Feminist diplomatic history highlights the diversity of women’s perspectives toward matters of armed conflict and gender equality. Research on the interwar era, for instance, shows that British and American activists in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) advanced a range of pacifist and feminist positions. Female diplomats representing the United Kingdom and the United States in the same period disagreed both with the WILPF and with each other (see Beers 2016; McCarthy 2016; Nash 2016).

This chapter probes an intellectual stream that contrasts with feminist historiography: namely, homogeneous or essentialist thinking about women as a group. This tradition can be discerned in older as well as contemporary accounts of war versus peace as well as gender equality. In each domain, writers have for centuries been tempted to generalize about roughly half of humanity and to draw conclusions that, while often tidy and sometimes comforting, hold limited value as guides to empirical analysis.

Our discussion explores in broad, impressionistic terms the large canvas of women, war, and feminism. Given space limitations, we present a selective summary of the main lines of argumentation and evidence. Tracing the history of thinking about women as a unified group permits us to show how contemporary writers—including influential social scientists—adopt perspectives not unlike those of classical and liberal political theorists. In particular, we argue, recent accounts that portray female decision-makers as averse to using armed force unless pressured by men around them to do so mirror narratives of the ancient Greek polis, as well as later studies in Western philosophy and psychology. Each of these strands relies on a (p.32) dichotomous view that identifies one side of the gender divide with norms of pacifism, serenity, and remoteness from sites of battle and contestation, and the other with a decidedly belligerent and combative public repertoire.

Figure 2.1. Time magazine cover from May 1999, with lead article by Walter Isaacson titled “Madeleine’s War.”

©1999 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from TIME Magazine and published with permission of Time Inc. Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

At the level of popular culture, a May 1999 issue of Time magazine neatly illustrates the durability of older views. The cover photograph in Figure 2.1 shows an intently focused US secretary of state speaking by field telephone from a NATO military base in Germany. The secretary wears a brown leather flak jacket with the bright insignia of US Air Forces in Europe. Above the insignia spills a bold headline in cautionary yellow type: “Albright at War.” The text of the lead story, excerpted in the following, signals a clear (p.33) discomfort with Madeleine Albright’s role in international conflict—thus reinforcing the imagery on the magazine cover:

The Kosovo conflict is often referred to, by both her fans and foes, as Madeleine’s War. In a literal sense, of course, that’s not true these days. Now that it’s become an armed conflict, she plays a supporting role to the President, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, and the military brass. But more than anyone else, she embodies the foreign policy vision that pushed these men into this war. And she is the one most responsible for holding the allies—and the Administration—firm in pursuit of victory. (Isaacson 1999, 1)

For general readers, the article promises to explain how one woman could cause so many powerful men to go to war in an obscure corner of Central Europe. For gender and politics scholars, the deeper puzzles are at least as fascinating. Why the unease with Albright’s role? How should she have responded to events in the former Yugoslavia?

Closely connected to treatments of conflict are expectations that waves of feminist mobilization in Western industrial systems cause female leaders to carry forward pro-equality positions. While this view contradicts a construction of women as pacific souls who hover above public debate, the two approaches share important commonalities. Among the most troubling is a tendency to ignore crucial nuances and variations, many of which are well documented on the public record, in an effort to reach spare, often reductionist conclusions.

Drawing on a variety of sources, this chapter casts doubt on notions that women leaders will “act for” women in general by defending either (a) typically feminine perspectives that evoke images of heavenly seraphs floating above the terrain on which men fight, or (b) progressive feminist outlooks as champions of a particular set of social movement demands. Boldly stated, the assumption that female elites will echo a specific view is questionable because the weight of evidence shows that women as a group are not uniformly or even overwhelmingly antiwar or pro-feminist. Instead, data pointing toward a polyvalence or diversity of attitudes are too fulsome to support sweeping generalizations about substantive representation.

Our discussion posits that views toward conflict and gender equality are best understood with reference to a spectrum of opinion, defined as a dynamic continuum that embraces widely disparate positions. We revisit theories of democratic representation that were introduced in Chapter 1 in order to reconcile the carrying forward of public claims by leaders with the varied views of citizens. The concluding section of this chapter presents a normative argument that in liberal democracies, it is appropriate for (p.34) political executives to defend views resembling those of the citizens who brought them to public office. We return to theories of normative representation in Chapter 7, where we compare the track records of women leaders.

This chapter opens with a look at how theoretical texts from the classical period and following present the relationship between gender and military force. Our attention then turns to the empirical evidence, where we show how interpretations of women as antiwar are highly contestable. The next parts consider left/right and feminist positions; they demonstrate why definitions of the substantive representation of women as “acting for” left and pro-equality interests are particularly problematic in research on contemporary American politics.

Women and Conflict

The claim that women are less inclined toward the use of force than men can be traced at least as far back as classical Greek philosophy. Women, like slaves, were not full members of the ancient political unit known as the polis. Instead, women’s sphere was defined as the motherly, nurturing space of the private household—a quiet refuge distant from the rowdy public forum in which men debated and resolved civic issues.

This divide forms the basis for a foundational public/private dichotomy in political theory as well as practice, one that imputes specific qualities to each side of the split. Classical philosophers elevate the importance of the public domain in which strong, articulate men advance their positions on matters of general consequence and, in some cases, exchange physical blows in order to defend those views. While women’s role is viewed as weaker and, in most respects, inferior to that of men, its grounding in self-sacrifice and care for others yields some compensation—namely, a persistent association of the private sphere with serenity, caring, and moral virtue (see Elshtain 1974, 456, 461–466; Okin 1979, 86).

In The Republic, Plato advances an innovative, relatively egalitarian treatment of gender and politics that broadly foreshadows socialist theories of the nineteenth century and following. According to his scheme for an ideal polity, the family and private property are eliminated to the point that some women are allowed to join a ruling caste known as the guardians. Although female guardians are seen as physically weaker than their male counterparts, they benefit from the same educational and political opportunities as men, including preparation in mathematics, philosophy, and martial arts. While Plato at no point considers female fighters to be the equal of males, he recommends investing in their military training in order (p.35) to provide greater protection for a city under threat. After reintroducing private ownership in The Laws, Plato reverts to traditional understandings of women’s domesticity, purity, and dependence on men (see Okin 1979, 69).

Given Plato’s inconsistency on this point, the beginnings of a firm public/private divide are generally dated from Aristotle (see Elshtain 1974, 454–455; Okin 1979, 86). In The Politics, women’s reproductive, sexual, and caregiving activities are central to the life of the family—which Aristotle presents as an institution essential to the existence of the polis, but not an integral political structure. The dominant male in his rendering participates fully in society by circulating openly in public life. By contrast, the subordinate female is effectively contained, confined to what Elshtain (1974, 455) terms “a lesser association, the household.” The private family thus forms for Aristotle a bounded domain such that women’s contact with the public realm is entirely mediated by male relations who hold full citizenship.

