(Re)Interpretations:

The Shapes of Justice

in Women’s Experience

Edited by

Lisa Dresdner and Laurel S. Peterson

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

(Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience, by Lisa Dresdner and Laurel S. Peterson

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-976-8, ISBN (13): 9781847189769

Table of Contents

List of Images......................................................................................................... x

Acknowledgements............................................................................................... xi

Introduction

Lisa Dresdner and Laurel S. Peterson................................................................. 1

Part I: Language

Chapter One

Language Teachers and the Law: Resisting Silence

Jo Scott-Coe.......................................................................................................... 23

Chapter Two

Women’s Speech and Silence at South Africa’s Truth

and Reconciliation Commission

Denise Handlarski................................................................................................ 45

Chapter Three

Contesting Injustice: Discursive Strategies of Resistance between Prisoners and Activists in the Radical Women’s Prison Movement

Jodie M. Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo......................................................... 63

Chapter Four

“Mrs. Pace” and the Ambiguous Language of Victimization

J. Carter Wood...................................................................................................... 79

Chapter Five

Making Illegal Art: Two Feminist Artists Resist Copyright Law

Pauline Greenhill................................................................................................... 95

Part II: Religion

Chapter Six

Public Hierarchy and Private Harm—Tort Law as a Remedy for Gender Inequality in Israeli Family Law

Yifat Bitton......................................................................................................... 117

Chapter Seven

Women’s Experiences of Justice and Injustice in a Polygynous

Bedouin-Tribal Society

Annemarie Profanter and Stephanie Ryan Cate......................................... 135

Chapter Eight

The First Feminist Nuns: The Immaculate Heart Community

of California

Susan Marie Maloney....................................................................................... 153

Chapter Nine

Shona Religion and Women’s Justice in Modern Zimbabwe

Mickias Musiyiwa.............................................................................................. 171

Part III: War

Chapter Ten

Mind/Body Dualism and the Un-just Gendered Logistics

of Militarization

Natalie Wilson.................................................................................................... 193

Chapter Eleven

Militant Masculinity and Jewish Women’s Peace Activism in Israel

Adam Gaynor..................................................................................................... 211

Chapter Twelve

Postwar Justice in Germany: The Case of Traudl Junge,

Hitler’s Secretary

Carmen Faymonville........................................................................................ 231

Part IV: Sex Trafficking

Chapter Thirteen

(Re)evaluating Trafficked Women’s Legal Rights under Dutch and British Trafficking in Human Beings Legislation Enacted Since 2000

Marc JW de Jong................................................................................................ 257

Chapter Fourteen

Accessing Help and Services: Trafficking Survivors’ Experiences

in the United Kingdom

Alison Jobe.......................................................................................................... 279

Chapter Fifteen

State Intervention in Women’s Bodies and Lives: Sex Trafficking

and United States’ Donor Aid in Armenia

Susan Dewey...................................................................................................... 299

Part V: Medicine

Chapter Sixteen

Women as Patients

Kristy Maher....................................................................................................... 319

Chapter Seventeen

Caring About Mental Illness: Autonomy, Freedom, and Care

M. Carmela Epright........................................................................................... 341

Chapter Eighteen

DES and Diflucan: Pharmaceutical Marketing Choices—Why Women Should Take Heed

Jody Lisberger..................................................................................................... 353

Contributors........................................................................................................ 379

Index.................................................................................................................... 385

Introduction

Stories of Justice Across Boundaries
in Women’s Lives

Lisa Dresdner and Laurel S. Peterson

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

—James Baldwin, “Notes from a Native Son”

Most people are familiar with the famous statue of Lady Justice, modeled on the goddess of Justice and Law, Themis, who carries a scale in one hand and a double-edged sword in the other. The scales are used to measure the strength of a case, and the sword symbolizes the power of decision-making. Since the 16^th century, she has been blindfolded to indicate that justice is not subject to influence. One might find some irony in the fact that Justice is personified as a woman, when the power to mete out justice is so often found in the hands of men, and historically often at the expense of women. But then, justice is also rarely blind, as the realities of our world attest in the daily accounts of the abundant global injustices administered across gender, race, ethnicity, and class boundaries.

For centuries, philosophers have debated the virtues and ethics of justice in the political and social arenas, and we know that justice is not simply what is equal or fair. Traditional theories of justice cast it as a cardinal virtue; unbiased and impartial, it has to do with truths, moral rightness, formal and abstract rights and rules. Casting justice in such abstractions allows the factors of community and relationships to be stripped away so that the principles can be applied to autonomous cases. However, our approach in this book is to reflect a more contemporary approach whereby theories of justice are removed from the abstract and localized in specific experiences. In this way, we are not separating the private from the public sphere but instead examining how individual stories are essential to public social transformation.

The rallying cry of feminism is, of course, that the personal is political, and to that end, most of the chapters in this book use personal examples from real peoples’ lives as a way to highlight the connections we all share across our differences. Those personal examples, though, also highlight that the political now is global, and it is increasingly difficult to act locally without thinking globally. In an effort to resist models of identity or activism that are rooted in assumptions of western culture—i.e., capitalism, industrialization, and individualism—these chapters cross the world, from the United States to Canada and the U.K., from Armenia to Israel, and from Germany to Zimbabwe. Additionally, this book is interdisciplinary because we believe interdisciplinarity is essential to understanding global interconnectedness. Shifting the focus to different parts of the world where the local realities are emphasized highlights the ways in which we are all parts of complex dynamic relationships (Castles 2001, 25).

