WOMEN, "FEMININITY" AND
FOREIGN POLICY DECISION MAKING:

DO GENDER DIFFERENCES IN INTERPERSONAL
RELATIONS EXTEND INTO
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?



"(T)he fact (is) that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity."
Simone de Beauvoir, 1949


"For all that its forms may have changed since the eighteenth century, the cultural production of a narrowly-defined and rigidly-prescribed femininity grinds on even as we approach the twenty-first. And language is part of it. For any woman who talks too much, too loudly, too frankly, too authoritatively, the epithet 'unfeminine' is waiting on someone's lips. Few words have such a chilling effect."
Deborah Cameron, 1992




INTRODUCTION
Would American foreign policy be different if more women than men were making the decisions? The attributes most typically associated with “femininity” include an enhanced sense of attachment and empathy towards others, a more inclusive sense of morality, and a greater aversion to violence and confrontation. Would these attributes cause, for example, a women foreign policy maker such as Madeleine Albright to be more likely to support policies congruent with those characteristics than, for example, Christopher Warren? Furthermore, would she be more likely to approach fellow diplomats in a more “feminine” (inclusive, moral, and less confrontational) fashion?

This is an important question to answer for pragmatic reasons, if no other. For if it is true that gender can and does impact decision making in this way, and we believe that a more inclusive, moral, and less confrontational foreign policy is the right choice, then we might decide that we need more women in that position, and spend some effort and resources getting them there. On the other hand, if we believe that such an approach would put America at a disadvantage in the cut-throat, self-help system of international politics, then we might direct our efforts at keeping women out.

Finally, if it is not true -- if women foreign policy makers do not significantly or consistently differ in their policy preferences and interactive behaviors from their male counterparts -- then we as citizens (and analysts) should be focusing our attention on something besides sex/gender when we speculate on the potential and actual performance of a political candidate. The task for political science, and this dissertation, is to devise a means by which to test the hypothesis of difference between male and female foreign policy makers, so that informed choices can be made.

This dissertation was designed to provide a comparison test of "women's standpoint" theory in international relations (e.g., Reardon 1985; Ashley & Walker 1990; Ruddick 1990), which argues that women are different and therefore will produce different foreign policies, and realist international relations theory (Thucidydes 1982; Rousseau 1973; Carr 1964; Morgenthau and Thompson 1985; Cohn 1989; Tickner 1992), which argues that the constraints of the system standardize policies across such things as nationality, race, religion, or gender. The women's standpoint hypothesis asserts that being female engenders a different perspective on how relationships ought to work, including political relationships. This uniquely feminine perspective affects the way women perform in political decision making roles, including foreign policy decision making. If one judges these uniquely feminine differences to be positive, one is led to the conclusion of "women's values" feminism: that adding women to the political process is a necessary precondition for achieving a peaceful, balanced, and just political existence.

Traditional international relations discourse theorists, including structural (neo)realists argue that the system structure of international relations - hierarchical, competitive, and focused on actual or potential conflict - creates a different set of rules for successful interaction. They argue that taking a “feminine” approach to international relations can have serious disadvantages. Hence, women quickly learn to modify their behavior when playing the foreign policy game, so as not to undermine their countries’ interests.

My subjects were United States Senators: three male-female pairs, matched to control for gender while factoring out other potential explanatory variables such as age, political party, political experience, region of representation, and the immediate context in which the behavior occurred. The behavior observed and measured was the language the subjects used in Senate Committee Hearings: unrehearsed conversations in which the lawmakers stated their opinions, discussed issues, and asked and answered questions of and from other Senators and expert witnesses (including various Cabinet Secretaries) about such topics as national security, human rights, international trade, and American foreign policy. The methodology is quantitative and quasi-experimental.

The rest of this chapter discusses the two competing theories -- women’s standpoint theory, and traditional IR discourse theory - and the predictions they make about the impact of “masculine” and “feminine” gender on foreign policy decision making behavior. A framework for analysis is established, which defines the independent and dependent variables, and the relationships between them. From these relationships, predictions are made about the impact of “masculine” and “feminine” gender on foreign policy behavior at both the process and outcome level of analysis.

Chapter Two provides a methodological framework for obtaining evidence. This includes the identification of: (1) a set of suitable subjects; (2) independent and dependent variables operationalized in terms of observable behavior; and (3) a set of measurement techniques which allow the competing hypotheses to be confirmed and/or disconfirmed by the acquisition of data. Chapters Three and Four present the results, and Chapter Five discusses them.

"Women's Standpoint" Theory
The increasing participation of women in politics has been a source of hope to many, who
believe that, because they are women, they will practice a different kind of politics; e.g.., more caring and compassionate. This hope is predicated on research-substantiated evidence from a number of different academic fields supporting the proposition that, relative to men, women are generally more empathetic, more concerned with establishing harmonious relationships, less willing to fight, less concerned with establishing dominance over others, and more caring about others (e.g., Shapiro & Mahajan 1986; Gilligan 1982; Maccoby 1967; Cattel & Child 1975; Fishman 1983; West & Zimmerman 1983; Tannen 1989, 1991). Women's standpoint theory evolved from this research. This theory asserts that the peculiar experiences of being female, sociological as well as biological, create within women a different understanding of relationships, including political relationships (Givens, Norris, & Lovenduski 1994).

Women's standpoint theory argues -- implicitly or explicitly -- that the world is as divided, aggressive, competitive, and hierarchically-organized as it is because men have created it in their own image. Men live their lives as an ongoing struggle to situate themselves in relation to others, with the preferred position to always be on top. The most historically and cross-culturally ubiquitous expression of this struggle for dominance can be found in the relationship between the sexes, with men always and everywhere subordinating women (e.g., de Beauvoir 1947; Reardon 1985; Chodorow 1989; Peterson & Runyan 1992).

Women are different than men, standpoint theorists argue. They are not driven by aggression, status, dominance, etc. Rather, women seek to make connections; to nurture, encourage, or otherwise provide care for those with whom they come in contact, seeing life as an interwoven fabric where the health and welfare of the individual is interdependent with the health and welfare of the whole (Gilligan 1991).