Defining women according to the terms of a “natural” association with the private sphere and its innately apolitical, system-supporting qualities proved extremely durable over the centuries. During the late medieval period, this approach found expression in the work of Christine de Pisan, among the most prolific European writers of the era. She remarks on “the pacifying potential of ‘the good princess,’ ” given that “women, who are physically weak and timid, are therefore more inclined to make peace and avert wars” (de Pisan, as quoted in Fraser 1988, 7).

Liberal philosophers expanded this depiction of dichotomous spheres. In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau lays out each woman’s responsibility to promote social and political stability, albeit in a quiet, behind-the-scenes manner. He charges her as follows:

It is your task to perpetuate by your insinuating influence and your innocent and amiable rule, a respect for the laws of the State and harmony among the citizens. . . . Continue, therefore, always to be what you are, the chaste guardians of our morals, and the sweet security of our peace, exerting on every occasion the privileges of the heart and of nature, in the interests of duty and virtue. (Rousseau 2005, 8)

Rousseau treats women’s activity in the home as highly purposive, both to create new generations and to inculcate within them a sense of ethical values as well as deference to the status quo. Rousseau’s arguments helped to foster a long-standing conceptualization of women as preternaturally peaceful and, as discussed later in this chapter, politically conservative.

According to Elshtain (1995, 4), Western thinkers since the eighteenth century built on these precedents by assigning women a collective image (p.36) as “beautiful souls.” The framing of females as private creatures defined by little more than an innocent maternal identity meant that political philosophers could conceive of a partial citizen best typified by the virginal Madonna of Renaissance portraiture: calm, modest, life-giving. By comparison, theorists present men as society’s bellicose combatants, the “just warriors” who would typically end rather than offer life. In Elshtain’s (1995, 4, 166; italics in original) words,

We in the West are the heirs of a tradition that assumes an affinity between women and peace, between men and war, a tradition that consists of culturally constructed and transmitted myths and memories. . . . Popular understandings of female givers, male takers, loft upward, becoming narrative truth for many, including contemporary scholars, male and female, and (some) feminists. Women and men’s wars; we are reassured. Whatever women may finally do once wars have begun, women don’t start them. Men are the first cause, the prime movers, of war.

This cultural legacy shaped understandings of peace and conflict long after the passing of the classical Greek polis. Using force in crisis situations, for instance, remains closely linked not to women, but rather to men. As Steans (2006, 48) notes, “If historically war has been associated with men and masculinity, peace has long historical associations with women and the ‘feminine.’ ”

In an unusual twist in the history of ideas, Anglo-American suffragists adopted the “beautiful souls” concept in the late 1800s and following. Social or maternal feminists proposed what became a popular claim that female voters would, en masse, purify the public realm. They maintained that the best way to end international conflict, along with domestic challenges (including corruption at city hall), was to apply the cleansing hand of maternal experience to the sordid mess known as politics. Anti-suffragists, by contrast, condemned what they saw as a loss of moral virtue inherent in extending women’s influence beyond the private household (see Buechler 1986; Holton 1986; Kraditor 1965; Lemons 1973; O’Neill 1971; Phillips 2003).

Efforts to apply women’s moral suasion to the civic realm underpinned not only social feminism, but also much of the broader Progressive project. As abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1967, 281) explains, the purpose of female political engagement is “to introduce into politics that superior delicacy and purity which women manifest in family life.” As time passed, this perspective proved less threatening to members of the general public and more conducive to success in legislative debates than equal rights (p.37) claims—which cited fundamental justice as the main rationale for enfranchisement (see Kraditor 1965; O’Neill 1971).

Divisions between public and private, masculine and feminine, remained in use long after the Progressive era. As Stoper and Johnson (1977, 193) write, the claim “that women are superior to men and therefore the world would be a better place if women were given their full share of power and public influence” remained alive and well through the late twentieth century. Whether expressed in radical feminist prose or more mainstream National Organization for Women (NOW) platforms, movement activists of the 1960s and following believed compassion and lack of egoism made females “saviors on whom the salvation of the world depended” (Stoper and Johnson 1977, 193). Feminist historian Joan Kelly echoed these views in expressing confidence that in the future, “women will struggle for a social order of peace, equality and joy” (Kelly, as quoted in Fraser 1988, 7).

What distinguishes second- from first-wave perspectives, however, are heightened demands that women’s attributes infuse not just Western electorates but also the corridors of power. For example, Gloria Steinem (1970, 1) calls for heightened involvement by women as a counterweight to the belligerent masculinity most men carry into public life; she recommends increased female engagement as a promising route toward “tempering the idea of manhood into something less aggressive and better suited to this crowded, post-atomic planet.”

Most notably, the idea that women carry particular features that reduce the likelihood of human conflict permeates multiple academic studies. In her text titled In a Different Voice, psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982) posits that girls grow up with an understanding of strength as emanating from interpersonal ties and, in particular, from showing emotional care and concern toward other people. This socialization process means that the lives of girls and women are shaped directly by expectations of nurturing and protective behavior. By comparison, male socialization experiences typically stress individual autonomy and physical prowess—a background that not only permits but also justifies the use of force to defend self and community (Gilligan 1982).

Philosopher Sara Ruddick (1995) extends Gilligan’s position by pressing generalizations about care and nurturing beyond the category of women who bear and care for children. Ruddick claims that the maternal values girls learn while growing up are imprinted upon them for decades to come, and create ripple effects through the life cycle. For Ruddick, women without offspring absorb norms that emphasize empathy and caring for other people such that they become indistinguishable from females who experience motherhood.

(p.38) In a volume called The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker (2011) asserts that increasing numbers of women leaders will make the world a more serene place. He grounds this claim in concepts of maternal protection and, in particular, a view that holding motherly roles throughout history encourages females to favor calm, stable conditions in which to nurture the next generation. Pinker maintains that clear incentives have led women to avoid the alternative path—which is an evolutionary dead end of seeing sons and daughters traumatized, wounded, or killed in war.

To be sure, scholars are far from unanimous in endorsing a “beautiful souls” thesis. Elshtain (1995) lays out its limits from the perspective of political philosophy, showing how dominant tropes that portray women as pacifist and men as belligerent are not just simplistic, but also often inaccurate. International relations analysts cite the damaging consequences of this approach for the conduct of global affairs. Ann Tickner (2001), for example, questions the tendency of antiwar groups to evoke traditional stereotypes. She maintains that the extensive use of maternal imagery by international peace movements “allows men to remain in control and continue to dominate the agenda of world politics, and it continues to render women’s voices as inauthentic in matters of foreign policymaking” (Tickner 2001, 60; see also Enloe 1989; Peterson and Runyan 2010, 243–255).

