The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War 019762975X, 9780197629758

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
1: The Hope for Democracy
Britain and the Fate of the Ottoman Empire
The Sun Never Sets
In Another Democracy Far, Far Away . . .
Conclusion
2: The Hope for Suffrage and Peace in the New Century
Conclusion
3: Gender and Aggression: Nature or Nurture?
Defining Sex
Gender, Aggression, and Preferences about War and Peace
But Why the Gender Gap?
The Role of Biology
How Different Are Male and Female Brains?
Conclusion
4: Suffrage, Democracy, and War
Women’s Suffrage and Peace
What Else Might Explain These Patterns?
Conclusion
5: Women’s Votes and the World Wars
Wilson and Women in the West
A Western Comeback
Women in Britain and the Rise of Hitler
Women and the End of the Cold War
Conclusion
6: Do Women Leaders Spell the End of War?
The Historical Record of Women Leaders and War
Kings and Queens
The Leaders of Today
Leaders Are Not Average
Incentives to Misrepresent
Conclusion
7: Women and War in the Modern Era
The Four Mothers
Shaping an Election
Shifting the Debate
Liberian Women for Peace
A Country Terrorized
Mobilizing for Peace
An Enduring Peace
Women and Japan’s Constitutional Pacifism
The Origins of the “No War” Clause
Article 9, Reinterpreted
Women as Roadblocks to Revision
The Slow Erosion
Conclusion
8: The Future
Who Votes Matters
Activists Put Peace on the Ballot
Communities Build Peace
Protecting Women’s Representation around the World
Changing the Face of Leadership or Changing the Narratives
Appendix
Data on Women’s Suffrage
The Relationship Between Measures of Democracy and Suffrage
Other Possible Explanations
Notes
References
Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

The Suffragist Peace

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The Suffragist Peace

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HOW WOMEN SHAPE THE POLITICS OF WAR

Joslyn N. Barnhart Robert F. Trager

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barnhart, Joslyn, author. | Trager, Robert F., author. Title: The suffragist peace : / how women shape the politics of war Joslyn N. Barnhart, University of California, Santa Barbara, Robert F. Trager, University of California, Los Angeles. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027327 (print) | LCCN 2022027328 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197629758 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197629765 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197629772 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Women—Suffrage—History—20th century. | Women and war—History—20th century. | Women—Political participation—History—20th century. Classification: LCC JF851 .B37 2022 (print) | LCC JF851 (ebook) | DDC 324.6/230973—dc23/eng/20220811 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027327 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027328

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

cont en ts

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List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Introduction xi 1. The Hope for Democracy 1 2. The Hope for Suffrage and Peace in the New Century 22 3. Gender and Aggression: Nature or Nurture? 40 4. Suffrage, Democracy, and War 66 5. Women’s Votes and the World Wars 87 6. Do Women Leaders Spell the End of War? 115 7. Women and War in the Modern Era 135 8. The Future 157 Appendix 168 Notes 179 References 219 Acknowledgements 238 Index 239

list of fig ures

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1. Campaign flyer for the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association.

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2. National Woman Suffrage Association poster, 1915.

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3. Homicides in the United States by sex.

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4. Women and men’s preferences in foreign affairs trend together, almost always.

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5. The pace of suffrage and democracy.

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6. The effects of women’s votes as democratic institutions expand.

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7. How likely two countries are to have military disputes.

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8. The spread of women’s suffrage in the United States.

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9. Partisan voting maps showing the shift in the West (states with women’s suffrage are marked in white).

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10. Reagan foreign policy approval by sex.

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11. Whether to use force to defend a NATO ally.

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12. The (slow) growth of women leaders in the modern era.

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13. Pitch range for the 116th United States Congress by sex.

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14–15. University of Tokyo Asahi-Shimbun surveys. 16. The polity scores of all states with female suffrage.

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list of ta bles

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1. All states granting suffrage in waves.

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2. Regression table for monadic analysis.

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3. Regression table for dyadic analysis.

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4. Percentage change in frequency of disputes.

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introd uc tio n

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Not all radical social changes are revolutionary and not all revolutionary changes are noticed. Profound changes sometimes unfold over time; they may even remain invisible for centuries. When the printing press was invented, no one understood that a half millennium later printed material would create a new form of political allegiance: nationalism. And yet, that seems to be what happened as the prevalence of printed material spurred literacy, creating common political narratives across expanding realms. National identities eventually covered the globe, redrawing political maps and recasting the social order. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, many recognized the impacts of the “dark Satanic mills” on human life.1 But no one understood that the resulting expansion of the human population would disrupt planetary systems leading to the sixth mass extinction since the birth of life on earth. And yet, that now appears likely too. The year 1893 witnessed the dawn of another era—one in which women around the world entered the political realm. At first, this era seemed to have little in common with those earlier transformations. People expected profound social change to follow. They spoke in revolutionary terms—with exultancy or fear—of the coming fundamental reordering of society. Women voting en masse would bring a “grand era of moral reform,” The Atlantic wrote in 1890.2 Their votes would

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give rise to “a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality . . . to lift man up into higher realms of thought and action.”3 Political parties centered solely around women’s issues would emerge over night, pundits predicted, as formidable, unified forces on the political scene, enabling women to dramatically remodel the world in their more virtuous guise. But this understanding of the meaning of women’s suffrage did not last. As women became voters and leaders, no powerful women’s parties emerged. Women’s politics looked much like men’s politics. Change seemed so distant that women’s periodicals questioned whether the suffrage movement had ultimately failed in its objectives.4 And this view persists today. Writing of the early expectations in the New York Times, Gail Collins went so far as to call women’s suffrage a “big flop.”5 A 1999 Gallup poll named women’s suffrage as the second most important event of the twentieth century (World War II was first), tied with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But many would be hard pressed to identify a lasting and significant social or political change brought about by women’s votes. Suffrage is viewed narrowly, as a major step in women’s long march toward equality, but not a source of fundamental political and social change. The advocates of women’s suffrage saw it as a means; we have come to see it as an end. And yet, could it be that radical change has gone unnoticed and unappreciated? Perhaps women’s entrance into political life has something in common with these long-run processes whose impacts were profound but difficult to detect at first. Perhaps the changing political status of women—a process which is ongoing—has created the modern world more than we realize. In this book, we ask whether women’s political influence is changing politics between nations. While it is too soon to characterize the full extent, and impossible to know for sure, we find that the historical facts are strikingly consistent with the idea that women’s inclusion in democratic electorates has been a cause of peace in the modern era. From the early days of the suffrage movement, the pursuit of peace was seen by many to be one and the same with the pursuit of the vote. Julia Ward Howe, author of the Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and eventual leader of the American Women Suffrage Association, anticipated that once women freed themselves

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from their almost military subjection to men, they would exercise their superior moral force in pursuit of global cooperation and compromise.6 Elizabeth Cady Stanton predicted in 1872 that women’s suffrage would bring not only prosperity but a “golden age of peace.” Such expectations were common, as we will see. Excessive optimism is indeed a useful trait for any activist and, alas, we do not live in an era of global peace. But, the evidence now—over one hundred years later—suggests that these early suffragists were on to something. Deciphering the levers of war and peace, conflict and cooperation, has arguably never been more important. With the number of nuclear weapons on the planet on the rise again, after declining by over 75% from their Cold War peak, and new technologies of violence made possible by advances in artificial intelligence no doubt on the horizon, war between great powers today could very well pose an existential threat to the planet.7 The magnitude of this threat may inspire caution among world leaders, but any resulting peace is a devil’s bargain, struck only through the always-present risk of catastrophic war. A “suffragist peace” provides a firmer foundation for futures of human flourishing. Democracy itself is also at a crossroads. Signs of disaffection with democratic rule are everywhere, especially amongst the young. Twothirds of Americans born in the 1930s believe that it is essential to live in a democracy. Less than one-third of those born half a century later agree.8 The trend is similarly acute in other democracies around the world. More than half of respondents in Argentina, South Korea, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Taiwan, India, and Romania, to name a few, believe that having a strong leader who is unconstrained by parliaments or elections would be a “good way” to run a country.9 Yet, in some places where democracy does not exist, people remain willing to take immense risks in the hope that they might one day be able to cast a ballot of their own. As many people in long-standing democracies believe their vote too valueless to be worth casting, people elsewhere hazard their lives for the same privilege. This book shows us part of what such people are fighting for and what those in existing democracies would be giving up in the tradeoff for the supposed efficiencies of more streamlined, less democratic leadership. Since 1950, seventy-four countries have elected or appointed a woman as head of state. This sounds like a lot, but it implies that

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over 110 countries have not. As of January 2021, the UN reported that women were serving as head of state in only twenty-two countries of the 193 countries around the world. Given the recent annual rate of increase, gender parity in the world’s highest offices would not be reached until the year 2150.10 But there are signs that the rate of change is itself changing. In 2020, six women ran for president of the United States, the highest number ever. One of them, Kamala Harris, became the highest-ranked woman in U.S. history. Roughly 25% of all parliamentarians in the world were women in 2020, more than double the number in 1995.11 This book helps us understand what these changes might mean for the future of democracy and the future of the international conflict. You would be right at this point to feel skeptical about some of the core concepts explored in this book. Such skepticism should be embraced when approaching any new explanation of complex social phenomena. You might argue that the world does not look all that peaceful. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the world is more vulnerable to existential danger than at any time in the last seventy-five years, a period which includes the extreme perils of the Cold War. The organization’s Doomsday Clock was set to only 100 seconds to midnight in 2020, down from a far more comfortable setting of seventeen minutes in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.12 The current danger stems in large part from the threat of nuclear war in an international atmosphere of increasing mistrust and competition. If this current outlook is the product of a world created by women’s votes, one might argue that such votes have not gotten us very far. There is spirited debate about if and how the rate and deadliness of wars have declined in the modern era. Some like Steven Pinker and John Lewis Gaddis argue that international violence is lower at present than in any prior period in history, though they disagree among themselves about the time scales.13 Others argue that the absence of great power war since 1945 is simply a statistical artifact explained by random chance.14 In this book, we will not settle this debate. What seems certain, regardless of broader global trends, is that individuals in certain parts of the world have been far less likely to die in war in the twenty-first century than in any century in the past. The continents

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of North and South America have also experienced prolonged periods without major war. This book will not suggest that major war is unlikely to happen in the future. In fact, it will provide insight into why war may emerge along the lines that it does. But the book does provide one reason why war is so rare where it is so. You might accept that you are living in a more peaceful era but direct your skepticism at the idea that this peace is in part a product of the preferences of women. To speak so bluntly about gendered preference today is to invite immediate reaction. And such reaction makes sense, given the insensitive and inaccurate wholesale assignment of characteristics or traits to groups defined by sex or race throughout much of human history. As we will see in Chapter 3, and as we all know from experienced reality, those who self-identify as women are not monolithic in their preferences and traits—just as those who identify as men or as part of other large ethnic or religious groups are not. But the acknowledged complexities of sex and gender should not prevent us from recognizing differences in the average preferences between groups. Such differences can provide key insights into understanding the preferences of democratic electorates more broadly and the political outcomes these electorates produce. You may even accept that it makes sense to talk about average differences between men and women on certain traits, but doubt that attitudes about war and peace is one of them. Many early suffragists certainly viewed women as inherently peaceful, but how do we square such a view with the historical record? When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe were writing in the 1870s, imperialism had not yet reached its zenith. Great powers would soon forcefully occupy whole continents and prominent women on both sides of the Atlantic would vocally support the necessity to spread civilization abroad by force. Susan B. Anthony condemned the U.S. Congress for embarking on war in the Philippines in 1898 but at the same time viewed the violent suppression of the Filipino people as a necessity. To her, it made no sense to give the barbaric “guerillas in the Philippines” liberty, for they would only “murder and pillage every which person on the island.”15 As World War I approached, many prominent activists in Britain immediately put aside their campaigns for peace and voting and volunteered to make the munitions to supply the frontlines.

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The record of women’s leadership might also give idealists pause. Women in positions of political power, though historically few in number, have often failed to exemplify unusual levels of restraint or serenity. In response to Roman assaults upon her land and her daughters, Queen Boudica of the Celtic Iceni tribe in England in the first century ad raised an army of a hundred thousand and led it in a scorched-earth campaign against prominent Roman towns, burning them to the ground and torturing and slaughtering an estimated seventy-five thousand inhabitants, in her quest to drive the Romans out of Britain.16 The Russian Empress Catherine the Great was certainly no paragon of international compromise, restraint, or calm. Half of her thirty-fouryear reign was marked by war—with the Ottomans, the Persians, the Swedes. She relentlessly sought the expansion of her empire, violently suppressing uprisings among the people she conquered, including the people of Poland after she led the charge to carve up and erase their country from the map.17 When a Prussian prince visiting the Russian court commented that to take land, “it seems that in Poland one only has to stoop and help oneself,” Empress Catherine smugly responded, “Why shouldn’t we both take our share?” Catherine’s contemporary Maria Theresa, eventual Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, certainly showed no reservations about raising an army to fight against the European forces encroaching upon her empire when she ascended to the throne as a young and inexperienced queen in 1740. Far into pregnancy and facing internal challengers as well as external predators, Maria spared nothing to keep her kingdom intact. “My mind is made up,” she wrote to the Bohemian chancellor. “We must put everything at stake to save Bohemia.” But she was also not above external predation herself. Her annexation of Galicia in 1772 paved the way for the total destruction of Poland. While Catherine the Great carved up Poland, Maria Theresa was by her side. “She wept,” Frederick the Great snidely commented, “but she took nonetheless,” and the map of Eastern Europe was redrawn to Austria’s advantage. Such cases suggest the latter half of the eighteenth century was no more peaceful because half of the major continental European powers were ruled by women. What then are we to expect from any expansion

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of women’s political leadership that might take place in the twenty-first century? Finally, you might question the value of democracy itself. Women’s preferences would, after all, have little effect on our world without democratic institutions to give them voice. Democracy itself has been the target of sustained skepticism in recent years. Why put faith in voting when those who get elected don’t appear to share your priorities? Ample data shows that democratic alignment does not always work. Sometimes the will of the people goes one way and their leaders go the other on all sorts of domestic and international issues. But as we will see, issues of war and peace can take on unusually high salience among voters and when they do, politicians who fail to pay attention risk electoral defeat. Each of these reasonable skepticisms suggest that we have our work cut out for us. We must convince you that it makes sense to even talk about gender differences in preferences for war and peace. We must also convince you that individual cases of women’s votes causing peaceful outcomes were representative of a broader trend, one that cannot be explained with other factors. And we must convince you that democracy, as ineffective as it might sometimes seem, has the potential to bind national leaders to the will of the people, just as early advocates of democracy had hoped. This book presents evidence from our own research on the effects of women on world affairs, while also drawing extensively on the work of others in international relations, political science, biology, psychology, gender studies, economics, and history. Ultimately, we cannot be 100% certain that this evidence is getting at the truth. The world as it is simply does not allow for such certainty on this issue. We cannot randomly assign democratic institutions and women’s suffrage to only some countries around the world and then watch to see what happens. Alas, we do not have that kind of power. But we can explore life before and after suffrage to outline the important ways they differ. We can examine systematic trends that define when men and women’s attitudes about war and peace are most likely to differ and when they are most likely to be the same. And we can put together the pieces of how such differences may trickle up to affect government policy at the

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highest level. Much can be gained from exploring the evidence the world presents to us. The twentieth century witnessed some of the most radical technological, economic, and political change in history. Nuclear weapons dramatically increased the scale and speed with which countries could inflict pain. Capitalism spread in unprecedented ways in the aftermaths of World War II and the Cold War and international organizations emerged which emphasized openness, diplomacy, and compromise. People around the world replaced centuries of arbitrary monarchical rule with democratic institutions aimed at aligning the will of the people with their leaders. Each of these extraordinary changes has been perhaps rightfully credited with reordering international affairs and fostering international peace in the twentieth century. But these accounts have long overlooked one of the most dramatic transformations of the twentieth century as a potential source of peace: the massive redistribution of political power as millions of women around the world gained a say in national politics. The persistent decline in war between nations, we argue, is a world made in part by women. Understanding the story of how and why is a window onto gender differences, the sources of conflict, and the nature of democracy itself.

• 1

The Hope for Democracy

The spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion . . . peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic. Montesquieu, 1748 Nor do I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine. “A [British] Patriot,” 1900

The impact of women’s participation in political life can best be understood against the backdrop of what came before. Until the twentieth century, most people who had ever lived on earth had lived under monarchy or tyranny.1 The United States constitution in 1787, with its affirmation of “we the people,” was the first glimmer of radical political change—peoples seeking to overthrow arbitrary rulers and establish majority rule by men. Revolutionary uprisings spanned the globe throughout the nineteenth century. But women would in many ways be excluded from these original acts of liberation. They would be freed of monarchic rule, but would remain under the economic and legal dominion of their husbands, unable to own property, keep their own wages, or have a say in the laws or leaders who governed them.2 The optimism that surrounded the first democratic revolution was nevertheless intense. Like the women suffragists who came after them, early liberal theorists like Thomas Paine believed that voting would bring fundamental social, economic, and political change. Monarchy

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0001

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had sated the interests of the few, he believed. But democracies would pursue the good of all. Monarchs had stymied commerce and purloined the people’s wealth to maintain a grip on power. Democratic leaders would redistribute wealth and bring widespread prosperity to the people. Above all, monarchs waged wars—endless wars—for the spoils that would enhance royal coffers, for the pride of victory and for the pleasure of revenge. According to Paine’s contemporary Immanuel Kant, monarchs did not “lose a whit by war.” Rather, they chose war “for the most trivial reasons,” as a sort of diversion or pleasure. Commoners faced the consequences on the battlefield while those they fought for continued to revel in the delights of “their table, their sport, and their palaces.”3 According to the growing liberal faith, once the people held sway over international affairs, wars would cease. Governments of the people would think long and hard before “decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war.”4 Those who bore the brunt of war would relish punishing war-mongering leaders at the polls. And with commerce and trade no longer hamstrung by greedy monarchs, people would be lifted from poverty and the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy that fostered war would simply fade away. Before there were kings, there were no wars, Paine argued. The same would be true after kings no longer ruled the earth.5 Paine’s ideas about the virtues of democracy were not just the subject of scholarly debate. His pamphlet Common Sense was read by hundreds of thousands of American colonists—potentially 20% of the entire colonial population—in the year after it was published in 1776.6 His writings in defense of the revolution in France a decade later would make him so beloved among the French that he would be elected a member to the first National Convention despite not speaking French. By the time Paine and Kant died—in 1809 and 1804 respectively— both had lived long enough to witness the first manifestations of democracy, however bloody they might have been. But they did not live long enough for their faith in democratic institutions to be truly tested. They would die optimists, steadfast in the belief that democracy would bring prosperity and perpetual peace. But as democracy among men began to spread in fits and starts, would their optimism prove warranted? Would cool reason counsel peace out of self interest or

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would inflamed passions mean war? Over the next century, as male democratic electorates expanded, this question would be put to the test time and again. Britain and the Fate of the Ottoman Empire For those seeking to assess the true effects of democracy on war and peace, the case of British democratization is a fascinating one.7 While in some countries like France, dramatic political transformation took place over night, in Britain, democracy came in piecemeal fashion— in incremental waves of electoral expansion that spanned centuries. With each successive expansion of the electorate, Britain increased the number of people involved in governing matters of war and peace. How many voters would be enough to check elites’ hunger for expansion and power? Would the votes of the working class—those most likely to end up on the frontlines—be required to achieve the promise of peace or would the votes of the wealthiest and best educated be enough? The course of Britain’s democracy provides a first window onto answers. The origins of democracy in Britain are rooted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the concept of “constitutional monarchy” was first introduced—a transformative shift in the distribution of political power. Although the king would maintain considerable influence, an elected parliament would make the laws. But who was now responsible for electing the parliament? For over one hundred and fifty years, an incredibly narrow slice of the public—roughly 400,000 men of property and wealth, or less than 2% of the British population—shaped and controlled parliament. By the early 1800s, change was inevitable. The working and middle classes, ignited by the economic inequalities brought on by the Napoleonic Wars and the industrial revolution, began to demand a voice. In 1831, political tension came to a head. Parliament refused to expand suffrage, resulting in the bloodiest and costliest political event of the century in England. Fearing full-scale revolution, parliament begrudgingly passed the first of three major reform bills, increasing the number of parliamentary seats and expanding the size of the electorate by roughly 250,000 men. All British men with over ten pounds to their name—roughly one in five—could now vote. Given the scale of

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citizens’ demands, the act was paltry and unsatisfying. But for those men who did meet the new criteria, the law provided them with their first opportunity to have a say in governmental affairs. Would their inclusion be enough to tip the scales towards peace? Their first serious test came in the aftermath of this limited electoral reform. By the mid-1800s, repeated military defeats, unrelenting financial insolvency, a successful push for independence by the Greeks, and violent uprisings by the Serbs had left the Ottoman Empire weak and fragile. British democrats believed that Britain’s interests would best be maintained by the preservation of the autocratic empire—or at the very least, a demise from which no other European power would benefit disproportionately. These interests were threatened when Russia invaded Ottoman territory. After success gaining much of the eastern shore of the Black Sea and the mouth of the Danube River in 1829, Tsar Nicholas I appeared in 1853 to be going for more. British leaders were forced to decide if and how to respond. With reelection always a looming prospect, voting-eligible Brits would play a role in shaping that choice. Debate on how to respond to Russian assertiveness was full-throated and intense. Stratford Canning, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and Home Secretary Lord Palmerston were, on the one hand, “bent on war.” They sought an assertive, if not aggressive, response to defend Turkish sovereignty and to keep Russia out of the Middle East, away from British trade routes, and far away from India, the socalled crown jewel of the British Empire.8 The prime minister Lord Aberdeen and Secretary for Foreign Affairs Clarendon, on the other hand, professed an “unabated desire for peace.” They saw no immediate demand for British military involvement in the conflict. Consistent diplomatic efforts would be sufficient to restrain Russian ambitions. A war to prevent a Russian expansion that they believed would never occur was, in Bismarck’s later phrase, akin to suicide for fear of death. The Russians also sought to avoid an unnecessary fight. Tsar Nicholas wrote personal appeals to Queen Victoria professing a commitment to peace and a willingness to compromise.9 The Sultan, meanwhile, revealed himself to be a particularly unreliable and disingenuous ally who was not above instigating conflict in the hopes of obtaining

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full British military involvement.10 But British leaders continued to negotiate with Russia, while still making their support for the Turks clear. Despite these diplomatic overtures, they would not be able to keep their countries out of war. The reasons for this may be varied. What is clear and consistent across essentially all major historical accounts of the war, however, is that the British public played a pivotal role.11 And it was not the role that Paine and his optimistic contemporaries had envisioned. Enfranchised Brits were not sentinels of peace, but rather a hindrance to it. Their “indisputably warlike” mood, as Prime Minister Aberdeen called it, thwarted peaceful compromise.12 Had he been properly supported by the public during the course of negotiations, Aberdeen argued, “peace might have been honourably and advantageously secured.”13 But fear of the public’s intense patriotism and enthusiasm for war forced him to abandon a more peaceful approach.14 Certainly, the Battle of Sinope—during which armed Russian ships chased down and sunk or grounded thirteen Turkish ships and killed nearly three thousand Turkish troops in a matter of hours—did little to help Aberdeen’s case.15 For the Sultan, Sinope was but one in a long line of military disasters in his endless wars against Russia. But for the British public, Russian action amounted to callous butchery. British leaders perceived that, as a result, a declaration of war was the only option.16 What exactly made British voters so bent on war? For starters, these new voters seemed ready to embrace a fight against an autocratic bully.17 To many British, Tsar Nicholas represented monarchy’s vile nature. He was ambitious, greedy, and indifferent to human suffering. “The first blow has probably been struck by oppressive absolutism against the peace and liberty of Europe,” the Daily News decried as the Tsar’s forces entered the Danubian provinces in 1853.18 Armed struggle to “defend right against might, and justice against oppression” was noble, Palmerston argued. The British people deserved credit for waging war not out of self-interest or a desire to oppress, but for the higher cause of liberty.19 In this episode, Nicholas was the clear villain, booed at public rallies, and the Sultan, whose name few could probably pronounce, himself no champion of liberty, was the noble leader, revered and greeted with cheers usually reserved for favorite athletes.20

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But beyond this pure nobility of spirit, the British public was also influenced by the visceral draw of war. “We have been so long without having experienced the horrors and miseries of war,” Aberdeen observed, that it was all too common to look upon it as a source of “pleasurable excitement.”21 British soldiers had not fought in a serious and protracted major war since 1815 and “the long, long canker of peace,” as Tennyson called it, had eroded British men’s energy and had degraded their morals.22 Many in the public sphere encouraged the passion and militant gallantry of war if, for nothing else, the sake of British civilization.23 War would renew patriotism, chivalry, and innovation.24 It would break down political divides and restore courage and heroism while removing the “curse of prosperity” brought about by modernity and industrialization. The Church of England even preached that war could be a source of salvation. God would obviously grant honor and glory to those who violently defended the moral order against absolutism.25 British men who set off to war in 1854 were also motivated by a desire to gain personal honor in an epic struggle against the forces of evil, while also fighting for the honor of their beloved nation. Lord John Russell, who became Foreign Secretary in 1859, wrote to Clarendon in late 1853 of the essentiality of national honor. “I know something of the English people,” he wrote, “and feel sure that they would fight to the stumps for the honour of England.”26 The Times editorial page agreed: “We have thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country. But now, war must begin in earnest.” Three months later, the public indeed seemed ready to stand for the honor of queen and country, even as many in the British government who had hoped to remain on the sidelines were mocked in the press and the House of Commons. Over 100,000 British men were sent to fight for British honor and the stability of a faraway empire. Over more than two years of fighting, more than 20,000 of them lost their lives, sent off to battle not by monarchs but by an uproar among the British public and the elected representatives of the wealthier fraction of it. The Crimean War did not resolve the fate of the Ottoman Empire. The war managed to prop up an ailing ally and ward off the Tsar. But these

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feats were temporary. If anything, the humiliation wrought by the war’s aftermath likely redoubled Russia’s commitment to its original cause.27 The voices of the people had failed to stop war—on the contrary, political leaders believed that public sentiment had actively encouraged the fight. Perhaps the issue was not democracy itself, but rather that too few Brits had been allowed to vote. A small, relatively wealthy minority still held sway over the political process—not, as Paine had envisioned, those who shouldered the heaviest burdens of war and would, as a result, be the most zealous advocated for peace. Following the Crimean War, the liberal faith that true democracy would bring peace received a stricter test when more Brits gained the right to vote. In 1867, the British electorate more than doubled to include all male heads of household over 21 within townships—roughly two out of every five British men. Surely some of these men, who would be among those on the frontlines, would go to great lengths to pursue peace. Their appetite for war would be put to the test in 1871, when Napoleon III was captured on the battlefield by Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon’s surrender signaled the demise of the French Empire and the rise of the new government that cared far less about joining Britain to check the Tsar’s plans for extended domination in Eastern Europe. Within a decade, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were at war again, except this time with the independence of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro at stake. As Russian forces advanced on Constantinople—a fate feared by so many Brits just a few decades prior—Britain did nothing. While Russia blatantly flouted Britain’s grounds for peace, British soldiers stayed home. Had these more working-class voters succeeded in curbing the bellicose impulses of prior British voters? Had Brits lost their appetite for war altogether?28 No, the British public was not quite ready to accept the canker of peace. Public reaction to Russia’s decision to remilitarize the Black Sea in 1870 showed that if national bellicosity and strong anti-Russian sentiment had retreated at all in the aftermath of the Crimean War, it hadn’t receded very far.29 The Tsar’s decision was met with near unanimous outrage in the press.30 The Saturday Review was sure that England would do the right thing and declare war, given the unanimity of popularity of support for war.31 “England, if challenged by a direct,

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deliberate insult, means prompt earnest resolute fighting,” its editors argued.32 Editors at the Daily News were more measured in their assessment: Britain would likely drift into war, not because of the government but “through the madness of a nation whose pugnacious instinct is so easy for fanatics and intriguers to arouse. . . . We are in danger as a nation of losing our heads, our sense and even our national character for phlegmatic calmness. . . .”33 Calmness, it seemed, was difficult to maintain in the face of such an affront to the nation. Once again, more vital than British national interest in the East was the question, as The Standard argued, of “[British] honour—our very existence as a great Power.”34 The Morning Post argued that a “manly policy—what used to be called, and what we trust may still be called, an English policy,” would also be a safe policy.35 Indeed, a firm policy would be the only policy that would prevent an Englishman from “blush[ing] at the name which he bears.”36 A small but vocal group of peace-mongers like John Stuart Mill pleaded with the British people that they not allow journalists to push the nation into a war “under the plea of honour.” “Let the [English people] cast away the clap-trap about honour and prestige, and do right,” one implored.37 England should do all it could, they argued, to avoid another Crimean War. What, then, kept the British out of war? Although many among the British people had quickly forgotten the horrors of war, many of their leaders had not. Like Aberdeen, Prime Minister William Gladstone’s natural predilection was for peace. Another war with Russia would be devastating for Britain’s people and threaten the country’s place in the world. William Gladstone was determined to pursue a peaceful solution even in the face of a “highly inflammable and susceptible state of the public mind.”38 Many of his ministers implored William Gladstone to be“strong for peace,” even as men enlisted for the fight and the public demand for military action grew. Unlike his predecessor in 1854, Prime Minister William Gladstone managed to withstand the demands of the war-hungry public and, in doing so, he kept Britain out of war. The Sun Never Sets If the liberal thinkers heralding the promise of democracy had been alive during the latter half of the nineteenth century, they might have

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concluded that Britain still didn’t have enough democracy. Perhaps the franchise was still too restricted to bring peace. While more men than ever could vote in the latter part of the nineteenth century, still less than half of all British men had a say in politics. In 1884, following a long and persistent popular campaign, the British government adopted the most wide-sweeping electoral reforms yet to extend suffrage to all British men paying rents of ten pounds or possessing equivalently valued land anywhere in the country. With this bill, electoral power shifted from towns to countryside, from aristocrats to rural mineworkers and those working in the fields. For the first time in history, more than 50% of British men could vote in parliamentary elections.39 Joseph Chamberlain called it the “greatest revolution the country has ever undergone.” These new voters brought renewed faith and optimism that they— the working-class men who would most likely find themselves on the frontlines of any significant war—would exhibit the pacific qualities foreseen by early liberal optimists. Remarking upon the prevalence of this hope in 1885, one journal predicted that the largest democratic infusion Britain had ever seen would bring about a foreign policy based more on ethics and altruism and less on “national security and dignity.”40 Around the same time, democracy faced a new challenge: how would white, male democracies interact with different people and cultures encountered through the accelerated quest for empire? To liberals’ dismay, these new voters would prove no more fundamentally opposed to war and violence. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed relative peace in Europe, though sometimes against the will of the British people. And abroad, a form of rapacious and often violent imperialism brought conflict to far-flung corners of the world. Between 1875 and 1900, British forces fought in no fewer than eight wars with non-European peoples. In 1878, British troops, for example, established dominance over the Zulu kingdom in South Africa when the Zulus refused to disband their army and abandon their tribal customs, killing roughly 10,000 Zulus in the process. In 1885, British troops succeeded in dismantling the Konbuang dynasty, wiping independent Burma off the map. In 1896, equipped with the most modern machined guns and artillery of the time and backed by a flotilla of gunboats on

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the Nile, Herbert Kitchener, newly named commander of the AngloEgyptian Army, led 11,000 British men into Khartoum, Sudan to fight 60,000 Mahdist warriors and regain possession of the city, killing or wounding over 25,000. Kitchener was celebrated throughout Britain for avenging the death of Charles Gordon, the national hero taken down by Mahdists forces after a 313-day siege in 1885.41 To be sure, the British people did not always express active support for each act of violent conquest. The public was sometimes indifferent and disinterested in colonial affairs, having little knowledge about whom British troops were fighting or where.42 The Empire was a project of vast complexity, the details of which could be lost on those not paying close attention. What was certain, however, was that the popularity of the imperial project—which was often explicitly intertwined with violent conquest—ballooned just as the electorate expanded to include a broad swathe of male voters.43 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Empire came to “infuse and be propagated by every organ of British life,” as British imperial historian John Mackenzie wrote.44 Imperial enthusiasm reached its peak in 1897 with Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which doubled as a “Festival of the British Empire” replete with a naval and military parade. The streets of London were resplendent with colorful displays of patriotism, beaming faces, and ceaseless cheers. At this point, the Empire governed land in every continent and over 20% of all peoples on earth.45 Much like conflicts of the past, “the pretexts” for Britain’s imperial wars were “always found in some specious appearance of a real good,” as Edmund Burke once wrote. In these cases, religion, morality, humanitarianism, and the rights of men were all invoked as just cause. It was, after all, the responsibility of the civilized to “liberate” and educate those beyond civilization.46 But it would be liberation achieved through war. And, for many in the British public, war continued to hold attractions of its own. “We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do. . . . We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!,” declared a popular song written in 1878. In the late 1900s, many Brits came to selfconsciously embrace the label of “jingo,” first used in this song, as an indication of their unimpeachable patriotism and their preference for war over compromise. A high tolerance for the use of force and violence

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enabled popular support for imperialism. War brings about “nothing but a chuckle of savage satisfaction in the common man,” J. A. Hobson observed at the time.47 In this context, war was viewed as both necessary and glorified.48 The idea of using brute force to destroy hated and contemptible foreigners was portrayed as a “theatrical event of sombre magnificence”—one which provided young men the ability to prove themselves and their love of country. Militarism and patriotism came to be viewed as essential characteristics to be instilled in grade school.49 The extension of empire came to be seen not only as essential to British preeminence but also as a patriotic duty requiring sacrifice and supported by a “general ethos of force . . . and almost hysterical antagonism” to states that dared to defy Britain.50 France was one such state that flouted Britain’s perceived preeminence and imperial ambitions. In 1898, French Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his forces set off on an epic fourteen-month trek through the jungles of the Congo and the deserts of the Sudan to seize the territory around Fashoda, a small town at the neck of the Upper Nile. The expedition arrived on July 10, 1898, planted a French flag in the ground near the desolate fort, and set up camp. Two months later, fresh off of victory against Mahdist forces in Khartoum, Lord Kitchener arrived with 1,500 British and Egyptian troops, set up camp, and raised an Egyptian flag at some distance from the Tricolour. Those who controlled the Upper Nile, it was said, would control Egypt and, along with it, a coveted base for further conquest throughout Africa. News of Marchand’s bold act reached London quickly, where it was met with national outrage, resentment, jingoism, and a call for war in the streets.51 “National or acquisitional feeling has been aroused,” Prime Minister Salisbury observed. “It has tasted the flesh pots and will not let them go.”52 The diplomatically minded Salisbury had managed to outmaneuver martially spirited colleagues for years. This time, he feared, would be different. He dismayed that the public’s determination to go to war with France might constrain his ability to negotiate Britain’s way out of the crisis.53 Upon receiving word of Queen Victoria’s concerns about possible war, Salisbury wrote to her: “I deeply sympathize with your Majesty’s dissatisfaction at the present deadlock, but no offer of territorial concession on our part would be endured by public opinion

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here.”54 In this case, peace and moderation were the spirit of the monarchy, war the mood of the republic. Salisbury had once argued that leaders should never simply allow the bellicose sentiment of the people to drive foreign policy. But in late 1898, he thought he had little choice but to follow through with their demands if he wanted to remain in his post.55 As the Royal Navy drafted war orders and mobilized its reserves, he warned the French to leave Sudan or else face consequences.56 Luckily for those on both sides of the Channel, the Dreyfus Affair—a domestic scandal that implicated a 35-year-old French Jew in the dissemenation of military secrets to Germany—pivoted public attention, allowing French leaders to quietly pull Marchand from the region, thereby ending the crisis.57 Just as the cries for war over Fashoda were fading, another imperial crisis emerged in modern-day South Africa, where since 1814, Britain had held land around the Cape of Good Hope. Throughout the nineteenth century, the British army had slowly expanded their control in the region until they pushed against the Boer Republics in the east. The Boers were descendants of Dutch farmers who had originally settled around the Cape of Good Hope but had continued to move east to escape British rule, forming the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Tension between Britain and the two independent states had been growing for decades as British citizens—“uitlanders” to the Boers— had sought jobs in the Boers’ new mining industry but had been met with significant discrimination. Tensions boiled over in 1899 after the Secretary of Colonial Affairs Joseph Chamberlain, arrogant and generally ruthless in his imperial ambitions, demanded that all uitlanders be granted equal rights. The crusty Boer leader Kruger refused to abide by these terms. In what would be the deadliest of their imperial encounters, the British would eventually commit over 350,000 British soldiers to the fight. In the lead up to war, the attitude of the British public regarding the situation in South Africa underscored the challenges that British leaders faced as they attempted to conduct a steady and predictable foreign policy during this period. South Africa was distant and circumstances on the ground were constantly evolving. The plight of the uitlanders was forced to compete for public attention with domestic and other

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imperial affairs. As tensions grew between Boer and British leaders, many in the British public remained uninformed and indifferent to South African affairs.58 But as British leaders who defended the causes of imperialism and expansion educated the masses about the treatment of British citizens by the Boers, indifference quickly turned to righteous and fanatical enthusiasm for war. Backed by pro-war imperial enthusiasts like Sir Alfred Milner, the Governor of the Cape Colony, Chamberlain worked to focus the British public’s attention on the harsh discrimination against British citizens by the Boers, eventually succeeding in arousing the vengeful spirit of jingoes at home.59 Pacifists who gathered in London to protest a possible war were shouted down and violently disbanded throughout London.60 British citizens rallied around a demand for revenge— a desire stemming from the perceived humiliation experienced by colonists after they lost the first small and short war against the Boers in 1881. “The root-passion of sheer brutality,” Hobson observed of the era, was blended with “admiration of courage and adroitness” fed by “the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate.”61 The war in South Africa would come to be viewed as a sport, “something of a magnificent game” in which young and old felt they wanted to be a part.62 The Church once again portrayed war as admirable. The Boer War was one of God’s wars, the clergy argued. In particular, it offered a spiritual opportunity to develop “hardier and manly virtues” such as endurance, self-control, and contempt for danger and death, the “origin of every fountainhead of honour.” Christian principles and “manliness” converged in the act of war, it was argued. The loss of war-like deeds was a symptom of the degeneracy of the race.63 One letter published in the Manchester Guardian in August of 1900, however, exposed the hypocrisy behind the Church’s belligerence: For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts, makes them brave. . . . Man’s moral nature cannot . . . live by war alone. Nor do I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and

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the suffragist peace timely rains of plague and famine. . . . But these are second bests, the halting substitute for war. . . . Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan. Signed “A Patriot”.64

Salisbury, in his thirteenth non-consecutive year as prime minister blamed the jingoes, including Milner, for simplifying complex international issues with the purpose of igniting tensions and necessitating the “considerable military effort” which was to come on behalf of “people whom we despise and for territory which will bring no profit and no power to England.”65 However, in igniting the passions of the voting public, Chamberlain had conjured a straitjacket—a public ire that undermined Salisbury’s ability to flexibly maneuver out of war.66 Three months into the Boer War, the world marked the arrival of a new century. Peace did not greet British efforts in the new year. But by September 1900, Boer political leaders relented, allowing British officials to declare victory over both republics, with the exception of the northern parts of the Transvaal. Boer military commanders were not willing to relinquish their sovereignty so easily and they would continue to fight for another year and a half, using guerrilla tactics to attack rail lines and British camps. The British responded with a scorched-earth policy—the destruction of crops and the burning of homesteads. They forced Boer women and children into concentration camps, where over 27,000 perished from starvation or disease. It was the first time in modern history that a concentration camp system was used to systematically target a whole nation—an outcome at least tacitly sanctioned by the fervor of a British electorate in favor of war. In Another Democracy Far, Far Away . . . In 1900, all women and more than 40% of men in Britain remained unable to vote. Although the recurring fear of total revolt had coerced reluctant Lords and aristocrats to slowly hand over increasing political power in pieces throughout the nineteenth century, Britain’s democratic project was far from complete. Perhaps, then, Britain at the end of the nineteenth century still did not provide an adequate test of the effects of democratic institutions on international affairs. Could a

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country truly be labeled a democracy if such a large segment of the population remained excluded from the voter rolls? As the oldest democracy in the world, the United States’ democratic institutions were relatively well established. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, had prevented states from denying the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but not on the basis of gender. All males over 21 therefore held a constitutional right to vote, even though some states continued their quest to raise barriers to minority voting. Perhaps the United States at the turn of the century provides a better test of the pacifying effects of democratic institutions. On March 30, 1898, President William McKinley began to cry.67 He did not want war with Spain, he told an associate. He had served as an enlisted soldier throughout the Civil War, witnessing the deaths of over 23,000 in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. “I have been through one war,” he wrote, “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”68 Theodore Roosevelt could not have viewed the prospects of war more differently. “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war,” he declared in a speech to the War College in 1897, before concluding, “Cowardice in a race . . . is the unpardonable sin.” “I should welcome almost any war, for I think the country needs one,” he proclaimed a year later.69 “Personally, I rather hope the fight will come soon,” he had written to his college companion and life-long friend Henry Cabot Lodge. Both Lodge and Roosevelt scoffed at the “cult of non-virility,” whose members supported the avoidance of war and the arbitration of disputes, a cult of which, they often implied, President McKinley was a member.70 McKinley had all the backbone of a chocolate eclair, Roosevelt had once famously mocked. By early 1898, McKinley had come to realize that such pro-war attitudes were not limited to a small, but powerful, few. As tensions with Spain built, a martial spirit had become palpable throughout the country. “The whole country thrills with war fever,” the Journal reported on February 18, 1898. “Hurray for War!” opponents of a prospective treaty shouted in New York, and not just war with Spain, one commentator noted, but “war with anybody anywhere.”71

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Republicans, having recently lost in municipal elections, feared losses at the national level if they did not adopt an aggressive policy towards Spain.72 Democrats dared not allow their opponents to adopt the mantle of sole defenders of national self-respect and honor. With midterm and upcoming presidential elections in mind, McKinley confronted his reality. A significant majority in Congress supported war with Spain largely because they feared unemployment if they did not.73 In the face of such public unanimity, any attempt McKinley made to maintain peace left him open to public disparagement. One newspaper infamously portrayed him as an old woman, donning a house dress and bonnet, attempting fecklessly to sweep back the sea— its waves comprised of pro-war sentiment seeded by the rain clouds of public opinion.74 “I can no longer hold back the Senate,” Vice President Garret Hobart wrote to McKinley. “They will act without you if you do not act at once.”75 “Fruitless attempts to hold back or retard the enormous momentum of the people bent upon war would result in the destruction of the President’s power and influence,” the U.S. ambassador to Spain Elihu Root wrote at the time.76 Even then, McKinley declined to request war powers for himself, leaving the matter in the hands of the Congress, which promptly voted for war.77 For some voters, the desire for war against Spain stemmed from depictions of Cuban plight under Spanish colonial rule. Depictions in the American press of the “barbarities, bloodshed, starvation and horrible miseries” at the hands of the Spanish motivated some Americans to advocate for U.S. forces to assist in the Cuban people’s liberation from their colonial overlords.78 As in Britain, outrage at the atrocious crimes of autocrats was easy to conjure in democratic publics.79 Humanitarian goals, however, were only part of the story. The Cubans had long rebelled against Spain and previous American governments had actually tried, at times, to prevent aid from reaching Cuba.80 Support for Cuban freedom also did not mandate an American declaration of war, especially since Spain had already more or less given in to U.S. and Cuban demands by the time of the war authorization. These facts, among others, have led many historians of the era to conclude that the United States went to war not because it wanted

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freedom for the Cuban people but because it wanted a war. Whether the Cuban people were freed as a result was of secondary concern.81 What made war such an attractive option to the American public? Spain did not represent a clear security threat to the United States and Cuba offered few economic advantages.82 Echoing sentiments expressed in Britain at the time, war was seen by many in the American public as a way for men to escape their fate in a newly industrialized world of material and social progress. War would keep men out of brothels and reduce crime. It would restore moral order and the “sturdy virtues” of a generation of men that had been enervated by easy riches and materialism, men who had become entranced by “the ignoble and in the inglorious,” as one Denver newspaper put it.83 For Admiral Stephen Luce, war was “one of the great agencies by which human progress is effected.” The philosopher William James agreed, arguing that militarism was the “great preserver of our ideals of hardihood.”84 Peace to Alfred Mahan was an “alluring, albeit somewhat ignoble, ideal” which could “not be allowed to sap American men of their manhood.”85 “No greater danger could befall civilization,” Mahan concluded, “than the disappearance of the warlike spirit (I daresay war) among civilized men.”86 Pro-war sentiment did not exist solely within the intellectual sphere. Such views were openly expressed within Congress. “I think a little blood-letting would be an admirably good thing about this time for the people of the United States,” said one congressmen.87 “War is a bad thing no doubt,” argued Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “but there are worse things both for nations and for men.” Senator Hernando de Soto Money, a Democrat from Mississippi, praised war for teaching sacrifice. “Any sort of war,” he proclaimed to Congress to wide applause, was better “than a rotting peace that eats out the core and heart of the manhood of this country.” War with Spain would have a purgatorial effect upon the nation, he concluded, and national honor would rise again from it “like the Phoenix from its ashes renewed with glory.”88 Some congressmen were so fervent in their support of war that they personally promised to join the fight. As in Britain, the honor of men and the honor of the nation were often depicted as sharing a common fate. Male honor was achieved through competition and

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combat—through demonstrations that one was prepared to assume the common male role of physical defender of family, tribe, and state. On February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in the harbor off of Havana, killing over 250 American seamen. Naval commanders were quick to convey that the explosion was most likely an accident. But an alternative narrative, actively promoted by journalists, quickly and easily took root in the American psyche. This narrative blamed Spain for the death of innocent American men and portrayed the explosion as a blatant attack on American honor.89 The situation demanded, many congressmen argued, a full-fledged defense—a demonstration of the bravery of American men and their unwillingness to suffer such blatant insult of their nation, no matter the cost. Senator James Norton of Ohio hated war, he said, but it would be “better far that this war should come through at the cost of untold treasure of countless wealth and human life, than the degradation of the country’s honor.”90 “There is a crucifixion of the soul when honor dies,” Senator Turner argued. He equated life under such conditions to a horrid nightmare in which “men shun their fellows and the laugh of little children becomes a taunt and a mockery.” Men could exist without national honor, “like worms in a muck heap” he descriptively argued, but the fate of their nation would be grave as a result. The unprecedented number of men who tried to enlist in the lead up to war must have, in some part, agreed. Some have blamed overactive yellow journalists of the era for conjuring up the Spanish-American War. If editors had not doubled down a narrative of Spanish barbarism, deceit, and aggression, the public would have likely not been so keen on war. The newspapers of the day, including William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, did compete for the attention of readers by offering salacious details of Cuba’s fate.91 And even after investigators were brought in to assess whether the downing of the Maine had resulted from accident, newspapers continued to suggest the evidence against Spain was definitive.92 Though there is no polling data from the period, it is hard to imagine that the graphic attention paid to the fate of the Cuban people did not affect American public opinion.93 But newspaper editors know their audience. The editors of the day must have known that they were tapping into the existing propensities and prejudices of the American public just as much as they were

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creating and shaping them.94 Pro-war editorials found an instantaneous audience, illustrating, as Mahan wrote, the “readiness with which a seed of thought germinates when it falls upon mental soil prepared already to receive it.”95 The war with Spain was not, it turned out, a one-off for the U.S. military, but just the first step in a brief period of American imperial expansion. After defeating the Spanish in just four short months, the United States turned its attention towards another former Spanish colony—the Philippines. The Philippine-American War, typically far less known but far more costly in terms of lives, money, and time, began on February 4, 1899. After fighting for the supposed liberation of the Cuban people, over 125,000 American soldiers were sent to violently subdue the Filipinos’ quest for independence after Spain had transferred control of the islands to the United States. For many, the war with Spain had only briefly sated the thirst for war. “There is not a man here who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896,” Senator Depew argued as part of McKinley’s reelection bid, in part because the United States was now, for the first time, an imperial power.96 The pursuit of empire would help in the continued quest to stave off degeneracy and national softness while simultaneously invigorating American manhood. As they had in the lead up to the war with Spain, jingoes argued that those who opposed expansion in the Philippines were tainted by effeminacy— “old women with trousers on,” they were called.97 Militancy served as a mark of manliness. Peaceniks were likened to nagging wives. One congressman from Minnesota equated withdrawal from the fight in the Philippines to a “confession of impotence,” a renouncing of manly duty. War in the Philippines would eventually lead to American victory, but at the cost of over 7,000 American and over 215,000 Filipino lives. McKinley, a convert to the imperial project, campaigned on the issue alongside Roosevelt, his new running mate who had been chosen in part because some thought his “barbarian ways,” as he referred to them, could strengthen the ticket in the West.98 McKinley’s opponent, William Jennings Bryan, deemed imperialism the “paramount issue” of the campaign early on, hoping to sway voters with a platform of antimilitarism and anti-imperialism. Midway through the short campaign,

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he realized peace was a losing issue with American voters and started campaigning on the issue of free silver. He lost the election by over six percentage points.99 Conclusion Contrary to early and modern faith in democratic pacifism, it was often the all-men voting publics that pushed reluctant leaders to promote policies of violence and conquest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Lord Salisbury, who served as leader of the British people for much of the 1880s and 1890s, offered a concise prediction in 1879. Early theories predicting that the decline of monarchs would mean peace had it exactly wrong, he argued. “If there is any possible danger in the future,” he concluded, “it rather arises from another cause—from possible gusts of passionate and often ill-informed feeling arising from great masses of population.”100 Great powers largely avoided fighting each other during this period. But great power democracies were anything but serene and satisfied. The slow march towards universal manhood suffrage coincided with the most significant period of colonial subjugation the world has ever seen. And support for the pursuit of honor and prestige by rabid voting publics was by no means limited to the United States and Britain. France acquired much of what would become one the largest empires in history only in the aftermath of the emergence of the Third Republic, the democratic government that rose in the wake of Emperor Napoleon III’s capture.101 In the early twentieth century, nominally democratic Belgium steamrolled over indigenous interests in the Congo, enacting one of the most violent and exploitative systems of colonial rule in history. Voters within these democratic states did not expressly consent to each act of often violent expansion. But they did not actively protest them either. These stories of conquest and war cannot tell us if democracies were any more or less war-prone than their autocratic contemporaries. We address that question in later chapters. But these stories do provide evidence that Salisbury’s view about democracy’s effects hewed closer to the truth than Paine’s—at least for democracy as it stood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Male voters could be

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unpredictable, urging peace at times and sometimes supporting wars with a passion “reminiscent of the worst years of the Wars of Religion,” as the historian Michael Howard put it, even if it might cost them their lives.102 Voters did in fact constrain their leaders—not always in the way that Kant and Paine predicted, but by cornering their worst instincts. Popular demands for war even in far-flung, unknown places could make the path to diplomacy and international compromise more difficult. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of democratic countries in the world had expanded to ten.103 In only one country— New Zealand—were women able to vote in national elections. In all others, democratic or not, public life largely remained a male affair. This did not mean that all women around the world were idle or silent on political issues, including war and peace. Many of the most prominent women of the day—women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, and many others—took on male and female gender roles more durable than monarchy itself, making a name for themselves through their activism and their outspoken views of the world governed by men. As we will see, their reports were not good.

