In the current febrile climate – meteorological and political – many questions are being raised about how to fight for and against causes. The alarming temperatures, the unaccountable rulers, the rise of extremism, rollback of rights, and self-evidently destructive policies that lead towards chaos: it has all created a cauldron of anger, dismay and rebellion. There are some interesting examples of women resisting. Greta Thunberg, the schoolgirl standing up for her generation’s right to an environmental future. Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, neutralising xenophobic violence in her country by aligning herself with the injured community, refusing to let divisive “othering” occur, and swiftly implementing gun legislation. These are brave confrontations. But what if a woman chooses a more literal fight?
Earlier this year, the revocation of Shamima Begum’s British citizenship and the labelling of her as an Islamic State “jihadi bride” exposed deep public and governmental discomfort around a woman’s – or in this case a girl’s – relationship with conflict. Was she a victim or had she agency? We can’t know what Begum thought, chose or experienced, whether she considered herself “at war” or not. Her case is spotlit, but by no means anomalous. Many boys chose to join European wars in the early 20th century because of propaganda – victims or heroes of complex situations and motivations. A woman, however, still faces enormous societal disquiet, scrutiny and often penalty, if she gets too deliberately close to the violence, even if she doesn’t pick up a gun.
So where are the sanctioned borders between women and violence, between supporting roles and combat? When might a woman agree to taking up arms premeditatedly, as well as instinctively in defence of herself or her values? Are women inherently more peaceable? And can they be capable soldiers?
These questions have long interested me. In 2005, on the back of several cataclysmic events – again meteorological and political – I began a short novel called The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North in the US). It imagines Britain in the near future, restructured by a rightwing government after economic collapse, peak oil and resource wars, and suffering the effects of the climate crisis.
Sister, the main character, narrates from prison. She becomes a survivalist, a paramilitary soldier who was trained in the Cumbrian mountains, taught guerrilla tactics and reconnaissance skills, and tortured to ensure she could withstand captivity. The society the army fights against is a despotic version of patriarchy; the resistance is female-led and operated.
Fiction has great examples of altered societies, dystopias and utopias where women are either victims of brutal regimes and must escape, such as in Margaret Atwood, or are autonomous and remote, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. How women orchestrate networks, underground or executive, is key in such narratives. Feminism in relation to violence and male power is a common literary theme, but there are very few female occupational fighters.
This might simply reflect reality. In War and Gender, Joshua Goldstein examines cross-cultural historical evidence relating to the participation of women in combat, and finds it to be consistently rare, “far fewer than 1% of all warriors in history”. In today’s standing armies, the vast majority of soldiers are male. War is a socially diverse phenomenon. So why does diversity disappear in relation to gender? Goldstein argues: “Killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, yet the potential for war has been universal. To help overcome soldiers’ reluctance to fight, cultures develop gender roles that equate ‘manhood’ with toughness under fire.”
We aren’t reconciled to female warriors. A woman in charge of a country and its military, or active in battle, has often been seen as sexually unnatural: Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher. Women serving on the frontline create unease – the media report on how many children they have, rebuking a reckless lack of maternalism. Connections with fundamentalism vex even more. Much depends on which side you are on. It seems acceptable for a woman to have fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war. But what of a contemporary British citizen going to fight with Kurdish forces in Syria?
These questions relate not only to notions of masculinity, but forms of feminism, too. Does participating in war undermine a feminist ethic of being anti male violence? For some suffragettes, hurling missiles at parliament and disrupting traffic were deemed necessary, though the suffrage movement contained many pacifists. Defensive confrontation can still be regarded as conflict against a prejudicial or harmful system. The full spectrum of war’s potentiality has always been available to women, including that most deadly human activity – premeditated killing. But why are there so few female soldiers on the page?
We see many depictions of “girl power” in games, film and books – almost mythical, superhero status allows female characters equality or superiority over men. In novels such as Naomi Alderman’s The Power, where women evolve electrically and lethally, inversions of hierarchy are explored. But there are few realistic, terrestrial examples. Brian Van Reet’s novel Spoils is notable. It features Cassandra Wigheard, a soldier serving in Iraq in 2003. She is 19, working class and good at her job. Captured by Islamists, she is held – potentially for execution. The horror of war is refracted though her perspective. Van Reet served with a tank crew and no doubt encountered female combatants, as 7.5% of active officers in the US Marines are women.
War consumes societies, affecting citizens of both genders. But war fiction by female writers is unusual – as if even the imagined domain isn’t one to which women feel entitled. AL Kennedy wrote about a tail-gunner in a second world war bomber in her novel Day, and there were discussions about the very choice of subject matter. It won Costa book of the year. Similarly, Pat Barker won the Booker with The Ghost Road, the last in her first world war trilogy. But there are surprisingly few women tackling such a critical, momentous subject.
I recently talked to the historian Margaret MacMillan, who delivered the 2018 Reith lectures on war and humanity. She recalls early on in her career encountering attitudes of “What do you know about it?” from colleagues. Her scholarship provided a solid defence. Women’s exclusions from armies and from institutions are commonplace, but they are also excised from historical documentation and artistic represen-tation. Examples of supreme female warriors often come via unreliable sources and with questionable evidence – the Amazons being top of the pile.
I mentioned to MacMillan the story of Boudicca releasing the hare from her cloak, and her rousing speech against the Roman invasion: “Let us show them they are hares and foxes trying to rule over dogs and wolves.” How exhilarating and rare this reading experience was – defiance, womanly leadership and poetry combining in one magnificent scene. MacMillan noted her own childhood reading included adventure war stories such as Biggles. To a girl, such books were initially accessible. Only later did the gender differentials of protagonist versus reader – identity transposition – come to mean more. Girls are used to processing male action figures. But beyond comic book superficiality, the opposite is not true for boys.
Female fighters may only make up a small percentage of warriors, but given the historical prevalence of war, many women have been involved in conflict. They have held a variety of roles in combat, technology and diplomacy, worked in intelligence, munitions and espionage. Women are used in war, as MacMillan points out, but their work has not necessarily been honoured or commemorated. They are returned to the domestic arena, relegated. Algerian women fighting in the FLN for independence from France were given roles as dangerous as men, but denied veterans’ rights and pensions. The actions of female soldiers have not been seriously recorded, which is why Svetlana Alexievich’s accounts of Soviet women fighting in the second world war – absent from official narratives – made The Unwomanly Face of War such an important book. Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel prize for her writing. Female soldiers remain missing in action, even if they come home alive. They have not been absorbed into cultural heritages, and societies have missed out, not only on an equality of memory, and a fuller “sense” of war as Alexievich puts it, but on their potential as role models and alternative heroines, and an understanding of the spectrum of female capability within human experience.
And if warfare is essentially human, it is female as well as male: a shared conundrum. As MacMillan notes, there might be biological arguments for the male shoulder having evolved well for overarm missile launching, but neuroscience is debunking notions of a hormonally tranquillised female brain. Women are not always peacemakers, victims, coward-shamers, or red-lipsticked morale boosters. Violence rarely solves violence. But neither has the idea of gender segregation brought enlightenment and peace.
The military politics of The Carhullan Army are not necessarily mine – why would they be? Fiction allows a writer to test gender bias and cultural assumptions, to create what-if scenarios and destabilise conditional thinking, including their own. But I created Sister as a resistance fighter, because I believe we must confront huge human-made political and environmental challenges with all the strength we can muster. I really hope there will be new Boudiccas on the page, so that we may embolden our minds from them, and conceive of women scrupulously. I don’t suggest we all turn to the gun, but toughening up to protest, to restructure, and to lead – we do need that.