Support for “Beautiful Souls” Arguments

If we set aside these critiques for a moment, it is important to acknowledge a large body of evidence that supports views of women as more pro-peace and less supportive of violent approaches to conflict. Since the beginnings of survey research and stretching through the first decades of the current century, a sustained flow of data shows women in the United States and most other Western countries are less likely than men to endorse military intervention to solve international disputes, and less supportive of higher spending to finance those conflicts. As the editor of Public Opinion Quarterly summarizes this durable, cross-national trend, women respondents typically lean toward “the antiforce option” at the same time as men choose the opposite (Smith 1984, 385).

While it is difficult to compress eighty years of poll data into a concise overview, the overwhelming pattern dovetails what emerged after the Roper Organization entered the field in early 1936. The firm asked Americans, “Would you be willing to fight, or to have a member of your family fight, in case a foreign power tried to seize land in Central or South America? Would you be willing to fight, or to have a member of your family fight, in case the Philippines were attacked?” In response to the first probe, (p.39) about 22 percent of men and 12 percent of women answered yes. On the second, roughly 30 percent of men and 17 percent of women replied in the affirmative (Smith 1984, 386).

A year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roper found that 56 percent of men versus 42 percent of women in the United States believed “the time has come for us to take strong measures against Japan” (Smith 1984, 387). Between 1950 and 1953, polling by both the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Gallup organization reported that American women were more likely than men to believe the United States had erred in sending troops to Korea, with differences reaching as high as 15 percentage points (Smith 1984, 388).

During the Cold War, Roper asked whether the United States should “adopt an even tougher policy dealing with the Russians,” a proposition with which 60 percent of men, compared with less than half of women, agreed in 1960 (Smith 1984, 388). The next year, Gallup pressed Americans to “suppose you had to make the decision between fighting an all-out nuclear war or living under Communist rule—how would you decide?” Among men, 87 percent chose the “better dead than Red” option, while three-quarters of women expressed that choice (Smith 1984, 388).

Beginning in 1964, the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center posed the question of whether “we did the right thing in getting into the fighting in Vietnam or should we have stayed out?” American men were significantly more likely than women to support military involvement, in some polls by as much as 15 percentage points. Gallup asked respondents during the same period to categorize themselves as hawks “if they want to step up our military effort in Vietnam,” or doves “if they want to reduce our military effort in Vietnam.” In 1968, half of males versus less than a third of females described themselves as hawks (Smith 1984, 389).

This same pattern held when pollsters queried Americans about conflict in general, hypothetical military interventions, or levels of defense spending. According to 1975 Gallup results, women were far more likely than men to view war as “an outmoded way of settling differences between nations” (52 percent vs. 37 percent). Conversely, higher percentages of men saw war as still necessary (55 percent vs. 38 percent; Smith 1984, 389).

Surveys also found that American women were less willing to send troops to defend any number of allies in the event of a communist attack. In the case of West Germany, 37 percent of men versus 18 percent of women were willing to send troops (Smith 1984, 389). For Japan, 24 percent of males but only 9 percent of females approved of boots on the ground. For Canada, two-thirds of men versus less than half of women were prepared to defend the northern neighbors (Smith 1984, 390). When asked annually between 1973 and 1983 whether the United States was spending too much, too little, (p.40) or “about the right amount” on military preparedness, men were consistently more likely to say expenditures were too low (Smith 1984, 390–391).

By 1980, results showing women’s consistently lower support for defense spending and stronger endorsement for “butter” expenditures to underwrite domestic social programs began to hold significant electoral consequences (see Baxter and Lansing 1983; Conover 1988; Shapiro and Mahajan 1986). Multiple studies examine why Ronald Reagan won roughly 10 percent less support among female than male voters in 1980, and why Reagan garnered about 8 percent less in his 1984 bid (Bolce 1985; Chappell 2012; Frankovic 1982; Gilens 1988). Gilens (1988, 43, 44; italics in original) concludes that views about foreign policy and especially military expenditures were the central reason:

The single most important factor in explaining gender differences in approval of Reagan is defense spending, which accounts for a 7.8 point gap between men and women. Adding respondents’ evaluations of Reagan’s handling of relations with the Soviet Union to attitudes toward defense spending shows that the military/foreign policy dimension alone accounts for a 10.8 point gender gap in overall approval. . . . Women are more liberal than men on these military/foreign policy issues, but more important, holding liberal attitudes produces a dramatically greater deficit in approval of Reagan among women than it does among men.

In short, Gilens (1988) finds that a robust gender difference held measurable implications for presidential contests in the 1980s.

Research since the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–1991 reinforces these findings. Eichenberg’s (2003, 112) assessment of nearly five hundred survey questions administered between 1990 and 2003 reports less support among American women for the use of military force for any purpose, largely because females are “relatively more sensitive to humanitarian concerns and to the loss of human life” than men. Haider-Markel and Vieux (2008) reach similar conclusions in their evaluation of American attitudes toward harsh interrogation tactics in the wake of 9/11. They find that women were less willing than men to endorse techniques that require detainees to be naked, face sexual humiliation, or have their heads held under water. During the Obama years, polls show that more than 60 percent of men and half of women supported a no-fly zone over Libya (CNN 2011). A Pew Research Center (2013) survey found that 39 percent of men and only 19 percent of women endorsed US military strikes against Syria.

These results resemble data from many other Western countries. British polls conducted between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, for example, reveal an (p.41) average gender difference of nearly 9 percent in approval for the use of force in a variety of hypothetical scenarios (Clements 2012). In subsequent years, men in the United Kingdom offered consistently stronger support than women for military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, with differences as high as 19 percent in the case of a 2003 Pew Global Attitude Survey on intervention in Iraq (Clements 2012, Table 1). These trends are far from unique, since studies by Pew as well as Harris/Financial Times show differences in the 10 percent or higher range in Spain when surveys asked about intervention in Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan in 2010, and Libya in 2011; and in France, Germany, and Italy on involvement in Libya in 2011 (Clements 2012, Tables 1 and 2).

These survey findings parallel an extensive history of peace activism by women’s organizations around the world. If we confine ourselves to North America and Western Europe during the past century, then a clear pattern emerges: many of the same campaigners who dedicated their energies to women’s rights causes were high-profile advocates of alternatives to violent conflict. For instance, American members of what became the Women’s Peace Party drew 1,500 demonstrators to a silent antiwar parade in New York City in 1914 (Stoper and Johnson 1977, 198). The party drew well-known feminists such as Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt (see Alonso 1993). In the postwar decades, Eleanor Roosevelt and Alva Myrdal campaigned for both disarmament and women’s rights (see O’Farrell 2010, 132; Stiehm 2005, 266). In the spring of 2015, Gloria Steinem co-chaired the International Women’s Walk for Peace, a group of activist women who dressed in white to cross the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. In Steinem’s (as quoted in Sang-Hun 2015) words, the campaigners’ trek across the border was “a trip for peace, for reconciliation, for human rights.”

