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Gender and war(s) Feminist theorists have also suggested that sex and gender are key to theorizing war. Some scholars have shown sex to be a key variable in war(s) by linking sex equality within states and states’ tendency to make war(s) (e.g. Den Boer and Hudson 2002; Caprioli 2004; Hudson et al. 2009). Using statistical evidence, Hudson et al. made the state-level (or ‘second image’) argument that ‘the treatment of females within society’ is a ‘fundamental and powerful factor’ in explaining when wars occur (2009, 7). While this work using gender as variable is interesting, using gender subordination as an analytical concept through which to understand inter- national conflict provides more leverage to analyze the gendered nature of states, militarism, and war.10 This perspective is the foundation for an emerging subfield of Feminist Security Studies that argues that security can be understood as constituted by gender, war seen as caused by gender hierarchy, and wars considered gendered competitions (Sjoberg 2009a; Sylvester 2010; Wibben 2011). Feminist scholarship has explicitly linked war and gender subordination in a number of different ways: conceiving of global politics as a ‘war system’ where sexism, human subordination, and violence are linked (Reardon 1985); noting that war often victimizes women (Stiehm 1983); pointing out the co-constitution of gender, nationalism, and conflict (Yuval-Davis 1997); linking gender and militarism (Enloe 1989), and understanding the enterprise of war as fundamentally gendered (Tickner 1992).11 This article argues that feminist theorizing of war and feminist structural theorizing can be productively linked.

Structural gender hierarchy and wars A feminist understanding of gender hierarchy as a structural feature of global politics suggests some suppositions about war and about war(s), discussed here in narrative form for economy of space. One hypothesis might be that the content and salience of the hegemonic/ideal-typical masculinity in states would be expected to be a predictor of their relative tendency to go to war. In a gender hierarchical international system, relative material or symbolic equality between states would be expected to breed conflict, while conflicts between states with vastly different functions or capabilities would be expected to be less frequent. Still, asymmetric conflicts would be expected to occur when a conflict between states’ claims to masculinity and/or states’ insults to each others’ masculinities occurs. Put differently, (state) gender relations would be expected to be an intervening variable in how power parity influences aggression. States with elements of hypermasculinity (Nayak 2006; Heeg Maruska 2010) in their nationalist discourses would be expected to be more aggressive, while states with elements of gender equity in their nationalist discourses (state feminists) would be less likely to be aggressive (see Mazur and Stetson 1995; Mazur 2001; Lovenduski and Baudino 2005). This is not because of any inherent property of the state but instead because of where the (perceived or actual) properties of the state place it on a gender hierarchy among states. The relative frequency of wars would be expected to vary with the relative intensity of gendered competition between states, which would be expected to vary with the relative aggressiveness of the ideal-typical masculinity in the international system. Gendered elements of state identities (like honor, protection, chivalry, and aggression) would be expected to determine ‘centers of gravity’ (Clausewitz 1830) that cause war, while gender hierarchy among states would be expected to be a permissive cause of war. A dominant hypermasculinity in the international system structure would lead states to approximate hypermasculinity in their functions, search for capabilities, and interaction with each other. Such an international arena would be expected to be conflictual and competitive. A dominant chivalric masculinity would produce different results, emphasizing values like ‘the responsibility to protect’ and incentivizing states to function and relate in ways that maintain toughness and tenderness. This can be expected to be manifested across states, not only in individual ones, using Waltzian logic.

Why do states make war? When (and why) do states refrain from making war? Though the ‘war puzzle’ has attracted much scholarly attention, one commentator lamented that, while ‘much has been written about the causes of war, little has been learned about the subject’ (Vasquez 1993, 3). This may be because war ‘multi-causal’ (Suganami 1996, 401) and put- ting together the ‘war puzzle’ (Vasquez 1993, 1) is complex. Several scholars have provided pieces of the ‘war puzzle’ both in terms of the causes of war generally and the causes of wars specifically, focusing on systemic-level variables (like international anarchy); super-national-level variables like culture and norms; state-level variables like regime type, trade interdependence, shifts in relative power, or changes in military technology; and sub-state level variables like leadership.1 Many of these theoretical approaches find little common ground in addressing the ‘war puzzle.’ A characteristic they do share almost universally, how- ever, is the omission of gender analysis. By ‘gender analysis,’ I mean thinking about the way that social expectations about masculinities and femininities influence the constitution, processes, and structures of global politics.2 On the other hand, the feminist tradition in International Relations (IR) has argued that the theory and practice of war has been gendered throughout modern history and that gendered elements at all levels of global politics are important causal and constitutive factors in causing war generally and wars specifically (Steans 1998; Tickner 2001; Sjoberg 2006a). Feminist theorizing about war has proposed that war is productive of and reflective of gender norms in global politics, that gender-based causal variables are required to understand war-making and war-fighting, and that the consequences of war can be understood in gendered terms (see, e.g. Tickner 1992; Sylvester 2010). While feminists theorizing war and wars have done important work, epistemological, ontological, and methodological barriers have often stopped feminist analysis from attracting a ‘mainstream’ audience in the discipline. Critics of feminist work (e.g. Halliday 1988; Keohane 1998) in IR have argued that there is not a feminist theory of IR or a feminist theory of war on par with a realist theory of war or a liberal theory of war. While this seems to me a hypocritical critique, since there is not a theory of war coming from any other paradigmatic approach to IR, it is nonetheless a critique feminist theorizing must overcome. This article looks to overcome those barriers by theorizing about war and wars through feminist lenses, but engaging an existing approach to theorizing war. Though there are doubtless a number of approaches to engage, this article focuses on one in particular, exploring the relevance of gender to understanding the general causes of ‘war,’ or, in Waltz’s (1959) terms, ‘third image’ analysis.3 Particularly, it focuses on the question of structure at the ‘third image’ or systemic level.4

(Elisabeth, Feminist Interventions in International Relations in Under Development: Gender edited by Christine Verschuur, Isabelle Guérin, Hélène Guétat-Bernard )

