Women living with the everyday realities of war:
A website dedicated to understanding
women's roles in war and peace

I ought to refuse to scrub the floor or prepare the food, make the bed or water the plant pots. I should let everything in the place die a slow death, and my father and mother would also do better if they stopped eating and living, for why should life continue inside the home when everything outside is collapsing? The apartment itself should fall down, too. Then it could be seen how war pervades the whole of Lebanon.

Hanan al-Shaykh,
The Story of Zahra

From highly controversial figures like Cindy Sheehan, who protested the Iraq War outside of George Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch after her son was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004, and the heartbroken, patriotic mother of a soldier killed in Iraq depicted in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 to less publicly visible women living with the realities of war in Iraq and Lebanon, many women in recent years have had to develop tactics for dealing with war as women, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and soldiers. With Condoleeza Rice in Israel and Laura Bush at home baking cookies, women’s public roles in the very real wars going on around us have become highly public and often hotly contested topics. At the same time, the place of war in the everyday lives of normal women have taken on new dimensions. Women have begun to function as key players in war and in the work for peace going on at local and global levels. But how new is this participation of women in the politics of war?

Whether living through the British Civil War in the seventeenth century or the American Civil War in the nineteenth century or today’s conflicts in the Middle East, women writers have historically chronicled their responses to war in ways that merge politics and domesticity. Despite vast differences in time and place, works like Jane Cavendish’s manuscript writing (ca. 1640) shares with Hanan al-Shaykh’s more recent evocations of war-torn Beirut a sense that women’s acts of everyday resistance—making bread even when food supplies have been raided, for example—impact the way war works, on metaphoric, physical, political, and ideological levels. Yet literary studies and other branches of academic inquiry often enforce a separation between the texts that are to be studied and the texts being lived all around us. The purpose of this website is to react against this academic impulse of exclusivity and to suggest that the borders between academic subjects and activism need not--should not--be so rigorously enforced.

While peace efforts--from those of the seventeenth-century Quakers to more recent movements in the Middle East--and the experiences of war are not precisely gendered in any way, the purpose of this website is to situate women's experiences of war in broader historical, material, and ideological contexts. In order to do so, I have attempted to bring together links, creative writing, and academic projects that focus on women and war.

Many organizations have enacted projects like this one, chief among them the Women's UN Report Network. And this site does not seek to compete with or otherwise displace the work of scholars involved on these networks but instead to provide a supplementary forum in which people can describe and interpret their own ideas about the realities of war (whether in historical texts or immediate contexts). As this site grows, I hope to develop links to similar pages, to "publish" creative and academic responses to war on these pages, and to generate print publications like the planned essay collection, Women Living with War. On a smaller but no less important scale, I hope that this site helps foster a sense of local community as much as a global one by becoming attached to various reading groups, demonstrations, and forms of activism.

By bringing together texts--literary, academic, critical, creative, and more--about women living with the everyday realities of war, this site should challenge perceptions about what it means to experience, understand, and perceive war. More significantly, though, this site should challenge current and past politics and helps insist on a world in which war is not something to be accepted but something to be struggled against. We live in a society desperately in need of peace, and the main goal of this site is to provide a creative outlet for the works that so many activists and individuals have produced (and continue to produce) with such aims in mind. This site is designed to connect texts by individuals who do not accept war as a necessary evil or as functioning for a greater good; it is designed to bring together works about hope and about how peace can be fought for through the humanities--and through individual actions.