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Giving Peace a Chance?
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14117 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1988 |
2,294 Words |
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Phyllis Zagano
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WOMEN AND WAR
Jean Bethke Elshtain
New York: Basic Books, 1987
288 pp., $19.95
This book is dedicated to the late John Lennon and notes in a concluding chapter that "peace is an ontologically suspect concept, as troubling in its own way as war." We are left to ponder the question of what other choices we have as the final page is turned and we no longer have the erudite company of political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Her tour through a supermarket of wartime memorabilia filled with films, popular novels, and newspaper accounts of military engagements begins with her appropriation of Hegel's concept of the "beautiful soul," which she says he characterizes as "a being defined by a mode of consciousness which allows him or her to protect 'the appearance of purity by cultivating innocence about the historical course of the world.'" Beautiful Souls are complimented by Just Warriors in her schema, and she apparently is attempting to argue that the Beautiful Souls are in danger of being co-opted by the Just Warriors so that the Beautiful Souls will no longer be beautiful and, therefore, feminine.
She argues against the two principal possibilities for the Beautiful Soul faced by the Just Warrior as presented in popular culture. The movie Private Benjamin, in which comedienne Goldie Hawn portrays a suburban "princess" whose image of the Army included sailboats and condos until she arrived at basic training, is her example of the corruption of the Beautiful Soul. Elshtain's criticism is that cooperative warfare skills that turn the Beautiful Soul into a supporter of a "disturbing, rosy portrait of army life that seems a far cry from accounts proffered by military women themselves." Yet the cooperative skills Goldie Hawn eventually learns, and the hilarious interludes as the leads practical jokes against the truly co-opted woman, the drill sergeant, point to Private Benjamin as a woman who will masculinize herself to conform to presumed military expectations only to a point.
Elshtain does not offer actual accounts by women currently or formerly in the military of the ways in which such membership has helped or hindered their personal or professional development. Nor does she give any information regarding her own specific expertise on the topic beyond her impressionistic first chapter, which treats her fifties girlhood as a period when war was glorified and she understood her role to be that of helpmate and supporter of the duties and responsibilities of men.
This, in fact, is her reading of the second American movie she sees as principal explanatory myth of the relationship between the Beautiful Soul and the Just Warrior, An Officer and a Gentleman. In this movie, a poor coastal factory town is coincidentally the location of a naval aviation officer candidate school. For Elshtain, the film's denouement means that the young heroine goes out of the factory and into the Navy as a symbiotic accessory to war. While there are many disturbing aspects of the film, perhaps most upsetting is that this may be the only way these young women can get out of the cycle of poverty resulting from their location and lack of education.
What Elshtain may not know is that Private Benjamin
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