Masculinity, Citizenship, and the Making of War Author(s): Nancy C. M. Hartsock Source: PS, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 198-202 Published by: American Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/418780. Accessed: 28/02/2011 08:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at. http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at. http://www.jstor.org/action/showpublisher?publishercode=apsa.. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PS. http://www.jstor.org
Masculinity, Citizenship, and the Making of War Nancy C. M. Hartsock* University of Washington Citizenship is not one of the issues political scientists hotly contest.1 Yet perhaps we have failed to recognize the profoundly controversial issues involved in citizenship. One of the most difficult for the modern citizen is, of course, whether the classical ideal of "high citizenship" remains a possibility. But the ideal of ruling and being ruled will not be my concern here.2 Rather, my concern will focus on the fact that citizenship has historically been a very exclusive social category. Many groups have struggled to attain the status of citizen. In the United States to be poor, black, or female, has for the most part meant automatic disenfranchisement. Citizenship, then, concerns the question of one's position in the community of which one is a part. It is, of course, not the only determinant by far and is itself dependent on other factors. Yet given these considerations, teaching about citizenship must raise the ethical issues which, if made as prominent as they deserve to be, would indeed make citizenship the subject of controversy. In this short essay, I can address only one aspect of these issues-that which centers on the relation of gender to citizenship. Although today many of us attempt to speak about citizenship in gender-neutralanguage, the connections of citizenship with manliness, established so long ago, still influence both thinking about citizenship and the conduct of rulers and ruled. Thus, the familiar gender gap on issues of peace and war should be seen as a symptom of deeper issues about politics, problems with a history traceable over several thousand years of Western history, problems defined by the overlay of citizenship, manliness, and military capacity. The events of the fall of 1983 in Lebanon and Grenada marked a recent context in which these connections were evident. As I followed the accounts of both military situations, I was particularly struck by Vice President George Bush's statement as he appeared on the evening news standing in the rubble of the marine barracks in Lebanon: "We're not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorists shake the foreign policy of the United States."3 It recalls a statement about Lyndon Johnson attributed to Bill Moyers: "It was as if.. he were saying, 'By God, I'm not going to let those puny brown people push me around..., 4 The sentiments sound strikingly more * Nancy C. M. Hartsock is associate professor of political science at the University of Washington. She is the author of Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, and is working on a book tentatively titled, The Barracks Community in Western Political Thought. 'Nannerl Keohane quite correctly made this point in "The Status of a Citizen," News for Teachers of Political Science, No. 30 (Summer, 1981), 19. 2For a useful discussion of this issue, see Richard Flathman, "Citizenship and Authority: A Chastened View of Citizenship," News for Teachers of Political Science, No. 30 (Summer, 1981), 9-10, 16-18. See for a discussion of the ways other aspects of social life were used in redefining citizenship J. G. A. Pocock's remarks to the Workshop on Citizenship of the Russell Sage Foundation (February 23-24, 1978). 3October 27, 1983. 4See Marc Feigen Fasteau, "Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in Foreign Policy," in Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon, eds., The Forty-nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1976), p. 192. 198 PS Spring 1984
appropriate to a street corner confrontation than to a reasoned discussion of foreign policy. Athough today many of us attempt to speak about citizenship in gender-neutral language, the connections of citizenship with manliness, established so long ago, still influence both thinking about citizenship and the conduct of rulers and ruled. One may ascribe such statements to the heat of the moment, but the connections between masculinity and military valor have also been spelled out by General Robert Barrow, the man who was until recently the commander of the U.S. Marines. He states: War is a man's work. Biological convergence on the battlefield [by which he means women in combat] would not only be dissatisfying in terms of what women could do, but it would be an enormous psychological distraction for the male, who wants to think that he's fighting for that woman somewhere behind, not up there in the same foxhole with him. It tramples the male ego. When you get right down to it, you have to protect the manliness of war.5 These connections are not simply idiosyncratic to the men cited but have received support from many contemporary sources. David Halberstam has documented the several ways Lyndon Johnson's concern about his manliness influenced his conduct of the Vietnam War.6 And masculinity named as such is still important in war.7 I contend that these statements represent an important strand of thinking about citizenship. This strand of argument, moreover, has managed to survive both the challenges presented by Christianity in the West and the transformation of the content of public life brought about by the rise of capitalism. War, and the masculine role of warrior-hero, have been central to the conceptualization of politics for the last 2500 years. Moreover, the political community constructed by the ancient warriorheroes and carried down to us in the writing of political philosophers bears uncomfortable resemblance to a particular type of male community-one whose most extreme form is represented by the military barracks of Sparta, where the male citizens lived until well into adulthood. In this community, military capacity, civic personality, "As interviewed by Michael Wright, "The New Marines: Life in the Pits," The San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 1982. edavid Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), pp, 531-532, cited in Fasteau, p. 191. 