“The troublesome question of nonviolence haunts the women’s movement and always has. We despise the brutality to which women are subjected by men, the arrogance and casual destructiveness of male violence as embodied in domestic battery, gang skirmishes, and officially sanctioned wars. Feminists have traditionally opposed police brutality, the draft, warfare, rape, blood sports, and other manifestations of the masculine fascination with dominance and death. Yet like all oppressed peoples, women are divided on the essential question of violence as a tactic. When is it appropriate to become violent? Is the use of force ever justifiable? When is it time to take up arms? to learn ju-jitsu? to carry a knife? Is violence just plain wrong, no matter who does it? Or can there be extenuating circumstances? The flow of our debate is muddied by traditional ideas of womanliness with which feminists struggle. Are women really better than men? are we inherently kinder, gentler, less aggressive? Certainly the world would be a better place if everyone manifested the virtues tradition assigns to Good Women. But will gentleness and kindness really win the hearts of nasty and violent people? Will reason, patience, and setting a good example make men see the error of their ways? Is “womanly” non-violence “naturally” the best and only course for feminists? Historically, the prospect for peoples and cultures which avoid violence is not good. They tend to lose territory, property, freedom, and finally life itself as soon as less pleasant neighbours show up with better armaments and bigger ambitions. It’s hard to survive as a pacifist when the folks next door are club-waving, rock-hurling imperialists: you end up enslaved or dead, or you learn to be like them in order to fight them. The greatest challenge to nonviolence is that to fulfill its promise it must be able to prevent violence. The image of the nonviolent activist righteously renouncing the use of force–while watching armed thugs drag away their struggling victims–is less than pleasing. We have also the problem of effectiveness. Non-violence is far more impressive when practised by those who could easily resort to force if they chose. A really big, tough man in the prime of life who chooses to discipline himself to peace and gentleness is an impressive personality. A mob of thousands who choose to sit down peaceably and silently in the street, rather than smash windows and overrun police lines, is an unnerving sight. These kinds of nonviolence make a profound political point. But when women advocate non-violence it may be much less effective. Why? Because women are traditionally considered incapable of violence, particularly of violence against men. In the 40’s the film beauty used to beat her little fists ineffectually on the strong man’s chest before collapsing into passionate tears; in the 70’s the ditzy female sidekick inevitably left the safety catch on when it was time to shoot the bad guy. Women are commonly held to be as incompetent at physical force as they are at mechanics, mathematics, and race car driving. The only violence traditionally permitted to women is the sneaky kind: conspiracy, manipulation, deceit, poison, a stiletto in the back. And when women do become violent, we perceive it as shocking and awful, far worse than the male violence which we take for granted. There is a self-serving myth among men that, given power, women would be “even worse” than the worst men–which, of course, justifies keeping women firmly in their place and making sure no power gets into their nasty little hands. Many of us believe that myth, to some extent: I can remember my mother (a strong and resourceful woman) retailing to me the common doctrine that the female camp guards of the Third Reich were worse than the men. Of course, only a handful of women attained to power in Hitler’s Germany; prison-guarding is an unfeminine occupation, also. So female camp guards, of high or low rank, were exceptional and therefore suspect. Their deeds are documented and unquestionably vile, but it’s hard for me to say how they might be distinguished as measurably worse, more evil, than those of their male colleagues. What makes them worse in the eyes of Allied historians, I fear, is that in addition to their other crimes they stepped out of women’s place. This different perception of male and female violence, this double standard, afflicts women at the most elementary levels. When a man makes unwanted social advances to a woman in, let’s say, a restaurant or theatre, and she eventually has to tell him loudly and angrily to get lost–she is the one who will be perceived as rude, hostile, aggressive, and obnoxious. His verbal aggression and invasiveness are accepted and expected, her rudeness or mere curtness in getting rid of him is noticed and condemned. One of our great myths is that a “real lady” can and should handle any difficulty, defuse any assault, without ever raising her voice or losing her manners. Female rudeness or violence in resistance to male aggression has often been taken to prove that the woman was not a lady in the first place, and therefore deserved no respect from the aggressor or sympathy from others. Until recently, violent women in fiction were always evil. Competence with guns, long blades, or martial arts automatically marked a female character as “mannish”, possibly lesbian, destined for stereotyping as a prison matron, pervert, manhater, sadist, etc. On the other hand, cleverness with tiny silver-plated pistols, poison rings, or jewelled daggers identified your “snakelike” villainness whose cold and perfect beauty concealed a heart twisted by malice and frozen with selfishness. Heroines, predictably, fainted or screamed at moments of peril and then waited to be rescued in the penultimate chapter. By the 1920’s the Good Girls might put up a brave struggle and kick the bad guy in the shins, but they certainly did not throw furniture, break necks, cut throats, or whip out a sword-cane and chase the villain through the abandoned warehouse. Tougher females emerged for a while in the war years, but only in the last 20 years have fictional females arrived who are ready with fists, karate kicks, and small arms. A new genre of Amazon Fantasy has grown up, where previously there were only one or two authors who dared to put a sword in a female character’s hand. Warrior women have become protagonists, with books and even epics to themselves. Admittedly, most of them are required by the author (or editor) to Learn to Love A Man Again by the end of the plot, but at least they start out by avenging their own rapes and their family’s wrongs. In commercial film (a conservative medium) fighting heroines and anti-heroines are beginning to surface: Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita, Deborra-Lee Furness in Shame, and of course there are Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon Thelma & Louise. Even in films with no pretense to social commentary or good intentions, fighting female sidekicks are popping up here and there (Conan the Destroyer, The Golden Child) who previously were restricted to the world of Marvel Comics. Americans are beginning to be able to handle the idea of female rage and vengeance, or at least of serious female violence, in fiction. In much the same way, the reading public of the 20’s and 30’s began to accept the Career Woman long before women made real inroads into the professions. Does this mean something? Is the ability to be violent a prerequisite for equality–as the maintenance of army and arsenal is for nationhood? Are these fighting females a good sign? Maybe. In a perfect world, no. In a perfect world we wouldn’t lock our doors, and no one would know how to throw a punch or how to roll with one. In this world, alas, perhaps the price of full citizenship is the willingness and ability to defend one’s self and one’s dignity to the point of force. We do respect people who “know their limits”, who cannot be pushed past a certain point–just as we mistrust and disrespect those who have no give in them at all and overreact violently to every little frustration. We respect people who can take care of themselves, who inform us of their limits clearly and look prepared to enforce them. Women are traditionally denied these qualities–the “no means yes” of male mythology–and one reason for this is that we are denied the use of force. To put it very simply, little boys who get pushed around on the playground are usually told to “stand up to him, don’t let him get away with it,” whereas little girls are more usually advised to run to Teacher. The bottom line in not being pushed around is our willingness and our capacity to resist. At some point resistance means defending ourselves with physical force. Women, kept out of contact sports, almost never trained in wrestling or boxing as boys often are, taught to flatter strong men by acting weak, are denied the skills and the emotional preparedness required to fight back.” - Justice Is A Woman With A Sword, by D.A. Clarke
Thoughtful. Maybe you need strength in numbers or in some kind of power before you can genuinely engage in nonviolent resistance.
