COLUMN LEFT : The Anti-War Gender Gap Is Back : The 'peace dividend' never came and death is in the air. No wonder women seek diplomacy.

COLUMN LEFT : The Anti-War Gender Gap Is Back : The ‘peace dividend’ never came and death is in the air. No wonder women seek diplomacy.

By RUTH ROSEN

Nov. 26, 1990 12 AM PT

<i> Ruth Rosen is a professor of history at UC Davis and author of "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America" (Johns Hopkins University Press). She is working on a history of contemporary American feminism</i>

The news media have discovered the growing anti-war movement, but they have missed the significant fact that women are far more opposed than men to American policy in the Persian Gulf.

Shades of the gender gap. With the United States poised to wage an offensive war against Iraq, the Bush Administration may want to consider the political consequences of women’s opposition to the possibility of war.

In late September, a national bipartisan survey conducted by the Public Agenda Foundation reported that “support for launching a massive counterattack or an all-out war is 25% lower among women (35%) than among men (60%).” A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that women, lower-income Americans and blacks expressed the greatest hesitation about war. Women were 19 percentage points more worried that the President has not explored the limits of diplomacy. If a shooting war begins, this gender gap will widen rapidly.

What’s behind women’s greater support for conflict resolution and diplomatic negotiation?

First, there is the traditional reason: many adult women are--or expect to be--mothers of the sons and daughters who fight wars. As primary care-givers, women learn early to nurture life rather than destroy it. Women, moreover, do not suffer from the dreaded “wimp factor.” If they support peace, their womanhood is not endangered. They do not have to prove (unless they become national political candidates) a manly willingness to win weekend wars or engage in international brinkmanship with Third World dictators.

More recently, two decades of the women’s movement have produced specifically feminist questions about war. In a recent editorial in Ms. Magazine, Robin Morgan asked why America should ignore the needs of its own citizens in order to liberate Kuwait, a country that limits suffrage to literate men over 21 who are “first-class” citizens (related to pre-1920 residents). At a recent teach-in at UC Berkeley, Prof. Kathleen Jones noted the contradiction of women fighting for a military that fails to provide adequate child care or effective health care and has, until very recently, ignored sexual harassment on its bases. A feminist undergraduate asks me how the United States can ask young people to die in the desert for American democratic ideals when the United States tolerates the subjugation of women in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Wasn’t apartheid, he asks, also a custom?

Skeptics may argue that the gender gap has been an apparition. True, women’s greater opposition to military spending and stronger support for domestic issues, health and welfare did not swing national presidential elections during the 1980s. On the state and local levels, however, the gender gap made a difference. Women’s greater support for a nuclear freeze and stronger resistance to military spending affected elections through the last decade. The gender gap does not mean that women will blindly elect another woman, as the recent gubernatorial election in California demonstrated. What it does mean is that women will disproportionately support a candidate dedicated to improving domestic welfare, securing women’s rights and maintaining peace abroad.

The media unthinkingly diminish the importance of women’s opposition to war. To discover the depth of anti-war sentiment in November, reporters called--or quoted--the usual white male spokesmen and, perhaps, Jesse Jackson. Women’s opposition is regarded as “soft,” predictable and unimportant. When men oppose war, they stare down the “wimp factor”; that is news.

The end of the Cold War brought the promise of a peace dividend to the very women, low-income Americans and minorities who now resist war. The tens of billions of dollars squandered by the military, whether in super-armed peace or even more in war, would help greatly to fund national health care, house the homeless, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, educate our youth, fight the despair that leads to drug addiction and assist families struggling with elder care and child care.

Any ambitious politician looking ahead to 1992 would be ill-advised to ignore the impact of a 25% gender gap. If body bags of daughters and sons start coming home, still more Americans will turn against a military solution in the Persian Gulf. Among them will be many women whose dreams of a peace dividend died with their children in the sands of Saudi Arabia.