• 2

The Hope for Suffrage and Peace in the New Century

Why we oppose votes for men. . . . Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them particularly unfit for the task of government. Alice Duer Miller, 1915

The “male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, slaughter, disease and death,” founder of the suffrage movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton lamented in her self-titled speech “The Destructive Male” in the aftermath of the Civil War. Carrie Chapman Catt often disagreed with Stanton about many things, but on this point wholeheartedly agreed that war was a product of men’s priorities, selfishness, and immorality. “The politics of men have embroiled the world in the most wholesale slaughter of the sons of mothers the world has ever known,” Catt wrote in 1915 before concluding that “when war murders the husbands and sons of women, destroys their homes, desolates their country and makes them refugees and paupers, it becomes the undeniable business of women.”1 Some, like American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, located the “destructive belligerence” of men within their innate tendencies. Men’s “all too-natural instinct to wander, kill and rob” would still run rampant, Gilman cheekily observed, if it had not been subdued by the

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0002

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attractions of the home created by women.2 Others, Gilman included, blamed the entrenched culture of masculinity and masculine honor. “In warfare, we find maleness in its absurdist extremes,” Gilman wrote in her book, The Man-Made World. “Here is . . . the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation with the loudest possible accompaniment of noise.”3 Young men were praised for a rationality and aggression that would enable success within business or on the battlefield. A notion of masculine honor, which Elizabeth Ward defined as “killing or being killed,” was imbued in them on multiple fronts, from national myths that celebrated military heroes and past victories to children’s toys that normalized violence, revenge, and military glory.4 Regardless of the exact source of men’s belligerence, the prescription for peace was clear—involve women in decisions about war and peace.5 Men might be able, for whatever reason, to tolerate the “battle fields sodden with the blood of our human fellow beings . . . those mothers stifling the wailing of their children in their arms . . . those trains bearing back to their homes the dead to be buried on the refuse heaps,” Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence decried in 1915, but women could not!6 For this reason, men had proven themselves unfit to have control “of the human family” solely in their hands. Stanton stated the expectation clearly: a woman’s love, “if permitted to assert itself as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence and war, would hold all these destructive forces in check.”7 Stanton’s statement locates women’s opposition to war in natural differences. In this, Stanton was not alone. The writings of renowned pacifist and Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams at times also pointed to nature as a source of women’s relative pacifism. She wrote of women being dominated “by one of those overwhelming impulses belonging to women as such, irrespective of their mental training, in their revolt against war.”8 Similarly, Pethick-Lawrence argued that within every woman is a “rooted revolt against the destruction of the blossoming manhood of the race,” regardless of the social role they played.9 Plenty of other accounts cited women’s unique social roles and their upbringing as the dominant if not sole source of women’s relative pacifism. Young men were trained for competition—in business, politics, and on the battlefield. Women were trained for selflessness and

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sentimentality, nurturing qualities that best suited their expected roles of wives and mothers.10 Women brought life into the world whereas men destroyed it. Their experiences and obligations as caregivers and mothers made women uniquely sensitive to the loss of human life and served as a powerful source of women’s moral authority in their opposition to war.11 Stanton, Catt, Addams and others were far from alone in their belief that war was the purview of men and peace the purview of women, as we will see. Such essentialized views of the sexes might sound odd to modern eras, but they pervaded public thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the obvious empirical inconsistencies. Some men, of course, strongly opposed war.12 Many of these women joined the ranks in pacifist organizations founded by men at one time or another. And clearly not all women, prominent or otherwise, were equally committed to peace. Stanton herself acknowledged in 1898 that though she hated war, she hoped to see Spain “swept from the face of the earth.”13 Women of the British Women’s Social and Political Union blew up the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s house in one of many bombings intended to terrorize the British government into granting women the vote, though they took care to avoid any injury or death.14 But on the whole, such inconsistencies were downplayed. Some men might oppose war, they argued, but women’s opposition differed in its nature and intensity. Women possess a “peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war,” declared the preamble of the Woman’s Peace Party written in 1915. Hannah Bailey, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of Peace and International Arbitration, also pointed to women’s distinctive enthusiasm for peace. “Many a man has not the moral courage to plead for peace, for fear he shall be accused of effeminacy and cowardice. Woman has no such fear; to be the advocate of peace is congenial to her character.”15 The challenge, of course, would be how to make men listen. They had their work cut out for them. Just as women had begun to make strident demands—for political voice, for financial independence, for freedoms more broadly—idealized conceptions of masculinity seemed

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to intensify in response. Traditional gender roles reasserted themselves and existing notions of masculinity were thrown into high relief. The brazen Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, displaying virility, energy, and even enthusiasm to engage in brutality and violence in the name of honor and country, epitomized American manliness at the turn of the twentieth century.16 The image would have been familiar to those who revered images of the honorable and inspiring British colonial soldier, heading off for adventure in the wild unknowns of Africa on behalf of queen and country, but with perhaps a bit more cowboy flair. Little was new about this construction of masculinity. Through their great epics of war and sacrifice, the ancient Greek and Romans—also some of the first to experiment with ideas of democracy—provided the natural archetypes to emulate. For women, honor has historically been achieved through restraint. For men in the era of Thucydides, moderation was but a “cloak for unmanliness” and “prudent hesitation” was a mere demonstration of cowardice. The Homeric hero Achilles embodied what was to be admired in a man: physical strength, daring, bravery, and the willingness to trade away a long life in exchange for honor achieved through success on the battlefield.17 “By nature, we yearn and hunger for honor,” Cicero wrote, “and once we have glimpsed, as it were, some part of its radiance, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and suffer in order to secure it.” The sense of excitement and the romantic draw of war that were felt in the towns and cities of Britain before the Crimean War or of France in August 1914, as young men cheerfully made their way to the front, would have been familiar to Cicero. Men forced to remain home, away from the battlefield and unable to glimpse the “radiance” of honor, were deemed unpatriotic and unmanly—a more dire outcome, some thought, than the horrors and glory of the front. Eliminating war would be a lofty goal that would require, some women concluded, fundamentally reshaping the ideal character of men.18 Peace will emerge only upon a “rising tide of moral feeling . . . slowly engulfing all pride of conquest and making war impossible,” Jane Addams believed.19 To alter the status quo, the culture in which the tin soldier was a popular toy would have to give way to ideals of reconciliation and compromise if the prospect of war were to decrease, Charlotte Gilman argued. The honor of a nation would have to be

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judged by a state’s success at compelling peace rather than war, Laura Elizabeth Ward believed. And British voters would need to be taught that rights were not bestowed “on the virtue of strength,” well-known British activist Priscilla Peckover claimed.20 But how does one, or even many, begin to challenge deeply entrenched norms? One strategy was to mobilize women to speak up about the cause of peace. Julia Ward Howe, eventual leader of the American Women Suffrage Association and author of the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was among the first in the United States to try her hand.21 The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 appalled Howe and led her to pen an “Appeal to Womanhood,” later called the “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” In it, she claimed that men would continue to forsake the “domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field.” But women “need no longer be made party” to such grief and horror. They could use their moral authority as wives and mothers to say firmly to their husbands and sons: “[do] not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Disarm, disarm! . . . Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.”22 Howe called for an annual day to be held on June 2nd on which women would speak out at regional “Women’s Peace Festivals” on the unique sufferings wrought on mothers by war. Howe’s “Mother’s Day,” as she would call it, failed to take root in the 1870s, but would later serve as inspiration for Mother’s Day as we know it today.23 Over the decades that followed, peace organizations organized by women increased in prominence. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union—founded in 1874 to advocate for a wide-reaching policy platform that promoted abstinence, temperance, as well as international peace—by 1890 had become the largest women’s group in the world. Events in Europe in 1914 motivated even greater commitment and effort to organize women for peace. At the Women’s Peace Parade in 1914, fifteen hundred women dressed in black or black arm bands marched in dead silence behind the banner of a dove down Fifth Avenue. After the parade, organizers Fanny Garrison Villard and Carrie Chapman Catt founded the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP), convened on a platform of the limitation of armaments and opposition to militarism. The party’s founding documents described women, as “custodians of the

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life of the ages,” who would no longer endure that “hoary evil which in an hour destroys the social structure that centuries of toil have reared.”24 Their long-term plan envisioned women as a “single humanity”—all women united against all wars—that would “humanize” government.25 For all their efforts to organize, however, women pacifists faced formidable challenges.26 Enlisting women into membership was one thing. But bringing them together en masse to draw attention to the cause of peace was another. When Julia Ward Howe attempted to organize the first Women’s Peace Congress in London in 1870 to derive solutions to the Franco-Prussian War, the effort failed because women lacked their own means to leave their homes and travel far distances.27 When women did effectively come together, there were clear ceilings on what they could do. Early on, the WPP’s activities centered around sending letters to the president expressing a support for peace, which they claimed had “no adequate expression in the press,” and hosting productions of Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women” nationwide with the hope of arousing anti-war sentiment.28 As Jane Addams saw it, women would have to take comfort in organizing parades or “maybe throw[ing] things.” The events surrounding the 1915 meeting of the International Congress of Women at The Hague illustrated both how far women were willing to go to bring about peace and the extent of the challenges they faced in doing so. Over eleven hundred women from twelve countries—on both sides of the war—traveled to a city only 125 miles from the Western Front with the intention of collectively constructing a path to peace in Europe.29 The list of attendees was a who’s who of influential women of the time: eventual World Peace Prize winner Rosika Schwimmer was joined by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Emily Hobhouse, and eventual Nobel Peace Prize winners Emily Green Balch and Jane Addams, who would chair the meeting. To board a cruise ship to cross the Atlantic or the English Channel in April 1915 was a courageous act. Both were strewn with the bodies of thousands of seamen and the hulls of recently downed ships. On the day that Jane Addams’s ship The Noordam left port in the United States, the Lusitania departed Liverpool for its second-to-last transAtlantic voyage. The Noordam was held for four days near Dover by

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the British Navy following its Atlantic crossing, as the women watched torpedo boats and destroyers rush past them out to sea, likely in search of submarines.30 As she called the meeting to order, conference organizer Dutch doctor Aletta Jacobs commended the attendees for their bravery, unity, and commitment. “We grieve for many brave young men who have lost their lives on the battlefield . . . we mourn with the poor mothers bereft of sons; with the thousands of young widows and fatherless children . . . we can no longer endure in the twentieth century of civilization that governments should tolerate brute force as the only solution of international disputes.”31 The women did not expect to end the war raging around them. Rather, the international conference, the first held during the war by anyone, would devise steps to ensure that this war would be the last. “We women . . . protest against the madness and the horror of war, involving as it does a reckless sacrifice of human life and the destruction of so much that humanity has laboured through centuries to build up,” began the resolutions laid down by the conference. Self-determination for all peoples and the creation of a neutral international body to arbitrate and mediate conflicts were among the actions recommended by the conference to achieve permanent peace. Unsurprisingly, the women and their peaceful intentions were broadly mocked in the public sphere. They were derided as “peacettes,” amateurs, nuisances, and bores by the press. The always pugnacious Theodore Roosevelt deemed them cowardly, silly, and base in the American papers, deriding their “shortsightedness, folly, sentimentality, selfish indifference and fanatical extremism.”32 They were accused of undermining morale of those in battle with their talk of peace. And yet the women—some of whom had been widowed and lost sons in the days leading up to the conference—stayed focused amidst the noise and the palpable yearning by the press for saucy details and dramatic reports of infighting.33 But the women remained committed to forming the basis of a lasting peace, moved by the desire to prevent the future suffering of other mothers, sisters, and wives. They also resolved to share their plan widely. Rosika Schwimmer, a self-professed “very radical feminist” from Hungary, made an impassioned speech urging them to meet in person with leaders in

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capitals all over Europe: “Brains—they say—have ruled the world till today. If brains have brought us to what we are in now, I think it is time to allow also our hearts to speak. . . . [L]et us, mothers, only try to do good by going to kings and emperors without any other danger than a refusal,” she argued.34 After some debate, conference leaders agreed that two small groups of delegates, helmed by Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs, would pursue an unconventional approach—traveling from government to government throughout Europe to present their platform of peace and to urge leaders to hold a peace conference of their own. Twenty-five leaders in fourteen European capitals received the women. Addams and Jacobs traveled from a meeting with the prime minister in London to a meeting with the Reichskanzler in Berlin and then on to Budapest, Paris, Vienna, Rome, and Havre. They sought the support of leaders in the Netherlands and Switzerland and even had an audience with the pope. Emily Balch, Rosika Schwimmer, and British activist Chrystal Macmillan led a second delegation to meet with the heads of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. Their reception was mixed at best. The British prime minister Asquith dismissed their resolutions as the “twittering of sparrows” and argued that any agreement to mediation would be akin to surrender. The British ambassador in Copenhagen hardly concealed his hostility, watching with eyes as hard as glass as the women spoke, Addams reported. German leaders similarly struggled to mask their annoyance, dismissing the women as “cranks.” The British press lambasted them for their “monstrous lack of understanding” and “want of sympathetic imagination.” For many, writing the women off as insincere, incompetent, unknowledgeable, naive, and ineffective was easier than entertaining the substance of their treatise. A few of the responses they received surprised them, however. “Perhaps it seems to you very foolish that women should go about this way,” Jane Addams said to the prime minister of Austria, who was at the time an old man with waning political power. “Foolish? Not at all,” the minister replied. “These are the first sensible words that have been uttered in this room for ten months,” he declared. Day in and day out, visitors entered with requests for more soldiers, more ammunition, and more money. “At last, the door opens and two people walk in and say,

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‘Mr. Minister, why not substitute negotiations for fighting?’ You are the sensible ones,” he concluded. The Pope also greeted them warmly, encouraging their efforts and remarking that he did not see why women had remained silent for so long on the issue of opposing war since it was, after all, women’s business to do so.35 Upon arriving in the United States at the end of the summer, Jacobs met with President Wilson, who noted that the women had arrived at the best plan yet. Six months later, in January of 1916, Wilson reiterated the compliment to Addams. “You see I have studied these resolutions,” he told her. “I consider them by far the best formulation which up to the moment has been put out by anybody.”36 That the women were even allowed a high-level audience to share their convictions was a sign of progress. The ability to speak did little, however, to mitigate the costs of war and it did little to alleviate the outrage and inefficacy many women felt at being confined to feckless peace societies. “I have felt so angry and stirred since you began to talk,” writer and feminist Mary Livermore had exclaimed publicly at an antiimperialist meeting in 1903. “Moral utterances” were but a feeble tool in the fight against recurring war and rampant imperialism.37 She offered one clear solution: Give women the right to vote. “Then, my brothers, we could help you men,” she said. “We cannot do much now.”38 In 1840, before Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a household name, she traveled to London with her new husband. Wealthy, unusually well educated for a woman of the day, and perhaps exceptionally stubborn, the 24-year-old Elizabeth had just eloped against her father’s wishes.39 For their honeymoon, she and her husband Henry traveled to London to attend the annual meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention. The trans-Atlantic tickets aboard the Montreal cost them $120 each, a small fortune at the time. But Elizabeth was excited to be surrounded by some of the most progressive leaders of the age—leaders at the forefront of the global push to eradicate human bondage. When word got out that Stanton and twelve other intrepid American women, including American abolitionist Lucretia Mott, were headed to London, prepared to infiltrate organized society, they were greeted with derision by British journalists who lined the shores to witness the arrival of these “manly” women. An affront to propriety, femininity, and

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virtue, the press declared. “Excitement and vehemence of protest and denunciation could not have been greater if the news had come that the French were about to invade England!” Stanton later recalled of their reception. Stanton, Mott, and the other women expected more of the progressive men running the convention on racial equality and human freedom. On the first day, the women took their seats—upfront, alongside the men, entirely unaware of the far-reaching consequences this simple act would have. In the near term, it sent the convention into a tail spin. The organizers shelved the topic of the universal elimination of slavery to make way for discussion of a far more pressing challenge to the social order—the rightful role and placement of these women in their midst. The delegates deliberated and debated for hours; and then they voted. Those in support of women’s participation lost. A majority of some of the most progressive men of the day decided not only to exclude the women, many of whom had crossed an ocean for the cause of abolition, but to do so in a most humiliating way. The women were directed to the spectator’s gallery in the back where their faces would be obscured by a dark curtain. They were to remain silent. Stanton’s new husband allegedly approved the measure. “Humiliated and chagrined,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton reported finding new purpose in London on that day. She later declared the event a turning point in her eventful life. What better proof could there be that changing the attitudes of men, even progressive men, would be a “herculean” task without real political power? From that point, Stanton turned her attention from the inequality of black men and women to the unequal conditions of half of the world’s population. She and Lucretia Mott left the conference, supposedly arm and arm, vowing one day to organize a convention of their own—one that would focus on the social and political fate of women.40 The convention they organized at Seneca Falls eight years later— the first of its kind in the United States—marked a new phase in the push for political and social equality of women.41 For on the list of the convention’s set of demands, Cady Stanton included something altogether revolutionary—the demand for women’s suffrage.42 The call for women’s suffrage at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 has come to symbolize the start of a revolution. This most defining

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event of the conference almost did not happen however.43 On the second day, the resolution on suffrage came up for debate. Some in the audience threatened to pull support from the whole proceedings if the demand was not dropped. The fate of the resolution fell into the hands of one man. Frederick Douglass, born a slave, was committed to the abolition of slavery. He was also committed to the pursuit of equality for all humans, regardless of race or sex. As the resolution for suffrage floundered, Douglass stood and eloquently petitioned the crowd. The world will be a better place if women are brought into politics, he said. Disenfranchisement equalled “the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice,” he argued, as well as the “maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”44 Douglass’s oratory moved the crowd. Without it, the resolution to publicly demand women’s enfranchisement would likely never have passed. Stanton and Mott had originally found their motivation for Seneca Falls at a meeting to protest the abomination of slavery eight years earlier. It was now a freed slave that had given the cause of women’s suffrage its voice. Douglass’s commitment to women’s suffrage was borne out of the desire to both right an egregious wrong and to live in a world shaped by women’s votes. It was a world, he later argued, in which “woman’s influence would greatly tend to check and modify this barbarous and destructive tendency” of men.45 Stanton and many of her pacifist peers came to agree.46 Protests, speeches, and conferences would not do it. Women’s votes would be required if slavery, imperialism and war were to be abolished. Votes could not easily be dismissed. They were tallied and the numbers amounted to something—to tangible political change, they believed. “I urge a sixteenth amendment because ‘manhood suffrage,’ . . . is civil, religious and social disorganization,” Stanton declared in 1868. Women’s suffrage would “lift woman to her true position [and] help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race.” Many would come to share her view. The vote would be necessary if they were to make a dent in the ingrained patterns and culture of war. “Never will the nations of the earth be well governed,” wrote British

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activist Anne Knight,” until both sexes are fully represented and have an influence, a voice and a hand in the enactment and administration of laws.” “When women shall have a direct voice in politics and in determining the continuance of carnal warfare, doubtless the former will become more purified and the latter will be abolished altogether,” Hannah Bailey of the Temperance Union predicted.47 Some lamented that women’s votes would surely have prevented the wars of the era. “The butchery of the Spanish-American War would never have been perpetrated,” Susan B. Anthony argued in 1899, if women had been allowed the vote. Alice Blackwell, editor of the Women’s Journal, offered a similar take. “This war . . . is utterly inexcusable,” she wrote about the Spanish-American War, “It is a Congress of men that has declared it.” Others focused on securing the vote in order to prevent future conflict. The British women’s magazine Common Cause, for instance, demanded in 1911 that women’s suffrage be granted quickly to stave off a coming war on the European continent: “If the statesmen of Europe really care for peace, let them enfranchise those whose function it is to preserve life in the race. . . . In the freedom of women lies our strong hope of future peace.” To those who argued that women did not actively engage in war and therefore should play no role in shaping the contours of war, the women argued that they shared an equal burden in war—as mothers, wives, daughters, and able workers. Such arguments were at the very heart of suffrage campaigns around the country (see Fig. 1).48 Even once war had begun, the women at The Hague in 1915 focused on the extension of the franchise to women as a centerpiece of their plan for future peace. Central among the resolutions presented by the women was democratic control over foreign policy. But not democracies with only male voters. “We consider that the introduction of women suffrage in all countries is one of the most powerful means to prevent war in the future,” the resolution stated. “Only when women are in the parliaments of all nations, only when women have a political voice and vote, will they have the power effectively to demand that international disputes shall be solved as they ought to be, by a court of arbitration of conciliation.” The combined influence of women in countries all

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Fig. 1 Campaign flyer for the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association. over the world—made possible by the right to vote—would best spare civilization from war, the final document said. Peace was the highest goal. Suffrage would have to be the means, the vote an empowering act of agency with the highest possibility of achieving real change.

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It is somewhat ironic that women around the globe had maintained a profound faith in the pacifying effects of a system that had long excluded them. But like Kant and Paine before them, Stanton, Catt, and others expected the vote to bring transformative change. They pursued suffrage not solely as an end in itself, but as a tool with which they could best achieve their broader goals. Women’s votes would shape who ran for office and which politicians got elected, giving rise to a political landscape that was more aligned with women’s interests. Politicians would attend to the interests of women activists and organizations as more than a mere courtesy, or else risk losing the votes of thousands or even millions that supported their causes. With the votes of half of the electorate behind them, their demands could not be so easily dismissed as the “extreme sentimentality” of women. The decision to entwine the pursuit of peace with suffrage was nevertheless controversial among the advocates for both. To demand peace during a time of war was easily characterized by influential jingoes as unpatriotic. The portrayal of women as radical pacifists might undermine the case for including them within the electorate. Moreover, not all who supported peace supported suffrage. Pressing for women’s suffrage might then weaken the call for peace.49 These tensions were evident in the strategies employed by many activists in the early decades of the new century. For fear that women would be deemed unworthy of the vote if they voiced their anti-war preferences too loudly, activists in Britain crafted a suffrage campaign that emphasized women’s courage, patriotism, and commitment to the wholehearted defense of Britain and its Empire.50 Within the United States, strong advocates of peace like Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw opted out of women’s marches that silently protested war, not wanting to draw attention to an unpopular cause among voters. “The best thing I can do for peace and a thousand other things is to get votes for women,” Shaw wrote to Aletta Jacobs of the Netherlands.51 In time, the two approaches to the pursuit of peace—organizing to advocate for cultural change and demanding political equality—would reinforce one another. But as war raged in Europe, these two approaches seemed to present a Hobson’s choice—you could have one of the other but not both. The tension between the promotion of peace and the

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promotion of suffrage was enough, Jane Addams concluded, “to drive a dry to drink.”52 After Woodrow Wilson declared war in 1917, the women’s movement in the United States split into two factions. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), offered her assistance to Wilson and the war effort. In a widely criticized letter she “pledge[d] the loyal support of our more than two million members” to the war.53 Catt viewed this as a strategic calculation designed to quell perceptions of suffragists as “unpatriotic” and gain support for a Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.54 Others, like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, accused Catt of selling out her commitment to peace in order to placate men in power. For her calculated political act, Catt was berated by the New York branch of the Woman’s Peace Party, essentially an act of dismissal from the organization she helped to found just a few years prior.55 Some women chose more assertive stances, placing women’s superior moral virtues and desire for peace at the center of their demands for political participation. “Might it not be better for the sex which furnishes nine-tenths of the criminals to give to the sex which furnishes two-thirds of the church members an equal share in the duties and privileges of citizenship?” the Woman’s Tribune asked. Perhaps men should be denied the vote altogether, writer Alice Duer Miller proposed, on account of their questionable credentials and character. For “no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it,” she wrote. Better that men be contained to their natural habitat—in the army—and kept out of the voting booth (Fig. 2). Though Catt was ostracized over her decision to support the war effort, the response of prominent men did suggest that calling for an immediate peace might indeed make the path to suffrage harder. Skepticism that women voters would not take the “hard decisions” to uphold national honor was deeply rooted and readily expressed. Teddy Roosevelt believed the move towards women’s political equality in the United States would cause national rot and international vulnerability. The “peace-at-any-pricers,” or “shrieking sisterhood,” led by “poor bleeding Jane” had lost all sight of true morality and represented a threat to national security.56 Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India early in the new

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Fig. 2 National Woman Suffrage Association poster, 1915. century, feared that giving women the vote would make England the laughing stock of Europe. “It will bring misery on our homes and ruin on our Empire,” he argued. For what powerful and resolved country would bring the weaker sex, with their tendencies for compromise and cooperation, into the public sphere? On May 1, 1915, the day the International Congress of Women concluded in The Hague with unanimous support of their resolutions for peace, an average of 3,000 men were dying daily in the trenches on the Western Front. The Ottomans were trying to push Allied forces off their coast and back out to sea in the ongoing battle for Gallipoli. The Austro-Hungarians were dropping tens of thousands of shells on Russian soldiers in Galicia on the Eastern Front and fighting in the Second Battle of Ypres wore on, the distinctive odor of pineapple and pepper becoming familiar to French and Canadian soldiers as signs of a gas attack. One could argue that the women’s efforts at the Hague ultimately helped to shape the peace process in Versailles after World War I. But it is harder to argue that the women’s anti-war efforts did anything to

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alter the shape or duration of the war in Europe.57 No woman present had held any illusion that would be the case. “We do not think we can settle the war. We do not think that by raising our hands we can make the armies cease slaughter,” Jane Addams had written during her trans-Atlantic journey to Europe. Without the vote, they were too easy to ignore. Only once women were able to vote in large numbers, they thought, would they have any tangible effect on such decisions. This advocacy, however, did foreshadow what women’s organizations might be capable of once women won the vote. In the aftermath of World War I, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which developed out of the Hague Conference and remains operational today with members in thirty-seven countries, prioritized opposition to the Versailles Treaty in 1919. The treaty, they argued, was too focused on revenge and would breed resentment, sowing the seeds for another war—critiques which proved eerily prescient just two decades later. The National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1924, advocated for the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by twelve nations in 1929 with the goal of avoiding war as a means to resolving international disputes. And during the World Disarmament Conference in 1932, the women’s movement collected 8 million signatures in fifty countries as part of an effort to push for universal disarmament. Conclusion In the years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, we have come to think of women’s suffrage as an endpoint, as the ultimate symbol of women’s equality and therefore worthy in and of itself of celebration. But many of the suffragists at the time did not see it exactly in this way. They did not solely seek suffrage and equality as ends in themselves. Rather, they sought them as a means to social and political change. They did not waver in what they believed the vote could achieve. And one of these things was peace. The issue with early liberal thinkers who had placed such profound faith in democracy, these advocates believed, was that the institutions alone were not enough to ensure peace. The end of the nineteenth century and the lead up to World War I had underscored this point. Although the democratic institutions

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certainly mattered in some regard, the suffragists believed that who was able to participate in the process was more important. Ultimately, they believed that peace would prevail because women differ from men in their political preferences and their willingness to countenance violence. But were they right? Are men and women really different in this way?

3

•

Gender and Aggression: Nature or Nurture?

Just off the coast of Venezuela, some 300 miles from the capital city of Caracas, lies Margarita Island, the self-proclaimed “Pearl of the Caribbean,” known for both its historic activity in the pearl industry and white sandy beaches. Once the base of operations for Simón Bolívar’s independence movement, Margarita Island is unusual because unlike most of the region—where “machismo” culture took root early on and continues to thrive—a consequential period of its history was shaped by the relative absence of men. Until the development of a free port for shopping, the main economic activities on the island included subsistence farming, fishing, and crafts. In search of economic opportunities, many men born on the island left for the mainland, leaving women behind.1 The gender disparities in migration were so stark that in 1941, for every one hundred women there were fifty-six men between the ages of 20 and 49. By 1981, this sex-ratio disparity had disappeared, but in the interim forty years, women dominated local culture. What form of society would these women create? Several decades of anthropological research paint a picture. As one townswoman explained, women on the island “do not put up with the fastidioso [annoying] behavior of men. We know how to parar el macho. We tell men to get lost when they get to be too much. If a man bothers me, I slap him in the face or I hit him over the head with a bottle. Once my women friends and I threw a guy on the ground because he was being disrespectful.” This phrase “Yo sé parar el macho”—I know how to stop male machismo—is commonly heard.2 Women use forms

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0003

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of aggression to exert social control over men, and sometimes to stop them from fighting. Fights between women are also common—over water during shortages, questions of paternity, and other matters. Such examples illustrate the central role of culture in influencing when aggression is used by different genders across societies. Biological determinism cannot account for these differences. And yet, across societies, there are also striking patterns. Over the course of thirtyfive years, the World Values Survey asked 136,500 men and 140,339 women in ninety-six countries whether they were willing to fight for their countries.3 78% of men and 66% of women said that they were. The probability that such a pattern in gender preferences would be due to chance is less than 1 in 5 quadrillion. In every region, in every time period, more men than women were willing to fight.4 Studies in psychology and criminology from diverse populations in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere show that men and boys are more ready to employ physical aggression than women and girls.5 These patterns raise the question of how biology influences gender differences in aggressive behavior. To reject biological determinism is not to reject the influence of biological differences between genders nor to deny that common patterns across societies may be shaped by common experiences. The possibility that different genders have systematically different preferences, on average, when it comes to their personal conduct leads to another question: do people of different genders have different political preferences on average? Do the factors that make women less willing to fight make them less willing to see others fight in their name? Committing acts of violence is one thing; expressing a political preference for others to do so is another. Are women—on average, compared to men—advocates for peace, as the nineteenth-century suffragists claimed? If so, there is reason to expect democracies with women in their electorates to be more peaceful too. Defining Sex In 2009, Caster Semenya burst onto the international track and field scene from relative obscurity. The 18-year-old South African, racing in her first senior-level competition, stormed to victory in the 800

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meter race, beating her opponents by two seconds in a race that is usually decided by fractions of a second. When a young talent shakes up the international track and field scene in such an undeniable way, conversations would usually focus on their incredible accomplishment or their meteoric rise from humble beginnings. In 2008, when Jamaican sprinting phenom, Usain Bolt, cemented his international reputation by setting the world record in the 100 meter dash, the public marveled at his “lightning speed” and flair, despite not even really trying.6 For Semenya, who had smashed the competition in Bolt-like fashion, the conversation immediately turned to something very different: her body and gender identity. Headlines like “Claims emerge that South Africa’s female 800m hope Caster Semenya is really a MAN!”7 and “Could This Women’s World Champ Be a Man?”8 dominated the fallout from the event. And Semenya’s opponents sneered things like, “Just look at her”, “These kinds of people should not run with us. For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man,” and “Even if she is a female, she’s on the very fringe of the normal athlete female biological composition . . . most of us just feel that we are literally running against a man.” Despite being “a human being who was born as a woman and who has grown up all her life as a woman,” Semenya agreed to undergo a gender test to address their concerns. Led by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body for track and field, testing involved endocrinologists, gynecologists, psychologists, and internal and external examinations. The results were intended to be kept private but were invariably leaked to the press. According to the BBC, the testing found that “she has testosterone levels that are three times higher than those normally expected in a female,” and “It’s likely that she has some hermaphroditic or intersex condition.”9 The case of Caster Semenya demonstrates not only how radically our understandings of sex have changed since the nineteenth century, when essentializing language about “men” and “women” was thrown around with ease, but also how difficult it is to conceptualize sex as a binary variable. What determines sex is far more complicated than the simple presence or absence of a Y chromosome. The assignment of sex at birth is frequently shaped by the presence of X or Y chromosomes, which typically determine the nature of reproductive organs. However, the

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process by which this differentiation occurs is not always so clearcut. In some cases, a child may be considered intersex, with “a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”10 What is clear, however, is that ambiguity of sex at birth is not too uncommon: in around 1 in 1,500 live births a specialist in sex differentiation is required to assign a child’s sex at birth.11 If biological sex is not binary, gender identity is even less so.12 As social constructions, gender identities are partly personal creations and partly societal roles, and they come in many forms. While the list is incomplete, there are at present at least fifty-eight different gender labels with which individuals may identify, including Cisgender, Pangender, Non-binary, and Genderqueer, among others.13 But in contrast to the diversity of biological, personal, and cultural forms, the evidence on the relationship between sex, gender, and aggression comes almost entirely from studies in which participants identify themselves as either “male” or “female.” Evidence from polls and surveys, including those we will discuss below, refers only to “men” and “women” and other commonly used binary terms. But it is important to be mindful of what these data represent. They are not a binary measure of biological sex because participants in studies are free to answer as they choose. Nor are they a binary measure of gender identity because participants may believe they are being asked to indicate their biological sex. Some participants may even, like Josephine Baker filling out forms at the airport in Paris, refuse to submit to any binary gender classification.14 Instead, polls typically analyze “self-identified binary gender”— among those who are willing and able to answer. This has the benefit that individuals are not placed in a category they did not choose. It has the drawback that we do not know the basis of the choice. It is likely, however, that this distinction corresponds closely to binary biological sex assigned at birth given that transgender individuals appear to comprise less than 1% of populations.15 Nevertheless, as we shall see, there are precious few instances where we can separate biological influences on behavior from cultural and even personal ones. Measurement difficulties aside, the question remains as to why we would even want to wade into the nature vs. nurture conversation to understand gender differences in preferences for war and peace.

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While some of the academic literature that looks at the nature side of human behavior is benign, several patently unethical and racially motivated studies have made plain the dangers of the nature side of the debate.16 The association of race and gender differences with biology has a terrible history in justifications for oppression. Yet, assigning gender completely to the realm of culture does not free it from being a basis for discrimination. Cultural differences can also serve as a basis for bigotry. For example, it was cultural differences between blacks and whites that were used to justify apartheid.17 As the critic Louis Menand has pointed out, “making the differences cultural enables people to say, ‘I’m not a racist—I just want to preserve our respective ways of life. I don’t want to be replaced.’”18 Another reason to take sex or gender-based biological differences seriously is that it is too dangerous not to. Incredible as it may seem today, not long ago, women’s biology was treated as so similar to men’s that it generally did not require separate study. Women were systematically excluded from clinical trials in the United States after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines in 1977 urging researchers not to include “women with childbearing potential.”19 A strange aspect of this practice was that it was simultaneously based, in part, on the very fact that women are different. The hormone cycle “introduces additional variables,” complicating scientific analysis. Imagine that. When enough evidence was amassed that these “additional variables” do indeed affect “reactions to drugs” and other treatments in important ways, Congress decided it needed to force scientists to examine all of this complexity. In 1993, the “NIH Revitalization Act” mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials for any NIH-funded research. Excluding women from clinical trials for their supposed “additional variables,” while simultaneously ignoring those differences in pursuit of scientific innovation and assuming what works for men will work for women, had the net effect of putting women’s lives at risk by failing to account for the very biological variation that led to their systematic exclusion from research in the first place.20 Yet another reason to examine these biological differences is that beyond whatever direct influence on aggression they may have, they appear to influence other aspects of decision-making that could in

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turn influence political preferences. For example, research in psychology has found that men and women respond differently to stress. With respect to risk, men become more daring in stressful situations; whereas, women become more cautious.21 With respect to interpersonal engagement, women become more collaborative; whereas, men become antisocial.22 Other research has found differences in how men and women assess their own abilities. This work finds that, in general, men tend to be overconfident when they are wrong, whereas women seem to hold more accurate perceptions of their weaknesses; however, in situations of certainty, men and women tend to be equally confident.23 These findings mirror other research in political science that shows that men tend to be overconfident in their likelihood of success in simulated wargames and more willing to attack than women—a difference in temperament that is used to underscore the importance of including more women in matters of high politics.24 Gender, Aggression, and Preferences about War and Peace We have already mentioned that, beginning at early ages and spanning cultural contexts, those who identify as “male” are more willing, on average, to engage in aggression than those who identify as “female.”25 Men commit violent crimes at about four times and murder at about eight times the rate of women. As Figure 3 shows, the relative rates of murder have remained remarkably stable over time. And since 1976, sixteen women have been executed in the United States as compared to 1,476 men. The odds that men and women personally engage in violent conduct differ significantly. But what, if anything, do these differences have to do with attitudes about war and peace between nations? Women may be less inclined to engage in violence themselves, but are they also less inclined to send others to fight on their behalf? One of the earliest insights we have into this question is from public polling conducted in the United States over the second half of 1940. The newlyformed Gallup company, in one of the first attempts at polling a representative sample, asked Americans about their support for entry into another war in Europe. Their answers, depicted in Figure 4, illustrate a number of near-universal patterns in the attitudes

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of self-identified “men” and self-identified “women” towards war. First, the opinions expressed by men and women tend to move in lock step together in response to the same events or political messages. Support for entry into the European war started to tick up for both genders in July before peaking and leveling off in October. Second, a remarkably consistent gap exists between men’s and women’s support for war. Even as overall preferences change over time, the willingness of self-identified men to use force is higher than the willingness of self-identified women. As we will see, this finding is remarkably consistent over time and place. When publics wrestle with whether their governments should use force, the preferences of men and women move in parallel, but a higher fraction of men are in favor. Finally, the graph illustrates the significant diversity that exists within genders. At no point would it have made sense to call all men warlike. At most, two in three men supported entry into the war. And at no point did all women support peace. By the end of the year, still twelve months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, over half of women supported sending American soldiers back to Europe despite the risks. In short, men are not war-mongers. Women are not submissive doves.26 Rather, women seem to have a more dovish baseline preference in many situations, but this preference responds to and interacts with information and context.27 To see these patterns in a different light, consider the women of Nazi Germany. In the reckoning over crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, just a handful of women stood trial in November 1945 at Nuremberg, among them only the worst kind of “beasts, sadists, and seductresses” like Irma Grese—an SS guard at Nazi concentration camps known as the “Hyena of Auschwitz”—who had used the skins of three inmates to fashion lampshades.28 Despite clear evidence to the contrary, women in Nazi Germany were still considered innocent victims, whose crimes were ignored due to the common belief that if they had dared to engage in violent acts, they likely did so only because they had been “blinded by love.”29 But these notions of the traditional innocence of women, rooted in deep-seated stereotypes, masked the decades of indoctrination that nurtured many Nazi girls into co-conspirators in mass genocide. Many of the half a million women who witnessed, encouraged, or perpetrated these heinous crimes came of age in the post-Weimar

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era as “World War I baby boomers.”30 These young adults straddled two different eras and they were determined to make a decided break with older generations of women who had, simply put, contributed to Germany’s defeat in World War I and the enduring national humiliation that followed.31 The new National Socialist rhetoric called for the formidable task of “emancipat[ing] women from woman’s emancipation”—extracting the Western ideals of feminism that had been implanted in a generation of German women by the Jews.32 To accomplish this goal, the Nazi party organized the League of German Maidens (the Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM) as the branch of the Hitler Youth for young women. There, women were indoctrinated in the ideals of National Socialism and into their new roles as the “mothers of Hitler’s future soldiers.”33 By 1936, membership in the group was no longer voluntary, and girls were routinely separated from their families to train for their future contributions to Nazi society. Although much of Hitler’s rhetoric with respect to German women focused on traditionally female tasks like motherhood, beauty was not defined in a traditional sense—by the amount of products she used or how thin she was—but rather the goal was to “create a new ‘type of girl,’” sturdy, skilled in marksmanship, natural, and above all, willing to give over her body to “a battle she wages for the existence of her people.”34 In this way, the League of German Maidens promoted an “image of girlhood both smart and sporty, devoid of any superfluous frippery” with women on the frontlines of an ongoing struggle to cleanse society of its impurities.35 Through their training these women were “conditioned to accept violence, to incite it, and to commit it, in defense of or as an assertion of Germany’s superiority.”36 This case demonstrates the effects of cultural indoctrination on gendered notions of the appropriate uses of violence. But it reminds us of something else too: cultures that disinhibit female violence often disinhibit male violence more. Young men too, had been shaped by the post-World War I era, many through their participation in the Hitler Youth. In January 1933, when Hitler came to power, the Hitler Youth counted 50,000 young men among their ranks. By the end of the year, their numbers had swelled to over 2 million. With an added dose of ideological indoctrination, at first their activities mirrored those of other youth programs—camping trips, crafts, and hiking were

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common—but over a span of a few years, those activities shifted toward more military exercises. Separated from their families as young as ten years old, the Hitler Youth sought to train the next generation of soldiers, both ideological and military. The same violent sacrificial ideology was “hammered” into them early on: “Germany must live, even if we have to die.”37 If indoctrinated German women became less likely to hold their nation back from war, the prospects for German men doing so became smaller still. The preferences of men and women probably moved together on average. Some German women were more willing to advocate for and commit acts of violence than some German men. It is likely that when women became amenable to violence on average, however, men still exceeded them. We can also see the same story in polling numbers from more recent conflicts. In perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of U.S. polling data to date, Eichenberg (2016) analyzes gender differences in public attitudes toward the use of military force in twenty-four cases from 1982 to 2013, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the crisis in Syria. He consistently finds that women are less supportive of using force; this result holds across time, the size of interventions (including smaller operations such as the deployment of Marines in Lebanon in 1983 or the airstrikes in Libya in 1986), and the partisanship of the president, although the magnitude of the gender gap varies. In another study, Eichenberg finds that the gender gap appears to hold cross-nationally, though its size and nature varies by country and context.38 Those findings comport with the studies that explore the gender gap in attitudes toward war outside the United States,39 but less data on male versus female political attitudes is available from less democratic and less wealthy parts of the world. Nevertheless, what data is available from less-sampled populations suggests that gendered population differences are consistent with what we see elsewhere. In 2014, for instance, 47% of male Kenyans preferred that the Kenyan Defense Forces continue their activities in neighboring Somalia; only 39% of Kenyan women agreed.40 Similarly, in Beijing China in 2015, more men (24%) than women (16%) saw the country’s greatest threats as coming from foreign powers.41

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Striking evidence comes from a fourteen-country recent study on approval of drone strikes. In every country surveyed, from Asia to Africa, from Europe to North America, men were more supportive than women. The average difference in the level of support across the studies was 22%. The difference was highest in Japan (31%) and lowest in Uganda (13%), but in all cases the difference was in the same direction. In most of the European and North American countries, majorities of men supported the use of drone violence while closer to a quarter or a third of women did.42 In Asia and Africa, fewer people supported the military use of drones, but the same gender gap was present. Of course, men and women do not always disagree to this extent. Some conflicts command broad support or fail to garner much support— from anyone. As we will see in Chapter 7, the “Four Mothers” who lobbied Israeli society against a continued military occupation of Southern Lebanon made this point clear. When one of them, Ronit Nahmias, was asked if she would send her son to fight in a war for survival, she seemed surprised by the question. “Of course I would,” she answered. “In a truly necessary war, I think all of us would be ready to send our sons.” To understand the impact of women in the electorate, we will need to focus on conflicts that are not clearly forced upon societies. At the opposite end of the security spectrum, there is also evidence that the gap between men and women in support for conflict diminishes if the objective of the conflict is humanitarian. Some have even suggested that women are more supportive of such conflicts, but we do not see evidence for that in real-world conflicts.43 So far, we have looked primarily at evidence from international polls that have asked about numerous conflicts, but each case is different and it is hard to compare across them. We can get an even clearer sense of how men and women differ by using experimental data from six countries across four continents collected by international relations scholars. These studies measure public opinion at different stages of international crises.44 By analyzing all of the studies together, we confirmed that women’s preferences are consistently more dovish than men’s. The likelihood that the difference between men and women’s support for the use of force would occur due to chance is less than one in

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a trillion trillion trillion trillion cases of similar polls being conducted. This far exceeds the so-called “five sigma” standard for discoveries in experimental physics of one in about 3.5 million. We found once again that the largest differences are in Japan, where more than half of men and only a quarter of women wished to see Japanese troops support U.S. forces in the Middle East. We found the smallest differences in Israel, where only a slightly higher minority of men wished to see Israel contest resources under the Mediterranean seabed militarily. But using these more controlled settings also enables us to gain broader and deeper insights into how men and women think about war and peace. For instance, one set of survey experiments, conducted in Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and the United States, presented respondents with an artificial crisis involving their country and then asked them how much they would approve of a variety of resolutions to the crisis.45 An interesting pattern emerges. Both men and women disapprove when their own country is said to receive less than a rival in some negotiated compromise. But women, on the whole, report less wholehearted disapproval than men of receiving less. Both men and women, on average, approve when their country comes out ahead, but men report significantly more enthusiasm for this outcome than women. Rather, women express greater concern that such a “greedy” foreign policy could raise the risk of war later on. Another set of experiments provides insight into how men and women think about leaders backing down in the face of a crisis. Women on the whole are more approving than men when leaders stay out of conflict altogether. Both men and women give leaders low approval ratings when they back down after threatening to use force. But women’s approval is the more responsive to the decision to back down because it is higher when the leader never gets involved in the first place. International relations scholars would say that leaders therefore pay higher “audience costs” among women than men if they make threats of violence but back down.46 Women’s preferences may even facilitate compromise in this way. For if leaders threaten violence knowing that they will face punishment at the polls if they don’t follow through, they will probably be less likely to make empty threats. Opponents might then be more apt to see their threats as genuine and be less likely to take risks that would lead to war.