7Excerpt from the Americas Watch Report on Guatemala, May, 1983," New York Review of Books, June 2, 1983 with several letters and replies March 1, 1984 note that at the unconfirmed but detailed report of the massacre at Parraxtut, members of a civil patrol from a neighboring town were gathered together and told they must be prepared to demonstrate their masculinity by killing all the men in the community. The women were then divided into two groups-young and old, the latter to be killed and the former to be raped. See also on this point R. Eisenhart, "You Can't Hack It Little Girl: Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training," Journal of Social Issues 3:13-23; R. Lifton, Home From the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 15, 244; Judith Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Walter Ong, Fighting for Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Susan Danziger Borchert, "Masculinity and the Vietnam War," Michigan Academician (Spring, 1983); Alice Duer Miller, "Why We Oppose Votes for Men," Poster, 1915, reprinted in RadicalAmerica, XV, 1 and 2 (Spring, 1981), 147. 199
Masculinity, Citizenshlp, and the Making of War and manhood were coterminous. Women were excluded from this community, yet deeply shaped its theoretical construction through their presence in mythic or symbolic form. Thus, the political community came to be defined in opposition to dangerous, disorderly, and irrational forces, forces significantly often characterized as or associated with the female. War, and the masculine role of warrior-hero, have been central to the conceptualization of politics for the last 2500 years. The ancient Greeks developed the fundamental theoretical features of the barracks community inhabited by warrior-heroes. The hero emerges most quintessentially in the Iliad in the person of Achilles, "the best of the Achaeans," a man whose purpose is the achievement of undying fame whether through glorious victory or glorious death. The problem of dangerous and disorderly female forces emerges in the reworking of ancient (archaic) materials in fifth century Athens. From this perspective, both the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the Republic of Plato can be read as efforts to accomplish a reconciliation with female forces. In the former case, the Furies, avengers of matricide from the darkness beneath the earth, are persuaded to accept a subordinate role in the polis. In the latter, Plato attempts to subordinate the private (and generically female) world completely to the public world, to dissolve the household into the polls.8 Aristotle in the Politics attempts to resolve the tension between the gendered public and private spheres by putting households in a properly subordinate place to the public sphere. Thus, the realm of freedom and leisure in which citizens pursue political activity and war depends on a realm of necessity and work populated by women, slaves and laborers. Aristotle's thought codifies an additional transition: the warriorhero whose power depended on his valor in battle gives way to the citizen whose power depends on his valor in the rhetorical battle of politics. As the Roman empire replaced the Greek city states, the Roman concept of virtus took over many of the connotations of the Greek arete, the moral excellence essential to the good citizen. And with it came the image of the goodness of the citizen as a capacity for heroic (especially military) action. The change from Roman Republic to empire, the increasing importance of Christianity, and the eventual breakdown of the classical world led to important changes in the understanding of the political community. Yet despite the ways the distinctions between public and private, male and female worlds, shifted ground and were overlaid with new understandings, some of the most fundamental aspects of the warrior-hero operating in a barracks community remained in place. One encounters the warrior-hero in some surprising places: Augustine, for example, argues that the martyr plays the role of the Christian hero in the City of God. The breakdown of the classical world created the theoretical problem of how to understand change; it led to a deification of the female figure of Fortuna. It was she who 8In this case, I would argue, the female forces which threaten the political community take the covert form of bodily appetites, with the body being systematically associated with the female in the Platonic dialogues. See, on this point, E. V. Spelman, "Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views," Feminist Studies VIII, 1 (Spring, 1982). I should note that I do not believe Plato really meant to include women in the guardian class in a serious way, but rather was forced into an inclusion because of his aristocratic loyalties. See on this point Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 124. For an opposed view see the appendix on this topic in Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 200 PS Spring 1984
