[Some of the
more complex American histories and stories revolve around women and war. In
this week’s series, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy five such stories—but this
is just the tip of the iceberg, for these stories and overall, and so as always
I’d love to hear your responses and thoughts!]
On communities
of protest and activism, and how we treat them.
Last week’s
series on country music and society included a post on the extreme reaction to
the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines and her March 2003 anti-Iraq War/George W.
Bush comments. I made the case there that the reaction had at least something
to do with gender, and with a sense of what kind of feisty independence is and
is not appropriate for female artists. But another important context would have
to be the way in which the
entire anti-war movement was treated by a sizeable percentage of American
media and society in
and around March 2003: as, to put it bluntly, a bunch of crazy drug-addled
kooks and hippies to whom the appropriate response would be (and much too frequently
was) simply a combination of mockery, ridicule, and scorn. (The concurrent
protests around the world were, it seems to me, taken much more seriously,
whatever their nation’s stance on the Iraq War.)
Such dismissals
of anti-war protesters were nothing new in American society, of course. Whereas
the Vietnam War became so broadly unpopular that its
anti-war movement garnered as much support as it did critique (although the
aforementioned stereotyping of the protesters still occurred to be sure),
the World
War II and World War I anti-war movements were far more nationally
unpopular and subject to the same kind of attacks. During both wars, many of the most
prominent pacificists, both in America and around the world, were also
women’s rights activists; a trend exemplified by Jeanette Rankin, the first
woman elected to Congress, who opposed both world wars and who represented the
sole Congressional “no” vote against declaring war on Japan on December 8th,
1941. Rankin’s political career survived her World War I pacifism, but her opposition
to World War II proved not only politically
costly but personally destructive, both in media coverage and in threats on
her life. (She did not run for reelection, but did live to lead an
anti-Vietnam War campaign in 1968!)
The virulent
opposition to Rankin and her pacifist colleagues could be attributed solely to
pro-war agitation and fever, and certainly that’s been a consistent part of
such wartime historical moments and narratives. But I think it would also need
to be analyzed in conjunction with the
equally virulent and too-often forgotten opposition faced by suffragists
and other women’s rights leaders. In that linked post I highlighted the
shockingly nasty children’s book Ten
Little Suffergets (c.1910), which offers a particularly vivid but far
from isolated illustration (literally and figuratively) of such anti-women’s
rights attitudes. If we have largely forgotten this kind of widespread anti-suffragist
vitriol, one clear reason would be our collective recognition of just how fully
those women’s rights activists were on the right side of history—a lesson that
we perhaps have yet to learn when it comes to our anti-war movements,
contemporary and historical.
Last war story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other war stories you'd highlight?
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