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We mentioned that both men and women give leaders low marks when they back down after threatening to use force. Interestingly, they do so for different reasons. What men disapprove of most is the inconsistency of the leader’s actions. When the leader threatens to use force but doesn’t, this could garner a reputation for empty threats and weakness. Most women, however, disapprove because the leader was belligerent in the first place and not because they did not follow through on their threat.47 Finally, the surveys show that, in some common international contexts, U.S. women are about as approving of political leaders who use force but gain nothing and leaders who back down after making a threat. Men, on the other hand, approve much more highly of leaders who use force, even if the intended goals are not accomplished, than leaders who back down and potentially endanger the country’s reputation. Approval among men is fully thirty-six percentage points higher for a use of force that achieves nothing and in which over 4, 000 U.S. soldiers die than for a U.S. president who backs down, achieving the same objective outcome without the loss of life.48 In short, self-identified gender predicts substantial differences in preferences for conflict and cooperation, and these differences are not limited to a few cultural domains or geographic regions. Differences in the size of the gender gap do exist across countries and we are still uncertain as to why. But in the United States, where most studies are conducted, women prefer less aggressive options at each stage of a crisis. Women impose larger audience costs for backing down versus staying out, relative to men. They also show higher approval for backing down versus engaging in any form of conflict. These findings generally support nineteenth-century suffragist claims about the relative peacefulness of women, even while they paint a far more nuanced picture. But Why the Gender Gap? It is clear that women’s political preferences are systematically different from men’s on average. The reason is not. This question of why is an emotional one. We stand now on the other side of a great centurieslong moral war, “the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom—humanity is one undivided thing.”49

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When Immanuel Kant began writing in the late eighteenth century, he thought black Africans could not participate in reason and therefore could not be agents with moral worth. A decade later, having read travel diaries of those who had visited the African continent, he changed his mind. But it took two more centuries for much of the world to shed even the most obviously false racial and gender prejudices.50 Even in the twentieth century, anthropologists were still dispensing racialized myths of differing cranial capacities. It was the task of a generation of mid-century anthropologists to demonstrate that many differences that had been assigned to race or gender were in fact due to culture. In trying to answer the question of why preferences diverge, psychologists have emphasized that human beings inhabit roles and that, unlike cultures, these roles can be exchanged remarkably quickly. If some individuals are told to inhabit the roles of the powerful and brutal and others are told to embody their weak victims, the gender of the participants is not as important as the role assigned.51 The roles that societies assign differ by gender, and nowhere is the relation between gender roles and the use of violence more apparent than in the practice of dueling. Take one young man of nineteen by the name of Franz, who fought his first of many saber duels in 1877. The ritual consisted of donning iron goggles and padded clothing and then attempting to slash one’s opponent’s face more than he slashed yours. In Germany at that time, this was a common practice among university students known as Mensur. Mark Twain, as an observer from America where dueling was already out of fashion, noted with amazement that “newly bandaged students are a very common spectacle in the public gardens of Heidelberg.” In fact, students prized wounds on the face in particular “because the scars they leave will show so well there.”52 A reporter who observed Franz’s face several years and many duels later described him as “a battle scarred veteran, though still a young man.” The reporter continued: “On the left side of his forehead near the temple two scars convene and cross. A scar ornaments also the left side. His nose was at one time nearly severed and the left side of his face from the angle of the lips to the ear shows a long scar.” The reporter concluded dryly, referencing the popularity of this form of dueling among university students, “He is a very learned man.”53

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This was Franz Boas, who would himself go on to destroy “scientific racism,” introduce the ideology of cultural relativism, and train many central figures who would transform the field of anthropology including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston. What was the offense that led to that first gruesome affair? It all involved some upset among the neighbors because Boas’s roommate had played the piano too loudly at the wrong time of day.54 To modern eyes, dueling is a startling example of the association of masculinity with forms of violence. As we saw in Chapter 2, standing up for one’s honor—where honor is about a willingness to engage in violent competitions in response to slights—has been a trope associated almost exclusively with men since ancient times. With only a few exceptions, duels were not fought by women and to do so made no cultural sense: women were not expected to stand up for their manly honor. The protection of a woman’s “honor” was something altogether different. It is reasonable to suspect that cultures that promote dueling and other forms of interpersonal violence would be more likely to approve of political violence. Indeed, connections between the need to fight wars and the need to duel to maintain reputation were often made. In the United States, for instance, the War of 1812 was thought of as an opportunity to win respect for the new nation whose very form of government was also new in the modern world. Would the United States be able to defend its honor when challenged? After the war, the Speaker of the House and future secretary of state, Henry Clay, left no doubt about the country’s intention in fighting yet another war with Britain: “Let any man look at the degraded condition of this country before the war; the scorn of the universe, the contempt of ourselves. . . . What is the present situation? Respectability and character abroad—security and confidence at home.” It was in this sense that the war was popularly called the “Second War of Independence.” The British envoy to Washington at that time, Augustus John Foster, eventually saw things much the same way. He worked against the coming of the war for years, virtually begging his government to make the smallest concession. Britain was in the midst of an existential war with Napoleon and, little wishing for the distraction, finally accepted U.S. terms. Unfortunately, the news of the concession reached the roused young country only after the declaration of war. Too much

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trouble to call it off, the Madison administration thought, and off they went to war. Having worked so hard to prevent it, Foster at first thought the war was pointless (and “baleful”), but came to understand its necessity: “It was as necessary to America as a duel is to a young naval officer to prevent his being bullied and elbowed in society.”55 Just so, Boas wrote to his father that due to his facial scars, “I remain unmolested since every student here knows that I would not be shy to defend my affairs with the sword.”56 Dueling has its roots in aristocratic ideals tied to a “culture of honor” ethos designed to protect a family’s “reputation, standing, and dignity.”57 By the mid-eighteenth century, dueling had become a way of recognizing status, and in a society transformed by industrialization and urbanization—where value was less tied to noble birth—it became a popular way to assert ones worth and display one’s “manly virtues.” Although the popularity of dueling waned in the early 1800s, the “chivalric ideas were absorbed into middle-class manners and morals as part of what was regarded as respectable behavior.”58 At the same time, the physical manifestation of masculinity, defined by strength and courage, gained traction as a result of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the union between body and spirit. In a quest for standardbearers of the ideal physique, the constructors of masculine culture took their inspiration from ancient Greece’s citizen warriors, who were believed both spirited on the battlefield and informed on matters of high politics. As the history described in Chapter 1 suggests, perhaps no events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were more influential in shaping perceptions of masculinity than wars. Universal conscription led to the creation of the Roosevelt-like “soldierly man” as the masculine ideal.59 With these wars—often fought with expansionist objectives—manhood became increasingly intertwined with conceptions of nationhood.60 Nationalism has originated, Cynthia Enloe argues, “from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.”61 Masculine themes like honor, patriotism, cowardice, bravery, and duty came to define these quests for national identity and expansionist power. Yet, according to sociologist Raewyn Connell, masculinity as it was conceived in the late nineteenth century could “not exist except in

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contrast with ‘femininity.’” As such, femininity became the diametric opposite of masculinity—or what a man should not be—and men who ascribed to more stereotypically feminine traits were viewed as “effeminate.” Even in the physical manifestations of the nation, where women did play a part, the female form represented the past—glorious, idyllic, and pure—and men represented the future—strong, ordered, and valorous.62 Women’s role in the nation was to serve as a mother to the nation’s future, “the symbol of the national hearth and home,”63 whereas men were viewed as life-takers, fighting to protect their country and kin.64 Thus, it is certain that cultural changes influenced the occasions on which men and women viewed violence as appropriate. Dueling was common among men in some places and then it wasn’t. The death penalty was once used to punish even minor offenses in some countries where it is now banned, but was never practiced in others. The argument that gender differences in forms of aggression stem from biological determinism is wrong. Some continuities, nevertheless, appear to exist across time periods. One is a greater concern among men about reputation and a willingness to defend it with violence. In the contemporary era, this no longer expresses itself through dueling, but reputation and honor are a frequent reason for violence among men, even today.65 As we saw, men disapprove of leaders who make commitments to use force and then back down almost exclusively, in some cases, because they feel that backing down causes damage to reputation and a loss of credibility. Some women feel this way too, but women on average are less likely to. The culturally appropriate triggers for the use of violence within and among societies have changed, but the greater willingness of men to employ violence given a certain trigger, seemingly, has not. The Role of Biology The more controversial answer to the question of why men have a greater inclination to support the political use of force across societies is that it has roots in biology. Even the idea is anathema to many, however. If men and women are born with different preferences, they are likely to develop different abilities. Different abilities sound a lot

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like inherent inequalities. It can be useful to choose to believe in nurture over nature because nurture seems easier to change. Nurture seems to imply that the world can be fixed while nature is here for good. Yet, there are biological distinctions between men and women—and these distinctions may influence patterns of behavior throughout life. Differences in individual levels of aggression by sex are detectable by two years of age, and thus may predate gender images themselves.66 Instances of physical aggression among both boys and girls decline as children age, but through that decline and continuing at least through early life, boys remain more likely to engage in aggression than girls.67 Similar patterns have been found across cultural contexts, bolstering the claim that biology may explain some of the difference. Aggression is thought to result from an imbalance between impelling emotions such as anger and inhibiting emotions such as fear and guilt. While women are no less likely to experience anger than men, studies based on self-reporting and nonverbal expressions show that women are more likely to experience fear. This difference may explain both heightened male physical aggression and smaller sex differences in “indirect aggression,” like malicious gossip and the like, which is less associated with fear.68 When women do engage in aggression, they are more likely to feel guilt or anxiety about it and to believe that engaging in aggression creates danger. In the United States, women are more likely to believe that aggression will cause a later danger to themselves—and this belief is highly predictive of the willingness to employ aggression.69 Across studies, sex differences diminish when aggressive actions are taken in self-defense or in response to provocations, but women are less likely to view the same conditions as provocative.70 Interestingly, males are more prone to cyberbullying even though there is no gender difference in the likelihood of cyber victimization.71 Much of what we know about the biological basis of sex differences in aggression comes from animal studies. In fact, researchers who see a link between biology and gender differences in behavior often draw inspiration from animal behavior. The scholar and science writer Olivia Judson wrote that it was “the jackdaws and spoon worms” that convinced her to investigate cognitive and behavioral differences between men and women. Accepting the influence of culture in humans and other species and rejecting biological determinism, these thinkers

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note the huge range of behaviors that differ across genders in the animal kingdom that scientists assign to biology and instinct. Such scholars ask why the same could not be true of our own species. For some primates, for instance, a main objective of a young male is to work his way up the social hierarchy. This is particularly true of male baboons, who will claw, fight and often bite other males, females, or children a fraction of their size to assert dominance or for a brief ego boost. The goal is stability and reproduction—and the males at the top of the hierarchy set the pace for both. Once a part of the hierarchy, a male baboon may attack others just because he can, with the full expectation that those with lower status will be unable to respond. Some research has found that even female baboons are likely to receive at least one serious wound from a male baboon per year—a chunk of her flesh or perhaps a part of her ear may become a casualty in this quest for power.72 While some, such as primatologist Richard Wrangham, argue that this aggressive behavior is as intrinsic to the male baboon as it is to other primates, an unexpected tragedy provides some evidence to the contrary.73 In 1982, a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya went hunting for food scraps in a nearby tourist lodge garbage dump. Due to the hierarchical nature of the species, only those at the top of the pyramid were permitted to fight over and feast on the spoils. Women, children, and lower-status males remained behind, unwittingly paving the way for one of the most fascinating transformations of primate “culture” observed in nature. The scraps from which the baboons feasted were contaminated with bovine tuberculosis, and all those who ate it died over the next three years. 46% of all adult male baboons died, leaving behind only those that did not eat from the infected refuse.74 With the most aggressive males removed from the social hierarchy, the traditionally lower-status male baboons stepped in to fill their positions of power. Though they may have assumed more dominant roles within the troop, their temperaments did not shift from timid to truculent. According to Sapolsky and Share (2004), who authored the influential study, the entire culture of the troop shifted toward pacifism when its most aggressive members disappeared. Compared to both a similar neighboring troop and the troop itself prior to the tuberculosis outbreak, these baboons appeared

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to be significantly more conciliatory and less aggressive. The typically rigid hierarchy became more relaxed and violence, particularly against female baboons, became far less common. According to hormone samples, low-ranking baboons in the troop were far less stressed than those that were part of more traditionally rancorous troops. When fighting did occur, it was between baboons of similar sizes and social status, rather than the persistent bullying previously observed. What is most remarkable, however, is that even after generational turnover, when gender ratios returned to normal, the male baboons who entered the troop abided by its distinct culture of equanimity. This case is therefore often taken to demonstrate that aggression is tied to baboon culture because the behavior of the troop remained pacific even after the proportion of male and female baboons returned to what it had been before the disease outbreak. But since the disease killed only a portion of the male baboon population of the time, it is also possible that the remaining males had underlying traits that predisposed them to be less aggressive, traits which were then subsequently reinforced by their newly elevated position in the social hierarchy. Teasing apart nature and nurture is not as easy as that. There is good reason to believe that wide-ranging behavioral differences between males and females stem from their divergent reproductive objectives—a difference that often leads to what biologists refer to as sexual dimorphism, or differences between the sexes of the same species that extend beyond differences in sex organs. Across a wide variety of species, males and females systematically differ in a variety of ways. Male peacocks are far more colorful than their female counterparts; male songbirds often sing, while females do not; male lions are on average around 100 lbs larger than their female counterparts; and male plants have larger petals than females. These are just a few of the more common adaptations that respond to divergent reproductive pressures. Others may seem bizarre to our eyes. For example, one of the more perplexing rituals is that of the honeybee drone (male bee), whose suicidal missions are designed to prevent the queen bee from reproducing with other drones—thereby ensuring the continuation of their genetic line. The queen bee emerges from her hive only one or two times throughout her life to take her

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“nuptial flight.” It is during this time that thousands of drones from neighboring hives must compete for the scarce queen. Competition to reproduce is stiff—out of the 8,000 to 15,000 drones who participate in this flight, she will only mate with twelve to fourteen. For those lucky few, the final objective is to ensure that their—not another drone’s— sperm is used to fertilize the queen’s eggs. Though they will never know the outcome, the drone bee will die trying to ensure their reproductive success. After the mating process, the drone will pull away from the queen bee, but in the process his endophallus will separate from his body—lodging itself in the fertilized queen, and killing the drone in the process. In the competition for scarce mates, this strategy is designed to crowd out other male honey bees’ attempts at reproducing with the queen.75 Though the reasons for such sex differences are somewhat contested, the common touchstone of this debate is Bateman’s principle, which proposes that the success of reproduction for males is frequently limited by the scarcity of female mating partners, while reproductive success for females is limited by resource scarcity. This is due to the fact that a female can only produce one offspring at a time, whereas a male’s reproduction capacity is only restricted by the number of available females. As a result, males must compete with other males for female attention in order to enhance their odds of reproductive success.76 More recently, some have challenged this theory, taking aim at both Bateman’s experimental design and his failure to take into account the diverse range of sexual behaviors across species and the clear “coevolutionary arms race” that exists between males and females.77 Though some of these criticisms are warranted, even within Bateman’s static framework, it is evident that males and females from a variety of species behave differently, likely due to divergent reproductive pressures.78 Some forms of aggression seem to have their roots in adaptive roles of males and females of various species. Building on Bateman, Trivers et al. (1972) argue that these differences are shaped by the relative levels of parental investment between males and females across species. Females, due to the relative scarcity of eggs with which they can reproduce, are more likely to invest in protecting their offspring than males, whose sperm number in the millions or billions. Because females invest more in caring for young, they have more incentive than males

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to select mates carefully. This creates competition among males and an evolutionary benefit to aggression. Thus, species with lower male parenting investment have larger sex differences in aggression as well as in size and strength. In cases where male investment in offspring exceeds female investment, the females of the species tend to be larger and more aggressive.79 In many species, Emlen and Oring (1977) note, “competition among males is extremely intense and the resulting sexual selection presumably has led to the marked sexual dimorphism and intensity of aggressive behavior.” Among wolves, for example, researchers found that over a period of sixteen years, males consistently showed more aggressive behavior against intergroup threats than females, with aggression concentrated among males in their reproductive prime, likely due to a desire to protect both resources and a scarcity of potential mates.80 This type of behavior is also evident in other animals, including chimpanzees, and may help to explain why males tend to be larger than females in many species.81 Although males may aggress as a way to protect access to preferable sites for food or water, or deter or attract mates, females are not immune to aggressive behavior. For example, aggression in some females is frequently activated in the presence of threats to offspring.82 Other researchers have offered entirely different explanations for why males tend to be more aggressive than females. For them, the answer lies in hormones—or the abundance of testosterone that is present in males and largely absent in females. Studies on rats have helped to illuminate the influence of testosterone due to the fact that the androgen surge in male rats spans both the pre-natal and post-natal periods. Researchers have exploited this developmental window to understand the effect of testosterone on behavior. In one study, researchers castrated some rats less than six days or three weeks old. As compared to those castrated later in life, those who were castrated early on displayed patterns of play similar to female rats, as opposed to a more aggressive type of play typical of males.83 The inverse patterns also emerged for female mice who were given testosterone immediately after birth.84 As Lise Eliot notes, “boys are not rats,” specifically citing the fact that the effects of testosterone on brain development in humans largely occurs prior to birth.85 In some species, such as rats, females that gestate between two males, for example, tend to be more aggressive and

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more masculine as pups than female rats that gestate between a male and a female. This is due to higher exposure to prenatal testosterone resulting from their gestation location. The behavioral effects of prenatal testosterone exposure in humans are far less striking—similar studies of twins do not find any difference in females with male twins, as opposed to those with female twins.86 And Henderson and Berenbaum (1997) find that girls with a twin brother are less likely than girls with an older brother to prefer more stereotypically masculine toys. Nevertheless, all of this does not mean that testosterone plays no role in human behavioral development. Because injecting humans with testosterone or castrating them immediately after birth is a clear violation of research ethics, it is difficult for scientists to understand the influence of testosterone on human behavior. To gain some understanding of this relationship, researchers have examined the behavioral effects of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a rare genetic condition that leads to elevated androgen production.87 This research consistently finds that females with CAH display increased male-typical play and behavior and are more physical, aggressive, and “boylike” when compared to their sisters.88 On the whole, therefore, there is substantial evidence that biological differences correlated with sex influence patterns of aggression in humans. How Different Are Male and Female Brains? As babies develop—be they mice or men—hormones regulate how the brain takes shape. And it turns out that different regulating hormones spike at different times in male and female fetuses. This has lead some to wonder whether male and females brains might be very different, even having different neural architectures. Could such fundamental differences lead to differences in baseline levels of aggression? The best evidence is against this view, and the experiments that demonstrate this are extraordinary. A virgin male mouse that encounters a female mouse with babies will often kill the babies and attempt to mate with the female. But this strategy is controlled by a set of genes related to detecting pheromones. Pioneering neuroscientist Catherine Dulac showed that if an experimenter modifies which gene is expressed, the male mouse will behave instead like a nurturing father. And not only

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that. Perform a reciprocal modification in a female mouse and she will behave like a male mouse—she may even kill babies she encounters. Deactivate this pathway and females will begin to hump other mice— males and females—and males and females cannot be distinguished by their behavior. Dulac refers to this pathway as the “gate of gender identification and gender identity.”89 Thus, gendered aggression in mice is controlled by what genes are expressed. Both sexes have the capabilities, and the genes, for both sets of behaviors. It is not that their brains are so different, but that which gene is expressed is different. Researchers can modify which genes are expressed to make doting, virginal fathers and murderous mothers. Clearly, these findings directly apply only to mice, and not to humans. But in fact, it is not so simple. This circuitry of aggression is what biologists call “highly conserved” across the animal kingdom. It goes back a long way in evolutionary time. The triggers of aggression differ across species, but the underlying mechanisms that are triggered tend to be the same. Thus, what applies to mice probably does apply, in a refracted, altered form, in humans. These experiments tell against biological determinism, something with which cultural variation had already dispensed. They suggest a role for the environment in triggering certain genes, in certain genders, at certain times. But they also suggest that gender-differentiated biological processes play a role. Thus, it is not a question of nature vs. nurture, but rather a question of nature and nurture, and the ways in which these processes interact and adapt together. As Marcus (2004, p. 40) notes, “Logically speaking, there’s no reason to see plasticity as being in conflict with the idea of built-in structure. ‘Built-in’ doesn’t mean unmalleable, it means organized in advance of experience.” How, then, might cultural pressures and biology interact in humans? One thing to note is that differences in the experiences of males and females start early—at gestation. Female fetuses tend to develop in the womb more rapidly than male fetuses, and they respond and habituate to external stimuli about two weeks earlier. There is also a difference in the overall vulnerability of the fetus: miscarriages are 30% more likely to occur with male embryos than female embryos; and males are more likely to be premature at birth.90 These small biological differences in development can lead to challenges following birth, with boys more likely to succumb to illness or suffer

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from cognitive issues, including cerebral palsy.91 Further differences in infant temperament, such as the ability to self-soothe and higher irritability, may also be related to different development patterns in the womb. And a study conducted on newborns found sex differences in sensory responses to smells between newborn boys and girls, which may have implications for breastfeeding.92 Though male and female newborns are far more alike than they are different, over time, the small differences registered at birth can morph into much larger divisions shaped by divergent child-rearing and socialization practices. Brody (2009) in her book, Gender, Emotion, and the Family, argues that these differences “may evoke different responses from parents, and both parents’ and children’s temperaments become transformed over time as a result of their repeated interactions with each other.” Haviland and Malatesta (1981), for example, found that parents are more likely to ignore or shush cranky boys, who may be more fussy than their female counterparts. And caregivers may devote more effort toward emotional regulation for boys than for girls.93 Thus, due to small differences in newborn temperament, “parents and other socialization agents may respond to boys in ways that dampen emotional expressiveness . . . as a way to down-regulate their high emotional arousal and activity levels” as infants.94 Though far from the intent, over time, this strategy may encourage boys to limit their expressive behavior and suppress their emotions, a stereotypical trait of men.95 Research on sex differences in aggression follows a similar line of thinking— small biological differences due to testosterone or mating objectives may exist, but they are amplified by outside social pressures that simultaneously encourage overt aggression in males and discourage it in females. Conclusion In short, there is ample evidence to suggest that the faith in women’s relative pacifism exhibited by Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other pacifist suffragists before World War I was well warranted. Women are less likely to engage in interpersonal aggression and are less likely to support the use of military force against other nations in wars of choice. This is true across countries, across time, and—except when

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humanitarian needs or immediate self-defense concerns eclipse other rationales for conflict—across forms of international crises. We cannot say definitively why these differences exist. But we can say that there is compelling evidence that both nature and nature play a role in shaping the differing behavior of the sexes across the animal kingdom, including in humans. These processes operate in feedback loops: just as biological differences may shape external environmental pressures, the environment may also play a central role in gene expression.96 Women appear to be more pacific than men across a range of contexts as a result of both underlying biological differences, and the way those differences shape and are subsequently shaped by the external environment. But just because the evidence for these differences is so consistent and predictable does not mean that they would manifest in ways that would meaningfully shape a nation’s foreign policy. Many strongly held political preferences in societies are not exhibited in national policies, even when majorities of voting publics agree. 71% of Americans, for instance, supported tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars as part of a larger effort to battle climate change in 2020—the same year that government policy was moving in the opposite direction. Similarly, a 2019 Fox News poll found that 90% of Americans favored universal background checks, 81% supported taking guns from at-risk individuals, and 67% supported banning assault weapons.97 And yet none of these strongly preferred policies have come close to becoming national policy recently. What is to say that attitudes about war and peace would be any different? The next three chapters examine answers to this question. We turn now to how patterns of conflict have changed over the last two hundred years and how much of this change might be explained by the enfranchisement of women. Small hormonal differences seem to have large effects on the behavior of individual men and women; do they also have large effects at the highest levels of politics?

4

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Suffrage, Democracy, and War

No two countries’ stories of women’s suffrage are alike. In some places, the fight for women’s votes was much longer than in others. In New Zealand, the governor signed suffrage legislation in 1893, only two decades after the first petitions for suffrage had been submitted.1 (That same year the American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage was arrested for even trying to vote in a local school board election in New York State).2 The fight for women’s suffrage in Switzerland represents the other end of the spectrum. Swiss women filed their first petition for suffrage in 1886. By 1925, they had lost patience and were marching through the streets of Bern with a giant snail statue in tow—a symbol of the government’s leaden pace in dealing with their demands.3 Swiss women had to wait another forty-six years to win the nationwide vote through a national referendum in 1971—eighty-five years after the first petition. In most countries around the world, women attained the vote in national elections in a single wave. In a few, however, legislators doled out votes to women in stages. In Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, white or “European” women gained the vote an average of fifty years before women of color.4 Iceland and Ireland first limited women’s voting on the basis of age while Bolivia and Portugal first excluded women on the basis of age as well as literacy for over a decade. Romania and the United Kingdom first excluded women on the basis of age, education, and property. Belgium’s first wave of suffrage was unique. War widows and mothers of those killed in World War I received the vote in 1918. All other Belgian women waited until 1948 before voting in national elections. The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0004

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What explains why women around the world obtained the vote when they did? The answers here vary. Large-scale societal events like war certainly correlated with the extension of women’s suffrage in some countries, including Britain, Belgium, the United States, and France. In such cases, the need to raise more funds through taxation or shifting cultural perspectives forced by women’s contribution to war efforts might explain the connection.5 But in most countries on earth, women’s suffrage did not correspond with war.6 One might also imagine that variation in the force and funding of national suffrage movements might have played an important role in when women obtained the vote. But while the strength of women’s organization may have forced rapid change in some places, suffrage activism was hardly existent in others—including many of the western territories in the United States, some of the first adopters in the world—before women were granted the vote.7 More recently, scholars have come to focus less on numbers and more on technique. Women’s groups in the western United States, for instance, focused on persuading politicians by emphasizing women’s nurturing qualities rather than on mobilizing supporters or by making arguments about the reasonableness of women’s equality and rights.8 Self-interested politicians also likely played a big part. Where political competition was tight, politicians who thought their party might disproportionately benefit from including women in the vote were often suffrage’s biggest champions.9 What is perhaps more surprising, however, is that women’s epic struggle for suffrage was often not really about the act of voting itself. In places like New Zealand, Switzerland, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Sweden, Turkey, Indonesia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many others, women had been able to vote in municipal and local elections for decades.10 The fight was instead about the right to vote in national and federal elections—in elections that were thought to have large-scale domestic and international consequences. Local politics tended to focus on education, health, and welfare—areas that already squarely existed within the feminine domain and which seemed more like natural extensions of women’s societal duties as wives, mothers, and daughters. The cutthroat domain of “high politics” was, however, seen as something altogether different. It required expertise, knowledge, and

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interest in topics that many men felt women did not possess in sufficient amounts.11 The struggle for women’s suffrage is not over. In 2015, Saudi Arabia incorporated women into the municipal electorate. With this act, women in every country on earth that holds elections of any kind finally became able to vote.12 But women’s suffrage today is as varied as its origins. The rates of voting range significantly. In Pakistan, less than 40% of women regularly vote—a full 20% fewer than men. This is a far cry from Sweden where 88% of all women vote, largely matching male voting percentages in recent elections. The acceptability of women’s voting has become so much the norm that even countries like China, Qatar, and Eritrea that do not hold open elections for their national leaders officially have women’s suffrage on the books. The adoption of women’s suffrage in national elections brought widespread expectations of dramatic political and social change throughout the world. Many expected women to eschew traditional political parties and to consolidate support around feminized political agendas with enough political force to reshape national politics. Women would vote in large enough numbers to revolutionize politics the suffragists and many others believed. Such expectations were reflected at the moment that suffrage was embraced. The United Kingdom has become “if not in actuality at least in prospect—a kingdom of women,” the New York Times declared upon the passage of the first stage of suffrage in Britain in 1918.13 To an amazing degree, the expectations for this revolution were the same around the world. For decades, Susan B. Anthony had been claiming that women voters would seize the moral high ground and eliminate vice and immorality in society. Many had come to hope or fear that she was right. Men in many Western countries marched against suffrage, fueled by the fear that women would oppose drinking, gambling, and vice. Throughout Latin America and Spain, opponents of suffrage argued that women would be too heavily influenced by their strong conservative Catholic values and would prevent progress and further leftist revolution.14 Pope Pious XII explicitly supported women’s suffrage as a path to the defense of conservative morals. From this view, opponents of suffrage were, according to one who characterized the

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argument in The Atlantic, “miserable masculine bipeds” who after six thousand years of tyrannizing women were trying to monopolize the ballot “as a last desperate means of continuing [their] degenerate ways, in spite of the eagerness of progressive women to lift [them] again to the heights of virtue.”15 But the reality of suffrage was more nuanced. Many who lived through suffrage did not feel they were living through a revolution, except perhaps where the prohibition of alcohol was concerned. In general, the “woman’s vote” did not appear to materialize in most places. Women did not join women’s political parties in large numbers and their voting patterns did not appear to differ all that much from men’s, though women, on average, did seem to vote in lower numbers.16 The few pundits who had argued all along that women’s suffrage would make little difference in the end seemed to be proven right. But like many notable social, economic, and biological changes, shifts in our political landscape can accumulate through the slow and gradual evolution of ideas politicians advocate for on the campaign trail, the rhetoric they employ and the policies they think they can pursue while still keeping their jobs. Such change may not manifest in a year or two but may become evident over longer time scales. Recent research has shown that, far from having little noticeable effect, women’s suffrage in fact brought about significant economic, social, and political change at the domestic level.17 For one thing, the size of national budgets in many countries increased substantially in the years and decades after women’s suffrage.18 Why was World War I the first U.S. war in which government expenditures did not return to pre-war levels? Economists John Lott and Lawrence Kenny have shown that the size of the government grew by 28% in the forty-five years following the extension of suffrage most likely because the inclusion of women voters shifted the electorate to the left. Lott and Kenny draw on the interesting fact about suffrage in the United States that thirty-six American states granted suffrage willingly while twelve others, mostly in the South, were forced to extend the vote to women following successful ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.19 Significantly, the estimated increases in state budgets after suffrage were similar in states that had embraced suffrage voluntarily and states that were compelled to bring women into the fold,

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suggesting that if some confounding factor caused both suffrage and increases in government budgets, its effects are small. The increases in spending associated with suffrage were not, however, felt equally in all areas of the budget. Shifts in spending seemed to prove Jane Addams right. In 1906, she had observed that women, perhaps due to their “obligation for the health and welfare of young children and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of others,” had different political priorities than male voters, who were largely indifferent to the “details of the household.”20 In the years after suffrage in the United States, government spending on health care increased by about 35%, funding door-to-door hygiene campaigns that fueled an estimated 8–15% decline in child mortality rates.21 No such changes occurred in similarly sized periods just before suffrage extensions. Spending on education increased by 9% on average in American states in the years after women’s suffrage, an increase that correlated with a notable rise in school enrollment, especially among children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and notable increases in productivity and economic outcomes.22 These effects of suffrage were not unique to the United States. Switzerland experienced an estimated 12% increase in government expenditure as a result of adopting women’s suffrage in 1971, a full fifty years after the United States.23 This figure again masks the true nature of the change, however. Researchers found that social welfare spending in particular—on health, education and welfare—increased by 53% in the four years after suffrage, a larger increase than any other four-year period in modern Swiss history and larger than increases in other European countries during that time. Over the same period, consumption spending—money spent on military equipment and the like—modestly declined. Overall, women’s suffrage in Switzerland was followed by a significant reduction in the size of budget deficits across Swiss cantons.24 There is evidence that similar changes occurred across eleven other European countries as well.25 One paper found women’s enfranchisement to be associated with increases in spending on health, education, housing, and welfare in Norway, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, amongst others. Extending suffrage to increasing numbers of men—as happens when age or economic requirements for voting are

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removed—correlated with significant increases in spending as well— but on infrastructure, national defense, and the maintenance of internal law and order. Much of this research on the true impact of women’s suffrage has only taken place in the last few decades and it has tended to focus on Western countries. It remains to assess—and reassess—the full political, economic, and social influence of women’s suffrage in countries around the world. But some things are clear. There is no such thing as the “woman’s vote,” because sex is just one among many factors that affect voting behavior.26 Race, education, religion, age, and an assortment of other factors alongside the political context influence how women vote, just as they do men.27 Nevertheless, this research suggests that shifting the mean preference of voters can significantly affect the policies of democratic states. One important question is how. A simple answer relates to the political incentives of democratically elected leaders. If representative democracy works as intended, policies should change as public opinion changes over time.28 If, for instance, average opinion in an electorate becomes increasingly negative on immigration, we would expect more antiimmigration candidates to win elections and more politicians in office to adopt anti-immigration measures with reelection in mind.29 If average public opinion grows increasingly comfortable with once disdained ideas like gay marriage or the legalization of marijuana, candidates who support those policies should, on average, receive greater vote share in elections and politicians who support such policies will face fewer political headwinds in passing such measures. Of course, it doesn’t always work this way.30 There are plenty of out-of-step politicians who fail to represent the will of the voters, representing their own interests, those of their donors or those of their party instead. There is also compelling evidence that causation sometimes goes in the opposite direction—that public opinion plays catch up to shifts in public policy instead driving them.31 But there is also ample evidence that public opinion on issues like defense, education, and health care roughly predict budgetary expenditures on these items over the long term, at least in developed Western countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.32

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Moreover, one might only consider how the distinct preferences of voters in Texas and Massachusetts are reflected in the ideologies of the politicians elected in both states. The British Conservative party of the early twentieth century offers a clear case of a political party adjusting its domestic priorities in the face of what it perceived was a shift in public opinion as women were brought into the electorate. British Conservatives were diehard opponents of universal suffrage,33 but in 1918 a confluence of political forces resulted in suffrage for women over thirty years of age with property and education.34 To the surprise of some, however, their electoral fortunes were good in the era of limited suffrage. Conservative leaders were forced to acknowledge that the party would, “Of necessity be compelled to attract [women].”35 In the early 1920s, party leaders quickly focused on establishing successful conservative women’s organizations to attract women to the party. They changed the rules of the party to be more inclusive, creating a “Women’s Department” and even a magazine for Conservative women entitled Home and Politics. But more importantly, Conservative governments throughout the 1920s passed seven pieces of legislation aimed at improving the lives of women, including acts removing gender barriers to prominent professions and doubling the sum fathers had to pay for the maintenance of children out of wedlock. This compared with the passage of only two similar acts since the turn of the century.36 As pressure built for the extension of suffrage to all women in 1928, the Conservative government knew it had little choice if it did not want to alienate a large portion of the new electorate.37 The Equal Franchise Act passed in 1928 under Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin without strong opposition from any major party, extending the vote to women on the same basis of men for the first time in Britain’s long history.38 A variety of factors determine whether the preferences of the average voter influence policy. At the top of the list is salience—the extent to which voters are aware of and care about some difference in the candidates or their policies. Because political candidates differ in many ways, voters cannot hold them to account on all things. They discount lower salience factors in deciding how to vote. Voters want a candidate who will bring prosperity, for instance—this is almost always a high-salience

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issue in elections. If the candidate who they believe will do this also favors a small trade agreement that is relatively unpopular, they are likely to vote for that candidate anyway. Aspects of the electoral calculus also influence when the average preferences of the electorate become government policies. Minority populations with strong preferences over a set of issues often have outsized influence, for instance. Political leaders realize that satisfying the minority will gain them a set of votes without losing votes in the rest of the population for whom the issues are less salient. Thus, Cuban-American voters in Florida have large influence on U.S. Cuba policy in spite of their relatively small numbers in the broader electorate. Of course, Florida’s status as a swing state also gives its voters more influence on national policy than voters in states that reliably cast their electoral college votes for one party or the other. Foreign policy is sometimes viewed as a unique political domain, one which requires expertise, experience, and knowledge the voting public often does not have full access to or sufficient interest in.39 Some have gone so far as to say that public opinion plays little role in the “high politics” domain of international relations.40 In some elections, it is true that foreign policy plays little role at all. But in others, as we will see in the next chapter, issues of war and peace can be central to voters’ decision-making. War was the key issue, for instance, in the U.S. presidential elections of 1916, 1952, and 1968. Foreign policy and the fate of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco were major issues in the French presidential election of 1956. Foreign policy has been central to almost every election held in Taiwan and Israel since their birth. The list could go on of elections defined by the international crises surrounding them. Foreign policy—and issues of war and peace in particular—are not always on the ballot, but when they are, they can be particularly salient. Gilens (2012) and Gilens and Page (2014) argue that majority rule does not determine policy in the United States. Rather, affluent individuals and interests groups have outsized influence, particularly in the domain of foreign policy where they promote a globalist international agenda the general public tends not to favor. Issues of war and peace, however, constitute a unique domain of foreign policy conduct in which the costs can be personal to voters and can be of the highest order. Voters pay greater attention. Good politicians are likely aware that few issues focus the mind like matters of life and death.

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The influence of the popular will on foreign policy is not always easy to identify; it does not always manifest in bitter campaign debates over foreign initiatives. If the national mood is clear enough, politicians of all parties have an incentive to adopt, or co-opt, the same policy or else pay the electoral costs. When candidates adopt differing positions on fundamental questions of war and peace and foreign policy is salient, it can matter to voters a lot. But often, candidates don’t adopt differing positions, and thus the elections center around other issues. In such cases, foreign policy is latently salient, and the popular will—the will of the average voter—influences policy all the more. In the 2002 congressional campaigns, for instance, the Republican foreign policy of war with Iraq was popular. The result of this broad popularity was that even Democrats who opposed the Iraq War were loathe to campaign on the issue, choosing instead to focus campaigns on domestic issues. The result was that Democrats and Republicans largely adopted similar positions on foreign policy and congressional Democrats supported the resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. This was not lost on one Republican Senate candidate who complained of his opponent’s position on Iraq, “wherever I’m at, that’s where he’s at. If I said, Hang them by their feet, he’d say, Hang them by their feet.”41 As we shall see in the next chapter, similar electoral forces pushed the foreign policy positions of U.S. president Reagan and Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale together in the 1984 campaign. Here it was Mondale who complained of his opponent “He’s tried to sound like Walter Mondale.” In both of these cases, by the end of the campaigns, there was little daylight separating the candidates’ foreign policies so voters’ decisions would not be based on foreign policy. But this did not mean that the popular will did not influence foreign policy positions in dramatic ways. Thus, issues of war and peace can either be directly salient in elections or latently salient in the sense that they would be salient if the candidates were perceived to be importantly different on this dimension. Of course, such differences are more important in times of international tension than in times of peace. This salience or latent salience of issues of war and peace means that the preferences of the average voter matter. We should expect them to influence policy.42 Bringing new voters with different preferences into the electorate changes this average over

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time—not just for one candidate, but for all of them. Positions about war and peace that once seemed acceptable may now fall outside of the mainstream. The shift may not feel revolutionary. It may not be defined by sharp electoral tensions and drawn out debates over dramatic policy shifts. It may occur relatively silently as politicians with different ideologies recognize they are uniquely suited for the moment, or as existing politicians read the always shifting electoral odds and allow their actions and words to be shaped by the national mood. Women’s Suffrage and Peace Research has provided convincing evidence that women’s suffrage has increased the size of government, improved the health of citizens, and raised their overall levels of education. Such findings lead us to expect that the effects of women’s suffrage may extend far beyond these areas into others where women’s average preferences consistently diverge from men’s, like issues of war and peace. If women are, on average, less likely to support violence, shouldn’t democracies with women’s suffrage be less likely to pick fights? To answer this, we gathered data on women’s suffrage and the military and economic capabilities of all countries around the world from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. We examined the impact of bringing women into the electorate in a large variety of statistical models that also accounted for other major changes of the twentieth century—the advent of the nuclear era, and the growth of capitalism, among others. (Readers interested in the details of the variety of statistical techniques we employed should consult the Appendix, p. 000).43 We also gathered data on states’ degree of democracy—but what does it mean for a state to be a “democracy?” We tend to use the word in binary terms—a state is either democratic or it isn’t. But such distinctions are often not clear cut. States can, for instance, possess the key feature of democracy—the popular vote—but such votes are meaningless if voters only have one candidate to choose from and if forces within the state can tightly control who is on the ballot. Moreover, leaders may be elected by the people, but is the state a democracy if the leader is not constrained by the rule of law? Or if newspapers are not able to report the truth? Or if—more

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pertinent to our topic—the electorate excludes vast swaths of the adult population? Political scientists have indeed drawn a circle around what makes up a mature democracy. Such states have open and competitive elections in which there are few constraints on who can run for office and elected officials are bound by the same laws as others.44 Notably, however, this definition says nothing about who should be in the electorate.45 For this reason, we focused our analysis on differences in conflict propensity between ‘male-voting democracies’ in which only men could vote and ‘democracies’ in which women made up at least 40% of the electorate in national elections.46 We also compared the conflict behavior of these states to autocracies. Here is what we found. Within any given year, democracies in which only men could vote were 30% more likely to start a dispute with another state than democracies in which women could enter the voting booth during national elections. Of course, not all conflicts end up in full-blown war. Some remain at the level of small-scale crises or simmering tensions over time. But male-voting democracies were over 130% more likely to start a war than democracies with women voters.47 Autocratic countries, often thought to be more conflictual by nature, were indeed more belligerent than democracies with women’s suffrage. They were 21% more likely to start a conflict and 73% more likely to start one that erupted into full-scale war; these analyses are based on the regression models described in the Appendix, Table 2. But perhaps it is unfair to examine over two hundred years of recent history. As Figure 5 shows us, democratic institutions spread slowly throughout the nineteenth century. But democracies with women voters only came about starting in 1893. Moreover, by 1955, democracies without women voters had more or less faded from existence. All but two democratic states—Sudan and Switzerland—had granted women the vote by that time. If we constrain our analysis only to look at the narrower historical period from 1893 to 1955 when there was a mix of countries with democratic institution both with and without women’s suffrage, we find even more significant differences. Democratic countries that restricted the vote to men were 72% more likely to threaten, display or use force in any given country over this period than democratic countries where women had national power.

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45 40

Number of States

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1815

1835

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1875

1895

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1975

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Fig. 5 The pace of suffrage and democracy.

They were 113% more likely to start wars. Autocracies were 110% more likely to pick fights and 160% more likely to pick fights that became wars. So far, our results have examined the more binary notion of government type—as though states are either governed by open, fair, and competitive elections and the rule of law or by entrenched autocrats. But what if we treat government type as a continuous variable between these two extremes? Women may be able to legally vote in many countries but we would expect their preferences to more closely align with policy outcomes in places where more democratic institutions prevail. This is indeed what the data appears to show. Figure 6 shows the effect of extending the vote to women in countries that are more and less democratic on the likelihood that a state picks a fight with another. As democratic institutions broaden and deepen, women’s suffrage appears to have an increasingly pacifying effect. Women’s suffrage has little effect unless a country’s democratic institutions are strong enough. Amongst countries with the most ingrained democratic institutions, and only in those countries, states with women’s suffrage are almost 40% less likely to start a fight than male-voting democracies. Increasing levels of

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Likelihood of Starting a Conflict

60% 40% 20% 0% –20% –40% –60% Less Democratic Institutions

More Democratic Institutions

Note: The range is between 0 and 10 on the Polity IV scale. The figure reflects the effects of changing women’s suffrage from 0 to 1 in Model 4 in the dyadic regression table (Table 4) in the book’s Appendix. All continuous variables were held at 0.

Fig. 6 The effects of women’s votes as democratic institutions expand. democracy in countries in which only men can vote has little effect, by contrast, on the likelihood the state starts a fight. The data so far give us initial reason to believe that women’s suffrage has dramatically changed international politics over the course of the twentieth century, rendering countries who embrace it less likely to pursue violence and conflict. But is it always so easy to identify who picks a fight? The instigator of some wars may be clear as day. Napoleon invading Portugal and Spain with the intention of isolating Britain and eventually conquering the European continent, for instance. Or Hitler, unprovoked, sending troops into Czechoslovakia and Poland with the plan of extending German Lebensraum. But blame for other wars is often hazy, despite simplified descriptions in history books. Japanese action in Pearl Harbor precipitated the War in the Pacific in 1941. But Japanese leaders saw their act as one of self-defense, a last attempt at survival in the face of harsh American policies aimed at cutting off Japan’s access to oil and preventing the rise of Japan as a major power in the East.

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Moreover, just because countries are less likely to start conflicts does not mean that they are less likely to fight in them. A disinclination to fight might actually make it harder for a country to remain at peace, because it emboldens others who might perceive a preference for peace as a sign of weakness. As we will see in the next chapter, Neville Chamberlain opted in 1938 to capitulate to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland rather than risk another fight. Observers noted at the time that Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler only strengthened Germany’s hand in any future conflict. Hitler had pushed and no one had pushed back. He would soon push harder, leaving the reluctant Chamberlain no choice but to enter the war. So it is not enough to consider only the pacific tendencies of countries in isolation in order to understand their experiences with conflict. If one country knows that another country prefers peace, it may take advantage of that perceived vulnerability. But if two countries know the other possesses peaceful tendencies, then neither need fear exploitation by the other, allowing trust to build and conflict to be avoided. Countries confronting those that tend towards belligerence may have to remain on their guard, ready to fight back when pressed or threatened regardless of their own interest in fighting. The idea that certain types of states are less likely to fight with each other does not exist in the realm of pure theory. Leaders dating back to the early liberal era have maintained faith that two democratic countries would be less inclined to fight than two autocratic countries or two countries of different types. Contemporary politicians have accepted that there is a “democratic peace” according to which democracies are very unlikely to go to war with each other. In his 1994 State of the Union address, U.S. president Bill Clinton told the U.S. Congress that “the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy.” President George W. Bush linked his 2003 policy of war in Iraq to this same idea: “The reason why I’m so strong on democracy is that democracies don’t go to war with each other.” President Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize lecture expressed a similar faith in the pacifying effects of democracy, noting that America has never fought a war against a democracy and that the European continent only found peace once it embraced political freedoms.

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the suffragist peace Compared to two democracies with women’s suffrage: Two autocracies are … 3.6 times more likely Two democracies without women’s suffrage are … 3.2 times more likely One autocracy and one democracy without women’s suffrage are … 4.5 times more likely One autocracy and one democracy with women’s suffrage are … 3.8 times more likely One democracy with women’s suffrage and one democracy without are … just as likely

Fig. 7 How likely two countries are to have military disputes. The democratic peace theory has become akin to an empirical law in political science. And yet, the idea that democratic institutions alone are sufficient to enable peace is hard to square with what we have seen, so far, of the preferences that voters can hold. Voters do not always constrain leaders to peace. Sometimes they compel leaders to aggression. We would expect, however, that voting publics with more pacific preferences would be less inclined to do so. Thus, the democratic peace may have just as much to do with who’s voting as it does with the act of voting itself. This is exactly what the data suggest. We analyzed the likelihood that pairs of countries ended up in militarized disputes with each other over the period 1816 to 2010. Figure 7 illustrates what we found. The figure shows how the chance of conflict between countries of different types compares with the chances of conflict between two democracies where women can vote. Pairs of autocracies and pairs of early democracies without women’s suffrage were both more than three times more likely to end up threatening, displaying, or using force than two women’s suffrage democracies. When autocracies faced democracies where women can’t vote, they were 4.5 times more likely. There is also evidence, however, that democratic institutions themselves may play some role in fostering peace. Democracies with and without women voters are just as likely to have conflicts with democracies where women are included in the electorate. When we look at full-scale war, rather than at lower levels of conflict, we find that two democracies have never gone to war with each other, regardless of the composition of the electorate. This part of the democratic peace theory is true.48 But full-scale war is mercifully rare. The use of violence to achieve one’s will in international

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affairs is less so. And democracies without women’s suffrage have been 62% more likely to end up in violent conflict with each other than democracies with women’s suffrage. Two autocracies have been 77% more likely to use force against each other than two democracies with women’s suffrage. Autocracies and democracies without women voters were the most violence-prone over the period in question, being 81% more likely to engage in violent disputes than two democracies with women voters. Once again, it is important to consider how increasing the breadth and depth of democratic institutions might affect the force of women’s suffrage on conflict between pairs of countries. If democratic institutions are flawed or lacking, the preferences of the electorate will shine through less clearly in national policies. Again, the data suggests this is true. Increasing the levels of democracy between two states with women’s suffrage corresponds to a significant reduction in conflict. Increasing the democratic features of democracies without women voters has no measurable effect. What Else Might Explain These Patterns? Of course, all of the conclusions drawn above are based on observational data. Observing the associations of events in the real world can, and often does, lead us to false conclusions about how those events are related. To gain confidence in our conclusions, we would ideally randomly designate some countries as democracies with women voters, some as democracies with only men voters and still others as autocracies and then, holding all else constant, see precisely what happens. Alas, nations do not exist in our laboratories. It is important, then, to focus on if and how changes in international conflict that we have attributed to the spread of women’s suffrage around the world might be better explained by any of the other numerous technological, economic, and social changes that took place over the last two hundred years. The twentieth century was a time of massive change. The emergence of nuclear weapons and international organizations tasked with minimizing the risk of conflict, the spread of capitalism around the world, increases in human liberty across the board—each of these dramatic changes have been credited on their own

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with contributing to international peace. How can we say then that women’s suffrage has had a pacifying effect on its own? For one thing, many of the major changes of the twentieth century took place in the period after World War II. The first nuclear bomb was dropped in August 1945, two months before the United Nations and six months before the World Bank came into existence and just as the new liberal economic policies designed at Bretton Woods were starting to be implemented. Detonation of the bomb also signified the emergence of a new strategic environment, the first major act in an emerging Cold War in which a newly empowered United States sought to signal its dominance over a beleaguered Soviet Union determined to emerge ever stronger from the conflict. The effects of women’s suffrage on peace can be found, however, prior to World War II and before any of these important events took place. In the period between the Napoleonic Wars in 1816 and the beginning of World War II in 1939, autocracies and male-suffrage democracies were each much more likely than women’s suffrage democracies to start a dispute or use force. In fact, democracies with only male voters were almost three times more likely to start a fight. Two democracies where women could vote were 82% less likely to have a conflict than two autocracies and 77% less likely than two democracies without women’s suffrage during this period. The effects of women’s suffrage on international conflict preceded the lasting structural effects of World War II. But what about the effects of World War I, the war to end all wars, on the short- and long-term likelihood of conflict?49 The first global war could have had numerous lingering effects that might have shaped man’s willingness to fight. Those that lived through four years of all-out war were sickened by the idea of violence and the unprecedented loss of life. Maybe war diminished perceptions of military force as manly and heroic and perceptions of the state as worth fighting and dying for, sparking a new desire for peace among all genders. As it happened, the post-war era witnessed the rapid spread of both democratic institutions and the expansion of the electorate in some of the very countries that had witnessed the worst of the war. Belgium, Britain, the United States, Germany, and Austria all adopted suffrage

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within a few years of war’s end.50 Though they corresponded in time in these countries, war and women’s suffrage were only coincidentally linked. In the United States, for instance, the suffrage movement gained momentum long before the start of the war. By the time the United States entered the war, fourteen American states had already granted women the ability to vote for president, as we will see in the next chapter. By war’s end, the number would be twenty-one. In Britain, the success of the suffragist movement has been attributed more to the savvy electoral strategies of women’s groups than to any role that the war might have played.51 Whether the timing of war and women’s suffrage was coincidental or not, however, the question remains whether the war offers a truer underlying explanation for the empirical patterns discussed above. Once again, there is evidence that women’s suffrage has had a pacifying effect on conflict above and beyond any deleterious and lasting effects the First World War might have had on those who saw the worst of it. We excluded all countries that adopted women’s suffrage in the year 1918, 1919, and 1920 from our analysis and found that democratic countries with suffrage remained 88% less likely to start a fight than autocracies and 83% less likely than democracies that exclude women voters. Of course, not all social and cultural change results from national trauma. Norms of acceptable behavior often change gradually over long periods. Attitudes about gender equality, for instance, may have been spurred along by women’s participation in war efforts in the twentieth century.52 The same forces that gave rise to increasing civil liberties among women may also be responsible for changing societal attitudes about war and peace among men and women voters. But these attitudes shifted in the time before World War I and have continued to do so since. Similarly, attitudes towards violence may have been shaped by centuries-long forces by which individuals became increasingly empathetic to the pain of others and thereby less inclined, for instance, to watch public beheadings as a form of amusement.53 Gender relations may also serve as a model—the first model that many children see—for how conflicts should be resolved. Thus, gender equality may socialize members of societies in conflict norms from their earliest days. And

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indeed, in statistical analyses, we find that women’s civil liberties and suffrage appear to exert independent effects reducing the propensity for states to engage in international conflict.54 The effect of long-scale processes like these can be difficult to quantify since they correspond with so many other changes over time. What we can say, however, about women’s suffrage in the context of broader, long-term cultural change is that we find evidence of suffrage’s effects in the near-term—within decades of suffrage’s adoption. Countries are 20% less likely to initiate conflict in the twenty years after the adoption of suffrage than they are in the twenty years before. They are 14% less likely in years 10 to 20 after suffrage than they are in years t-20 to t-10, suggesting that any near-term effects of war on women’s suffrage do not account for the findings.55 Finally, how do we know that the extension of suffrage solely to women is the ultimate driving force behind the decline in conflict and not the extension of suffrage to men as well?56 Scholar Adam Przeworski collected data on every instance suffrage was extended not only on the basis of sex but also on the basis of class, wealth, and education.57 When we examine instances in which the vote was extended to men only, we find that increasing the proportion of men eligible to vote increases the likelihood a state is involved in a dispute within the following twenty years by 27% compared to the twenty years before. Conclusion Many scholars of international history claim that humans now in existence are living through the most peaceful era in human history, at least amongst the great powers. Amidst ongoing civil wars, arms races, and brewing geopolitical competition between the United States, China, and Russia, the claim may be hard to internalize. But there is evidence in its defense.58 Not since the Roman era have seventyfive years passed without war between the earth’s major powers.59 The average number of wars per decade has decreased since 1945.60 This period of relative peace, at least in some parts of the world, has undoubtedly been shaped by countless forces. The intimidating scale of potential destruction in the nuclear era has invoked a unique

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sense of caution amongst those making decisions about what is worth fighting for. Unprecedented levels of economic integration, the source of vastly increased wealth in many places, also amplify the costs of war in ways that might give leaders pause. Longer term shifts in attitudes about the acceptability and honor of war may have also increased pacific tendencies in the contemporary era. Solely focusing on the post-World War II era, however, overshadows the pacifying role of one of the most significant political and cultural events in human history—the incorporation of half the population into democratic electorates. Just as there is convincing evidence that women’s suffrage altered the size of government and made populations more healthy and educated, there is strong evidence that women’s preferences for peace have shaped the foreign policies of democratic states in which women are able to vote. So, was the faith that Kant, Paine, Montesquieu, and the liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century placed in a “democratic peace” proved right in the end? Not in the way they expected. Male-voting democracies have been remarkably warlike. Modern-day believers in a democratic peace, who see this faith in democratic institutions as vindicated, ignore this history. In fact, the suffragists, whose ideas were much derided as utopian, appear closer to the mark. They believed women voting would reduce conflict in the world—and the evidence suggests they were right. A broad set of democratic institutions is also required to bring peace. They ensure that the popular will matters. But contrary to the beliefs of the early liberals, these institutions are not enough; who votes matters too. But such findings make the process of producing peace sound easy and automatic, as if women’s suffrage produces peace with nothing more to say or do. Introduce democracy, give women the vote and peace will come. Clearly this story is far too simplistic. The coming chapters of the book examine more of the story, examining puzzles that remain and what any of this means for the future. If women’s votes are such a powerful source of peace, why, for instance, did they fail to prevent some of the most deadly wars in history? When should we expect women’s votes to bring peace—and when might more pacific preferences invite exploitation? Does the evidence presented in this chapter mean that

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peace will expand as more and more women become heads of state and legislators? And will women activists, like those of the early twentieth century, increase their role in shaping foreign policy since women now wield the vote? We examine the evidence—and follow the stories of women who led nations and social movements—to find out.

5

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Women’s Votes and the World Wars

Let nations arbitrate their future troubles, It’s time to lay the sword and gun away, There’d be no war today, If all mothers would say, I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier(song). From the hit 1915 song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” As for the woman who approves the song . . . her place is in China— or by preference in a harem—and not in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt’s response to the song’s popularity1

The prospect that the modern era is more peaceful than at any point in history may seem hard to fathom when considering the events of the twentieth century. The unprecedented toll of the First World War, responsible for the death of roughly 20 million, was soon exceeded by that of an even deadlier conflict in which roughly 50 million soldiers and civilians died. These grueling conflicts were then followed by 45 years of a Cold War in which a substantial portion of the world’s population lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. How can we make sense of such conflict and tension in light of the advance of the supposedly pacifying effects of women’s suffrage over this period? This chapter examines what, if any, influence women’s votes had on three defining episodes of the twentieth century: America’s entry into World War I, Britain’s response to Hitler’s aggression in Czechoslovakia, and the beginning of the end of the Cold War following

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0005

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the U.S. 1984 presidential election. In each case, we will see that women’s votes, motivated by issues of war and peace, affected the political process in meaningful ways even when they did not succeed in preventing war. Wilson and Women in the West In none of the major belligerent countries in Europe did women voters in 1914 have a voice in whether their country would go to war. For many of these nations, women’s suffrage would not come until after war’s end. But this was not true of one late entrant into the war—the United States. By the time of the U.S. presidential election of 1916, in which the fate of the United States’ involvement in the European war would be decided, roughly 4 million women in twelve American states could already vote in national elections. All but one of these states— Illinois—were west of the Mississippi River and all but two—Illinois and Kansas—were in the far West (Fig. 8).2 Why did these states in the western United States become some of the first large communities in the modern world to grant women the vote?

