LECTURE FOLLOW-UP: Enloe: War Hurts Women Harder

“War ripples on,” said guest lecturer Dr. Cynthia Enloe, who spoke Friday on the ramifications that the three wars in one and a half generations have had on Iraq's social fabric.

Her lecture, “The Invisible Costs of War,” focused on women's access to paid work during wartime and traced the saga of Iraqi women's history in order to describe the social consequences of the Iraq war in human terms.

Enloe, a research professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., in the Department of International Development, Community and Environment, recently won the Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement in Peace Studies Award for her research on women and international politics.

Enloe's presentation revealed a facet of Iraqi history outside the scope of mainstream media.

“I was struck most by how new all of this is, considering I had been following the news. I guess this wasn't covered on the news,” said first-year doctoral student Chelsea Neil.

The Iraqi feminist movement began as early as the 1920s when, inspired by Egyptian feminists, Iraqi women campaigned for access to paid work. However, change really began when the Ba'athist party, led by Saddam Hussein, instated a secular, nationalistic regime in the 1960s, which used oil revenues to build industry and develop a skilled workforce. The government increased women's education and access to paid work in order to rapidly modernize Iraq. Two decades later, the Iran-Iraq war offered even more employment opportunities to women who replaced the men drafted into the army.

The devastating human repercussions of the war, measured in widowed women and men too wounded to work, weakened the legitimacy of Hussein's government, and he began seeking political allies among the religious clergy.

Twelve years of international economic sanctions placed on Iraq created a shrinking government sector, which had been the largest employer of professional women. Many government-employed women were forced into unemployment. Social constraints prevented these women from finding jobs elsewhere because a woman could work in a mixed-gender environment and maintain her respectability, and thus marriageability, by working in the civil service, but not in the private sector. Many of these women were the sole income earners in multigenerational families, and the financial responsibilities drove women to prostitution.

Throughout the lecture, Enloe highlighted the importance of gender studies and feminist research in policy implementation. She pointed out that the United Nations Security Council made the decision to apply economic sanctions without conducting a gender analysis on the effects of sanctions. Additionally, the complicated history of women in Iraq was recorded almost entirely by female, Middle Eastern historians who had the insight to seek out places where women felt comfortable enough to speak freely.

“It really made me think about what it means to be a woman and a human in how I look at war,” said junior Ellie Cooper.

Enloe grounded the reality of war in the story of Nimo, one of the eight women Enloe interviewed for the book “Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War.” In April of 2003, one month into the Iraq War, Nimo still operated a humble beauty parlor in Baghdad, near Saddam's palace, despite limited access to water and electricity. Her beauty parlor served as a place where women could chat about security and the imams who wanted women to wear more modest clothing.

“I don't want religion in politics,” Nimo said.

The situation in Iraq became more volatile in the late 2000s when Iraq's social fabric frayed apart: People could not trust their neighbors, the availability of social services such as water and electricity declined, and life became unpredictable. People lost their sense of security. Two million Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan. Religious militias of men, who believed “if only women would act as women should,” began to form. A year and a half after the American military occupation, beauty parlors were being firebombed.

“Feminists take anything that has been trivialized and look at it again, take anything treated as ‘natural' and look at it a third and a fourth time, and see who gains,” Enloe said.