Challenging Gendered Norms : Why Do Women Participate in Political Violence?

Gendered norms about women's behavior include that of nurturers, caregivers and peacemakers. In fact, in times of intra- and interstate conflict, women often make a conscious choice to work for peace as a form of political activism. Sometimes these actions are driven by feminist goals, defined as promoting political, social and economic equality of women and men, and sometimes they are the result of more basic and traditional ideas, specifically, as a wife and/or mother who want peace in her society. Often the goal of women's activism is not only to bring about peace, but to change the circumstances that contributed to the violence in the first place, or, as Johann Galtung refers to this, structural violence. As we and others have noted, changing the social structure to eliminate the attributes that contributed to the onset of violence is more characteristic of women's approaches to peacemaking and conflict resolution than of men's