Women's standpoint theorists in the field of political science argue that, because women are both biologically and socially responsible for reproducing the human race, the act of taking away life and/or sustenance is anathema to them (Reardon 1985; Ruddick 1992). The conclusion is that a society governed by women, or somehow otherwise grounded in "feminine" principles, would not, therefore, rely on violence -- including the mass violence of war -- as a means of maintaining social order. Instead, a new and different set of institutional arrangements for resolving conflict would be created, grounded in the "feminine" ethic of personal responsibility, cooperation, communication, and egalitarianism.

Evidence has been found to support the women’s standpoint hypothesis. For example, at the mass level of analysis, survey research reveals that:
"Compared with men, women express views that are less militaristic; less favorable to using force as a way of handling nonmilitary situations; more favorable to environmental protection policies and alternatives to the use of nuclear power; more supportive of programs to help the economically disadvantaged and to achieve racial equality; and more positive toward laws for regulating social problems such as drugs, gambling, and pornography (Mandel 1995:407)."

Women holding positions of power in domestic politics evidence the same "feminine" biases. A 1988 survey of state legislators by the Center for the American Woman and Politics (CAWP) found that:
"women were more likely than their male colleagues to have established and worked for legislative priorities dealing with health care, children's and family issues, or women's rights regardless of party, ideology, feminist identification, constituency ideology, seniority, age, or political insider status. The study also provided evidence that women office-holders are having an impact on the way that government operates by bringing more citizens into the process, opting for government in public view rather than behind closed doors, and behaving more responsively to groups traditionally lacking access to the policy-making process (Mandel 1995:423)."

But what about international politics? What if the focus is narrowed to the impact of gender on the foreign policy opinions of male and female policy makers? In their examination of elites, Holsti and Rosenau (1976, 1980, 1984) and found the differences between them "substantially less impressive than (the) similarities (1984:338)." In fact, in a twelve-year study, variation in foreign policy opinion among male and female elite decision makers was controlled for by occupation in every case but one.

McGlen and Sarkees (1993) interviewed or otherwise surveyed a total of 38 men and 41 women in the upper echelons of the U.S. Departments of State and Defense (Senior Foreign Service and Senior Executive Service). No clear pattern of differences emerged in the specific area of foreign policy views until the sample was controlled both for Department and for the nature of the position held by the subject. Then, it turned out that women could be both more "liberal," and more "conservative" than men, depending upon whether they were, respectively, careerists or appointed, or working at State or in the DOD.

It seems reasonable to think that the behavioral norms we learn with respect to relationships, which are always peculiar to gender, would logically extrapolate from the interpersonal level, where people interact with each other, into family and community relations, to nationality, state, and even -- some might argue -- to the level of a global village. That is to say, if females grow up believing nonthreatening patterns of communication facilitate good relationships (Lakoff 1974; Maltz & Borker 1982; Tannen 1991) they might not distinguish between relationships involving people and those involving states. Thus, the logical inference that women foreign policy makers will adopt a different approach to inter-state relations than men.


Traditional International Relations Discourse Theory
Traditional international relations theory has explicitly argues that the inherently anarchical structure of the international system imposes a particular set of rules for behavior that differ from those for ordinary society ( Machiavelli 1950; Rousseau 1973; Carr 1964; Morgenthau & Thompson 1985; Waltz 1959; Gilpin 1981). Instead of assuming a basis for cooperative, or at least negotiated, social relationships, one must assume a priori lawlessness, as everyone continuously and aggressively competes for scarce resources in a hostile environment.

There is only one way to survive in such a system: to continuously calculate "rational" strategies in terms of material self-interest. Power is defined as anything that helps achieve that self-interest, including the power to give up power (Hobbes 1986). Within such a system, trust and interdependence are viewed as liabilities or weaknesses, for they leave one vulnerable to the calculated self-interest of others.

Any evidence of cooperation within such a system, therefore, must be viewed as simply the appearance of cooperation, and not the reality. For example, one should not be misled by the appearance of such "cooperative" international organizations as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the GATT. Their "cooperation" is not attributable to a growing realization on the part of the international community that cooperation, even interdependence, can yield rich rewards all their own. Rather, it is simply one of two things. Either the dominant hegemon views the cost of the side payments to other actors to elicit their cooperation as a Pareto optimal equation of doing business and/or maintaining a superior position (Gilpin 1981); or, the members of such organizations each individually view what they give up as less than what they gain, or at least superior to other possible alternatives (Keohane 1984). In any case, such organizations and the "cooperation" they represent are viewed as contingent and therefore transitory. As soon as they cease to yield profit, they will be discarded. There is no real general trend toward diffused sovereignty.

Is this the way the world really is? One could argue that it is, if one accepts the philosophical assumption that thought, language, and action are co-relational (Gumperz 1982; Hegel 1981; Saussure 1974; Wittgenstein 1968). And indeed, it would be difficult to argue that the discourse of international relations - conducted by presidents, prime ministers, and professors using words like “nationalism,” “sovereignty,” and “war” -- does not somehow appropriately define the field. The instant such language is employed as a medium through which political relationships are conducted, the terms themselves become a defining aspect of reality (Hegel 1981).

This dialectic of thought and action, mediated by language, not only creates and sustains an international political arena characterized by division, aggression, competition, and hierarchy, it also renders the situation extremely resistant to change (Cameron 1992). Institutions as buildings can be dismantled or destroyed; institutions as people can die or be killed. Institutions as intellectual traditions -- embodied in language -- are as real and as amorphous as culture, with which they have a symbiotic relationship. Each sustains and is sustained by the other. To destroy a culture requires destroying its ideas; thus, the logic of total war (Arendt 1960; Aron 1954). And campaigns to wipe out a conquered people's natural language have long been a practice of conquering nations. How many people in Ireland speak Gaelic?

