Stirring Women, Weapons, and Weaving

As a second-wave feminist, I have always found the association of women and weapons troubling. In the 1970s, some anti-feminists argued that the feminist demand for parity with men included a demand to participate in the armed forces, with licence to kill. The subtext of this argument was that unless this were prevented, the whole edifice of femininity itself would implode, with disastrous consequences for the reproduction of society. Weapon-wielding ‘Amazons’ belonged to some distant past, not the civilised present (Taylor 1997: 199–205).