War is Not Liberating

   

During World War II, the Axis and Allied Powers both launched extensive propaganda campaigns encouraging women to engage in wartime production. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of the Nazi Women’s League, wrote in 1940: "Our men at the front do their duty in the face of death—we women at home, with the same unflinching courage, go in whatever direction the Fuhrer indicates."[1] Replace “the Fuhrer” with “Uncle Sam” and the quotation conjures an image of Rosie the Riveter smiling in her Victory Red lipstick. The similarity between the two campaigns is the first red flag. Rosie the Riveter and her friends weren’t there to free women, but to execute a military strategy. These propaganda campaigns were so successful that many still believe WWII was one of the greatest forces for women’s liberation in the 20th century.

My contention is the exact opposite— war does not and cannot liberate. There are two key reasons why. First, war is destructive, not productive. New opportunities, including those that enable women who had previously been confined to domestic employment to enter the broader workforce, require economic growth. War can divert mass amounts of resources into war-related projects, but at best this is a shifting of innovation away from less militaristic projects to more militaristic ones. More realistically, since the technologies and projects invested in during wartime are generally used to destroy people and property, wartime production should be expected to bring about significant social losses. Killing and impoverishment impede economic growth; they do not accelerate it. The satiric economic commentator Frédéric Bastiat said it best when he observed that you can’t make an economy thrive by throwing rocks through windows, regardless of what the glazier might like you to believe. Likewise, you can’t expand women’s economic opportunities by dropping bombs on Berlin, regardless of what Uncle Sam might like you to believe.

In the United States, the process of entrepreneurship leading to new job creation leading to new work opportunities for women had been steadily picking up pace since the early days of the Industrial Revolution—well over 100 years before Rosie the Riveter and “Janes who make planes” came on the scene. To give the war the credit for the work entrepreneurs and women’s rights activists had been doing all that time is to confuse correlation with causation. Post-war economies do not require a labor force with the skill sets that women learned in order to engage in wartime production. It should be no surprise that these experiences did not translate into a permanent upward shift in women’s economic opportunities.

The final stage of the war production plan was for millions of women hired during wartime to be fired or replaced by men once they returned from war. In addition to clear historical records of these mass layoffs, Claudia Goldin’s (1991)[2] analysis of labor force survey data found that the plurality of white married women who were in the labor force in 1950 had either been in the labor force since before the war or entered after the war. Evan K. Rose further clarified the picture of women’s employment during WWII with a 2018 paper[3] that found that the cities and industries most involved in wartime production were not key drivers of women’s labor force participation post-war. In other words, the job opportunities that endured and the women who took advantage of them were in the industries and places that were less affected by wartime production. This evidence supports the argument that women’s wartime employment was transitory and did not change the long-term trends of women’s work.

The second key reason that war does not—and indeed cannot—liberate is that it strengthens hierarchy, not equality. Soldiers and generals alike learn the giving and following of orders. They do not learn skills that would help them to collaborate on equal footing with women they view as their inferiors. Obedience as the highest virtue is reinforced. The ideology of the “separate spheres”— women in domestic roles and men in public roles—may even have gained in popularity following WWII.[4] The women of the 1950s had the right to vote, maintained independent economic rights even after marriage, could attend many colleges, and work in an ever-increasing range of professional fields, but the cultural association of women with domesticity and men with authority was in many ways as strong as ever.

Historically, one of the greatest barriers to women’s participation in public processes has been the absence of opportunities to develop the necessary skills. Mary Wollstonecraft and other early defenders of women’s rights were sharply critical of the fact that women and men received different educations, and that women were often prepared exclusively for their roles as wives and mothers. In Wollstonecraft’s view, the education “…which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire—mere propagators of fools!”[5] The reason the education women received rendered them insignificant and foolish was because it trained them to be chosen (for marriage) and to be acted upon (as they obeyed their husbands) rather than to choose and to act for themselves.

In short, marriage in the 18th and 19th century was a hierarchy with one ruler and one subject. How could war transform subordination into equality? It is possible that formal women’s rights could be used as a bargaining chip in the international politics of war. A country may change their property laws (with or without changing actual practices), or grant women voting rights to receive money or support from global NGOs. This may or may not be a step in the right direction, but long-term change in women’s rights and social status requires reform of the rules in use, not just the rules in form. Progress for women living under patriarchal oppression requires a re-conceptualization of social and political power. Men and women must become capable of holding power with each other rather than always relying on hierarchy.

Militarization supports the skills that are required to exercise “power over.”[6] Militaries establish strict hierarchies where soldiers are taught that order and success require obedience. For this reason, Wollstonecraft analogized women’s lives under coverture to soldier’s lives in the military. Both experiences stunt moral development and produce a character better suited to hierarchy than freedom:

War creates opportunities for people to become better despots, not better democratic equals.

Sadly, one reason we know this is true is the extent to which intimate partner violence and other forms of gender-based violence increase during war and after exposure to conflict. Men with exposure to war are more likely to become perpetrators, and women with exposure to war are more likely to become victims.[8] This is one of the most extreme adverse outcomes associated with women being encouraged to be subservient and men being encouraged to be aggressive. Increased violence toward women is a critically important reason why the claim that war benefits women should be viewed with deep suspicion. It is also more evidence that war-time habits lead to abuse of power. This cannot possibly support the development of greater mutual sympathy and respect between the sexes.

War does not and cannot liberate. Liberation requires progress, growth, and mutual respect. War produces death, destruction, and despotism. Those seeking to advance women’s rights and opportunities should work for peace.

[1] Quoted in Rupp, Leila J. 2015. Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945. Princeton University Press, p. 130

[2] Goldin, Claudia D. 1991. “The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women’s Employment.” The American Economic Review 81 (4): 741–56.

[3] Rose, Evan K. 2018. “The Rise and Fall of Female Labor Force Participation During World War II in the United States.” The Journal of Economic History 78 (3): 673–711. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050718000323.

[4] Becchio, Giandomenica. 2024. The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics: Gender Equality and Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51262-9.

[5] Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.

[6] Ostrom, Vincent. 1997. The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge. University of Michigan Press.

[7] Chapter 1 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.

[8] Torrisi, Orsola. 2023. “Young-Age Exposure to Armed Conflict and Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Marriage and Family 85 (1): 7–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12876.