These discourse institutions, states Cameron, are:
"codified in grammars, style manuals, standing orders, editing and subediting rules and so on (and) are quite literally handed down from generation to generation of professional language users. They are part of a professional mystique and their authority is seldom questioned. Nor is it usually noticed that there is an ideological side to these apparently innocuous 'customs' (Cameron 1992:197)."

The institutional discourse of international relations, formulated by men thinking about men, is therefore overwhelmingly "masculine," its vocabulary replete with terms reflecting the "masculine": aggression, conflict, competition, and hierarchy. Because there is no other way to talk about it, those characteristics get recreated in the system in an endlessly recursive process of thought-action-language-thought-etc. that is very difficult to tease apart.

To illustrate this phenomenon in action, Cameron draws on the real life experience of feminist Carol Cohn:
"In an article called 'Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals', ... Cohn discusses the process of acclimatization to a form of discourse she had initially found repulsive as well as ludicrous [Cohn 1989]. Cohn went to a defence policy think-tank in the US to find out what made defence intellectuals tick and to discuss issues of war and peace with them from an oppositional and feminist standpoint. In order to talk with the experts, however, and to have any credibility in doing so, Cohn found herself obliged to learn the language they used. In that context, it was not just a language of power but in effect the only intelligible language.

"But as a Whorfian might have predicted, it was a short step from speaking the experts' language to understanding -- even sharing -- their point of view. What the men said began to make sense to Cohn, and she began to feel pleasure in her own command of the (extremely sexist and sadistic) terms. In the end she found it hard to hold on to the vision that had impelled her to go to the institute in the first place (Cameron 1992:223)."

The implication here is that it doesn't matter whether women are "feminine" when they enter the field of international relations. Once there, the "masculinized" discourse and institutional requirements socialize women into the calculating self-interest seekers they need to be in order to understand and successfully interact with their predominantly male peers.

Research Problem
Is it possible for women to actively engage in the milieu of international politics and still maintain their inclusive, cooperative, and compassionate (i.e., "feminine") approach to foreign policy relations? For those who care about such questions, there is argument both for and against. Some (e.g., Reardon 1985; Ruddick 1993) assert that it is not only possible, but to some extent, inevitable. Others (e.g., Cohn 1989; Tickner 1992) have argued that it is not possible, and that women in positions of political power in the international arena "lose their femininity" when it comes time for them to act in that role (Tickner 1992:141)

But what does it mean to "lose” one's femininity? Obviously, femininity is not lost, but merely subsumed by the moment. Situational constraints intervene on judgment, and mature individuals make distinctions between what is appropriate behavior in one situation, but not in another. Thus, it would be completely reasonable for a female foreign policy maker to view herself as a cooperative member of a group of respected (and respectful) fellow citizens, equally committed to serve the welfare of the same nation-state. At the same time, she might just as readily assume that the welfare of her nation-state must be pursued in a lawless, cruel and hostile environment -- the international arena (Peterson & Runyon 1993; Thom 1981). It is, quite clearly after all, "... a man's world...inhabited by diplomats, soldiers, and international civil servants most of whom are men. Apart from the occasional head of state, there is little evidence to suggest that women have played much of a role in shaping foreign policy in any country in the twentieth century (Tickner 1992:1-2)."

Because of this, women have to learn to deal effectively with men, who in turn have certain expectations about how relationships are supposed to work. For example, if it can be said that men value confrontation, women must learn to be confrontational in order to earn men’s respect and be taken seriously by them. After all, "when in Rome, do as the Romans." It thus seems entirely reasonable to conclude that women in foreign policy must and do adopt a second, "masculine" set of rules for interaction with men, to be brought on-line in relevant situations.


A Theoretical Framework for Analyzing Gender Differences in Foreign Policy Decision Making

This dissertation attempts to contribute to the field of international relations by providing a means to obtain evidence concerning the two competing hypotheses presented above. That is, to explore whether women foreign policy decision makers are more, less, or equally as "feminine" or "masculine" as male foreign policy decision makers when engaged in that role, and to what degree that demonstrated “femininity” or “masculinity” changes over time with exposure to the constraints of the international political arena.

To do so requires a valid, measurable definition of "feminine" as distinct from "masculine." Rather than make one up, the researcher decided to draw on already-available results of scientific research on gender differences in the fields of psychology, socio-linguistics, and political science. The following sections briefly review the literature in each of these fields. In each case, the material was analyzed to answer three related questions: (1) What is the central hypothesis regarding gender-related behavioral differences between females and males? (2) What are the implications/research findings regarding behavior in interpersonal relations? (3) What are the implications/research findings regarding behavior in international relations. This information will be summarized in a table at the end of each section, following a discussion of each contribution.

"Masculine" and "Feminine" Behavior in Psychology
At the level of pure instinct, it seems safe to assume an innate, psychological desire in every human being -- male or female -- to do what pleases their parents/caretakers, and to successfully learn the behavior patterns their social organization teaches them so they will be accepted and protected by them, survive, and thrive. As a consequence, children learn "appropriate" ways of speaking and behaving. If they don't, they run the risk of being labeled "deviant," with all its attendant miseries (Lakoff 1975; Fiske & Taylor, 1984). So it is that children learn how to be a particular gender. Among other advantages, it makes it easier for us to identify each other, which helps to reduce our shared sense of threat.

Psychologists have long argued that gender is a central theme differentiating the content of personality. Past models of gender posed masculinity and femininity as a "pair of general and opposing personality traits which somehow summarized one's psychological sense of maleness vs. femaleness and guided overt action (Koestner & Aube 1995:686)." More recently, this simplistic model has given way to a conception of gender as a multiplicity of constructs, the content of which may vary independently according to what aspect of the individual is being measured; e.g., disposition, personal interests, role behaviors, or personal values (Frable 1997). Human beings are multi-dimensional creatures, in their psychological composition as well as their functionality. "Thus, a person describing himself or herself as possessing expressive traits is not necessarily one who engages in female-valued interests and role behaviors (Koestner & Aube 1995:686)."

