as “comfort women” to men in the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II, the realities of their sexual enslavement were invisibilised and denied.

Against such evasions, Enloe insists that we name women’s experiences accurately, so that we better understand war and conflict. She writes:

“Systematic wartime rape” and its companions “rape as a weapon of war” and “sexual slavery” have enabled us to see war more accurately for what it is.” (31, italics in original)

Naming sexual violence against women as a systematic crime – not as a woman’s individual misfortune or normalising it as “comfort” for men soldiers – is necessary to take action to prevent rape as a weapon of war and to hold men accountable for their actions, after a conflict.

She gives us international relations from the bottom up, showing us that war is about concrete relationships and immediate choices about family, work, childcare, and reproductive health. All of these circumstances and choices are shaped by inequalities between men and women before, during and after conflict.

When we are careful in attending to women’s experiences and how we name them, Enloe argues, “We begin to see patterns where once we saw only chaos” (31). In contexts as different as post-war England and Kuwait, women have fought against the reassertion of patriarchy, instead seeking “to convert women’s wartime sacrifices and contributions into expanded political rights” (122). They have carved out spaces, often small and badly funded, to have their experiences of war remembered, creating museums and memorials that centre women. One of the feminist lessons Enloe teaches is that if wars and conflict are gendered, so is the aftermath.

The usefulness and vitality of Enloe’s scholarship are as evident as ever, in her familiar insistence that women matter to war and to international peace. So are the shortcomings of her work. Critics of Enloe’s scholarship will regret the emphasis on personal moral imperatives, when this focus comes at the cost of a sharper analysis of the broader forces that shape militarisation and women’s lives.

Describing a conference in the 1990s, Enloe recalls the general surprise that, in the United States Army, “Black women are 48% of all enlisted women” (58). Enloe remarks that these women “had made their own calculations about their chances in a racialized civilian workplace” (58). She does not go further in analysing why the military may be attractive to Black women.

Instead, the lesson that Enloe draws is about the feminist need to beware of “the co-opting allures of militarism” (59) – this is the absolute, moral imperative. Yet right relationships – notably, the need for greater gender and racial equality outside the military – are given short shrift, when this context surely helps explain why Black women find the military comparatively attractive for employment.

Enloe’s powers lie elsewhere, when she evokes women’s everyday experiences of conflict and when she recalls the difficult, practical work required to build an international feminist peace movement. She gives us international relations from the bottom up, showing us that war is about concrete relationships and immediate choices about family, work, childcare, and reproductive health. All of these circumstances and choices are shaped by inequalities between men and women before, during and after conflict.

If the insights in Twelve Feminist Lessons of War are not new to anyone already familiar with Enloe’s work, they remain salutary. This includes her insistence that understanding and sympathy are not enough. When we learn about the horrors and violence of war, “It is not enough to be ‘sad’” (167). We must listen to and learn from each other. This leads to the final lesson: in the feminist struggle for justice and for peace, we all have work to do.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: sametkoprubasi on Shutterstock.

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