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It’s Women’s Work As a member both of Catholic Peace Fellowship of Philadelphia and a member of the Grannies for Peace Philadelphia Chapter I have been impressed with our positive reception by the public. I became active in the Grannies for Peace Brigade December 1, 2006, the day of the trial of eleven Grannies for “defiant trespass” at a downtown recruiting center. They asked the military recruiters the previous June to send them to Iraq rather than their grandchildren. One could say that our hats and vigorous singing put us in the category of “harmless entertainment” rather than confrontational debate. But I also think that our status as grandmothers gives us an identity perceived as less ideological but rather unarguably personal than that of other organizations. That may help us get through apathy and even some resentment. This is one reason that I paid special attention to a recent article in Sojourners (June 2007) edited by Jim Wallis who wrote the introduction to Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistable Revolution. “Women’s Work” pointed out that the International Crisis Group’s research in Sudan, Congo and Uganda found that peace agreements, post-conflict reconstruction, and governance do better when women are involved. Why? Social science research generally supports the theory that women emphasize collaboration and “judicious compromise more than men”. Claiming the identity of “mothers,” they can cut across ethnic, national and religious borders. I recall a talk to the Brandywine Peace Community by the daughter of a survivor of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. She told us that a group of these daughters of survivors offered to come to Manhattan shortly after 9/11 for a meeting of those women who mutually understood and shared “Ground Zero”: being beneath the terror in the skies. How differently shared mourning and an appeal to international law rather than opting for a misplaced revenge could have turned out! Wangara Mattahi’s Nobel Peace Prize was a public declaration that environmental degradation of the planet was indeed war, a point Wendell Berry made very early in this Administration’s declaration of a war on terrorism. Nature Conservancy has compared maps of the world highlighting countries suffering environmental degradation with those waging war and found them virtually identical. Many people might think of Mattah as a “Johnny Appleseed” unless they read her memoir, Unbowed. Her house arrest and imprisonments until her election to the legislature in Kenya and her outspoken criticism of corrupt government preceded the founding of the Greenbelt Movement spreading across Africa. Ecofeminism has long maintained that exploitation of and assault on Creation parallels an assault of rape and plunder on women. The national legislature with the highest percentage of women in the world is Rwanda. In a time when women, children and civilians exceed soldier fatalities in warfare, United Nations Resolution 1325 in 2000 affirmed the need for women in all aspects of peace and security issues. The 2005 World Economic Forum study found that when 30 to 40 percent of women hold political office, they spend less on military and more on health care and education. We need to hold our own Congress responsible to support this Resolution and for American voters to support it as a specific concrete consequence of our Catholic social teaching on the environment, opposition to war, and social justice. Jeanne Allen |