A Canadian group known as Voice of Women formed in 1960 with the aim of promoting nuclear disarmament and world peace. Members included University of Toronto metallurgist Ursula Franklin, whose research showed how atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons led to an accumulation of radioactive substances in children’s teeth. Voice of Women (VOW) pressed for greater Canadian independence from US foreign policy, and endorsed the country’s withdrawal from NATO. In 1972, VOW helped to establish the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, a Canada-wide umbrella organization for second-wave feminism (see Macpherson and Sears 1976; Roberts 1989).

Greenham Common was the site of one of the largest peace mobilizations of the postwar period. From an initial effort by about 250 women to protest the Thatcher government’s decision to station Cruise missiles at a British military base, the scale of activism increased to the point that one (p.42) Embrace the Base event in 1983 drew 70,000 demonstrators. The peace camp formed in the early stages of the protest continued until 2000, by which time the missiles were withdrawn and activists worked on creating a historic site to commemorate their campaign (see Harford and Hopkins 1984; Hipperson 2005).

A third stream of evidence that women are pro-peace follows from the careers of prominent female politicians. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman member of the US House of Representatives, opposed not only America’s entry to World War I but also the declaration of war against Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor (Woerhle 1995, 243). Ellen Wilkinson, among the earliest women to take a seat in the British House of Commons, stood out in Labour Party circles in Manchester as a vocal critic of World War I (Perry 2013, 223). The first female member of the Canadian House of Commons, Agnes Macphail, participated in international disarmament efforts and worked to close military academies (Crowley 1991, 147–148). More recently, Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar—founders of a pro-peace women’s coalition of Catholics and Protestants—won seats in the Northern Ireland parliament (Cowell-Moyers 2014, 69, 72).

A fourth source comes from research on the relationship between women’s legislative numbers and the probability of armed conflict. As discussed in Chapter 1, multiple analyses find that female parliamentary representation is consistently, and often to a statistically significant degree, associated with less likelihood of violent state action (see Caprioli 2000; Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Koch and Fulton 2011; Regan and Paskeviciute 2003). Furthermore, as Koch and Fulton (2011) report, numbers of women legislators are inversely related to levels of defense spending in Western liberal democracies.

Patterns showing lower approval among women for the use of force have created measurable unease in some quarters. Neoconservative author Francis Fukuyama (1998, 35), writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, worries 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’s key concern is not conflict among stable democracies—which he views as unlikely given that these countries share common legal norms and an emphasis on individual rights.

Rather, Fukuyama’s (1998, 36) anxiety emanates from a feminized Western leadership facing “those parts of the world run by young, ambitious, unconstrained men.” He cites the specific threats posed by “states in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia with young, growing populations, led mostly by younger men” (Fukuyama 1998, 39). Those countries confront (p.43) what he describes as shrinking Western societies, with a preponderance of small families unwilling to lose their single child to war, dominated in electoral terms by older women who oppose the use of force. According to Fukuyama, Western states seeking order in unstable times should embrace muscular and masculine foreign policies, rather than risk-averse, feminine approaches.

Contrary Evidence

Feminist historians argue that public/private divisions were irrelevant to the lives of women leaders even in the early modern era, and question stark dichotomies between women/peace and men/war (see Fraser 1988; James and Sluga 2016). Fukuyama (1998, 36–37) admits that as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher refused to surrender in the face of armed force. This section considers a wide range of material that casts doubt on women’s presumed aversion to conflict and support for pacifism. It concludes that sweeping generalizations are best avoided.

Significant sources in Western culture deviate sharply from “beautiful souls” expectations. In the visual arts, Caravaggio’s painting of Judith beheading Holofernes reminds us of a dark biblical scene in which the Israelite widow wields the sword of her victim, focusing her gaze downward as blood splatters from his open neck. The expansive canvas shows us that Judith has visited the Assyrian leader in his tent, encouraging him to drink fine wine to excess. Once Holofernes collapses in a stupor, Judith decapitates him in order to ensure the defeat of his troops and the victory of her people. Holofernes’ painful expression of surprise and fear contrasts with Judith’s distant, remote look and her sense of wonderment as to how her hand has committed murder. Off to the side of the composition is the wrinkled, curious face of Judith’s maid—a visage that contrasts starkly with the smooth complexion of the young Israelite.

Folklore contains many examples of actors who contradict the beatific concepts of docility and pacifism. Like Judith, forceful women in Celtic myths are often portrayed in highly sexualized terms, typically as seductresses. Fraser (1988, 11) observes that women who scheme for power are typically presented as voracious, licentious, and “preternaturally lustful” vixens. Given that they engage in public battles, these characters are denied the virtuous trappings of the beautiful soul. Yet the very existence of their stories suggests a far from sealed gender divide.

Social science data reinforce the case against a binary split between peaceful, risk-averse women and bellicose, risk-taking men. Surveys of (p.44) mass publics show that considerable proportions of North American and European women were and remain sympathetic to assertive military action, just as they demonstrate that men were not and are not uniformly belligerent. For instance, Smith’s (1984, 388) review of attitudinal data shows that when Americans were asked in 1960 how the United States should deal with Russia, 46 percent of women advocated “an even tougher policy than we have now—even if it means taking some risks.” While this result is lower than the comparable level for men in the same survey (60 percent), it nevertheless represents the modal category for female respondents. Twenty years later, the presidential election of 1980 was widely seen as a watershed event that demonstrated weaker support among women for hawkish Republican candidates (see Bolce 1985; Frankovic 1982; Gilens 1988). Yet roughly half of female voters that year cast ballots for Ronald Reagan (see Davis 1991, 415; Roper Center 1980).

More recent data from the Pew Global Attitude Surveys show that many European women endorsed continued deployment of their country’s military forces in Afghanistan. As Clements (2012) reports, 47 percent of British and Spanish, 46 percent of Italian, and 43 percent of French women questioned in 2010 favored having their armies remain in place until the situation stabilized. Although support for the same view among men was as much as 10 percentage points higher (in Britain, France, and Spain), the commitment of European women to retaining troops in Central Asia was substantial nearly a decade after the attacks of 9/11.

Research on terror suspects demonstrates that high percentages of women approved of forceful options. Haider-Markel and Vieux (2008, 31) find that 54 percent of American women questioned in 2004 endorsed not permitting detainees to sleep, 45 percent favored keeping a hood over suspects’ heads for long periods, and 42 percent supported bombarding them with loud noise for long periods. Although approval for each tactic was higher among men, Haider-Markel and Vieux (2008, 27–28) emphasize that “not all men support harsh techniques and not all women oppose harsh techniques.”