For feminists, assertions that war-making has nothing to do with gender has always sounded hollow in light of the predominance of men in the security apparatus. The masculinity of war thus is a starting point for a number of feminist studies, yet there is contestation about what exactly the relationship is between gender and war. It is possible to identify three fault-lines in the feminist literature. The first focuses on the premise that associates men with war and women with peace: Is it correct to say that men for the most part support war and that women are more likely to favour peace? The second divide pertains to levels of analysis and addresses causality: Does the relationship between gender and war belong at the individual or systemic/structural level? Finally, the third fault-line pertains to the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and war: Does militarist masculinity have a substantive content or are masculinity and war empty signifiers that derive their potency from their formal qualities? The first disagreement amongst feminists is whether women should be thought of as outside war or inside war. On the surface, the evidence is striking: historically and cross-culturally men have accounted for the vast majority of soldiers and fighters. Women have participated in fighting wars, but they have invariably made up only a small minority of fighters (Goldstein, 2001). While this puzzle has given rise to interesting theorising, feminists have been uncomfortable with universalist assertions that reproduce the association of women with peace and men with war and that fail to take into consideration historical and cultural contexts.1 Against the empirical record that associates men with war and women with peace, feminists thus have put forward evidence that contradicts the idea that women do not fight. In part they have done so by broadening the types of militarised conflicts they look at to include non-state actors, and by taking seriously the various supporting roles that women play in conflicts. This has allowed them to bring into view the fact that women participate in violence and wars extensively: they cheer on men to engage in violence and shame them into participation (Goldstein, 2001); they have appeared as suicide bombers in the Middle East, in terrorist activities in Chechnya, and as participants in the Rwandan genocide (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007); they have a long record of fighting in liberation movements and militias, in African, Asian and Latin American revolutions of the 20th century, in loyalist militias in North Ireland, in militant movements in Kashmir and Sri Lanka, and in recent African conflicts from Sierra Leone to the Congo (T£treault, 1994; Puechguirbal, 2003; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007; McEvoy, 2009; Parashar, 2009; MacKenzie, 2009). Women do not constitute a majority of fighters in these contexts, but they make significant contributions, accounting for over 30% of insurgents in some instances. Moreover, women increasingly are integrated in regular militaries; they now account for almost 15% of the US military (The Women's Memorial, 2011), the highest amongst NATO member states.2 The second disagreement amongst feminists focuses on the question of the causal or constitutive relationship between gender and war, and whether this relationship needs to be explored at the individual or the systemic/structural level of analysis. In other words, is masculinity a cause of war or are war and masculinity co-constituted? And do these causalities arise from socialisation and individual identities or from the masculinisation/militarisation of societies, cultures and global structures? These are amongst the most contested issues with far-reaching implications for how feminist scholarship can connect to security studies more broadly. The difference between approaches largely hinges on the understanding of gender. A series of quantitative studies has made a link between a country's propensity to go to war and the degree of gender equality within a country. They have shown a strong and consistent correlation between domestic gender inequality and a tendency of states to resolve conflicts violently. Using different indicators for gender equality (such as the percentage of women in the labour force and in parliament) and for violent conflict (militarised interstate and intrastate disputes and a "global peace index") and drawing on different databases, these studies agree that gender inequality is a significant predictor of conflict that in some models even outweighs the key explanatory variable of democracy (Tessler and Warriner, 1997; Caprioli, 2000, 2003, 2005; Caprioli and Boyer, 2001; Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003). Although empirically operating at a state level of analysis, scholars have drawn on arguments at the individual level to explain this correlation, evoking evolutionary biology and psychology. They have argued the adaptive advantage of male violence and its diffusion over time and drawn a causal relationship between resulting male characteristics and war fighting (Hudson et al., 2008). But the argument is difficult to sustain. Goldstein's comprehensive survey of evidence finds no support for simplistic causalities based on human biology and psychology, emphasising the interaction of biology with culture. Ultimately, he explains, the cross-cultural uniformity in the association of warfare with men is a result of "small, innate biological gender differences in average size, strength, and roughness of play" which combine with the "cultural modeling of tough, brave men, who feminize their enemies to encode domination" (Goldstein, 2001, p. 406). Biology and culture interact to produce a universal pattern and, in a startling reversal of general wisdom, biology emerges as more malleable than culture. Goldstein's survey thus gestures towards levels of analysis beyond the individual. A more thoroughly constructivist understanding than his leads to explanations at systemic or structural levels. A long tradition of feminist literature has located the relationship between war and gender at the systemic level and postulated a connection between patriarchy and "the war system" (Reardon, 1985). This type of literature has found the reasons for militarism in various forms of misogyny and suggested that fighting patriarchy is imperative in order to overcome war (e.g., Wasmuht, 2002; Mathis, 2002; Zwingel, 2003; Sjoberg, 2012). Cynthia Cockburn (2010) recently has provided a re-statement of this argument that takes into consideration new developments in feminist theory, including a focus on intersectionality. Taking the standpoint of anti-war feminist movement activists, she suggests that gender relations are one important root cause of war. She rejects individual-level arguments, emphasising that this causality cannot be put on the backs of what individual men and women do. Instead, war is a system in which everyday violence operates on a continuum with military violence, in which militaries and governing ideologies are systemically intertwined, and in which economic power and ethnic and national power intersect with gender power. She conceptualises militarised masculinities and femininities as emerging from social practices and discourses, insisting that these constructions can be thought of as causal. Similarly operating on a systemic and structural level, Cynthia Enloe (1989, 1993, 2000, 2010) has perhaps most extensively explored the structuring logic of masculinity and militarism in her large body of writings, making both causal and constitutive arguments. Relentlessly pursing the question "where are the women" in international affairs, she provides a forceful narrative of the power that is necessary to keep women in their subordinate place and enable militarist and exploitative international politics. Like Cockburn, Enloe takes her cues from feminist anti-militarist networks and talks about patriarchal social orders as "engines of militarization" (2007, p. 15). Yet her single-minded focus on women also leads her beyond simple causality to observe the parallel imbrications of economic and political orders with masculinist and militarist values and the perverse effects of these on marginalised populations. (151-4)

INTERSECTIONALITY IN MILITARIZATION AND WARS In a recent volume, Hunt and Rygiel (2006b, 3) develop the concept of “(en)gendering” war to “disrupt and make visible the masculinized, militarized, racialized, sexualized, and classed dynamics through which war operates.” They argue that official war stories do political work: they camouflage interests, agendas, and politics that underpin war for the purpose of legitimating and gaining support for militarization. A crucial aspect of their effectiveness is the extent to which they depend on gendered ideologies (masculinization and feminization) that are naturalized and therefore go unnoticed (2006, 5). By going unnoticed ideologies are depoliticized, even as the identities and practices they mobilize profoundly affect politics. In the remainder of the chapter I explore how feminization accomplishes typically unnoticed political work in war stories. The most familiar theme in war stories involves constructing the enemy as “other”: to distinguish “us” from “them,” render others in some sense inferior, and thereby justify war’s violence against “them.” The specifics of othering vary by history and context but invariably involve some form of objectification so that “they” become objects to which norms of respect and non-violation need not be extended. Historical othering ranges from early Greeks characterizing Persians as effeminate to Christians casting nonbelievers as immoral to Europeans depicting “natives” as uncivilized. Thinking through how othering occurs in nationalist, colonial, and con- temporary war stories reveals gendered identity investments and ideologies in operation. Critics of European imperialism have produced a wealth of research documenting the manipulation of ideologies to justify colonial wars and obscure their racist, economic, and heteronormative dynamics.3 What surfaces repeatedly are characterizations of the colonized as feminine: weak, passive, irrational, disorderly, unpredictable, lacking self-control, and economically and politically incompetent. European power wielders (not only men or all men) could then justify military interventions by casting themselves in favorable masculinist terms: as uniquely rational, sexually and morally respectable, and more advanced economically and politically. In colonial wars and geopolitical maneuvering, “civilization” became a code word for European superiority. Through this lens, military interventions were perhaps a regrettable but nonetheless a necessary component of “enlightening” and “civilizing” primitive, unruly (feminized) “others.” As Eisenstein (2004, 75) observes, although they extolled the virtues of reason as a progressive force, Europeans positioned rationality “against savagery (natives), emotionality (women), and sexuality (racialized others).” At the same time—and complicating simplistic models of gender—the development of European nationalism and normalization of bourgeois respectability produced an idealized model of femininity: pure, dutiful, and maternal. This superficial valorization of femininity is contradicted by the practices it invoked. Romanticizing the maternal feminine did less to empower women than render them perpetual dependents. Feminine virtue and morality were best ensured by confining these qualities—and (bourgeois) women—to a private sphere of domesticity and assigning men the public-sphere responsibility of defending and protecting feminized dependents. Rather than empowering European women, the idealization of bourgeois (heteronormative) femininity became a tool for disempowering non-European men. The patronizing and protectionist logic of bourgeois norms provided imperial governments with a moral, and rational, justification for militarized colonization. In this war story, the barbarity of “other” men was proven by their (allegedly) oppressive treatment of women, and this demanded the rescue of victimized females by honorable, civilized men. In short, the protection of idealized femininity (to paraphrase Spivak’s [1987] apt analysis) justified wars by white men to save brown women from brown men. The crusading rhetoric and protectionist logic obscured colonial government agendas, and it resurfaces with particular vengeance and new complexities in contemporary militarism and war.4

