Review
Joshua S Goldstein (2001) War and Gender.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thembisa Waetjen
Although the phenomenon of human aggression has always been offered
in support of claims made by socio-biology, it is odd that the current,
deeply disturbing scale of superpower belligerence appears to have
invigorated biological explanations for warfare. According to one report,
'a growing number of anthropologists and biologists [have concluded] that
war is not a product of civilisation - of nations and economies and
boundary lines - but has somehow been hardwired into the brain, humanity's
most potent weapon for good and evil' {Sunday Independent March 3,
2003). Such discussions reflect enduring 17th century philosophical
uncertainties regarding human nature, epitomised in the rival positions of
Hobbes and Rousseau, and it appears that these debates are alive and well
in mainstream political science in the United States. More recently, a
compounding issue - the problem of gender - has come under scrutiny.
 Why is war a visibly masculinist enterprise?
    The gender division of labour that organises warfare - ie, that relegates
 direct combat and killing overwhelmingly to the agency of men and that
 mobilises women to an array of 'supportive' and "civilian' roles - appears
 to be cross cultural and transhistorical. How can the consistency of this
 gender pattern be explained? As the wide-ranging volume War and Gender
 demonstrates, answers to these questions are forthcoming from disciplines
 in the biological and social sciences. Joshua Goldstein sets out to evaluate
 the evidence articulated by several schools of thought 'in the context of the
 overall [multi-disciplinary] picture' (2001:1). While this useful endeavour
 produces an engaging and clearly written review of some diverse literatures,
 the book is ultimately weighed down by the author's ambition definitively
 to test all possible hypotheses and to derive conclusive answers from the
  sum of the various disciplinary parts. Along the way, it almost entirely
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     avoids engagement with critical theory and research, choosing instead to
    treat both war and gender as human universals that are subject to the
    influence of positivistic variables. Critical readers will likely find its
    conclusions somewhat arbitrary, even trivial.
       War and Gender is organised to examine six prominent explanations for
    the consistency of gender roles in war. These include the influences of
    biological differences in anatomy and physiology (including genetics,
   testosterone levels, cognition and sex hormones), behavioural sex
   differences (in group dynamics, hierarchy, and bonding) and cultural
   influences such as gender socialisation, the feminisation of enemies, and
   men's sexual and economic social dominance. Goldstein chooses to consider
   these variables as formal hypotheses, each addressed in a separate, robust
  chapter that discusses aspects of the major claims and research findings.
       Chapter One tests the core assertion of the book to determine whether,
  indeed, gender roles in war are cross-culturally and historically consistent.
  He demonstrates convincingly that despite a minute number of cases that
  tend to be inflated and overused as anecdotal evidence to argue the
  contrary, gender norms in war are astonishingly invariable. His assessment
  of the data indicates that accounts of societies in which women have
  constituted the military majority (eg Amazon matriarchies) are, in fact,
  well-circulated myths or cases that have become greatly exaggerated.
  Substantiated instances in which women were organised for combat in all-
 women units, such as the Dahomey in 18th and 19Ih century, present-day
 Benin, or the bomber squadrons of the Soviet Union in the Second World
 War, stand out as exceptional cases - and, indeed, serve to demonstrate the
 general rules of gender normativity, since such units never composed more
 than about eight to 12 per cent of a state's total combat forces.
      Still, as Goldstein is quick to point out, women have engaged as
combatants in all-women units, in mixed units, and as individuals (both
openly and disguised as men) in all-male units, in hundreds of documented
circumstances. The rich and numerous cases he highlights make for a
fascinating second chapter. Goldstein investigates the historical record to
determine whether women perhaps have simply unequivocally failed to
make good soldiers - a possibility that would preclude the need for further
explanation of why men dominate soldiering. Yet he discovers, on the
contrary, that women (when they have fought in wars) have successfully
demonstrated martial prowess on the battlefield. When women have
participated they have added to, not detracted from, the military power of
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   Thembisa Waetjen
   a state or social group, showing a capacity not only to risk death and injury,
  but also to wound and kill identified enemies. Indeed, it is the documented
  success of women in combat that redoubles the puzzle of gendered war.
      Yet, perhaps cases of women warriors are proportionately few because
  fewer women than men are biologically predisposed towards the demands
  of fighting. This possibility is considered in Chapters Three and Four.
  Chapter Three ascertains the existence of sex differences in relation to
  aggression, to physical strength and to certain cognitive abilities. The first
  task is to ascertain whether any significant differences are attributable to
  sex per se; the second, to determine whether such differences can be
  considered a strong explanatory factor for gendered warfare. The c ommonly
  held idea that testosterone causes aggression is shown to have almost no
  empirical support, and the idea of a separate genetic code for men - an
  'aggression gene' on the Y chromosome - turns out to be simply wrong.
 Size and strength, which are relevant to particular feats (such as carrying
 a particularly large wounded comrade from the battlefield) offer a more
 plausible argument for a pragmatic preference of'men for men in modern
 warfare - given that only a sizeable minority of women are bigger and
 stronger than a sizeable minority of men. Still, these factors are unconvincing
 as explanations, and Goldstein's discussion has the effect of showing the
 limits of physiological variables as causes for gendered war.
