Sex & world peace Valerie M Hudson,Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill,Mary Caprioli and Chad F Emmett

Reviewed by: Breanne Fahs, Arizona State University, USA

While reading this pathbreaking volume—Hudson, Ballif-Spanvall, Caprioli, and Emmett’s Sex & world peace, a sweeping and startling book on gender and international relations—I kept returning again and again to a similar conclusion: I thought I knew this. I can’t believe this! Why haven’t we been talking more about this…and this…and THIS?! The book tackles subjects that we think we know about—gender inequities worldwide, and their roots in all sorts of international relations crises, disasters, and problems—yet it does so in a way that presents a fuller and richer picture than I have ever previously seen in any single volume. The book takes a careful, calculated approach to providing evidence for a plethora of worldwide problems, funneling them down to a single cause: misogyny, discrimination toward women, and gender inequality. The authors begin the book with the metaphor that the field of international relations typically focuses on the branches of the tree (e.g. war, genocide, violence, loss of government, economic insecurity, poor education systems, and so on) rather than the roots of the tree (in this case, they make a compelling argument that gender inequities underlie all of these problems); when we only see the branches, we ignore the roots and thus never fully grasp the problem.

This is one of the most ambitious and well-executed books I have read in many years, so much so that, after I read the first chapter, I instantly decided to assign it to all of my women’s studies and gender studies undergraduates. (I also spent the next week incessantly talking about it to my friends and colleagues, urging them to pick it up.) The book’s accolades and awards thus far are certainly deserved. They argue, clearly and forcefully, that gender inequity (that is, the subordination and oppression of women) creates, produces, and sustains violence, and that gender inequity produces certain blind spots in the analysis of international relations (e.g. choosing of independent variables, translating world events into new policies, “forgetting” about women when hatching plans to combat war and genocide). Hudson and her colleagues attack the production of silence—what we willingly pretend not to know, and how the bodies of women become the projection for so many masculinized problems on the world stage. They take on a range of perpetrators—academics who perpetuate the absence of women in international relations courses and scholarship; policymakers who ignore convincing data about the role of women in producing healthy and successful societies; public health “experts” who forget about the “microaggressions” women face (lack of bodily security, lack of equity in family law, lack of parity in decision-making and government); and the US media, who all-too-willingly ignore women (particularly outside of the US) and the different challenges they face.

After laying out these central claims, supported by an immense and thorough exploratory dataset, the book ends with two chapters about how to act to change these patterns, smartly uniting “top down” and “bottom up” approaches—that is, approaches where governments and institutions act on behalf of women, and approaches where grassroots organizing leads to change on an individual and collective level: “We must further the cause at every level of society, including at the grassroots level, where we can work to protect one woman, and then another, and then another, until more and more women benefit from our efforts. It is reported that Mother Teresa once said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will’” (157). As an added bonus, the book also includes a series of eleven maps which I found fascinating and perfectly illustrative of their central points. The authors include world maps about the physical security of women, son preference and sex ratios, trafficking in females, polygyny, inequity in family law and practice, maternal mortality, discrepancies in education, governmental participation by women, and discrepant government behavior concerning women, as well as two maps depicting intermingling in public and required dress codes for women in the Islamic world. I would challenge anyone to look closely at these maps and not feel outraged—they provide a vivid portrayal of gender inequity across the world and, of course, at home.

This book should have a wide audience and has much to offer numerous fields. In addition to injecting the field of international relations with much-needed feminist analysis, Sex & world peace would work well in courses in women’s studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, American studies, political science, psychology (especially political psychology), sociology, and economics. It beautifully transcends audiences and would suit the needs of undergraduate and graduate students as well as experts in the field and laypeople interested in the political roots of gender inequity. The book evokes the sheer power of thinking about women as a class, a claim US radical feminists made in the 1960s even though we have yet to fully realize its meaning. Sex & world peace reminds us of the perils and pitfalls of gender inequity and gender bias, as those countries that promote gender equity, include women in government, have lower sex-skewed ratios, educate women, and forcefully prosecute violence against women end up with societies that thrive. Conversely, those that continue to perpetuate and sustain gender inequalities and fail to enforce gender laws end up struggling and stalling. These gripping arguments—and the solid data that support them—deserve serious consideration, reflection, and analysis and should find a home among feminist psychologists and within the feminist classroom.