The insight involves several interactive moves. In one sense, casting the subordinated as feminine devalorizes not only the empirical gender category of women but also sexually, racially, culturally, and economically marginalized men (e.g., “lazy migrants,” “primitive natives,” “effeminate gays”). Underpinning this claim is the observation that although structural hierarchies vary by reference to the “difference” emphasized and the modalities of power involved, they typically share a common feature: the denigration of feminized qualities attributed to those who are sub- ordinated (lacking reason, agency, control, etc.). Invoking the “natural” inferiority of the feminine plays a powerful, though not exhaustive, role in legitimating these hierarchies. In a second sense, and understanding gender analytically, not only subjects (women and marginalized men) but also concepts, desires, tastes, styles, “ways of knowing,” cultural expressions (art, music), roles, practices, work, nature, and so on can be feminized—with the effect of reducing their legitimacy, status, and value. Importantly, this devalorization is simultaneously ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic). Consider how what is considered women’s work—whether done by women or marginalized men—is typically underpaid, or frequently not paid at all; and we hardly notice, in part because the depreciation of feminized activities is so taken for granted. This devalorization normalizes—with the effect of legitimating—the marginalization, subordination, and exploitation of feminized practices and persons. Oppressions differ, as do attempts to explain and/or justify them. As Wendy Brown (1997, 86–87) states, “not simply the content but the modalities of power producing gender, race, or caste are specific to each production,” even though “these powers of subject formation are not separable in the subject itself.” Because oppressions take various structural forms, feminization is not the only “normalizing” ideology in operation. What distinguishes feminization and renders it so ideologically powerful is the unique extent to which it invokes a deeply internalized and naturalized binary—the essentialized concept of sex difference—which is then available to naturalize diverse forms of structural oppression. This warrants clarification. Even as sex and gender are increasingly ambiguous to some, most people most of the time take a categorical, essentialized distinction between male and female completely for granted: as biologically given, reproductively necessary, and psychosocially obvious. Yet constructionists argue not only that sex difference itself is produced—through contingent, historical practices and institutionalizations—but also that sex difference as an essentialized binary and masculinism as a system of asymmetrical power are co-constituted. In other words, the deeply sedimented concept of sex difference and historically institutionalized practices of gender hierarchy are mutually constituted. As one effect, the naturalness of sex difference is generalized to the naturalness of masculine (not necessarily male) privilege, so that both aspects come to be taken-for-granted givens of social life. Common sense becomes a two- pronged justification of hierarchy. On the one hand, subordinated individuals or groups are devalorized by feminization; depictions range from lack of capacity and being weak or irrational to being offensive or posing a danger. On the other hand, responding appropriately to such individuals or groups requires masculinized practices; these range from patronizing and protectionist behaviors to disciplinary measures and violent coercion. In short, not only are the subordinated devalorized by feminization, but the qualities they supposedly lack are typically just what the dominating (masculinized) group has to offer, or is compelled to practice. This conveniently justifies both the necessity of rule and who should rule. The common sense of privileging the masculine and devaluing the feminine is culturally and collectively internalized to such an extent that we are all variously complicit in its reproduction. And it is also implicitly and explicitly manipulated to reproduce inequalities as if this were natural and inevitable, thus making critique and resistance difficult. In short, devalorizing the feminine produces even as it obscures vast inequalities of power, authority, and resource distribution. Exposing how this power operates must be one objective of a critical political agenda. I argue that the transformative potential of feminist critique lies in exposing and subverting all hierarchies that rely on denigration of “the feminine” to normalize and depoliticize subjection. I am not arguing that gender hierarchy is the “primary” oppression overshadowing race or class or sexuality. The point is rather that gender hierarchy and its elevation of “masculinity” is a historically contingent structural feature of social relations, that the subordination of women is not reducible to other structural oppressions (or vice versa), and that the dichotomy of gender underpins—as the denigration of the feminine naturalizes—hierarchies of gender, class, race, sexualities, and geopolitical “difference.” Because forms of subjection differ structurally, systematic and comparative analyses of race class, gender, and sexuality require attention to “different histories, different mechanisms and sites of power, different dis- cursive formations, different regulatory schemes” (Brown 1997, 86). In this chapter, however, my focus is less on the production of subjection than on the exposure of the political work that collective and internalized gender coding does across multiple forms of subjection. I am not presuming that sexist oppression is the most salient or powerful hierarchy in any particu- lar context; I am arguing that investigating feminization as devalorization allows a broader understanding of how oppressions are naturalized and provides us with greater analytical/political leverage. Although this is only one among a number of critical insights to be expanded and applied,2 I consider it a particularly productive vantage point, especially in relation to militarization and war.

Vulnerability: Contrasting conceptions Ruddick’s work on maternal thinking offers us more than a prompt to focus on the question of “whose vulnerability?” is acknowledged in a security discourse and whose is denied, displaced, and effaced. Attention to the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities and habits, and identification of virtues that are part of maternal thinking about vulnerability, when contrasted with those that are part of security thinking, help to make the strangeness and dysfunction of security thinking more evident and to make alternatives to its logic more imaginable. In other words, even putting aside the question of whose vulnerability is acknowledged in a security discourse, I would argue that in, for example, the most state-centric conception of national security, the conventional assumptions about and logics of how to best respond to the demand for preservation of the state can be thrown into relief, and rethought, by attending to the ways of thinking that Ruddick described as arising out of maternal practice. So in this section, I will consider some of the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities/habits, and identification of virtues that Ruddick wrote about as characterizing preservative love, and have a look at what they make especially strange about national security thinking. “To give birth is to create a life that cannot be kept safe, whose unfolding cannot be controlled and whose eventual death is certain” (Ruddick, 1989: 72). Clearly, Ruddick is talking about a human life here, which, as we have already established, is not the principal referent of either nuclear or national security discourse. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to use this sentence as a heuristic for thinking about the state, and the moment that we do, the contrast with US national security thinking could not be more apparent. In maternal thinking, we find the acknowledgement of the impossibility of creating perfect safety or invulnerability, the impossibility of control, and the inevitability of decline. US national security policy, in contrast, seems to be based in denial of each of these, as vast human, financial, and natural resources are spent in the effort to make the US militarily invulnerable, to control the United States’ own fate via controlling the actions and regimes of other states, and to maintain the belief that “We’re Number One” and that we can and must continue to be so far into the future. In a sense, US national security policy might best be metaphorized by President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI), also popularly known as “Star Wars”—the vision of erecting an impermeable shield around the United States to protect it from a possible attack by strategic nuclear missiles; that is, to try make the United States invulnerable at all costs, even though most scientists agreed it was technologically impossible, and the financial cost would have been extraordinary (Cohn, 1989). But while SDI may work as a metaphor of the quest for invulnerability and the denial of its impossibility, there is at least one way in which the metaphor falls short. Reagan’s protective dome was to cover only the territory within US borders; in contrast, US national security policy has characteristically sought invulnerability, control, and supremacy by taking military action far outside its own borders. In the so-called GWOT, for example, the United States uses drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen to kill individuals whose actions are seen to make the United States vulnerable. What maternal thinking can open to us, then, is the question: what kind of national security policy would be recognized as rational if we acknowledged that vulnerability is inevitable, that control has limits, and that ultimately decline is unavoidable? What alternative policies would be crafted? How would we think about security, and about preservation of the state, as well as of human beings and the planet? What kinds of military, foreign, and economic policies might appear most rational, if we acknowledged those realities? Exploration of these questions has typically been foreclosed in security policy circles by the symbolic association of vulnerability with the “feminine”; that which is associated with the feminine, or inadequate masculinity, is not only devalued in national security discourse, it is also excluded from deliberation as inherently inadequate (Cohn, 1993). However, admitting irreducible vulnerability does not, despite policymakers’ apparent fears, equate with giving up, passivity, or powerlessness. Ruddick describes one response to vulnerability as the development of a “mental habit or cognitive style” that she calls “scrutinizing”: “mothers are on the lookout for dangers before they appear” (Ruddick, 1989: 71–72). At first, this cognitive habit might sound just like US security thinking, but in maternal thinking, this habit is tempered in several ways. First, in Ruddick’s account, both scrutinizing and protective love involve a kind of double focus—furtive glances at potential dangers even while one goes about normal events, and simultaneous awareness of the near and the eternal (Ruddick, 1989: 78). In contrast, the capacity for a split focus, for a complex rather than singular attention that can take in both short- and long-term dangers and values sounds like something that is too often missing in US security practice. “Furtive glances at potential dangers even while one goes about normal events” describes a state of being aware of potential dangers, but not letting them dominate your decision making, not letting fear of them reorient your priorities, not giving up or diverting resources from the sustaining activities and projects of daily life, all of which is arguably not a description of the balance between US attention to and investments in countering potential military threats, and its attention to and investments in the projects and practices that sustain daily life and long-term societal growth, from health care and education to public utilities and transportation infrastructure. Similarly, a split focus that attends to both short- and long-term dangers at times seems notably absent from US security policy; an example can be seen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the United States decided to encourage Islamic groups from around the world to come to Afghanistan and to provide billions in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding for building those groups up, despite warnings from Afghan experts that this would have disastrous longer term consequences (Hartman, 2002). Ruddick also warns that scrutinizing is a watchful gaze that can become “obsessive or intrusive”; however, at its best, it is tempered by a kind of metaphysical humility about what one can actually control (Ruddick, 1989: 72). Writing just a few weeks after the leaked revelations about the US National Security Agency’s “PRISM” program of covert electronic surveillance and mass data collection, focusing on the danger of “scrutinizing” within national security practice becoming “obsessive or intrusive” would seem gratuitous. And, in fact, I think it is the “metaphysical humility” that is of deeper interest here. Ruddick does not see this metaphysical humility as either automatic or unique to mothers or mothering practices; instead, it is an attitude that the drive toward preservation will have to cultivate if it is done with some reflective awareness. “Thus this wise attitude about the limits of control is not innate to the practice, but emerging from a thoughtful engagement in the practice” (Ruddick, 1989). Untempered scrutinizing, being on the lookout for dangers before they appear without the benefit of metaphysical humility, is many ways a perfect description of a cornerstone of US national security practices of assessment and planning, known as “worst-case thinking.” A prominent part of Cold War thinking, and still exemplified today in new doctrines such as AirSea Battle, the strategist imagines the very worst thing that could possibly happen and then plans backward from there, assuming that the only way to prevent it is the development and deployment of weapons (Wass de Czege, 2012); through worst-case planning, gargantuan investments of energy, research capacity, and money in weapons technologies come to appear rational or justifiable, even though they most likely will never be needed or used. Critically, in worst-case thinking, the question of how likely it is that a particular hypothetical threat will materialize is ruled out of bounds; if in a strategist’s wildest imagination a threat can be conjured as possible, how probable it is is considered irrelevant. Similarly, although there might be means other than military ones to forestall the hypothetical threat, such as diplomacy, alliance building, or disarmament (and these could affect probability), worst-case thinking abjures these considerations. For all that worst-case thinking is justified in the name of “realism,” when viewed through the lens of maternal thinking, the scrutinizing of worst-case thinking can be seen to be obsessive, as well as lacking a realistic metaphysical humility about the limits of control—and the moderation which would follow from that humility. In Ruddick’s account, “although protecting work is never finished, there are no perfectly protected children and … the best control provides for the limits of that control” (Ruddick, 1989: 73). According to Ruddick, maternal thinking develops distinctive ways of thinking about control; the task of preserving a growing, changing, and self-directing being within a tumultuous, complex, and dangerous environment engenders distinctive attitudes about the recalcitrance of the given, and the “recalcitrant givens” include both complex human beings and complex and dangerous environments. In other words, although a mother recognizes the dangers that threaten her or his5 child, and might wish to perfectly protect the child from hunger, disease, accident, failure, self-harm, violence or heartbreak, she or he knows that this perfect protection is not possible. Instead, a reflective maternal practice will include acts of preservative love, nurturance, and training designed to equip the child with resources for avoiding dangers when possible and for otherwise dealing with the consequences of dangers that neither mother nor child will be able to perfectly control. Metaphysical humility about the limits of control and the recalcitrance of the given, then, can lead to more rational thinking about responses to threats. The mother in the United States who recognizes her or his daughter’s vulnerability to sexual violence might decide to send her daughter to self-defense classes but will recognize that attempting to identify all the men who might ever assault her and to target them with drones would not only be illegal and immoral, but also not the use of resources most conducive to family health and happiness. Taking maternal thinking as heuristic, we would need to ask whether worst-case thinking, untempered by metaphysical humility, is any better for the state than it is for the family. And if unbridled worst-case thinking were renounced as a basis for national security strategy, how might policymakers within the state (including but not restricted to the military branch) think in new ways about both avoiding dangers and dealing with their consequences?

