Oeindrila Dube, a professor of global conflict studies at the University of Chicago, and S P Harish at New York University – have studied four centuries of European kings and queens. To assess the behaviour of women leaders during crises, they say, one needs a large sample – ‘which history cannot provide’. Along with Mark A Boyer at the University of Connecticut, she counted 10 military crises in the 20th century involving four female leaders (seven of which were handled by Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974). That assumption is not always grounded in reality, says Mary Caprioli, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), his study of violence throughout history, Pinker wrote: ‘women have been, and will be, the pacifying force’. Perhaps she had thinkers such as Stephen Pinker in her sights. ‘It stereotypes gender, and assumes leadership is uncomplicated,’ she told me. Given the tiny sample size, does it even make sense to ask if, given power, women are more or less likely than men to wage wars? The medical anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick, who directs the conflict, resilience and health programme at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, thinks not. Two countries, Ecuador and Madagascar, had a woman leader, each of whom served for a mere two days before being replaced by a man. They included 18 presidents and 30 prime ministers. Between 19, according to data compiled by Katherine W Phillips, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, just 48 national leaders across 188 countries – fewer than 4 per cent of all leaders – have been female. Think of Boudicca, the woad-daubed Queen of the Iceni people of eastern England, who led a popular uprising against the Roman invaders or Lakshmi Bai, Queen of Jhansi and a leader of the 1857-58 Indian Mutiny against the British or even Emmeline Pankhurst, who led British suffragettes on a militant campaign of hunger strikes, arson and window-smashing, then, in 1914, became a vociferous supporter of Britain’s entry into the Great War.īut these examples are anecdotal because, throughout history, women leaders have been extremely rare. Thatcher is hardly the only woman leader celebrated for her warmongering. If you ask this question out loud, not a minute will pass before someone says ‘Margaret Thatcher’, the British prime minister who waged a hugely popular war in the Falklands that led to her landslide 1983 election victory. But how true is this? Do incidences of violent conflict alter when women become leaders, or when their share of parliamentary representation rises? In what sense do women mother wars? Many activists believed that if women had political power, they would not pursue war. She hoped for ‘a world in the far-off future that will not contain one soldier’. Swanwick helped to found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation dedicated to eliminating the causes of war.
Or, as her fellow peace activist Helena Swanwick wrote: the shared fear that in war ‘women die, and see their babies die, but theirs is no glory nothing but horror and shame unspeakable’. Hollins’s grand scheme did not materialise, but neither did it emerge in a vacuum it was nurtured by a century of activism largely grounded in maternal love. During the opening months of the First World War, in the midst of the incendiary jingoism roiling Britain, the poet Dorothea Hollins of the Women’s Labour League proposed that an unarmed, 1,000-strong ‘Women’s Peace Expeditionary Force’ cross Europe ‘in the teeth of the guns’ and interpose itself between the warring armies in the trenches.
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