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It Doesn’t Have
to Be That Way
Interview with Betty
Reardon
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Professor Betty Reardon
is widely acknowledged as a founder of contemporary peace education and
is the founding director of the Peace Education Center at Teachers
College, Columbia University, U.S.A. She has served as a consultant to
several UN agencies and education organizations and has published widely
in the fields of peace and human rights education and gender issues.
SGI Quarterly: What has been the
role of women in helping the emergence of a paradigm of cooperation?
Betty Reardon: I think that women
have done a great deal that could be a lot more effective if it were
done in complementarity with men. I think that what women have done
reflects the concerns they embrace as a consequence of their gender
socialization. This seems to me a very important distinction to make:
nothing innate or essentially female in women causes them to tend more
toward cooperation. It is the
learning acquired through their roles as caregivers and sustainers of
life and well-being that influences their cooperative behavior.
Cooperation, competition and conflict are learned behaviors, modes of
achieving human ends. Women’s traditional roles socialize them toward
cooperation and inclusion to produce more well-being for more people.
Men’s traditional roles socialize them toward competition and
exclusion, concerned with the well-being of their own group to the
exclusion of others, behavior that leads to conflict.
When thinking about conflict, there are two arenas of action which are
important. One is education in the sense of systematically cultivated
learning. And the other is political structures in which conflicts play
out. These structures are set within a paradigm of essentialism--whether
it’s gender essentialism, ethnic essentialism or political
essentialism--the idea that human beings can be summed up in a set of
characteristics that are in fundamental opposition to another set of
characteristics.
This sense of essentialism perpetuates gender inequalities. Education
can help unpack that kind of thinking, but education per se
cannot deal with the structures out of which it comes. I believe those
structures are multiple manifestations of patriarchy. Most of our
politics are essentially patriarchal. We are socialized to patriarchal
politics, and we are socialized to patriarchal gender roles.
SGIQ: How can women play a role in
changing the overall dynamic of that multilayered essentialization?
BR: Gender essentialisms are used
both constructively and destructively. The destructive manifestation is
woman as object, woman as the body of the enemy, as victim. As for the
constructive use of such
essentialism, as women become aware of the fact that wars are basically
men’s conflicts--that is, they are conflicts in the interest of the
politically powerful--they can see that it is no longer in women’s
interests to go along with war. They want their work saved--and women’s
work is maintaining human life and viable societies. So what women are
now doing is bringing up an antiwar discourse, calling upon their gender
roles as caregivers, mothers and teachers to intervene in and prevent
armed conflict, as some have, even physically--putting their bodies
between combatants.
Women can also raise consciousness that gender roles are culturally
derived and changeable. Conflict is a matter of human choice, and that
brings up my favorite expression, "It just doesn’t have to be that way."
We can make a difference. If, for example, you look at the stories of
the 1,000 women who were jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in
2005, then you see the multiple ways in which women actually make
a difference, manifesting the roles of mother, teacher and courageous
intervener.
SGIQ: What about the role of women
as teachers in the home--can they change the way children are
socialized?
BR: Those women, indeed all parents,
who are conscious of gender socialization and trying to educate for a
"culture of peace" can do a great deal in communicating to children such
values as universal human
worth and human equality. They can provide a worldview in which
youngsters learn that conflict is not necessarily inevitable and that
there are other ways of achieving one’s goals.
They can teach that women and men, all individuals, have different
capacities. The ideal arrangement is when those capacities are used for
the mutual advantage of both in the relationship and for all in the
family. Children can see that sometimes the mother is better at fixing
the plumbing than the father, sometimes the father more nurturing than
the mother. They can begin to see that we all have various
capacities that can be arranged for collaborative purposes in a
complementary and equal gender relationship.
New Leadership
SGIQ: Is there a critical mass of women’s leadership that is
required before the dynamic begins to change?
BR: I’d like to see many more women
in politics and in power, but I hope they would be women who have a
consciousness of patriarchal structures and an understanding of the
significance of gender socialization, so that they are able to work
together with men in a complementary, collaborative way for
transformation of the culture of war and violence. Transformation can
only occur when there is both organic and structural change. By organic,
I mean the inner consciousness that drives behavior. Education must be
such that it can lead to internalized learning that affects worldview,
behaviors and, ultimately, can produce a politics of significant
transformative structural change.
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Women in Somaliland demonstrate for peace
[HamishWilson/Panos
Pictures] |
SGIQ: You are speaking to such a
deep transformation. Does this mean we need to be patient?
BR: I think we have to be impatient!
We need to act now. Transformation is organic and evolutionary as well
as revolutionary. Politics is a living system, because it’s made by
living beings. This means we can make significant short-term
interventions which will determine whether the longer evolutionary
process is positive or negative. We should understand that we will
probably reap some immediate positive result from our efforts, but we
probably will never see the larger transformational consequences in our
lifetime. We have to come to terms with that. Human society is very
young in terms of the history of living things on this planet. So we
have to be impatient but aware, organically aware, that we have ethical
responsibilities to act against war and gender injustice now as steps in
an evolutionary process to achieve a culture of peace.
At last we are debating, although very awkwardly, issues of the
fundamental ethics of the public sphere. We have had, over and over
again, reminders from religious leaders, from philosophers and from
various scientists that we are one species. Now we must understand that
we are one, we are slowly evolving, that we might become really good at
making a society built on constructive, mutually beneficial
relationships if we act within the time frame and the conditions that
are open to us.
While we might not get the satisfaction of seeing the long-range nature
of these changes, we can get a lot of short-term satisfaction from
specific achievements, like SC 1325, the UN Security Council
resolution on women’s participation in peacemaking. This is a landmark
international development toward gender equality and political change,
the result of action by women in NGOs associated with the United
Nations.
So if that could happen in the short term, then I think long-term
transformation can happen. And knowing that should give us the courage
to face the full extent of the transformational path.
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