Rationality in Interaction This skew is particularly evident in the assumption of rationality." The rationality assumption implies that the knower/actor can separate himself/herself from the “other” in interactions with that other. Feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and political; therefore, states and their leaders’ decisions about how to interact with others are not rational, but informed by their situational and political biases. In this view, the rationality assumption may be seen as at once itself a political bias and obscuring other political biases. As Naomi Scheman argues, perceived rational cost-benefit analysis about war-making and war-fighting should “always be seen as especially problematical when... constructed only by those in positions of privilege... [which provide] only distorted views about the world.”78 In this view, rational calculation is not an objective, attainable, and desirable end, but a partial representation of both interest and actors’ representation of those interests. In this way, through gender lenses, rationality has been seen as importantly incomplete, leaving out significant (if not the most significant) factors that go into decision-making.79 In addition to understanding the rationality assumption as partial (and therefore unrepresentative), feminist research has pointed out links between rationality and mascuIinism.8° As Karen Jones notes, advocates of rationality as a guide for interstate interactions“ assume: 1. Available... conceptions of rationality and reason represent genuinely human norms and ideals; 2. The list of norms and ideals contained within available conceptions of rationality and reason are sufficiently complete; and 3. The external normative functions assigned to reason and rationality are unproblematic.82 Looking through gender lenses shows problems with each of these assumptions. Feminists have argued that “the identity of the modern subject-in models of human nature, citizenship, the rational actor, the knowing subject, economic man, and political agency-is not gender-neutral but masculine (and typically European and heterosexua|).”83 This impacts not only how we see the rational subject, but how we predict and understand his decisions, at the state level as well as at the individual level. According to Margaret Atherton, the possibility of rationality has “been used in a disturbing fashion to mark a gender distinction. We have, for example, on the one hand, the man of reason, and, on the other, the woman of passion.”84 In rationality assumptions, traits associated with masculinity are normalized and traits associated with femininity are excluded. The impact is compounded because (masculinized) rationality and its (feminized) alternatives are not on equal playing fields. As a result, Karen Jones notes that “women’s assumed deficiency in rationality” has been used to exclude both women and knowledge associated with femininity from accepted views of the world.85 The alleged gender neutrality of rationality, then, “is often a covert form of privileging maleness”85 and omission of “what has traditionally counted as ‘feminine.’”87 Still, adding women and values associated with femininity to current concepts of rationality is unlikely to create a gender-neutral concept of rationality.88 This is because, epistemologically, the sovereign rational subject constructs artificial gendered boundaries between rationality and emotion, male and female, and knower and known.89 Among states, those boundaries are not benign. Instead, they breed competition and domination that inspire and foster war(s) and conflict(s).90 This competition frequently relies on contrasting the state’s own masculinity to the enemy’s (actual or perceived) femininity. This cycle of genderings is not a series of events but a social continuum. In these gendered relationships, as Zillah Eisenstein argues, “gender differentiation will be mobilized for war and peace,” especially moving forward into the age of an American empire focused on manliness.9‘ Feminists have long argued that competitions between hegemonic masculinities and subordinate masculinities play a role in causing war(s).92 Hidden beneath the assumed independence, rationality, and unity of state interaction leading to war are gendered interstate interactions that cause, constitute, and relate to war and wars. Feminist scholars have recognized the extent to which the preeminence of masculine values dominates (particularly conflictual) accounts of interstate interactions, wherein “rational” interactions often become “a self-reproducing discourse of fear, suspicion, anticipated violence, and violence” in which “force is used to checkmate force.”93 Interstate interactions leading to wars often show the gendered nature of war narratives, war logics, and war languages, which produce (and reproduce) gendered cycles of violence.