Informing our approach in this book is Charlotte Bunch’s astute observation: “Female subordination runs so deep that it is still viewed as inevitable or natural rather than as a politically constructed reality maintained by patriarchal interests, ideology, and institutions” (1990, 491). We define social institutions as those persistent structural forms that are linked by their “controlling, obligating, or inhibiting” characteristics (Martin 2004, 1251). Claiming gender as a social institution, Patricia Yancey Martin outlines the characteristics more thoroughly: They are, of course, social, but they are also enduring—across both time and space, their expectations are internalized; they have what she claims is a “legitimating ideology” in that there is a perceived “rightness” of the practices; they are often contradictory; they are recursive with change; and they are organized with and by power. What contemporary theorists are acknowledging, she points out, is that they are also embodied: “the ‘material body’ is key,” Martin claims. She explains that “the practices and interactions of ‘real’ people with bodies that talk and act constitute social institutions, gender included” (2004, 1251). To that end, we organize this book around those social institutions that are patriarchal in nature and, thus, are in many ways inherently unjust: Language, Religion, War, Sex Trafficking, and Medicine. These institutions govern all aspects of women’s lives: their minds, their bodies, and their souls. Additionally, they govern the ways in which women are perceived by others and the ways in which women perceive themselves.

Some might argue that the arenas listed above are no longer solely controlled by men. Certainly, women traffick other women, women have achieved religious and political power, and women serve in the military and as medical doctors. Yet, under what philosophical umbrella do women enact their empowerment? We would argue that a system that routinely disempowers women by selling their bodies for profit and for male use is a system, whether it is run by men or by women, that is patriarchal in nature: it serves the male power structure. If women are not getting the medical care they need because of the establishment’s philosophies about medical testing, “hysterical” women, or women’s abilities to make decisions about their own bodies, then it is still a patriarchal system, functioning under assumptions that men (and perhaps women) make about women. If women are still raped as a way to disempower the enemy during war, if they are still treated as bounty, if they are not given the power to minister to others’ spiritual needs because that would place them above men, then the system in which they, and we, are functioning is still a patriarchal system.

As part of a feminist agenda, women have challenged the power and authority vested in these systems in an effort to subvert the inherently patriarchal foundations. Part of the way that has happened is through the many people around the world, both in formal women’s studies’ programs and not, who are investigating, discussing, and acting on these issues. This book germinated from one of those discussions, a New England Women’s Studies Association (NEWSA) Conference focused on issues of justice that we hosted at Norwalk Community College in February 2006. The interdisciplinary issues that arose as a result of the conference’s discussions are the place we begin now, as none have reached satisfactory resolution in the almost forty years since second wave feminism.

While we focus on women’s experiences of justice in this book, we are careful to resist either universalizing or reducing women to a single identity. We recognize that both men and women experience injustices, and that race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are factors that directly impact the extent and means of injustice; however, the focus on women’s experiences in particular grows out of our shared commitment to women’s issues of justice. Our purpose is to illustrate how women work within and without traditional, patriarchal structures to create justice. In particular, the book aims not only to raise the questions, but also to show the ways in which women are creating new pathways for themselves. We believe firmly in the adage that one must not only bring the problems forward for discussion, but one must also come to the table prepared with possible solutions.

At the heart of these essays and what binds them together is storytelling. Stories or narratives are essential to our understanding of ourselves in the continuum of human lives, and narratives themselves are an expression of ideology. But in the last century, women have begun to challenge the authority of existing narratives by telling their versions—their experiences—and in so doing, have called attention to and challenged the political and social realities that narratives construct. Not everyone has the power to tell her own story, though, and even for those who do, other questions arise: Which stories do we choose to tell and how do we choose to tell them? How does one take a story that has been told to her and reshape it for her own use? What happens when the story we have been telling about who we are no longer fits who we want to be? How do stories make women visible or invisible? Who will speak for those who do not have a voice? Emphasizing the importance of stories and storytelling in women’s lives, Carolyn Heilbrun writes:

Lives do not serve as models, only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. (37)

We do not assume that our readers will necessarily be familiar with the interdisciplinary scholarship and theories that inform these chapters, and to ensure this book will be useful to a wide audience, this book is neither too specialized nor too daunting. At the same time, though, each chapter is framed with a solid, but accessible theoretical structure and firmly grounded with the most current supporting data. The writers in this book are using this material to reinterpret the stories of patriarchal institutions—in language, religion, war, sex trafficking, and medicine—in ways that challenge and question how women experience justice. If women are to reclaim their lives and to reclaim justice for themselves, their daughters, and their sisters, then they must also reclaim power over themselves in each of these areas. They must change the stories they tell.

* * *

Significantly, the first section of this book focuses on language. With its abilities to define, label, and identify, language shapes our feelings and names our actions. It is, in the words of poststructuralists, a signifying practice, and as such, it orders our lives and our environment. By claiming language as a social institution that shapes practices of justice, we are recognizing it as a patriarchal discourse that articulates, codifies, and maintains a system. The failure to question the labels that establish and define our realities often has grievous results. Additionally, women have too often been excluded from language and its power; they have been spoken for and about. In their influential work, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointedly ask, “If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how does its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice?” (290). The answer, of course, is that the Queen is silenced; we do not hear her voice. Precisely because we recognize the importance and power of claiming and speaking one’s voice, this section on language provides a framework for the entire book.

