Women and Wars by Carol Cohn

Women and Wars by Carol Cohn

In the book Women and Wars Cohn (2013) presents the argument that women have a huge involvement in the process of war as opposed to the myth that it is only men who do all the work in the times of war and that women and children are helpless when in fact they are just as many soldiers, fighters and much more than just a simple housewife, or a simple army wife, they took important roles like activists against war, peace builders, etc.

Throughout her book Cohn (2013) suggests that militarization is the process in which people, a person or an object become controlled by the military and in turn those things become dependent on the military and place such a high value for it creating a cycle of control and dependency, and also suggests that militarism is “a set of attitudes and social practices which regard war and the preparation for war as a normal and desirable social activity”. Enloe (2000) suggests militarization to be a similar concept by describing it as “a process by which a person or country comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend on for its well-being on militaristic views”. Conversely, Riley (2008) describes militarization to be a purely masculine concept where she compares being militarized as becoming masculinized, and that women are becoming more like men, but however then suggests that instead maybe the concept of gender is “being more fully diversified and essentialized simultaneously Eisenstein (2007) as cited by Riley (2008)

In relation to gender and militarism, we can infer from (Cohn, 2013) that there are two sides to women during war time. They can be seen protesting wars whilst other women support them, they can prevent wars whilst others prompt wars. However, women’s experience of war and relation to it can be considered to be quite varied, this is due to the fact that there is both “diversity among women and diversity among wars” (p.2).

War is portrayed to have many influences especially on society, but more specifically, politically. Cohn (2013) states that voters can be militarised by those running for the government as voters are often attracted to leaders who show capability in deploying military skills and interests as it is supposed that voters are more easily convinced and comforted by these traits as they relate to potential for solving complications and problems facing civilian society.