Vulnerability: Denials and displacements Ruddick writes that three demands—for preservation, growth, and social acceptability—constitute maternal work: “to be a mother is to be committing to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training” (Ruddick, 1989: 17). Of these three demands, the one that most obviously is an equally central demand of state security practice would be preservation, classically in the form of preservation of the (one’s own) state. (It would be very interesting and potentially fruitful, though, to imagine what it might mean to security practice if preservation and growth of “Other” states, and social acceptability of one’s own state, were included among the central demands of security work.) The demand for preservation stems from the fact of vulnerability, and indeed, vulnerability is implicitly one of the concepts at the core of both maternal thinking and security thinking, although how and where it does or does not make its appearance, and what counts as a “rational” response to it, is strikingly differently in each. A foundational contrast is found in the object of preservation, that is, in who or what is seen as vulnerable and in need of preservation. Clearly, in maternal thinking, it is the human child. In contrast, in the technostrategic discourse of nuclear strategists, human vulnerability is entirely absent, literally unspeakable; when the word “vulnerable” appears, it is in discussion of the “vulnerability” of both weapon systems themselves and the technological communication systems which are central to the “command and control” of those weapons (Cohn, 1987). In broader US national security discourse, the vulnerability of humans is also effaced, and it is the vulnerability of the state to penetration of its physical boundaries that is of concern, as well as the vulnerability of its stability and its “interests.” (“Interests” can be understood as an extremely plastic concept that has allowed US security practice to extend far beyond the state’s own borders and into the territory or political affairs of many other state whose activities have been labeled as threatening to what the state has broadly defined as its “interests.”) Two things are striking in this contrast between who or what is seen as vulnerable in maternal thinking, on the one hand, and in these security discourses, on the other. The first is that while maternal practice and thought is centered on and responsive to the vulnerability of the mother’s Other—the child—in national security discourses the vulnerability of the state’s Other—other states—goes either unimagined or imagined only as weaknesses to be exploited; certainly, it is rarely if ever imagined as requiring or evoking a preservative response (the very limited exception might be among states deemed as close allies, extensions of the Self). The second, perhaps even more fundamental, issue which emerges in this contrast is the invisibility of human vulnerability in nuclear and national security discourses, and its displacement onto weapons and states. So in nuclear technostrategic discourse, for example, when human death must be referred to, it is euphemized and abstracted into “collateral damage,” and this construction “makes sense” because human suffering is in this discourse collateral to the only vulnerability which matters—that of the discourse’ subject, which is weapons (Cohn, 1987). Similarly, in US discourses on conventional warfare, the death and injury of civilians is also referred to as “collateral damage.” So while human vulnerability is at the center of maternal thinking, it is beyond the margins of national security discourses, the reality of its inexorability unaddressed, while anxieties about vulnerability are displaced elsewhere. Although this article’s focus is the way vulnerability is treated in security discourses, it is worth briefly noting that human vulnerability’s absence, denial, and displacement have characterized much of Western social and political theory, as well as the institutions and policy frameworks to which they have given rise. It is only in recent years that this lacuna is starting to be named and explored, and that vulnerability has started to be more attentively theorized. Martha Fineman (2008, 2010), for example, argues that the rational, autonomous, instrumentalist subject posited by political and legal theorizing in the liberal tradition fundamentally denies the vulnerable and interdependent nature of human beings, and that “the vulnerable subject,” rather than the “liberal subject,” should be at the heart of our theoretical and political projects. Her interest is in moving beyond discrimination-based models to more substantive equality, and she argues that the understanding that vulnerability is “universal and constant, inherent in the human condition” can and should become the basis for “a more responsive state and egalitarian society” (Fineman, 2008: 8). Moving from the state to interstate relations, Beattie and Schick (2013) bring the idea of the vulnerable subject to a rethinking of international relations (IR) theory; their starting point is that IR’s rationalism denies vulnerability as anything other than a problem to be solved. Judith Butler (2004, 2009) finds in universal human vulnerability not a problem rather a potential basis for community and a nonviolent ethics; a central concern is the way in which some people are made more vulnerable than others and their lives less grievable. Erinn Gilson (2011), too, sees vulnerability as “not just a condition that limits us but one that can enable us” as “a condition of openness, openness to being affected and affecting in turn” (p. 310). The emphasis on the relational aspect of vulnerability found in Butler’s and Gilson’s work is also found in Peadar Kirby’s (2006a, 2006b) work on the value of the concept of vulnerability in theorizing globalization’s social impact. Kirby (2006a) argues that the inherent relationality in the concept of vulnerability makes it a “surer concept” than human security, as human security lends itself to the methodological individualism, militarism, and commodification characteristic of the concept of state security, from which it is derived (p. 646). These and other authors who have been engaged in the retheorization of vulnerability take the universal, inexorable vulnerability of humans, rescue it from its denial and displacement in rationalist liberal social and political theory, and make it a cornerstone of their theorizing, instead.3 There has been, in the last few decades, another, more common, albeit more partial, form in which vulnerability has appeared in theory and policy, and that is in the concept of “vulnerable groups” or “vulnerable populations.”4 Vulnerable groups is a concept used in discourses ranging from human rights to humanitarian assistance, development assistance, bioethics, research ethics, ethics of care, public and global health policy, and environmental policy. In contrast to the centering of vulnerability as a universal defining feature of human life in the work of the theorists above, “vulnerable groups” discourses focus on defining which human subgroups are especially vulnerable, at risk and in need of protection. The literature variously locates the sources of a group’s vulnerability in multiple factors, including physiological frailty or dependency; limited capacity or freedom (Macklin, 2012); the violation of human rights (Reichert, 2006; Turner, 2006); the ways that people are positioned in economic, political, and social structures and processes (Aoláin, 2011; Ben-Ishai, 2012; Luna, 2009; Rogers et al., 212); warfare (Turner, 2006); globalization and neoliberalism (Kirby, 2006); the physical and social conditions that facilitate the spread of disease (Bluhm, 2012; Edström, 2007; Onuoha et al., 2009); the ways that people’s geographic location and livelihoods have made them susceptible to humanly—and/or naturally produced environmental change or disaster (Alaimo, 2012; Kirby, 2006) or environmental conflict (Perry et al., 2010); and the myriad factors that lead to human displacement and statelessness (Butler, 2004; Hanafi, 2009). Logically, there should be no intrinsic incompatibility between a universal human vulnerability approach and a focus on vulnerable populations—that is, between understanding all humans as vulnerable, and then exploring the specific factors that make some more so than others (e.g. at particular moments in a life cycle or within specific political and economic relationships). Indeed, most universal human vulnerability approaches tend not only to acknowledge but also to give serious attention to the latter. Yet, in both theory and practice, the concept of “vulnerable groups” has in many ways been at odds with an approach which apprehends vulnerability as a defining aspect of the human condition; instead, it tends to treat vulnerability as the property of some groups, not all (more on this below). Human vulnerability is then, in a sense, displaced onto a subset of humans. I believe that the reasons for the various denials and displacements of vulnerability referenced above (as well as later in this article) are multiple and complex, and require a thoroughly multidisciplinary treatment that is far beyond the scope of this piece. For the moment, however, I want to briefly address what I think is one important piece of the puzzle—the ways in which vulnerability is intensely gendered at a symbolic level. It seems noteworthy, and not coincidental, that the majority of theorists who have focused on the implications of human vulnerability have been women, and many of them feminists. Prevailing Western gendered meaning systems associate vulnerability with femininity, weakness, dependency, passivity, lack of control, emotionality, and victimhood; at the same time, they associate invulnerability with masculinity, power, autonomy, agency, control, cool rationality, and stoicism. As I have argued elsewhere, this means that in national security discourses, there is an extremely high premium on avoiding thinking about human fallibility, vulnerability, and suffering. To admit those things not only threatens the constructions of rationalist hegemonic masculinity that are built into the entire intellectual project; they also tend to threaten the legitimacy and identity of the speaker who brings them up, because in speaking about them, one assumes the “feminine” (and thus devalued) position in the discourse (Cohn 1987, 1993). Although my own empirical research has been only in national and international security communities, my experience in those locations suggests that vulnerability’s symbolic gender coding as feminine would make it hard to put the inevitability of universal human vulnerability at the center of other masculinist projects of theory or policy as well. Whatever the range of motivations and mechanisms that underlie the denial and displacement of vulnerability, I think the phenomenon itself should be of grave concern. When theorists and policymakers are not grounded in an apprehension of their own bodily contingency and frailty, and their own physical and social dependence, a host of consequences follow. When it is only the “Other” who is vulnerable, it is much easier to cut or destroy social safety nets, to support violently repressive rulers in the name of “stability” or of protecting one’s own interests, to start and prolong wars, or to put profit over the health of the planet’s ecosystems. At the very least, this suggests that we should be wary of any security discourses which invisibilize the universality of human vulnerabilitys, and try to imagine security practices which center it, instead. Hence, we return to Ruddick.