It is therefore difficult to believe that even if women give up their feminine style of speaking, they would also necessarily give up their femininity. As has been stated, women (and men) can become linguistically bi-sexual. It is possible for a woman, as much as a man, to speak without hesitation or apology, asserting her view on the situation in an aggressively competitive way, even raising her voice and getting confrontational, for the purpose of winning the argument because she thinks it's important, and yet still remain fully "feminine" in other aspects of her personality. For example, the content of her language -- the topics she is discussing and what she has to say about them -- might still reflect "feminine" biases; e.g., the pressing need for faster and more extensive conversion of military industrial resources to peaceful (re)productive purposes.

This assumption of multi-dimensionality points to the fundamental difference between style and substance, process and outcome. When we consider whether gender-appropriate rules for interpersonal relationships extend into the international arena, we need to be aware that foreign policy behavior occurs at both levels. International relations are only representationally conducted between states. Its true actors are people. This distinction will receive more attention in the next chapter. For the time being, the issue of psychological multi-dimensionality is addressed by reviewing the literature in a number of different subfields, including personality theory, social cognition, developmental, and clinical.

Gender in Personality Theory
In his textbook on the subject, Maddi (1989) argues that personality theories can be grouped according to three competing models: the conflict model, the fulfillment model, and the consistency model, each of which has two versions.
"In the conflict model, it is assumed that the person is continuously and inevitably caught in the clash between two great forces that are defined in content to be continually acting, necessarily opposed, and unchangeable. According to this model, life must be a compromise, which at best involves a dynamic balance of the two forces and at worst a foredoomed attempt to deny the existence of one of them. There are two versions of the conflict model. In the psychosocial version, the source of one force is within the individual and the source of the other in groups or societies. In the intrapsychic version, both forces arise from within the person regardless of his or her status as an individual or a social entity (Maddi 1989:41)."


The fulfillment model, on the other hand, does not assume these two "irrevocably opposing" forces. Rather, there is thought to be only one motivating force in life: the drive within every organism to fulfill its own potential. Again:
"There are two versions of the fulfillment model, the difference between them being the nature of the postulated force. If the force is the tendency to express to an ever greater degree the capabilities, potentialities, or talents based in one's genetic constitution, we are dealing with the actualization version. In the perfection version, the force is the tendency to strive for what will make life ideal or complete, perhaps even by compensating for functional or genetic weak spots. The actualization version is humanistic, whereas the perfection version is idealistic (Maddi 1989:97)."

Finally, there is the consistency model:
"In its version of the core tendency of personality, the consistency model emphasizes the importance of the information the person gets from interacting with the external world. The model assumes that people will develop personalities that increase the likelihood of their getting the kind of information that is best for them. The personality is determined much more by the feedback from interaction with the world than it is by the human's inherent attributes.

"In comparison with consistency theories, both fulfillment and conflict theories put much greater emphasis on an inherent nature as a component of personality that determines life's course. According to fulfillment theories, life is an unfolding of the human's inherent nature. And even when conflict theories stress society as an important force in living, they assume that personality is in large measure an expression of the human's inherent characteristics. For both fulfillment and conflict theories, personality is far more influenced by the attributes the human brings into the world than is the case for consistency positions.

"To be sure, consistency positions make some minimal assumptions about what is inherent in humans, but they are much more concerned with the compatibility among aspects of the content of personality than with the nature of that content. For consistency theorists, such content is largely learned and represents the history of feedback resulting from interacting with the world. Certainly feedback influences the content of personality along the lines of the assumed core tendencies of personality, and these core tendencies are inherent in human nature, but one cannot specify what particular content will result (Maddi 1989:155)."

For example, in conflict and fulfillment models, "gender" is a direct social manifestation of the consequences of being either male or female. In the first case, this identity is achieved in conflict, male versus male, versus female, versus male. In the second case, the identity is achieved in process, male becoming male, and female becoming female. In both cases, there is the assumption of an “ideal” outcome. In conflict theory, this ideal is a balanced integration of the two opposing forces, the result of a conscious reconstrual of experience in memory, which can ordinarily only be achieved through psychoanalysis. In fulfillment theory, this ideal is a manifestation of an inherent peculiar potential. The level of focus here can either be on the potential of the individual, or the collective. In both cases, these potentialities are preconceived, reflecting past value systems.

In cognitive consistency models, there is no preconceived ideal, except as a socialized starting point. For example, "gender" is not predetermined by anything within, but from without. That is, it is nothing more than a set of culturally-specific learned behaviors which are only contingently related to biological sex, and can therefore have an infinitely variable content, depending upon the ongoing interaction between what has been learned (memory), what is being learned (consciousness), and how the individual chooses to weight these factors in perception (personality). Thus, “gender” could be comprised of any combination of characteristics. And in fact, observation of the different traits associated with masculinity and femininity within different cultures supports this conclusion.
Cross-cultural research suggests that there are no absolute personality differences between men and women, that many of the characteristics we normally classify as masculine or feminine tend to differentiate both the males and females in one culture from those in another, and in still other cultures to be the reverse of expectations.

Margaret Mead’s studies describe societies in which both men and women are gentle and unaggressive (the Arapesh); in which women dislike childbearing and children and both sexes are angry and aggressive (the Mundugumor); in which women are unadorned, brisk and efficient, whether in childrearing, fishing, or marketing, while men are decorated and vain, interested in art, theater, and petty gossip (the Tchambuli); in which adult sex roles follow conventional expectations, but both boys and girls are initially raised alike to be alternately gentle and nurturant or assertive, following which boys undergo severe initiation ceremonies and claim to forget any feminine-type experiences or reactions (the Iatmul) (1989:24).”

The researcher takes this as evidence that the cognitive consistency model more accurately reflects social reality (though not always social ideology), and so has adopted a cognitive consistency model of personality. Within the terminology of cognitive science,“gender” would be defined as a “role schema.” To explicate:
"A schema is a cognitive structure that represents organized knowledge about a given concept or type of stimulus. A schema contains both the attributes of the concept and the relationships among the attributes (Fiske & Taylor 1984:140)....A social role is the set of norms and behaviors attached to a social position, so a role schema is the cognitive structure that organizes one's knowledge about those appropriate norms and behaviors (Fiske & Taylor 1984:159)."

