I am becoming very interested in the idea that women may actually have a moral duty as citizens to serve their countries by producing future generations. Surfing the web recently, I have come across more than a few websites, which extol the virtues of motherhood, and decry female soldiers as mothers who have abandoned their children, and who aren’t doing their true service to our nation.
Margret Atwood begins to address this issue in her dystopian novel, A Handmaid’s Tale. In the book, the author creates a future world in which the state alleges to protect all women from sexual abuse, objectification, and allows them to have their babies in “peace”. But, there are some women in the society who can’t have children, and they are known as unwomen. This brings me to the question, is the term woman defined by the act of having children, or even raising adopted children?
Obviously, in Atwood’s utopian society motherhood does define the term woman, but it also divides the female sex into two parts, because the women who do not have children are not called men, they are called unwomen. The state defines them with the negative. As my professor was saying in class the other day in reference to bisexuality, it is difficult to get power as a group if the members of the group do not agree to identify under the same context. Unity must exist, the members of the group, of the female sex in this case, must agree to how they want to be treated and to who they are, or else they will lose power with the state. But of course, this issue is not as clear as perhaps the racial exclusions that have occurred in our country because the biological differences present a singular challenge. Atwood defines the problem as the capability and the choice whether or not to have a child.
Should a woman’s ability to have a child define her as different from men, (people who biologically cannot have children), as someone to be treated differently, given different rights, and also laden with different expectations? States and nations protect their women because power rests in the ability to produce babies. Women who can have children do, then, have a responsibility to the state to produce them. Of course, there are many unwanted, abandoned children in this country. So then when does the choice to have a child become the imperative? In times of national crisis, perhaps, the way military service becomes the imperative when there is a war, or the state issues a draft.
What if we could get away from gendered language, could we manage to get away from gendered vision? Someone has to have the children, and women are of course biologically equipped to do it. But do we discriminate or segregate on the basis of other biological differences? The freedom and the ability to chose to have a child or not should not affect a woman’s status with respect to the law. The state exists, after all, to protect and equalize citizens despite differences. But at the same time, women should be conscious of their duty to the state. Whether that means being a doctor, a lawyer, working for the poor, becoming a mother, or doing any combination of those things, women have duty, like men, to help and serve their country.
Women and War 