Of course, the welfare system does not deal with women on women's terms. On the contrary, it has its own characteristic ways of interpreting women's needs and positioning women as subjects. In order to understand these, we need to examine how gender norms and meanings are reflected in the structure of the U.S. social-welfare system. This issue is quite complicated. On the one hand, nearly all U.S. social-welfare programs are officially gender neutral. Yet the system as a whole is a dual or two-tiered one; and it has an unmistakable gender subtext. There is one set of programs oriented to individuals and tied to participation in the paid workforce, for example, unemployment insurance and Social Security. These programs are designed to supplement and compensate for the primary market in paid labor power. There is a second set of programs oriented to households and tied to combined household income, for example, AFDC, food stamps and Medicaid. These programs are designed to compensate for what are considered to be family failures, generally the absence of a male breadwinner. What integrates the two sets of programs is a common core of assumptions, underlying both, concerning the sexual division of labor, domestic and non-domestic. It is assumed that families do or should contain one primary breadwinner who is; male and one unpaid domestic worker (homemaker and mother) who is female. It is further assumed that when a woman undertakes paid work outside the home this is or should be in order to supplement the male breadwinner's wage and so it neither does nor ought override her primary housewifely and maternal responsibilities. It is assumed, in other words, that society is divided into two separate spheres of home and outside work and that these are women's and men's spheres respectively. These assumptions are increasingly counterfactual. At present, fewer than 15% of U.S. families conform to the normative ideal of a domicile shared by a husband who is the sole breadwinner, a wife who is a full-time homemaker and their offspring. Nonetheless, the separate spheres norms determine the structure of the social-welfare system. They determine that it contain a primary labor market-related subsystem and a family or household-related subsystem. Moreover, they determine that these subsystems be gender-linked, that the labor market-related system be implicitly “masculine” and the family-related system be implicitly “feminine.” Consequently, the normative, ideal-typical recipient of primary labor market-oriented programs is a (white) male, while the normative, ideal-typical client of household-based programs is a female. This gender subtext of the U.S. welfare system is confirmed when we take a second look at participation figures. Consider again the figures just cited for the “feminine” or family-based programs, which I earlier referred to as “means-tested” programs: more than 81% of households receiving AFDC are female-headed, as are more than 70% of those receiving housing assistance and more than 60% of those receiving Medicaid and food stamps. Now recall that these figures do not compare female vs. male individuals, but rather female vs. male headed-households. They therefore confirm four things: 1) these programs have a distinctive administrative identity in that their recipients are not individualized but familialized; 2) they serve what are considered to be defective families, overwhelmingly families without a male breadwinner; 3) the ideal-typical (adult) client is female; and 4) she makes her claim for benefits on the basis of her status as an unpaid domestic worker, a homemaker and mother, not as a paid worker based in the labor market. Now contrast this with the case of a typical labor market-based and thus “masculine” program, namely, unemployment insurance. Here the percentage of female claimants drops to 38%, a figure which contrasts female vs. male individuals, as opposed to households. As Reference Pearce and FeinsteinDiana Pearce (1979) notes, this drop reflects at least two different circumstances. First, and most straightforwardly, it reflects women's lower rate of participation in the paid workforce. Second, it reflects the fact that many women wage-workers are not eligible to participate in this program, for example, paid household service workers, part-time workers, pregnant workers and workers in the “irregular economy” such as prostitutes, baby-sitters and home typists. The exclusion of these predominantly female wage-workers testifies to the existence of a gender segmented labor market, divided into “primary” and “secondary” employment. It reflects the more general assumption that women's earnings are “merely supplementary,” not on a par with those of the primary (male) breadwinner. Altogether, then, the figures tell us four things about programs like unemployment insurance: 1) they are administered in a way which individualizes rather than familializes recipients; 2) they are designed to compensate primary labor market effects, such as the temporary displacement of a primary breadwinner; 3) the ideal-typical recipient is male; and 4) he makes his claim on the basis of his identity as a paid worker, not as an unpaid domestic worker or parent. One final example will round out the picture. The Social Security system of retirement insurance presents the interesting case of a hermaphrodite or androgyne. I shall soon show that this system has a number of characteristics of “masculine” programs in virtue of its link to participation in the paid workforce. However, it is also internally dualized and gendered, and thus stands as a microcosm of the entire dual-benefit welfare system. Consider that, while a majority—61.6%—of adult beneficiaries are female, only somewhat more than half of these—or 33.3% of all recipients—claim benefits on the basis of their own paid work records (Reference NelsonNelson 1984; Erie, Rein and Wiget 1983). The remaining female recipients claim benefits on the basis of their husbands’ records, that is, as wives or unpaid domestic workers. By contrast, virtually no male recipients claim benefits as husbands. On the contrary, they claim benefits as paid workers, a labor market-located as opposed to family-located identity. So the Social Security system is hermaphroditic or androgynous; it is internally divided between family-based, “feminine” benefits, on the one hand, and labor market-based, “masculine” benefits, on the other hand. Thus, it too gets its structure from gender norms and assumptions.

The right to social protection is a human right, but so many women and girls worldwide still can’t access it, according to a recent UN Human Rights report on social protection. “In times of social and economic instability, social protection shields those that are most affected,” said Mahamane Cisse-Gouro, Director of the Human Rights Council and Treaty Mechanisms Division, UN Human Rights. “It helps prevent social exclusion and promotes social inclusion.” The COVID-19 pandemic, climate emergencies and related emerging conflicts, and increasing inequality have made the gender gap even worse for social security, Cisse-Gouro added. Other reasons for this gap are caused by their position in society as girls may have their education interrupted due to early pregnancy, child, early and forced marriage, or be responsible for most of the domestic work, leading to less access to formal employment and subsequent contribution-based social security, Cisse-Gouro added. Women also find themselves in the lowest paid jobs. Their reproductive and care roles often force them to opt out from or interrupt their access to formal employment. Older women often face a gender pension gap, he stressed. This is especially true for migrant women who are more likely to be employed in jobs that lack occupational health and safety, according to Michele LeVoy, Director of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. “One of the key barriers for undocumented migrant women in accessing services or justice is the fear that they might be detained and deported,” LeVoy said during the panel event. Cisse-Gouro said to overcome all these problems, women themselves must have a say in decisions that impact them the most. “That is the most effective way to find solutions and to secure their right to social protection is fully realized,” he said. “Yet, men continue to be over-represented in national parliaments and women continue to be under-represented in leadership positions in the private sectors and trade unions. There is a lack of women’s participation in public and political life in relation to shaping and influencing social protection policies.”