Gender is just one of the many cognitive elements of personality presumed in cognitive consistency theory, along with thoughts, expectations, attitudes, opinions, and perceptions (Maddi 1989:155).

Conflict Theories of Gender and Personality
The conflict model, with its dialectical notion of opposing forces, is reflected in Carl Jung's theory of personality. For Jung, personality is a synthetic resultant, emerging as a composite of a vast panoramic array of antithetical oppositions. Life is conflict. Yet this is not in itself a bad thing. In fact, the opposition is necessary for growth, and enables the creation of a healthy synthesis. What is needed, he argues, is for people to learn to accept and understand the conflicts, and consciously work through them and thereby gain a "dynamic balance." States Maddi (1989:91): "The tension, pain, and difficulty created by the conflict are not to be avoided, for they are the stuff of life itself.”

One of the more critical oppositions occurs in the subconscious: between the personal unconscious, similar to Freud's concept of the unconscious, which consists of our own unique experiences stored in memory in the usual way but for some reason forgotten, and the collective unconscious, which consists of "the accumulated experience of the human species" (Maddi 1989:81). The collective consciousness is composed of spiritual archetypes, dualistically opposed essences which provide the "subjective aptitude" -- in Kant's terms, the categorical imperatives -- for acquiring meaningful experience.

In this way, one could argue that Jung's is not only a conflict model, but also a cognitive consistency model. The archetypes provide the backbone for the schematic framework upon which humans build an understanding of the world.
"As we know, there is no human experience, nor would experience be possible at all, without the intervention of a subjective aptitude. What is this subjective aptitude? Ultimately it consists in an innate psychic structure, which allows man to have experiences of this kind. Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc. The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth and death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These a priori categories have by nature a collective character; they are images of parents, wife, and children in general, and are not individual predestinations. We must therefore think of these images as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts, which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life. They are in a sense the deposits of all our ancestral experiences...(Jung 1982:79)."

Again, these "psychic aptitudes" are categorical imperatives. We can only perceive what we are preprogrammed to receive. All other data in the environment is and remains meaningless.

There is always presumed to be a unity in the opposites, a completion, where one fills the gap specifically created for the other, like single strands of genetic helixes that can only accept their polar opposites, or antibodies designed to lock only into certain other cells. So does woman complete man, and vice versa.
"Woman, with her very dissimilar psychology, is and always has been a source of information about things for which a man has no eyes. She can be his inspiration; her intuitive capacity, often superior to man's, can give him timely warning, and her feeling, always directed towards the personal, can show him ways which his own less personally accented feeling would never have discovered (Maddi 1982:77)."

Of course, as the Particular must identically (though oppositionally) reflect the Universal, so man also must have a feminine side. Thus, there exists in man the archetype of the feminine, the Anima, and in woman, the masculine Animus. What is their essential difference? Said Jung:
"If I were to attempt to put in a nutshell the difference between man and woman in this respect, i.e., what it is that characterizes the animus as opposed to the anima, I could only say this: as the anima produces moods, so the animus produces opinions; and as the moods of a man issue from a shadowy background, so the opinions of a woman rest on equally unconscious prior assumptions (Maddi 1982:95)."

The "feminine," according to Jung, is associated with mood and emotional intuition; the "masculine," with opinion and logical reasoning. Mood has no basis in fact; opinion, no emotion. Of course, these other elements occur as secondary or residual effects of other processes. But at its core, Jung would argue, the feminine is a condition of knowing things intuitively; of being right without logical explanation. The masculine, on the other hand, is blind to intuition, needing a conscious reason for everything.

What are the implications of Jung’s theory for foreign policy decision making? One is that female foreign policy makers will tend to respond to situations based on feelings only; impulsively, without reflecting deeply and dispassionately on less affectively tangible, more long-term strategic considerations. In other words, Jung would say that women react with their hearts, rather than their heads.

In politics, emotion has traditionally been viewed with suspicion, since it can often lead to destabilizing extremes (Aristotle 1991; Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1961). Thus, although useful as a means to attract attention to a problem, there should always be a “voice of reason” - or opposing faction -- waiting in the wings to intervene before emotion “carries us away.” Thus, equating women with emotion immediately labels them unsuitable for leadership. And when this trait is attributed to biological destiny, it renders them by nature unsuitable, all and forever.

Further, if a woman appears whose demeanor is not particularly emotional, she must be viewed as deviant, as must an emotional man. As we know, the social consequences of exhibiting deviance can be quite severe. Enough, some would argue, to motivate naturally unemotional women to display emotion, and naturally emotional men to suppress their feelings. Thus can the reliability of a trait be confused with validity, as women and men reconfigure their personalities - more or less successfully - to meet society’s gender expectations of them. And, as previously mentioned in Chapter One, the tendency to want to successfully fulfill social expectations may also have a great deal to do with how some women have behaved when in power in international politics.

A conflict theory of personality that more specifically addressed the issue of gender was Karen Horney's contribution of a "feminine" psychology to psychoanalytic theory. Horney, who received her medical degree in 1913 and began an active and prolific career as a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920, not surprisingly developed an interest in utilizing her own feminine perspective to deduce how women might pass through Freud's stages differently, and so require a different approach to analysis if they were to be relieved of neuroses. "After confronting Freud's male-oriented psychology with her own so-called female psychology, (Horney) prepared the way for a philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis of whole people living and interacting with their changing environments (Kelman 1967:31)."

One of her first disagreements was regarding what Freud considered to be "primacy of the phallus" stage that occurs between the third to seventh years of life. Freud argued that females, upon learning that males have a penis while they do not, become envious of them, and turn hateful toward their mothers for having castrated them, and desirous of their fathers to give them either a penis or a baby to compensate. The resolution of this very deep and complex conflict marks successful passage into the next stage of development.

