Women and Nonviolence
Carol Lee Flinders
Thinking about women and nonviolence, I found myself wondering what difference
gender actually makes in the way an individual embraces and practices
nonviolence. It felt like an odd question to raise, because the heroes and
heroines of nonviolence have a fine way of transcending conventional gender
scripts altogether. The almost maternal gentleness of a Cesar Chavez and the
unyielding courage of an Aung San Suu Kyi confirm our sense that as a human
being is “taken over” by the core tenet of nonviolence— the conviction that all
of life is one – gender in the ordinary sense becomes meaningless.
That said, I have to add that the life stories of women whose names are, for
me, synonymous with nonviolence do take on fresh meaning when read from the
standpoint of gender. I’m inclined to think our understanding of nonviolence
itself gets deepened in the process as well..
Consider, for example, the discovery made several years ago by a pair of UCLA
scientists – both women, as it happens -- that the testosterone-fueled “fight
or flight” response we’d been told was the human being’s normal response to
stress and threat is really only normal for men. Women are far more likely to
slip into a “tend and befriend” mode: quiet the children, feed everyone, defuse
the tension, and connect with other females. It’s all about oxytocin, the
hormone that kicks in to facilitate labor contractions and the “letdown”
response in nursing mothers, but also, curiously, in moments of perceived
danger. A woman who believes her children are directly threatened will fight
unto the death, but only, it appears, when she’s exhausted other strategies.
Both “fight or flight” and “tend and befriend” are adaptive behaviors acquired
in our remote, prehuman past. Among chimpanzees, our nearest relations, males
patrol the territory within which the females and infants feed. They’re primed
to fight because nobody’s DNA will get reiterated if they don’t. Females are
rarely out on those frontlines, they’re more typically engaged in direct care of
their offspring.
Broadly speaking, then, it’s never been particularly adaptive for
women to engage in direct combat. This fact does not make women inherently
better at nonviolence, but it does mean that women tend to come at it from a
somewhat different direction and even live it out rather differently.
Most conversations about women and nonviolence begin by noting that Mahatma
Gandhi said he’d learned nonviolence from his wife Kasturba -- specifically,
from her ability to resist his “petty tyrannies” without ever withdrawing her
love or being anything but gentle and patient. In fact, Kasturba was behaving
as devout Hindu wives always have, and she could have gone on doing it for
another thousand years without giving rise to the “science” of nonviolence if
Gandhi himself hadn’t been poised on one of those critical tipping points in
consciousness. Because he was desperate for a way to transform the powerlessness
of his oppressed countrymen into power, something clicked, and he asked himself
the kind of simple question we associate with genius: “What if a man
were to behave in this way toward his oppressor? What if a man were to
lower his fists, drop his gun or his sword or his club, and refuse to fight?
And
of course the rest is history.
When a man decides he will not retaliate, but search instead for common ground,
and cultivate love and respect for his opponent, he is going against millions of
years of conditioning, and the life stories of men who have made this decision
suggest that it can feel very much like a religious conversion or “metanoia”
-- a dramatic reversal and a powerful re-direction of one’s whole being that
is both revelatory and profoundly energizing.
Women, on the other hand, are rarely stirred in the same way by the idea
of renouncing violence. Yet there is, I believe, a comparable “Eureka!”
moment in the life of a woman who gives herself over to nonviolence – a Peace
Pilgrim, a Dorothy Day, a Mother Antonia -- and that is when she voluntarily
steps out of the relatively safe, secure, and comfortable enclosure that
men-with-guns [and] have traditionally provided for “their” women and moves into
places where there is no guarantee she will be safe at all, or even remotely
comfortable: the open road in one case, the slums of New York City and Chicago
in the second, and a Tijuana prison in the third.
Sister Helen Prejean was forty-two when she left what she calls the “terrarium”
or the “bubble” of the comfortable convent in one of New Orleans’ better suburbs
and moved to the Projects. Insulated no longer from the suffering of those her
Saint Joseph Sisters call “the dear neighbor,” she worked at first in an adult
literacy program, and when someone asked her if she’d be willing to correspond
with someone on Death Row, she said she would. “And the terrible thing is,” she
deadpans today, “he wrote back.”
And again, the rest is history. Within a few months Sister Helen had begun the
work that would make her the world’s best known opponent of the death penalty.
The thrill of walking out of “safe places” into direct contact with her fellow
human beings is a leit motif through all of Sister Helen’s writings and
speeches. She connects it with “wildness” and a way of life that is increasingly
unscripted and improvisational. The winds of grace are blowing through her life
now, she says, filling it with joy and almost limitless energy.
There is another and related way in which the nonviolent work of women tends to
take a somewhat different tack from that of men. Ella Baker is a good case in
point.
Ella
who?
Exactly.
Ella Baker is often described as “an unsung heroine of the Civil Rights
movement.” In the literal sense that’s not true, because of all the songs that
the black women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock performs, none
is more beloved than “Ella’s Song,” composed by Sweet Honey founder Bernice
Johnson Reagon. The song begins in Ella Baker’s own words, “We who believe in
freedom cannot rest.” Initially a member of Martin Luther King’s inner circle,
Ella Baker went her own way after two years at the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference because she disagreed with its policy of strong central leadership.
She gave herself over instead to grassroots organizing, working with young
people in particular because she believed that “strong people don’t need strong
leaders.” Today her memory is honored at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
in Oakland, where an initiative is being launched this summer called Reclaim the
Future. The plan is “to build a constituency that can transform urban America by
creating jobs, reducing violence and honoring the earth.”
Ella Baker’s work, and the work going on today in her name, represents the
dimension of nonviolence that Gandhi called, in language that is almost
dauntingly prosaic, “Constructive Program.”
The spinning wheel was the rallying point, and women the backbone, of
Constructive Program, a far-reaching plan to rebuild India from the ground up
into a nation that was so strong and self-reliant that it simply couldn’t be
colonized any longer: The British would leave not so much because they’d been
defeated but because a certain kind of hypnotic spell had been broken for
colonized and colonizer alike. Dorothy Day envisioned much the same goal for the
Catholic Worker movement: “to build a new society within the shell of the old” –
a shell that would break and fall away when the life within it couldn’t be
contained any longer. Quaker sociologist Elise Boulding agrees, arguing that
only by building sturdy “cultures of peace” will we be able finally to crowd
out cultures of war and violence.
I"ve come to think of ]Constructive Program and its analogs as “preventive
nonviolence,” or even “stealth nonviolence,” because they address the root
causes of violence – racism, poverty, and militarism for example – at the level
of community, neighborhood, and family. Building cultures of peace is long haul
work, undramatic and unheralded, and often infinitely tedious, and most of the
people doing it probably don’t even think of themselves as practitioners of
nonviolence.
Maybe it’s time they did.