Variations across individuals or groups in economic status in retirement can be traced to differences in labor market earnings, retirement saving derived from those earnings, and other factors including marital status, life expectancy, risk aversion, and financial acumen. These factors help explain women’s resources in retirement. For a variety of reasons, women earn less on average over the course of a lifetime than men do. Lower lifetime earnings make it harder for women to save for retirement. Exacerbating these differences, women are on average longer lived, more risk averse, less financially literate, and more likely to have greater caregiving responsibilities than men. Public policies that aim to boost women’s status in retirement should focus on the ways women participate in the labor market and in wealth accumulation programs as well as on specific retirement programs and benefits. Earnings For several interrelated reasons, average lifetime earnings are substantially lower for women than for men. Primarily, women provide a majority of unpaid family caregiving, which can lead women to interrupt their careers, seek part-time jobs in the market, or work in low-wage occupations to maintain flexibility. Caregiving provided during women’s 20s and 30s, when careers are formed and when age-earnings profiles are relatively steep, creates career-long earning losses. One study found that a woman with one child earns 28 percent less on average over her career than a woman without children, partially as a result of time out of the work force. (In sharp contrast, becoming a father typically does not reduce a man’s earnings.) Each additional child reduces average women’s earnings by another 3 percent. Women are also more likely than men to care for their aging parents—a responsibility that predominantly falls on women over the age of 50. People who leave the labor force early to care for a parent or other elderly relative lose an average of $142,000 in wages. Even within occupations, however, women receive unequal pay for similar work. Among full-time, year-round workers in 2018, median women’s earnings equaled 81.1 percent of median men’s earnings. Controlling for age, education, job tenure, occupation, job title, location, and industry, the figure rises to 94.6 percent. Because this estimate controls for job title and occupation, it obscures important facets of gender inequality—the social constraints and biases that limit women’s opportunity for career advancement (i.e., promotions) and pressure women into lower paying jobs. The wage differential varies across occupations but is almost always to women’s detriment. Progressive income taxation of family income provides significant disincentives for married women to work in the paid labor force. By taxing the first dollar of a second earner’s income at the same marginal tax rate as the last dollar of the primary earner’s income, the tax system discourages work among married women. From earnings to retirement wealth Lower lifetime earnings lead to lower retirement wealth. The most important link is through Social Security, which provides over half of family income to 52 percent of the elderly and at least 90 percent of income to 25 percent of the elderly. Women receive Social Security benefits that are, on average, 80 percent of those men receive. Benefits are based on a person’s 35 highest earning years. Women with long career interruptions risk not having 35 years with positive earnings, and the wage gaps noted above further reduce women’s benefits. The motherhood penalty applies here, too: having a first child reduces a woman’s Social Security benefits (through reduced earnings) by an average of 16 percent. Each additional child increases the gap by 2 percent. Women who leave work to care for an elderly family member not only lose wages, they also lose an average of $131,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits. Spouses (or ex-spouses, if the marriage lasted more than 10 years) can choose to receive benefits based on their own earnings history or to receive half of their spouse’s benefit. Given the trends in employment, earnings, and marriage, women are increasingly choosing to receive their own benefits. Women receive Social Security benefits that are, on average, 80 percent of those men receive.

Even today many supposedly gender neutral policies disproportionately negatively impact women. The widely-used system of joint filing taxes was instituted in 1948 to incentivize women who had joined the workforce during World War II to relinquish their jobs to returning soldiers and go back to homemaking instead. Despite the normalization of dual income households over time, modern tax policy continues to push married women at virtually every income level to work fewer hours than they otherwise would, or to stay out of the labor force entirely—a major contributing factor to the gender pay gap. The Social Security system is similarly structured to reward women who stay home rather than those who work, and working women who are married may find themselves paying the full 12.4% Social Security tax without collecting any more benefits than married women who don’t work. Throughout American history, many of the major wins for feminism have involved women gaining access to markets and then using that access to push for further equality and acknowledgement of their individual and civil rights. Women benefit—not just financially, but in all facets of their lives—from having the freedom to work, choose their professions, start businesses, own property, and the like with minimal state interference. According to the Economic Freedom of the World report, co‐published annually by the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and more than 70 free market think tanks around the world, “the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions is key to economic and social progress.” In 2017, when the report began accounting for disparities in economic liberty granted to men and to women, 20 countries fell notably in the rankings, indicating that in many countries, there’s still significant progress to be made. The shameful legal and cultural history of patriarchal policies like coverture continue to reverberate in America today, and the more roadblocks to economic liberty are put in place, the more sexism women will continue to face.

Some proponents suggest that universal childcare must accompany a basic income if it is to succeed in unseating sexual divisions of work and care. However, the cost implications of providing both might be economically and politically unfeasible. Young, writing in the Canadian context, has supported the idea of a basic income alongside other essential features of a welfare state that improve the position of women.100 She argues that a focus on basic income as the key policy option to redistribute resources risks failing to focus on the problems of the market in terms of its ‘provision of services and its treatment of workers’.101 The focus of a basic income on the individual can foreclose a focus on structures that create and maintain inequality. Aside from these conceptual concerns with a basic income there are many practical concerns about the size and shape of a basic income and the possibility that achieving it results in policy losses for women or groups of women currently benefiting from more targeted measures. A final concern with the basic income debate is raised by feminists from the Global South who question whether a small payment will be sufficient to address extreme poverty and inequality; and whether women will be able to control this income at the household level or be in any way better placed to resist violence.102

Basic income as a form of universal and unconditional social assistance has significant appeal to many groups of women currently frustrated by punitive and patchy systems.110 It offers unencumbered access to income for unpaid carers and precarious workers, groups that are women dominated and face challenges under many social security systems. These groups may struggle to meet activation requirements such as job seeking while balancing caring obligations; and may also be burdened with responsibilities that are sometimes attached via conditions to cash transfers.111 These arguments suggest that in some contexts a basic income will enhance equality and rights to social protection by bringing poor women and carers into the social protection fold without additional demands being placed on them. 112 But this alone will not undo the structural disadvantage that these groups face and will not necessarily be transformative in altering the gendered responsibilities for care; nor will it necessarily remove all the barriers to, and within, the labour market facing women and carers. This suggests that a substantive gender equality approach could endorse a basic income if it offered more to women in a given society than already existed. But it would also require further social policy measures to redress the sexual division of labour at work and home. These changes are unlikely to flow automatically from a basic income where structural inequalities along gender lines are embedded in society. Other measures will be needed, whether through state provision, market regulation or norm realignments or combinations of these to spread caring in more gender equal ways. A basic income would need to sit alongside state support to realise other interdependent human rights including health care, housing, social services and worker rights, themselves developed in accordance with substantive gender equality.

A human rights approach that is attentive to gender suggests that a basic income is likely to assist women who are disproportionately poor and vulnerable in all societies. But on its own it will not address the complex and structural inequality that they face. A basic income will need to be accompanied by measures such as the provision of childcare and support for sole parents, alongside changes to the labour market and tax system. It will also have to be of adequate size to make a real difference to inequality. The form of a basic income, its likely impact and its desirability as a policy solution is contingent on the political and economic conditions of the particular country in which it is being considered and should be subject to democratic deliberation. Human rights principles informed by gender will help to ensure that any basic income proposal is carefully evaluated within the context of that country to advance rather than impede substantive gender equality.

A basic income in a society where women have more limited access to paid work and social security than men might advance equality and address gender disadvantage by empowering women financially. Since women tend to be disproportionately represented among the poor, this is a compelling equality argument for a basic income. However, the universality of a basic income, while attractive in principle, is itself indiscriminate in treating all people in the society alike. It could therefore be seen as a formal equality measure, inadequate in addressing the structural disadvantages facing women. Young observes that ‘the (neo-) liberal goods of economic liberty and formal equality resound strongly for women – but they are loaded freight and also function to justify much of modern economic and social relations that are deeply oppressive and unequal for women’. 108 As a formal equality measure designed by its universal nature to give everyone an equal sum, those who start off more disadvantaged may not see their position significantly altered, and existing hierarchies of power and privilege may not be shifted.

