Are women more peaceful than men? My inner feminist wants to scream, “NO!” I have an internal knee jerk reaction every time this question is asked, because I worry about the effect the answer, “yes,” has on women. I think it locks them in gender roles and does not allow them to explore their full potentiality. It affirms the social construction of women as passive and caring and supports a culture where violence against women is not vehemently opposed. (Don’t believe me? Then what’s with all the attention Charlie Sheen has been getting lately despite his history of domestic abuse?) Isn’t it sad that my reaction has to be so intense, that the standard in our culture is violence and not peace? I want to believe that women and men have an equal capacity for violence, but we should be focusing on our universal capacity for peace.
I think women have been socially constructed to be peaceful- does this mean that they wouldn’t choose peace on their own? That under the same circumstances men would be as peaceful? We will never be able to remove the role of social construction and discover what the natural instincts of humans actually are. In exploring answers to these questions and how they can contribute to Peace Studies it is essential to realize the role of social construction and acknowledge that we are the products of a patriarchal society.
So, I don’t know if, “are women more peaceful than men?” is the question we really want to be asking. The answer seems obvious, yes, our culture has made them that way. Instead we should be reflecting on our patriarchal society, the system of social construction and evaluating what values and traits we want to encourage that will contribute to a more peaceful world.
“I don’t know if, “are women more peaceful than men?” is the question we really want to be asking.”
This is exactly it. Regardless of whether it *could* be proved (which it can’t) that women are peaceful than men, that doesn’t really get us anywhere. Humans, both men and women, are vested with the potential for all kinds of behaviors. How that potential gets developed and expressed, though, has entirely to do with culture and society. Otherwise, men and women from different cultures and time periods would behave pretty much the same. As you say, the main point of focus ought to be on how to socialize *everyone* to value peace over violence and provide each individual with the incentives and the tools to find peaceful resolutions to all kinds of conflicts, big or small.
That said, because men and women are, in fact, acculturated differently in most parts of the world, the inclusion of women’s (and other marginalized) voices in discussions about peace is crucial if we are to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms and impact of violence.
I, too, agree that this question cannot be answered conclusively. It’s to tangled up in social constructivist and essentialist perspectives to ever reveal one thread. Furthermore, to say that it is one or the other just puts us on the track to maintain the facile, archetypal constructions of warrior male and the compassionate female. This does not, however, mean that we ignore these roles. We cannot just drop them; I think they have to be slowly undone and replaced with new identities–perhaps mostly, on part of males. To me, a caring, non-violent female is something to be appreciated– a violent, macho man is not. Yet the problem here is that these gender roles seem to be defined by what the other is not. In other words, a male defines himself by being unlike his female counterpart and vice versa. This point was explained well by Boulding and has a lot to do with the construction of our families. So yes, the more important question to explore, yet still hard to answer, would ask if there is universal capacity for peace.