Like public opinion data, patterns of social movement activism reveal that women’s mobilization was not always consistent with efforts to promote peace. In the run-up to World War I, for instance, the National American Woman Suffrage Association offered the US government the loyal patriotic services of its two million members—a group that massively overshadowed the size of the Women’s Peace Party (Elshtain 1995, 186). In the same period, suffragists in the United Kingdom threw stones at windows in government buildings, set off a bomb outside the home of cabinet minister David Lloyd George, and slashed a stereotypically feminine (p.45) portrait (the Rokeby Venus by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez) on display in London’s National Gallery (see Phillips 2003, 255–256).

During the late 1960s and following, radicals such as Ulrike Meinhof and Bernardine Dohrn directed well-known, often violent protest factions. West German women who participated in the Baader-Meinhof Gang set fires in Frankfurt department stores to protest the Vietnam War (Rosenfeld 2010, 357–358). Dohrn and others who participated in the Weather Underground and its splinter organizations bombed the US Senate and detonated explosives in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., to condemn military actions in Vietnam (Churchill 2007, 31–33). In 1970, civil rights and prison rights advocate Angela Davis purchased guns used in a violent courtroom hostage-taking in California, which resulted in four deaths. Davis was charged with conspiracy in the case but eventually was acquitted (Shaw 2009, 101–102).

McGlen and Sarkees’ (1993, 1995, 2001) research on US foreign policymakers also disconfirms claims about female pacifism. Interviews conducted in 1988 with about eighty men and women in senior State Department and Pentagon positions found that males and females held similar views on the use of force (McGlen and Sarkees 2001, 131; see also Holsti and Rosenau 1988, 288). Variations that did emerge reveal more hawkish views among women. In the Defense Department, for example, “women were more likely to disagree on the need to enlist the support of the United Nations in settling international disputes and to reject the desirability of giving foreign aid to poor foreign nations. Similarly, the women in Defense accepted the Cold War view that revolutionary forces are not nationalistic but rather controlled by the Soviet Union or China” (McGlen and Sarkees 2001, 131).

After dividing their sample between career civil service and political appointees, McGlen and Sarkees (2001, 142) report that careerists in the State Department were the most dovish and most unlike appointees from both streams at the Pentagon. Their analysis reveals widely varied attitudes among senior foreign policy officers, even during a conservative Republican presidency. As McGlen and Sarkees (2001, 142) conclude, “One thing is clear: The women in the foreign policy process, at least during the Reagan administration, were not a homogeneous group. There was no women’s view adopted, even in part, by all women.”

In terms of elected politicians, some parliamentarians who opposed World War I, including Ellen Wilkinson in the United Kingdom and Agnes Macphail in Canada, later endorsed decisions by their countries to enter World War II (Perry 2013, 220; Crowley 1990, 168). As noted in Chapter 1, quantitative studies report disparate results concerning conflict for (p.46) parliamentarians versus political executives: women’s presence at the latter level serves to increase the severity of violence, while legislative presence exerts the opposite effect (Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Koch and Fulton 2011).

The limits of a beautiful souls argument are arguably clearest in accounts of women who go to war. Goldstein (2001, 127) concludes his extensive review of this literature as follows:

When women have found their way into combat, they have generally performed about as well as most men have. Women in combat support roles, furthermore, have had little trouble fitting into military organizations, and have held their own when circumstances occasionally placed them in combat (especially in guerrilla wars). They can fight; they can kill. . . . Most striking are the very rare historical cases in which larger numbers of women were mobilized into combat—a substantial number of the healthy, strong young women in a population. In the nineteenth-century Dahomey Kingdom and the Soviet Union of World War II, women made up a nontrivial minority of the military, and clearly contributed to the war effort. They were a military asset which, when mobilized, increased the effectiveness of the military in combat, in a few cases even turning the tide of battle.

Goldstein’s account of the experiences of women under fire is consistent with Plato’s initial view that training female guardians would benefit a besieged city.

What about women who command armies into battle? Fraser (1988) writes that although relatively few assumed this role in the centuries from Cleopatra to Boudica to Thatcher, their simple existence casts doubt on conventional assumptions. She reports that those who reached top positions did not hesitate to employ violent force when they faced serious threats and when other options failed; most conducted the wars they entered with courage, ferocity, and strategic insight. By contrast, ample evidence exists that some males failed entirely as “warrior kings.” Goldstein (2001, Chapter 5, esp. 299–301) describes the travails of men who were seen as “wimps” or “sissies” precisely because they lacked typically masculine leadership skills.

In short, propositions about women’s aversion to the use of force tend not to stand up to close empirical scrutiny. Although some data can be adduced to support “beautiful souls” claims, the historical record offers compelling grounds for rejecting binary ideas about gender and war/peace. Whether we consider patterns of public opinion, protest engagement, or action in combat, the idea of a preternatural aversion to violent conflict (p.47) fails to describe the attitudes and behaviors of significant proportions of women.

The next sections trace questionable generalizations about ideological and, in particular, feminist preferences.

Left Ideology and Feminism

Theories dating from classical antiquity, as reviewed earlier in this chapter, tend to associate men with the public world and women with the private realm. Rousseau’s elaboration of this dichotomy assigns to females a specific and decidedly conservative task, one which holds significant consequences beyond each household: to defend the prevailing social order. Expectations following from Rousseau suggest that once women obtained the right to vote, they would endorse the status quo at the ballot box.

This view was confirmed for many decades in Western Europe—much to the chagrin of socialist theoreticians and party leaders who proffered multiple reasons for female voters to embrace political change. In fact, their understanding of women as logical partners in the progressive struggle contrasts directly with arguments advanced by Rousseau about women’s conserving essence. In the paragraphs that follow, we summarize ideas and then data concerning gender, ideology, and feminism.

Utopian socialist Charles Fourier was among the earliest writers to posit an inextricable link between women, on one side, and progressivism and feminism, on the other. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Fourier presents human advancement, including sexual liberation, as directly related to improvements in the status of women. In his view, wider educational and occupational opportunities constitute the basis of generalized social progress. Fourier endorses the creation of communities called phalanstères in which a quarter of the female population voluntarily takes responsibility for domestic work, and where children are raised cooperatively to ensure women’s economic independence (see Altman 1976).

These proposals presaged Frederick Engels’s work (using earlier notes from Karl Marx) on the reorganization of domestic life under communism. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, first published in 1884, Engels merges older notions of a natural attachment to the family unit with utopian concepts of community. As he explains,

To emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labour and (p.48) restricted to private domestic labour. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. (Engels 1970, 221)

Engels’s version of the public/private divide thus eliminates private property, shares domestic work among women living on communes, and includes both genders in a socially organized system of production.

