Women and War / Edition 2

by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Overview

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226206264
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/15/1995
Edition description:	1
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beautiful Souls/Just Warriors: The Seduction of War
1: Not-a-Soldier's Story: An Exemplary Tale
A Child of the 1950s: Images of War and Martyrdom
The Growing Up of a Political Theorist
2: The Discourse of War and Politics: From the Greeks to Today
Taming Homer's Warrior: Plato and Aristotle
The Ideal Republic: Machiavelli and Rousseau
The Nation-State
The Revolutionary Alternative: Marx and Engels
The "Science" of War and Politics: International Relations Becomes an Academic Discipline
3: Exemplary Tales of Civic Virtue
Women and the Civil War
The First World War: "My Nation-State, of Thee I Shout"
4: The Attempt to Disarm Civic Virtue
The Christian Conundrum: From Pacifists to Reluctant Warriors
Just War, Holy War, and the Witness of Peace
Female Privatization: The Beautiful Soul
Implications of the Just-War Tradition
5: Women: The Ferocious Few/The Noncombatant Many
The Historic Cleavage
Female Group Violence
The Ferocious Few
The Noncombatant Many
6: Men: The Militant Many/The Pacific Few
The Militant Many
The Pacific Few
The Literature of War
Structures of Experience: The Good Soldier/The Good Mother
7: Neither Warriors nor Victims: Men, Women, and Civic Life
The Liberal Conscience
Uncertain Trumpet: Feminism's War with War
Women as Warriors: "You're in the Army Now"
Beyond War and Peace
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Refusing to accept the inevitability of war, Elshtain, a political scientist who teaches a course on war and peace, disputes theorists from the Greeks to Michael Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977). Using an impressive range of literary, historical, and mythological examples, she examines the rhetoric and iconography of war. She classifies the assigned or adopted roles of women from Minerva to the Greenham Common women, from Spartan mother to warrior to victim. Finally, she proposes a leap of imagination, a search for new alternatives to the war/peace dichotomy. Elshtain does not argue that the world would be better if women ran it; she does insist upon the responsibility of women and men, as citizens, to reflect on history and experience, to find new forms of civic virtue, and not to leave everything to the experts. A challenging book of the first importance which should be in most libraries. Mary Drake McFeely, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens

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