Fig. 8 The spread of women’s suffrage in the United States.

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The reasons are up for debate. Perhaps the highly skewed sex ratios in the West made women’s suffrage less threatening. Or perhaps the ubiquity of drinking, prostitution, and gambling made women’s “keener sense of moral behavior” an attractive solution to social ills.3 Even if true, such cultural explanations fail to explain why suffrage was adopted in these states when it was—over a broad timespan between 1869 and 1913.4 Moreover, we have little reason to believe that the men who settled in the West—and the laws they enacted—were any more progressive than in other parts of the United States.5 Instead, the most convincing explanations for the early adoption of suffrage in the West, offered by scholars steeped in the politics of the era, point to non-systemic factors like the unique political strategies used by suffragist groups and the unusually fluid nature of political competition in western states.6 So what effect, if any, did these women have in a presidential election in which matters of war and peace were central? With conflict looming not only with Germany but also with Mexico, would these newly enfranchised women fall in line with the nationalist ethos that had propelled American citizens to war against Spain and in the Philippines or would they counsel caution, fulfilling the vision of what democracy could be in its most benevolent form? History provided Woodrow Wilson with little hope for re-election in 1916. The Republican party had dominated politics in every region of the United States except the South since the end of the Civil War in 1865. Only one Democrat—Grover Cleveland—had been elected president in the entire fifty years prior to Wilson’s election in 1912, though Cleveland had been elected twice. The election of 1912 had been an incredible anomaly—an unusual U.S. election where a serious third-party contender garnered a huge portion of the vote share. Previous Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and his newly founded progressive Bull Moose party had siphoned off millions of votes from Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, leaving Wilson victorious, but with only 41.8% of the popular vote.7 By 1914, support for Roosevelt and the Bull Moose had declined quickly and the Republicans were able to unify, seemingly restoring their sure odds of victory in 1916.8 Republican’s historical dominance of the Midwest and Northeast meant that Wilson’s best chance for re-election was in the

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West—in states where four years earlier, he had received, on average, only 36.5% of the vote. From early on in the election cycle, it was clear that the 1916 election would center around international affairs and serve as a referendum on Wilson’s attitudes towards war and peace. Amidst ever-louder Allied calls for U.S. involvement in the war effort against the Germans, Wilson had gone to some lengths to maintain the United States’ position of neutrality. He had granted large loans to Britain and France, intended for the purchase of food and weapons, but also allowed unfettered trade with Germany to continue. He ignored demands at home and by the British government that the United States should use force in response to the deaths of the 128 U.S. citizens aboard the downed Lusitania in 1915. Tensions with Germany were not the only international crisis that had consumed the country’s attention in the lead up to the election. Throughout 1915 and 1916, Wilson had also faced a delicate situation in the southwestern United States. The revolutionary unrest that had rocked Mexico since 1910 had begun to spill over the northern border, as gangs of revolutionaries attempted to foment an armed uprising to “liberate” the American Southwest by attacking American citizens on their own soil.9 In March 1916, Pancho Villa and six hundred of his men attacked Columbus, New Mexico, a town three miles north of the border, exchanging fire with the U.S. Army and killing eight. In response, Wilson ordered General John J. Pershing and 4,800 American troops to enter Mexico in pursuit of Villa.10 Tension grew as Pershing chased Villa quixotically through Mexico, reaching its peak on June 21 when the de facto Mexican army fired on the American troops, killing roughly fifty. In the days that followed, the countries came so close to war that Wilson requested permission to address Congress with a formal declaration. But within days, Wilson had decided to change course. Before the Press Club of New York, he questioned the honor and purpose of military action against Mexico, arguing: “The easiest thing is to strike. . . . Do you think the glory of America would be enhanced by a war of conquest in Mexico? Do you think that any act of violence by a powerful nation against a weak and destructive neighbor would reflect distinction upon . . . the United States?…I have to constantly remind

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myself that I am not the servant of those who wish to enhance the value of their Mexican investments, that I am the servant of the rank and file of the people of the United States.”11 Leading into the election, then, Wilson found himself saddled with the mantle of peacemaker.12 Wilson’s success at holding to “the old paths of neutrality” became central to the Democratic party platform. Wilson had respected the fundamental rights of all states and maintained a commitment to using military force only as a last resort, even in the face of the death and destruction of Americans and their property.13 As the Democratic delegates met at the convention in St. Louis, party elites picked up on Wilson’s pacifism and neutrality as the issue with the greatest potential for electoral success. Keynote speaker Governor Martin Glynn of New York first hit upon the campaign theme that would eventually drown out all others—in crisis after crisis, Wilson had “kept us out of war.” Glynn acknowledged that Wilson’s policy of neutrality would not satisfy “those who revel in destruction and find pleasure in despair,” the “fire-eaters” or the “swashbucklers.” It would, however, appease those “who worship at the altar of the God of Peace.”14 Senator Ollie James of Kentucky followed with similar praise of Wilson’s diplomacy and restraint. “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun . . . he wrung from the most militant spirit . . . an acknowledgement of American rights and an agreement to American demands. Every mother whose son is today safe in his home,” he continued, “may thank God for Woodrow Wilson.”15 Of note, however, is that—as the speeches suggest—the campaign did not expect the message of peace to resonate equally with all voters. Governor Glynn argued at the convention that Wilson’s pacifism would appeal in particular to “the mothers of the land . . . at whose hearth and fireside no jingoistic war has placed an empty chair” and to “the daughters of this land, from whom brag and bluster have sent no husband, no sweetheart and no brother” to the grave.16 Convinced that women’s view on the “peace issue” might be “sufficient to swing a majority of the women’s votes for President Wilson’s re-election,” Wilson’s campaign managers began to target women accordingly, sending, for instance, printed materials to homes that included two pamphlets: one with battle scenes depicting the horrors

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of war in Europe intended for the women and the other about farm policy intended for the men.17 “The whole spirit of the law has been to . . . give opportunity to those who could dominate, but it seems to be that the function of society now has another element in it,” Wilson told a crowd of four thousand women in Chicago at one of the few high-profile speeches he gave during the campaign, “I believe that it is the element which women are going to supply. It is the element of mediation . . . the power of sympathy, as contrasted with the power of contests.”18 Wilson’s Republican opponent Charles Evans Hughes, meanwhile, did not explicitly come out in support of war. But he also did not cower from his portrayal as decisively more hawkish. “How many more Americans must be massacred . . . how many more miles of property seized before . . . Washington will be able to count the game of retribution worth the risk of alienating the support of peace-at-any-price adherents?” he asked at rallies.19 The incomparably hawkish Teddy Roosevelt vigorously hit the campaign trail for him, peppering his speeches with “wild war talk” that even led moderate Republicans to denounce him.20 Hughes eventually called on Roosevelt to tone down the harsh rhetoric, but only in one month before the election once the damage had already been done.21 Hughes’s campaign had provided Wilson with an easy and obvious angle in the final days of the campaign: “The Lesson is Plain: If you want WAR, vote for HUGHES: If you Want Peace with Honor, VOTE FOR WILSON!”22 By late fall, just as the Democrats were growing confident that they had “clinched” the election by targeting their message of peace at women voters, Republican leaders were similarly concluding that if Wilson’s peace message got out to a sufficient number of women voters in the West, their party would have a “fight on [its] hands.”23 A Western Comeback On election night, Charles Evans Hughes and his wife went to bed at 1:15 in the morning, confident in the prospects of victory. Throughout the evening, aids had “repeatedly burst into their suite to overwhelm them with good news.”24 Hughes had won New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois and by 10 pm had collected 247 electoral votes,

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only nineteen shy of the required 266. Confident that the results yet to come in from the West would look as they had in the past, newspapers around the world called the election that night. “Hughes Elected by Narrow Margin,” ran the New York Sun. The Detroit Free Press ran a photo with the caption, “President-elect Hughes and his charming family.”25 Newspapers across Europe expressed elation or horror at the announcement of a Hughes victory, assuming his election would mean imminent American military involvement in their fight.26 Roosevelt declared Hughes’s election a “vindication of national honor.”27 But around 2am, returns from the West started to arrive. By midnight the next day, Wilson had collected 251 electoral votes—he had won every western state but Oregon, which he lost by only six thousand votes. The state of California had been decisive, with Wilson winning by a margin of only 3,773 votes. Wilson had become only the second Democrat since Franklin Pierce in 1852 to receive a majority of the popular vote and he had done so largely on the backs of voters in western states.28 The once elated or horrified European press fell into deafening silence. “Berlin Now Expects Wilson Peace Move: Reelection Due to the Pacific Temper of the Americas,” summarized the Boston Daily Globe’s post-election headline.29 The British ambassador in Washington concluded from the election that the “great mass of Americans desire nothing as much as to keep out of the war.”30 What had tipped the West in Wilson’s favor? Given the lack of exit polls at the time, our best possible answer to this comes from the press, which almost unanimously agreed that—just as Wilson’s campaign had hoped—women voters in the West had been the decisive force.31 “Votes of Women and Bull Moose Elected Wilson,” declared the New York Times. The Times correspondent on the ground in San Francisco reported that California women “voted for Wilson 3 to 1.”32 The New Republic concluded that “without the women voters . . . Mr. Wilson might well have failed of election.”33 The Topeka State Journal credited the “quiet, unannounced women vote on the farms and in the big towns that cared nothing for party lines and traditions.” Women’s votes, the journal concluded, led to the result that “surprised the Democrats almost as much as it shocked and jolted the Republicans.”34 The New York World portrayed the pivotal role of women in a cartoon in which

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“Pauline Revere” rode eastward from the sunset carrying a banner with a single word: “Wilson.”35 Journalists’ accounts are bolstered by data: states in which women participated in the 1916 presidential vote were 51% more likely to vote for Wilson than states without women’s suffrage. States with women’s suffrage also saw 8-point-large vote swings on average compared to the vote in 1912 (see Fig. 9).36 The embrace of Wilson also did not mean a nationwide embrace of the Democratic party. Wilson had cause to celebrate in the days after the election, but many of his Democratic colleagues did not. Despite Wilson’s success in California and Washington, Republicans won Senate seats in both. The Democratic majority in the House and Senate, which had also been made possible by the Republican party split in 1912, disappeared. Rather than helping with down-ballot elections, Wilson ran ahead of the Democratic ticket in two-thirds of the states. Beatson (1961, p. 56).37 As further evidence of the plausible effect of women’s votes, in four states where women had voted in 1912, turnout rose by 18.4% in 1916 and in three others, turnout reached rates unseen since 1896, something matched by only five other non-suffrage states. Why might western women have voted for Wilson in potentially decisive numbers? Again, the press was largely in agreement.38 “Peace as a Powerful Issue” ran the headline in The New York Times. Based on dispatches from around the country, the Times concluded that Wilson’s record of peace had resounded most clearly with female voters. The Time’s correspondent reported that, “The slogan ‘He Kept Us Out of War’ had been the dominant note with women.” Prominent Republican Senator Smoot of Utah, for instance, conceded that “he kept us out of war” had been responsible for Wilson’s victory and that “it was the vote of the women that was influenced by it.”39 The Times reporter in Kansas, where an estimated 70,000 Republican women out of 625,000 total voters went for Wilson, characterized the fear that lay behind women’s votes as follows: “Hughes, with Roosevelt urging him, would engulf the country in war with Mexico, possibly with Germany. No amount of argument could shake Kansas women from this belief.”40 Reports based on interviews with women voters were the same within states all over the west. In Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Wyoming, California, and Kansas, among others, women cited Wilson’s record of peace as the factor with

WA 5

1904 Actual

MT 3

OR 4

ND 4

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CA 10

NV 3

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SD 4

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CO 5

KS 10

IL 27 MO 18 AR 9

NY 39

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NE 8

UT 3

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PA 34

OH 23

IN 15

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KY 13 TN 12 MS 10

ME 6

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MA 16

NC 12 SC 9

4 7

NJ 12 DE

LA 9

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RI CT

3

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2

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OR 4

ID 3 WY 3 NV 3

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ND 4

MN 11

SD 4 NE 8

UT 3

CO 5

WI 13

IA 13 IL 27

KS 10

MO 18

OK 7

AR 9

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MI 14

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KY 13 TN 12 MS 10

PA 34

OH 23

IN 15

ME 6

GA 13

AL 11

VA 12 NC 12 SC 9

MA 16 RI

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LA 9

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SD 5 NE 8

CO 5

KS 10 OK 10

NM 3 TX 20

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IA 13 IL 29 MO 18 AR 9

NY 45

MI 15 IN 15

OH 24

KY 13 TN 12 MS 10

AL 12

GA 14

ME 6 VT 4 4 NH

PA 38 WV VA 7 12 NC 12 SC 9

MA 18 RI

5

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NJ 14 DE

3

MD 8

LA 10 FL 5

Fig. 9 Partisan voting maps showing the shift in the West (states with women’s suffrage are marked in white).

2

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the greatest influence on their vote. The Times reporters noted that this view was consistent across women of all types, regardless of marital and maternal status. Women voters were clearly not the only adherents to the cause of peace, as the press noted. Many men states they had voted on the issue. But men’s commitment to peace was often characterized in different ways. According to the Times, within those states where women could vote, Wilson’s pacifism reportedly appealed to a “hatred of war.” Interviewees in the Midwest, where only two states allowed women the vote, also mentioned peace as a priority. But respondents there were far more likely, as the paper described it, to mention a desire for “continued prosperity” than a “theoretical pacifism or instinctive horror of war,” suggesting the issue of peace might have been less of a priority in tougher economic times.41 Of course, journalist accounts are merely circumstantial; they cannot provide concrete evidence of who voted or why. Similarly, state-level statistics on vote choice and turnout do not paint a definitive picture of women’s effect on the elections since they can obscure other important electoral factors. Moreover, the notion that women played a decisive role in 1916 would seem to go against the premise that women had little effect on political outcomes in the years following the adoption of suffrage, either because they were too likely to vote as their husbands did or because they did not vote in sufficient amounts.42 Importantly, however, for many women in the western states, 1916 was not an early election.43 In Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Colorado, and Idaho, for instance, women had been voting for anywhere between twenty and forty-seven years.44 Women in other western states, like Nevada, Montana, and Arizona, did vote for the first time in 1916. But even in those states, there is reason to believe that women could have voted in large enough numbers to have been decisive.45 For one thing, research suggests that early women voters were more likely to come out to vote when issues of particular salience are on the ballot.46 And given what we know about women’s preferences on matters or war and peace, it is easy to imagine that the growing possibility of wars with Mexico and Germany would have been just such issues.47 Additionally, the relatively small vote margins for Wilson in pivotal states means even if women only moderately favored Wilson but turned

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out in significantly lower numbers than men, their votes still would have been decisive. If, for instance, the percentage of women in California voting for Wilson—where he won by only 3,773 votes—was five percentage points or more higher than the percentage voting for Hughes and women represented only 8% or more of the electorate, it would have been impossible for more men to vote for Wilson over Hughes, implying that women’s votes would have been decisive.48 One might imagine that the issue of women’s suffrage itself, and the call for a national amendment, might have affected women’s votes to an even greater degree. Women’s groups certainly attempted to mobilize western women on the issue of women’s suffrage itself and the need for a national amendment.49 And yet, Wilson carried all but one of the states with women’s suffrage despite not having publicly endorsed an amendment to legalize women’s suffrage nationwide.50 Unlike Hughes, who at least rhetorically supported a national suffrage amendment, Wilson had long dragged his feet on the issue. Suffrage groups, as a result, had committed to “get[ting] Mr. Wilson’s scalp” on account of his failure to voice public support like his opponent.51 While we cannot ultimately know for certain how women voted in 1916 and why, we do know that prominent politicians and political analysts on both sides of the aisle believed that the issue of war and peace had decided the election specifically because of its appeal to women. Republican Senator Smoot of Utah acknowledged that “he kept us out of war” had been responsible for victory and that “it was the vote of the women that was influenced by it.”52 Die-hard pacifist and supporter of women’s rights William Jennings Bryan, who had spent eight full weeks touring the West as Wilson’s campaign surrogate, had long perceived women’s suffrage as the most viable path to peace.53 The outcome of the election only confirmed this belief, he wrote in December 1916, and demonstrated that the war-prone world needed women’s votes “even more than women need the ballot.”54 Five months after the election, the electoral impact of women’s preference for peace remained clear in the minds of numerous congressmen as they publicly debated the vote to authorize war with Germany. John Burnett, a Democratic representative from Alabama, summarized Wilson’s electoral success as follows: “In the States where women voted,

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thousands of noble wives and mothers and sisters voted for him, although the Republican candidate declared for woman suffrage. This because they did not want to see their loved ones torn from their homes and butchered in a war for which we were not responsible. . . . Had you told them that you were going to tear the young men from the hearts of the mothers who passed through the very shadow of death to give them birth and have them butchered 3,000 miles from their homes, do you believe you would have been in this hall tonight?”55 Republican representative King of Illinois told his colleagues that he would be paying more attention “to the prayer of a mother for her son” than to any other considerations, before reading an ardently anti-war poem written “in a state where women vote on war questions.” King’s colleague from Illinois Frederick Britten perhaps made the clearest argument that voting for war would be felt in the future: “Every one of you who votes for this resolution will feel its effects a year from now when the sisters, widows and mothers of your district come to you and say, ‘Mr. Congressman, my boy is my only support.’ ”56 Ultimately, the looming threat of women voters and the re-election of Wilson was not enough to keep the country out of war. In less than five months, the United States was at war with Germany. Wilson, despite his “Lincolnian patience,” was not able to keep the country out of war.57 “They talk of me as though I were a god,” he privately bristled to his Secretary of Navy in the lead up to the election, “but any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage.”58 Indeed, in early 1917, the calculated outrages grew. The Germans renewed their unrestricted submarine attacks and secretly proposed a military alliance with Mexico. In the case that the United States entered the war in Europe, Germany promised to provide Mexico with “generous financial support” as well as political support for the Mexican reconquest of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Full-scale war with Mexico would limit America’s capacity to shape the war in Europe, the Germans hoped. What could Wilson do in the face of such affronts? His campaign rhetoric accurately portrayed his desire to avoid war. Up until the declaration of war, he spoke of prioritizing peace. But by late March, the momentum had grown too strong. Wilson’s pacifism drove not only his critics apoplectic (Roosevelt threatened to “skin [Wilson] alive” if he did

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not declare war against Germany), but also members of his own cabinet, who threatened to present the war resolution to Congress themselves if Wilson refused to do so.59 On April 2, 1917, Wilson begrudgingly stepped before Congress and requested war powers against the German Empire. After his speech, Wilson lacked the gusto typically exhibited by those steeling themselves for battle. “Think what it was they were applauding,” an emotional Wilson told his private secretary. “The death of our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that,” Wilson lamented, in tears.60 Wilson’s re-election did not prevent American involvement in the war in Europe. The same can not be said about war with Mexico. In the days before the election, Mexico and the United States had pulled back from the brink of war. But the situation remained fraught. Pancho Villa continued to launch attacks along the border, killing hundreds of Americans and costing Americans and American businesses in the Southwest and in Mexico roughly $170 million. But a Joint Commission had failed to devise an agreement acceptable to both sides.61 These tensions persisted throughout World War I, again reaching an apex while Wilson was in Europe helping to shape the peace in the summer of 1919. This time, the Mexican government had used force to stop oil drilling by the Atlantic Refining Company and followers of Pancho Villa were firing into the United States, killing multiple Americans. But Wilson remained determined to avoid war. “If we could not get the oil in a peaceful manner from Mexico . . . we will simply have to do without,” he wrote in dispatches from Versailles.62 Wilson saw no pretext for war or intervention. Even after Wilson’s return, the press for war continued. A group of bellicose Republicans on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, led by Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, were not only calling for Mexico to be made a full-on protectorate of the United States.63 They were actively preparing plans for annexation. Even Wilson’s Secretary of State and his own ambassador to Mexico pressured Wilson for action. Ailing from a massive stroke in October 1919, Wilson rose from his sick bed to speak in defense of peace. Mexico did not pose a security threat to the United States, Wilson declared, leading the Mexican ambassador to the United States to conclude that Wilson was “the major figure preventing war between Mexico and the US.”64 One

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American diplomat agreed, telling the ambassador that Wilson, a man improbably returned to office by women voters in the West, was the only friend the Mexican government had and that “if they lost him, they lost everything.”65 Thus, women voters though few in numbers, probably kept the United States out of war with Mexico. They did not keep the United States out of the world war, but they likely caused the election of the more pacific of the two candidates. These two options were the only ones available to them. The scope of political contestation—the options available for voting on in elections—is a theme to which we shall return. Women in Britain and the Rise of Hitler Twenty years later, the situation in Europe looked different and yet the same. While only four countries had allowed women the vote in 1914, over twenty countries had legalized women’s suffrage by the time tensions with Germany reemerged in 1936.66 Among them was the United Kingdom, which in 1918 extended suffrage to women over thirty years of age with property or an education. Millions more men remained able to vote until 1928 when suffrage was extended to all adults over the age of 21.67 “If not in actuality at least in prospect,” the New York Times declared, the United Kingdom had become “a kingdom of women.”68 While the prospect of war in Europe had been the focal point of a presidential election in the United States in 1916, giving women an opportunity to voice their opinion on the optimal direction of U.S. foreign policy, this was never exactly the case in Britain in the lead up to World War II. When Neville Chamberlain was elected prime minister in May of 1937, he had expected to leave a mark on his country through a legacy of domestic and social reform. Hitler’s intentions were not yet a pressing concern among the public. But this did not mean that the pacific tendencies of women voters did not shape the course of events, even if—once again—they ultimately failed to prevent world war. The Anschluss, or the “joining,” was an ominous sign. In March 1938, in clear disregard of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler annexed Austria. Six months later, he set his sights on Czechoslovakia, citing

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the need to protect the Sudetenland Germans from the “indescribable” conditions imposed by the Czechs. Germany would no longer tolerate the oppression of the largest German population outside of the Reich, Hitler declared at the annual Nuremberg Rally, and it would use force if necessary. Seeking to rachet down tensions, Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler personally. Expecting a negotiation, Chamberlain was met only with the demand that the Sudetenland immediately be given to Germany or else. Chamberlain protested the ultimatum. Pointing to the document listing the demands, Hitler declared: “read the top, it says memorandum.”69 But while Chamberlain made great show of resisting this particular “memorandum,” he conceded to an almost identical set of demands a few days later in Munich. In exchange, he received only Hitler’s promise that he would not claim any more territory in Eastern Europe. Chamberlain returned to London with the Munich Agreement signed. Jubilant crowds filled the streets along his nine-mile journey from the airport to Buckingham Palace where he met with King George VI for over an hour and a half. “I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain infamously declared outside 10 Downing Street. Echoing Benjamin Disraeli’s famous speech following the Berlin Conference of 1878, he concluded his speech by telling the relieved citizens of his country to now “go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” Convinced that he had maintained peace, Chamberlain believed he would be able to return to his preferred focus on domestic affairs. Public support for Chamberlain’s now-infamous soft-gloved treatment of Hitler seemed broad on the face of it. And yet, if one looks closer, a familiar division emerges. In one of the earliest political polls, conducted in 1938, women expressed significantly higher support for Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement than men. While only 43% of men supported Chamberlain, 56% of women did so, bringing approval of the policy above 50%.70 More men opposed Chamberlain than supported him. But support for the prime minister was 25% higher than opposition among women.71 In a summary from thousands of interviews conducted around England at the time, the group Mass Observation remarked upon a “marked tendency [for women to support Chamberlain] when their men are once more saying that Chamberlain was weak and we should have stood up to Hitler.” The group concluded that at

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every stage in the crisis, women had proven to be the “conservative, peace-at-any-price and pro-Chamberlain element.”72 Parliamentary “by-elections” held following the Munich Agreement in constituencies whose MP positions had fallen vacant shed further light on a huge gender gap. The first of the these was in Oxford, and here Mass Observation undertook the first constituency poll ever conducted in Britain. The pollsters estimated that while men were split between the candidates, women favored the candidate from Chamberlain’s party by five to one. “The general feeling of men [was] f**k Hitler and we ought to have stood up to him before,” the pollsters succinctly summarized. The general feeling of women was, in contrast, “Anything for peace. Chamberlain did his best. He’s a good gent.”73 Women voters were also perceived as having swung towards the government in other byelections, and while not every by-election went for the government, in all of them, commentators believed that “a large proportion of the vote of the women who support Mr. Chamberlain’s peace policy” played an important role.74 In some elections, women voted for women candidates, but they also appear to have broken with the women candidate who criticized the Munich Agreement. That candidate, the Duchess of Atholl, stated publicly: “I blame my defeat on the votes of the women [who thought] that if they voted for me they would be voting for war.”75 Would Chamberlain have been as willing to compromise at Munich if women had not supported his policy? His preference to avoid another war on the continent was undoubtedly affected by numerous factors. But evidence from his correspondence and public speeches, while not definitive, suggests the answer may be no. On a number of occasions, Chamberlain and those close to him spoke of the bolstering effect that the vast numbers of letters he received had on him—and most of these letters were from women. In fact, as Gottlieb (2016, pp. 198–9) has pointed out, when Chamberlain made what later became his most infamous and oft-quoted statement, he was not expressing his own views at all, but representing what he saw as the perspective of the many women who had written to him. In his radio broadcast before he flew to Munich to meet with Hitler, Wilson spoke of the letters he had received urging peace. “Most of the letters have come from women—mothers and sisters of our own country-men. . . . To read such letters has made

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[my responsibility] seem almost overwhelming. How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gasmasks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” He was not naively suggesting that the British government and people knew nothing of affairs in Czechoslovakia, as is often supposed, but rather empathizing with what he saw as the perspective of the women who had written to him. “I seem in these days to be the target for a lot of rotten eggs,” he later said, “but I can assure you that does not keep me awake, because I believe that I have the support of the women of the country and that they have a clearer vision than some of those whose sight is obscured. . . . More and more women are making their influence felt in politics, and there is no subject on which they have a greater right to be heard than on foreign affairs.”76 A similar picture emerges from the accounts of Chamberlain’s family and his private correspondence. According to his wife, “One of the most moving things, and one that has touched my husband deeply, has been the messages of confidence which have been sent to him from the women of the country.”77 Writing to his sister, he admitted he was feeling “very dispirited & lonely” in the House of Commons, but said that the letters he was receiving from women made him believe that the country was with him. Opponents of the compromise with Hitler saw things in much the same way, often placing the blame on women for the country’s myopic policy. The famous diplomat and author, Harold Nicolson, then a Labor MP, was explicit: “A great body of women rendered nationally immobile by fear without resolution must be regarded as a dead-weight, a restrictive influence on national policy. With a majority population now clamouring for peace at any price, what, we may wonder, can any Government do but clinch a bad bargain and snatch a peace that is momentarily presentable but as poisonous behind its exterior as Snow White’s apple?”78 Richard Law, a parliamentary opponent of appeasement, blamed women who had, he wrote in private correspondence, “brought nothing but degradation and dishonour to politics.”79 Chamberlain’s belief in women’s support might have given him the push he needed to compromise with Hitler in 1938. But as the events of

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1939 wore on, the mood within all of Britain shifted and the gender gap closed. When Chamberlain did finally declare war on Germany in September, 90% of men and 86% of women approved. Only 17% of men and 18% of women favored further discussing terms of peace with Germany. By that time, Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, making his intention to dominate Europe clear. British women and men were united in opposition. The resolve of the British people was largely steadfast throughout the war that came one year after Munich. To the extent that male and female opinion shifted, they usually did so together. By the end of 1940, for instance, large majorities of both men and women favored treating Germany even more severely in any post-war settlement than after the First World War; the difference between men and women was less than 2%. When Chamberlain finally lost the confidence of the British people in May of 1940, he lost the confidence of both men and women together. Following military failures in Norway, Chamberlain faced opposition in parliament, including from one conservative MP who echoed Oliver Cromwell’s words dissolving the Long Parliament: “You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”80 Chamberlain’s approval among men fell by twenty-three points to 30% and among women by twenty-eight points to 34%. Once Winston Churchill assumed the prime ministership, his approval from both sexes hovered close to 90%. Where men and women did differ was on preferred war tactics and on how the enemy was perceived. At the start of the war, 60% of men and only 41% of women favored bombing military targets. By May of 1940, both sexes had become markedly more willing to contemplate all forms of violence against the Germans. But a gap remained, with 73% of men and 52% of women supporting “general bombing” in Germany. This change coincided with another interesting shift. At the start of the war, large majorities (88% of men and 92% of women) perceived Hitler as the enemy and not the German people. By May 1940, following Britain’s defeat in Norway, only 46% of men and 61% of women agreed. By the end of that year, following the defeat of France, the percent of

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Britons who viewed the Nazi government, in contrast to the German people, as the enemy had fallen further, to 40% of men and 48% of women. Bolstering Chamberlain at Munich, British women may have kept Britain out of war for a time. But in retrospect, this was not a moment of distinction. If Britain had resisted Germany at Munich, Czechoslovakia assisted by Britain and France would have fought a German invasion.81 We do not know what would have happened then. As R. W. SetonWatson pointed out on September 26, 1938, prior to the Munich Agreement, however, the capitulation at Munich greatly strengthened the German position in any future conflict. Only after the removal of Czechoslovakia from the European map could Germany “safely concentrate her forces against the West, having wiped out an efficient army of 150,000 men with 2,000 planes, having possessed herself of some of the largest munitions works and steel and iron plants in Europe, and having cut off the Balkan states from their best supply of munitions.”82 Thus, this history illustrates why peaceful outcomes occur when suffrage democracies are on both sides. In the summer of 1938, Chamberlain himself said that there was no threat of war because the women of Germany would not allow it.83 Had Germany been a democracy still, he might have been right. Women and the End of the Cold War While women’s votes arguably prevented conflict between the United States and Mexico, they had not managed to prevent two major world wars. Given the nature of the threat posed by Germany, no one could have expected them to. A country can, after all, unilaterally wage war, but it can not unilaterally wage peace. Compromise and negotiation require two willing parties. But what of the third defining conflict of the twentieth century? The Cold War never witnessed direct military violence between the United States and Soviet Union. But the palpable nearness of war consistently shaped world affairs for decades. Voting women in the United States did not prevent the development of

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mistrust and rivalry between the United Status and Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. But there is good reason to think they might have helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end. During Ronald Reagan’s first term as U.S. president from 1980 to 1984, one would have struggled to see the end of the Cold War on the horizon. With the shift from Carter to Reagan, the Cold War had transformed from a low-simmering stand-off back into a bitter geopolitical rivalry. On the one hand, Reagan’s rhetoric was far more severe. The Soviets must be made to understand that “we will never compromise our principles and standards [nor] ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” he declared to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. Americans should not be tempted, he warned, to blithely declare themselves above it all. The arms race was not some “giant misunderstanding” and victory could not be achieved by trying to remove yourself from the struggle “between right and wrong and good and evil.”84 The shift was not only rhetorical. The same year, Reagan approved the deployment of the Pershing II nuclear missiles to accompany those already stationed with European allies and pointed at the Soviet Union. In response, the Soviets suspended arms control talks.85 In a private letter to Reagan, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov wrote that with these provocations, “a heavy blow has been dealt to the very process of nuclear arms limitation. The tension has grown dangerously. We know this, and you know this, too.”86 A few months later, writing of Reagan’s pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Stars Wars”) program to destroy Soviet missiles in flight, a new Soviet General Secretary described the danger of an arms race “whose magnitude it is difficult even to imagine.”87 But despite this resurgence in hostilities, in less than a decade, the Cold War would come to a welcomed and anti-climactic end. The longserving Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and many others, date the origins of this transformation to the time of the 1984 presidential election in which Reagan faced off against the more pacific Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale.88 Though we will never know precisely what precipitated this change, electoral considerations in the United States were surely an important factor.

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During the course of the campaign, a different and unfamiliar side of Reagan emerged. Almost over night, his menacing rhetoric railing against the “evil empire” transformed into a more conciliatory approach: “Our challenge is peaceful,” Reagan said in early 1984. “We do not threaten the Soviet Union. . . . Our countries have never fought each other; there is no reason why we ever should.”89 In September 1984, two months before the election, Reagan proposed a meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, thereby demonstrating, his administration announced, his “interest in building a constructive relationship with the Soviet Union and reducing the chill in relations” that marked his first term. Four years into his presidency, it would be Reagan’s first meeting with a top Soviet official. Scholars have long debated why President Reagan changed his approach to the Cold War in 1984. Some argue that defense buildup in his first three years in office made him feel more secure in extending the olive branch.90 Others point to Reagan’s realization that a simple misunderstanding could bring on nuclear catastrophe. Reports, for instance, that the Able Archer NATO exercise in 1983 had led the Soviets to question whether the United States was initiating a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union worried the president. “I don’t see how they could believe that—but it’s something to think about,” he told CIA director William Casey.91 The movie The Day After, about nuclear winter, lead Reagan to write in his diary that he was “greatly depressed.”92 But still others have pointed to the president’s electoral incentives to avoid the impression that his uncompromising stance towards the Soviet Union might increase the likelihood of nuclear war.93 Although he would ultimately win in a landslide, in late 1983, Reagan certainly appeared vulnerable in the upcoming election. Some polls put his approval levels below those of presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon at comparable times in their presidencies.94 Political observers across the country located the source of his declining support in opposition to his foreign policy platform. The Washington Post wrote that “with the economy boosting his appeal but foreign policy working against him, Reagan seems to be at a political standstill.” Writing in the New York Times, James Reston thought Reagan was “beginning to scare the American . . . people with his dukes-up attitude toward the Russians

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and his adventures in Lebanon.” The Soviets recognized this weakness as well, commenting to Vice President George H. W. Bush “that the President’s extreme anti-Communism might be a hindrance to his reelection.” Bush concurred with their assessment, saying “Well, he’s hard, very hard indeed.”95 The polls in 1984 continued to suggest that foreign policy was the president’s Achilles’ heel. With the president’s approval consistently above 50% on handling of the economy and other domestic affairs and consistently below 50% on foreign policy, it is no wonder that the Democratic candidates sought to focus their campaigns on Reagan’s foreign policy conduct. Foregoing other critiques of the president, the front-runners for the nomination—Walter Mondale and John Glenn— emphasized the danger of nuclear war. Both spoke of the foremost problem confronting the United States in terms of the “nuclear menace,” the “survival of humanity,” and the administration’s “drift toward war.”96 Reducing the risk of nuclear war “is not just an important issue,” Mondale argued, “it is the issue.”97 In this context, it is also no surprise that the president’s key advisors—and even his own wife—urged him to be more accommodating to the Soviets.98 In his speech in 1984 announcing a new approach toward U.S.-Soviet relations, Reagan depicted a conversation between an American couple and a Soviet one in which they discover how much they have in common. Cautiously optimistic though still unswayed by Reagan’s olive branch, the Communist party newspaper Pravda extended the conversation in a different light—Jim and Sally, the American couple, frequently turned their heads back to see if they were being followed by the FBI.99 Shortly after the speech, Reagan sent a letter to the Soviet leadership, a portion written in his own hand, stating: “Our common and urgent purpose must be the translation of this reality into a lasting reduction of tensions between us. I pledge to you my profound commitment to that goal.”100 Though the German foreign minister apparently danced for joy upon reading the text of Reagan’s initial speech,101 journalists, Soviet elites, and indeed the other candidates themselves all viewed the president’s turn as an election-year ploy to assuage nervous voters. In the Wall Street Journal in early 1984, David Ignatius wrote: “Mr. Reagan appears to be

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in a no-lose position in terms of domestic politics. By extending the olive branch toward Moscow as the election year begins, he is likely to blunt charges by political opponents that he has allowed U.S.-Soviet relations to deteriorate to their lowest level in decades.”102 Mondale concurred: “In the last few days, we’ve heard a soothing new tone from Mr. Reagan, and we welcome it. For four years, he sounded like Ronald Reagan. This last week, he’s tried to sound like Walter Mondale.” This presidential shift prompted a crucial question, Mondale continued: “which Reagan would be president if he’s re-elected?”103 In the view of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, “it was hard to believe in Reagan’s sincerity,” which he still viewed as driven by opinion polling.104 Based on these assessments, President Reagan’s shift is exactly what we would expect of a presidential candidate trying to expand their appeal in an election year.105 The state of the economy could not be the Democrats’ winning issue—the economic trajectory was incredibly positive in the lead up to the election. But the Democrats did appear to have a winning issue on foreign policy. More than two-thirds of the American electorate said they were “worried” or “very worried” about the possibility of nuclear war.106 In response to Democratic attacks, Reagan moderated his stance towards the Soviets, neutralizing to some degree the Mondale critique and thereby securing victory in the 1984 election. It is impossible to know what factors swung Reagan the most. Each explanation has a set of authors that advocate for it. Most probable is that several factors were important, perhaps even all of those mentioned here. It is possible that Reagan’s electoral incentives, visible in the data and represented in the recommendations of important advisors, played a lesser role. But given the concerns of voters, it would have been highly tempting for Reagan to search for compromise with the Soviet Union.107 If he had not done so, it may be that the more dovish Mondale would have been elected. And in this case, as in so many others regarding the use of force and threat of war, the concerns of all voters were not the same. Once again, the more pacific preferences of women shifted the electoral incentives of leaders towards a more accommodating stance.

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If Reagan’s handling of foreign policy was his Achilles’ heel going into the 1984 election, it would not have been so without women. In the early stages of the presidential race, 54% of men but only 42% of women approved of the president’s handling of foreign policy. Women also cared more about foreign policy: while just over half of men reported feeling “worried” or “very worried” about the possibility of nuclear war, over three-quarters of women reported feeling this way.108 Without women, there would have been little electoral incentive for Mondale to give foreign policy such a prominent place in the campaign and little reason for Reagan to take the more conciliatory approach that had so forcefully been lobbied for by his advisors. On the whole, Reagan’s move towards a more conciliatory approach appears to have worked. By the time of the election, a majority of voters of both sexes supported his approach to foreign policy (Fig. 10). There is also some evidence that the approval gap between men and women narrowed as Reagan emphasized his attempts to reduce superpower tensions. This corresponded with a small but measurable reduction in the proportion of women who were worried or very worried about nuclear war.

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By giving Mondale an incentive to make reducing the danger of nuclear war a signature issue, women voters incentivized Reagan to adopt a similar position. In this way, women voters helped to establish a more unified elite discourse in favor of arms reductions and accommodation with the Soviets. This more unified message among political elites of both parties may have further shifted political opinion, thereby enabling further political action.109 But this time, Reagan’s greater receptivity to compromise was noticed by the other side, bringing about the opportunity for real improvements in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Although they did not identify women voters as the catalysts, the Soviets recognized that a strategic shift had taken place over the course in 1984. They sought to respond to Reagan in kind, eager for improved relations.110 But like America skeptics at home, they initially questioned Reagan’s sincerity. “Through the first half of the year, the most intriguing challenge . . . was to determine just how serious the president was in reaching out to the Soviet Union—if that was in fact what he was doing—and how long he intended to continue. Would this last beyond the November elections?” the Soviet ambassador questioned.111 On the one hand, the Soviets preferred Mondale and did not want to assist Reagan by making his strategic shift on foreign policy appear successful. On the other, they recognized a clear window of opportunity to improve relations.112 They accepted the United States’ offer of a meeting between Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and Reagan.113 From Moscow’s perspective, this represented a consequential shift in Soviet diplomacy. As the Soviet ambassador wrote in retrospect: “The Soviet Union thus had changed its approach from confronting Reagan to starting to try to reach agreements with him. They wanted to take advantage of his more conciliatory attitude during the election campaign in hopes of exploiting it afterward. They were right to move fast because, in retrospect, there was no certainty that this electoral window of opportunity would stay open.”114 President Reagan scored a campaign victory as a result of the meeting, which took place on September 28, only six weeks before the election. He claimed to have moved the superpowers closer toward an understanding on limiting the arms race. The Soviets also saw the

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meeting as highly consequential in the effect it had on Reagan. The Soviet ambassador reflected that “Reagan formed the impression that the Soviet Union was really keen on agreements to slow the arms race, and the opportunity for that would appear after November.”115 Reagan’s push for arms reduction agreements did continue after the election. Indeed, on the day after the election, Reagan sent a letter to Soviet General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko suggesting renewed arms control talks. The sides eventually decided to do just that— before Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union.116 Why did Reagan continue his more measured and even compromising stance with the Soviets even once the electoral incentives to do so had passed? It is possible that Reagan became convinced of the Soviets’ sincerity about arms control and desire to reduce Cold War tensions across the board. It is also likely that Reagan felt cornered by his own rhetoric. Had he backed down from his election year pledges, his rhetoric might have appeared to be an election year gimmick. His popularity might have taken a hit and even second-term presidents know the benefits of high approval numbers.117 Reagan’s own public statements likely, therefore, heightened his own resolve to follow through on them.118 In fact, once Gorbachev—who sought arms control agreements from the start of his tenure—entered office in early 1985, he used Reagan’s statements to achieve that very goal. The Soviet ambassador commented that Gorbachev took “propaganda advantage of the openings provided by Reagan and follow[ed] them up with major new initiatives to curb the arms race.”119 The end of the Cold War had many causes, including the elevation of Gorbachev, the waning power of the Soviet Union, and the demand of national populations in parts of the Soviet empire to be ruled by coethnics. Nevertheless, 1984 marked a clear turning point, as actors on both sides of the conflict recognized. Without the events of that year, it is mere speculation to say what course history would have taken. Conclusion Each event described in this chapter was a turning point. While America’s entry into the European war in 1917 was the beginning of the end, the Munich Agreement was just the beginning, as Hitler pushed deeper

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into Eastern Europe and eventually forced war with Britain and France. The presidential election of 1984 re-directed the trajectory of the Cold War, paving the way for a lasting detente. In each, women voters were influential but in different ways. American women voting in the West in 1916 swayed the election towards a candidate with a demonstrated commitment to peace. Chamberlain, by contrast, was not elected on the basis of his dedication to international compromise. But he was emboldened by his perception that British women were behind him as he pursued this controversial path once in office. Finally, American women in 1984 did not shape affairs by electing a more peaceful leader. Rather, their votes pressured both candidates to adopt more peaceful stances, thereby creating an opportunity to end the Cold War. Women voters were influential during these pivotal episodes. They played an important role in preventing war with Mexico and in tamping down tensions at a particular heightened moment of the Cold War. But they did not always bring peace. Wanting peace does not always make it so. Pacifism may invite exploitation and embolden the aggressive. It may also undermine support among friends. Women in NATO countries, for instance, are less supportive then men of using force to defend NATO allies when they are attacked (Fig. 11). This might make it hard for NATO leaders to galvanize the support needed to maintain 90

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alliance commitments, potentially destabilizing and undermining the utility and longevity of the defensive alliance. But if more and more countries incorporate more pacific tendencies into democratic systems, we should expect a desire for peace to win out ever more often. Thus far, we have focused on the extraordinary effects of women voters. But most of the leaders these women were voting for were men. Sometimes, none of the men on the ballot were advocates for peace. How much more impactful, one wonders, are women as national leaders themselves? Might they show the way to more peaceful futures?

• 6

Do Women Leaders Spell the End of War?

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

In 1949, when President Harry Truman met with twelve men, the foreign ministers of NATO’s founding countries, to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, his remarks made the absence of women in foreign policy explicitly clear: “We do not believe that there are blind tides of history which sweep men one way or another,” he remarked. “In our own time we have seen brave men overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable and forces that seemed overwhelming. Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny.”1 Since then, and now with twenty-nine members, the member states have never selected a woman to serve as secretary general of NATO and only two women— Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and Rose Gottemoeller—have served in the position of deputy secretary. This case is indicative of a broad pattern. Until very recently, women have been conspicuously absent from the upper echelons of the foreign

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0006

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Fig. 12 The (slow) growth of women leaders in the modern era. policy apparatus around the world.2 This dearth of women in foreign policy decision-making mirrors a broader lack of women leaders across the board.3 Of the more than 2,321 national leaders who have served in office between 1900 and 2020, only sixty-nine were women, or about 3% (see Fig. 12).4 Of the 196 countries on earth, only twenty had women at the helm in the year 2020. And women are only somewhat more represented in national legislatures. In 2016, women made up 23% of all legislators and held 18% of ministerial posts globally.5 In the domain of national security—where political leaders have historically demonstrated they have “the stones for war”—women remain significantly underrepresented today.6 Since 1945, out of more than 5,000 defense ministers around the world, only ninety-six were female. Among NATO countries, less than 10% of those serving in the armed forces are women.7 Since 1970, women have held only thirty-six of the 297 positions in the U.S. government specific to nuclear policy decision-making.8 Noticeably, in matters of foreign policy where stereotypically “feminine” attributes—like promoting peace—might be an asset, women still

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are frequently relegated to the sidelines. Throughout the vast number of peace negotiations conducted between 1992 to 2019 around the world—from Afghanistan to Sudan to Myanmar—women made up, on average, only 13% of the negotiators and only 6% of the signatories. In seven out of ten of all negotiations, women played no role at all in mediation.9 Only two women have served as chief negotiators, of whom only one, Miriam Coronel Ferrer of the Philippines, actually signed the final peace accord. Around the world, women have occupied just 15% of ambassadorial positions—even fewer in countries with high regional military status.10 Such low numbers persist despite mounting evidence that the inclusion of women in peace processes leads to more durable agreements as well as agreements that include more provisions for largescale political reform.11 This suggests a tantalizing prospect—the swelling ranks of women leaders bringing peace in the modern age. If democracies that include women voters, who very often are voting for men, are more peaceful, how much more peaceful would a world of women leaders be? It is a hopeful idea in the context of the wave of women entering political life following the me-too movement. In 2020, more women ran for political office than ever before. A record number of six women vied for the Democratic presidential nomination. For the fourth time ever, a woman was on the presidential ticket for a major political party, and for the first time in history, a woman is serving as vice president of the United States of America. A funny thing about the association between women leaders and peace, however, is that some take it as an article of faith. Former U.S. president Barack Obama stated bluntly: “If more women were put in charge, there would be less war.” Well-known public intellectual Steven Pinker opined that “over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force”12 —apparently excepting the legions of hawkish female leaders who spring readily to mind. Some observers take the opposite view with equal certainty. The “association between women and peace” is a “myth,” according to the prominent scholar of gender in international affairs, Ann Tickner, that “has been imposed on women by their disarmed condition.”13 Who is right, and are women leaders more likely to pursue peace when afforded the opportunity?

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The Historical Record of Women Leaders and War On March 21, 1961, the “Gentlelady from Maine”—donning her customary red rose lapel pin and pearls—took the floor of the Senate Chambers.14 Seldom one to mince words but frequently restrained in her public pronouncement, Margaret Chase Smith had, most famously, made an enemy out of Senator Joseph McCarthy by denouncing his Communist “witch hunts” and calling for a “declaration of conscience” in 1950. The first senator to speak out against McCarthyism, albeit not directly by name, she warned of the danger of “rid[ing] to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny, fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” At the height of his political power, McCarthy vowed retribution by financing her political rivals, removing her from key subcommittees, and threatening her already farfetched nomination as vice-president in 1952. But Margaret Chase Smith held on to her seat and by 1961 had worked her way up to become a senior Republican party leader, albeit with a fiercely independent streak.15 When she took the floor again in 1961, the brunt of her contempt was not for the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin. He had been censured by the Senate in 1954, effectively ending his political career. Nor was it directly aimed at the Soviet menace abroad or the growing Cuban threat just 90 miles from the southern tip of Florida. Instead, she focused on the home front and a far more powerful member of the U.S. political establishment: once Senate colleague and now president, John F. Kennedy. Since June 4, the United States had been entangled in a standoff with the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin. At their first meeting in Vienna, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had demanded that Kennedy withdraw American troops from West Berlin. Though Kennedy refused to withdraw, he also signaled his acceptance of a divided Berlin.16 As the dispute stretched into the fall, Chase Smith grew wary of what she perceived to be Kennedy’s lack of credibility on matters of foreign policy. In a fiery speech, she denounced “Khrushchev’s reckless confidence” and the “foul clouds of his nuclear blackmail blasts.” But then she arrived at the true focus of her ire. “What has happened that permits Khrushchev to act as he does?” she asked. Her answer was simple: U.S. military power, though previously

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unquestioned by the Soviets, had been undercut by the perception that the young new president would be unwilling to use the nuclear forces at his disposal. The president’s “fear of risk” has led us into “deterring ourselves instead of deterring the Soviets,” she declared. Kennedy’s timidity had emboldened Khrushchev and encouraged him to act recklessly, Smith believed. And now the freedom of mankind hung in the balance.17 As one of only two women in the Senate and twenty overall in Congress, Margaret Chase Smith seemed an unlikely spokesperson to encourage more forceful nuclear and anti-Soviet policies. But the sentiment she uttered echoed through the Senate halls, drawing praise from many of her colleagues, from the U.S. public, and from some of the more influential journalists of the time, including James “Scotty” Reston, who lauded her “remarkable speech” and chided Kennedy, who “talked like Churchill and acted like Chamberlain.”18 It was not long before news of her performance crossed the Iron Curtain. Outraged by her “provocative” rhetoric, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, “this woman” was “blinded by savage hatred.” So much so that it was “hard to believe how a woman, if she is not the devil in disguise, can make such a malicious man-hating appeal.” In a nuclear war, he warned, “millions of people would perish, including her own children, if she has any,” adding, “even the wildest of animals, a tigress even, worries about her cubs, licks and pities them.”19 Months later, Nina Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s wife, added that the senator from Maine had dangerously threatened the prospects of peace by encouraging President Kennedy “to destroy our homes, to kill our husbands, to take lives of our country.”20 Neither wife, at the time, nor mother, Chase Smith shrugged off the sharply worded criticism with typical candor: “Mr. Khrushchev is angry because American officials have grown more firm since my speech.” Why was it that the words of “this woman” had so unnerved the Soviet premier? Margaret Chase Smith is one in a long list of women leaders who were thought of as foreign policy hawks. Everyone’s favorite example is Margaret Thatcher, who made war on Argentina in 1982 and who abetted the first U.S. war in Iraq. Without her stiffening George H. W.