     Discussions about aggression and, in Chapter Four, about the possibility
 of innate gender propensities for certain activities - such as group bonding
 or working within hierarchies - raise questions about how war is to be
 defined. Goldstein's definition of war as 'lethal inter-group violence' is
 extremely broad. Yet, it becomes quickly clear that most of the available
 research on warfare is weighted towards conflicts between modern industrial
nation-states, and that - even within these conflicts - guerrilla armies,
revolutionary wars and genocides are generally portrayed by Goldstein as
outlier cases, cases that stand in contrast to patterns of 'conventional' war.
Moreover, while political conflict in 'simple societies' (Goldstein's term
for pre-capitalist or pre-modern societies) are assessed, they can hardly be
brought usefully to bear on the questions that are being posed - questions,
*°r example, such as whether men more than women function better in a
bureaucratic military hierarchy or why men experience diminished sexual
V1
    gour 'in the trenches' and 'at the front'. Since such questions clearly
relate to historically specific modes of warfare, it would be better for the
au
    thor to acknowledge the difficulties of conceptualising (let alone
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 explaining) war as a 'human universal' within his study. Vet, Goldstein,
 appears too driven by the design of his project and cannot seriously
 comment on the historically situated nature of war, nor the organisational
 and technological transformations of war over time and space.
    This maddening lack of historicity and context affects the book in other
 ways. Early on, in his effort to establish the universality of war, Goldstein
 makes some preposterous social comparisons - leaps that are only possible
because of a complete denial of social complexity. His intention, justifiably,
 is to challenge certain myths about celebrated 'peaceful' societies. Yet,
rather than rejecting the use of totalising adjectives to encapsulate the
character of a 'people' (or, indeed, to problematise conceptions of
 'peoplehood' that can be easily characterised in the first place) Goldstein
searches for evidence to reveal that so-called 'peaceful' societies, ones that
do not engage in full-blown wars, may yet be 'warlike'. Witness the case
of the !Kung, who, according to one 1916 report (the political burden
associated with colonial anthropology is not even mentioned) 'warred
frequently with neighbouring peoples until the European colonists arrived,
only then becoming more peaceful' (2001:28).
    Goldstein then quotes an account of a !Kung raid in which '(w)omen
frantically seized their children and tried to flee, but were slaughtered
without compunction. Here a mother nearly managed to escape with her
baby, but... a few blows with a kiri smashed the child's skull and finished
off the mother, too. Only a few lucky ones managed to get away...The
victors ... started looting. Everything useful was taken away. Clay pots
were smashed and huts set on fire' (2001:28). Goldstein's conclusion from
this account reveals his fierce determination to level human groups to a
brutal common denominator. 'If this is a peaceful society,' he remarks,
'perhaps Bosnia in 1992 would fit that category as well!'
    Chapters Five and Six explore cultural and sociological explanations for
gendered warfare. Yet, even here, there is no discussion of how systems of
production, exchange, or political rule affect gender relations or the
relations of violence. In these accounts, war is presented as something
'cultures' or 'societies' do to men (and to women) in order to fulfil the
functional needs of group protection or group aggression. Because war is
essentially a traumatic reality, boys are emotionally 'toughened through
a variety of socialisation vehicles (war play, sports, TV, video games, etc)
in order to prepare them for combat. While clinical pathologies such as
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder indicate that war does not come naturally
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   Thembisa Waetjen
  to men, cultures construct masculinity in association with traits required in
  war (aggressiveness, emotional suppression and social dominance) so that
  combat becomes a 'test of manhood'. Causal directions are quite opaque
  here. Moreover, in these accounts, men appear to have little agency or
  power in shaping the society that delegates these roles, and seem also to
  have little relational power over women.
      The product of a McArthur Foundation grant, this book provides a well-
  written review of several research literatures, confidently guiding the
  reader through the vocabularies, methodologies, and empirical case studies
  associated with different approaches. Yet it notably excludes the critical
 perspectives emerging from history and sociology. Moreover, though
 Goldstein recognises what is at stake for feminist theory in questions about
 the relationship between masculinity and violence (he includes a brief
 summary of feminist perspectives at the outset), the book is not set within
 any larger historical understanding of patriarchal power and social relations.
 Rather, it overwhelmingly favours functionalist perspectives within the
 social science disciplines. Material that is soundly non-academic (for
 example, Robert Bly and his mytho-poetic Men's Movement perspective)
 receives attention that is surely unmerited, given the silence on more
central scholarly views. In particular, it seems indefensible that a 400-plus
Page book on gender and political violence could omit any serious critical
discussion of the state, of nationalism, or the material histories of patriarchy
ar
  >d property relations associated with political power.
     Goldstein asserts that the best explanation of gendered war roles comes
down to the compounding influence of two variables: 1: small, innate
D1
    ological gender differences in average size, strength and roughness of
Play, and 2: cultural moulding of tough, brave men, who feminise their
enemies to encode domination (2001:401). How helpful (and how valid)
can such a conclusion be? More convincingly, the book helps to destabilise
several well-circulated ideas about the causal influence of sex hormones
and genetics over peaceful or aggressive behaviours. Men are not
    ologically programmed to be more warlike than women; and while some
w
  omen oppose wars, most women support them.
     Goldstein's remaining discussion is rushed and unsophisticated. After
advocating for an alternative method of raising boys - expressed in the
m
  °st facile and instrumentalist way imaginable - he moves on to compare
 " e global, interstate system to a group of individuals trying to get along
Peacefully. Within this framework, symbolic, reconciliatory handshakes
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                                                                   Review
between state leaders are compared to those found among apes in the wild.
Such musings detract from the book's worthy sections and only served to
underscore the limitations of a positivist approach to an historically
complex question.
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