The first chapter calls to mind the the maxim “The pen is mightier than the sword,” which emphasizes the empowerment found in one’s writing voice, but as Jo Scott-Coe details through the legal case of Janis Adams v. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), that empowerment, when used as bullying under the guise of free speech, comes at great cost to its victims. Sadly, Scott-Coe points out in the first chapter of this section, “Language Teachers and the Law: Resisting Silence,” the “mighty pen” is used to silence a teacher and the “sword” of justice is impotent. The case involves a high school in a wealthy school district, populated by students who live a privileged life. These students persistently and with increasingly hostile language engaged in overt bullying and sexual harassment against Ms. Adams. Referring to what she calls the “schoolmarm narrative,” in which female teachers are cast as caretakers, nurturers, and models of virtue, Scott-Coe explains that in spite of their express task to educate students, the price teachers pay when bullied is their inability to claim authority. Like much “feminine” work, teaching is de-valued within a schoolmarm narrative, and a false dichotomy of “those who care” and the “others” is established. Implicit in such a black and white view is that to “care” means to acquiesce. Thus, if one attempts to speak out against injustice, to shout “No!,” then she is cast as the villain, and the student bullies are cast as harmless, rebellious teens. Scott-Coe reveals how victims of such abuse are effectively held as “rhetorical hostages” because care is “an ultimate value.” They are silenced, and their rights and abilities to protest are undermined. Yet, if the teacher in this case is considered a victim at all, she is perceived as “deserving it.” Where is justice, Scott-Coe asks, when the jury’s decision, which sided with the teacher, is overturned by the judge? Is one of the privileges of class the ability to intimidate?

If, as Scott-Coe shows, the silencing of a woman results in her disempowerment, then the next chapter reveals that a woman who chooses to be silent may empower herself. In “Women’s Speech and Silence at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Denise Handlarski points out how silence can be viewed as a demonstration of power. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was an effort to facilitate healing and reconciliation after the horrors of apartheid. Considered to be a “progressive method of justice and reconciliation” in contrast to the forms of retributive justice used in the Nuremburg trials or punitive justice used worldwide, it focused on narrativizing the past. Both victims and perpetrators were encouraged to tell their stories, which were then compiled into a public historical record that would lead to collective healing. However, Handlarski deftly points out the complexities of such a project that necessarily involves both interpretation and translation.

First, many women resented being cast as victims, as they perceived themselves as “resisters” or fighters; second, both the Commission and the media continually elided the individuals’ identities as females with their roles as mothers, and, in so doing, motherhood became equated with victimhood; finally, the commission’s insistence that women speak about their experiences as autonomous individuals countered the way the women claimed their experiences in terms of relationships; that is, they could not extricate their individual suffering from the communal suffering. Consequently, many women simply refused to cooperate with the ways in which the chairman wanted them to tell their stories; they silenced themselves. As Handlarski points out:

Silence is not merely the absence of voice; it speaks to the refusal for individual stories and experiences to become usurped by and reconfigured into a larger national memory and history that may not do justice to those experiences.

Additionally, Handlarski analyzes the kinds of voices the women employed when they did speak; using linguistic theories she explains that the silences, hedges, and other responses traditionally associated with “female” language and considered weak were actually used to show resistance, strength, and community building. Thus, while the TRC appears initially to be the kind of project in which, quite literally, the “master’s tools” might be used to “dismantle the master’s house,” in fact, the creation of an “official” national history and memory leaves the master’s house still standing: the master narrative subsumes the individual stories.

Questions of interpretation and translation are further complicated in the next chapter, “Contesting Injustice: Discursive Strategies of Resistance Between Prisoners and Activists in the Radical Women’s Prison Movement,” by Jodie M. Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo. Glossing the injustices of the prison system, its employment of psychological and physical abuse as well as medical mistreatment, Lawston and Murillo focus their attentions on how gender, race, and class privilege affect female prisoners’ access to language and their abilities to voice their concerns and complaints about their mistreatment. Lawston and Murillo’s sociological study of a group of women activists, Women for Women Prisoners (WWP), who act on behalf of the prisoners to help give them a voice, reveals the burdens and liabilities of speaking “for” others. These prisoners—most of whom are of color—want to be heard, but they have no access to a public voice. Lawston and Murillo explain that “it is not that [they] do not have something to say, but that there has not been anyone who cares to listen.” In contrast to the experience with the TRC, the WWP’s interpretation and translation of the stories come with their awareness that they must resist imposing their own “narrative rubrics” on the prisoners’ stories. The quandary the activists face is how to speak “for” another when they do not share the prisoners’ experiences; how might they act on their behalf without duplicating the hierarchies of race and class? The solution, Lawston and Murillo show, is to seek the language of connection. Using Chela Sandoval’s concepts of oppositional and differential consciousness, the authors explain that the activists and prisoners find common ground in their shared opposition to a dominant social order. Careful not to reduce this connection merely to a facile assumption of “sisterhood” or shared gender oppression that masks the underlying operation of a hegemonic referent, the authors clarify that the connection actually hinges on the intersection of the women’s associations and, thus, emphasize the impact of language in that the authority to speak rests not on identity but on accountability.

