Why women should serve in the military--and make decisions about war

Women as a group are the natural enemies of war--but not because they are nicer. If we are ever to abolish the practice, putting women in powerful decision-making positions will be essential, as I describe in Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace. So I consider it excellent that they be in the military, to experience the reality that usually only our men experience, and perhaps, help keep down the number of atrocities, as some female IDF soldiers have said. And if having them serve also turns a lot of women against war period, all the better, especially if it generates sufficient resolve in them to do something to abolish this archaic evil.  Why are women the natural enemies of war? My key conclusion, one that is consistent across cultures, is that women, as a group, have a strongly evolved proclivity for social stability, much stronger than similar urges in men. Women are very emotionally uncomfortable with any social turmoil, certainly anything as likely to get them or their children killed as war, and they possess an evolved set of traits that service that proclivity. For example, women are much more ready to negotiate in a conflict situation, or to compromise. Another example: women, as a group, tend to show stronger responses of empathy, a trait that is helpful for defusing social conflicts. Other traits also service the strong preference of women for a socially stable environment.  What is clear is that opposed inclinations in question—the urge to go physically “kick ass” or to “work nonviolently for social stability” are found in both women and men. Our problem is that the strengths of these tendencies DO differ, on average, between men and women as groups. If you take women out of the decision making process in situations of conflict, as we have progressively done more and more in our cultures since the Agricultural Revolution, what you end up with is our recorded history, one that reflects unrestrained male biology in matters of war. War after war after war. Is war in our genes? No. We could abolish war if we choose to. But the roots of it do lie in our biology, particularly in aspects of male biology, and to put an end to it, we need to understand those roots. That’s what my book and my A Future Without War website (www.afww.org ) are about: why we can do it and how.  Judith L. Hand, Ph.D., author of  A FutureWithoutWar.org -- downloadable for free