Women and International Relations: Evolution of a Concealed Binomial

This article focuses on the role of feminism in international relations theory. The wide-ranging theme will be inscribed within the system of logics, particularly Western subordination logic. Feminism has indeed its roots in Western logic. It is one of the products of subordination logic and does not exist anywhere else. Subordination logic allows the evolution of women and their entry into politics.

The article will be divided into three paragraphs. The first paragraph will portray some important female characters in the politics of antiquity. In the second the focus will be directed to the emergence of feminist issues, feminist claims, the various feminist waves, even if of distant origin to arrive, to talk about feminist theory within international relations. In conclusion, recent developments, up to the present day will be outlined.

Source: Cosmopolitan

Relevant women in ancient times

This paragraph focuses on three-character portraits: the wife of Pericles, Aspasia di Mileto, and wife of the Roman Emperor Augusts, Livia Drusilla.

Information about Aspasia is available through the ancient historiographers and philosophers. Socrates praised her wisdom and political insight.

Aspasia run a pleasure house in Athens visited by important men, among which the governor of Athens Pericles. Pericles, married with two children, fell in love with her and initially made her his personal concubine. Ultimately, Pericles married his beloved. Pericles and Aspasia were defined as a cultural-political couple. Their partnership constituted the rise of the golden age of Greek culture in the 5th century.

Aspasia was a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy in one of the most famous intellectual circles in Athens. She indeed played an important role in the emancipation of women, laying the foundations for the future involvement of women in the political life of the city.

Livia Drusilla was the wife of the first emperor of Rome, Octavian Augustus. The third Roman emperor Caligola called her Ulixes Stolatus, 'an Ulysses in skirts'.

She distinguished herself for her attempt to redeem her status as a woman, to the point of demanding recognition of her imperial presence alongside her husband. As early as 35 BC Octavian had granted her the honor of managing his personal finances. When Augustus died, he left as his last will and testament the wish to 'adopt her'. With Livia, women took on not only a political function, but also a sacred one, as beneficent deities, founders and protectors of the empire.

The great turning point is marked Christianity, which paves the way for the substantial emergence of women in society and politics. The key evidence is the speech by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in which he exalted the mother of the Emperor Constantine, Helena.

Helen Flavia Julia Augusta was the daughter of an innkeeper. The tribune Constantius Chlorus fell in love with her in 270 and married her: they were both pagans. Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, was born to them and the union continued until 293, when Constantius Chlorus was appointed Caesar by Diocletian, who obliged him to repudiate Helena.

When Constantine in 306 was acclaimed Augustus, Helena was placed in the highest dignity.

Connected to the figure of Helena, and here fits the oratory of Ambrose, is the inventio crucis. It is Ambrose one of the first to attribute to Helena the inventio crucis, in his excursus dedicated to her in De obitu Theodosii. Placed in the context of the funeral oration for Theodosius, the excursus serves Ambrose to justify the right of the eleven-year-old Honorius to the kingdom in the name of that hereditas fidei which is the principle on which, from Constantine onwards, the transmission of power is based, legitimized precisely by faith. The mother of the first Christian emperor, Helena is the one who establishes this new criterion of succession: the physiognomy of the relationship with her son is considerably modified. It is no longer Helena who depends on Constantine, but Constantine who is lucky to have such a mother a great woman who found much more to offer him than he could receive from her.

These represent the roots that put the female condition in a line of evolution. The subordination logic is a logic of desire, which does not stand still. Its products never stand still, it is an evolutionary logic. Even the figure of the woman is not locked in a cage but is anchored in the temporal evolution.

The emergence of feminism and its entrance in IR theory

This paragraph will focus on the so-called feminist waves and will then approach the feminist theory of international relations. As underlined by J. Ann Tickner, it is indeed evident how the development of a feminist theory within international relations has been influenced by feminist epistemology, by the struggles of the different generations of the demand for these or those rights, and the influence is especially more visible in that feminist theory within the arena of international relations is also in the continuity of that goal of trying to fight and avert the subordination of women in that sphere.

As highlighted, feminist issues have old roots. Looking back at history, we can trace that women have largely been confined to domestic roles.

