In this essay we make visible the contribution of women even and especially when women cannot be added to mainstream, non-feminist accounts of peace. We argue that if feminism is taken seriously, then most philosophical discussions of peace must be updated, expanded and reconceived in ways which centralize feminist insights into the interrelationships among women, nature, peace, and war. We do so by discussing six ways that feminist scholarship informs mainstream philosophical discussions of peace.

Alice Hertz was a woman who, in J965, burned herself in protest against the Vietnam War. 1 first became aware of her through studying the writings of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and a central figure in the history of nonviolence. In this essay I reflect on how Alice Hertz's action and Dorothy Day's vision of nonviolent commitment can each illuminate the other.

This essay is about my coming to awareness of my national identity as a Jeivish'lsraeli while building a friendship with a Palestinian woman, Amal Kawar, and the place of such an awareness in the process of the re-formation of identity. To the extent that it has a conclusion, it is that, at least in the Jewish-Israeli-Palestinian context, a peace that does not reproduce the past necessitates an ethico-politically based self-examination and change.

In this essay, I connect the sexual victimization of women, children, and pet animals with the violence manifest in a patriarchal culture. After discussing these connections, I demonstrate the importance of taking seriously these connections because of their implications for conceptual analysis, epistemology, and political, environmental, and applied philosophy. My goal is to broaden our understanding of issues relevant to creating peace and to provide some suggestions about what must be included in any adequate feminist peace politics.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf criticize the social construction of the soldier and argue that gender hierarchy relies on particular constructions of masculinity and femininity. Both contend that private tyrannies lead to public ones, and thatmen's domination in families provides a model for public domination. This reveals the social and psychological conditions which replicate domination, violence, and war. I examine how gender constructs promote and participate in the psychological conditions necessary for war.

The examination of cultural productions with nuclear themes reveals the regular recurrence of the theme of incestuous fatherhood. Connections include a nuclear-father figure, one who threatens dependents while purportedly protecting them; the desecration of the future; the betrayal of trust; insidious long-term effects after initial harm; the shattering of safety; the cult of secrecy, aided by psychological defenses of denial, numbing, and splitting (in both survivor and perpetrator); the violation of life-preservative taboos; and survival.

Feminist peace theories that find hope for peace in the ideal of the caretaking woman are grounded in patriarchal gender distinctions, fail to challenge adequately the patriarchal dualism that constitutes the self by devaluing the other, and the practice of caretaking about which they speak may be easily co-opted into the service of war. Feminist peace theory should address the devaluation of “others,” in order to undermine this justification and motivation for war.

We criticize the following views: only the rapist is responsible since only he committed the act; no one is responsible since rape is a biological response to stimuli; everyone is responsible since men and women contribute to the rape culture; and patriarchy is responsible but no person or group. We then argue that, in some societies, men are collectively responsible for rape since most benefit from rape and most are similar to the rapist.

Only rarely have feminist theorists addressed the adequacy of just-war theory, a set of/principles developed over hundreds of years to assess the justice of going to war and the morality of conduct in war. Recently, a few feminist scholars have found just-war theory inadequate, yet their own counterproposals are also deficient. I assess feminist contributions to just-war theorizingand suggest ways of strengthening, rather than abandoning, this moral approach to war.

I argue that the achievement of feminist justice is centrally related to the pursuit of peace, so that those who oppose violence in international arenas must, in consistency, oppose violence against women as well. This requires putting an end to the overt violence against women that takes the distinctive form of rape, battering, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse, and to the structural violence that takes the form of inequalities suffered by women in their families and in the economic arena.

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of “maternal practice” and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's “motherwork.”