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Bush’s resolve, it is not clear that war would have happened at all.21 But in fact there are many female leaders of an aggressive bent not named Margaret who have left their mark on history. A favorite example of Britons is Queen Boudica, who became the leader of the Iceni tribe, a Celtic people whose lands encompassed what is now Norfolk, on the eastern coast of England. Abuse and oppression at the hands of Rome, whom many in the area viewed as financially exploitative and infringing on Briton independence, drove her in ad 60 to plot an uprising against the Romans. Rattling a spear in her fist, she explained her rationale for rebellion to a skeptical public unfamiliar with fighting under a woman. Referencing both her own flogging and the rape of her daughters at the hands of the Romans, with her “notably harsh voice,” she declared, “It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters,” before adding, “This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.”22 With an army of 120,000, Boudica descended on Camulodunum, known today as Colchester in Essex, and swiftly sacked the defenseless city, massacred the vast majority of its inhabitants, and burned it to the ground. No traces of the battle’s dead have been found save skeleton skulls around the area, presumably from decapitations, which remain relics of the era and hint at the kind of punishment that was likely inflicted on Camulodunum’s inhabitants. In a particularly grim account of the events, Boudica’s army sliced off the breasts of women who supported the Romans, sewed them into their mouths and then impaled them lengthwise, as if they were food to be cooked for a banquet.23 Following the devastation at Camulodunum, Boudica turned to Londinium, a prosperous town located in present-day London, and Verulamium, now St. Albans. Roman sympathizers in these areas met the same fate. But the battlefield victories would soon end. Despite heavily outnumbering the Roman forces, Boudica’s poorly disciplined and ill-equipped army would face unequivocal defeat at the hands of Suetonius, a Roman general. Although the history remains unclear, it is likely that Boudica did not die on the battlefield—opting instead to take her own life by poison. Though her failed rebellion against a people who made war as a matter of business was ultimately unsurprising, the legend of Boudica can be summed up in the words of Dio Cassius, who

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wrote of the Roman reaction to the Camulodunum massacre: “All this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.”24 Even more horrifying, and closer to our own time, is the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the first woman to be charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in an international court. Nyiramasuhuko’s most egregious crimes stretch back to the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where as minister of family and women’s development, she was sent to her home prefecture to quell unrest in the city of Butare, a Tutsi stronghold where the local government had resisted calls to massacre its own citizens. Rather than providing assistance, as many thought she might, Nyiramasuhuko orchestrated one of the more grim events of the genocide. Cars with loudspeakers promoting the arrival or Red Cross assistance drew people to a nearby stadium. There, instead of food and shelter, individuals were by met with gunfire and grenades. Nyiramasuhuko supervised the spectacle, adding counsel here and there like, “Before you kill the women, you need to rape them,” and overseeing the scene until a bulldozer had begun to collect the bodies and pile them in a pit. Over the three-month period, Nyiramasuhuko returned to Butare at least three times. Swapping her normal attire for military fatigues, she was often seen with a machine gun on her shoulder referring to Tutsi women as “cockroaches” or handing out condoms to soldiers who had been encouraged to seek out “virgins.” It was said that Nyiramasuhuko had given the men permission to go after the Tutsi girls because they were “too proud of themselves.”25 Once signs of political collapse became clear, Nyiramasuhuko and her son fled Rwanda. For three years, she evaded capture, until in 1997 she was apprehended in Kenya. Consistently denying any wrongdoing, Nyiramasuhuko claimed “I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman—a mother—killed, then I’ll confront that person.” But others claimed that her racism had become so deeply ingrained that she was “horrified at having to be in daily contact with Tutsis.” With more than eighty-seven witnesses testifying against her, Nyiramasuhuko was sentenced to life in prison for her crimes in June 2011, but the impact of her trial shocked the world. As Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, summarized,

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“There is a shared concept across cultures that women don’t do this kind of thing. . . . Society doesn’t yet have a way to talk about it, because it violates all our concepts of what women are.”26 Further examples highlight the capacity of some women to commit acts of political violence. From Joan of Arc, who claimed divine inspiration to fight for France against the British and was burned to death for heresy before her canonization a half-millennium later,27 to Tansu Çiller, the first female prime minister of Turkey from 1993 to 1996, who modernized the Turkish army in an effort to more effectively counter the Kurds and challenged Greece over their sovereign claim to the Imai islets in the Aegean Sea, such examples abound. Yet, throughout history, women leaders have also been at the forefront of efforts to make peace in seemingly intractable conflicts. During negotiations to end the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, Monica McWilliams and May Blood brought together Catholic and Protestant women under the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition to help shape the Good Friday Agreement into a more durable peace.28 And in Liberia, Leymah Gbowee helped organize the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, an organization of Christian and Muslim women that played a critical role in ending the country’s fourteen-year civil war. The group was so vital to the peace process that at one point when talks had come to a standstill, they formed a human barricade to ensure that none of the negotiators left until an agreement was reached. The case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko is clearly exceptional. Of the ninety people indicted by the International Criminal Court for the Rwandan genocide, Nyiramasuhuko was the only woman. But the cases of Monica McWilliams and May Blood or Leymah Gbowee are exceptional too. They represent the few women leaders who have garnered enough political clout to make it to the negotiating table—or near the official table in Gbowee’s case—in the first place. All of these cases leave open the question of whether the women leaders of the past have made the world more peaceful on the whole and the essential question of whether they might in the future. Kings and Queens It turns out that determining whether men and women leaders behave differently on average—and why—is difficult. For starters, men and

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women may come to power in different contexts. Men may be more likely, for instance, to rise to power in dangerous times, making them appear more willing to go to war even though they are not.29 Women might be elevated to positions of power when things are going poorly for male leaders—a phenomenon known in business as “the glass cliff.” In these contexts women are put into precarious positions with a far higher likelihood of failure, making it exceedingly difficult to assess performance. This was the case for prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who was was appointed in 2017 to stabilize Iceland after three elections in the preceding four years, and British prime Minister Theresa May, who was given the extraordinary task of negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union, a no-win political situation that made no one wholly happy with the outcome. On the flip side, women may also come to power when more cooperative, stereotypically “feminine” attributes are required, like postwar reconciliation. This was the case in Germany, when Angela Merkel rose to power in a recently reunified Germany and in a post-war Liberia, where Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took over with her “motherly sensitivity.” Beyond these examples, there may be a thousand differences in context that influence both which genders come to power and whether states end up at war. These unknown elements of political contexts may be the true cause of apparent differences among leaders of different genders. Anther reason that this question is so difficult to answer is that men and women leaders may be treated differently by both their militaries at home and their male colleagues abroad. Corazon, the former president of the Philippines, reported, for instance, that the Filipino military found it “extremely difficult to accept a woman commander-in-chief.”30 If female leaders are more likely to seek peace, it could be this very tendency that leads them to be attacked more often.31 Happily, one study largely overcomes these challenges by taking advantage of a randomization performed by nature herself: the sex of the first-born child. In European history, when kings and queens had children, the sex of the first-born child was a strong predictor of whether the next ruler would be male or female. This fact allows researchers to use a statistical technique known as “instrumental variables” to parse out the effect of that ruler’s sex on war and peace.32 It is almost like running an experiment in which the gender of the ruler is randomly

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assigned, just as new drugs are randomly assigned to some participants in drug trials. But not quite because a first-born female may not be able—or allowed—to take the throne. These researchers use data on European kings and queens from 1480 to 1913. Incredibly, they find that queens are 39% more likely to fight a war in a year than kings. Queens also took more territory than kings over the course of their reigns. Catherine the Great is not as exceptional as we thought. Some scholars had believed that the gender of a leader would make no difference. After all, decisions of state are about more than personal inclination. Few expected women leaders to be systematically more likely to be involved in a war. Even fewer would have predicted the difference would be so large. What explains this dramatic finding? One possibility is that queens were not more likely to attack, but more likely to be attacked. This was the case for Maria Theresa, the only female to rule the Habsburgs throughout its 650-year dynasty. Initially, Maria Theresa’s ascent to power was prohibited by an ancient law known as the Salic Law, which excluded women from dynastic succession. With no sons and no remaining Habsburg males in line for the throne, the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI sought a workaround to ensure his daughter could rule following his death. In 1713, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict effectively circumventing Salic Law and establishing the legitimacy of Maria Theresa’s future claim to the throne. Though the edict was accepted throughout much of Europe during Charles VI’s reign, following his death and two months after her ascent to power in 1740, Frederick II of Prussia changed course and invaded territory under her control. His rationale was in part: No woman should ever be allowed to govern anything. The researchers directly address this issue, finding that on the whole, it is not that queens were more likely to be attacked. Determining who is the attacker can be difficult, but social scientists do their best. When they do so in this case, the conclusion is that queens were themselves more likely to attack. Lest anyone think that male advisors were to blame, it turns out that more experienced queens, who would have relied less on advisors, were at least as aggressive as young queens. Why might women leaders during this time have been more likely to attack? One explanation is that male leaders were less likely to respect

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the true military force of powerful queens or less willing to acquiesce to their demands.33 Pakistani president Yahya Khan’s response to threats from Indira Gandhi, for instance, is a teaching moment—for men leaders—in this regard. “If that woman [Indira Gandhi] thinks she is going to cow me down,” he said, “I refuse to take it. If she wants to fight, I’ll fight her!” And he did so, until her army soundly defeated his within thirteen days.34 The Leaders of Today Remarkable as these historical findings are, they beg the question of whether things might have changed in the interim, and whether women leaders in other parts of the world might behave differently. The world of Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great is hardly the world of today. Perhaps modern women leaders are different too.35 In this regard, there is one hopeful finding: countries with more women in national legislatures are less likely to use force. A 5% decrease in the proportion of women in parliament is associated with an incredible five-fold increase in the likelihood that states use force to resolve a dispute.36 At first glance, this seems to support Susan B. Anthony’s contention that women legislators would decrease the incidence of war. Yet, there is also discordant evidence. Analysis of the Leader Experience and Attribute Descriptions (LEAD) data set suggests that the likelihood of conflict continues to be higher under women leaders in the contemporary era, both in acts of initiating and in acts of defense.37 Conflicts occurring under male leaders also appear to be much less violent, with significantly fewer known fatalities. Others have also found women in positions of national power are associated with larger increases in military spending, though this relationship is tempered by the gender composition of the legislature.38 Both sets of findings, on national leaders and legislators, are historical associations and they are based on the very few cases of contemporary women in power. So the evidence is far from conclusive. Determining what such associations mean is also truly difficult. Perhaps, for instance, powerful countries are both more likely to elect women leaders and also more likely to go to war. In such a case, the gender of the person in power might have little direct effect on war and peace. When many

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factors could play a role, it is very difficult to figure out what is driving what. We can get more leverage on the question of how women leaders behave by turning again to legislatures voting on the use force. As in the study of European queens, we can use a natural experiment to rule out the effects of the contexts in which leaders come to power. In this case, we use the randomization created by close elections. This is what social scientists call a “regression discontinuity.” To see how it works in this case, consider that when an election is very close, it should be “as if random” which leader comes to power on a given day of election. We can use this fact to identify the effects of electing a woman versus a man in a close election in which both are on the ballot. This means our analysis will not be influenced by the fact that in some places where the voters are more willing to elect women, they and their representatives may also be more or less willing to sanction the use of military force. To perform this analysis, we collected information on the results of all congressional elections in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada and all votes by representatives to authorize or restrict the use of military force. In general, we find that women legislators are significantly more likely to vote to authorize the use of force than their male counterparts. When we turn to the natural experiment created by close elections, we again find that women are more likely to vote for the use of force. This finding is not statistically significant at conventional levels, but we can rule out a large positive effect of women legislators on peace with a very high degree of confidence.39 So when we look within some states at how women legislators actually vote, we see evidence for a different story than when we look cross-nationally at the proportion of women legislators. Countries that elect women to the legislature are more peaceful, but women legislators in those countries do not appear to be more peaceful than men in those countries.40 This suggests that some other variable, associated both with electing women legislators and with peaceful outcomes, may be driving this association. One candidate for that other variable, of course, is women’s suffrage. In other words, the reality could be that women’s suffrage alongside a range of democratic institutions promotes both peace and the election of women to the legislature. But once in office,

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there is little evidence that women office holders, on average, are greater advocates for peace. In short, there is little evidence that women in national office are any less aggressive than their male counterparts. Rather, the evidence points to the opposite. This presents a puzzle: women in power are possibly more aggressive than male leaders, on average, but women in the population are less likely to support aggression than men. How can we explain the findings about women leaders in light of what we saw in Chapter 3 about the average differences between men and women? Leaders Are Not Average There are two primary theories that can explain why women on average are more pacific but women leaders on average are not.41 The first is that leaders, for whatever reason, fundamentally differ from the populations they represent.42 Prime ministers and presidents may not be like the rest of us, in their personalities but also in their attitudes towards risk and the use of force. Men and women in positions of power may in many ways be more alike than women on average are like men. In terms of personal attributes, women leaders have significantly fewer children and less military experience than men in positions of leadership, though the differences are small. In terms of state characteristics, they are significantly more likely to lead countries with more open and competitive elections. None of these differences seem likely to influence women leaders to be more aggressive internationally. Interestingly, women leaders of the past do not seem to be less experienced than their male counterparts, and their personal lives tend to be more similar to male leaders than not. It may be that the sort of women who can become political leaders are more like men in their willingness to employ military force. In fact, there is a long history of women leaders who were seen as having male traits. The Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, for instance, would proudly tell the likely apocryphal anecdote that a former Israeli prime minister had called her “the only man in the cabinet.”43 Artemisia, queen of the ancient Greek city-state of Halicarnassus, modern-day Bodrum in Turkey, was described by Herodotus as the only woman to possess the characteristic of andreia, a term that signifies courage,

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but literally translates to “manliness.” “India’s Iron Lady,” “Turkey’s Iron Lady,” “Israel’s Iron Lady,” “the iron lady of the Caribbean”— a substantial fraction of the female heads of state in the modern era have carried these monikers to distinguish their personalities from stereotypically female traits.44 It’s a strange question even to ask—whether certain women are “like men.” Strange for a variety of reasons, such as that there are all sorts of men. It is also a strange question because we already know women leaders are like male leaders in the way they conduct foreign affairs, or perhaps they are even more aggressive. But are there other attributes related to foreign policy aggression where male and female leaders are more similar than males and female in the general population? One marker of gender difference that we can study among politicians is vocal pitch. Pitch is interesting because it is often associated with other traits that factor into voter preferences, like authority, strength, competence, respect, and intelligence—traits that are more often attributed to men in politics, and which women have to cultivate.45 It’s why the now disgraced tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, purportedly—and perhaps mistakenly—worked to lower her vocal pitch to a deeper register.46 And it may explain why in an analysis of the 116th United States Congress, we found that on average the pitch of female members of Congress was approximately eleven points lower than the average pitch of the general female population, and 63% of all women in Congress had average pitches below the average female pitch.47 By contrast, only 30% of the randomly sampled male representatives and senators had average pitches below the average pitch of the general male population, and average male pitch in Congress was about thirteen points higher than the average pitch of the male population.48 We plot these findings in Figure 13.49 Our results demonstrate that while it is true that congresswomen have lower voices on average than the average among women in the population, the opposite may also be true of men, who tend to have higher vocal pitch than the average male. It appears as though, based on these findings, both sexes may be moderating their voices to appeal to the population average. Thus, our results demonstrate that congresswomen have lower voices on average than the average among women in the population. This is interesting for many reasons, one of which is that lower pitch has been

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0.4

Proportion of Congress by Sex

Men

Women

0.3

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0.0 Lowest

Androgynous

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Voice Pitch Sex Male

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Fig. 13 Pitch range for the 116th United States Congress by sex. linked to assertiveness and aggression.50 Female leaders are “different” from the average female and more like the average male on a trait that correlates with aggressive behavior. Yet, we also find that congressmen tend to have higher vocal pitch than the average male. Perhaps this is an instance of democratic publics selecting leaders of a certain type—a type which is different from how they themselves are on average. Another interesting aspect of pitch is that it is not just how people are, but also how they choose to present themselves. Even prior to becoming prime minister, Margaret Thatcher recognized the way her voice—which biographer Charles Moore described as having “the hectoring tones of the housewife”—could be weaponized by her political opponents.51 On the advice of Gordon Reece, one of the few media specialists at the time tied to the Tory party, she took steps to minimize their criticism by enlisting the services of the National Theatre’s voice coach, Kate Fleming, who had been recommended to Reece during a chance encounter on a train with the great stage actor, Laurence Olivier.

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Coached by Fleming throughout her political career, Thatcher transformed her voice from “shrill housewife” to authoritative leader.52 The Thatcher story is not an outlier either. It is striking how many female leaders of the past altered their presentations of self to be less stereotypically feminine. It is theorized, for example, that following the death of her husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten, the Egyptian queen Nefertiti transformed in the historical record into Smenkhkare, her male alter-ego, so that she could rule as pharaoh.53 And it was Indira Gandhi herself who said she was a “biform human being”—neither man nor woman—in her political life, though she conformed to traditional gender norms in her personal life. When Margaret Thatcher met Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, sometimes described as “the first woman Prime Minister in the West,” Thatcher was asked if she had learned anything about being a woman prime minister. She responded scornfully that they were much too concerned with issues to discuss such matters. Meir followed up: “They think that’s all women think about.”54 For her part, Meir was often critical of feminists, calling them “crazy” and “man-haters.” Incentives to Misrepresent The fact that leaders are in control of their presentation of self brings us to the second explanation of why women leaders are at least as aggressive as men even though women on average are not. It may be that women have particularly powerful political incentives to appear forceful in international affairs. Are women leaders, the queens of five hundred years ago and the prime ministers of today, in danger of being perceived as weak and therefore overcompensating with aggression? It is safe to say that women leaders are often in danger of being perceived as weak. As John Know, Protestant reformer (reformist left of his day) said of women when the Catholic Mary Tudor became queen, they were believed incapable of effective rule because “nature . . . doth paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish.”55 Do similar prejudices hold sway today or is it self-fulfilling prophecy because women leaders think that they do? Not so very long ago, U.S. president Richard Nixon expressed his view: “I don’t think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don’t. The reason why

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I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional. Men are erratic and emotional, too, but the point is a woman is more likely to be.” In 2004, most Americans agreed: 61% believed men were better equipped to lead the country in a military crisis compared to 3% who thought women were better equipped.56 In fact, the image of a leader is a virtual list of stereotypically male traits.57 Leaders are more popular when they are seen as having the stereotypically male traits—“tough, assertive, and outspoken”—as opposed to female traits like “caring, compassionate, and nurturing.”58 And politicians receive these signals. Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist in the 2008 presidential campaign was explicit about her incentives to portray herself in stereotypically masculine terms. “Regardless of the sex of the candidates,” he averred, “most voters in essence see the presidents as the ‘father’ of the country. They do not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world. . . . [Thatcher] represents the most successful elected woman leader in this century—and the adjectives that were used about her (Iron Lady) were not of good humor or warmth, they were of smart, tough leadership.”59 When it comes to foreign policy, these concerns are well founded. Recent polling in the United States demonstrates that a female president would indeed pay a huge cost for appearing weak that a male president would not. Popular disapproval of a female president who elects to back down against a foreign male leader rather than follow through on a threat is fully 20% higher among Americans than disapproval of a male leader who does the same thing in the same situation. Disapproval for a female leader who goes to war rather than stay out of a conflict is much lower however. Thus, female leaders have powerful incentives to engage in conflict. Interestingly, when a male leader faces a female leader, the male leader faces the same incentives. That is, he too will be punished for backing down after making a threat or staying out of a conflict entirely relative to going to war more than he would be if his adversary were male. The implication then is that when female and male leaders face off, both sides have powerful incentives to go to war.60 Do leaders respond to such incentives? There are strong reasons to believe that they do. This is why it often takes “a hawk to offer the olive branch,” or “a Nixon to go to China.”61 Few leaders came into office

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with the unqualifiedly hawkish reputation Richard Nixon had, and yet few left it with so many apparent achievements in the cause of peace. From “Peace with Honor” in Vietnam, to Shuttle Diplomacy in the Middle East and the rapprochement with China, the Nixon administration seemed to notch one foreign policy achievement after another. Some were longer lasting than others, but all reflected a freedom to make foreign policy concessions that those with dovish reputations, those on the political left, did not have. President Nixon’s opponent in the campaign, Hubert Humphrey, never could have accomplished such things. If he had tried, he would have been attacked effectively from the right as weak.62 Republicans and Democrats in Congress feel analogous incentives to men and women. In the opinion polls of recent years, Republicans tend to hold much more hawkish views than Democrats. They are more willing to see force used abroad.63 And yet, in Congress, Democrats are significantly more likely to vote for the use of military force—including when we examine the regression discontinuity created by close elections to eliminate any effects of political context.64 Democrats have the same political incentives that women do to jump into conflicts. If they stay out, women and Democrats are punished politically for appearing weak in a way that men and Republicans are not.65 Conclusion Electing representatives of one gender is not a short-cut to a pacific international order. Of course, there are no gender monopolies of pacifists and war-mongers. The most significant factor in understanding the differences on average between leaders of different genders, however, appears to be the cultural contexts that condition leader incentives. We expect leaders to lead, but very often they are merely running to the front when the crowd begins to move. It is the crowd with its cultural tropes that drives events. Leaders’ skill is then not to bring the crowd where it should go, but to figure out before others where the crowd is going. In a democracy, this is almost a requirement. Democratic leaders would not be leaders at all if they did not take account of the attitudes of their constituents. Sometimes, this will mean taking actions to counter

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stereotypes about genders, and sometimes those will involve adopting a hard-line or conciliatory stance. The suffragists appreciated this danger that women would mold themselves to masculine ideals. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, never one to mince words, did not disappoint in a speech on the subject in 1868: We have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of God on her own soul.

To decry “the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form,” she knew, “would be [called] mere sentimentalizing.” Women voters changed the character and incentives of political leaders, but they did not revolutionize them. Women, like men, traffic in gender stereotypes. Like men, women’s expectations of female leaders continue to give them an incentive to make war—relative to the incentives of male leaders. That is, women voters gave all politicians additional room to choose peaceful options, but women leaders still face exceptional challenges. They will not have the same opportunities to choose peaceful options until cultural expectations of women as leaders change. This is not to say, however, that we should give up on female leadership as a path to peace. Women leaders who are tougher and more hawkish than men may erode the stereotypes of the so-called weaker sex. In this way, hawkish female leaders may create opportunities for other women in power to be doves. The flood of women entering political office may create new understandings of what leadership is and what it has the capacity to become.66 We are already seeing that today—as female foreign affairs leaders in Sweden, France, and Canada have paved the way for a new kind of “feminist foreign policy,” which explicitly

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focuses on the relationship between national security and rights, representation, and resources for women around the world.67 Over time, these developments may open up cultural spaces for women—indeed for all genders—to advocate for compromise without creating the perception of weakness, for decency and compassion without the label of sentimentality.

7

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Women and War in the Modern Era

When God said to Abraham, “Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac,” Abraham did not argue. We believe that if God had approached Sarah, she would have replied, “Forget it, I’m not sacrificing this child.” Four Mothers Spokesperson Irit Letzter, Ha’aretz, Jan. 1998

In democracies, there are voters and there are leaders. But there are also many layers of social organization in between—interest groups and social movements that play a vital role in setting the tone and structure of political debate, altering norms of acceptable behavior, and encouraging active political participation by others. This chapter shows that women’s greater on average preference for peace continues to shape international affairs in the contemporary era. Traveling across three countries and three continents, it looks at women voters and leaders in action and illustrates how women’s social movements can play a vital role in shaping peace. The chapter begins in 1982 when Israeli troops crossed the border into southern Lebanon. “The invasion,” as the Lebanese would call it, led to eighteen years of occupation, an occupation brought to an end by four Israeli mothers and their ability to shape a political election. It then turns to Liberia and the extraordinary story of women’s fight for peace and the subsequent 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman leader. In a country in which more than 70% of women were raped during fifteen years of brutal civil war, Liberian women not only

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0007

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forced peace on a fractured nation, but also worked tirelessly to expand the political role of women so that it would endure. The chapter ends in contemporary Japan where women’s preferences play an instrumental role in continuing to deny political leaders the opportunity to revise the country’s pacifist constitution, an act which would surely raise the chances of war in East Asia. These stories demonstrate the lengths that women in the modern era must still sometimes go to to bring about peace when they lack the vote, struggles that would have seemed familiar to women suffragists fighting for peace at the turn of the twentieth century. Beyond that, it also shows the delicate line women must still sometimes walk in order to bring about peace even in democratic systems which include them. In many democratic countries where women can vote, politics remains the domain of men and women constitute a silent constituency whose priorities only enter public debate when they are forced there by powerful peace organizations. The Four Mothers When it started on June 6, 1982, it was called “Operation Peace for Galilee.” Over 60,000 Israeli soldiers invaded Lebanon intending to besiege Beirut. The goal was to forcibly expel the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the country and support pro-Israeli Christian leaders with whom the Israelis could find lasting peace. Israel’s initial optimism about quickly pacifying affairs and gaining influence in Lebanon, a country beset by internal strife and warring factions, proved misplaced. After an initial phase of active combat, Israeli forces eventually retreated to a narrow security zone along the southern border. From there, they would continue to conduct raids on nearby guerrilla fighters, kidnapping Hezbollah leaders while defending against rocket attacks and suicide bombers. The conflict would eventually be called the Lebanon War by some and “the forgotten war” by many, or Israel’s Vietnam. In 2000, after eighteen years of fighting, Israeli forces abruptly withdrew from Lebanon, without a peace agreement in place and without having made life safer for those living in northern Israel. What had prompted Israeli leaders, many of whom had vowed never to withdraw

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under such conditions, to make such an about-face? The beginning of the end can be dated to February 4, 1997. Two Israeli helicopters en route to the security zone had collided in the fog, killing all seventythree Israelis onboard. IDF casualties had continued throughout the occupation, but no other day had been more deadly. A national day of mourning followed. Victims’ names were read on radio and television and the Knesset observed a minute of silence. The crash drew national attention. But it was perhaps the precise location of the crash—near the front yard of a school—that would prove most fateful for Israel’s prolonged mission in Lebanon.1 For years, Rachel Ben-Dor had lived in a kibbutz close enough to southern Lebanon to draw rocket fire attacks. A teacher and mother of three sons, she had never been particularly political. But the helicopter crash crystalized her belief in the need for change. She and three neighborhood mothers, whose children had all attended the school and whose sons were stationed in the Security Zone, decided to bring attention to what they saw as an endless and ineffective military campaign. They began by protesting at nearby intersections, conveying a simple message: “Leave Lebanon in Peace.” At the time the women began their street-side protest, the issue of Lebanon was not high on the agenda of existing Israeli peace organizations.2 The topic received little public attention, even in the first few months after the helicopter disaster. A large majority of Israelis believed the IDF should stay the course in Lebanon and elite support was bipartisan.3 Options for change were shot down. Even to raise the question of whether Israel should remain in Lebanon was treated by some in the military as a victory for Hezbollah.4 But the image of mothers protesting at major intersections drew widespread media attention. Politics in Israel continued to be dominated by men and women were expected to keep to the private sphere. So when women took to protesting in the streets, it was a story.5 In July 1997, with momentum behind them, the women announced the formation of “Four Mothers,” an organization committed to achieving full withdrawal from Lebanon, with or without a peace agreement.6 “Our husbands were fighting this war when our boys were still babies,” they argued. They would ensure that their grandsons would not be.7

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To be clear, though Four Mothers would become a successful peace movement, the women of the Four Mothers were not pacifists. As repeatedly noted throughout this book, few women support peace at any cost. As the level of existential threat to the nation grows, the gender gap on the use of force usually decreases substantially. “In a truly necessary war, I think all of us would be ready to send our sons,” one of the group’s core founders Ronit Nahmias said. “We know we have only ourselves to rely on to defend ourselves.”8 But they saw the occupation of Lebanon as different. Its aims were political and ambiguous rather than necessary and existential.9 But how exactly did they go about achieving withdrawal? Typical strategies for Israeli peace organizations involved discussion of territories for peace or outlines for peace agreements. But the Four Mothers would speak of none of this. Their approach would be explicitly rooted in their roles as mothers and the need to protect their children’s lives.10 They would focus on the human toll of occupation. When opponents spoke of “reasonable losses” assumed in the course of conflict, they would put these losses in human terms. In emphasizing their responsibility to protect their “fighting children,” the group turned the Israeli conception of motherhood on its head. Motherhood in Israel has long been viewed as a “national mission” of vital importance to national security, a role in which they were expected to birth and sacrifice soldiers to defend Israeli existence.11 To frame the unilateral withdrawal of sons and husbands as the ultimate act of maternal protection, conducive to the needs of the state, introduced a new political dimension to the cause of peace in Israel, one the group’s critics would find it hard to write off. With this approach, the women attracted added attention. Debates pitting the women and their arguments against hardened military generals arguing for resolve and staying the course were common and popular. The women also sought to undermine Israeli conceptions of war and the unquestioned confidence in the military more broadly. “I don’t bury my head in the sand,” said Irit Leztzer, one prominent member of the group, “but I won’t agree with the warped male notion that war is somehow a challenge, a project, heroic.”12 The pursuit of military pride costs young men’s lives and military was complacent about it. “In Israel, we are all the time thinking that the army knows what it is doing and

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sometimes we have to think twice. Someone should say this is crazy,” group founder Rachel Ben-Dor argued. While leaning into their maternal roles, a potentially less threatening approach than rooting their cause in feminism alone, the group also sought to achieve the delicate balance often demanded of those advocating for peace. Like so many pacifists before them, they sought to ward off jabs at their patriotism. They cloaked themselves in patriotic displays whenever possible, donning the Israeli flag and leading processions of the national anthem when protesting. They framed their plight as the ultimate form of patriotism, speaking never of “withdrawal,” which could easily be tarred as defeat, but of the preservation of Israeli life. They debated invoking the fate of the Lebanese people, but ultimately decided that such sympathy would work against them. This did not, of course, prevent critics from leveling the predictable tropes often aimed at women publicly advocating for peace.13 The group was accused of demoralizing Israeli soldiers and undermining national security. “All these calls for withdrawal . . . cause unimagined damage. They hurt our deterrence abilities and they have no grounding in reality,” one Knesset member argued. While motherhood brought them legitimacy in the eyes of some, it made them easily dismissible by others. They were labeled “Arafat’s whores,” the “four rags”, and told to go “back to the kitchen” by military men who rolled their eyes when debating the women on TV. “When Katyausha rockets begin to fall,” Major General Yossi Goldberg argued, he would be the first to point a finger, saying “look what you’ve caused, you, the great experts.” Such reactions reflected the long-standing irrelevance of women and their voices to the political sphere, especially where issues of war and peace were involved, even though women had long been in the military and had long been able to vote.14 But with the rise and persistence of the Four Mothers movement came signs of change. The attempts to dismiss and patronize failed to fully resonate.15 Increasing numbers of Israelis were coming to express sympathy for the women’s cause. By early 1999, support among the Israeli public for immediate unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, the cause with which Four Mothers was by then synonymous, had increased to 55%.16 But this number obscures a familiar pattern. Amongst men voters, support for unilateral withdrawal was only 45%; 37% said they

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did not support the policy at all. Support amongst women voters was, in contrast, 62%. Only 17% expressed zero support for the policy. Shaping an Election As public support for unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon rose, the issue caught the attention of political candidates competing in the upcoming general election in May 1999.17 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition had collapsed at the end of 1998 and his former minister of foreign affairs Ehud Barak was now his primary political opponent. With just two months left in a “volatile, personality-based” campaign, the election outcome remained uncertain. It was at that point that Barak introduced the first “actual issue,” as the New York Times called it, into the race—withdrawal from Lebanon.18 Barak, who only weeks before the campaign began had argued that withdrawal would be a “security disaster,” promised that if elected, he would remove all Israeli troops from Lebanon by June 2000.19 Within a week, “bringing the boys home” became the singular national issue of the campaign, with each of Barak’s competitors promising an earlier withdrawal date than the one before. Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon went so far as to propose postponing the election to form an emergency government tasked with immediate troop withdrawal. Netanyahu later endorsed the idea, but was far more equivocal. Barak would ultimately go on to win in a landslide by twelve points. Politicians are often loathe to admit they follow rather than lead. But in some instances, the evidence is hard to deny. We know that Barak was interested in polling numbers of the Lebanon issue, ordering his own internal polls around the time that public polls showing majority support for withdrawal were released. At the very least, therefore, it is clear that Barak knew he had the backing of a majority of the public—a majority arrived at only through the inclusion of women’s preferences—before shifting his support. We also know that his political opponents had an incentive to nullify the issue by adopting similar views. Moreover, we have few convincing alternative explanations to explain the radical policy shifts of the whole slate of candidates. Nothing significant changed about the military operation or the situation on the ground in the weeks before their newfound support for withdrawal was

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announced. Lebanon remained a low-level conflict, simmering as it had been for almost two decades. Finally, Barak’s deputy defense minister would later go on to admit the role of shifting public opinion explicitly, revealing the “whole truth” about the policy shift: it resulted from the inability of the Israeli public “to stand firm.”20 In May 2000, the last Israeli soldier stationed in the Security Defense Zone left southern Lebanon. Prime Minister Barak had fulfilled his electoral promise six weeks earlier than originally planned. Many journalists, politicians, and scholars credited the Four Mothers with the policy shift.21 “Israel’s redeployment from southern Lebanon was a military and political decision. At the core of the exodus, however, lies the simple story of moral courage, persistence and maternal love,” said the St. Petersburg Times.22 By the time of withdrawal, the Four Mothers had become “one of the most successful grass-roots movements in Israeli history,” according to the Jerusalem Post. In the eyes of supporters, the group had achieved a “victory for democracy and sanity; in the view of critics—a triumph of defeatism.”23 As the New York Times summarized, “Today many Israelis celebrated with the ‘Four Mothers,’ the most successful grass-roots movements in Israeli history, that shaped the Lebanon pullout.” The group, according to the article, had taken a “classic Israeli stereotype—the silent, suffering soldier’s mother—stood it on its head and dared to challenge the military.” Soldiers on the ground in southern Lebanon also credited the group with the occupation’s end. Two soldiers called Rachel Ben-Dor on May 25, just after the border gate closed and the last remaining soldier re-entered Israel, to thank her for bringing them home and for showing them and their country “something about how democracy can work.”24 Around the same time, Rachel Ben-Dor also received calls from the Israeli president, members of parliament, and journalists who expressed their gratitude and astonishment that the occupation had ended as it did. Perhaps most indicative of the group’s influence was the invitation to the Defense Ministry by Ehud Barak for a special military ceremony a week after withdrawal on June 3, 2000. Now inside the building they used to picket, the women were accompanied by men who not long before had attempted to paint them as ignorant, emotional, and traitorous. Now they found themselves pinning a Four Mothers medal

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on Barak’s chest—a military honorific used so often in the past to praise bravery was now being used to honor peace. Shifting the Debate Ultimately, it is impossible to know the full effects of the Four Mothers movement on withdrawal. It is possible that the group did alter public opinion in fundamental ways, convincing people with their message about the value of the sanctity of Israeli lives. At the very least, however, it seems certain that the group simply made it less taboo for people to express what they already believed—that the costs of Israeli presence in Lebanon were simply too high.25 Before the group began to publicize its cause, Lebanon was the “silent war,” unquestioned by the public and elites alike. But the group successfully weaponized the classic stereotype of the Israeli soldier’s mother, expected only, as one group founder said, to “make the schnitzel and hand-wash the uniforms and play the passive role inbred in Israeli society.” Such a challenge to the dominant political narrative drew widespread attention and was hard to categorically dismiss. The Four Mothers shows the important role that women’s peace movements can play in widening the range of the politically possible. They can raise the salience of issues and draw the interest of pollsters and politicians seeking to know how the public feels about new, previously unstated policy options. When the possibility of peace remains taboo, any distinctions in the preferences between men and women will remained veiled. Even when armed with the right to vote, women are not able to choose peace if it is not on the ballot. Liberian Women for Peace While it may be impossible to know the extent of the Four Mothers campaign on ending the Lebanon War, the impact of women in pressuring Liberia’s warring factions to the peace table in 2003 is undeniable. Perhaps no African country in history has been so dramatically shaped by women’s grassroots advocacy and political engagement as Liberia. To put an end to over a decade of armed conflict, a broad-based coalition of women united to rebuild a country that had been devastated by

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civil wars and strongman leadership for fifteen years. During this time, children were often kidnapped and sent to war; women and girls were raped in front of their families in acts of sheer brutality; and citizens starved as their country burned to the ground. In the midst of a second civil war, a coalition of women decided that they had had enough, and united—Christians and Muslims, together under one banner—to advocate for change. A Country Terrorized Liberia’s origins as a nation state arguably set the stage for the rise of warlord Charles Taylor and the devastation wrought by two civil wars. A settler colony for freed slaves from the United States and the Caribbean, Liberia is the first and oldest nation state in Africa. Modeled in many ways after the United States political system, as many as 18,000 people relocated between 1820 and 1846 to what would become Liberia. For over one hundred years, Americo-Liberians— the descendants of freed slaves—dominated the political system until in 1980 they were overthrown by Samuel Doe, the country’s first indigenous leader who hailed from the Krahn ethnic group dominant in the eastern part of the country. A heavy-handed autocrat known for his extreme brutality, Doe’s antagonism and violence toward other groups fueled resentment. On Christmas Eve 1989, Charles Taylor—who had initially ingratiated himself into Doe’s regime—invaded Liberia with money and supplies from Libya and explicit backing from the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, sparking the first civil war. He found quick allies among Liberia’s disgruntled, and Doe was captured and executed in September 1990. However, war continued to rage, as splintered insurgent groups vied for political power. During the civil war, Taylor embraced brutal rebel commanders, like General Butt Naked, who became notorious for leading a troop of drug-addicted child soldiers to terrorize villages in search of human sacrifices, wearing nothing but shoes and magic charms, which allegedly would make them “immune to bullets.”26 Between 1989 and 1997, more than 50,000 people were killed, at least 25,000 were raped, and 1 million were displaced. In July 1997, Taylor was elected president, having campaigned on the sinister slogans, “He

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killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him” and “better the devil you know than the angel you don’t.”27 Two years into Charles Taylor’s presidency the second Liberian civil war began. Largely made up of a group of disgruntled former commanders in Taylor’s forces, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) fought to overthrow the Taylor regime. During this time, Taylor had already reneged on his promise at inauguration to “not be a wicked president.”28 At home, his son, Chuckie, led an “antiterrorism unit” which systematically tortured and murdered people who spoke out against his father’s rule. And abroad, the U.S.-educated Charles Taylor financially supported the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, which led brutal campaigns—often carried out by child soldiers under the influence of amphetamines and cocaine— across the country in an effort to pillage diamonds. The Liberian warlord sold the diamonds he collected from financing the civil war to al Qaeda, which just prior to 9/11 had endeavored to conceal their wealth in the gemstone because they were considered harder to trace and more mobile. For the most part, the international community—distracted by terrorism in the Middle East, sometimes political cozy with Charles Taylor, or just generally uninterested in interfering in a small, already unstable country in Africa—turned a blind eye to these endeavors, content with labeling Liberia a “pariah state,” while committing minimal effort toward halting his abuses.29 As civil war tore through the country again—for the second time in as many years—many of the Liberia’s citizens felt hopeless in the face of hunger and constant insecurity. This time though, unwilling to sit on the sidelines again and in an effort to save their own livelihoods, a grassroots movement of women across Liberia, led by Leymah Gbowee, decided to take action. “At that point in time,” one of the organizers noted, “we didn’t care whether we had jobs or not, whether we had food or not, because if we never had peace you wouldn’t have job.”30 Mobilizing for Peace The idea to mobilize the country’s women came to Gbowee in a dream, where “someone was actually telling me” to get the women of the

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church together to pray for peace. It began as the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative, until their Muslim counterpart quickly joined the fray. United under the banner of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, the women advocated for an end to the country’s seemingly never-ending cycle of conflict and instability. At first, their efforts were more localized: they spoke to religious leaders, went to the fish market wearing all white to pray and sing, and denied sex to their partners unless they would put down their weapons. In their eyes, as Gbowee noted, “Men were the perpetrators of violence so either by commission or omission, you were guilty.”31 Eventually, as conflict intensified in the capital, they delivered a statement to parliament, in which they threatened to keep sitting “in the sun and rain” until they heard from the president. As their numbers swelled into the thousands, with more and more women joining their ranks each day, their presence became harder to ignore. Eventually, Charles Taylor agreed to a meeting at his mansion, four years after the conflict had begun. Speaking on behalf of the women who had organized for peace, Leymah Gbowee read a statement: “the women of Liberia, including the [internally displaced persons], we are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of children being raped. We are now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children.” With popular support on their side, the women succeeded in pressuring Charles Taylor to participate in peace talks in Accra, Ghana with LURD rebels.32 At the peace talks, which lasted from June to August 2003, many of the men were treated to better accommodations than they had experienced in their four years hiding in the Liberian countryside. In Accra, they “were living their dream life” as if “they were on vacation.” As the talks stretched on, between 150 and 200 women rose each day to sit outside the hotel advocating for a peace agreement. “We are their conscience sitting out here,” Gbowee warned, as the men inside enjoyed their fine accommodations without making much tangible progress. In the midst of stalled peace talks, Charles Taylor was indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone, forcing him to flee to Liberia in order to avoid arrest. With conflict further intensifying in Monrovia, Taylor’s delegation remained in Accra to continue the talks. The women also remained in Accra and, led by Gbowee, they went back and forth

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between the government and the rebels, attempting to help them find common ground and unwavering in their demand to see progress toward peace. After six weeks of stalemate and fears that talks would end without a resolution, the women descended on the hotel, locking arms to bar delegates from leaving the building until an agreement was signed. As the police warned Gbowee that they would arrest her for “obstructing justice,” she threatened to strip—an act of defiance that would curse those who saw her naked body. Although the men had enjoyed their lavish stay thus far, the women would bar them from exiting the building that day: “They won’t come outdoors. Today they will feel the hunger our people are feeling.”33 After the women’s sit-in in late July, the tone of the talks shifted, and the international community began to apply more pressure toward reaching an agreement. Two weeks later, the parties announced a peace deal: Taylor would be exiled to Nigeria, a UN peacekeeping force would enter Monrovia, and a transitional government would ultimately lead to democratic elections. On August 11, 2003, Taylor departed for Nigeria. His “parting words: God willing, I’ll be back.”34 An Enduring Peace Historically, more than 50% of all negotiated peace agreements have failed in the first five years.35 This is particularly true of peace talks that do not incorporate women into official roles as negotiators or mediators.36 Though instrumental in bringing war to an end, Liberian women were excluded from the peace talks that led to the 2003 agreement between the warring parties. Many of them, including Gbowee, saw that for peace to endure, they would have to continue their fight, but now for democracy. “We believed that until we had elected democracy,” Gbowee later said, “Liberia would not know true peace. We decided to keep working and go into the field until that day came.”37 But democratic institutions would not be enough on their own. For peace to endure, women would have to be included in the democratic process—as both voters and leaders. Gbowee and many others worked to obtain gender quotas for upcoming elections so that women would constitute at least 30% of elected representatives.38 And they worked tirelessly, transferring their energies from fighting for peace into

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campaigning to elect former minister of finance Ellen Johnson Sirleaf president in the 2005 election. Sirleaf, who had run against Charles Taylor in 1997 and lost, was not an ordinary candidate. She conveyed the political skills often associated with masculine leadership, oozing confidence, assertiveness, and strength and highlighting her Harvard education and professional experience in the public realms of finance and politics.39 The approach disarmed potential skeptics, who admiringly concluded that while she was female, she was “not really a woman” in the traditional sense and would therefore make a fine leader. Supporters unimaginatively deemed her Liberia’s “Iron Lady.” Posters at her rallies read “Ellen, she’s our man.” But Sirleaf did not hide her feminine strengths either. In fact, she advertised them. Like the Four Mothers in Israel and women pacifists one hundred years before her, she embraced her maternalism as a powerful source of her world view and as legitimation for her right to a political voice.40 “Women are the ones who truly have the heart to care and serve,” she argued. With motherhood comes selflessness and increased sensitivity to those in need. Women are more democratic and less susceptible to corruption, she argued, also declaring “All in all I am glad I am woman.” The emphasis earned her yet another moniker among supporters—“Mama Ellen.”41 With the newfound confidence, persistence, and organizational skills they had acquired during their long fight for peace, women in organizations like Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace and the Women in Peacebuilding Network threw themselves behind “Iron Lady” Ma Ellen.42 They organized registration drives and get out the vote campaigns.43 “We rolled up our mattresses and went by bus or car to as many areas as we could,” Gbowee recalled of their efforts. “We painted the picture for women that showed how, for the first time, our daughters could have a future we could only dream about.” That future would not only involve the first ever African woman as head of state. The future election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would also, they believed, be one where peace endured. “We all had a stake in the peace process,” Gbowee later described, “and if we didn’t seize the opportunity now with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, then we would only have ourselves to blame.”44

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In 2005, Sirleaf won the election by sixteen points. We have no polling data on the election, but many newspapers credited women voters with her win.45 Estimates do suggest that turnout amongst literature women was 77%, higher than any other demographic group. See Bauer (2009). At her inauguration, she credited them as well: “I want to, here and now, to gratefully acknowledge the powerful voice of women from all walks of life whose votes brought us to victory. They defended me. They worked with me. They prayed for me. It is the women who lingered and advocated for peace throughout our region.” A darling in the international development scene, Sirleaf ’s tenure in office was marked by significant economic growth and foreign investment, though not at the unrealistically high levels at which she had set expectations during her campaign. Justice was also served: in 2012, an international tribunal found Charles Taylor “responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history” during Sierra Leone’s civil war.46 And during Sirleaf ’s second term she launched a “national peace and reconciliation initiative,” led by Gbowee and designed to bring together a divided country in the wake of electoral violence.47 Since Charles Taylor’s ousting from power, Liberia remains an impoverished nation, crippled by corruption and, most recently, rattled by an Ebola epidemic. Despite these challenges, relative peace has persisted through a successful political transition. For a country that previously served as a lightening rod in the region fomenting instability, the most significant foreign policy controversy Liberia has faced since the end of the civil war came on May 25, 2018, when the country broke ranks with the rest of Africa to announce that it would vote for the Canada-Mexico-United States World Cup bid over Morocco’s.48 In a country where one in ten people died in the civil war not two decades prior, the persistence of peace can directly be attributed to the women who advocated for change in institutions and political beliefs, and oversaw a double political transformation in their country. The first transformation brought peace; the second brought democracy and lasting peace. Remarkably, in the course of advocacy, they came to understand that lasting peace required both democratic institutions and a strong voice for women.

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Women and Japan’s Constitutional Pacifism In Israel and Liberia, women voters and activists worked together in bringing about peace. Affairs in contemporary Japan show that sometimes the constraining effects of women can be more straightforward. In 2013, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe made clear his intentions to restore the war-making potential of Japan. Restricted since 1947 when the Japanese government accepted Article 9 as part of a new post-war constitution, Japan lacks the large standing army and extensive military weaponry of other developed states. Like his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who had served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960, Abe sought significant revisions to this “no war” clause, setting off heated public debate. As political leaders fell in line behind Abe’s objective, one remaining step was required for the constitutional amendment— majority vote within a referendum of the people. As we will see, the threat of women’s votes has presented a potent force for keeping the article intact. The Origins of the “No War” Clause Throughout the early twentieth century, Japan’s approach to foreign policy was not just extremely ambitious but also unnecessarily brutal. As part of its efforts to conquer Asia, Japan annexed and established colonial rule in the Korean Peninsula in 1910, and in December 1937, Japanese forces invaded the then Chinese capital of Nanking during the Second Sino-Japanese War, killing nearly 300,000 people and raping 80,000 women. In an effort to further their imperialist goals throughout Asia, Japan aligned themselves with Nazi Germany in 1940. After a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan compelled the United States into the war, paving the way for devastating defeat. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. forces in 1945 definitively ended Japan’s imperial ambitions, which had already begun to flounder following the Battle of Midway in 1942. From 1945 to 1952, Japan remained occupied by Allied forces led by the United States. Occupation was intended to promote political reform through the creation of a pacifistic, democratic Japan. The occupation would end, according to the Potsdam Declaration, only after the Allied forces had “convincing proof ” that “Japan’s war-making

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power” had been “destroyed.”49 U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, who had previously led the U.S. offensive in the South Pacific during World War II, oversaw the occupation and touted “a new day [which] dawns for Japan. No longer is the future to be settled by a few. The shackles of militarism, of feudalism, of regimentation of body and soul, have been removed.”50 The main catalyst for that “new day” was the revised Japanese constitution, which had been drafted over the span of a week in late 1946 and would come into effect on May 3, 1947. Among a number of provisions, the revised constitution put power into the hands of the people, effectively transforming the emperor from the seat of power to a symbolic post, and granted women the same rights as men. Equally consequential, the new constitution detailed Japan’s pacifistic approach to foreign policy, vowing in Article 9 that the country will “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” and adding that, “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”51 Article 9, Reinterpreted Whatever the origins of Article 9, its mere existence fundamentally transformed the dynamics of political debate throughout Japan almost immediately. Attempts to circumvent the “no war” clause, without wholly violating it, have tested generations of political leaders ever since. In what could be construed as steps toward remilitarizing Japan, in 1954, the government created “the Self-Defense Forces (SDF),” whose primary goal was to defend Japan from potential outside attack, and a new agency, “the Defense Agency,” attached to the prime minister’s office and tasked with coordinating defense spending. By 1957, one of Japan’s main political parties, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), led at the time by Abe’s grandfather, had begun to advocate openly for revisions to Article 9. By 1976, the Defense Agency launched a National Defense Program, designed to enhance the capacity of the SDF (deemed a “small but significant force”) to defend its borders. In 1978, the U.S. and Japanese governments announced the Guidelines

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for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation, the first statement of its kind. And since 1992, Japan has sent SDF troops around the world to aid in military operations, including nine peacekeeping missions with the UN.52 Since the end of World War II, the Japanese government has revisited and stretched the boundaries of interpretation for Article 9. As the political situation in East Asia has evolved, with growing threats from China and North Korea, politicians have even debated whether the SDF is capable of fulfilling its main mission to defend Japan from outside threats. Perhaps no politician in Japan’s modern history has been more forceful in advocating for the elimination of Article 9 from the Japanese constitution that Shinzo Abe, who served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020. In 2007, at the sixtieth anniversary of the constitution, Abe argued that it was time to escape the “post-war regime” and to enable the country to “stand proud again” by removing the U.S.-enforced principles from his country. During his tenure in office, Abe further expanded the interpretation of Japan’s right to “self-defense,” explaining that Japan would be “expected to exert leadership not just on the economic front, but also in the field of security in the Asia-Pacific,” particularly as a counterweight to China’s growing influence.53 When Abe was re-elected in 2012, his party, the Liberal Democratic Party, won in a landslide. Constitutional revision had the support not only of those in the LDP but those from other parties as well, potentially reaching the necessary two-thirds support required for constitutional amendment.54 A resulting sense of optimism must have accompanied Abe’s subsequent release of an ideal LDP-authored constitution which outlined subtle but important changes to Article 9. The “Renunciation of War” section was now given the more flexible title “Security” in the new draft. The stated prohibition of “war” and the “aggressive use of force” were also included, but with an important addendum: such a commitment does not prohibit the right of Japan to “self-defense.”55 What “self-defense” meant, however, would be left for the Japanese government to decide. Perhaps most significantly, the draft introduced a constitutional mandate for a “National Defense Force” tasked with protecting the peace, independence, and security of the nation, the typical stated tasks of most armed forces around the world.