The rise of suffrage movements brought the question of whether women would endorse tradition or radical change into the domain of realpolitik. European parties of the left tended to support enfranchisement at the level of ideas, but dreaded the actual impact of female voters. By contrast, the Catholic Church and its allies were averse to changing gender roles, yet recognized the likelihood that as electors, women would support parties of the center and right (see Bashevkin 1985).

The initial decades of suffrage produced results favorable to conservative interests. On average more religious than males, females were vigorously courted by confessional parties including the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) in France and the Christian Democrats (CDU) in West Germany (see Goguel 1952; Klausen 2001). British Conservatives established a unit known as the Primrose League to recruit women, who over time became the backbone of the extra-parliamentary party (see Campbell 1987). Research indicates that the postwar dominance of the German CDU and the British Tories was directly attributable to loyal female support bases (Klausen 2001, 216).

Yet patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and secularization gradually undermined the advantage enjoyed by right-of-center parties. Younger cohorts of women who worked for pay were more open to “New Left” appeals of the late 1960s and following. As early as 1968, French surveys found that one-third of women voters overall and 46 percent of those under the age of thirty identified with the left. The passing of older generations, combined with concerted efforts by socialist groups to recruit female supporters, activists, and candidates, meant that by 1978 more than half of France’s women voters and 62 percent of those under the age of thirty endorsed left parties (Bashevkin 1985, 94).

This trend crossed national boundaries. As Inglehart and Norris (2000, 459) demonstrate, women in six out of nine OECD countries tended by the 1990s to be “more left-leaning” than men—with younger females who came of age in the period of second-wave mobilization the most progressive, and older women the most conservative population segment. Similarly, in the United States, “women moved towards the Democrats since 1980 while (p.49) men moved toward the Republicans on a stable, long-term, and consistent basis” (Inglehart and Norris 2000, 442).

Moreover, cross-national survey data from the 1970s and following show that support for pro-equality positions on such matters as legal rights, abortion, child-care provision, and equal pay formed part of a broadly left-of-center orientation that endorsed greater government intervention in the economy and higher levels of social spending (see, e.g., Conover 1988; Nevitte and Gibbins 1991). Most notably, younger women whose formative years corresponded with the peak of movement mobilization were found to be not only more progressive, but also more feminist than other citizens (Inglehart and Norris 2000).

These patterns help to explain the willingness of gender and politics scholars to define the substantive representation of women as elite advocacy for progressive, pro-equality claims. Considered even in narrow empirical terms, however, the conflation of women, left ideology, and feminism remains problematic for at least three reasons. First, as Inglehart and Norris (2000, 456) note, public opinion results show that women in many—but not all—advanced industrial systems tend to be more left-of-center than men. Gender differences in some nations are insignificant, while in cases such as Finland, women are more conservative than men.

Even in countries where females as a group are more progressive than males, considerable percentages of women nevertheless hold conservative views. As reported earlier, about half of American women who voted in the 1980 presidential election supported Ronald Reagan (Davis 1991, 415; Roper Center 1980). This finding is particularly significant given a Republican campaign platform that rejected feminist positions on constitutional equality rights, reproductive choice, and affirmative action (see Melich 1996).

A second difficulty involves the political coherence of organized feminism. Boldly stated, women’s movements of both the first and second waves experienced deep internal schisms. Militant suffragists in the United Kingdom who chained themselves to the railings at the prime minister’s residence and attacked a painting in the National Gallery were far more radical than moderate campaigners who held orderly public meetings and lobbied parliament for electoral reform. During the same period, rifts in the United States over constitutional equality show that first-wave activists fundamentally disagreed among themselves as to whether group interests rested in reinforcing traditional gender roles or challenging them. Serious internal divisions re-emerged in the 1960s and following, when second-wave streams of radical, socialist, and liberal feminism developed divergent agendas, and when cogent critiques from race, class, and sexual orientation (p.50) perspectives challenged the priorities of affluent, white, straight women (see, e.g., Collins 1991).

Beginning in the 1970s, organized anti-feminism staked out a competing claim to represent the interests of American women—one which echoed attempts during the suffrage era to create a countermovement. In the period of World War I, that effort drew about 350,000 members to an organization opposed to enfranchisement (Marshall 1991, 51). Backlash mobilization against the second wave was less visible and less influential in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom (see Bashevkin 1998, 45, 168), but in the United States the reality of a dissident conservative mobilization posed a third problem for analysts (see Critchlow 2005; Klatch 1987; Schreiber 2008). Simply put, it signaled that efforts to define the substantive representation of women as the carrying forward of left and feminist views offered at best a partial and, at worst, a distorted understanding of gender and politics.

How are variations in left/right ideology, within feminism, and between feminism and anti-feminism relevant to the study of political executives? We demonstrate in the following sections that each set of distinctions limits our ability to identify a bounded repertoire that constitutes “acting for” the category of women, to the point that no single cluster of claims-making activities since enfranchisement can be said to equate with “pro-women” representation. In fact, if we confine our review for reasons of space to the United States, it becomes clear that individual women in public life can defend any number of perspectives toward matters of left and right as well as group interests, and still can be considered representative in democratic theory terms of a palpable strain of female public opinion.

Splits over Feminism

Internal divisions during the first wave of feminist activism offer a helpful starting point for empirical discussion, since they helped to shape public attitudes in subsequent decades. The US movement contained two major streams that held competing understandings of women’s status. On one side, social or maternal advocates affiliated with the Progressive movement proposed a range of policies to restrict child labor and impose controls (known as protective legislation) on women’s paid employment. The latter typically barred female workers from night shifts, as well as jobs that involved heavy lifting or exposure to substances that could harm reproductive organs. Trade unions in sectors including the garment industry defended these initiatives as necessary limits on the already extreme exploitation (p.51) of women—especially young girls and immigrants—in sweatshops (see Lemons 1973).

By contrast, equal rights feminists elevated the cause of pure justice above social reform and opposed sex-specific labor laws. In their place they promoted laissez-faire solutions that did not treat women either as weaker than men (and hence in need of special protection) or as irrevocably tied to caring roles. For Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, the best route toward justice rested in constitutional language known as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a short and simple clause first proposed in 1923 that remained controversial for decades afterward (see Kraditor 1965; O’Neill 1971).

While it is hard to gauge the resonance of traditional versus role-challenging ideas among the general public, research suggests that both streams exerted measurable influence. According to Rothman (1978), a strong social consensus through the 1950s viewed the primary place of the American woman as the domestic realm, and her priorities as the well-being of children and family. Yet early polling results also reveal the ripple effects of equal rights arguments. Sears and Huddy (1990, 251) report that “[i]n the 1930s and 1940s women were substantially more supportive than men of liberalized roles for women, particularly their suitability for paid work and political office.”

