Unanswered Questions: Women, War and the Durability of Institutional Change

  

In her essay, “Women and War: Can Chaos Induce Social Change?” Claudia Williamson Kramer notes “Over the last 30 years and across over 165 countries…[w]ar, especially civil wars with foreign involvement, correlates with jumps in the WBL [Women, Business, and Law] index, a measure of legal parity between men and women’s access to economic opportunities.” She goes on to discuss several examples of this trend, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, positing that these observed changes in women’s rights stem from economic realities as opposed to underlying philosophical changes. She is careful to mention that war is not easy for women, of course, and that war’s role as a catalyst for change highlights that individuals are the real agents of change, not governments. 

In my mind, two items in the essay are of critical note and worth more discussion and exploration. 

First, Kramer notes that measurements of legal parity between men and women jump during and following war. Indeed, there is an established link between war and the enfranchisement of marginalized groups, including women, following conflict (see Porter 1994). The logic is straightforward; it is difficult to deny political rights to groups of individuals who just participated directly in a war effort. However, this is not universal—and may be a more contemporary phenomenon. It is important to note that 30 years of data captured in the WBL index offers information about a sliver of the conflicts that have been observed globally in the last century, much less across human history. Did the Second Boer War of 1899-1903 increase women’s political and economic parity with men? The Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939? Such arguments would be difficult to make. This is not to say wars have not or cannot move the needle on women’s rights, but it is worth exploring why these changes occurred only with relatively recent conflicts. 

It is also possible that war hinders the acquisition of rights and economic opportunities for women. Hochschild (2011), for instance, notes how the momentum of the women’s suffrage movement in England slowed in the buildup to and during the First World War. Suffragists like Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, suspended her efforts advocating for women in favor of generating support for the war. While some women were granted the vote in 1918 (those with property or married to a property owner), voting rights would not come to all English women until 1928. Would these rights have come sooner absent the war?

The second, particularly intriguing question Kramer raises in her piece is the question of “stickiness” as it relates to institutional change and women’s political and economic participation during and post-conflict. She has her doubts. As an economist focused in the area of defense and peace economics, I do as well. At a theoretical level, it’s suggested that institutional change is most likely to “stick” when it is well-aligned with the core values of a society. Institutional change that is endogenously imposed and aligned with the core values of a society is more likely to stand the test of time than exogenous institutions imposed exogenously. 

It is worthy of note that Kramer highlights that those conflicts with foreign involvement are especially likely to see increases in their WBL index scores. It seems plausible to me that her suggestion that the emphasis on women’s rights within international aid groups (e.g., the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund) may engender change on paper but not change in practice. 

Again, historical examples may be helpful. In her initial article, she mentions the push in the United States following World War II to have women return to more traditional gender roles as well as the implementation of post-war policies favoring men. But there are many more examples across different types of political systems. Svetlana Alexievich, for example, discusses how Soviet women who participated directly in World War II, as tank operators, machine gunners, etc., were socially stigmatized after the war. Parents advised their sons against marrying female veterans, with many assuming the women were “whores.” She writes of “two wars” fought by Soviet women—the war at the front and the “war” to which they returned. 

A more recent example would be the complete breakdown of women’s rights following the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021. Women in the country are no longer able to attend school, are denied participation in much of public life, and have their activities severely restricted. If exogenously imposed rights for women were going to “stick,” it seems as though a twenty-year occupation would have done it. 

Kramer highlights questions in desperate need of inquiry. While war can facilitate institutional change—including changes in women’s rights—changes are not promised to be positive nor are they guaranteed to last. Under what circumstances are women’s rights likely to improve—and last? Here there is clearly room for statistical work, longitudinal studies, comparative institutional analyses, etc. But there is also room for other kinds of economic work, analytical narratives and other methods, to help us begin to understand these questions.