Women and War

Although I have officially been a Doctor of Philosophy in American History for many years, it was only recently that I got interested in reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This came about through reading another book, Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People, which makes a big point about how important the Uncle Tom book was in helping to bring about the American Civil War, although it was published nearly a decade before the war began.

The author was a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she certainly wrote a devastating and poignant indictment of the whole system of slavery as it existed in the American South. That system, as the book so graphically presents it, took no account of family relationships – and each individual slave (including children, and even babies) – could at any time be separately bought and sold, and at the whim of the purchaser taken anywhere in the States where slavery was legal. Also, no slave could testify in court, regardless of how cruelly they may have been treated.

This brings to mind another woman whose writing was intimately connected with the Civil War. In this case, it was a song, which became known as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” (a title given to it by the magazine in which it first appeared). Julia Ward Howe had a strong religious background, and after actually visiting President Lincoln and hearing Union soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched off to fight, took that same melody – which had originally been that of a Methodist hymn – and wrote inspiring words which, in semi-Scriptural language, depicted the war as a Crusade against Evil. As Harriet Stowe had predicted, the war was now seen as a matter of divine vengeance – punishment for all the years of Southern injustice against a whole race of people.

The song uses Biblical terms and concepts, such as “Mine eyes,” “grapes of wrath,” “builded Him an altar,” “His judgment seat,” “sifting the hearts,” and “be jubilant.” It might be said that Mrs. Howe simply turned the Bible into poetry, and applied it to the great war of her own time.

Of course, women have been involved in causing and promoting wars since long before modern times. I need hardly mention the name of Helen to evoke that ancient epic of the siege of Troy as sung by Homer in the Iliad. Hers, as much later characterized by Christopher Marlowe, was “the face that launched a thousand ships.”

Then, of course, there have been more or less manipulative warrior queens, as personified by Cleopatra, of Egypt; Christina, of Sweden; Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia; and Elizabeth I, Queen of England. And, in our own time, now that democratically elected women can govern countries, we have women no longer so much being the cause of wars as leading their countries into them. Thus in 1971 Indira Gandhi led India in a war against Pakistan which enabled the completely separate eastern part of that country to become independent as Bangladesh. In 1973, Golda Meir led Israel against its neighbors in what became known as the Yom Kippur War. And in 1982 Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Falklands War against Argentina. And let it be noted that in each case the woman-led country was victorious.

And what used to be called the Fair Sex are still stirring up men to fight. This does not apply to anyone in my family – as far as I know – but during World War II, when I was a child, my mother – like many other women on what was called the “Home Front” – saved fats (to help make ammunitions), went to Red Cross meetings to participate in such activities as rolling bandages, and learned about air raid precautions (which included blacking out windows and having sand ready to put on incendiary bombs) and what to do in case of an actual raid. (Happily, no such crisis ever occurred in the U.S. We were on the East Coast – but even on the West Coast there was only one fatal “raid” when a family in Oregon, camping out in a wooded area, came upon an unexploded Japanese “balloon bomb,” and made the terrible mistake of attempting to handle it.)

Women have now won the right to fight and die for their country. But for some reason (perhaps greater wisdom) far fewer of them than men have so far taken advantage of that privilege.