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Masculinity, Citizenship, and the Making of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

Nancy C. M. Hartsock
Nancy C. M. Hartsock*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

Citizenship is not one of the issues political scientists hotly contest. 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. 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-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. 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.

Type
Educating for Citizenship: What Should Political Scientists Be Teaching?
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 198 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1984

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References

1 Keohane, Nannerl quite correctly made this point in “The Status of a Citizen,” News for Teachers of Political Science, No. 30 (Summer, 1981), 19.Google Scholar

2 For a useful discussion of this issue, see Flathman, Richard, “Citizenship and Authority: A Chastened View of Citizenship,” News for Teachers of Political Science, No. 30 (Summer, 1981), 9–10, 16–18.Google Scholar 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).

3 October 27, 1983.

4 See Fasteau, Marc Feigen, “Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in Foreign Policy,” in David, Deborah S. and Brannon, Robert, eds., The Forty-nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1976), p. 192.Google Scholar

5 As interviewed by Wright, Michael, “The New Marines: Life in the Pits,” The San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 1982.Google Scholar

6 Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 531–532 Google Scholar, cited in Fasteau, p. 191.

7 Excerpt 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 Eisenhart, R., “You Can't Hack It Little Girl: Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training,” Journal of Social Issues 3:13–23 Google Scholar; Lifton, R., Home From the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 15, 244Google Scholar; Stiehm, Judith, Bring Me Men and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ong, Walter, Fighting for Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Gray, J. Glenn, The Warriors (New York: Harper and Row, 1970)Google Scholar; Borchert, Susan Danziger, “Masculinity and the Vietnam War,” Michigan Academician (Spring, 1983)Google Scholar; Miller, Alice Duer, “Why We Oppose Votes for Men,” Poster, 1915, reprinted in Radical America, XV, 1 and 2 (Spring, 1981), 147.Google Scholar

8 In 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, Spelman, E. V., “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies VIII, 1 (Spring, 1982).Google Scholar 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 O'Brien, Mary, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 124.Google Scholar For an opposed view see the appendix on this topic in Okin, Susan, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

9 The Prince and Discourses (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 94.

10 Pitkin, Hanna has written extensively about these issues in Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

11 The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

12 For an historical example of these differences see Kaplan, Temma, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” Signs: Journal of Woman, Culture, and Society, VII, 3 (Spring, 1982).Google Scholar