Horney (1967) suggested that this "phallic primacy" argument might be over-stated. She argued that, if there was something between the two sexes to envy, it was more likely to be the ability to bear children: to get pregnant, give birth, and nurse a baby.
"I, as a woman, ask in amazement, and what about motherhood? and the blissful consciousness of bearing a new life within oneself, the ineffable happiness of the increasing expectation of the appearance of this new being? and the joy when it finally makes its appearance? (Horney 1967:60)"

She argued that it was thus equally likely that the sexes would envy each other, desire each other, fear each other, and so driven in their development.

This all-important difference in their physiology, that women can have babies and men cannot, sets the stage for one of the most critical of the gender differences: how males and females interact with the world. Men develop as proactive and aggressive; women, reactive and passive. This is because the act of having a baby proves without a shadow of a doubt that a young female has achieved true "womanhood" and fulfilled what society requires of her. But males cannot show the same proof of their manhood. Certainly, an erection and an ejaculation are needed. But somehow this falls short. Even infant males can achieve erection. And ejaculation can occur in sleep. What else is there? Surely there must be something else.
"Now one of the exigencies of the biological differences between the sexes is this: that the man is actually obliged to go on proving his manhood to the woman. There is no analogous necessity for her. Even if she is frigid, she can engage in sexual intercourse and conceive and bear a child. She performs her part by merely being, without any doing -- a fact that has always filled men with admiration and resentment. The man on the other hand has to do something in order to fulfill himself (Horney 1967:145)."

What is commonly mistaken for "manhood" among children -- the ability to get laid -- is so easily achieved in comparison to womanhood that, at some level, men come to deem it worthless. Horney (1967) argument, which is later taken up by Margaret Mead (1949), is that this is the reason why males in primitive cultures develop initiation rites: to compensate for the rigor imposed on women by childbirth. In the absence of such initiations, manhood becomes very slippery and difficult to achieve, at least with any finality.

What are the implications of this argument for foreign policy? One might argue that aggression in international relations, as the expansionist drive for political and/or economic conquest, is a distinctly male characteristic. Expansionary conquest, war, the active exertion of influence over the lives of other men, women and children, provides proof positive that the men engaging in such actions are undoubtedly “masculine.” Thus, men are always seeking to establish new domains in new frontiers, leaving their old habitats to decay untended, or to tear down and rebuild, rather than maintain or repair.

Women, on the other hand, because they are much more secure about their (sexual) identity, may be much more relaxed about how they define progress. Because they are not driven to constantly do, do, and redo, women might be less likely to support revolutionary or expansionist policies. Instead, they might rather focus on preserving and improving the status quo.

Erik Erikson was another personality theorist who adopted a biological conflict model. His perspective differed only in that he located the source of the conflict outside the individual, placing it in the nature of social life. By so doing, he reached different conclusions about development, though not, we shall see, very different conclusions about gender.

"Biology is destiny" argued Erikson (1967:600). There is no inherent conflict within. Humans, like other organisms, are conceived as a set of potentials, predefined to develop fully and completely, each in their own way. The final form that definition takes is the result of the interaction of the developing organism and its interaction with the environment, including conflict and capitulation. A host of other potential contradictions exists to challenge and configure the development of the individual: unsuitable or inappropriate parenting, inhospitable or incompatible environment, physical trauma, war, famine, etc.

Thus, for Erikson, the fact that men have a penis and women do not does not set up an internalized conflict for women, for the potentially fruitful womb more than compensates for the missing organ. Rather, the important thing about sex lies in the essential anatomical differences that (necessarily) cause them to attract each other, which in turn causes them to approach maturity/development in opposite and therefore fundamentally different ways. This also guarantees that they will resolve conflicts by fundamentally different means.

The introversion of their vagina, the internal space of their womb, creates in women a natural preoccupation for internal spaces, such as the domesticity of home. Acceptance of the need to fulfill the potential of those spaces is what marks a woman's evolution from adolescence to maturity. Thus, we have a 20th century reiteration of the ancient Greek distinction between "private" and "public" spheres of existence. Indeed, the antiquity of the assertion is viewed as evidence of its eternal truth.
"What (women) have always stood for privately in evolution and history...(is the) realism of householding, responsibility of upbringing, resourcefulness in peacekeeping, and devotion to healing (1964:583)."

Male identity, on the other hand, is based on a preoccupation with penetrating external spaces, and filling them up with himself, or what he has produced.

The implications of Erikson’s theory for international relations echo those suggested by Karen Horney’s analysis: that men are more likely to produce and support aggressively expansionist foreign policies that penetrate the borders of other nations. This does not have to mean war. The foreign investment networks of multi-national capital is an equally effective means of control, as dependencia theorists pointed out (Galtung 1971; Gunder-Frank 1972; Wallerstein 1976).

Fulfillment Models of Gender and Personality
The fact is, that among the theorists included in Maddi's textbook analysis of the fulfillment model -- Carl Rogers, Kurt Goldstein, Abraham Maslow, Alfred Adler, Robert White, and Gordon Allport -- there is no trace of a discussion of sex or gender differences, either as an object of development, or as a drive. Perhaps this is because masculinity and femininity are a priori assumed; i.e., they are either chromosomal tendencies (achievement version), or what the immediate environmental conditions require to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number (perfection version). Their “meaning” - which depends entirely upon how they appear to the individual at the time -- is thus in some way overdetermined. No conscious processing, no active reconstrual, is required. What one must be or do becomes apparent only in the moment, in the intersect of all other intervening variables, including the ideal pattern one is striving to achieve.

This researcher argues that fulfillment models are also cognitive consistency models. To reiterate:
"In its version of the core tendency of personality, the consistency model emphasizes the importance of the information the person gets from interacting with the external world. The model assumes that people will develop personalities that increase the likelihood of their getting the kind of information that is best for them. The personality is determined much more by the feedback from interaction with the world than it is by the human's inherent attributes.