Like Lawston and Murillo, J. Carter Wood addresses the criminal justice system in his chapter, “‘Mrs. Pace’ and the Ambiguous Language of Victimization.” Wood’s focus on questions of victimhood links this chapter as well to Scott-Coe’s account of Janis Adams. Wood tells the story of Mrs. Pace, a British commoner who was accused and acquitted of murdering her husband with arsenic poisoning in 1928. Mrs. Pace was a woman who followed what has become a common pattern of victims of domestic abuse: both fear and shame silence them; they believe their partners’ promises to change and, in fact, the abusers’ remorse leads to their forgiveness; and their sense of self is such that they often feel as though they “deserve” the abuse. The double-standard in western society is nowhere more evident than in cases such as these: Where Scott-Coe pointed out that Ms. Adams was effectively punished for breaking her silence, for speaking out against her abusers, Mrs. Pace was viewed with sympathy precisely because she endured the abuse with stoic silence. Where the gender script written for female teachers was used against Ms. Adams, the gender scripts for wife and mother were used to martyr Mrs. Pace. Wood, though, insightfully reveals how the narrative on which Mrs. Pace relied, a narrative that is traditionally used to confine and limit women, was used strategically by Mrs. Pace herself for empowerment. Wood argues that she effectively “transformed her victimization into a form of authority,” in effect by capitalizing on her “fifteen minutes of fame” to write a serialized memoir. By keeping herself in the spotlight, she inadvertently increased her power in other ways as the ongoing media coverage was used to critique the current judicial system and civil liberties. Yet Wood effectively teases out the complexities of doing so: Mrs. Pace’s empowerment of herself in the public arena uses the story that disempowers her in the home. Thus, her acceptance of the underlying patriarchal privilege may empower her, but it also disempowers other women in the same situation.

Just as language is a signifying practice that contributes to the production of social and political meaning, so, too, is art. In the final chapter of this section, “Making Illegal Art: Two Feminist Artists Resist Copyright,” Pauline Greenhill addresses two postmodern, Canadian artists—Diana Thorneycroft and Ukrainian-born Natalka Husar—who have become entangled in the language of law. Greenhill highlights how the visual statements the artists make become doubly resistant. Specifically, she illustrates how the artists, who appropriate images from mass media—deliberately using pre-existing meanings that are part of everyday life—to critique the Soviet diaspora in Husar’s case and media violence in Thorneycroft’s case, are then thrust into a legal debacle that compels them to doubly resist in their efforts to thwart the attempted limits placed on their artistic creativity. Both artists employ postmodern parody, which inherently has the potential to deconstruct and thus to challenge unexamined assumptions. Parody in this case illustrates how representations conceal ideology; in postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon’s words, it “paradoxically mak[es] us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation—in any medium” (95). But that parody puts the artists in the gunsights of the corporations who own the images—Mickey Mouse, for example, or the covers of Harlequin romance novels—corporations that are interested not in challenging assumptions, but only in asserting their own property rights. While not all corporations assert these rights, Pepsi being a notable exception, most use their corporate power —read: money and lawyers—to force the artists—usually poor, or at least poorer than a multinational—to remove their work from public view. Greenhill points out that the artists’ works in this case allow us to examine the history and process of legitimization and authorization: why and how do some things get represented at the expense of others? The further irony she uncovers in this chapter is that while often artists re-tell or reframe what has previously been silenced, in this case the artists are re-telling in an effort to highlight not what has been silenced, but what has been invisible ideology, and the artists themselves are silenced in their re-telling by “corporate bullying.” What is again revealed is that language is an institution that is dominated by power struggles.

The second section raises questions about how women can reclaim authority and advocate for a more just world through religion and religious institutions. The three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, form the bedrock of Western culture and patriarchy, as well as its colonizing influence, and religious institutions are often blamed for the continued oppression and disempowerment of women. Trenchant feminist critiques of these religions generally advocate an either/or view: accept the teachings or abandon the religion altogether. This binary view neglects to account for alternative views that suggest organized religion might be a site for liberation struggles. In other words, feminism and religion are not necessarily irreconcilable.

The authors in this section attempt to show how women can use the systems to which they already have access to reclaim their power and serve their own needs—both inside and outside traditional religion. In the first chapter, “Public Hierarchy and Private Harm: Tort Law as a Remedy for Gender Inequality in Israeli Family Law,” Yifat Bitton discusses the intersections of religion, gender injustice, and the legal system. She argues that the Israeli state is deeply entwined with the Jewish tradition upon which it was founded, and this tradition often blocks women’s access to equality and achievement. Bitton’s essay focuses specifically on the religious rules pertaining to divorce, suggesting that Jewish feminists must reinterpret these to expose the male-perspective-interpretation that they represent. Tragically, under these rules, many women are forced to remain in a sort of invisible half-life, where they are neither married nor divorced, because their husbands must consent to the divorce. Some men attempt to compel their wives to give up, Bitton tells us, “many of their rights on issues like child custody, schooling for the children and alimony”—or to surrender some or all of their property.

