Looking at War as if Women Counted

Filmmaker, philanthropist and scholar Abigail Disney reached some surprising conclusions in her studies of war narratives. She shared them with a rapt audience at Stanford's Cemex Auditorium Wednesday evening.

Her five-hour television series, War Women and Peace, debuted on PBS Tuesday and will continue for the next four weeks. It depicts women in the war zones of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia and Liberia. The series is her answer to the question, “What if you looked at war as if women really mattered?”

From her extensive reading of literature about war from Homer to Mailer she realized that over thousands of years, for the most part, women are absent in these landscapes.

“They don't exist," she said, "except in the distance watching combat, as an admirer, or as an observer, as a potential reward sexually, as the mother sending them off, as a prostitute, or a nurse.”

She felt compelled to restore women to that landscape. She wondered, “What would happen were you to sew the camera into a sari or a headscarf of a woman? How would it look different? How would the vocabulary change? How would the ethics change? How would the cost-benefit analysis look?”

Disney said “when you talk to women about war you hear you hear about fire, running, starvation, and whether their children will get an education.” She sees a gender difference. “Women are busy making life happen. They need peace. For thousands of years we ignored this to our detriment,” she continued.

Last week the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize would be divided by three women– Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen --for their “nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Disney hailed the Nobel Committee's decision saying, “There are Leymahs and Ellens and Tawakkuls all over the world. And hopefully their newfound recognition will shed light on how transformational women are in peace and democracy.

After showing a 16-minute trailer for the film series Disney was joined by Anne Firth Murray, the founder of the Global Fund for Women, to answer questions from the audience.

One questioner asked why the UN hasn't done anything to stop the rapes associated with the ongoing war in the Congo. Disney replied that “the UN has an inability to incorporate change in its ways.” She further asserted, “the bad guys know that raping scares everyone and forces them to run away from their villages. People fighting these wars have no motivation to stop.”

Disney cited UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (adopted on October 31, 2000) as the first UN action to specifically call for respecting women's rights in resolution of a conflict.

Another person asked about the effective our dollars that are donated through the UN. In her answer, Disney quoted secretary of state Hilary Clinton, “If the UN didn't exist we'd be creating it.” Disney added that the UN needs a reorganization of its bureaucracy.

In response to Murray's question, “what gives you hope,” Disney said, “We are at a different moment in time now that women are peace-builders and CEOs.”