In effect, this “feedback” could be all of the other intervening variables in the world that are available from which to constitute the “ideal,” personal or political, that one is trying to fulfill. Although Maddi makes a distinction between the greater emphasis conflict/fulfillment models place on “inherent nature” as compared with consistency models, he is not, and probably cannot be, precise as to the relative degree these two factors affect the individual. For example, he argues that:
"In comparison with consistency theories, both fulfillment and conflict theories put much greater emphasis on an inherent nature as a component of personality that determines life's course. According to fulfillment theories, life is an unfolding of the human's inherent nature. And even when conflict theories stress society as an important force in living, they assume that personality is in large measure an expression of the human's inherent characteristics. For both fulfillment and conflict theories, personality is far more influenced by the attributes the human brings into the world than is the case for consistency positions (Maddi 1989:155).

How much greater emphasis is “much greater?” And what are the inherent attributes the human brings into the world? It sounds as if Maddi is stating that fulfillment models, in contradiction to consistency models, assert that these inherent attrributes are wired-in from the beginning. But consistency models, cognitive (Kelly 1955) or physiological (Fiske & Maddi 1961; Maddi 1989), confirm rather than contradict this assertion. In both cases, the internal self is dependent upon the external environment for the actual content of its realization, whether that self is a set of cognitive constructs acquired, tested, and amended through continuous self-reflective interaction with the world, or as a system of organic processes seeking constantly to (re)gain a situational neurological equilibrium. Maddi thus indirectly argues that “consistency” is a kind of fulfillment; the achievement of equilibrium between past and present experience captured by perception in perception and memory, and mediated understood in consciousness.
"To be sure, consistency positions make some minimal assumptions about what is inherent in humans, but they are much more concerned with the compatibility among aspects of the content of personality than with the nature of that content. For consistency theorists, such content is largely learned and represents the history of feedback resulting from interacting with the world. Certainly feedback influences the content of personality along the lines of the assumed core tendencies of personality, and these core tendencies are inherent in human nature, but one cannot specify what particular content will result (Maddi 1989:155)."

But, to some degree, that is what social science is all about: specifying what particular content will result, given the constraints of socialization, the necessity of having been raised within a particular body politic. The present individual cannot be understood without reference to the past person, and to insist that it can denies the impact of learning and development.

Thus, rather than lump together conflict and actualization models, and oppose them to consistency models, this researcher would prefer to make the distinction between conflict models on one hand, and consistency/fulfillment models on the other. Both approaches assume that conflict exists. The difference between them lies in the different role assigned to conflict. In conflict models, conflict is assigned the role of a drive, the fundamental motivating force behind development. In consistency/fulfillment models, conflict is the antithesis of the drive. Rather, conflict is what gets in the way of drive; what circumscribes fulfillment, and contradicts consistency. Again, it is difficult to distinguish between the two, for like all antitheses, they form a unity. But the difference is essentially the difference between positive and negative charge, between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

A Consistency Fulfillment Model of Gender and Personality
How these two models might be synthesized into a single paradigm is illustrated by George Kelly’s “naïve scientist” theory of development. Maddi identifies Kelly only as a “cognitive” consistency theorist. However, this dissertation argues that a fulfillment ideal is an integral aspect of Kelly’s thinking, as well.
The core tendency of personality from Kelly’s (1955) point of view is easily stated: It is the human’s continual attempt to predict and control the events of experience. Kelly bases his model for the human not on the biological organism or on the frame of reference of happiness and unhappiness but on the scientific pursuit of truth. Truth is not necessarily what pleases or satisfies our immediate desires and needs; rather, it is what convinces us of its inexorable reality…(I)t is as scientists that people approach the task of living. The only important difference between real scientists and people in general is that scientists are more self-conscious and precise about the methods and procedures employed (Maddi 1989:156-57).

It is not that science has an ideal. Rather, science is the ideal: the pursuit of truth, defined as predictable reality. It is wired into all of us, Kelly argues, as is the procedure for building constructs.

The implication of Kelly’s theory for foreign policy decision making is that people will tend to behave in the present as they have in the past, and that changes in perception and/or behavior will occur only as a result of some contradictory event. And indeed, this is the assumption underlying foreign policy analyses that employ psychohistory, personality assessment, operational code analysis, generational effects, and other psychological approaches to predicting political behavior (Cocks and Crosby 1987; Hermann 1976; Holsti and Rosenau 1980; George 1979; McClelland 1961; etc.,)

Another cognitive consistency model of gender differences in personality development was proposed by sociologist Nancy Chodorow (1989). Chodorow’s theory is essentially a restatement in cognitive science terms of Horney's (1967) theory regarding the masculine rejection of femininity and the subsequent, peculiarly masculine need to "prove"oneself. By so doing, Chodorw rejects the assumption that this personality difference is due to biological necessity, and argues that this difference is rather the result of socialization practices; in particular, the practice of giving females primary responsibility for the care and socialization of children.

From a cognitive standpoint, both male and female children begin their lives with a predominately "feminine" identity (self schema) because they are primarily raised in the company of women. Only when they are about age three years of age does this identity come under question, and then only for male children. At that time, society begins to make it clear to little boys that they must act like little boys; i.e., to behave in accordance with the culturally-appropriate "masculine" social role. Suddenly, they must become male, an other who is not-me (i.e., female). Certain “masculine” behaviors are encouraged and rewarded, other “feminine” behaviors are discouraged and punished. And, as we know, the punishment for failure to conform can be very harsh, even deadly.

This process, which involves learning how to strictly categorize and control one’s own behaviors, puts a great deal of pressure on boys to be able to make distinctions, and logically determine differences. These differences must be determined "logically," because females are emotional, and males must not be that way. This social pressure, in turn, creates a great deal of anxiety. As a result, argues Chodorow, men develop a dread of the feminine in themselves: a fear that their female side will be stronger, and overwhelm their masculinity. This "dread of the feminine" is presumably what drives men to subjugate women on the outside; by so doing, they prove the masculine is stronger. The process drives itself, though how the joys of childrearing came to be considered unmasculine is an open question.
"One indication of the continuing threat of an internalized femininity to males in our culture is the strength of both external and internal pressure on little boys to conform to masculine ideals and to reject identification with or participation in anything that seems feminine. Initially, this pressure is generated by socializers of both sexes, but it is soon rigidly internalized by young boys, who hold both themselves and their peers to account over it (Chodorow 1989:36)."