To create a more just process and give women a voice and power to shape their own lives, Bitton argues for the use of tort law, which allows plaintiffs to sue for the damages done to them. This, she believes, would both compensate women for the harm inflicted on them through religion-oriented discriminatory practices and decrease the impact of the discriminatory rules themselves by triggering the male rabbis to reinterpret these rules in a manner that is less offensive to women. While many feminists, as Bitton notes, may suggest that the only real solution to the problem is to reject the traditional and religious rules, she argues that tort law offers a solution that allows Jewish women to honor their faith and still achieve equality. In the words of Dr. Joan Borysenko, an authority on women’s spirituality, “Each of us has the inalienable right to worship in our own way, within or outside the walls of religious institutions” (1999, 53).

Also reflecting this complex relationship between tradition and equality is Annemarie Profanter and Stephanie Ryan Cate’s chapter, “Women’s Experiences of Justice and Injustice in a Polygynous Bedouin-Tribal Society.” In their chapter, Profanter and Cate explore issues of justice and injustice in polygynous marriage in the predominantly Islamic region of Dhofar in Oman. Using the results of a five year study, they demonstrate that, for these women and this society, community and its needs and traditions are the most important value, outweighing the needs of any individual. In this context, they ask whether the U.N. definition of human rights—equality between women and men—conflicts with the Islamic traditions that allow men to take as many as four wives. While Western interpretations of polygyny are almost uniformly negative, Profanter and Cate’s findings indicate that the women themselves voice far more nuanced responses, ranging from pride to tolerance to dismay. In addition, a divergence between Oman’s rapidly changing national culture, which is moving toward finding its place in the new globally connected world, and its deeply traditional ways provides women with new opportunities to create, to impact, and to become connected while simultaneously limiting them by suggesting their true role is to be a good Muslim wife. Profanter and Cate effectively tease out the complexities of Qu’ranic interpretation with which Dhofari society and the Islamic faith are wrestling, complexities made more intricate by the national scope of the issues and the far-reaching implications of change.

Privileged male power is also at issue in the next chapter, “The First Feminist Nuns: The Immaculate Heart Community of California,” by Susan Maloney. In 1970 the Immaculate Heart Sisters (IHM’s), influenced by a variety of factors, relinquished their vows and created a new Christian ecumenical community of over 400 members that included women and men, thus taking a step away from strict religious tradition. Maloney shows that the Second Vatican Council, which called for, among other things, modernizing convent life, inspired the nuns to adopt “new prayer rituals, theological discussion groups… and secular dress.” The collaborative process required to make these changes operated as a catalyst for self-reflection and self empowerment, created a sense of community membership, and gave the women’s experiences a new sense of authority. The IHM’s used their communal decision-making to empower themselves, to give their community a voice, and to reject the interference of the male hierarchy —in particular, a local cardinal with international power and recognition—who attempted to block the changes. As Maloney so poignantly writes, “The path to God (sanctification) is not a denominational allegiance but a personal commitment realized within a communal context.” In relinquishing their vows, these women assumed the power previously invested only in the church to legitimate their own Catholic commitment, and thus took control of their lives and their stories. While the nuns would not have defined their actions as feminist Maloney tells us, she contends that the actions they took to create justice for themselves, their community, and, finally, other Catholic sisters, were based on deeply feminist ideals. Thus, the IHMs demonstrate that feminism and religion are not irreconcilable, but redefining the parameters of the religion may be necessary to make it so.

The dilemma of reconciling traditional religious practices and modern life is also addressed in Mickias Musiyiwa’s chapter, “Shona Religion and Women’s Justice in Modern Zimbabwe,” the final essay in this section. Comparing women’s experiences of justice in both traditional and modern Zimbabwe, Musiyiwa argues that because women have traditionally been accorded great privileges and protection under the traditional tribal Shona religion, they have more to gain in their quest for justice if they invoke the rights accorded to them by it rather than if they rely on legislation that has developed from the predominantly Christian designs brought to Zimbabwe by the colonists. In delightful contrast to the societies portrayed in a number of the other essays, Musiyiwa states, “Women’s happiness is defended in Shona culture because the loss of happiness by women translates to the disharmony of the entire society.” Unfortunately, Christianity stripped women of their powers on the basis of their sexuality, demanding they be silent. However, in the Shona religion, the god Mwari, as Musiyiwa shows, embodies both sexes, while family spirits of both genders exist, and women acted as High Priestesses, traditional healers, warriors, and mediums. Girls could also be dedicated to the oracle (or “voice ”) of Mwari, a position of privilege. In contrast to Maloney’s chapter in which Christianity was made to serve women’s needs, Musiyiwa claims that, in this case, it is not possible for women to reshape the parameters of Western religion; it is too damaging to both the women and their culture. Instead, they must leave behind the stories Western religion tells and return to the stories of their roots if they wish to reclaim their voices.

While language and religion primarily address the life of women’s minds and spirits, war, sex, and medicine are about their bodies—a traditionally contested area of women’s experience. Who gets to own a woman’s body? Is it hers or does it belong to the man or authority to whom she is attached (as in the case of her trafficker, her doctor, or her social worker)? How do we protect and care for each other while honoring the right of each woman to make her own decisions about her body? The next three sections address these questions.

The third section, on war, assumes the obvious injustice in the interrelationships of war and social injustice. But what is perhaps less evident, particularly in the current state of world affairs, is how military might still relies on patriarchal ideologies in order to function. The glorification of heroism and sacrifice and the eroticization of violence both devalue women’s roles in the military and diminish their sufferings and exploitation. In this section, we move from the broad view of Natalie Wilson who illuminates how we define the various players in war, to Adam Gaynor’s chapter, which examines women’s roles in a particular military organization, to the focused view presented by Carmen Faymonville, who uses a case study to evaluate the complexities of one woman’s response and responsibility for the atrocities during World War II. Thus, this section explores women’s roles in war—both in and out of the military—their struggles to create peace, and the impact war has on their lives.

