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Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives

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Cynthia Enloe adds to her series of writings looking at the effects of militarisation on women's lives - from the laundresses, camp followers, comfort women and sex workers to feminist military personnel and those who fight the home front.

Like Jan Jindy Pettman's "Worlding Women - a feminist international politics", Enloe's latest book seeks to look at international relations from a gendered perspective - and succeeds admirably.

The author relies a lot on secondary sources (citing a lot of newspaper stories), but weaves together the strands of militarisation on women's lives in a compelling and readable style. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes that illustrate the broader themes of the multifacted impact of contemporary militarisation (I particularly enjoyed the discussion on why British military officers from all services and US Air Force and Navy officers are allowed to carry umbrellas, but they are fobidden as too girlie for the US Marines and US Army! )

Dr. Enloe's work is a frenetically paced tour of the seedy gendered underside of militarization throughout the world. While she raises good questions concerning the effects of militarization on women throughout the world, too often her work displays an unfamiliarity with the military facts that she uses to bolster her arguments. These factual inaccuracies and omissions, e.g. overstating the casualties at Gettysburg and in the Vietnam war by a factor of ten or the omission of the fact that the JROTC is completely voluntary, discredit otherwise valuable perspectives on the less-publicized effects of the growth of the national security state.
Secondly, the assumptions that the author makes are based primarily on secondary sources. It is obvious that she has not spent much, if any, time observing first hand the gender dynamics that play themselves out in military units. Instead, Dr. Enloe constantly shifts between levels of analysis in an attempt to prove her points. This theoretical instability makes it difficult for the reader to connect the evidence that is used to support the author's conclusions.
Lastly, in one of her other works, Dr. Enloe asks the question "Where are the women?" In this work, she fails to follow up on her scant observations concerning the differences that exist among, for example, the branches of the US military. Instead, the different services are alternately treated as separate organizational cultures or as a single military monolith depending on the point that she is trying to make. This is the books greatest folly. It is absurd to assume that an organization as large as the US military speaks, acts, and thinks with one mind. More research and observation of military units would show that the differences between branches is only the starting point in the analysis of military organizational culture with respect to gender analysis. There are a myriad of divisions even within particular services, such as the difference between all male combat arms units on the one hand, and combat support and combat service support units on the other, just to name one.
All of these factors combine to demonstrate an unfamiliarity with the inner workings of militaries which undermines the credibility of Dr. Enloe's arguments and which prove to be the biggest failure of this particular book. I would recommend her book, "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases" for a more coherent statement of feminist ideas concerning international relations.

Cynthia Enloe is the author most quoted by opponants of women in the armed forces, because she presents the real Feminist viewpoint, which is staunchly anti-war and ambivelant toward the military. Enloe's arguments, supported by N.O.W., are coopted by "anti-feminist" foes of servicewomen as proof of their own contention that women have no place in the military. Paradoxically, after quoting Enloe, those same crusaders then lambast a so-called "feminist lobby" for promoting gender integration in combat operations. No doubt they confuse Feminism with some "politically-correct" positions of Congressional military panels, which are, ironically, often ignored or opposed by N.O.W. But Enloe's books go much further than simply stating Feminism's pacifist ideals. In "Maneuvers", she accuses the military of deliberate victimization of women worldwide. She makes a number of good points concerning the cruelties of war toward civilian women, but her antimilitary bias shows and is sometimes rather venomous. She gives no thought whatsoever to the conditions which make warfare an unpleasant reality and the armed forces a necessity. Nor has she any real concern for American military women or their reasons for wanting to serve. By relating selected incidents of harassment or violence against servicewomen, she presents a negative and mostly false impression of the American military's widespread and willful victimization of its female members. Read "Maneuvers" for the Feminist counter of Brian Mitchell's "Flirting With Disaster", but don't expect balance in the views of either author.