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Despite seemingly being within reach of passing this or similar legislation through the Diet, Abe and the LDP never put forth the draft proposal for a vote. Despite supporting revision for over fifty years, the LDP, in fact, never has. The reason for this rests substantially with the Japanese public and, more specifically, women voters who have consistently voiced their opposition to constitutional reform efforts in public polls. Women as Roadblocks to Revision The history of demilitarization of the Japanese state has— unintentionally or not—coincided with the political liberation of Japanese women. Prior to the end of World War II, women and Japan had been referred to as “daughters kept in boxes,” with little economic or political freedoms.56 In 1945, women won the right to vote for the first time, and Japan’s constitution guaranteed economic rights for women separate from their husbands. Since then, Japanese women have expressed some of the most predictably pacific preferences in the world relative to men in their country. Numerous surveys in Japan have found the average gender gap on use of force to be over 20%.57 These more pacific attitudes have extended to the hot-button issue of Article 9 and its revision, an issue on which Japanese firms and newspapers poll often. Countless polls have shown that women have remained far less interested in altering the status quo than their male counterparts. Figures 14 and 15 show support for revision and defense during the crucial period between 2012 and 2016 when Abe and LDP had a decent chance of passing revisions through the government.58 Had he done so, one obstacle to revision would have remained: a public referendum. In 2012 and 2013, support among women during those years never went over 43%, according to an annually conducted representative poll by the University of Tokyo. Support for revision among men was, in contrast, somewhere between 50% and 56%. Support among both groups falls in 2014, but a gender gap persists. During Abe’s most recent push to revisit the Japanese constitution, in other words, had women not been allowed to vote it is quite possible that a referendum could have garnered a simple majority of the male-voting population—enough

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“We should revise Article 9.”

70% 65% 60% 55% 50% 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 2009

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Figs. 14 and 15 University of Tokyo Asahi-Shimbun surveys. public support to take steps toward amending the constitution and removing the pacifist clause for good.59 These same survey questions have also, interestingly, been asked of those running for political office. Their responses (Fig. 15) vary from the general public in some ways, but not in terms of the gender gap. Women

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running for office showed even less support for constitutional revision in 2012 than potential women voters, leading to a gender gap with men running for office of over 25%. Overall support for strengthening the countries defenses was lower among candidates than the general public, but the gender gap never decreases below 13%. Of course, even if women candidates are less likely to support these changes, the number of women who run for office remains relatively low.60 Women continue to make up only make up around 10% of the Diet—the lowest percentage among developed nations.61 The Slow Erosion The threat of women’s votes may have helped stymy official amendments to the constitution, but it hasn’t stopped the erosion of Japan’s committed pacifism completely. In 2014, Abe started pushing for “self defense” to include the collective defense of allies. More than half of Japanese disapproved of the endeavor. But, circumventing the amendment process, Abe and the LDP passed legislation in 2015 authorizing Japanese Defense Forces to engage in offensive tactics on foreign soil for the first time in seventy years.62 Social activists took to the streets. Women, many previously apolitical, joined groups like “Women Who Won’t Have Sex With WarMongering Men,” with its self-explanatory tactics. Others like “Mothers Against War” protested the new measures by employing the tactics of so many women pacifists before them. Started by Minako Saigo, a 28-year-old graduate student and mother of three, the group began as a Facebook page for moms sharing child-rearing tips. Chapters of the grassroots peace organization that emerged have sprung up in thirteen regions around Japan, calling for the protection of their children’s futures. Thousands of women have marched through city streets with “Save our children from war” posters in hand and their children in the other. Saigo and other leaders of the group have declared that they are not solely in pursuit of peace. As they see it, they are also in pursuit of a functioning democracy in which the voices of all groups—including those like mothers who were previously thought to

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be apolitical—are incorporated into the political process. “We’re not going to see democracy in this country unless the ‘silent majority’ speaks up,” group founder Saigo as said. “That’s why we need the voices of everyday people.”63 Other activists have taken to shoring up the principles of Article 9 in more symbolic ways. In 2013, Naomi Takasu, a previously apolitical mother of two from the Kanagawa Prefecture, had the idea to nominate Article 9 itself for the Nobel Peace Prize. She gathered tens of thousands of signatures but was told the prize could only be awarded to individuals and organizations. She founded an organization called the “Japanese People Who Conserve Article 9” as a result.64 By June 2014, over 80,000 signatures were collected in support of the group and its mission to gain international recognition of Article 9.65 “In a world where war has yet to be eliminated, we must recognize and hold high our constitution’s pacifist ideals,” Takasu wrote.66 Like Mothers Against War, the group sought to prevent Japan from “threatening other people’s right to live in peace,” but also to prevent the government from ignoring the will of the people. “All peace-loving people around the world” should raise their voice in unison, Takasu wrote. “Each person’s voice and capacity might be small, but will become a great force when combined.” In 2017, despite having pushed through unpopular foreign legislation, Shinzo Abe called for an early general election. North Korea had just launched two ballistic missiles over Hokkaido so perhaps Abe was hoping that the public, generally supportive of a hardline against North Korea, would forget their opposition to one of his primary foreign policy goals—the permanent revision of Article 9.67 Abe’s gamble proved successful. The LDP was elected by a large margin, setting Abe up to become the longest-running leader in Japan’s history. Though Abe stepped down in 2020 for health reasons, there is little reason to expect elite efforts to officially revise Japan’s relationship to the use of force to diminish in the future. Whether they are successful in revising Japan’s committed renunciation of war as a sovereign right of the nation will continue to rest on the endurance of Japanese women’s committed preference to peace.

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Conclusion Across the globe, women voters continue to be a critical pacifying force in the contemporary era. Whether by forcing the question of peace or by halting efforts toward military expansion, women voters shape public opinion in ways that favor pacifism over militarism and negotiation over prospects for continued war. We have seen that without the voices of women, the Lebanon War might have gone into its second decade. The Liberian Civil War might also have lasted many more years, adding to the immense human suffering that citizens had already endured. Japanese politics—and by extension, the politics of East Asia—might look very different, and perhaps far more conflict-prone than the current status quo. But women voters often do not work alone. Women’s political activity outside of the voting booth can also have tremendous effects on war and peace. Israeli women have been able to vote since their country’s beginning. But the original four mothers did not see their preferences represented in the political realm. They had to create the debate themselves, forcing change on a culture in which stating a preference for peace had been quickly shot down with accusations of treason. Women’s groups in Liberia had to go to even greater extremes to create peace as an option so that women in the voting booth could act upon it. In Japan, the right of women—and men—to have a say in the country’s approach to war and peace is written into the constitution. And yet, even there, activists’ efforts to arouse the “silent constituency” to collectively demand that democracy function as intended may be essential to maintaining stability and peace in East Asia in the future.

• 8

The Future

The first international conference on the rights of women happened at a time and place of immense change. When the International Congress of Women convened in 1878 upon the occasion of the third World’s Fair in Paris, over half a million spectators were assembled across town to witness the first visible signs of the modern era—Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Edison’s first phonograph, and the first electric streetlights. Pieces of the Statue of Liberty, including the enormous completed head, were displayed for public view all across Paris as monuments to freedom and democracy before finding their collective home in New York Harbor. But signs of change and reasons for hope among those convening on women’s rights there were few. Thirty years had passed since Seneca Falls where Elizabeth Cady Stanton first pronounced the right of women to vote. Women’s suffrage remained so taboo in 1878, however, that it was deliberately excluded from discussion in Paris. Delegates at the Congress drew widespread attention for expressing the still-controversial idea that “the adult woman is the equal of the adult man.”1 Freedom was on the rise for men throughout France and beyond, but it was a freedom their wives and daughters would not experience. “Abdicate [your] masculine kingship,” a French delegate demanded of French men. Until the complete rights of women were recognized, men’s struggle for greater liberty could only appear to these women as a “quarrel between despotisms.”

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0008

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Such international gatherings of women were themselves, however, a sign of progress. They created the sense of shared power and possibility necessary to ignite a social movement. A quarter century later in 1904, Margery Corbett Ashby, who would one day be elected President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, traveled from Britain with her mother and sister to the meeting of the Congress of Women in Berlin. Susan B. Anthony called the meeting to order in the rococo Prinz-Albrecht Palace and Carrie Chapman Catt received the gavel from delegates of Wyoming, where women had been able to vote since 1869. Years later, Corbett-Ashby wrote: “I can remember the thrill of gazing down on women from many European countries, and especially the brilliant delegates from the USA.”2 She had recently passed the “Classics Tripos”—literature, history, art, archeology, philosophy, and languages—at the University of Cambridge, but received no degree because they were not granted to women at the time. How could she not have been inspired? By the time of the Amsterdam meeting in 1908, a remarkable new tone dominated proceedings. Discussion was infused with a sense of optimism and momentum. In her speech as president of the new International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Chapman Catt placed the movement in the larger world historical struggle for freedom, speaking of women’s suffrage as an inevitable “final step” of a slow political evolution that had begun with the Magna Carta. Inspired by significant gains in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Germany, the group, once stifled but now emboldened, could now speak of “turning the laugh” on English parliamentarians behind guarded doors and skulking down side streets lest a woman pop out and proclaim the moral justice of women’s suffrage.3 Joined by women from every suffrage association in the world, Chapman Catt called on delegates to grow closer to one another, to learn from each other and to develop a spirit clarified of personal ambitions and national antagonisms. “Verily, my sisters, these are good times in which we live, and unless the signs augur amiss,” women would experience universal liberty in the not so distant future. In contrast to these gatherings, the experience of voting is isolated, the exercise of power seemingly meager. Yet, collectively these acts of voting, made possible by impassioned activism, can change the world.

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How can this be so? The enigmatic Italian novelist Elena Ferrante wrote of women today: “The power that we require must be so solid and active that we can do without the sanction of men altogether.”4 Voting, which women in many countries now do at higher rates than men, as much as any exercise of power in the world, fulfills this injunction. Modern democratic voting empowers individuals. Voters take their identities with them into the voting booth, and thus all that has influenced them over their lifetimes. Once inside, they are free to make a choice without prying eyes, without direct compulsion, without consideration for the approval of another. Entering a polling booth alone can feel like a commonplace act to those who long have possessed the right to do so. But it is extraordinarily empowering to classes of people whose lives so often require acquiescence to power structures that impinge upon their values, identities, and freedom. It appears that the effects of women’s suffrage on the international system approached the hopes and dreams of these suffragists. States with women’s suffrage have been much less likely to fight each other, enabling communities of more pacific countries to form. Often comprised of suffrage democracies, these alliances reinforced other processes to promote peace, leading some to ask whether the world as a whole has entered a new era of peace—an era which liberal thinkers of the eighteenth century had long anticipated. There is of course an irony that many today believe these thinkers were fully vindicated. According to this conventional wisdom, it is as if the often violent history of democracies before women obtained the vote never occurred. The peaceful forecasts of the suffragists, by contrast, are viewed as mere fantasy. In reality, the evidence on the side of the suffragists is stronger. This is not to say that other factors did not influence the changing nature of international relations in particular parts of the world. Certainly, a large number of factors outside of the ones we explore in this book influence attitudes towards war. Of particular interest are those factors that vary systematically across time and place. Some populations are, for instance, more vengeful than others. These populations retain the death penalty for longer and are also more likely to fight wars.5 Some populations have a historical sense that their status in the eyes of the world is not what it ought to be and they too are more likely to use their

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militaries.6 Although a host of factors influence moral attitudes and attitudes towards military conflict, women’s attitudes towards conflict remain surprisingly consistent across time and place—when compared to men in the same time and place. The process by which the votes of women altered the international conduct of countries is not simply a matter of historical interest, however. Understanding how and why women’s votes have affected foreign policies around the world offers broader fundamental insights into the present and future workings of democracy and international politics. Who Votes Matters For one, the changes wrought by suffrage illustrate that who votes matters. The extended peace experienced in some parts of the world is, in many respects, a story of the rise of democracy. But it is not the simple account that early modern thinkers hypothesized, whereby democratic institutions permit those who bear war’s costs to prevent it. Certain voters may renounce violence while others may invite it. Some may prioritize the global while others may be consumed by nationalist fervor. Consideration of such variation is necessary to understanding what democracy can provide. As women have entered the electorate, they shifted electoral incentives towards the pursuit of peace. The institution of voting alone was not enough to do this. This tight connection between voters, wants and what the political outcomes are is obviously not how it works in every case. There are many reasons that policy may not align with the preferences of the majority. For one thing, political campaigns cannot address every political issue. World events and political necessity typically dictate what politicians can afford to spend their scarce political capital on at any moment. Voters choose one candidate often on the basis of whatever issues are most pressing at any given moment. Forming a perfect alignment between majority preferences and leaders’ will on all issues is impossible with such crude tools. But when politicians disagree about questions of war and peace, these issues come to the fore. Changes in the popular will can constrain leaders. Politicians who do not prioritize peace within their agendas when peace is popular can expect to be punished for it.

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The observation that who votes matters may seem obvious to some but would seem dubious to others who find little trace of their political preferences represented in national policies. The existence of a “suffragist peace” is grounds for renewed faith in the responsiveness of democracy. With new voters came new preferences and different policies followed. Activists Put Peace on the Ballot We have also seen that, even with suffrage, activism is still required to put peace on the ballot. Immense dedication, sacrifice, and humility were required of women around the world to gain women the vote. The cases of Israel and Liberia show us that even after the vote is won, the work of activists often remains central to the story. Suffrage can be powerful, but, as just noted, majority preferences do not automatically manifest in national policy. They do when peace constituencies are mobilized and candidates respond.7 Peace activists existed before suffrage of course, but they had less influence without the more pacific constituency of voting women. Before suffrage, peace activists were simply easier to ignore. Thus, in some parts of the world, extraordinary leaders played a part in the declining incidence of conflict, but it is not the one conventionally assigned. Leaders stirred souls in the fight for women’s suffrage. Leaders of social movements, who often held no official position, helped voters make sense of their thoughts and feelings, thereby tapping into and refining public opinion. Communities Build Peace The history of the past century shows us that isolated states do not build peace; communities do. Lasting international peace, like international war, involves the commitment of many. Woodrow Wilson, re-elected on a platform of peace, was unable to commit to peace with Germany in 1917. The war came to him and to the millions of Americans mobilized in the course of the war effort, whether they supported the war or not. Neville Chamberlain’s conciliatory policies towards Hitler’s Germany in 1938, a policy that appeared to serve Britain’s interests in the near term, would likely not have been politically viable without the support of British women. And yet, the policy has been blamed for paving the way

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for Hitler’s aggression. As the Nazi threat grew in the 1930s, Winston Churchill saw the future coming and argued that confrontation sooner would be preferable and less costly to the inevitable confrontation later. Or perhaps Britain would have avoided war altogether if Hitler had been convinced early on that grabs for power would be met with armed resistance. In the end, however, Britain did fight and both women and men supported the war in large numbers. Ultimately, a natural aversion to war within one or a few suffrage democracies can only reduce international conflict so much. We can expect the potential for exploitation to decline as democracy and women’s suffrage become more ingrained and a growing number of countries become less individually inclined to use force. Protecting Women’s Representation around the World Although democracy is widespread across the world today, the quality of democratic institutions is highly variable. In the United States the persistence of these imperfections is acknowledged in the preamble to the United States constitution—the goal of government, of democracy, is always to form a “more perfect union.” The barriers to exercising these democratic principles vary across time and place. In the United States, for example, they manifest themselves in the form of racial barriers to voting, initially in the form of poll taxes and literacy tests and today in the form of reduced numbers of precincts in minority-majority neighborhoods and voter identification laws. In many other countries, these barriers target women, who are still unable to fully participate in political life despite their legal rights and often face persistent impediments to exercising an independent voice at the ballot box. In Afghanistan, for example, electoral authorities have repeatedly attempted to restrict female participation in elections. In 2013, a rule requiring body searches when entering polling stations threatened the ability for women to vote due to a shortage of female officers trained to carry out these searches.8 Most recently, in 2019, women faced further constraints to voting due to a requirement that they be photographed in order to prevent electoral fraud. In more conservative parts of the country, women are required to cover their faces and may only remove

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this covering around male relatives. Showing their face to an electoral official, many of whom are male, would be a violation of these cultural practices. The fear—and perhaps the hope of some—was that this law could prevent women, who represented only one-third of registered voters, from voting.9 In Iraq, where the United States made explicit efforts to push for the inclusion of women in political life, women are arguably less free than they were before the Iraq War began in 2003. This push for “gender mainstreaming” in Iraqi post-conflict reconstruction coincided with the United Nation’s follow-up report on Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, passed in 2000 and designed to increase women’s participation in government, policy, and in shaping peace processes. Critics have argued that talk of liberating women from injustice was designed to dampen criticism over the United States’ invasion of Iraq in the first place, but in reality the United States made little attempt to incorporate women’s voices into the peace-making process, including the drafting of a new constitution. When the issue was raised, U.S. government officials responded with a shrug. According to Lt. Col. Carl E. Mundy III, who was involved in post-conflict reconstruction, “We didn’t give special considerations to engaging the women” because the “concern was not stepping where I shouldn’t step, or dragging a woman in there that would anger the local men.”10 In a context where the United States had forced significant shifts in Iraqi policy, it was willing in many ways to sacrifice true changes in women’s rights to avoid derailing the entire peace process while simultaneously making women’s rights a major feature of public rhetoric. As Susan Willet succinctly notes: “gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping will consciously be contained at the level of a rhetorical norm, within a highly masculinized and militarized hierarchy, unless the transformatory implications of 1325 are fully implemented.”11 This is exactly what happened in Iraq. In the 2005 Iraqi constitution, which the United States had a hand in writing, the preamble vaguely promises “to pay attention to women and their rights” but provides little specifics as to how it will accomplish this objective beyond ensuring that women make up a quarter of the country’s Council of Representatives.12 Though women do participate in parliament, very few hold such posts as a result of an electoral mandate. Rather, the vast majority were placed

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there due to constitutional requirements. As a result, their ability to enact change of any form is blunted.13 In other government positions, like ministerial posts, women’s voices are largely absent. And in some cases, women’s rights in Iraq have actively been harmed as a result. Due to the focus on women’s rights in U.S. rhetoric about Iraq, women have become targeted with retaliatory violence as symbols of U.S. occupation and forced Westernization. Their rights under the law, however surfacelevel they may be, are also being actively threatened. As recently as 2017, political elites have attempted to rewrite Iraq’s “personal status laws,” which guarantee women basic rights with respect to marriage, inheritance, polygamy, and custody. Although women are allowed to vote, they still face issues of “family voting,” where the male head of household determines who the entire family will support.14 As a result, women in Iraq are unable to vote in a way that aligns with their best interests and beliefs. Changing the Face of Leadership or Changing the Narratives Women in high political office have had less impact on changing state relations. This may be because, for millennia, masculine power structures and norms have held sway in both politics and daily life. The few women heads of state of the past have had to operate within these systems, sometimes by embodying more aggressive, typically male preferences in order to participate successfully in political life. As a result, despite a clear gender gap in attitudes among the general population, the average woman in high office has been no more pacific than the average male leader. Still today, although more women achieve high political office with each election cycle, so far they are at least as warlike on average as their male counterparts. Many groups continue to long for representation by someone who looks outwardly the way that they look or shares other aspects of their identity—although not necessarily their values. In many ways, this is a continuation of a 200-year-old trend. The nationalism that arose in the nineteenth century and continues today represented the demand of populations around the world to be ruled by someone like them. The modern need for, as sociologist Andreas Wimmer has called it, the rule of “like over like” is a fundamental ordering principle and driver of

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war over the last two centuries.15 It led to the decline of multi-ethnic empires and the rise of the nation state. We should not underestimate its power in the modern world. Ethnic and gender representation also serve important needs—they expand the horizon of possibilities for those who see themselves reflected in those occupying these new roles.16 These important benefits notwithstanding, however, it has been the shared values of leaders and publics, more than shared ethnic and gender identities, that caused a decline in war. Ultimately, much of the story of how many parts of the world achieved an era of relative peace is not about leaders. It is about choices made by millions in the privacy of voting booths. And in this it is part of a broader narrative about how peaceful social change has occurred and will likely continue to occur—from the bottom up. This shift did not require demographic change at the top. Indeed, when change at the top did come, it did not have the effects—or at least not yet—for which many had hoped. The promise of women in greater numbers not merely winning the political game through election, but changing its rules as their numbers swell, is the possibility, as yet uncertain, of an even more pacific future. The question, however, remains: what will it take for women leaders, on average, to reflect the on average greater pacifism of female populations? It is a difficult question to answer due to the fact that when women have assumed political power, it has been within the structures devised and reinforced by men. Perhaps it is a simple question of critical mass: more women in power will lead to further participation of women in politics, which will eventually transform political expectations for female leaders. Or perhaps changes in norms and expectations of what we expect from women are required for female leaders to both achieve political office and have a certain freedom of action while in office, rather than be beholden to masculine norms of political engagement. If political norms change in this way, it is likely to evoke other as-yetunforeseen effects. We are already seeing some of these changes taking root in some countries around the world. Although, for good reason, democratic backsliding has become a major focus of political discourse, this has coincided with a rise of female political leaders who are in many ways challenging pre-existing political structures and creating room for

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women to operate in national politics outside of typically masculine norms. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Arden, has openly advocated for leadership based on “kindness and empathy” as opposed to “assertiveness and strength,” arguing that the two are not mutually exclusive: “it takes strength to be an empathetic leader.”17 She was also the first national leader since 1990 to give birth in political office, normalizing motherhood through weekly Facebook Live updates and criticizing detractors who asked if she would become a “part-time prime minister.”18 It appears as though the strategy has paid dividends electorally. In 2020, she won reelection in a landslide victory, marking the first time since 1951 that any political party has won an outright majority of votes in New Zealand. In Germany, the typically reserved prime minister Angela Merkel has opted for a different approach, generally downplaying gender altogether during her fifteen-year tenure as Chancellor. Bernd Ulrich, the deputy editor of Die Zeit, once described Merkel’s political success as rooted in the fact that she was not a “woman of strong emotions. . . . Too much emotion disturbs your reason. She watches politics like a scientist.”19 In the latter period of her tenure, this steady, methodical approach to government has been replaced by a more compassionate tenor at critical, even legacy-defining, points in German politics. During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, she was lauded as “mama Merkel” and celebrated by some as “the woman who saved the dignity of Europe” for her decision to open Germany’s borders to over 1 million refugees.20 Although her domestic popularity took a hit and critics assailed her for being blinded by emotions, when pressed about her decision, the product of East Germany, who grew up knowing the realities of a barbed-wire fence well, replied: “I had no choice.”21 This dip in popularly never went below 60%, however, and her favorability ratings have since recovered, due to what many laud as her “leadership based on compassion, openness, and a hands-on approach” to addressing the coronavirus pandemic in Germany.22 Although whether she considers herself a feminist leader is a source of frequent debate, she has paved the way for future female leaders in politics, both in Germany and beyond. And in a break from her past stance on the issue, she has also begun to reckon with her legacy as Europe’s longest-serving woman leader,

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acknowledging in her typically methodical demeanor: “when I say or do something, I am saying or doing it as a woman.”23 The question is often asked “What if women ruled the world?” There is no single answer to this question because individuals inhabit cultures. Though change may be on the horizon, the record of women with political power to date sheds but little light on the issue because of the cultures of command in which they exercised authority. What if political norms derived from women’s voices, what sort of world would that be? The experience of a century of women’s suffrage provides the first part of the answer. It is a world that is less willing to fall in love with war as a noble end in itself, less prone to lapse into violence for the sake of maintaining an image. In other words, it is the world we live in now, more so than we have ever realized.

appe n d ix

•

Data on Women’s Suffrage Data on women’s suffrage was collected primarily using the United Nation’s report on the Progress of the World’s Women which lists the voting status of women by year in all 196 countries. All but five countries—Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE—had legalized women’s suffrage by the year 1999, even if national elections were not held in the state. In 180 countries, suffrage was extended to all women above the national voting age within one legislative act. Within thirteen countries, suffrage was granted to women in stages. The restrictions imposed by these states are presented in Table 1 below. The first wave of female suffrage in these thirteen countries was most commonly extended on the basis of educational, age-based, ethnic, or geographic qualifications. Australia, Canada, and the United States first granted women suffrage on the basis of race, while some states—such as Bolivia, Ireland, Romania, and the United Kingdom—first granted women suffrage on the basis of literacy, property rights, or education level, and only later adopted legislation allowing full women’s suffrage at an equivalent age as men. Some constraints were unique. In Belgium, for instance, war widows, mothers of those killed in war, and female political prisoners were granted the right to vote in 1919 while all other Belgian women of an equivalent voting age of men were granted the vote in 1948.

Table 1 All states granting suffrage in waves. Country

First Wave

Female Extension

Second Wave

Male Restrictions

Australia Belgium

1902 1918

1962 1948

Same as women. Age 25.

Bolivia Canada

1938 1917

1952 1960

Same as women. Same as women.

Iceland Ireland Nigeria Portugal Romania South Africa Trinidad and Tobago United Kingdom

1915 1918 1958 1931 1938 1930 1925 1918

1920 1922 1978 1976 1946 1994 1945 1929

Age 25. Age 21. Age 18. Same as women. Property; age 21. Same as women. Same as women. Age 21.

Zimbabwe

1919

All but indigenous women. War widows; mothers of those killed; political prisoners. Literate women over 20. All but aboriginal and Chinese Canadian women. Women over 40. Women over 30. Women within the northern provinces. Literate women only over 21. Literate women over 30 with property. European white women over 18. Women over 30 with property. Women over 30 with property or a degree. European white women only over 21.

1957

Same as women.

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For our primary analysis, we employed a binary measure of suffrage that accounted for whether women made up at least 40% of all eligible voters. Within seven cases, equivalent voting restrictions were applied to men during the period of restricted female voting. We estimate, therefore, that women constituted at least 40% of all eligible voters after the first wave of suffrage in these cases. Within six cases, Belgium, Iceland, Ireland, Nigeria, Romania, and the United Kingdom, men experienced fewer or no restrictions beyond the typical age requirements during the period of restricted female voting. In these cases, we estimate that women did not constitute 40% of eligible voters until the second wave of suffrage in which all women were granted the vote. Within the case of Nigeria, for instance, women within southern states were prohibited from voting until 1978. We estimate that between 1958 and 1978, women constituted only 27.7% of eligible voters. This is based on census data from 1952 in which the population of the northern states was 55.4% and the population of the South was 44.6%. Within the first stage of suffrage within Belgium, war widows, female political prisoners, and the mothers of those killed were granted the right to vote in national elections. It is estimated that Belgium suffered roughly 38,170 military deaths, most presumably men, over the course of World War I. The population of the country leading up to the war was roughly 7,662,000. The segment of Belgian women granted suffrage in the first wave represented, therefore, a small minority of all eligible voters. Similar calculations led us to the same conclusion for Iceland, Ireland, Romania, and the United Kingdom. The Relationship Between Measures of Democracy and Suffrage The primary analysis in the paper uses polity scores for measures of democracy. This data ranges from 10, for states with the highest levels of democracy, to −10, for fully autocratic states. As Russett and Oneal (1999) notes, measures of democracy within the Polity IV data do not always correspond with extensions of suffrage. It is possible, for instance, for states without women’s suffrage to receive a polity score of 10. This incongruity between women’s suffrage and polity score is represented in Figure 16 below. The figure shows that of those countryyears in which states receive polity scores of 10, in only around 89%

appendix

States with polity scores of  but no suffrage: Australia  Costa Rica – France – Greece – New Zealand – Norway – Netherlands – Sweden – Switzerland – United States –; –

100 90

Percent with Suffrage

171

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Polity Score

8

9

10

States with polity scores of  but no suffrage: Canada – Denmark  France – Greece – Montenegro – New Zealand – Sweden  United States – States with polity scores of 8 but no suffrage: Colombia – Denmark  Estonia  East Timor – France – Greece –; – Pakistan – Serbia – Sudan – Sweden  United Kingdom – United States –

Fig. 16 The polity scores of all states with female suffrage. have been women granted the vote. In roughly 85% of country-years in which states receive a polity score of 7 or higher are women granted the vote. The column on the right indicates the countries and years in which states with polity scores or 8, 9, or 10 did not grant women the vote. Other Possible Explanations One possible explanation for the results we report in the book is that countries with fewer security concerns are more likely to adopt women’s suffrage and that therefore the causal arrow should be reversed. A number of facts speak against this explanation. First, as shown in Table 4, the likelihood of conflict in the years following suffrage is significantly reduced when compared with the years leading up to women’s suffrage.

Statistical Analysis Table 2 Regression table for monadic analysis. Variables

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3 1893–1955

Model 4

Polity Women’s Suffrage Polity x Women’s Suffrage Dem w/o Women’s Suffrage (0/1) Autocracy (0/1)

.977** (.33) .623** (.18)

Civil Liberties Contiguity Capability Ratio Alliance Minor Powers

3.24*** (.27) .031 (.03) .345 (.19) −.541* (.21)

.831** (.32) .149 (.23) −1.19*** (.33) 3.176*** (.29) .027 (.03) .329 (.21) −.451* (.22)

.946*** (.19) .884*** (.22) −.870** (.29) 1.502*** (.17) .051*** (.01) −.327* (.17) −2.208*** (.14)

Model 5

Model 6

Model 7

.008 (.02) .564 (.30) −.151*** (.04)

.029 (.02) .379 (.30) −.110** (.04)

.010 (.01) .296 (18) −.123*** (.02)

−.990*** (.23)

3.19*** (.27) .034 (.03) .364 (.19) −.578** (.21)

−1.192** (.34) 3.141*** (.29) .027 (.03) .348 (.21) −.504* (.22)

.847*** (.13) .574*** (.10) −.985*** (.21)

.029 (.04) −.328*** (.08) −.609*** (.14)

.015 (.04) −.323*** (.08) −.597*** (.14)

Variables

Model 1

Model 2

At Least One Nuclear Power Joint Nuclear

.858*** (.22) .758 (.63) −28.73 (18.43) −1.054*** (.28) −.003 (.00) −2.417*** (.70) −.121*** (.01)

.810*** (.23) .737 (.68) −18.52 (15.84) −1.21*** (.27) −.004 (.00) −2.487*** (.71) −.116*** (.01)

.009* (.00) −.333 (.49) −.065*** (.01)

347,235

325,701

178,967

Trade Interest Similarity Year Distance Peace Years Fixed Effects N=

Model 3 1893–1955

Model 4

Model 5

Model 6

Model 7

−.198 (.11) .120 (.21)

.844*** (.22) .778 (.65) −24.422 (16.87) −1.147*** (.28) −.004 (.00) −2.48*** (.70) −.120*** (.01)

.786*** (.23) .745 (.69) −16.621 (14.66) −1.279*** (.27) −.004 (.00) −2.542*** (.70) −.114*** (.01)

−.211 (.11) .102 (.21)

347,235

325,701

.007*** (.00)

−.041*** (.00) Dyad 69,792

Coefficients for binary variables estimate difference with democracies with women’s suffrage. * = Coefficients at the .05 level. ** =.01 level. *** =.001 level. Robust standard errors clustered by dyad in parentheses below.

.008*** (.00)

−.041*** (.00) Dyad 69,792

Table 3 Regression table for dyadic analysis. Variables

Model 1

Model 2 1893–1955

DemL

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

Model 6 1893–1955

Model 7

−.079*** (.01)

−.056*** (.01) .791** (.26) −.182*** (.04) .037*** (.01) −.358 (.21) .007 (.03)

−.035** (.01) .762** (.27) −.168*** (.04) .022 (.01) −.444* (.21) .059 (.03)

−.043** (.01) .749 (.62) −.222* (.09) .032* (.01) −.177 (.40) .017 (.05)

−.008 (.01) .795*** (.23) −.192*** (.03) −.011 (.01) −.328 (.21) .053 (.03)

−1.17*** (.21)

−1.456*** (.31)

−1 570*** (.29)

Joint Women’s Suffrage Dem∗L Joint Women’s Suffrage DemH

.023*** (.01)

At Least 1 Women’s Suffrage Democracy Suffrage-DemocracyH Joint Autocracy (0/1) Joint Democracy w/o Women’s Suff (0/1) Dem w/o Women’s Suff / Autocracy (0/1) Dem w/o Women’s Suff / Dem w. Women’s Suff Dem w. Women’s Suff / Autocracy (0/1) Civil-LibertiesL

1.379*** (.19) 1.264** (.39) 1.619*** (.23) −.561 (.52) 1.449*** (.19)

2.162*** (.33) 1.343** (.48) 2.250*** (.34) −.086 (.58) 2.160*** (.33)

Variables

Model 1

Model 2 1893–1955

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

Model 6 1893–1955

Contiguity

2.030*** (.18) −.002 (.01) .257** (.09) −1.406*** (.12) .678*** (.13) −.302 (.53) −20.777 (10.92) −1.003*** (.22) −.001 (.00) −.000*** (.00)

1.739*** (.20) .015 (.02) −.361* (.17) −2.026*** (.11)

2.042*** (.18) .001 (.01) .278** (.09) −1.399*** (.12) .682*** (.13) −.301 (.54) −15.085 (10.32) −.852*** (.23) −.000 (.00) −.000*** (.00)

2.004*** (.20) −.017 (.01) .308** (.10) −1.34*** (.12) .633*** (.13) −.454 (.54) .708 (10.86) −1.187*** (.23) .002 (.00) −.000** (.00)

1.667*** (.22) .001 (.02) −.392* (.18) −1.979*** (.12)

302,889

70,125

2.054*** (.18) .000 (.01) .259** (.09) −1.398*** (.11) .633*** (.12) −.343 (.53) −20.124* (10.26) −.824*** (.22) −.003 (.00) −.001*** (.00) 203 302,889

294,482

277,213

59,218

Capability Ratio Alliance Minor Powers At Least One Nuclear Power Joint Nuclear Trade Interest Similarity Year Distance Fixed Effects N=

.000 (.00) −.000* (.00)

* = .05 level. ** =.01 level. *** =.001 level. Robust standard errors clustered by dyad in parentheses below.

.004 (.00) −.000** (.00)

Model 7

−.077 (.06) −.274* (1.1) −1.328*** (.26) −.217 (.13) −.707** (.26)

.009*** (.00)

Dyad 28,922

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Table 4 Percentage change in frequency of disputes. Female Time Span + / − 10 Years + / − 10–20 Years + / − 20 Years

Male

First Wave

Universal

Second Wave

−11.6% (p = .11) −17.5% (p = .04) −15.9% (p = .01) N = 49, 40

−19.8% (p = .01) −14.5% (p = .07) −19.9% (p = .002) N = 50, 41

+10.1% (p = .28) +22.6% (p = .16) +27.0% (p = .47) N = 16, 12

The periods of ten to twenty years before and after suffrage were also compared and a similar decline following suffrage was found. Second, we compared the average rate of dispute involvement in the five years leading up to suffrage with states’ average rate of dispute involvement in different five-year intervals in the decades before women’s suffrage. The rate of dispute involvement is, for instance, 55.6% (p=.000) higher in the five years before than in the fifteen to twenty years before suffrage. The average rate of dispute involvement in years t − 5 to t − 10 was also 16% higher than the average over years t − 15 to t − 20 (p=.10). One might also assume that states that have recently experienced war may be more likely to adopt suffrage. Some have argued that suffrage was made more likely by the entrance of women into the workforce during both world wars.24 The effects of women’s suffrage that we find might, in such a case, simply be capturing war weariness on the part of recent adopters. Many pieces of evidence speak against this explanation. First, only three of the forty states examined over a twenty-year time frame before and after suffrage adopted suffrage within five years of the end of a war. Dropping these cases from the analysis, we see a 20.4%** decrease in the twenty years following the first wave of suffrage. Second, we conducted out analysis after excluding those countries that first adopted women’s suffrage in the years 1919–21 or 1945–47. Truncating the data in this way excludes all dyads involving

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the United States, Belgium, France, Albania, the Netherlands, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, among others. Our results hold on this narrower sample of the population. States with women’s suffrage are less likely to be involved in disputes than are states without women’s suffrage, even in states that did not adopt suffrage shortly after conflict. This negative effect of women’s suffrage increases with the level of democracy of the state. Analysis of particular key cases in which suffrage was adopted shortly after war also shows that the effects of war were if anything indirect. Teele (2014) demonstrates that women gained the vote in Britain in 1918 because they pursued successful electoral strategies aimed at granting women the vote. War led to a multipolar cabinet that enabled their particular electoral strategy to succeed. Teele notes that the adoption of suffrage was not a product of the rise of the liberal government in 1906. Suffrage was achieved through a process of what she calls “ordinary electoral strategy.” One might also surmise that the pacifying effects of extended suffrage has little to do with gender but is rather a reflection of expanding the voting population to men as well. Przeworski (2009) relies on data on extensions of male suffrage by class. This data does not include information about how much the eligible number of voters grew within each suffrage extension. Those instances of male suffrage extension which took place within five years prior to or after extension by gender were excluded from the analysis. Once democratic states which were not consistent members of the state system for the ten- and twenty-year periods before and after the suffrage extension, sixteen cases remained within the ten-year sample and twelve cases remained within the twenty-year sample. In contrast to the expectations of the alternative hypothesis, we see that increasing the proportion of men eligible to vote is associated with a 27% increase in dispute involvement when comparing the twenty years before and after suffrage extensions. As discussed above, one might assume that male suffrage would be extended in periods leading up to war, potentially explaining this finding. Przeworski (2009) finds little empirical support for this common theory. In his analysis of the causes of suffrage extensions, Przeworski finds that of the 226 extensions of suffrage that are covered by the

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the suffragist peace

Correlates of War dataset, only twenty occurred in the five years prior to war. Within our within-country analysis, only two of the cases of suffrage extension by class—Italy (1913) and Japan (1925)—took place within states which saw war within the subsequent five-year period.

not e s

• Introduction 1. The phrase is from William Blake’s poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” in the preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books. The interpretation of the mills is contentious with views ranging from factories to churches. In our view, Blake’s work links the two as common subjects of false idolatry. 2. Charles Worcester Clark, “Woman Suffrage, Pro and Con,” The Atlantic, March 1890. 3. This was the prediction of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a key founder of the suffrage movement, from a speech entitled “The Destructive Male” given in 1868. 4. “Are Women a Failure in Politics?” Harper’s magazine felt the need to ask in 1925. See Andersen (1996) on the many others who declared suffrage a failure in the mid-1920s. 5. “100 Years of Voting Hasn’t Done What We Thought It Would,” New York Times, July 30, 2020. 6. Quoted in Alonso (1993, p. 45). Howe’s attempt to proclaim a national day to honor the unique sufferings wrought on mothers by war became the basis for the first ever Mother’s Day. Howe’s appeal was later called the “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” Howe failed to institute an annual Mother’s Day in 1870, though Anna Jarvis, who would eventually organize Mother’s Day as we now know it, acknowledged taking inspiration from Howe, a colleague of her mother’s. “History of Mother’s Day as a Day of Peace: Julia Ward Howe,” The Peace Alliance. https://peacealliance.org/history-ofmothers-day-as-a-day-of-peace-julia-ward-howe/

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7. Two thousand Russian and U.S. warheads are currently kept in a state of high operational alert.https://sipri.org/media/press-release/2021/globalnuclear-arsenals-grow-states-continue-modernize-new-sipri-yearbookout-now. 8. World Values Survey, 2005–11. 9. Each of these countries reported an increase in this perception from the mid-1990s to mid-2002. See Foa and Mounk (2017). 10. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-politicalparticipation/facts-and-figures. 11. https://data.ipu.org/women-ranking?month=10&year=2020. 12. The nadir during the Cold War was in 1953 when the United States and Soviet Union both tested their first thermonuclear devices. https:// thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2020-doomsday-clock-statement/clocktimeline. 13. See Pinker (2012). Also https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-andarchaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths. 14. Cirillo and Taleb (2016); Braumoeller (2019). 15. Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 18). 16. Tacitus, Annals 14.33. 17. The defeats inflicted in her name upon the Ottomans were some of the heaviest defeats the Empire ever suffered.

Chapter 1 1. Many communities around the world had embraced a form of early democracy, in which rulers sought the consent of those they governed, prior to the era of modern democracy. But as Stasavage (2020) notes, these communities were often very small in scale, their size and populations paling in comparison to the vast empires that long encircled the earth. 2. Originating in the late Middle Ages in England, the legal doctrine of coverture placed married women in the United Kingdom in a position of subordination to their husbands. Until the late 1800s, women in the United States also lived under coverture and therefore lacked separate legal status from their husbands. In many countries, the status of women actually declined in the modern liberal era with the spread of the Napoleonic Code, which subordinated married women to their husbands. See Stretton and Kesselring (2013). As Towns (2009) notes, the exclusion of women from politics was seen as a mark of advanced civilized societies in nineteenthcentury European society, distinguishing them from “savage” societies which allowed women to play a role in the political sphere. 3. Kant (1983, p. 123). 4. Ibid. Also see Howard (1978). 5. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, February 14, 1776. 6. Hitchens (2008). Thomas Jefferson viewed Paine’s writings as the match that lit the revolutionary keg and, perhaps ironically, bolstered enlistment in the Continental Army, giving Paine a claim on the title, “Father of the American Revolution”.

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7. This prompts the question of what ultimately is a democracy. Even labeling some of these states as “democratic” might be striking to contemporary readers, given the significant ways they deviated from twenty-first-century conceptions of democracy. Despite restrictions on voting on the basis of race and gender and often on the basis of class or education, the distribution of power and the application of law in these early democracies more closely resembled contemporary democracies than the absolutist states they replaced. Leaders who failed to shape or be shaped by voters’ opinions— even if it was only a narrow subset of voters—could be removed from office in the voting booth. 8. See Rich (1985, pp. 90–3). 9. Ibid., p. 99. 10. Martin (1924, p. 157). See also Trager (2012). 11. This position has been taken by many, including Martin (1924); Anderson (1967); Goldfrank (2014); Lambert (2011), among others. 12. Martin (1924, p. 54). 13. Correspondence of Aberdeen, March 3, 1854. 14. Anderson (1967, p. 29) N. S. Martin (1924, p. 222). In an era without surveys and pollsters, politicians gleaned a sense of what the public believed and wanted largely from newspapers. While editors were blamed for “inflaming chauvinistic sentiment” against Russia, they also grew their papers in the process, suggesting they had a keen grasp of what would appeal. “It is a well-known fact that The Times,” with its readership of roughly 40,000 per day, “forms or guides or reflects—no matter which— the public opinion of England,” Lord Clarendon wrote at the time. Quoted in Cook (1916, p. 294). See also Krebs (2004); Potter (2014); Conboy (2002), and Martin (1924, pp. 130–3). 15. Leaders had been cowed by public demands for belligerence for months before. Clarendon had reluctantly sent the British fleet to help defend the Turks in May of 1853 because he perceived that it was “the least measure that will satisfy public opinion.” 16. “The public seems to think there is nothing to do but to declare war against Russia,” Clarendon wrote to Aberdeen in late October. The public, Lord Palmerston observed, would indeed be “delighted” if war broke out with Russia. Palmerston perceived himself to be particularly attuned to public opinion and uniquely capable of steering it. Martin (1924, p. 117). British leaders attempting to reign in the public with reminders that no British life or property had been harmed in the battle were howled down in the press and within the House of Commons. 17. Howard (1978). 18. July 7, 1853. 19. Quoted in Martin (1924, p. 229). Clarendon wrote to Aberdeen in late December of 1853 of the effects of the Battle of Sinope on public opinion. “You think I care too much for public opinion, but really when the frightful carnage at Sinope comes to be known we shall be bitterly disgraced if,

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20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

notes upon the mere score of humanity, we don’t take active measures to prevent any more outrages.” Aberdeen later declared, “The abstract justice of the cause, although indisputable, is but a poor consolation for the inevitable calamities of all war . . .”. Correspondence to Lord John, March 3, 1853. Martin (1924). Hansard, CXXX.646–8; in Martin (1924, p. 222). Aberdeen deemed it the government’s responsibility to help the people resist these feelings—to “direct them in the course of prudence and of policy,” he wrote. The British army had been used to suppress various uprisings and conquer more lands in Australia, Southeast Asia, South Africa, Afghanistan, and China, to name a few. But it had not been mobilized to fight an army of near or equal force. Martin (1924, p. 75). Anderson (1967, p. 22). Ibid., p. 20. Martin (1924, pp. 240–2). Ibid., p. 125. The Treaty of Paris which followed the Crimean War stripped Russia of its ports along the Black Sea and mandated the destruction of the entire Russian navy. Never before had a defeated great power been forced to disarm in such a way. See Temperley (1932); Lambert (2016). On the effects of such humiliating events on international politics, see Barnhart (2020). This may have been one’s impression in 1855, as the British people took to the streets to protest news of fiascoes on the battlefield and as the prime minister lost a vote of no confidence over the perceived botched handling of the war. Surveys in the aftermath of the war likely would have reflected public condemnation of the leaders who the people blamed for its persecution. Mosse (1963, p. 38). Russia was in for a “rude awakening” if it thought England would sit quietly by as a witness to its ambitions in the East, The Telegraph declared. November 17, 1870. November 19, 1870. November 22, 1870. Historian J. A. Hobson noted the oddity of such unanimity given how little most within the public sphere knew of the intricacies of the Eastern Question. “A suggestion of national animus with a vague assertion attached to it is quite sufficient at this stage in the manufacture of the Jingo spirit,” Hobson argued in reference to British attitudes in the 1870s. November 16, 1870. For similar quotes, see Mosse (1963, pp. 40–1). November 15, 1870. The Standard, November 23, 1870. Mosse (1963, p. 49). Gladstone to Granville, November 19, 1870. Quoted in Mosse (1963, p. 45).

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39. This brought the size of the electorate to 5.5 million. Two-thirds of English men were allowed to vote, though the number was only one in two in Ireland. 40. Quarterly Journal, January 1899. Quoted in Knight (1968, p. 40). 41. In addition to these, the British Army fought in Afghanistan in 1878, Egyptian forces in 1881, the Ashanti in 1893, Nigerian forces in 1897, and the Boer War in 1899. See Rosato (2003). 42. MacKenzie (1984, pp. 1–5). 43. Many more within the electorate were now literate as a result of the Education Act of 1870. 44. Ibid., p. 2. 45. Pubs were allowed upon until 2:30 am for the occasion and cheering and singing are said to have continued through the night. Until symbols of the empire were paraded through the streets, the meaning of empire had been more ambiguous, reported the Daily Mail. The parade helped solidify the newfound importance of empire: “It makes life newly worth living, worth living better and more strenuously to feel that one is a part of this enormous, this wondrous machine, the greatest organization the world ever saw,” editorials reported. 46. Satia (2020). 47. “A brief irrelevant, ‘Yes, war is brutal’ . . .”, is how Hobson described it. Hobson (1901, p. 36). 48. Ibid. pp. 1–15. 49. MacKenzie (1984, p. 6). Military activities became a source of recreation for working-class men and, in this way, a large proportion of the population acquired connections to military and paramilitary organizations. 50. Knight (1968). 51. As Potter (2014, p. 40) notes, British politicians accused the French newspapers of “willfully shut[ting] their eyes to the import of [British] unanimity” on the topic of Fashoda. 52. Lady G. Cecil, Life of Salisbury, IV, pp. 41–2. Salisbury to Wolff, February 23, 1887. 53. “All the anti-Jingoes . . . feel the force” of the remarkable determination to go to war, Salisbury observed. See Knight (1968, p. 350). “The elements of compromise do not exist,” The Times reported on September 28. British Weekly reported on September 29 that “There is only one opinion in London. . . . A general readiness to go to war rather than to make any concessions.” 54. Buckle, George Earle, ed. The Letters of Queen Victoria: Third Series. Vol. 3. J. Murray, 1907. p. 290. 55. In an 1897 speech at Guildhall, Salisbury had declared “In every country it is one of the very great difficulties of conducting foreign affairs in the present time that every Government possesses over against it a mass of critical public opinion which requires that in every negotiation its

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56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

notes own country shall have unquestionably the superiority.” Quoted in Potter (2014, p. 39). Pakenham (2015, p. 552). Langer (1951). It likely also affected leaders that Britain would have had a massive military advantage if the crisis bubbled into war. Porter (1980, p. 1). Porter (1980, pp. 26–31). Chamberlain argued that the conduct of foreign policy would have to change now that the electorate was huge and public support was required for assertive foreign policy actions. See also Knight (1968) for more on this case. Knight (1968, p. 455). Hobson (1901, p. 30). According to one Conservative MP. See Knight (1968, p. 548). Knight (1968, pp. 38–9). Hobson (1901, p. 62). Porter (1980, p. 247). Ibid., pp. 264–7. Leech (1999, p. 182). Thomas (2010, p. 169). Beale (1956, p. 37). Thomas (2010, p. 70). Hoganson (2000, p. 40). Offner (1992, p. 139). Trask (1996, p. 181). Quince (2017, p. 137). Also May (1961). Public sentiment could be fulfilled by war and no other way, Henry Cabot Lodge reflected years later. See Trask (1996, p. 32). Hoganson (2000, p. 104). Musicant (1998, p. 178). Healy (2011, p. 146). See Musicant (1998, pp. 180–90). The vote was 311-6 in the House and 42-35 in the Senate. See Hoganson (2000, p. 105). See Hamilton et al. (2006, p. 80). Also Offner (1992, p. 228). Weart (1998). Foner (1972, pp. 281–2). See Hofstadter (1952, p. 293). Healy (2011, p. 4) argues that the American public wouldn’t have fought just to do good, but that they also wanted to see their cause as just. Theodore Roosevelt perceived that the country was going to war against the interests of commercial entities. See Miller (1970, p. 43). See the debate on the role that economic interests played in Healy (2011). This and similar quotes in Healy (2011, pp. 99–101). Young American men represented the “most stupendous reservoir of seething energy to be found any continent,” the early American sociologist Franklin Giddings observed in 1898. Denied an outlet, this energy would “discharge itself in anarchistic, socialistic and destructive modes,” he concluded. Giddings (1898, p. 590).

notes 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

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James (2015). Quoted in Healy (2011, p. 108). Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 36). Ibid. Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 73). Wilkerson (1967, p. 103). On the debate as to whether the press can be blamed for the war, see Hamilton et al. (2006). Senator Pitney of New Jersey similarly argued, “We desire peace with honor but we lay a solemn emphasis upon the word honor. Honor comes first. It is most important; it is the end ever to be held in view.” For this and similar quotes, see Hoganson (2000, pp. 72–4). “. . . There are things more horrible than war,” Senator Sulzer of New York argued. Hamilton et al. (2006). Wilkerson (1967). At the same time, McKinley, who showed particular interest in gauging public opinion, likely viewed the newspapers as the best measure of where the public stood given that was much of what he had to go on. May (1961, p. 689). Offner (1992, p. 229). Also Miller (1970) and Trask (1996) argue that the press had a marginal effect on the likelihood of war. Quoted in Healy (2011, p. 67). Hoganson (2000, p. 143). Ibid., p. 174. Schlesinger et al. (1985, p. 1889). These U.S. cases do not tell us whether states were just as warlike under male suffrage democracy as they were under monarchy. We shall get to that question in later chapters. What these cases tell us is that popular sentiment did not always have the restraining effect that early liberals imagined. On the contrary. Quoted in Porter (1980, p. 19). At its peak in 1939, the French colonial empire spanned almost 10% of the surface of the earth and contained roughly 150,000,000 inhabitants. Howard (1978, p. 131). These included Costa Rica, France, Luxembourg, Norway, and fellow commonwealth members Canada and New Zealand. This data is taken from the Polity IV dataset.