In the first chapter, “Mind/Body Dualism and the Un-just Gendered Logistics of Militarization ,” Wilson uses 9/11 and its associated wars as her centerpiece. She suggests that waging war depends on stereotypical ideologies of males as soldiers, heroes, and strategizers, and females as mothers of soldiers and victims needing protection. This dichotomy, Wilson argues, codifies those men waging war as “mind,” while codifying those the war aims to “protect” and those the war is waged against as “body ,” a category associated with the feminine. Equating the first world with the mind and the “rest” of the world as the body, Wilson posits that the “mind” is attempting to control all parts of the globe or any bodies on that globe that do not “march to the beat of advancing capitalist globalization.” Further feminine erasure has occurred through, among other things, a lack of images of women in the war, persistent use of the male pronoun when referring to soldiers, and cuts to social funding (“women’s issues”) while military spending climbs. All this results in the silencing of “bodies,” whether those are presented as nations (Iraq or Afghanistan) that need to be protected or “saved”; or groups (war protesters who are too “wimpy” to do the “real” work of war); or individuals. Highlighting again the power of voice and storytelling, Wilson, like Handlarski and Scott-Coe, reveals the strategic uses to which narratives are put: in this case, the narrative of feminine victimization is used to “bolster support for war.” Wilson argues that those “bodies” must refuse to be silenced ; they must use their voices to insist they matter in the politics of war, in order to create a more just world. If they are silenced, she claims, then rampant militarization and capitalist globalization will rage unchecked, perhaps damaging us and our world beyond repair

Further complicating the idea of dichotomies, Gaynor’s chapter, “Militant Masculinity and Jewish Women’s Peace Activism in Israel,” looks at women’s roles in the modern Jewish state, specifically at male/female roles in the military. Calling attention to the private/public dichotomy of women’s lives, he suggests that women have been discriminated against not only in the personal sphere, but also in military and political hierarchies, which further reinforce the culture of masculinity in these more public spheres. Reflecting the issues that Bitton’s chapter on tort law raises regarding discrimination in Israel and echoing Wilson’s framing of the hierarchical nature of the military as masculine, Gaynor asks if it is possible to balance a woman’s right to serve in the military with a feminist obligation to undermine patriarchal militarism.

Historically, he begins, Jewish men have been constructed as more passive and feminine than European Christian men. This hierarchy was reinforced through the denial of traditional male privileges such as owning land and weapons and access to high status professions. As compensation and reaction against this, Zionists created the image of the “new Hebrew”: “young, muscular Jews who could reacquire their lost masculinity by moving to Israel, the national homeland, to work the fields and defend their rights through military force.” Socialism was a powerful influence in Zionism, and it resulted in the apparently gender-equal institutions of the kibbutzim and required national military service for both men and women. However, Gaynor argues that these institutions, in fact, remained highly gendered in terms of decision making and work roles. In Israel’s present day military, this hierarchy continues, especially as it applies to the power vested in combat roles. Class also plays a role, as affluent, white men are more likely to enter prestigious units, while those of Arab, Berber, Kurdish, Turkish or Persian origin, who are often from impoverished neighborhoods, frequently define their masculinity through caring for mothers, daughters or sisters “whom they perceive as weaker and in need of protection”—an interesting echoing of Wilson’s mind/body dichotomy. Gaynor presents two trends in response to this inequality. The liberal case states that women should have equality in military service because it is the “ultimate expression of citizenship in Israel,” while the radical case argues that women’s participation in the military supports the masculine values of patriarchy. Many women’s organizations have taken a different tack, however, creating peace organizations that address the inequality indirectly by recognizing the link between “war and women’s disempowerment.” These organizations have had an incredible impact on national life by making the voices of women heard, and at the same time, have created controversy, given the centrality of the military to continued Jewish national identity. Finally, Gaynor argues that only in recognizing the “danger of militarism to women’s lives and rights” will it “cease to disempower the very people it purports to protect.”

In the final chapter in this section, “Postwar Justice in Germany: The Case of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s Secretary,” Faymonville focuses on Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, who was blindly loyal to Hitler until his death. In her chapter, Faymonville asks questions about whether women are outside or inside the power structure, about the expectations of women as the more “peaceful” sex, and about how biologistic conceptions of femininity as peace-loving are problematic. Using Junge’s experience of what Faymonville calls “self-induced amnesia,” she asks what women should be held accountable for in war, and if the standards to which they are held should be the same as those used for men. Suggesting that a binary construction of perpetrator/victim is too facile, Faymonville shows the complications “of personal and national responsibility.” Without dismissing the horrific effects of war on their own lives, she nonetheless points out that women can have similar agency and impulse as men. Certainly our recent experience of women in combat, including examples as diverse as female suicide bombers, Lynndie England (of Abu Ghraib notoriety), and Jessica Lynch, lead us to question the story we tell ourselves of women as more peaceful than men.