In the period of Enlightenment women were not included in the new reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality and natural rights and this led female intellectuals to start demanding for inclusivity.

The first women’s rights convention was held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, with the Declaration of Sentiments which emphasized education and political rights for women, and claimed the right to vote.

The ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting African American men the right to vote, paved the way for the relaunch of the feminist discourse, and this time the central issue was specifically that of suffrage. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote, passed.

It was however Russia the first country to grant, in 1917, the right to vote to women. Equal rights for men and women in all spheres of public life were thus proclaimed. In 1919, Lenin wrote: "In the years of Soviet power, much more has been done in one of the most backward countries of Europe for the emancipation of women than has been done in 130 years in all the 'democratic' republics of the world." (Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919)).

Discourse over an equality in the working field was already a thematic presented in 1863 by the author Chernyshevsky, in his book What is to be done?. The novel gave a strong impetus to the spread of democratic ideas and the women’s issue itself.

As during the first world war new working opportunities for women appeared, the same happened during the second world war. However, the achieved opportunities and working positions were immediately reclosed with the end of the war.

Between the 60s and the 70s, a new wave of feminism, the second, began. It was in this period that people began talking about feminism as a series of waves and mainly, starting from 1968, when the American writer Martha Weinman Lear published her article in the New York Times, “The Second Feminist Wave”.

While the fight of the first wavers had been political, the fight of the second wave movement was over social equality, and it was based on the assumption that “the personal is political,” an assumption that had its origins in a paper of the same title authored by Carol Hanisch. According to this assumption, problems that seemed personal and trivial — regarding sex, relationships, access to abortions, and domestic labor — were rather systemic and political. In fact, the feminists’ concerns were seen by society as personal issues, which had to find solution through individual initiatives and not through political organizations/movements. This slogan served Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), emerged in the late 60s.

Despite the great resonance, and the rising of academic debates, the decline of the second wave did not take long to arrive.

The third wave emerged in the mid-1990s. Notwithstanding the previous gained victories, women were still marginalized in all top-level government positions. In making women visible, feminism has also started to contest women’s absence from decision-making and institutional structures.

It is during the systematization of third-wave feminism, in the late 80s, that feminist theory entered the sciences of international relations. Until then, feminist issues were looked at rather from a sociological point of view and not in the context of international relations.

These studies are linked to the third debate of IR, that of methodological, ontological and epistemological pluralism, which allows for the emergence of new research traditions such as social constructivism and all the critical approaches.

The theoretical basis is that of the postulates of post-liberal feminists according to which gender hierarchies are a social construction that help to maintain power structures that essentially work against the entry and participation of women in political life and foreign policy.

Firstly, feminists in international relations pointed to the existence of gender-responsive states that support and foment political practices that mostly favor the male sex.

Thus, the arena of international relations and international politics sees the existence of an almost absolute hegemony of the masculine figure. So, any analysis with a gendered stance and approach to ideas and actions that develop within international relations need to pay particular attention to the creation and reproduction of masculine traits.

Indeed, IR feminist theorizer did focus on the deconstruction of gender – in its social construction of identities and in its role of organizing logic. In this regard, is the first step is to distinguish ‘sex’, biological and ‘gender’, socially constructed. Gender entails those socially constructed characteristics, behaviors assigned to female sex and male sex. If males' characteristics are rationality, power, strength and present public sphere, females are associated with irrationality, vulnerability, weakness, domesticity and the private sphere. Plus, these gendered identities are imbedded in a patriarchal society, where women are subordinated to males' power. IR scholars have indeed often associated feminism with maternal and peaceful characteristics. Feminist scholars are opposed to such representations as they believe they lead to a lowering of their authority.

What IR feminist theories try to demonstrate is that these constructed gender identities influence and structure international relations and interactions, dictating the role of both men and women, power dynamics and what is to be considered important in this domain.

Through the process of deconstruction, IR feminist theorizers would challenge these gender roles assumptions, especially pointing out how they impacted IR sphere. According to them, ignoring gender's influence underestimates the contributive role in global affairs, how the latter influence their lives and legitimate their exclusion from this domain.