Jacqueline O’Reilly and Anca Gheaus are less optimistic about the positive contributions of basic income to the feminist cause. Gheaus proposes that in order to judge to what extent a policy promotes gender justice, we should assess whether the costs of engaging in a lifestyle characterised by gender symmetry would be smaller than or equal to the costs of engaging in a gender asymmetrical lifestyle. She argues that basic income will raise the costs of gender-symmetric lifestyles. Rather than giving equal support to home- and career-centred women and accepting their preferences at face value, we should “aim to ensure that preferences (of all individuals) are formed under just circumstances” (2008, p. 4). One such deeply unjust circumstance is the devaluation of care; therefore, in the world as it is, a basic income would be an obstacle to gender justice. O’Reilly adds further critical notes to the effects of a basic income when implemented in the real world. She surveys the gender effects of existing social policies and concludes that she is “sceptical that BI could radically address all the causes of gender inequality” (2008, p. 2). The feminist struggle requires a clear spelling out of what kind of gender equality we want and an acknowledgement of the complexity of the multiple dimensions of gender equality. So what can we conclude from this wide array of views? I would suggest that an in-depth feminist case for or against basic income requires considerable additional information other than just the claim that an unconditional basic income will be provided as a citizenship right. First, we need to be more specific about the level of basic income, since different levels of basic income may plausibly have different effects on the gendered distributions of income, labour market participation, and the intra-household divisions of caregiving. Second, we also need information on whether or not child care provisions and provisions for others who are dependent on family care would remain intact or would be expanded in the basic income society, and on what other measures will be implemented to create the flexibility that employed carers need. Third, empirical information about the likely effects on the well-being and the material standard of living of various groups (children, women, men, employed and unemployed adults, employed and nonemployed carers, single parents, dual parents, and so forth) needs to be collected. If we argue as several contributors to this debate do that a basic income would need to be complemented with other measures that redistribute care and unpaid work between women and men, we need to know more precisely what these measures are, their effectiveness, and their public and private costs. These feminist discussions do need to be integrated into the mainstream basic income debate. After all, once a basic income is implemented it may be too late to notice that it adversely affects the gender division of labour and thus women’s position in society, or too late to notice that there is no money left to spend on the merit goods of special importance to women and children. To my mind, the main merit of this debate in Basic Income Studies is that it provides evidence of the consolidation of the conflicting feminist views about basic income proposals when analysed at a general level. Therefore, I believe that it is time to move to a second stage of feminist analyses that needs to focus more on the details of the entire package deal of a basic income society, in an empirically grounded fashion.

The U.S.–led “war on terror” exemplifies how identity investments, ideological commitments, and militarized practices interact. Some argue that George W. Bush’s forceful response to the 9/11 bombings involved not only his outrage and claim to military leadership but also his desire to establish a hypermasculine image of himself and the United States. It is well-known that Bush had personal reasons for enhancing his militarist (manly) identity. He had avoided serving in Vietnam, was invested in the image of being a “guy’s guy,” and arguably hoped to redeem his father’s failure to oust Saddam in the First Gulf War. For many Americans, the identity and power of the United States had been feminized by its defeat in Vietnam, made more humiliating by losing to a people stereotyped as ethnically/racially inferior. Feminization anxiety was also fueled by the increasing visibility of women in politics and the workplace and the growing strength of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) political movements. A yearning to remasculinize the nation (Jeffords 1989) was already present and readily tapped by Bush and his advisers as the nation responded to 9/11 and its spectacular demonstration of U.S. vulnerability to penetration by foreign men. The war story the Bush administration immediately cultivated featured fanatical terrorists inexplicably committed to destroying freedom, democracy, and (implicitly Western) civilization by any means. Enemies this irrational and unpredictable could only be defeated by drawing an absolute line between good and evil and adopting the strongest possible measures to eliminate those deemed evil. Feminization operates here to construct enemies as so absolutely different from “us” that the only viable strategy is their annihilation. Those who were fearful, were skeptical, or actively opposed Bush’s strategies were rendered unequivocally suspect—unpatriotic, anti-American, naively (irrationally) out of touch, or quite simply unmanly (lacking the guts to do what must be done). In this instance, feminization operates to deny absolutely the rationality of dissenters or any cogent reasons for critique. Dissenters are simply and irredeemably discredited: unwilling to stand up for their country, ungratefully abandoning the United States and freeloading on its military power, and/or failing to grasp real-world politics. Those seeking debate and diplomacy are feminized—cast as behaving like cowardly women and undermining U.S. interests by wimping out of military action. In effect, dissidents become a less stark but ultimately an equally threatening enemy: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” And as enemies, those who are against us lose any claim to inclusion, respect, or (apparently) rights. Investments in gendered identities and commitments to masculinist ideologies mattered for initiating the “war on terror,” and they also matter within processes of militarization. Militaries, of course, are quintessential sites of hypermasculinity. Success in war is presumed to demand a constellation of qualities long considered the exclusive province of men: superior physical strength, incomparable male bonding, heroic risk taking, extremes of violence, and readiness to sacrifice one’s life for the cause. Historically, military service afforded decisive proof of manhood and constituted a claim to citizenship. The identities and ideals of military service continue to inform recruitment and enlistment, with the increasingly crucial addition of economic incentives. Masculinist qualities remain key to military life but are complicated in today’s services by a variety of differences among men (by ethnicity, race, religion, class, skills) and by the inclusion of women. Within militaries, multiple masculinities are differently mobilized in pursuit of warring objectives.5 More physically powerful and hyper- masculine men are valued but subordinated to orders from above; commanding officers, with their presumed leadership competence, enjoy higher prestige and less ambivalent valorization. Increasing reliance on advanced technologies prompts new masculinities. While desk jobs that distance soldiers from the battle front were previously feminized, computer specialists and high-tech operators today are increasingly valorized (Blanchard 2003). If we consider the education and training required for these positions, classed and raced dimensions of masculinities come into view. Indeed, the techno-war paradigm of the U.S. military presents a new version of Western superiority: high-tech sophistication, efficiency, and awesome power.

Feminist scholars have pointed to the fundamental gender asymmetry in mainstream conceptualizations of growth (Marilyn Waring Citation1989). Growth is defined as the increase in the goods and services produced in a country within a given year, valued at market (or imputed) prices – with one important caveat: it is restricted to those goods and services that are, or could be, bought and sold in the market place. The production of these goods and services is classified as “economic activity” and, as the labor force data tell us, is largely carried out by men. The goods and services produced through unpaid domestic labor for consumption and use by the family, including those which reproduce the “economically active” labor force on a daily and generational basis, are explicitly excluded from definitions of economic activity and growth. As time use data tells us, this work is largely done by women. In other words, the economic growth of a country is defined and measured in a way that arbitrarily excludes the essential, but invisible “economic inactivity” that goes into making it happen. This has led feminist scholars to argue that a key criterion for assessing the gender implications of growth strategies must be the extent to which they address the consequences of this asymmetry. This means asking questions about the quantity and quality of economic opportunities associated with different growth strategies, about the gender distribution of these opportunities, and about the extent to which state policies serve to reinforce or offset gender inequalities in the ability to benefit from new opportunities (Diane Elson and Nilüfer Çagatay Citation2000). Strategies for growth have varied over time. Most developing countries embarked on import-substituting, state-led industrialization strategies after gaining independence in the postwar period, using Keynesian macro economic management to achieve nationalist ends. The oil shocks of the 1970s and the ensuing debt crisis in many of these countries coincided with the rise of neoliberal ideologies within wealthy donor countries and their dissemination across the world through the lending policies of the international financial institutions. The result has been a major shift across the world toward export-oriented growth strategies based on the liberalization of markets, trade, and capital flows at national and international levels. Drawing on the feminist criteria outlined above, it could be argued that there was a strong male breadwinner bias to the early state-led import-substitution strategies. They promoted large-scale, capital-intensive industries, privileged men's employment, and tied access to social security to full-time, life-long employment (of the kind largely enjoyed by men). At the same time, the state also took responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens, and there was a gradual, though highly uneven, expansion in welfare services in most developing countries that created formal employment opportunities for educated women and supported many more in their reproductive roles. The shift to neoliberal policies has been associated with a very different set of outcomes. Efforts to create flexible labor markets in order to attract “footloose” capital and to enable countries to compete in international trade have led to the dismantling of state protections previously accorded to labor. Where these cutbacks in state welfare provision have not been accompanied by an equivalent expansion in affordable market provision, it has been the unpaid labor of women, particularly among low-income groups, that has had to make good the shortfall. The male breadwinner bias of earlier policy has been partly attenuated by women's access to jobs in export-oriented sectors, but the reduction of the role of the state has meant the loss of one of the few sources of “good jobs” available to women in developing countries, as well as a decline in state support for their reproductive responsibilities. To sum up, therefore, the feminist economics literature suggests that the interrelationship between economic growth and gender equality is likely to be mediated by a variety of contextual factors, including the broad policy regimes, within which growth strategies are embedded, as well as the structures of local patriarchy. It thus rules out the possibility of making a priori generalizations about how the interrelationship will play out in different contexts. However, as the analysis in this contribution will show, the resilience of certain aspects of patriarchy means that we continue to find elements of continuity in the midst of much change.