At least initially, second-wave mobilization seemed to resolve the tension between traditional and role-challenging ideas in favor of the latter. The intellectual origins of activism in the 1960s and following rested in two change-oriented texts: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, first published in French in 1949, and Betty Friedan’s diagnosis of “the problem that has no name” in The Feminine Mystique, released in 1963. Many second-wave recruits were young, progressive women with backgrounds in civil rights, student rights, and anti–Vietnam War activism (see Davis 1991). A sense that their contributions to those struggles had been ignored or trivialized provided valuable common ground for the consciousness-raising gatherings in which Jo Freeman and thousands of others participated (see Freeman 2013).

Yet established and more politically moderate formations dating from first-wave feminism, such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women (AAUW), remained active and proved integral to the legislative reform agenda of the National Organization for Women (NOW) after its founding in 1966 (see Davis 1991, 147). Moreover, older groups that focused on participation in mainstream institutions became springboards for many female legislators. In Jeane Kirkpatrick’s (1974, 44) sample of state house members, “about forty percent were (p.52) active in the League of Women Voters; affiliation with this group played a key role in the political careers of several.” Lawmakers reported that they relied heavily on campaign volunteers from the League and the AAUW (Kirkpatrick 1974, 87, 89).

Once a series of US Supreme Court decisions deemed protective legislation to be unconstitutional, leading trade unions dropped their opposition to the ERA. They worked with NOW on pressing for a successful vote in Congress in 1972 and for state-level ratification. The fact that NOW allied with trade unions to alter the foundational law of the American polity underlined the left positioning of second-wave mobilization. Moreover, the assumption behind ERA advocacy in the second wave was unequivocally progressive: the regulatory and enforcement powers of government would be harnessed to the cause of gender equality (see Davis 1991, 61–64; Kenney 1992).

Anti-communist crusader Phyllis Schlafly claimed that the ERA threatened not just free and unfettered markets, but also conventional family organization. In the early 1970s, she launched a strong grassroots campaign against feminism that merged religiously based opposition to abortion and reforms to family law with a laissez-faire stance against expanding the state’s reach. Schlafly saw the ERA as imposing a Soviet-style regime in the United States, one in which the small-state libertarianism she favored would be trumped by a large, heavy-handed, and highly bureaucratized government bent on making men and women equal (see Critchlow 2005).

Schlafly’s vision of a moral order grounded in traditional Judeo-Christian values, with men as heads of household and women as wives, mothers, and keepers of the domestic realm, was thus tied to a rejection of political progressivism. Her influence was pivotal in practical terms, since she served as the lead catalyst for a conservative countermovement that placed American feminism squarely on the defensive (see Bashevkin 1998; Critchlow 2005). In the pitched battle between NOW and Schlafly’s STOP ERA network, which reached its crescendo between 1972 and 1982, anti-feminists managed to slow and then reverse the momentum of pro-equality activism.

Attitudinal Divisions

Splits within pro-equality interests, as well as between movement and countermovement, help to explain why even at the peak of second-wave activism, American women were far from solidly behind either feminist (p.53) or left positions. In an influential study of the major legal rights demand of US campaigners, Jane Mansbridge (1986, 27) concludes that NOW and its allies faced members of a general public who were ready to endorse the ERA “only so long as it did not change much in practice.” Moreover, even though females were more likely than males to say they supported Democratic candidates and identified with the Democratic Party during the 1980s (Sears and Huddy 1990, 252), a higher proportion of women who voted in 1980 were opposed to or didn’t have an opinion on the ERA than supported it (New York Times/CBS News exit poll, reported in Mansbridge 1985, 166).

Subsequent studies indicate that a trend toward greater egalitarianism that unfolded in the American public through the 1970s and 1980s had largely stagnated by the mid-1990s. Cotter, Hermson, and Vanneman’s (2011, 261) analysis of data from 1977 through 2008 finds “quantitative evidence that the cultural attacks on feminist equality have had their impact on public consciousness.” In particular, earlier shifts toward greater openness to female politicians and support for mothers working for pay reversed themselves in a decisive way.

Research on political elites further undermines the idea of a solidly pro-feminist consensus. Kirkpatrick (1974, 166) reports that about a fifth of the state lawmakers in her 1972 sample identified with radical strands of second-wave feminism. In her words, “Approximately 60% of the legislators expressed opposition to the women’s liberation movement and many criticisms were leveled against the women’s liberation movement” (Kirkpatrick 1974, 164). Lawmakers described the movement as “hostile to marriage and the family,” “extremist in its criticisms and its proposals,” and “partisan and sectarian” because it was too left-wing and overly wedded to the Democratic Party (Kirkpatrick 1974, 165). Kirkpatrick (1974, 166–167; italics in original) describes deep schisms among state legislators as follows:

Disagreements about the women’s movement within this group of legislators illuminate the problem of uniting women in a single, political action group. Beyond agreement on some few, very basic beliefs about women’s rights and women’s place, these women see issues as Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, easterners or westerners. They did not at all agree with the proposition advanced by various speakers at the conference [at Rutgers University where the research was conducted] that as women they should support a particular child care bill, or health program, or welfare scheme. To most these seemed “political” questions, to be resolved by political philosophy and the local context rather than by sex.

(p.54) According to Kirkpatrick (1974), differences among legislators were so deep as to void any expectation that elite women formed a unified category.

Many scholars after Kirkpatrick used the concept of substantive representation to frame the question of whether legislators “act for” other women by carrying forward a feminist policy agenda (see, e.g., Swers 2002; Thomas 1994). Although initial studies reported a positive association between numbers of female politicians, on one side, and attention to women’s issues and pro-feminist policy outcomes, on the other, later accounts reveal a far less automatic translation (compare, e.g., Saint-Germain 1989; Thomas 1994; with Cowell-Meyers and Langbein 2009; Osborn 2014).

Research on substantive representation tends to identify party and political ideology as more significant than gender. Berkman and O’Connor (1993) report that Democratic state lawmakers were considerably more likely to challenge restrictive abortion policies than Republicans. Swers (2002, 263) finds that “[p]arty affiliation is one of the most reliable predictors of legislative behavior” in the House of Representatives. Carroll (2002) shows a growing ideological gulf between right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats in state legislatures. According to Bratton (2002) and Osborn (2012), Democratic women in US state houses were more active pro-equality advocates than their Republican counterparts. Bratton (2002, 138) concludes her assessment of gender and race in state-level politics as follows: “the main point of this article is to emphasize the diversity that exists within groups, and thus it is important to recognize that among all groups there is disagreement over what is in a group’s interests.”