Chapter 2 1. Quoted in Alonso (1993, p. 61). 2. Gilman (1903). Hoganson (2000, p. 85). Many prominent arguments emphasized the role of culture and social environment over any potential biological differences as the source of differing attitudes. See the arguments of Emily Balch discussed in Schott (1997, p. 33). 3. Also Alonso (1993, p. 61). As historian Jill Liddington has argued, the strand of feminism which has equated maleness with violence fails to

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

notes acknowledgewomen’s own involvement with militarism. See Liddington (1991, p. 8). Hoganson (2000, p. 85). Prominent British journalist and activist Caroline Ashurst Biggs editorialized in 1870 that “one great effect of the recognition of the right of women to co-operate with men in political life will be that the horrors of war will in a great measure be averted.” Quoted in Schott (1997, p. 42). “The sentiment was later echoed by Marguerite Wells who argued: “It is universally conceded that women are the great foes of war. Here, for once, the difference between men and women seems actually based on sex. Women are the conservers of life: they know its costs and they hate wasting it. Women, also, unlike men are not competitive; do not like contests, have no gusto for a fight.” Wells, Marguerite M. “Some effects of woman suffrage.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 143, no. 1 (1929): 207–216.” Macmullan (2001); Mahowald (1997), and others. Quoted in Patterson (2008, p. 42). Paula Baker. “The domestication of politics: Women and American political society, 1780–1920.” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (1984): 620–47. Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, Olive Schreiner and others emphasized this in their writing. “I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish and brutal . . . but I refer to those characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish the stronger sex . . . the love of acquisition and conquest . . . the powers of destruction used to subjugate one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. Quoted in Curti (1936, p. 171). Hoganson (2000, p. 14). This included strict orders that “not a cat or a canary” was to be killed. Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 178). This image was part of a concerted effort at “remasculinization” after a period of perceived feminization of young men by their mothers, teachers, and female caregivers. It was the reason for the reinvigorated interest in the YMCA and the founding of the Boy Scouts, as well as the rapid expansion of all male institutions, designed to regenerate the “‘governing class’ and to nourish and prove his manhood.” See Testi (1995). Crook (2009). Hoganson (2000, pp. 19, 85). Quoted in Alonso (1993, p. 59). Brown (2018, p. 123). Alonso (1993, p. 45). Julia Ward Howe, “An Appeal to Womanhood throughout the World,” An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera, Library of Congress.

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23. Howe’s appeal was later called the “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” Howe failed to institute an annual Mother’s Day in 1870, though Anna Jarvis, who would eventually organize Mother’s Day as we now know it, acknowledged taking inspiration from Howe, a colleague of her mother’s. “History of Mother’s Day as a Day of Peace: Julia Ward Howe,” The Peace Alliance. 24. By January 1916, the party had over 40,000 members. They acknowledged that plenty of men supported peace but that the demand for peace among women seemed universal and impassioned. Women were more eager and would therefore have to start the work of preventing war. See Schott (1985). 25. Other women threw themselves into peace organizations founded by men. Male anti-imperial activists were astonished by the ease with which they could organize women around the issue of peace. At the first meeting of the American Anti-Imperialist League in June of 1898 over half those in attendance were reportedly women, a notable fact given the risk they would be accused of dereliction in their motherly duties. For detailed histories of women’s roles in peace organizations and on the history of women’s peace activism, see Alonso (1993) and Liddington (1991), who argues that any history of the peace movement which ignored issues of gender “and ignores the powerful language and imagery of women and peace remains inadequate and misleading; so is any history of feminism which omits peace ideas and campaigns” p. 5. 26. There were clear limits to women’s influence within established organizations as well. Prominent women like Jane Addams and Anna Garlin Spencer were allowed to join the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, for instance, but were not allowed to lead. Addams concluded that such societies “have as little use for women . . . as have the militarists.” Quoted in Schott (1985, p. 18). Even the Universal Peace Union, a society created by both James and Lucretia Mott, did not, ironically, allow women to hold positions of leadership until 1871. And only in 1878 were women allowed to speak at the annual International Peace Conference meeting in Paris. 27. Alonso (1993, p. 45). 28. Alonso (1993, p. 63). 29. Women from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, and Italy were in attendance. Over 180 women from England had petitioned to come, but last-minute closure of the North Sea prevented their transport. See Addams et al. (2003) for more on the conference. 30. After four days, the women were allowed to continue on their journey, the Channel now deemed safe enough for passage. Addams, Emily Balch, and Alice Hamilton wrote about their experience in Addams et al. (2003). 31. Noted in Addams et al. (2003, p. 10). 32. See Patterson (2008, p. 63). 33. Addams et al. (2003, p. 14). 34. Patterson (2008, p. 81).

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35. Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, HOR, 64th Congress 1st Session, Jan. 11, 1916, p. 17. 36. Patterson (2008, p. 183). 37. Livermore professed that she felt much in common with the Filipino people who were unable to vote. See Sneider et al. (2008, ch. 4) on the relationship between U.S. expansionism in the Philippines and women’s fight for suffrage in the United States. 38. Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 9). 39. Her new husband, the abolitionist Henry Stanton, was a man unusual enough in his own right that he married a women set on omitting the promise to obey from her wedding vows. 40. Cady Stanton would later recall that “Mrs. Mott was to me an entirely new revelation of womanhood,” someone of “sufficient confidence in herself to have and hold an opinion in the face of opposition . . . .” 41. At the time, Seneca Falls was not considered a particularly influential event in the women’s movement. Rather, it would take decades for a narrative to emerge about the centrality of both the Seneca Falls meeting and its organizers to the march for women’s rights and this narrative formed in large part because of the storytelling efforts of Mott, Stanton, and Anthony themselves. See Tetrault (2014). 42. Stanton’s first cousin Gerrit Smith was nominated as the Liberty Party candidate for president in 1848 and was perhaps the first man to publicly call for women’s suffrage in the United States at the National Liberty Convention on June 14–15, 1848. 43. The demand for the vote was considered by far the most controversial. Stanton’s husband left town so as not to be tarnished by the farcical proceedings and even Stanton’s Mott begged Stanton to remove the suffrage clause, exclaiming “Why Lizzie, I fear thee will make us ridiculous!” 44. McMillen (2008). 45. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/dougl92.html. 46. Douglass, Stanton, and Anthony together would pursue universal suffrage for all adult citizens for years after Seneca Falls along with the abolition of slavery. But debates over the shifting basis of the vote in the lead up to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would cause a major rift. Stanton, Anthony, and others within the women’s movement allied themselves with opponents of black suffrage, employing some of the worst racist rhetoric of the day, in their efforts to ensure that the basis of the vote was not along gender lines and that all men and women would obtain that vote at the same time. Their approach also caused a major schism within the women’s movement. See Free (2015). 47. Quoted in Hoganson (2000, p. 37). 48. Ignoring the indirect price women paid as a result of war, Roosevelt thought that the ability to fight should dictate the ability to vote. He was not alone in this calculation. See Daniels (1996).

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49. Eventual Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch’s brother was one who felt at sea, asking her what those who single-mindedly favored peace but opposed suffrage were supposed to do. See Patterson (2008, p. 60). 50. See Liddington (1991, p. 54). 51. Quoted in Patterson (2008, p. 59). 52. Quoted in Patterson (2008, p. 46). 53. Van Voris, Jacqueline. Carrie Chapman Catt: a public life. Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life, p. 138. 54. Ibid., p. 140. 55. Following the ratification of the Nineteen Amendment, Carrie Chapman Catt would quickly return to the cause of peace. In 1924, she co-founded the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW). 56. See Hoganson (2000, p. 20). 57. Many of the ideas proposed by the women at The Hague—like the creation of an internationally recognized space for cooperation and arbitration— found their way into the peace deal and influenced international institutions that endure to this day.

Chapter 3 1. Henshall (1993, p. 169). 2. Ibid., p. 153. 3. 29,383 respondents replied that they “did not know”; 77,413 (29,940 men and 47,473 women) respondents replied “no”; and 199,426 (106,560 men and 92,866 women) respondents replied “yes.” For analysis purposes, we only evaluate those who responded “yes” or “no.” 4. See Appendix p. 000 for analysis of data on willingness to fight around the world. 5. See in particular Lansford et al. (2012). A debate exists on whether men are more or less likely to employ indirect aggression. Influential scholarship argues that girls only appear more likely to employ indirect aggression because they are more verbally expressive. Men eventually catch up on indirection aggression. See Archer (2004); Björkqvist et al. (1992); Crick and Grotpeter (1995). 6. Mike Rowbottom. “ ‘Lightning’ Bolt storms to record in 100 metres,” Independent UK, June 2, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/ athletics/lightning-bolt-storms-to-record-in-100-metres-838174.html. 7. Stewart Maclean, “Claims emerge that South Africa’s female 800m hope Caster Semenya is really a MAN!” Daily Mail, August 19, 2009, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-1207661/Worldathletics-sensation-Claims-emerge-South-Africas-female-800m-hopeCaster- Semenya-really-MAN.html. 8. William Lee Adams, “Could This Women’s World Champ Be a Man?” Time, August 21, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,19177 67,00.html. 9. “SA threatens ‘war’ over Semenya,” BBC Sport, September 11, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/8249948.stm.

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10. “What is Intersex?” Intersex Society of North America https://isna.org/faq/what _is_intersex/. There are many different ways a person can be born intersex— sometimes, they are born with XXY chromosomes, commonly referred to as Klinefelter syndrome. Other intersex people may have male-typical exterior anatomy, but primarily female-typical interior anatomy. Some cells may have a mix of both XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes. Still others may have receptors that are unable to circulate testosterone, despite the presence of XY chromosomes, while others may develop genitals that straddle the male-female binary, such as an enlarged clitoris or a bifurcated scrotum. And sometimes, these distinctions may develop later on, when a child reaches young adulthood. Eliot (2009, p. 75). 11. Dreger (1998). To further complicate this process, some research has found that it is not the whole Y chromosome that contributes to sex determination, but just a small region, called the “sex-determining region of the Y chromosome,” or SRY for short. A mutation in the SRY gene can lead to men with XX chromosomes or women with XY chromosomes, in defiance of biological sex divisions. Eliot (2009, p. 71). 12. McDermott and Hatemi (2011). 13. Russell Goldman, “Here’s a List of 58 Gender Options for Facebook Users.” ABC News, February 13, 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/ 02/heres-a-list-of-58-gender-options-for-facebook-users. 14. Holz (2018). 15. Andrew Flores, “How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States.” Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, June 2016, https://williams institute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/. 16. See for example, psychiatrist Peter Neubauer’s research, which separated twins and triplets at birth and placed them in homes of varying socioeconomic levels, made infamous by the documentary film Three Identical Strangers. 17. Kuper (2009). 18. Menand (2019). 19. Merkatz (1998, p. 78). 20. “NIH Inclusion Outreach Toolkit: How to Engage, Recruit, and Retain Women in Clinical Research,” National Institutions of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health, https://orwh.od.nih.gov/toolkit/recruitment/ history#10. See Perez (2019). 21. Van den Bos et al. (2009); Lighthall et al. (2009). 22. Mather et al. (2010); Wickelgren (2010). 23. Lundeberg et al. (1994). 24. Johnson et al. (2006); Xanthe Scharff, “Only Women Can Stop the Apocalypse.” Foreign Policy, April 15, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/ 15/only-women-can-stop-the-apocalypse/. 25. Björkqvist (2018); Tapper and Boulton (2004); Hyde (1984); Whiting and Whiting (1975).

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26. Using experimental data, Brooks and Valentino (2011) find that the gender gap can be moderated under conditions related to political feminism, such as whether the war stakes are humanitarian rather than strategic. Indeed, Eichenberg (2016) also found evidence that women are more supportive of the use of force under humanitarian circumstances, and that during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the gender gap decreased as men became more sensitive to casualties. Chaney et al. (1998) find that different views on the use of force contribute to the gender gap in presidential elections. Eichenberg and Stoll (2012) found that women were less supportive of defense spending on average, but that men and women’s support for defense spending comoved over time and were responsive to similar factors. 27. In the extreme, women can also be perpetrators of violence, as the work of Cohen (2013) shows. 28. Lower (2013, p. 421). 29. Ibid., p. 372. 30. Ibid., p. 68. 31. Reese (2010, p. 46). 32. Lower (2013, p. 61). 33. “League of German Maidens (Bund Deutscher Madel),” BBC News, www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/51/a4456451.shtml. 34. Reese (2010, p. 46); Lower (2013, p. 57). 35. Reese (2010, p. 21). 36. Lower (2013, p. 354). 37. Rees (2014, p. 135). 38. Eichenberg (2017). This trend has continued beyond the end of Eichenberg’s timeline, even in a renewed era of concern over terrorism and the rise of the Islamic State. For example, a CNN/ORC poll taken in August 2015 asked respondents, “Do you favor or oppose the United States sending ground troops into combat operations against ISIS forces in Iraq or Syria?” 56% of men favored sending ground troops, while only 39% of women supported sending ground troops, a gap of seventeen percentage points, even during a political campaign that frequently highlighted terrorism. See http://www. pollingreport.com/isis.htm. 39. See, for example, Tessler and Warriner (1997); Cohen and Jung (2018). 40. Afro Barometer, “Kenyans Register Mixed Feelings about Devolution and KDF’s Withdrawal from Somalia,” available at: www.afrobarometer.org. Note that because Kenya was a democratic country with women’s suffrage at this time, we expect this difference in political attitudes to have an influence on policy. 41. Peking University, China National Studies Center, Beijing Social and Economic Development Tracking Questionnaire. 42. Alexis C. Madrigal, “Why Do Women Disapprove of Drone Strikes So Much More Than Men Do?” The Atlantic, July 25, 2013, https://www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/why-do-women-disapproveof-drone-strikes-so-much-more-than-men-do/278112/.

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43. See Eichenberg (2016); Brooks and Valentino (2011); McDermott (2015). Note that Brooks and Valentino use an experiment to show that women are more supportive of conflicts than men when the UN approves of the conflict or they are humanitarian in nature. Eichenberg shows, however, that while humanitarian concerns narrow the gender gap in real-world conflicts, men are still more supportive of the use of force. This may be because real-world uses of force that are framed in humanitarian terms tend to be framed as also having a security rationale. 44. The countries are the United States, Great Britain, Egypt, Japan, Israel, and Turkey. For a detailed description of this analysis, see Barnhart (2020). 45. See Barnhart (2020). 46. Fearon (1994); Tomz (2007); Trager and Vavreck (2011). 47. These findings come from data collected by Kertzer and Brutger (2015) and analyzed in Barnhart et al. (2020). This is consistent with findings at the interpersonal level that while men and women both feel anger to similar degrees, men are more compelled to violence for revenge.Wilkowski et al. (2012). 48. Barnhart et al. (2020). 49. King (2020, p. 4). 50. Bernasconi (2002). 51. Siderits et al. (1985). Even in these experiments, however, there is suggestive evidence that men were more aggressive in the aggressive role when they were asked to play that role first rather than second. In other words, women were less aggressive unless they were treating the men as the women had been treated by the men. It is interesting that the researchers do not interpret the results this way, perhaps because of a bias towards social role findings, in spite of their own data. 52. Zumwalt (2019, p. 38). 53. Ibid., p. 202. 54. For a lively account of Boas’s impact on contemporary culture, see King (2020). For a contrasting perspective, see Anderson (2019). 55. Perkins (1963, p. 435). 56. Zumwalt (2019, p. 50). 57. Mosse (1998, p. 18). 58. Ibid., pp. 21–3. 59. Ibid., p. 109. 60. Nagel (1998). 61. Enloe (1990, p. 45). 62. Nagel (1998, p. 246). 63. Ibid. 64. Hooper (1999, p. 479). 65. Nisbett and Cohen (1996). 66. Archer and Côté (2005). 67. Broidy et al. (2003); Nagin and Tremblay (1999); Baillargeon et al. (2007).

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68. See Campbell (2006) and Cross and Campbell (2011). Differing levels of testosterone in men and women have also been hypothesized to cause differences in aggressive behavior (Archer (1991); Book et al. (2001)). 69. Eagly and Steffen (1986). 70. Bettencourt and Miller (1996). 71. Li (2006). 72. Natalie Angier, “No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture.” New York Times, April 13, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/ no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html. 73. John Horgan, “Chimp Guy Knocks Baboon Guy’s Upbeat View of Human War.” Scientific American, July 24, 2017, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ cross-check/chimp-guy-knocks-baboon-guys-upbeat-view-of-human-war/. Note that the highest-ranking male primates are not just bullies. They also engage in more nurturing behavior after conflicts between third parties. See Romero et al. (2010). 74. Sapolsky and Share (2004). 75. Over time, however, male bees have adapted to this suicide mission, and developed ways to dislodge the severed endophallus from the queen bee. 76. Bateman (1948). 77. Birkhead and Møller (1998); Judson (2003). 78. Janicke et al. (2016). 79. See Archer and Côté (2005, p. 427). Note also that sex segregation in schools increases aggression for both boys and girls; this is hypothesized to also derive from increased competition for mates (Faris and Felmlee, 2011). 80. Cassidy et al. (2017). 81. Wilson et al. (2001). 82. Albert et al. (1992). 83. Albert et al. (1986); Beatty (1992). 84. Edwards (1969). 85. Eliot (2009). 86. Eliot (2009). 87. Berenbaum and Hines (1992); Hines et al. (2004). 88. Leveroni and Berenbaum (1998). 89. Catherine Dulac, “Neurobiology of Parenting Behavior,” Lecture Delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole, MA, https://mbl.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ac3bbabe4962-4f93-a7d0-aa5401545733. See Dulac and Torello (2003); Dulac et al. (2014); Hrdy (1979); Stowers et al. (2002); and Kimchi et al. (2007). 90. Eliot (2009). 91. Johnston and Hagberg (2007). 92. Makin and Porter (1989). 93. Weinberg et al. (1999). 94. Chaplin and Aldao (2013). 95. Eliot (2009).

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96. Vercelli (2004). In macaques, for example, Snyder-Mackler et al. (2016) found that social status played a vital role in shaping immune responses and gene expression with respect to health challenges. 97. Dana Blanton (August 14, 2019). “Fox News Poll: Most Back Gun Restrictions after Shootings, Trump Ratings Down.” Fox News.

Chapter 4 1. Grimshaw (2013). 2. Gage recognized her only crime was that of being a woman. The women of New Zealand were by no means the first to vote. As Stasavage (2020) notes, there are numerous examples of women participating in early democracies, though rates of participation declined with higher levels of governance. Iroquois women in later-day Canada, for instance, had the right to choose successors to office in their clans in the mid-1600s. They also attended political councils, though typically did not speak. As givers of life, it was thought that women should have a say in when life was taken in war and should have influence over efforts for peace. See Shoemaker (1991). Wagner (2011) notes that knowledge of the Iroquois government served as inspiration for early American suffragists like Cady Stanton and Gage. 3. As Banaszak (1996) notes, differences in language, religion, and politics impeded the formation of a national suffrage strategy in Switzerland, contributing to the relative delay of the adoption of women’s suffrage. 4. For more information, see the Appendix (p. 000). Of course, even if suffrage is on the books, this doesn’t mean that all citizens have safe and equal access to the polls. 5. Rousseau and Grieg (2021). Ticchi and Vindigni (2006) examines this relationship in the context of the extension of suffrage to men and the need for additional conscripts. Also Przeworski (2009). 6. As Stasavage (2020) notes, some of the countries that adopted suffrage in the era following World War I, such as Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, had not participated in the war effort, suggesting that war is not enough to explain the wave of women’s suffrage in this period. 7. Research on this topic has focused in large part on the adoption of suffrage by states within the United States. McConnaughy (2013) argued that the size of suffrage groups correlated with suffrage extension in different states in the United States. Braun and Kvasnicka (2013) and Banaszak (1996) do not find evidence for this claim. 8. McCammon and Campbell (2001). Banaszak (1996) also distinguishes women’s groups in the United States from those in Switzerland, where they used far less confrontational tactics. 9. See Teele (2018) and Teele (2014), which demonstrates these dynamics in the case of Britain. 10. The expansion of municipal voting to women occurred in Indonesia in 1905, though literacy requirements meant that only about 2% of women in the country were able to vote.

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11. Franceschet et al. (2018). 12. This excludes Vatican City which does officially vote on church leadership, but not on broader political matters. 13. “Survey Finds British behind Chamberlain,” New York Times, October 19, 1938. 14. As Gamboa and López (2019) note, the fear of suffrage’s effects was so great that some countries employed municipal elections as a test case. In Chile, for instance, women received the right to vote in local elections in 1934. Observers watched to see if women’s votes would shift the balance of power in new political directions. Only once it became clear that women’s votes would roughly mimic the existing distribution of votes in male-only parliamentary elections was suffrage expanded to the national level—in 1949. 15. Charles Worcester Clark, “Woman Suffrage, Pro and Con,” The Atlantic, March 1890. 16. Because early voting data by gender is lacking in most places, we can only form rough estimates about the rates at which early women voters turned out. Data presented by Duverger (1955) suggests that early turnout of women across Europe and Australia lagged that of men by more than 10%. Corder and Wolbrecht (2016) find similar patterns in ten American states. But the evidence also suggests that while the gender gap in voter turnout varied significantly across countries in early elections, the gap closed over time in most places within a few decades, a fact which Inglehart and Norris (2000) and others view as evidence for a process of socialization in which women were acculturated to the political sphere. See also Andersen (1996) and Wolbrecht and Corder (2020). 17. Recent work has shown that political and social context matters in who turns out to vote. Skorge (2021) shows that women’s early participation in early Norwegian elections was enhanced by the switch from a voting system of plurality to one of proportional representation in which elites were incentivized to mobilize new women voters to gain seats. Kim (2019) also shows how direct democracy increased women’s sense of political efficacy as well as turn out. 18. Lott and Kenny (1999). 19. Mississippi was the last state that existed at the time to officially ratify the amendment in March of 1984. 20. Addams (1906). 21. This equated to roughly 20,000 child deaths nationwide. Miller (2008). 22. Kose et al. (2020). Carruthers and Wanamaker (2015) find that one-third of the significant increase in spending that occurred between 1920 and 1940 can be attributed to women’s suffrage. 23. See Abrams and Settle (1999). 24. Krogstrup and Wälti (2011). 25. Aidt and Dallal (2008). 26. Wolbrecht and Corder (2020).

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27. Ansolabehere and Hersh (2011); Böhm et al. (2010). 28. Public opinion can vary considerably by context. But Stimson (1999) shows that there are common dispositions among the public that can be tracked over time, even if there are finer-grained variations when comparing individual surveys. 29. On public opinion and immigration policy in Britain, see Jennings (2009). 30. See Achen et al. (2017). According to Monroe (1998), policy outcomes in the United States corresponded with majority opinion in about 63% of policies from the period 1960–79 and in about 55% of policies from 1980 to 1993. 31. See Page and Shapiro (1983). Politicians shape the opinion of the people through messaging and the media. See Aldrich et al. (2006). But public opinion and policy is a two-way street. 32. Soroka and Wlezien (2010). Similar patterns have been found for health care spending and education spending within the United Kingdom and Canada. Research on the United States shows that elected officials at the national (Erikson et al. (1993, 2002)), state (Stimson et al. (1995)), and municipal (Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2014)) levels respond to the policy preferences of the electorate. 33. See Teele (2018, 60–2). 34. See Teele (2018, ch. 3) for an account of the political machinations and estimates of their effects. 35. McCrillis (1998, p. 19). 36. See Thane (2003) and Fawcett (2011). 37. McCrillis (1998). 38. As Teele (2018, 79) notes, this universal adult suffrage extension did not correspond with conservative electoral success. 39. There has been an active debate in the field about the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy, particularly in the United States. Some argue that public opinion tends to be shaped by or ignored by politicians. Converse (1964). Others argue that public opinion will constrain the foreign policy of some presidents but not others. See e.g. Foyle (1999); Aldrich and Borgida (1989). 40. Almond (1956). Also Gilens (2012). 41. Lindsay O. Graham, Republican Senate candidate in South Carolina, quoted in the New York Times, September 21, 2002. 42. In extreme cases, politicians can manipulate electorates to get what they want. But this is risky—and the political leader has to really want it. Consider, for instance, the lengths that U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevent went to to bring the United States into the Second World War. Arguably, he made U.S. arms convoys to Europe increasingly vulnerable to German attack and provoked the first strike by Japan at Pearl Harbor. These actions were necessary because of the relatively isolationist mood in the U.S. electorate. And they worked. But the electorate was hardly diametrically opposed to war, as we shall see in the next chapter. Such actions also

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

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demonstrate the high barriers that leaders need to overcome—even risking charges of treason—to go against the public will on war and peace. In this sense, the case demonstrates how very constraining public opinion is on these matters. For discussion of this case, see Schuessler (2010); Trachtenberg (2013); Reiter (2012); and see also Baum and Potter (2015); Reiter and Stam (2002). The results reported in this chapter are based on extensive statistical analyses. Those seeking complete descriptions of all data, statistical methods, and results referred to in this chapter should also consult our article entitled, “The Suffragist Peace,” co-authored with Elizabeth Saunders and Allan Dafoe, published in the academic journal International Organization in 2020 and the related appendix, which can be found at http://joslynbarnhart.com. Marshall et al. (2002). See Paxton (2000). For our measures of democracy, we used the Polity IV dataset to locate regime type on a spectrum between fully autocracies and high democracies. The size of the electorate is one of many factors included in the measure of democracy but, as Paxton (2008) notes, female suffrage is often considered within this measure. For robustness, we conducted our analysis on a measure of democracy that omitted the political participation component and found similar results. See Appendix (p. 000) for further description. “Picking a fight” amounts to initiating an international crisis by threatening, displaying, or using force against another country. There are those that quibble with this statement. Some claim there are many close cases—that Spain’s leaders were elected democratically when they went to war with the United States in 1898. See Peceny (1997). Tickner and True (2018) note how long it took for feminist activism to take hold and that in World War I, many suffragists supported the war, suggested that activism surrounding suffrage and feminism in a particular period is separate from the political processes we describe here. Ticchi and Vindigni (2006) argue that suffrage has often been extended as elites prepare for war, though the principal has been “one man, one vote, one gun.” Teele (2014). At most, Teele argues that war played an indirect role by giving rise to a broad coalition cabinet whose members thought they might gain political power by attracting women’s votes. Some have argued that suffrage was made more likely by the entrance of women into the workforce during both world wars. Participation in the war effort and workforce may have altered the image of women as mentally inferior and unable to responsible cast their votes. See Acemoglu and Robinson (2006). Pinker (2012). See Hudson et al. (2012); Caprioli (2003); Hudson et al. (2020).

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55. In the appendix,we describe other analyses that relate to the questions, including fixed effects regressions and temporal controls. 56. We examine numerous additional alternative mechanisms in the Online Appendix which accompanies our article. See www.joslynbarnhart.com. 57. Przeworski (2009). 58. Mueller (2007). 59. Inglehart et al. (2015). 60. Human Security Project Report 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20090 221074733/ http://humansecurityreport.info/. See also Freedman (2014); Pinker (2012); and cf. Braumoeller (2019).

Chapter 5 1. Over 700,000 copies of the sheet music to this song were sold in the first eight weeks of its release. Despite his strong interest, Roosevelt was not nominated by the Republican party in 1916. Quoted in Seitz (2018). 2. Ohio and Nebraska both passed bills to allow women to vote in presidential elections in 1917, but these bills were soon thereafter overturned. 3. Grimes (1967); Brown (1958). This expectation was particularly extended to alcohol consumption amongst men. As Grimes (1967, p. 70) has described the perception of women, “Women were for law and order and opposed to vice . . . and the starting place of vice was the saloon.” The perception that women’s suffrage would lead to temperance led to the mobilization of opposition campaigns by liquor companies in states across the country. See Teele (2018, p. 447). 4. See Teele (2018) who argues that the timing was too dispersed to allow for an argument about cultural shifts. 5. As Teele (2018, p. 456) notes, the year in which women were granted the right to own their own property, keep their own wages, and own their own business was on average later in the West than it was in other regions of the United States. See also Braun and Kvasnicka (2013); Beeton (1986); Lewis (2011). 6. On the political environment, see Teele (2018). On strategies, see McCammon and Campbell (2001) who shows that suffrage activists in the West distinctly focused more on persuading politicians directly than on mobilizing public support. This strategy was less likely to arouse public opposition to the constitutional change. See also Mead (2006); McDonagh and Price (1985). Western groups employed different rhetoric, justifying their cause in terms of the nurturing qualities that women would bring into public life rather than in terms of the moral need for “equality” and “rights.” McCammon and Campbell (2001); Banaszak (1996). 7. He had garnered more than 50% of the vote in only eleven states, all of which were Democratic strongholds in the deep South. 8. In the midterm elections in 1914, progressive candidates were shut out of all seats in Congress but one. Roosevelt himself noted that by 1914, “the

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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people as a whole are heartily tired of me and my views.” Link and Leary (1971, p. 2246). See Harris and Sadler (1978) for more details. Before Wilson called for the expedition, the Senate introduced a motion authorizing it in hopes of prodding Wilson into action in response to the Columbus raid. See Neiberg (2016, p. 173). Congressional Record, 64th Congress, 1st Session, 1916, Vol. 53, p. 1315. Beatson (1961, pp. 45–6). Ibid., pp. 2271–81. As Link notes, in that this platform outlined the argument for internationalism as a basis of peace, it stands as one of the most significant documents in American political history. Link (2015, p. 2253). Quoted in Link and Leary (1971, p. 2254). Link (2015, p. 46). Quoted in Link and Leary (1971, p. 2254). “Do you want your boy to go to hell? If you don’t, vote for Wilson,” read one mailer intended for mothers. These mailers were initially sent to homes in Ohio, where women were not able to vote and where the Democrats believed they had no chance of winning. Campaign managers expected the peace issue to be so potent among women, however, that wives and daughters around the country would be able to convince men to vote for Wilson and they believed that word would get out to women voters in the West where it was more expensive to campaign actively. Ibid. “Illinois Depends on Women’s Votes,” New York Times, October 24, 1916. “Democrats Appeal to Women of Ohio: Influence on Voters of Wives and Mothers Believed to be Potent on Peace Issue: Republicans Badly Sacred,” New York Times, October 22, 1916. New York Times, October 22, 1916. See “Women for Wilson as America’s Hope: Good News from West,” New York Times, October 22, 1916. Link and Leary (1971, p. 119). That Wilson gave one of the few highprofile speeches of the campaign to women in Illinois was indicative of how important women were perceived to be to his strategy. A straw poll conducted shortly after the speech suggested the campaign’s approach was working—a majority of women across Illinois planned to vote for Wilson, even if the men in their district did not. The same poll reported that “if reports from all parts of the State are to be relied upon,” the argument that President Wilson had kept the country out of war had made “a deep impression on the women here, as in other States.” New York Times, October 24, 1916. Link (2015, p. 134). Neiberg (2016, pp. 176–8). As William Jennings Bryan put it, “Mr. Roosevelt is still waging war on Mexico and Germany, but shells are falling in the camp of one Charles Evans Hughes.” Quoted in Doenecke (2011, p. 213). According to Neiberg

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

notes (2016, p. 174), even some more pacifist Republicans feared the election of Hughes because they assumed his likely advisors wanted “war at any price.” Bryan specifically argued, in his tour of nineteen states throughout the West, that U.S. military involvement in the European war would be a “certain prospect” if Hughes won. “Democrats Appeal to Women of Ohio: Influence on Voters of Wives and Mothers Believed to be Potent on Peace Issue: Republicans Badly Sacred,” New York Times, October 22, 1916. Pusey (1951, p. 360). “Hughes Shares News with Family Group: Asleep as First News of Victory Comes In, then Joins in Happy Dinner with Wife and Children,” Indianapolis Star, November 8, 1916, p. 2, https://search. proquest.com/docview/751806152?accountid=14512. “President-Elect Hughes and His Charming Family,” Detroit Free Press. November 8, 1916, p. 1, https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 566060215?accountid=14512; She Becomes “The First Lady of the Land” March 4 Next. Washington Post, November 12, 1916. “Vindication of National Honor, Says Roosevelt: Will Make No Recommendations to Hughes, He Asserts,” Hartford Courant, November 8, 1916, p. 1-a16, https://search.proquest.com/docview/556412451? accountid=14512; “‘Wonderful!’ Verdict of Republican Women,” New York Tribune. November 8, 1916, p. 5. Available from: https://search. proquest.com/docview/575662195?accountid=14512. At the time, elections were won with 266 electoral college votes. Wilson won with his highest margins outside of the confederacy in the West, where he received 60.7% of the vote in Colorado and 57.2% in Arizona. He won the states of Utah and Wyoming, states deemed weeks earlier by The Nation as “safely Republican states if any are so,” by margins of 58.8% and 55%. November 15, 1916. Link (2015, p. 162). Of the twelve states that had granted women the vote, all but Oregon and Illinois voted for Wilson. Oregon voted for Hughes by only a margin of roughly six thousand votes. November 10, 1916. November 11, 1916. Vol. 9, p. 31. November 8. The Emporia Gazette, also out of Topeka, similarly credited women’s suffrage in the West for Wilson’s victory, as did many others. See Beatson (1961) for similar headlines from other states. See the Literary Digest, vol. 53 (November 18, 1916), p. 1313. p ≤ .001. This compares the combined votes for Taft and Roosevelt in 1912 with the votes for Hughes in 1916. See Beatson (1961); Cooper. Jr. (2009); and Link and Leary (1971, p. 2269). Also the Sacramento Union, November 15, 1916; Harper’s Weekly,

notes

39. 30. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

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November 20, 1916; San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 1916; Los Angeles Express, November 11, 1916; Literary Digest, November 15, 1916; Seattle Post Intelligencer, November 16, 1916, amongst many others. See the New York Times, November 12, 1916. Ibid. An estimated 70,000 Republican women in Kansas voted for Wilson for fear of war in the event of a Hughes election. Reporters concluded that the states where the slogan appealed to “a moral sentiment were chiefly States where women won.” See Harvey (1998); Andersen (1996); Cott (1987). Corder and Wolbrecht (2016) estimate, for instance, substantial turnout gaps by gender in early elections from 1920–36, though these estimates are based on limited data from ten states not in the western United States. They also find, however, significant variation across cases. Duverger (1955) finds some large gender gaps in early voting in other nations, though more recent work, like Skorge (2021) finds much smaller gaps in some European countries. Evidence suggests that turnout increases with years voting, though turnout rates for men also appear to increase with the length of time women have been able to vote. See Corder and Wolbrecht (2006). Gerber et al. (2003) argues that voting is a learned behavior achieved through socialization. Stanton et al. (1902, p. 952) cites evidence that the number of registered women voters in Utah lagged behind registered by men by less than 2,000 votes in 1900 while the number of women who voted was roughly only 1,500 less than men in the 1900 election. The notion that women could—for the first time ever—sway a national election given the electoral arithmetic was not lost on leading suffragists Alice Paul when speaking at the Women’s party founding convention in 1916. States where women could vote, she noted, constituted nearly onefourth of the electoral college and more than one-third of the necessary votes to elect a president. See Sainsbury (1999). Corder and Wolbrecht (2016). States in the West also moved to integrate women into party political structures soon after suffrage. Both Wyoming and Utah sent women to party conventions in the 1900 election. Numerous women delegates from western states, including California and Colorado, attended the Republican and Democratic party conventions in 1916. See Sainsbury (1999). New York Times reporters estimated that women in California, for example, voted for Wilson three to one so a 5% higher margin is a conservative estimate. The on-average difference in the support for war between men and women is often found to be significantly higher than 5%. See, e.g., Barnhart (2020). Corder and Wolbrecht (2016) find that women in nonwestern communities made up far more than 8% of the electorate in 1920, with the exception of West Virginia, in an election where war and peace were not on the ballot. Even if the percentage of women voting for Wilson

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50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

notes was only two percentage points higher than the percentage voting for Hughes, women would have had to constitute 20% of the electorate to be decisive. The New York Times editors perceived that the efforts of women’s groups backfired as women reportedly recoiled from the suggestion that they would be told by other elite women or their husbands how to vote. They concluded, based on their nationwide dispatches, that “the dream of solidifying women as a sex and swinging her vote this way and that at the order of female political leaders is shattered forever. . . . The women voted without regard either to how the women politicians bade them or to how their own men folks voted.” Woodrow Wilson, who would eventually oversee the nationwide legalization of women’s suffrage, had long been a consistent opponent. He first voted in support of women’s suffrage within a New Jersey referendum on women’s suffrage in 1915. This vote did not convince leading women’s groups in the lead up to the 1916 election of his commitment to women’s suffrage at the national level. The Woman’s Peace Party, for instance, “terrorized” the Democratic convention, threatening the weight of the 4 million voters they could mobilize in support of Hughes. The NWP would protest the White House for thirty months from 1917 until the national amendment was passed, with one protestor labeling him “Kaiser Wilson” and equating the plight of American women with the German citizens living under autocracy that Wilson felt it necessary to free. See Ibid. Levine (1987). See The Commoner, June 1915, p. 7 and July 1915, p. 15. Also Link (2015, p. 161). The Commoner, December 1916, pp. 17, 19. Also see Levine (1987) and Link (2015, p. 161). Republican Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin concluded that Wilson would have to accept the outcome of the election for what it was: “a clear mandate from the American people to hold steadfastly to his course against war.” Quoted in Link (2015, p. 162). One Republican pundit, smarting at the success of the peace issue, mocked those voters to whom the peace issue appealed, with some questioning whether the “sordid, fat contented West” was still American and others suggesting that those in the western states would benefit from a “course in patriotism” so as to disabuse them of the notion that “the loss of national self-respect is to be condoned if it is accompanied by peace.” Quoted in Beatson (1961, p. 57). United States Congressional Record, 65th Congress, April 5, 1916. Ibid. New York Times, April 4, 1916. Baker (1922, p. 258). Quoted in Link (2015, p. 392).

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60. Quoted in Axelrod (2018, p. 42). Although war was the means, Wilson’s eventual decision to wage it has also been understood as a sign of his greater commitment to peace as well as his desire to ensure American leadership in a post-war world and, as Tooze (2015, p. 82) notes, to preserve the “future of ‘white supremacy on this planet.’ ” See also Kennedy (2008, p. 80). Wilson believed that achieving a “peace without victory”—or a peace that did not involve the victor imposing its will upon the vanquished—would be essential to avoiding another war. Enforcing a peace outcome in which defeated states were stripped of their rights and voice would engender humiliation, and “leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” Senate address, January 22, 1917. Immediately following the vote for war, Wilson wrote to the warring parties inquiring about their terms of peace. Link (2015, p. 137). 61. See Bemis (1955, pp. 542–3). 62. Hall (1995, p. 16). 63. The group included, among others, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and anti-Mexican activist Albert Fall. Elihu Root had been favored by many Republican elites for the nomination in 1916, but it was feared he wouldn’t win any state west of the Mississippi. See Doenecke (2011, p. 201). See Hall (1995) on this period of tension. 64. Ibid., p. 23. 65. Ibid., p. 58. 66. Belgium, Germany, and the United States had extended the vote in the aftermath of World War I. Russia also had women’s suffrage on the books, though the country did not allow elections. 67. In 1918, the United Kingdom had extended suffrage to almost 9 million women, thereby maintaining a male majority among the voting-age population of 3 million people. In 1928, women were given equal voting rights, which meant a female majority of 2 million in the voting-age population. 68. Gottlieb (2016, p. 163). 69. McDonough (1998, p. 66). 70. This thirteen-point difference can be distinguished at the p < .0001 level. 71. All British polling described in this section, except where noted, is from the British Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup) Polls, 1938–46, available from the UK Data Service. It is interesting to note that the gender gap on support for Chamberlain almost precisely mirrors the gender gap at the time on support for the death penalty in Britain. Cross-nationally, support for the death penalty correlates with support for more aggressive foreign policies (Stein 2015). 72. Gottlieb (2016, p. 187). They even noted a systematic difference between surveys conducted in the evening, when men were at home, and those conducted during the day when they weren’t. 73. Ibid., p. 219.

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74. Ibid., pp. 220–3. 75. See Gottlieb (2016, p. 228). During this time, many women claimed not to have knowledge of or interest in politics, and one woman even told an interviewer during the Munich Crisis: “I don’t believe in foreigners.” Nevertheless, certain issues did compel great numbers of women, and in 1938, the great issues of the day, across genders, concerned foreign policy. According, Eleanor Rathbone, then a new member of parliament: “The sphere of effort into which enfranchised women have thrown themselves in the greatest number and with the greatest intensity of interest is the sphere of internationalism.” 76. Ibid, p. 199. 77. Quoted in Gottlieb (2016, p. 116). 78. Harold Nicolson, “Pale Cast of Thought,” Manchester Guardian, November 4, 1938. 79. Ball (2013, p. 53). Some women certainly saw the danger posed by fascism. This was true of the anti-war suffragist, Margery Corbett Ashby, who wrote at the time: “I am sure we should have to contemplate the possibility of the use of war to stop war” (Gottlieb 2016, p. 30). 80. Self (2017, p. 423). 81. Press (2005). 82. Seton-Watson (1989, p. 381). 83. Gottlieb (2016, p. 93). 84. Wilson (2008, pp. 466–7). 85. Matlock, Jr. (2005, p. 72). 86. Wilson (2008, p. 469). 87. Wilson (2008, p. 471). 88. Dobrynin (1995, p. 544). 89. Matlock, Jr. (2005, p. 33). Note that President Reagan had often called for arms control in the past, for instance in the “evil empire” speech itself: “to keep America strong and free, while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals and one day, with God’s help, their total elimination.” 90. Miles (2018). Note, however, that the president does not appear to have felt secure in U.S. strength. During his first term, his anxieties about Soviet capabilities are well documented. In his diary from the year before, he noted: “We are still dangerously behind the Soviets & getting farther behind” (Reagan 2007, pp. 134–5). 91. Fischer (1997b, p. 25). See also Fischer (1997a); Oberdorfer (1998). 92. Morris (2011, p. 498). 93. Mann (2009); Risse-Kappen (1991). 94. Fischer (1997a, pp. 53–4). 95. Dobrynin (1995, p. 480). 96. Fischer (1997a, p. 56). 97. Vavreck (2009, p. 81). 98. Fischer (1997a, p. 60); Miles (2018, p. 282).

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99. Dusko Doder, “Times Are Tough for Jim and Sally, but They Can’t Tell Ivan and Anya,” Washington Post, January 22, 1984, https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/01/22/times-are-tough-forjim-and-sally-but-they-cant-tell-ivan-and-anya/71885b01-3870-4bee9194-4cc0ba6904f4/. 100. Matlock, Jr. (2005, p. 89). 101. Matlock, Jr. (2005, p. 86). 102. Fischer (1997a, 57–8). 103. Miles (2018, p. 282). 104. Dobrynin (1995, p. 545); Dobrynin (1995, p. 564). 105. Vavreck (2009). 106. American National Election Studies, 1984 Continuous Monitoring Study. 107. The president’s secretary of defense thought that “The president believed that it was his role to inform public opinion,” not follow it. The national security adviser Richard Allen, a long-time friend of the president’s, agreed: “Ronald Reagan, as I have known him, has never been a man who was led by public opinion polls, but always sought to lead public opinion.” See Fischer (1997a, p. 60). Note, however, that on occasions when he did try to adopt a more accommodating policy, he was discouraged by his more hawkish advisors. For instance, he proposed writing to Andropov “If we can agree on mutual, verifiable reductions in the number of nuclear weapons we both hold, could this not be a first step toward elimination of all such weapons? What a blessing this would be for all the people we both represent,” but members of the National Security Council convinced him this would be poor negotiating technique (Schultz (1993, p. 433)). This points back to the election as a necessary impetus for a real change in tone as opposed to merely continued good intentions. The edited version of Reagan’s letter was “formulaic . . . end[ing] any chance of a rapprochement with Andropov” (Morris 2011, p. 488). 108. American National Election Studies, 1984 Continuous Monitoring Study, data from January through June, 1984. 109. Zaller (1992). 110. Improving relations was a consistent Soviet goal for a variety of reasons, including economic ones (Brooks and Wohlforth 2007). In fact, a case can be made that only U.S. actions and hard-line rhetoric prevented an earlier end to the Cold War (Wilson 2008; Evangelista 2002). While the Soviets had long been interested in arms reduction agreements, they had recently suspended all talks because of U.S. nuclear missile deployments in Europe. 111. Dobrynin (1995, p. 546). 112. U.S. political elites had their own opinions about the sincerity of Reagan’s stance. Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told the Soviets that “Reagan believed his conciliatory tone was enough to placate the voters.” Prominent U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s analysis was similar, but he argued that the Soviets should take Reagan up on his proposals to test his

206

113.

114. 115. 116.

117.

118.

119.

notes sincerity and to press for action during the campaign in areas where progress seemed possible. The pressures of the campaign might make it awkward for Reagan to refuse their attempts at reconciliation. Dobrynin (1995, p. 548). It is interesting to note that the Soviet response would have been even greater if the Soviets had not been so mistrustful of Reagan. Thus, even pure electioneering can have salient impacts on rivalries. Dobrynin (1995, p. 555); and cf. Matlock, Jr. (2005, p. 100). Dobrynin (1995, p. 558). Some have argued that this demonstrates that the election had little to do with Reagan’s changed foreign policy position because he did not revert to type after the election. Fischer (1997a, p. 65). As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock has put the point: “Public statements are not so easy to circumvent, for if actions by agencies or individuals in an administration seem inconsistent, this is normally noticed by journalists, questions are asked, and bureaucrats do not relish being suspected of resisting the president’s policy. Therefore, policy speeches are important not only to explain to the public what a president is doing, but to communicate to officials in the government what the president really wants. Disputes over the concrete application of broad principles continue, but it is much more difficult to attack the principles themselves” (Matlock, Jr. 2005, p. 85). These “audience costs” may have created an additional incentive to search for agreements that would not have existed without the rhetoric of 1984. See Fearon (1994); Tomz (2007). Dobrynin (1995, p. 565); and cf. Brown (1997).

Chapter 6 1. LaurenHarrison, “The Men-Only Club,” Foreign Policy, April 3, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/the-men-only-club/; Harry S. Truman, “Address on the Occasion of the Signing of the North Atlantic Treaty,” April 4, 1949, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/ document/address-on-the-occasion-of-the-signing-of-the-north-atlantictreaty/. 2. See Krook and O’Brien (2012); Jalalzai and Krook (2010); Jalalzai (2013); Paxton et al. (2020). 3. For exceptions, see Bashevkin (2018). 4. This number is calculated by using the LEAD data set, which follows Archigos, and hand coding between the years of 2005 and 2020. In hand coding, we follow LEAD/Archigos in identifying the “effective leader.” We do not code the ceremonial position, which in some cases may be the president, or in other cases may be the prime minister. Per the Archigos codebook, “In parliamentary regimes, the Prime Minister is coded as the leader, in presidential systems, the President. In regimes that combine elements of both parliamentary and presidential systems”—e.g., Finland,

notes

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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France,and Portugal—“we code the president as the leader since in these regimes presidents typically control foreign policy. In communist states we generally code the Chairman of the Party as the effective ruler” (Goemans et al., 2009). Parline database (https://data.ipu.org); The Women in Public Service Project (https://web.archive.org/web/20200217203020/data.50x50movement.org/ data). Carol Cohn, “The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles,” New York Times, January 5, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/ security-masculinity-nuclear-weapons.html. See also Barnes and O’Brien (2018a). The Women in Public Service Project (https://web.archive.org/web/20200 217203020/data.50x50movement.org/data). Heather Hurlburt, Elizabeth Weingarten, Alexandra Stark, and Elena Souris, “The Consensual Straitjacket: Four Decades of Women in Nuclear Security,” New America, March 5, 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/ political-reform/reports/the-consensual-straitjacket-four-decades-of-womenin-nuclear-security/#authors. “Women’s Participation in Peace Processes,” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/interactive/womens-participation-in-peace-processes. Towns and Niklasson (2017). O’Reilly et al. (2015); Krause et al. (2018). Pinker (2012, p. 511). Tickner et al. (1992, p. 59). David M. Shribman,“Hurrah for Margaret Chase Smith, a Pioneering Republican,” Wall Street Journal, January 2014, A.15. “A Chic Lady Who Fights: Margaret Chase Smith,” New York Times, January 28, 1964, p. 17. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–3, Vol. 5, Soviet Union, Memorandum of Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna, June 1961, Excerpts. Margaret Chase Smith’s September 21, 1961, Speech on the Senate Floor, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=qbDf6X2CoKwC&hl=en&pg= GBS.PA20623.w.10.0.0. James Reston, “President Not Clear on German Policies,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1961, p. F2. “World: Nikita, the Devil, & the Ballplayer,” Time, October 20, 1961, http: //content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872795,00.html. Winzola McLendon,“Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Khrushchev Reply to Women’s Peace Appeals: Peace Calls Made,” Washington Post, November 15, 1961, p. A1. “Oral History: Margaret Thatcher,” PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline\/gulf/oral/thatcher/1.html. Fraser (2011, p. 121); Cornelius Tacitus, “The Annals, Alfred John Church,” William Jackson Brodribb, Ed.

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23. Cassius Dio, Roman History, vol. LXII, p. 62. 24. Fraser (2011, p. 152); Lawson (2013). 25. Peter Landesman, “A Woman’s Work,” New York Times, September 5, 2002, p. 82, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/magazine/a-woman-s-work. html. 26. Ibid. 27. Malcolm G. A. Vale, “St. Joan of Arc,” Encyclopeadia Britannica, https:// www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Joan-of-Arc. 28. Rachel B. Vogelstein and Jamille Bigio, “Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations in Northern Ireland Made Them Less Likely to Fail,” Women around the World Blog, Council on Foreign Relations, April 17, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/blog/womens-participation-peace-negotiationsnorthern-ireland-made-them-less-likely-fail. 29. Barnes and O’Brien (2018b), for instance, show that male defense ministers are more likely to come to power in times of conflict. 30. Schramm and Stark (2020). 31. Caprioli (2000); Caprioli and Boyer (2001); Regan and Paskeviciute (2003); Koch and Fulton (2011). 32. Dube and Harish (2017). Note that this paper also uses the existence of a monarch’s sister as a second instrument. We view this instrument as less convincing because having a daughter—as opposed to the sex of the first born—could be correlated with having many children or with the desire to have a daughter, which in turn could be correlated with factors that relate to conflict behavior. As the researchers note, however, their results are similar for both instruments. 33. Post and Sen (2020). 34. “Obama Said That if Women Ran the World, There’s be Less War. Here’s the Research.” by Abigail S. Post, Washington Post, December 22, 2019. In fact, according to Post and Sen (2020), “women are nearly 17 percentage points more likely than their male counterparts to face resistance to their threats from international opponents.” 35. See Jalalzai (2008) on the conditions under which women are most likely to achieve executive authority. 36. Caprioli (2000, p. 63). Barnes (2016) argues that women are particularly effective in legislatures through collaborative legislative strategies. 37. We code conflict in a variety of different ways, using both a binary and count measure for conflict (Hostility Level 5 (War) in the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset). We code defensive conflicts using the SideB variable and initiator as SideA in MID. We also use the Gibler coding, the LEAD conflict variable, and the MIDs Originator and Revisionist codings for conflict initiation. Coefficients for the revisionist coding are statistically insignificant, whereas all other models are significant. See the online statistical appendix for details of these analyses. 38. Koch and Fulton (2011).

