A Piece of a Woman's Mind

This week I watched the movie 20 Days in Mariupol written and directed by Mstyslav Chernov. He headed up a team of Associated Press journalists taking daily videos in Mariupol, Ukraine during the first twenty days of the Russian siege of that town as part of Putin’s goal to take back the nation of Ukraine. The film is streaming widely if you would like to view it for yourself. You probably saw some of the heartrending, gruesome pictures which were distributed worldwide March and April of 2022.

The film reminded me once again that the people most affected by war are women and children. Supposedly in every war there is a winner and a loser (win-lose). In fact every war is a lose-lose for both sides. In the movie the destruction of homes and apartment buildings in residential areas of Mariupol is widespread. For women, their home, be it a house or an apartment, is their fortress. It is their place of protection for themselves and their children. Women naturally fall in charge of establishing a nest, a safe place. A woman takes great pride in her home and works to keep it clean and inviting. It is where she cooks/provides food for the members of her immediate family and nurses them when they are sick. It is where she welcomes and entertains friends and family. Even if a woman works outside her home, it is still the headquarters for her daily existence. It is home base.

The Mariupol movie shows dazed, crazed women in despair because their home has been destroyed. They have lost their mooring and no longer have a way home. There is no home. A maternity hospital was destroyed. There is a picture of a wounded woman with a late-stage pregnancy on a gurney as rescuers attempt to get her to another hospital. Both she and her baby died. There are other gut-wrenching pictures of parents wailing over their children who were killed on a playground.

Currently we see pictures of the Gaza refugees, mostly women and children. Israeli fire has destroyed many apartment buildings and displaced many people. The women are often hysterical. They are asking where they are going to go, how are they are going to care for their children, and where are their missing relatives who are part of their daily support network. They are crying for their missing lifelines.

Being dispossessed from their homes is just the start of the problems for women in a war zone. One of the worst threats is rape. Some invading armies make rape a crime and punish offenders by death. These prohibitions are not one hundred percent effective. Moreover, some armies do not care about what happens to the women in a conquered war zone. At the end of WWII there were many rapes in occupied Germany. The majority of those were in the Soviet zone, estimated to be up to 2 million. Some women were raped multiple times. During the war between Serbia and Croatia 1991-1995, Serbs assaulted many Croatian women. In one documented case a group of forty-four Croatian and Muslim (Bosniak) women were gang-raped, twenty-one of whom were raped every day with the specific intention of getting them pregnant. The crime of rape indelibly scars a woman’s life. If the rape results in pregnancy, the victim is faced with what to do. If she elects for an abortion which is botched, she may become sterile. If she carries the pregnancy to term, she must decide whether to raise the infant or to give her up for adoption. Giving an unwanted child up for adoption leaves its own mental scar tissue that lasts for a lifetime.

Life for women and their children after war is very difficult. Usually there are shortages of everything, especially housing and food. Even though the war is over, death continues to stalk them. If the women lost some or all of their male family members including husbands, fathers and brothers, there is no one to help and support them. Many war widows are forced to become prostitutes to support themselves and their families. Women must continue their lives even when they are overwhelmed by grief for their lost ones. If their loved ones come home with crippling physical and mental disabilities, women must assume the role of caregiver as well as provider. They feel guilty when they ask themselves whether it would have been better for the wounded family member if he had died instead of survived.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the increasing number of brave females on active duty with the armed forces. Many of them have families. Although many women have important careers along with their roles as wife and mother, those roles are especially difficult for female soldiers. They cannot control which duty station they are assigned to. They may be called into a war zone at any time and any place. These women are exposed not only to injury or death in the war zone, but also to the pressure of familial problems to which they are not free to respond due to their relative isolation in the war zone. War is not a positive event for these women.

The most frustrating thing about wars is that they are almost always fomented and declared by men. Even in modern times when we have increasing numbers of women serving in legislatures and as leaders of countries, they are never even close to being in the majority. I truly believe that if women were either equally represented or in the majority, we would have a lot less war in the world. There have been several well-known female pacifists in the history of the United States. One of the most famous was Jeannette Rankin.

 Jeannette was the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, which also means she was the first woman to be elected to Congress. She was elected as a Republican from Montana and started her term in 1917, two years before women were allowed to vote in a federal election. (In Montana women got the right to vote at the state and local level in 1914.) During her first tenure she worked on a resolution to amend the Constitution to grant universal suffrage to women. After failing once, that resolution after her term ended eventually resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment. She was a lifelong pacifist and firmly believed that war was never the answer to resolving differences among nations. She also worked on behalf of social welfare for women and children. In 1940 she returned to the House of Representatives representing Montana. On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was the only Congressional member who voted against entering the war against Japan. That vote effectively ended her political career. She continued to support peace movements for the rest of her life including women’s peace marches against the Vietnam War. Ask yourself how many of our current members of Congress would be willing to follow their consciences on an important vote even if they knew it meant the end of their political career.

Jeannette believed that we had to have more women in government in order to come to sensible decisions which benefitted the entire nation. She believed that nations should reduce their armed forces and actively work toward disarmament as the path to peace. I agree with her on both counts.