The impact of political ideology is also discernible in the track records of political executives. Before becoming secretary of labor in the George H. W. Bush administration, Lynn Martin was a Republican member of the House of Representatives who refused to pay her full dues to the Congresswomen’s Caucus. Martin explained that she “ ‘believes in working from the inside’ and ‘has always been one of the boys.’ She ‘hates the term women’s issues and wants to focus on people’s issues’ ” (Martin, as quoted in Bashevkin 1998, 183). As UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher rejected “the strident tones we hear from some Women’s Libbers” and grew tired of having “to push my way through protesting feminists chanting, ‘We want women’s rights not a right-wing woman’ ” (Thatcher, as quoted in Bashevkin 1998, 173).

In short, like characterizations of all females as averse to the use of force, depictions of the group as consistently attached to left, pro-equality positions are not sustainable. This last point is especially important in research on the United States, where organized anti-feminism has exerted measurable political influence since the 1970s. As argued in the next (p.55) section, these empirical problems with the conventional treatment of women, war, and feminism exist alongside major theoretical limits.

Returning to the Conceptual Level

Studies of substantive representation tend to compare the actions of political elites with respect to conflict and gender equality, on one side, with public attitudes toward those issues, on the other. Our discussion to this point has introduced a broad range of empirical materials that illustrate diverse, often deeply divergent views toward war and feminism among women. These data suggest that useful propositions about the actions of female leaders are unlikely to follow from attempts to generalize about the extremely varied half of humanity which they are presumed to represent.

Moreover, there exist multiple theoretical reasons for doubting prevailing interpretations of women, war, and feminism. First, logic cautions against seeing large societal patterns as valid or reliable bases for predicting individual action. At the heart of any leap from the general to the specific is the potential for ecological fallacies that generate false or misleading expectations (see Idrovo 2011; Robinson 1950). For instance, the tendency for females as a group in most Western democracies to oppose the use of military force offers no guarantee that each individual woman, let alone a specific foreign policy leader, will hold that opinion or act in accordance with it. Similarly, the fact that women in the United States and some other democratic systems are on average more left in their partisan preferences than men, and that some women have deeply engaged in feminist activism, provides no basis for assuming that female members of a political executive will be either progressive or feminist.

Second, political philosophers including Pitkin (1967, 63) warn against mirror or “proportionalist” assumptions that decision-makers with particular demographic features will act for a larger group with whom they share such characteristics. According to Pitkin, the link between descriptive and substantive representation is suspect based on studies of legislatures. In her words, “We tend to assume that people’s characteristics are a guide to the actions they will take and we are concerned with the characteristics of our legislators for just this reason. But it is no simple correlation; the best descriptive representative is not necessarily the best representative for activity or government” (Pitkin 1967, 89).

Elite theorists offer a third basis for questioning whether group background is a useful predictor of political action. As Robert Michels (2001) argues in Political Parties, first published in 1911, the German Social (p.56) Democratic party effectively socialized younger members into existing norms. His “iron law of oligarchy” posits that the longer new recruits are involved in a well-established organization, the more likely they are to resemble their predecessors and uphold that structure. Quoting Michels (2001, 127, 131), “The permanent exercise of leadership exerts upon the moral character of leaders an influence which is essentially pernicious. . . . As the led becomes a subordinate leader, and from that a leader of the first rank, he himself undergoes a mental evolution, which often effects a complete transformation of his personality.” Michels rejects the tenets of mirror theory, in Putnam’s (1976, 142) words, because “demographic representativeness is neither necessary nor sufficient for responsiveness.”

Feminist institutionalism offers additional reasons to doubt the substantive tie between elites and mass publics. Scholarship suggests that when more women are elected to a deliberative body with overwhelmingly male members, new legislators do not easily transform either the policy priorities of the institution or its “rules of the game,” including hours of work, seniority practices, styles of debate, and norms of socializing that men have built up over successive generations (see, e.g., Mackay 2008; Poggione 2011). As Kathlene (1998, 197) observes with respect to US state houses, “gender affects more than just the individuals who occupy the legislature. The institution itself is gendered through the rules, norms, and expectations of how business should proceed. In our society, this gendering is also inextricably linked to power” such that those voicing disparate perspectives inside gendered institutions are frequently marginalized. By viewing female decision-makers as structurally constrained in their ability to carry forward or represent, institutional theories conceive of citizen beliefs as tangential to the actions of elites.

A final intellectual stream, postmodernist philosophy, interrogates an even more basic point: that is, the utility of fixed, dichotomous gender categories. According to Judith Butler (1990, 139, 140), gender identity is best defined as “a corporeal style, an act, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning . . . a stylized repetition of acts.” Poststructuralists view gender as malleable rather than rigid, since it is constructed within the context of particular times and cultures. Conventional approaches are thus problematic because they adopt singular, universal ideas of masculinity and femininity that occlude within-gender differences by assuming all members of the category “women” perform gender in the same ways and share similar experiences—in defiance of significant sources of variation. Since poststructuralists reject arguments grounded in fixed, unchanging, (p.57) and ahistorical binaries, they examine gender identity in ways that resist conceptual as well as methodological determinism.

In particular, poststructuralists reject a homogenizing essentialism that lumps together holders of a single identity category. Defined in this context as the assumption that all women share a universal, “irreducible, unchanging” identity (Fuss 1989, 2), essentialism rests at the heart of constructions of pacific woman (as contrasted with fighting man) or, alternatively, left feminist woman (versus conservative anti-feminist man). Butler (1990) draws particular attention to social class and race as important lines of distinction within gender categories that deserve careful attention.

Taken together, these conceptual streams underline the importance of considering women, war, and feminism in ways that break with traditional theorizing. In particular, they suggest that empirical findings concerning a diversity of women are best complemented by a conceptualization of ideas and actions along a wide spectrum that captures the varied possibilities of “acting for” representation. With reference to the political conflict behavior of cabinet ministers, this continuum could potentially stretch in the contemporary United States from committed pacifism and anti-militarism at one polarity to extreme bellicosity and pro-armed interventionism at the other. On matters of gender equality, we can conceive of a possible distribution of perspectives from strongly pro-feminist and progressive at one end to committed anti-feminist and conservative at the other.

Our review of the extent of variation among American women, in particular since the 1970s on matters of gender equality, demonstrates the potential range of a normatively good repertoire for political elites; that is, women leaders can be seen to carry forward the disparate views of members of the general public that are arrayed along both spectrums. As long as those “acting for” behaviors resemble in approximate terms the views of citizens who brought a given political executive to office, they constitute normatively good representational repertoires in democratic theory terms.

Our discussion now turns to the foreign policy contributions of four US leaders. We return to considerations of normative political theory in Chapter 7.