Part of Faymonville’s argument rests on precisely the kind of “closure” that Handlarski references is the goal of the TRC . However, in contrast to the TRC’s laudable efforts of gaining some closure through the healing power of personal stories of apartheid, the “recovery of national ‘closure’ currently happening in Germany,” Faymonville tells us, which “the German Right has been pursuing as its main cultural initiative,” is, sadly, one of “erasure.” Faymonville points out how Junge’s silences within her story “unwittingly lends support to the recovery” of this erasure.

In the same way that Faymonville discusses how women are cast as victims during war, the fourth section, on sex trafficking, questions the various characterizations of women who are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Sex trafficking is defined by the U.S. Department of State as “the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for profit.” (“Trafficking” 2007). The State Department also tells us that:

The International Labor Organization (ILO )—the United Nations agency charged with addressing labor standards, employment, and social protection issues—estimates there are 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude at any given time; other estimates range from 4 million to 27 million. Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of transnational victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. (“Trafficking” 2007)

Sex trafficking can be framed in a variety of ways, as a human rights violation, violence against women, discrimination against women, and even as a health problem—a concern not, as some might assume, with the transmission of STDs and the HIV virus from the trafficked women to men, but, rather, that the customers themselves are passing the infections to the women—and these women are among the last to receive proper medical treatment.

The problem of sex trafficking is complex and cumbersome, but this section addresses specifically the plight of women trafficked into sexual exploitation and the efforts of those who aim to help them—from governments to international aid groups. Julia O’Connell Davidson writes in Children in the Global Sex Trade that:

…campaigns to highlight the plight of victims of tyranny and discrimination, and organizations and individuals who attempt to assist those who are harmed, abused, and victimized always tread a difficult line between exposing and ameliorating injustice and reinforcing the objectification of the Other. (2005, 150)

This objectification is often accomplished through the medium of language, and the language used to categorize women as either victims or as actors greatly impacts the kind of treatment they receive.

The chapters in this section attempt to deal with this fine line through discussions of current legislation and specific programs designed to combat trafficking and its effects, such as the POPPY Project in the United Kingdom. Many issues in trafficking are addressed: definitions of trafficking, including who gets trafficked and why; the categorization of women and children as illegal aliens who need to be returned to their home countries rather than as victims of crime who need safe houses, legal and physical protection from their traffickers and abusers, and opportunities that will allow them to create economically viable lives for themselves; the issues involved in prosecuting traffickers, who are often given slaps on the wrist for minor violations; and the economic and social considerations of sex trafficking, including the effects of war and poverty. The too-often invisible victims of this industry are left with devastated lives, as demonstrated through their poignant stories.

The section begins with “(Re)evaluating Trafficked Women’s Legal Rights under Dutch and British Trafficking in Human Beings Legislation Enacted Since 2000” by Marc Jung-Whan de Jong. In this chapter, de Jong provides an in-depth overview of British and Dutch anti-sex trafficking legislation and compares it to European Union policy, as embodied in the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. He details the shortcomings in Dutch and British law, noting that items such as the criminalization of sex work, short reflection periods for victims, and the treatment of trafficking as a criminal immigration issue rather than a human rights issue all make helping victims more complex. However, he notes many positives, including the British POPPY Project (covered in more detail in Alison Jobe’s essay), the British government program that educates heterosexual men in the ways that the sex industry objectifies women, and the Dutch government’s attempt to cut the ties between organized crime and sex work. These, he argues, show these governments’ commitment to dealing with trafficking issues. However, while they have made significant efforts to condemn human trafficking, unfortunately, neither the Dutch or British government have yet ratified the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (although both have signed it), which de Jong suggests currently offers the most “holistic” options for aiding trafficked women, men, and children. De Jong ends his chapter by offering ways in which new or expanded legislation can improve women’s legal and political rights and protections.

Alison D. Jobe, in her chapter, “Accessing Help and Services: Trafficking Survivors’ Experiences in the United Kingdom,” shifts the focus from legal analysis to individual stories of women who have experienced sexual trafficking and their difficulties as they apply for asylum to remain in the United Kingdom. Jobe argues that sex trafficking must be defined as a human rights problem rather than a problem of illegal immigration . Illegal immigrant status, she shows, often results in deportation and re-trafficking. Jobe’s article is based on research she did while working with the POPPY Project, a “UK Home Office funded project… to house and to assist women who have been trafficked for the purposes of prostitution in the UK,” and it documents the difficulties that law enforcement and the women face as they interact, including language difficulties, the concomitant silencing that those language difficulties engender, and cultural differences. Continuing the emphasis on the importance of storytelling, Jobe’s article powerfully addresses the issue of voice, as the women are often not allowed to tell their stories, barred either by their traffickers’ threat or application of violence , or by fear caused by their traffickers’ stories of what the authorities will do to them if they do speak out. In addition, the story that law enforcement tells about a particular woman when she does find the courage to seek help or when she is taken into custody defines her ability to either move forward or remain trapped, as well as the POPPY Project’s ability to aid her. Jobe suggests that only by treating the women as victims of an unjust system will they be able to receive the help they need to change their lives.