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39. One thing this design does not tell us is whether something else that is correlated with being an elected woman—not something about the place she was elected or the context she was elected into, but something about he—could be driving this result. It turns out that there is a plausible trait that is correlated with being an elected woman in the United States that might explain the finding: being a member of the Democratic party. It turns out that Democrats are also much more likely to vote for the use of force than Republicans and elected women are also much more likely to be Democrats. When we evaluate the effect of gender after controlling for the effect of party, we find that men and women are about as likely to vote for the use of force. This isn’t really surprising since most representatives vote with their parties. But this doesn’t tell us which effect—of gender or of party—is the primary one in a causal sense. It would seem like being a woman might affect which party you join, but joining a party is much less likely to influence one’s sex. This would seem to suggest that the effect of sex is the primary effect. Not so fast. Suppose women join a party for other reasons, but then end up going along with the party’s views on the use of force. It may be that the Democratic party is more likely to vote for the use of force and many of its members just happen to be women. Or it may be that the fact that there are more women elected as Democrats influences the nature of the party and the positions it takes such that it is more likely to vote for war. We don’t know whether being a woman or being a member of a political party is the causally prior effect— or whether neither are causal. What we do have fairly strong evidence for is that elected women have not been a stronger voice for peace than their male counterparts. 40. Another possibility is that causality goes in the opposite direction: countries with greater external threats elect fewer women. See Kang and Kim (2020). 41. A third explanation suggested by Dube and Harish (2017) is that women leaders are more likely to share responsibility with husbands than male leaders are to share responsibility with wives, thereby increasing the capacity of women leaders generally, including their capacity to make war. 42. The difference between elites and the general public is a subject of recent empirical work. Kertzer (2020), for example, challenges existing theory that attributes the elite-public gap on political attitudes to elite-level expertise. Instead, he finds that these differences are more often explained by the composition of this elite group, which is systematically different than the voting public with respect to traits like age or wealth. 43. Triger (2014, pp. 109, 112, 115). 44. Schramm and Stark (2020). 45. Klofstad et al. (2015); Gregory, Jr. and Gallagher (2002); Kreiman and Sidtis (2011). 46. Katie Heaney, “What Kind of Person Fakes Their Voice?” The Cut, March 21, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/why-did-elizabeth-holmes-usea-fake-deep-voice.html.

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47. Dietrich et al. (2019) examined changes in vocal pitch amongst men and women in Congress and found that women members of Congress speak with greater emotional intensity when they speak about women’s issues and that such emotional speech may affect other lawmakers’ behavior. 48. Dietrich et al. (2019). 49. To conduct this analysis, we first obtained a list (https://cawp.rutgers. edu/list-women-currently-serving-congress) of all the women in the 116th Congress https://www.congress.gov/members and all the men in the 116th Congress. We then randomly sampled 127 men (to match the number of current women in Congress) and combined the list of men and women in Congress to create a full dataframe of 252 senators and representatives. Data includes: state, district (if applicable), sex, party and position (senator or representative). We then compile links to YouTube floor speeches for all observations in the data. At the time of this analysis, four newer representatives (Kendra Horn, Susie Lee, Joe Cunningham, and Kim Schrier) did not have available floor speeches on YouTube, so we gathered regular policy interviews/speeches where they spoke uninterrupted for at least thirtysecond. We then convert the YouTube videos to audio files using the online software “ytmp3”. From these audio clips, we identify a thirty-second period where the speaker is uninterrupted, where possible the 0:15–0:45 second period so that we bypass the formalities of congressional speeches, and the speaker is likely already speaking about the focus of their address. In some cases this is not possible, due to, for example, the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the video. In these cases, we identify the next uninterrupted 30second period after the speaker has had time to “warm up.” Following prior research on politician pitch, we use the Praat program, a free voice analyzer commonly used in social science research. In Praat, we upload the audio clips and extract the pitch using “Analyse periodicity—To pitch,” with a pitch floor of 75.0 Hz and a pitch ceiling of 300 Hz, which covers the standard range for both men and women. We then Query the pitch object to get both the mean and standard deviation of the pitch object. Following the recording of these numbers, we compare the average to the ranges provided in the Voice Pitch Analyzer app. According to the app, a range from 85–180 Hz is typical for men and from 165 to 255 Hz is typical for women. This means that the ‘androgynous’ pitch range is between 165 and 180 Hz. We also create categories based on whether the number falls in the top, middle, or lower portion of the male range (85–164 Hz) and the female range (181–255 Hz). 50. See, for example, Zhang et al. (2021). 51. Charles Moore, “The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher,” Vanity Fair, November 18, 2011, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/margaret-thatcher-201112. 52. Moore (2013). 53. Kara Cooney, “Women Achieved Enormous Power in Ancient Egypt. What They Did With It Is a Warning for Today,” Time, October 18, 2018, https: //time.com/5425216/ancient-egypt-women-in-power-today/.

notes 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

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Klagsbrun (2017, p. 676). Cited in Jansen (2002, p. 1). Lawless (2004). Ayman and Korabik (2010); Heilman (2001); Schein (2001); Enloe (1990, pp. 97–8); Cohn (1987); Campbell (1992); Ruddick (1993); Elshtain (1995); Kinsella (2005); Sjoberg (2011, 2012). Bauer (2017). Schwartz and Blair (2020, p. 8). Ibid. Schultz (2005); Cukierman and Tommasi (1998); Trager and Vavreck (2011). Schultz (2005). Trager and Vavreck (2011). See Appendix (p. 000) for analysis of these data. Trager and Vavreck (2011). Dube and Harish (2017, p. 2583) argue that their finding that queens fight more than kings cannot be explained by the perceived weakness of queens because queens were more likely to initiate conflicts. In this, they are mistaken however, because they have not considered the full implications of the need for those perceived as weak to be tough. They note that if “queens were signaling [toughness], there should be larger effects on war aggression earlier in their reigns, when it would have been most valuable to send signals to maximally discourage future attacks. Yet we observe no such differential effect.” In fact, however, there is evidence that both genders have incentives to build reputation early on through aggressive behavior in the first years of office (Bertoli et al. 2016). Thus, the absence of an early difference between male and female rulers can be explained on other grounds. Barnes and O’Brien (2018b). Rachel B. Vogelstein, “Five Questions on Feminist Foreign Policy: Margot Wallström,” Women around the World Blog, Council on Foreign Relations, November 18, 2019, https://www.cfr.org/blog/five-questionsfeminist-foreign-policy-margot-wallstrom

Chapter 7 1. “Israel Honors Mothers of Lebanon Withdrawal,” New York Times, June 3, 2000. 2. Women made up a larger proportion of Israeli peace groups in the 1980s, according to Chazan (1991). Also see Svirsky (2004). Sasson-Levy (1992) argues that women are disproportionately represented in peace movements in Israel because they remain significantly underrepresented within formal politics and the political hierarchy. 3. Lieberfeld (2009a, p. 320). 4. L. Collins, “Ya’alon: Pullout Talk Pleases Hizbullah?,” Jerusalem Post, February 12, 1997.

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5. See Lieberfeld (2009a) on the role of the media in promoting the group. Also Helman (2001); Lieberfeld (2009a). 6. “Four Mothers” referred to the four biblical matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel. 7. “Mission Accomplished?: Israel’s “Four Mothers” and the Legacies of Successful Antiwar Movements” by Rachel Ben Dor and Daniel Lieberfeld, International Journal of Peace Studies, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring/ Summer 2008, page 86. 8. Nahmias herself had come to Israel from France on her own at age sixteen and had served in the military. 9. Leora Eren Frucht, “The Movement That Shaped the Lebanon Pullout,” Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2000. The claim was hard to deny outright given the year-long ceasefire observed by the PLO in northern Israel at the time of invasion. 10. Sharoni (1997) argues that women-led peace organizations in Israel that do not adopt maternal identities have been less effective at achieving policy change. Four Mothers were not the first Israeli peace organization to legitimize their participation in politics through their roles as mothers. Mothers Against Silence had taken this approach in the early 1980s. See Berkovitch (1997); Helman (1999). 11. Lemish and Barzel (2000); Berkovitch and Berqôvîč (1999). 12. Avihai Becker, “Sarah Would Have Told God ‘Forget It,”’ Ha’aretz, January 1998. 13. The movement did receive the support of some prominent individuals, including a former foreign minister and head of IDF Northern Command. 14. Halevi (1999); Sharoni (1998). 15. See Lieberfeld (2009b) for a discussion of other factors that facilitated the increasing success of the cause. 16. See Israeli National Election Survey, First Phase 1999, conducted between January 25 and March 7. This was composed of people who agreed to a “great extent” or “certain extent” that Israel should unilaterally withdraw immediately from Lebanon. 17. This was only the second election to directly elect the prime minister so all-Israeli interests like national security, rather than the parochial interests that had often governed most prior campaigns, could assume a more prominent place. 18. Deborah Sontag, “Issue of Troops in Lebanon Energizes Israeli Election,” New York Times, March 6, 1999. 19. Lieberfeld (2009a, p. 321). 20. For a detailed argument on the role of Four Mothers and public opinion in the 1999 election, see Lieberfeld (2009b). 21. See Lieberfeld (2009a) for examples. 22. May 28, 2000. 23. June 7, 2000. Also see June 1, 2000 and August 8, 2000; and, e.g., New York Times, July 7, 2000.

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24. Rachel Ben Dor. 25. Frucht, Leora Eren, “The Movement that Shaped the Lebanon Pullout,” Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2000. 26. Damon Tabor, “The Greater the Sinner,” New Yorker, March 7, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/general-butt-nakedthe-repentant-warlord. 27. Lydia Polgreen, “A Master Plan Drawn in Blood,” New York Times, April 2, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/07/27/thedevil-they-know. 28. Howard W. French, “Liberia Waits: Which Charles Taylor Won?,” New York Times, January 17, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/17/world/ liberia-waits-which-charles-taylor-won.html. 29. “World Briefing: Africa: Liberia: Ex-Ally Challenges President,” Associated Press, February 12, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/world/ world-briefing-africa-liberia-ex-ally-challenges-president.html. 30. Abigail E. Disney, Gini Reticker, and Blake Leyh. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Sausalito, CA: Distributed by Roco Films Educational, 2008. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Karl Vick, “Taylor Assails Us in Farewell Speech,” Washington Post, August 11, 2003, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/ 08/11/taylor-assails-us-in-farewell-speech/9317bb3c-4b3f-4965-8fb5b8da305117b0/. 35. Licklider (1995). 36. O’Reilly et al. (2015). 37. Abigail E. Disney, Johanna Hamilton, and Gini Reticker, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Documentary film. 38. The provision was eventually removed from the proposed new elections law. See the Gender Quotas Database, Liberia, https://www.idea.int/data-tools/ data/gender-quotas/country-view/173/35. 39. Thomas (2010). 40. Moran and Pitcher (2004). Franceschet (2001) shows in the case of Chile that it is easier for women to argue for power when their rhetoric is rooted in “military motherhood.” 41. Wilson and Boxer (2015). 42. Moran and Pitcher (2004). 43. Women as a percentage of registered voters increased from 30 to 50% in one month according to the National Election Commission. 44. Abigail E. Disney, Johanna Hamilton, and Gini Reticker, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Documentary film. 45. C. Y. Kwanue, “Women Endorse Ellen Candidacy,” Liberian Daily Observer, October 26, 2005. 46. Ben Brumfield, “Charles Taylor Sentenced to 50 Years for War Crimes,” CNN, May 31, 2012, https://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/30/world/africa/ netherlands-taylor-sentencing/index.html.

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47. Prue Clarke and Mae Azango, “The Tearing Down of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,” Foreign Policy, October 9, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/ 09/the-tearing-down-of-ellen-johnson-sirleaf-liberia-elections/. 48. Piers Edwards, “Liberia to Vote against Morrocco’s 2026 World Cup Bid,” BBC, May 24, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/44247560. 49. “Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, Issued, at Potsdam,” July 26, 1945, https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 50. General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan: Policy and Progress, pp. 135–6. 51. “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” Library of Congress. While demilitarization was clearly an objective laid out in the Potsdam Declaration, in General MacArthur’s memoir written just before his death, he denied that the “no war” clause was “forced upon the government by my personal fiat.” He claimed it had been proposed by Japanese prime minister Shidehara, who predicted, “The world will laugh and mock us as impractical visionaries, but 100 years from now we will be called prophets.” MacArthur (1964). 52. “Japan’s Postwar Constitution,” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www. cfr.org/japan-constitution/japans-postwar-constitution. 53. Gerard Baker and George Nishiyama, “Abe Says Japan Ready to Counter China’s Power,” The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2013, https:// www.wsj.com/articles/abe-says-japan-ready-to-counter-china8217s-power1382703668. 54. The LDP along with its coalition partner Komeito held 146 out of 242 in the upper chamber after the 2012 election and possessed a significant majority in the lower house of the Diet, giving them a two-thirds supermajority in both houses. This, of course, does not mean that all members of the coalition would vote for revision. But average support for revision in both parties has been above 90%. See https://www.globalasia.org/v11no3/feature/abesdifficult-road-to-constitutional-change-in-japan_j-berkshire-miller. 55. https://thediplomat.com/2016/07/how-specifically-does-japans-ldp-wantto-revise-the-constitution/ 56. Anderson (2006). 57. Ikeda and Tago (2014). Eichenberg (2016) found a gender gap of 18% in Japan, second only to Taiwan with 20%. 58. These numbers come from a representative poll taken by the University of Tokyo. http://www.masaki.j.u-tokyo.ac.jp/utas/utasindex_en.html. Public polls are numerous in Japan, with most of the major newspapers representing views across the political spectrum conducting annual polls among their readers on key political issues. Support for Article 9 revision varies significantly within these more partisan polls. Some papers like Yomiuri Shimbun found support for revision at 56% in May 2017. The more leftleaning Asahi Shimbun located support closer to 40% the same year. Most of these polls do not record the respondents’ gender, but those that do consistently show a gender gap of around 15%.

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59. The survey also asked about the need for strengthened defense more broadly and again a highly persistent gender gap emerges. Throughout the period in question, men’s support for more defensive measures never dropped below 60%. Amongst women, it never breached 50%. 60. 28% of candidates in the 2019 Upper House elections were women. Women won 22.5% of the seats up for election. 61. “Gender Imbalance: Japan’s Political Representation by Women Lowest in G20,” Nippon, March 8, 2019, https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/ h00409/gender-imbalance-japan%E2%80%99s-political-representation-bywomen-lowest-in-g20.html. 62. Jonathan Soble, ‘Japan Moves to Allow Military Combat for First Time in 70 Years,” The New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes. com/2015/07/17/world/asia/japans-lower-house-passes-bills-giving-militaryfreer-hand-to-fight.html. 63. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/japan-is-scrapping-its-pacifistconstitution-despite-massive-public-opposition/. 64. https://www.cfr.org/blog/naomi-takasu-nobel-peace-prize-article-nine. 65. https://www.prio.org/About/PeacePrize/PRIO-Directors-Speculations2014/. 66. https://www.cfr.org/blog/naomi-takasu-nobel-peace-prize-article-nine. 67. His primary opponent in the election Yuriko Koike—Tokyo’s first woman governor—also supported revision of Article 9.

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22. Judy Dempsey, “Why Merkels Coronavirus Address Matters,” Carnegie Europe, March 24, 2020, https://carnegieeurope.eu/2020/03/24/whymerkel-s-coronavirus-address-matters-pub-81357. 23. Emily Schultheis, “Is the World’s Most Powerful Woman Finally a Feminist?” New York Times, January 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/ opinion/angela-merkel-feminism.html.

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ac know led g e men ts

•

The contributors to this project are legion. First are Elizabeth Saunders and Allan Dafoe. We began this project with them and together, the four of us published an article in the journal International Organization that forms the basis for the statistical and theoretical portions of the book. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with these scholars and for their many insights that improved the project. Next is Valerie Wirtshafter, a research assistant who helped us write and edit many of the chapters. She wrote first drafts of some of the book’s most lively anecdotes, collected and analyzed data, for instance for the leaders chapter, and helped us to frame the project as a whole. Her many contributions make the book more witty, more interesting, and more clear. We are so very grateful. Her work was funded by the UC Laboratory Fees Research Program. For helpful comments, we are grateful to Erin Baggott, Andrew Bertoli, Jeff Carter, Andrew Coe, Rafaela Dancygier, Alex Downes, James Fearon, Charles Glaser, Joshua Goldstein, Valerie Hudson, Bruce Jentleson, Robert Keohane, Dov Levin, Danielle Lupton, Yonotan Lupu, Jonathan Markowitz, Barry O’Neill, Thania Sanchez, Kenneth Scheve, Kenneth Schultz, Duncan Snidal, Michael Tomz and seminar participants at Oxford, Stanford, USC, GWU and Wesleyan. Thanks are also due to family and friends who put up with over-excited accounts of our latest discoveries along the way. The book is dedicated, with all our love, to Chessa, who, with two political scientist parents, has to put up with some things herself.

inde x

• Note: Tables are indicated by a t, Figures are indicated by an f. Abe, Shinzo 149, 151–52, 154–55 Aberdeen (lord) 4–6, 181n19, 182n21 abolitionism 30–32, 188n39 activism 161 Addams, Jane 23, 70 peace advocacy of 25, 29–30, 35–36, 38, 187n26 on women’s suffrage 35–36, 38 Afghanistan war in 49, 191n26 women voting in 162–63 aggression, gender and 53, 192n51 animal behavior and 57–63, 193n73 biology in 41, 56–64, 193n68 brain in 62 in children 57 indirect aggression 57, 189n5 on Margarita Island 40–41 sex segregation and 193n79 social pressures in 64 studies on 41, 43, 189n5

testosterone in 61–62, 64, 193n68 violent crime 45, 46f alcohol 89, 198n3 Allen, Richard 205n106 American Anti-Imperialist League 187n25 Andropov, Yuri 106, 205n106 anger 57, 192n47 animal behavior 65, 194n96 aggression and 57–63, 193n73 baboons 58–59 bees 59–60, 193n75 mice 62–63 rats 61–62 wolves 61 Anthony, Susan B. 33, 68, 125, 158, 188n41, 188n46 anthropology 53–54 apartheid 44 “Appeal to Womanhood” (Howe) 26, 187n23 Aquino, Corazon 123 Archigos 206n4

240

index

Ardern, Jacinda 166 Arizona 96, 200n28 Artemisia (queen) 127–28 Ashby, Margery Corbett 158, 204n78 Asquith, H. H. 29 Atholl, Duchess of 102 audience costs 51, 206n117 Austria 29–30. See also Holy Roman Empire baboons 58–59 backing down 51–52, 56 Bailey, Hannah 24, 33 Baker, Josephine 43 Balch, Emily Greene 189n49 Baldwin, Stanley 72 Banaszak, L. A. 194n3, 194nn7–8 Barak, Ehud 140–42 Barnes, T. D. 208n29, 208n36, 216n16 Bateman, A. J. 60 Battle of Sinope 5, 181n19 BDM. See Bund Deutscher Mädel bees 59–60, 193n75 Belgium in Congo 20 women’s suffrage in 66, 168, 169t, 170 Ben-Dor, Rachel 137–39, 141 Berenbaum, S. A. 62 Biggs, Caroline Ashurst 186n5 binary gender and sex classification 42–43 biological determinism 41, 56, 63 biology in aggression 41, 56–64, 193n68 animal behavior 57–63, 65, 193n73, 193n75, 194n96 brains 62–64 gender and 41, 44–45, 56–65 race and 44 sexual dimorphism 59, 61 social pressures and 63–65, 194n96 Black suffrage 15, 188n46

Blackwell, Alice 33 Blood, May 122 Boas, Franz 53–55 Boer War 12–14 Bolivia 168, 169t Bolt, Usain 42 Boudica (queen) 120–21 brains, female and male 62–64 Bretton Woods 82 Britain 26, 182n22 Aberdeen in 4–6, 181n19, 182n21 Boudica in 120–21 under Chamberlain, N. 79, 100–105, 112–13, 161–62, 203n70, 204n74 Conservative party in early twentieth century 72, 196n38 coverture in 180n2 democratization of 3–4, 8–9, 14 Equal Franchise Act 72 on Franco-Prussian War 7 Glorious Revolution 3 International Congress of Women and 29 jingoes in 10, 13–14, 182n33 May in 123 Nazi Germany and 79, 100–104, 100–105, 112–13, 161–62, 204n74, 204n78 Ottoman Empire and 4–6, 181n15 press in 5–8, 30–31, 182n30 Russia and 4–8, 181nn14–16, 182n30, 182n33 Salisbury in 11–12, 14, 20, 183n53, 183n55 in South Africa 9, 12–14 Stanton, E., and 30–31 in Sudan 9–12, 183n51 suffragists and 35, 83 Thatcher in 119–20, 129–31 War of 1812 54–55 Women’s Social and Political Union bombing in 24

index women’s suffrage in 68, 72, 83, 100, 168, 169t, 170, 177, 196n38, 203n66 in World War I 90 in World War II 79, 104–5, 162 British electorate, expansion of after 1831 3–4 1867 7 1884 9, 183n39 British public on Boer War 12–14 Crimean War and 5–7, 181nn14–16, 182n28 on France 11–12, 183n53, 183n55 on imperialism 10–11, 183n45 on Russia 5–8, 181nn14–16, 182n33 Britten, Frederick 98 Brody, L. 64 Brooks, D. J. 191n26, 192n43 Bryan, William Jennings 19–20, 97, 199n21 Bull Moose party 89 Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens) (BDM) 48 Burchard, S. M. 216n16 Burke, Edmund 10 Burma 9 Burnett, John 97–98 Bush, George H. W. 108, 119–20 Bush, George W. 79 Butt Naked, General 143 CAH. See congenital adrenal hyperplasia California 93–94, 97, 201nn46–47 Campbell, K. E. 198n6 Camulodunum, massacre in 120–21 Canada 168, 169t Canning, Stratford 4 Carruthers, C. K. 195n22 Catholicism 68 Catt, Carrie Chapman 22, 26, 35–36, 38, 158, 189n55

241

Chamberlain, Joseph 9, 12, 14, 184n59 Chamberlain, Neville 100 Munich Agreement 79, 101–3, 105, 112–13, 161, 204n74 women supporting 101–5, 113, 161, 203n70 Charles VI (emperor) 124 Chazan, N. 211n2 Chernenko, Konstantin 112 children, aggression and 57 children, first-born 123–24 Chile motherhood in 213n40 women’s suffrage in 195n14 China 49 chromosomes 42–43, 190nn10–11 Churchill, Winston 104, 162 Cicero 25 Çiller, Tansu 122 Civil War, U. S. 15, 22 Clarendon (lord) 4, 181n19, 181nn14–16 Clay, Henry 54 Cleveland, Grover 89 clinical trials, women in 44 Clinton, Bill 79 Clinton, Hillary 131 coding 208n37 Cold War 82, 87, 105 Germany in 118 Reagan in 106–13, 204nn88–89, 205n106, 205n109, 205n111 Smith, M., in 118–19 Colorado 96, 200n28, 201n46 Columbus, New Mexico, raid 90, 199n10 Common Sense (Paine) 2 communities, peace built by 161–62 confidence 45 conflict and cooperation, preferences on 50–52 congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) 62

242

index

Congo 20 Congress, U. S. 128–29, 129f, 210n47 Connell, Raewyn 55–56 Conservative party, British 72, 196n38. See also Thatcher, Margaret Constitution, U. S. 1 Fifteenth Amendment 15, 188n46 Nineteenth Amendment 36, 38, 69, 189n55, 194n19 constitutional pacifism, Japanese. See Japan cooperation and conflict, preferences on 50–52 Corder, J. K. 201n41, 201n47 coverture 180n2 crime, violent 45, 46f Crimean War British public and 5–7, 181nn14–16, 182n28 Russia after 6–7, 182n27 Russia in 4–6, 181n15, 181n19, 182n30 Cuba 16–17 Cuban-Americans 73 Curzon, George 36–37 cyberbullying 57 The Day After (film) 107 death penalty 56, 159, 203n70 defense ministers 116, 208n29 defense spending, support for 191n26 democracy 21, 181n7, 197n50 British democratization 3–4, 8–9, 14 contemporary 162–64 democratic peace 79–80, 80f, 85, 197n48 democratic revolutions 1–2 early 180n1 leaders in 132–33 in Liberia 146–48, 213n43

measures of 75–78, 78f, 170–71, 171f, 197n46 Paine on 1–2, 180n6 peace organizations in 135–36 U. S. at turn of century 14–15 U. S. racial barriers 162 voting in 158–59 women’s suffrage and peace in 75–85 Democrats, U. S. 202n49. See also United States presidential election; Wilson, Woodrow incentives to appear forceful 132 Iraq war and campaigns of 74 1916 platform 91, 199n13 Reagan and 74, 106, 108–11 Spanish-American War and 16 Wilson and 89–94 women politicians of 117, 209n39 determinism, biological 41, 56, 63 Dietrich, B. J. 210n47 Dio Cassius 120–21 Dobrynin, Anatoly 106 Doe, Samuel 143 Douglass, Frederick 32, 188n46 drone strikes, approval of 50 Dube, O. 209n41, 211n65 dueling 53–56 Dulac, Catherine 62–63 Eagleburger, Lawrence 205n111 effective leader 206n4 Egypt 11, 130 Eichenberg, R. C. 49, 191n26, 191n38, 192n43, 214n57 Eliot, Lise 61 elite-public gap 209n42 Emlen, S. T. 61 Enloe, Cynthia 55 Equal Franchise Act (Britain) 72 Euripides 27 experimental data, on conflicts 50–52

index Fashoda, incident at 11–12, 183n51 fear 57 feminist foreign policy 133–34 Ferrante, Elena 159 Fifteenth Amendment 15, 188n46 first-born child, sex of 123–24 Fleming, Kate 129–30 Florida 73 Food and Drug Administration, U. S. 44 forceful, incentives to appear 130–33, 211n65 foreign policy feminist 133–34 incentives to appear forceful and 131–32 in 1984 U. S. presidential election 107–11, 110f public opinion and 73–74, 196n39 women and apparatus of 115–17 Foster, Augustus John 54–55 Four Mothers 212n6 Ben-Dor 137–39, 141 Lebanon occupation opposed by 50, 135, 137–39, 141–42, 156, 212n13 Letzter 135, 138 on motherhood 138, 142, 212n10 Nahmias 50, 138, 212n8 France British conflict with 11–12, 183n51, 183n53, 183n55 1878 Paris World’s Fair 157 Franco-Prussian War 7, 26–27 imperialism of 20, 185n101 Napoleon III 7, 20 in Sudan 11–12, 183n51 Franceschet, S. 213n40 Franco-Prussian War 7, 26–27 Frederick II (king) 124 fuel efficiency standards 65 Gage, Matilda Joslyn 66, 194n2 Gamboa, R. 195n14

243

Gandhi, Indira 125, 130 Gbowee, Leymah 122, 144–48 Gender, Emotion, and the Family (Brody) 64 gender gap 164 backing down and 51–52, 56 biology and 56–65 decrease in 104, 138 on drone strikes 50 Japanese 51, 152–54, 153f, 214n57, 215n59 on Munich Agreement 101–2 reasons for 52–56 in U. S., on recent conflicts 49, 191n26, 191n38 gender identity 43 gender test 42 Germany Britain and Nazi 79, 100–105, 112–13, 161–62, 204n74, 204n78 in Cold War 118 Merkel in 123, 166–67 Munich Agreement 79, 101–3, 105, 112–13, 161, 204n74 women in Nazi 47–49 in World War I 90, 98 gestation 63–64 Giddings, Franklin 184n83 Gilens, M. 73 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 22–23, 25 Gladstone, William 8 Glorious Revolution 3 Glynn, Martin 91 Goldberg, Yossi 139 Good Friday Agreement 122 Gorbachev, Mikhail 112 Gordon, Charles 10 Gottlieb, J. V. 102 government spending 69–70, 191n26, 195n22 Greeks, ancient 25, 55, 127–28 Grese, Irma 47 Grimes, A. P. 198n3

244

index

Gromyko, Andrei 111 gun control 65 Hague Conference. See International Congress of Women Hapsburgs 124 Harish, S. 209n41, 211n65 Haviland, J. J. 64 Henderson, B. A. 62 Herodotus 127–28 Hezbollah 136–37 Hitler, Adolf 78 Britain and 79, 100–104, 112–13, 162 on German women 48 Hitler Youth 48–49 Hobart, Garret 16 Hobson, J. A. 11, 13, 182n33, 183n47 Holmes, Elizabeth 128 Holy Roman Empire 124 honeybees. See bees honor 54–56 Howard, Michael 20 Howe, Julia Ward 26–27, 187n23 Hughes, Charles Evans 92–94, 97, 199nn21–22, 200n31 humanitarian circumstances, war in 50, 191n26, 192n43 Humphrey, Hubert 132 Iceni 120 Idaho 94, 96 “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (song) 87, 198n1 Illinois 88, 98, 199n18, 200n31 imperialism American Anti-Imperialist League 187n25 British 9–11, 183n45 French 20, 185n101 U. S. 19 indirect aggression 57, 189n5 Indonesia 194n10

instrumental variables 123 International Congress of Women (1878) 157 International Congress of Women (1904) 158 International Congress of Women (1908) 158 International Congress of Women (1915) (Hague Conference) 33–34, 187n29, 189n57 WILPF and 38 World War I and 27–30, 37–38 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 158 intersex 42–43, 190n10 Iraq first U. S. war in 119–20 second U. S. war in 49, 74, 79, 163–64, 191n26 U. S. campaigns and 74 women in 163–64 Ireland 168, 169t, 170 Iroquois 194n2 Islamic State (ISIS) 191n38 Israel Barak in 140–42 Four Mothers 50, 135, 137–39, 141–42, 156, 212n6, 212n8, 212n10, 212n13 Lebanese withdrawal supported in 139–42, 212n16 Lebanon occupied by 50, 135–42, 156, 212n16 Meir in 127, 130 1999 election 140, 212n17 women and men on war 51 women in peace groups 211n2, 212n10 Italy 178 Jacobs, Aletta 28–29, 35 Jakobsdóttir, Katrín 123 James, Ollie 91 James, William 17

index Japan 178 Abe in 149, 151–52, 154–55 gender gap in 51, 152–54, 153f, 214n57, 215n59 LDP 150–52, 154–55, 214n54 nuclear bombing of 149 origins of constitutional pacifism 149–50, 214n51 revision of constitutional pacifism 136, 149, 150–56, 153f, 214n54, 214n58, 215n67 U. S. defense cooperation with 150–51 U. S. occupation of 149–50 women and constitutional pacifism 136, 149, 152–56, 153f, 215n67 women candidates in 153–54, 215n60, 215n67 Jarvis, Anna 187n23 Jefferson, Thomas 180n6 jingoes 10, 13–14, 19, 35, 182n33 Joan of Arc 122 Judson, Olivia 57 Kansas 88, 94, 201n39 Kant, Immanuel 2, 53 Kellogg-Briand Pact 38 Kennan, George 205n111 Kennedy, John F. 118–19 Kenny, Lawrence 69 Kenya 49, 191n40 Kertzer, J. D. 209n42 Khan, Yahya 125 Khrushchev, Nikita 118–19 Khrushchev, Nina 119 kings, war and 123–24, 211n65 Kishi, Nobusuke 149 Kitchener, Herbert 10–11 Klinefelter syndrome 190n10 Knight, Anne 32–33 Know, John 130 Koike, Yuriko 215n67 Konbuang dynasty, Burma 9

245

Lady Macbeth (fictional character) 115 La Follette, Robert 202n53 Law, Richard 103 LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party Leader Experience and Attribute Descriptions (LEAD) 125, 206n4, 208n37 leaders democratic 132–33 gender gap on backing down 51–52, 56 incentives to appear forceful 130–33, 211n65 sex of first-born child 123–24 with sisters 208n32 vocal pitch of 128–30, 129f, 210n47, 210n49 leaders, women as 114, 116, 116f, 128–30, 209n41 change following 164–67, 216n16 feminist foreign policy of 133–34 men and 122–25, 208n29 peace and 117, 122, 125 war and 118–22, 124–27, 133, 208n24 League of German Maidens (Bund Deutscher Mädel) (BDM) 48 Lebanon, Israeli occupation of 136 Four Mothers opposing 50, 135, 137–39, 141–42, 156, 212n13 Israeli support for withdrawal 139–42, 212n16 1999 Israeli election and 140 legislatures, women in 208n36 likelihood of conflict and 125–27 vocal pitch and 128–29, 129f, 210n47, 210n49 Letzter, Irit 135, 138 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (Japan) 150–52, 154–55, 214n54

246

index

Liberia democracy in 146–48, 213n43 Gbowee in 122, 144–48 peace negotiations in 145–46 Sirleaf in 123, 135, 146–48 Taylor in 143–48 women and peace in 122, 135–36, 142–46, 148, 156 Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace 122, 145, 147 women voters in 148, 213n43 Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) 144–45 Liberty party 188n42 Liddington, Jill 185n3, 187n25 Link, A. S. 199n13 Livermore, Mary 30, 188n37 Lodge, Henry Cabot 15, 17, 99, 184n74 López, M. A. 195n14 Lott, John 69 Luce, Stephen 17 LURD. See Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy macaques 194n96 MacArthur, Douglas 150, 214n51 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 115 Mackenzie, John 10 Mahan, Alfred 17, 19 Mahdists 10–11 Maine (battleship) 18 Malatesta, C. Z. 64 The Man-Made World (Gilman) 23 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste 11–12 Marcus, G. F. 63 Margarita Island 40–41 Maria Theresa (empress) 124 Mary Tudor (queen) 130 masculinity. See men Matlock, Jack 206n116 May, Theresa 123 McCammon, H. J. 198n6

McCarthy, Joseph 118 McConnaughy, C. M. 194n7 McKinley, William 15–16, 19, 185n93 McWilliams, Monica 122 Meir, Golda 127, 130 men. See also gender gap; suffrage, male idealized masculinity 24–25, 186n16 remasculinization effort 186n16 suffragists on masculine ideals 133 suffragists on war and 22–23, 37f, 38–39, 186n12 women as leaders and 122–25, 208n29 Menand, Louis 44 Merkel, Angela 123, 166–67 Mexico 90–91, 98–100, 113, 199n10 mice 62–63 MID. See Militarized Interstate Dispute midterm elections, U. S. (1914) 89, 198n8 Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) 208n37 Mill, John Stuart 8 Miller, Alice Duer 22, 36 Milner, Alfred 13–14 monarchy 1–2, 123–24, 211n65 Mondale, Walter 74, 106, 108–11 Money, Hernando de Soto 17 Monroe, Alan D. 196n30 Montesquieu 1 Moore, Charles 129 motherhood 166 in Chile 213n40 Four Mothers on 138, 142, 212n10 Sirleaf on 147 Mothers Against Silence 212n10 Mothers Against War 154–55 Mother’s Day 26, 187n23 “Mother’s Day Proclamation” (Howe) 26, 187n23

index Mott, James 187n26 Mott, Lucretia 187n26 Seneca Falls Convention and 31–32, 188n41, 188n43 Stanton, E., and 30–31, 188n43, 188nn40–41 Mundy, Carl E., III 163 Munich Agreement 79, 112–13 gender gap on 101–2 women on 101–3, 105, 161, 204n74 murder 45, 46f Nahmias, Ronit 50, 138, 212n8 Napoleon III 7, 20 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 36 national budgets 69–70, 191n26, 195n22 National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW) 38, 189n55 nationalism 55–56 national security, women in 116 National Woman Suffrage Association 37f NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization nature, nurture and 43–44, 57, 59, 63, 65 NAWSA. See National American Woman Suffrage Association Nazi Germany 78 BDM 48 Britain and 79, 100–105, 112–13, 161–62, 204n74, 204n78 Hitler Youth 48–49 Munich Agreement 79, 101–3, 105, 112–13, 161, 204n74 women in 47–49 NCCCW. See National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War Nebraska 198n2 Nefertiti (queen) 130

247

Netanyahu, Benjamin 140 Neubauer, Peter 190n16 New Zealand 21, 66, 166, 185n103 Nicholas I (tsar) 4–5 Nicolson, Harold 103 Nigeria 169t, 170 NIH Revitalization Act (U. S.) 44 Nineteenth Amendment 36, 38, 69, 189n55, 194n19 Nixon, Richard 130–32 Nordstrom, Carolyn 121–22 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 107, 113–14, 113–15, 113f Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition 122 North Korea 155 Norton, James 18 nuclear weapons 82, 84–85, 87 Japan bombed with 149 Kennedy and 119 Reagan and 106, 108, 111–12, 204n88, 205n106, 205n109 women in decision-making roles 116 nurture, nature and 43–44, 57, 59, 63, 65 Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline 121–22 Obama, Barack 79, 117 O’Brien, D. Z. 208n29, 216n16 Ohio 198n2, 199n17 Oneal, J. R. 170 Oregon 93–94, 200n31 Oring, L. W. 61 Ottoman Empire Crimean War and 4–6, 181nn14–15 Russian conflicts with 4–8, 181n15, 181n19 in World War I 37 Page, B. I. 73 Paine, Thomas 1–2, 180n6

248

index

Pakistan 68 Palmerston (lord) 4–5, 181n16 Paris, France, World’s Fair in 157 Paul, Alice 201n44 peace. See specific topics peace, democratic 79–80, 80f, 85, 197n48 peace negotiations 116–17, 145–46. See also Liberia peace organizations in democracy 135–36 Israeli 50, 135, 137–39, 141–42, 156, 211n2, 212n6, 212n8, 212n10, 212n13 women in male 24, 187nn25–26 WPP 24, 26–27, 36, 187n24, 202n49 Peckover, Priscilla 26 Penn, Mark 131 Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association 34f Pershing, John J. 90 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 23 Philippines 19, 188n37 Pinker, Steven 117 pitch, vocal 128–30, 129f, 210n47, 210n49 platform, Democratic (1916) 91, 199n13 policy. See also foreign policy public opinion and 65, 71–75, 196n30, 196n32, 196n39, 196n42 women’s suffrage and changes in 69–70, 72, 195n22 Post, A. S. 208n24 Potsdam Declaration 149–50, 214n51 Pragmatic Sanction 124 presidential elections, U. S. See United States presidential election press Russia and British 5–8, 182n30

on Spanish-American War 15–19, 185n93 Stanton, E., and 30–31 primates 58–59, 193n73 Progress of the World’s Women (UN report) 168 Prussia 7, 26–27, 124 Przeworski, Adam 84, 177 public opinion 196n28 policy and 65, 71–75, 196n30, 196n32, 196n39, 196n42 on Spanish-American War 15–19 public opinion, British. See British public queens, war and 123–24, 211n65 race in anthropology 53–54 biology and 44 Black suffrage 15, 188n46 scientific racism 53–54 U. S. democracy and 162 World Anti-Slavery Convention 30–31 Rathbone, Eleanor 204n74 rats 61–62 Reagan, Ronald Democrats and 74, 106, 108–11 Gorbachev and 112 in 1984 presidential election 74, 106–13, 110f, 205n111 Soviet Union and 106–13, 204nn88–89, 205n106, 205n109, 205n111 women and 109–11, 110f Reece, Gordon 129 refugee crisis, Syrian 166 regression discontinuity 126 remasculinization 186n16 Republicans, U. S. 89, 132. See also Reagan, Ronald; Roosevelt, Theodore Iraq war and campaigns of 74

index in 1916 election 92–93, 97, 199nn21–22, 200n28, 200n31, 201n39, 202n53, 203n63 Spanish-American War and 15–16 reputation 54–56 revenge 192n47 Revolutionary United Front (RUF) 144 revolutions, democratic 1–2 Rickne, J. 216n16 Romania 168, 169t Romans, ancient 25, 120–21 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 196n42 Roosevelt, Theodore 25, 28, 36, 87, 188n48 McKinley and 15, 19 1914 midterm elections and 89, 198n8 1916 election and 92–94, 198n1, 199n21 Spanish-American War and 15, 184n82 on World War I 92, 94 Root, Elihu 16, 99, 203n63 RUF. See Revolutionary United Front Russell, John 6 Russett, B. M. 170 Russia Britain and 4–8, 181nn14–16, 182n30, 182n33 after Crimean War 6–7, 182n27 Ottoman conflicts with 4–8, 181n15, 181n19 Rwandan genocide 121–22 Saigo, Minako 154–55 Salic Law 124 Salisbury (lord) 11–12, 14, 20, 183n53, 183n55 Sapolsky, R. M. 58 Saudi Arabia 68 Schwimmer, Rosika 27–29 scientific racism 53–54 SDF. See Self-Defense Forces

249

SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative Security Council Resolution 1325. See United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 segregation, sex 193n79 Self-Defense Forces (SDF) (Japan) 150–51 Semenya, Caster 41–42 Sen, P. 208n24 Seneca Falls Convention 31–32, 157, 188n41, 188n43 Seton-Watson, R. W. 105 sex, defining 42–43, 190nn10–11 sexual dimorphism 59, 61 Shakespeare, William 115 Share, L. J. 58 Sharon, Ariel 140 Sharoni, S. 212n10 Shaw, Anna Howard 35 Sierra Leone 144–45, 148 Sinope, Battle of 5, 181n19 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson 123, 135, 146–48 sisters, leaders with 208n32 Skorge, Ø. S. 195n17, 201n41 Smenkhkare 130 Smith, Gerrit 188n42 Smith, Margaret Chase 118–19 Snyder-Mackler, N. 194n96 social pressures, biology and 63–65, 194n96 South Africa apartheid 44 Boer War 12–14 Zulu kingdom in 9 Soviet Union 82, 105 Gorbachev in 112 Reagan and 106–13, 204nn88–89, 205n106, 205n109, 205n111 Smith, M., on 118–19 Spanish-American War 185n93 Anthony on 33 democratic peace theory and 197n48

250

index

Spanish-American War (continued) public opinion on 15–19 Roosevelt, T., and 15, 184n82 Stanton, E., on 24 Spencer, Anna Garlin 187n26 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 35, 133, 188n39, 188n42 on Black suffrage 188n46 on men and war 22, 32, 186n12 Mott, L., and 30–31, 188n43, 188nn40–41 on peace 23–24, 32 Seneca Falls Convention and 31–32, 157, 188n41, 188n43 at World Anti-Slavery Convention 30–31 Stanton, Henry 30–31, 188n39 Stasavage, D. 180n1, 194n2, 194n6 Stimson, J. 196n28 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 106 stress, gender and 45 Sudan 9–12, 183n51 suffrage, Black 15, 188n46 suffrage, male British expansions of 3–4, 7, 9, 183n39 conflict following 177–78 suffrage, of women 159, 161, 172t, 174t, 194n7, 197n52 Addams on 35–36, 38 in Belgium 66, 168, 169t, 170 in Britain 68, 72, 83, 100, 168, 169t, 170, 177, 196n38, 203n66 in Chile 195n14 conflict following 171, 176–77, 176t country differences 66–68 data on 168, 169t, 170 in Indonesia 194n10 International Congress of Women on 33–34, 157–58 measures of democracy and 170–71, 171f

national budgets after 69–70, 195n22 in New Zealand 21, 66 Nineteenth Amendment 36, 38, 69, 189n55, 194n19 peace and 75–85, 75–86, 77f, 80f policy changes after 69–70, 72, 195n22 in Saudi Arabia 68 in Switzerland 66, 70, 194n3 U. S. 1916 election and 88, 93–94, 95f, 96–98, 200n31, 200n34, 201n44, 201n47, 201nn39–40 voting rates after 69, 194n16 in waves 168, 169t, 170, 176t in western U. S. 67, 88–89, 88f, 93, 95f, 96–97, 113, 158, 198n2, 198nn5–6, 200n31, 200n34, 201n43, 201n46 after World War I 66, 83, 194n6, 203n65 suffragists 68, 133, 194nn7–8, 204n78 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 158 Iroquois inspiring 194n2 on men and war 22–23, 32, 37f, 38–39, 186n12 National Woman Suffrage Association 37f NAWSA 36 on peace 23–26, 32, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 52, 64, 85, 136, 159, 161 Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association 34f Seneca Falls Convention 31–32, 157, 188n41, 188n43 in western U. S. 89 Wilson and 97, 202nn49–50 in World War I 36, 83, 197n49, 197n51 Sweden 68 Switzerland 66, 70, 194n3, 194n8

index Syria conflict in 49, 191n38 refugee crisis 166 Taiwan 214n57 Takasu, Naomi 155 Taylor, Charles 143–48 Teele, D. L. 177, 196n38, 197n51, 198n5 temperance 89, 198n3 Tennyson, Alfred 6 terrorism 191n38 testosterone 42, 61–62, 64, 190n10, 193n68 Thatcher, Margaret 119–20, 129–31 Theranos 128 Three Identical Strangers (documentary) 190n16 Ticchi, D. 197n50 Tickner, J. Ann 117, 197n49 Tooze, A. 202n59 Towns, A. 180n2 transgender 43 Trivers, R. 60 “The Trojan Women” (Euripides) 27 Troubles, in Northern Ireland 122 True, Jacqui 197n49 Truman, Harry 115 Turkey 122 Tutsi 121 Twain, Mark 53 Ulrich, Bernd 166 UN. See United Nations United Kingdom. See Britain United Nations (UN) 168, 192n43 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) 163 United States (U. S.) 30, 83, 194nn7–8 Civil War 15, 22 Congress 128–29, 129f, 210n47

251

Constitution 1, 15, 36, 38, 69, 188n46, 189n55, 194n19 coverture in 180n2 democracy at turn of century 14–15 Fifteenth Amendment 15, 188n46 Florida 73 foreign policy and public opinion in 73–74, 196n39 gender gap on recent conflicts 49, 191n26, 191n38 government spending in 69–70, 195n22 imperialism of 19 incentives to appear forceful and 130–33 Iraqi women and 163–64 Iraq wars 49, 74, 79, 119–20, 163–64, 191n26 Japanese defense cooperation with 150–51 Japan occupied by 149–50 Mexico and 90–91, 98–100, 113, 199n10 NIH Revitalization Act 44 1914 midterm elections 89, 198n8 Nineteenth Amendment 36, 38, 69, 189n55, 194n19 Philippines and 19, 188n37 policy and public opinion in 65, 71–73, 196n30, 196n32, 196n39, 196n42 racial barriers to voting 162 Spanish-American War 15–19, 24, 33, 184n82, 185n93, 197n48 vocal pitch in Congress 128–29, 129f, 210n47 War of 1812 54–55 Wilson and suffragists 97, 202nn49–50 women in nuclear policy 116 women politicians of 117, 209n39

252

index

United States (U. S.) (conitnued) women’s suffrage in western 67, 88–89, 88f, 93, 95f, 96–97, 113, 158, 198n2, 198nn5–6, 200n31, 200n34, 201n43, 201n46 World War I and Wilson 36, 90–94, 96–99, 161, 199nn17–18, 201n39, 202n59 World War I entry 87–88, 98–99, 161, 202n59 World War II entry 45, 46f, 47, 78–79, 196n42 United States, in Cold War 105 nuclear weapons and 82, 87, 106, 108, 111–12, 119, 204n88, 205n106, 205n109 Reagan in 106–13, 204nn88–89, 205n106, 205n111 Smith, M., on 118–19 United States presidential election (1916) 89, 202n49 Democratic platform in 91, 199n13 Republicans in 92–93, 199nn21–22, 200n28, 200n31, 201n39, 202n53, 203n63 Roosevelt, T., and 92–94, 198n1, 199n21 women voters in 88, 93–94, 95f, 96–98, 100, 113, 200n31, 200n34, 201n44, 201n47, 201nn39–40, 202n48 World War I and 90–94, 96–98, 113, 199n13, 199nn17–18, 199nn21–22, 201n39, 202n53 United States presidential election (1984) Mondale in 74, 106, 108–11 Reagan in 74, 106–13, 110f, 205n111 women and 109–11, 110f, 113 Universal Peace Union 187n26

UNSCR 1325. See United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 U. S. See United States Utah 94, 96, 201n43, 201n46 Valentino, B. A. 191n26, 192n43 Vatican City 195n12 Versailles Treaty 37–38 vice, opposition to 89, 198n3 Victoria (queen) 4, 10–11 Villa, Pancho 90, 99 Villard, Fanny Garrison 26 Vindigni, A. 197n50 violent crime 45, 46f vocal pitch 128–30, 129f, 210n47, 210n49 voting 158–60 activism and 161 U. S. racial barriers in 162 women and barriers in 162–64 after women’s suffrage 69, 194n16 Wagner, S. R. 194n2 Wanamaker, M. H. 195n22 Ward, Laura Elizabeth 23, 25–26 War of 1812 54–55 Wells, Marguerite 186n7 Willett, Susan 163 WILPF. See Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Wilson, Woodrow 30 Mexico and 90–91, 98–100, 113, 199n10 in 1916 election 89–94, 96–98, 113, 161, 199n13, 199nn17–18, 200n28, 200n31, 200n34, 201n39, 201n47, 202n53 suffragists and 97, 202nn49–50 women voters and 93–94, 96–98, 100, 200n31, 200n34, 201n39, 201n47

index World War I and 36, 90–94, 96–99, 161, 199nn17–18, 201n39, 202n59 Wimmer, Andreas 164 Wolbrecht, C. 201n41, 201n47 wolves 61 Woman’s Peace Party (WPP) 24, 26–27, 36, 187n24, 202n49 Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace 122, 145, 147 Women’s Christian Temperance Union 24, 26, 33 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 38 Women’s Peace Parade (1914) 26 Women’s Social and Political Union 24 World Anti-Slavery Convention 30–31 World Disarmament Conference 38 World’s Fair 1878, 157 World Values Survey 41 World War I Britain in 90 Catt on 36, 38 death toll of 87 Germany after 47–48 Germany in 90, 98 International Congress of Women and 27–30, 37–38

253

1916 election and 90–94, 96–98, 113, 199n13, 199nn17–18, 199nn21–22, 201n39, 202n53 peace influenced by 82 Roosevelt, T., on 92, 94 suffragists in 36, 83, 197n49, 197n51 U. S. entry into 87–88, 98–99, 161, 202n59 Versailles Treaty 37–38 Wilson and 36, 90–94, 96–99, 161, 199nn17–18, 201n39, 202n59 women’s suffrage after 66, 83, 194n6, 203n65 World War II Britain in 79, 104–5, 162 death toll of 87 Germany in 112–13, 162 U. S. entry into 45, 46f, 47, 78–79, 196n42 WPP. See Woman’s Peace Party Wrangham, Richard 58 Wyoming 94, 96, 158, 200n28, 201n46 X chromosomes 42–43, 190nn10–11 Y chromosomes 42–43, 190nn10–11 Zulu kingdom, South Africa 9