ABSTRACT
This essay is situated within the historical, theoretical and tactical debates among United States feminists regarding the uses of female culture in radical movements for social change. These debates are part of an on-going discussion regarding the relationship of sex difference to sex equality. For feminist peace activists the pressing question today is whether peace groups that make their appeal to women on the basis of female difference, particularly woman’s identification with nurture and moral guardianship, do not in the end undermine woman’s political power and even the cause of peace. Critics of the politics of moral motherhood allege that gender-based women’s peace groups project the kind of essentialist view of women that re-enforces the notion of biology as destiny and legitimises a sex-role system that, in assigning responsibility for nurture and survival to women alone, lays the basis for male violence in the family and the state. 1 Simone de Beauvoir, who was a leading proponent of the equality over difference viewpoint, put it this way shortly before her death:
‘…women should desire peace as human beings, not as women. And if they are being encouraged to be pacifists in the name of motherhood, that’s just a ruse by men who are trying to lead women back to the womb. Women should absolutely let go of that baggage.’ 2