spun the wheel of fortune; her whims could make a man a prince or could destroy him. She represented a female force who operated through the creation of random disorder. Because theorists such as Machiavelli, who looked to the classical world for models, held that the collapse of the Roman Empire was due to a loss of its warrior virtue, the solution to the problems of disorder presented by Fortuna was a reassertion of manliness or virtu. (The Latin root in question is vir, i.e., man.) As Machiavelli states the fundamental problem confronting the prince, "Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force."9 Thus, politics and political action for Machiavelli were fundamentally structured by this symbolic gender struggle. Machiavelli reasserted the centrality of military power as the foundation of civic society and, given the centrality of gender imagery to his understanding of politics, worried about how some principalities had become "effeminate" by being insufficiently interested in military issues.10 Machiavelli's work should be understood as a treatise on ways to subordinate and suppress the female forces of disorder at work in the human community through the operation of a masculine virtue closely linked to military capacity. Civic leadership (if not yet citizenship in the modern sense) requires manliness. By the eighteenth century, the political community (as theorized in the work of Rousseau) is threatened less by the random disorder brought by Fortuna and more by the corrupting and effeminizing influence of Commerce. For him, Commerce represented the irrational change and degeneration which would result in one's subjection to the chaotic appetites and passions of both oneself and others. Rousseau makes clear that refinement of manners, civilization and culture are all enemies of virtue. His admiration for Sparta, his argument that inequality itself grows inevitably from dependence on others, his denunciation of the theater, and, finally, his arguments that women should be restrained from playing a role in public life-all this should be understood as part of an effort to recreate in eighteenth century Europe the virtue, or manliness, appropriate to the ancient republics. The profoundly structuring influence of gender on his thought, then, appears not so much in what he wrote about women, but in his concern for the effeminacy of the political community. Now that the work women (and slaves and laborers) have traditionally done is part of the public sphere, the barriers between public and private cannot be so firm, and those previously excluded from citizenship can make a better case for their inclusion in both the definition and practice of citizenship. Important shifts in the nature of public life had taken place by the nineteenth century: the merchant, or capitalist had ceased to represent the effeminizing power of Commerce and came to be an important public figure. Indeed, the content of the public world came to include production, which had hitherto been confined to the private sphere. Hannah Arendt, of course, has referred to this as the rise of the social sphere in opposition to politics.11 And there is a sense in which she is right. The public world is no longer confined to the agonistic pursuits of those with the freedom and leisure to 9The Prince and Discourses (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 94. l?hanna Pitkin has written extensively about these issues in Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 1 The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 201
participate. But rather than see this as an indication of decline, I would argue that this circumstance provides an opportunity to develop a more inclusive understanding of citizenship: now that the work women (and slaves and laborers) have traditionally done is part of the public sphere, the barriers between public and private cannot be so firm, and those previously excluded from citizenship can make a better case for their inclusion in both the definition and practice of citizenship. Let me conclude by clarifying both what I am and am not saying. I do not maintain that the only ethical issues involved in discussions of citizenship revolve around gender. Moreover, throughout the history of Western political thought there has been a number of challenges to the image I have set out. But gender issues have been one of the important structuring factors in the development of ideas about citizenship as we find them in many of the classic works of political philosophy. In addition, despite the association of manhood with military valor, I recognize that women have taken part in war. Women, like men, have fought for both their families and their beliefs. My argument, however, is that some of the reasons for which they fight differ from men. Most obviously, of course, they have no reason to prove their manhood.12 The masculine political actor as he appears in the classics of political philosophy is indeed most at home in agonistic and competitive settings, where he can pursue the attainment of glory, honor, and immortality in the memory of men. The calm and rational consideration of the best actions for the community as a whole are of less concern to him than his own status within it. Rather than war being politics by other means, political action from this perspective can be seen as war by other means, a war by means of which the citizens attain and celebrate manhood. For Achilles and Hector, there could be no complete manhood without war. General Barrow's remarks make it clear that similar views are still extant. Yet today, when the destructive power of our weapons could destroy life on earth, we should re-evaluate understandings of citizenship which link it with masculinity and military capacity. The admission of women to the political community as full participants-sharing both civil and military responsibilities-would be an important step toward forging a more satisfactory practice of citizenship. "2For an historical example of these differences see Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918," Signs: Journal of Woman, Culture, and Society, VII, 3 (Spring, 1982). 202 PS Spring 1984