Cintia Enloe, tries to demonstrate the importance of women in international politics. She asserts how women are very much involved in world politics but, established power structures that foster a division between the public and private spheres and determine what is considered important prevent them from being heard. On the wake of the slogan "the personal is political", she focused on showing how global politics impacts on and is shaped by the daily personal experiences and activities of men and women. In turn, these activities stem from gendered identities. She carries out the example of the military/war field, the classical male ambit par excellence. Women’s contributions to conflict and their experience in conflict have thus found no space in the realm of IR’s considerations, as it is the case of sexual and gendered violence in conflict, (mass rapes, for instance). Only in 2002 the issue was addressed legally: the Rome Statute recognized rape as a war crime.

An important catalyzer for the development of the discipline is the taking into account of the voices of all women from all over the international scene, even the more background actors. Thus, IR is shaped not only by gender but also by other identities, such as class, race or ethnicity.

Recent developments and conclusions

After having outlined the historical and theoretical framework, one cannot avoid to notice that the debate on the participation and role of women in foreign affairs and international security has not only touched the academic level, but has had and is having repercussions in practical terms in both national and international agendas. Attention has focused not only on the misrepresentation of women in leadership and other key positions in the area of governance, foreign and security policy, but also on the positive effect of including women in such areas.

In this wake, in October 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a watershed resolution in the tradition of foreign policy strategies. Through Resolution 1325, the UN recognized the need to adopt a gender approach to peace operations that would take into account the specific consequences of armed conflict on women and girls, on the one hand, and encourage the involvement of women in peacebuilding and peacekeeping operations, on the other.

The Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS), was formally initiated by this resolution. It is comprised of a set of UN objectives on the subject and plans drawn up to promote women's empowerment, is the cornerstone of the promotion of gender equality in the world of foreign affairs.

National action plans in at least 66 countries all over the world have followed as well as new resolutions and official reports published by international organizations such as the United Nations. Several initiatives are also being implemented at EU level, including through the 2018 EU Strategic Approach to WPS.

Gender issues have been raised to the international relation's agenda, stemming from the acknowledgment of women as essential resources for ensuring peace and security in the prevention and post-conflict reconstruction phases, and for decision-making and negotiation processes to achieving long-term solutions in areas of greatest instability.

However, at present, there remain limitations to the full implementation of the shift of paradigm launched by Resolution 1325.

As for international security affairs in non-governmental domains, the Women in International Security data reports an even wider the gender gap. For example, about 73% of security experts in Washington think tanks are men. A United Nations study by Radhika Coomaraswamy (2015) found that in post-conflict reconstructions, women still experience high rates of violence post- conflict, are still excluded from peace processes and still ignored in peace- building policy. Megan Mackenzie (2009) has claimed that women are yet not considered as agents in conflict, but they are victims with limited agency.

International initiatives have been indeed undertaken to overcome these conditions.

Women In International Security (WIIS), founded in 1987, is the premier organization in the world dedicated to advancing the leadership and professional development of women in the field of international peace and security.

Research has repeatedly shown that gender equality contributes to peace, and that peace negotiations involving women have a better chance of being sustainable and effective. Gender-equal societies enjoy better health, stronger economic growth and higher security.

Indeed, new opportunities have been opened up to women in international and defense affairs. The international community now agrees over the importance of women in promoting peace, security and the function of democracy. "The inclusion of women in decision-making is a democratic good in itself and breaks male dominance in politics" (Hassim, 2006).

Women have advanced to increasingly important roles in the field of international security and there are new and expanding opportunities for women’s participation globally especially at senior levels of policymaking. In this regard, at present, some outstanding examples, among others, are represented by the Russian Head of the Central Bank, the German Minister of Foreign Affair, the American Vice President, the President of the European Commission, the French Minister of the Armed Forces, that are all women.

The IPUS’s latest Woman in Parliament in 2021report reported that global proportion of women parliamentarians has increased by 0.6 percentage points to reach 26.1%. However, this trend of gender equalization was not shared evenly across the globe.

Finally, on a global scale, these trends witness that misrepresentation of women is still an issue and a reality, the overcoming of which will, eventually, take place in different forms and according to different timing.