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Contending with Women and War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2015

Christine Sylvester
Christine Sylvester*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Extract

The late Jean Bethke Elshtain was a difficult feminist, a public intellectual and scholar who drew on feminist thinking but interpreted or applied it so idiosyncratically that many feminists disavowed her. Elshtain's early works encapsulated the best hopes of 1980s' feminists to bring women and gender to the fore across many academic fields. She was influential in political theory, religious studies, and feminist analysis, and she was one of the leading lights of feminist international relations (IR) well into the 1990s. Yet she was moving in other directions and would let it be known that she disapproved of gay marriage and endorsed George W. Bush's war in Iraq as just. These positions were anathema to most western feminists, and Jean Bethke Elshtain slid down the feminist reputational ladder from pinnacle to the point where she was almost persona non grata, deemed an imperialist traitor to feminist causes. She did not draw back or go quiet under attack: to the last public address she gave shortly before her death, Elshtain was on the road defending her controversial political viewpoints openly and forcefully. Let it not be said that the difficult feminist is shy.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 586 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2015 

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References

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