The last chapter in this section, “State Intervention in Women’s Bodies and Lives: Sex Trafficking and United States’ Donor Aid in Armenia,” by Susan Dewey, explores, through a case study and personal observation, the ramifications of the American donor aid process on sex trafficking victims in Armenia. Many issues that hamper the aid relationship are explored here, including the following: The ways information is interpreted by those in power, the indifference and bureaucracy of the power structure, the institutionalization of corruption in the former Soviet Republics, ineffective counter-trafficking legislation, lack of protection for trafficking victims, the language in which the forms were written and filled out, the ability of the NGOs to procure abortions for women who needed them while still retaining U.S. government funding for their work, the assumption that the women had been “marked” by their experiences as sex workers, and the “profound gaps in education and authority between works at international and non-governmental organizations.” All these issues serve to silence trafficked women, Dewey argues, and further victimize and criminalize them. Additionally, Dewey underscores that aid, dependent upon a country’s tier status as determined by the U.S. Department of State, is often given or withheld as a way to advance the broader national goals of the U. S. government. As Dewey points out, “Just because a country meets the terms defined by the United States does not mean that trafficking is being effectively combated.” The power of the U. S. government to define completely the story that was told about each of the victims showcases how the imbalance of power in the trafficking relationship continues into the aid relationship. Dewey suggests that this case illustrates that the complex webs of bureaucracy and legislation that the women, the NGO, and the embassy workers must navigate end up rendering both the “powerful and the powerless” ineffective in remediating the women’s issues and situations in any substantial way.

If the chapters in the section on sex trafficking reveal how women’s bodies are objects of exchange, then the final section on medicine highlights how even in the context of healthcare, where the primary goal is to “do no harm,” women’s bodies are also a site of contention. The first chapter, “Women as Patients,” by Kristy Maher, provides a systematic overview of the historical paternalism that has informed the medical profession. Similar to previous chapters, Maher points out how western culture functions in binary. She explains that the gendered dichotomy of the private/public sphere has historically affected the ways in which women have been characterized as healthy or not. That is, those not participating in the public sphere, who are not, Maher says, “functioning” members of society, are likely to be qualified as unhealthy. Through history, women were kept in subordinate positions by defining them as weak or unhealthy; Maher notes this, outlines the unjust consequences in areas from education to economics, and asks how women have attempted to disrupt this injustice. Maher’s overview addresses other costs of the traditional paternalistic role taken by medical practitioners, including what happens when women are excluded from medical research and when women’s natural, biological events are medicalized. While women have begun advocating for more autonomy and power in their medical care, Maher argues that until women move beyond their individual complaints and toward institutional or societal change, the current state of the medical establishment will ultimately remain unchallenged.

Taking control of one’s medical treatment is at the heart of the next chapter, “Caring About Mental Illness: Autonomy, Freedom, and Care,” by M. Carmela Epright. Drawing on her expertise as a bioethicist, Epright explains the complex dilemma of seeking the most just approach in medical care, particularly as it relates to psychiatric patients. The most sacrosanct principle in health care ethics, she notes, is autonomy: to respect a person’s ability to make his/her own decisions is “to respect the equality and worth of rational beings.” However, given that autonomy is linked to rationality, what happens when patients’ abilities to self-govern are significantly compromised? Who, then, should be protected—the individual or society? Who should do the protecting? And, finally, who makes these decisions? Using a specific case to make her point, Epright examines these questions and reveals that no easy answers exist. Sometimes, there is no “right” way of doing something, only the “best” of all possible choices, but these choices, Epright argues, must be viewed through the lens of care ethics, whereby “moral problems are understood to be embedded in a context of relationships.” Additionally, the focus must move beyond the present, past the immediate experience of medical duress, and concentrate on the patient’s history and future. Of course, as Epright points out, this kind of approach puts more burden on both the caregivers and healthcare institutions, but, she asks, in our efforts to create a more just society, what choice do we really have?

Moving beyond the immediate doctor/patient relationship of the medical field to the medicine itself in the last chapter, “DES and Diflucan: Pharmaceutical Marketing Choices—Why Women Should Take Heed,” Jody Lisberger calls attention to the insidious and often dangerous ways in which the pharmaceutical industry invades and affects our lives. Disputing the ostensible benefits that accompany what has become an increasing amount of pharmaceutical advertising, Lisberger points out that these companies continue to unfairly exclude women from drug testing, persistently disregard findings that reveal certain drugs to be harmful to women, and too often value profit over public health. She argues that the drug companies “cloak marketing under the guise of ‘education,’” and she focuses specifically on the drug Diflucan, which is often prescribed for the common yeast infection. These marketing strategies, she says, seemingly “flatter” women’s independence and self-determination—their autonomy—but ultimately “perpetuate gender roles that depend on essentialized notions of women as nice and obedient.” Noting that pharmaceutical companies rely on the patient/doctor hierarchy that Maher addresses, Lisberger claims that the “pharmaceutical pursuit of profit” exploits women and in effect puts them at risk. Importantly, Lisberger offers potential solutions, including calling on doctors to engage in more collaborative relationships with their patients, changing patent laws, creating independent drug testing agencies, and urging patients to ask more questions of their doctors as well as the drugs they prescribe.

* * *

As all these stories demonstrate, women have a long way to go before they achieve justice. From our religious lives to our intimate lives to our public lives, we find ourselves constrained—still—both subtly and overtly by patriarchal structures. We believe that these stories have the power to change lives, to transform women’s experiences of justice, and we hope these stories begin to open doors, both imaginative and real, for the women who read them. Yet for stories to have real power, they must have an audience that is willing to take action. To quote Marge Piercy, the keynote speaker at the NEWSA conference that began this book project, “To transcend what we have, we have to imagine what we can be.”

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