In a Different Voice, (1982) Carol Gilligan expanded this argument by pointing to how the socialization practice of giving young children over to the exclusive care of women also leads to gender differences in socio-moral development and hence, politics: different conceptions of what constitutes justice in society. This understanding of right and wrong, and an internalized willingness to conform to those dictates, is essentially what makes society possible. Gender differences in the kind of morality male and female children develop could certainly be expected to have a later impact on their public policy opinions, including foreign policy.

Gilligan wrote In a Different Voice as a reaction to and counter-explanation for Lawrence Kohlberg's (1969) cross-culturally validated research results indicating that females do not generally attain as advanced a level of morality as male. Kohlberg's theory was premised on Piaget's (1932) postulate that cognitive ability develops in progressively more complex stages, from pure sensory motor operations to abstract operational to concrete operational, which is the ability to conjoin the two reciprocally. This last ability, which enables logical operations involving reversibility, conservation, and transitivity -- in human terms, to "decenter" your perspective so you can see and feel and understand from the other's point of view -- comes only in the final stage of development.

Kohlberg's model integrated this evolution of cognitive capability, placing the development process within the individual, thereby contradicting traditional "societal" explanations of moral development, which argued that the values guiding moral judgments are impressed upon the minds of children by their social environments (Locke 1960; Durkheim 1961). Environment is thus the over-riding independent variable. Instead, Kohlberg argued that the degree to which people are able to become "moral" actors depends not so much on their environment, but on the limits of their ability to cognitively reconstruct the situation from a decentered and socially-mediated perspective. Thus, it is possible to see "great souls," such as James Baldwin or Mother Theresa, arising out of oppressive or adverse circumstances. In this way, Kohlberg's is also a fulfillment model.

Kohlberg theorized that cognitive socio-moral development proceeded through three culturally universal levels of development: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Pre-conventional morality is characterized by adherence to social norms only because the actor either fears punishment or expects to gain some direct reward (like an animal). This is the level of moral reasoning achieved by children under nine, and a significant proportion of both teen-agers and criminals. Conventional morality is characterized by reciprocity between the actor and his social environment (reflecting increasing cognitive ability to decenter perspective), but the reciprocity is based on the expectation of some future exchange in kind; i.e., we need to be responsible, law-abiding citizens so we can live in a responsible, law-abiding society. Conventional morality describes the level of reasoning achieved by most adolescents and adults.

At the third level is post-conventional morality, characterized by behavior oriented toward "reciprocity as ideal." Under this condition, the actor attains full reversibility of logic, and is completely able to decenter perspective. That is, the act which the individual contemplates is abstracted and considered in terms of its effect as if the actor and object were abstract universals; e.g., Rawls' theory of justice (1973).

In reviewing the fairly significant empirical results supporting this hypothesis, Kohlberg found that one of the independent variables, sex, tended to control for the level of moral reasoning achieved and, by implication, achievable. Females, he discovered, rarely reasoned past second level "conventional" morality. Their ability to think about moral problems was apparently limited to the degree that problems and their solutions could be analyzed and discussed in terms of the immediate situational context and pragmatic needs and desires -- "reciprocity in fact" -- rather than more abstract, universal principles of right and wrong. In fact, females tended to cluster in the first stage of the second level, wherein "morality is conceived in interpersonal terms and goodness is equated with helping and pleasing others” (Gilligan 1983:18)."

Gilligan argued that the source of women's poor performance lay not in the limitations of the subjects, but in the limitations of the researcher. She suggested that Kohlberg, being male, had not surprisingly used his own "masculine" -- i.e., male value-biased -- moral reasoning process as a standard for progressively superior achievement. Women, having been raised to perform different roles and abide by different rules, simply have a different experience of the world than males, and hence, a different way of thinking about the rights and wrongs of human relationships.

"When one begins with the study of women and derives developmental constructs from their lives, the outline of a moral conception different from that described by Freud, Piaget, or Kohlberg begins to emerge and informs a different description of development. In this conception, the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules (1983:19)."

The reality of women's social role of caregiver instills in them a set of rules for reasoning about right and wrong in relationships that elicits more of the affective than the cognitive element of thought. "Right" and "wrong" are considered to be meaningless unless they include a consideration of whether and to what degree they impact the feelings, health, and welfare of real live human beings.

"The moral imperative that emerges repeatedly in interviews with women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the 'real and recognizable trouble' of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears rather as an injunction to respect the rights of others and thus to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment....This construction of the dilemma leads...women to recast the moral judgment from a consideration of the good to a choice between evils (Gilligan 1983:100-101)."

In other words, women tend to ask: of everyone involved in the situation, who is going to experience the most pain with the least among of gain? Gilligan also notes that women tend to sacrifice themselves in the process; i.e., willingly accept an outcome where they will experience more of their share of the pain so that certain others will receive less. Men, on the other hand, perform a structural analysis of the relationships involved: Who is being challenged? What principles are involved? What are the rules? And in what way might the outcome change the rules?

The implication of Gilligan’s research for foreign policy decision making is that, because women focus more on immediate feelings, pain, suffering, etc., they will be more concerned with the concrete impact of their decisions on personalized individuals and groups, rather than on the strategic balance. Also, it may be the case that human rights - peacekeeping, refugees and population migration, suppression -- would be more important to women than threat containment.

Clinical Psychology
In 1974, Maccoby and Jacklin conducted a review of all prior empirical research on gender differences in the field of psychology, with respect both to their nature and when and how these differences develop and/or change over time. They identified three categories of explanation, which roughly correspond to those suggested by Maddi. According to Maccoby and Jacklin, psychological sex differentiation occurs:
“1. Through imitation: children choose same-sex models (particularly the same-sex parent) and use these models more than opposite-sex models for patterning their own behavior. This selective modeling need not be deliberate on the child’s part, of course (1974:1).”

This model reflects the same basic assumptions of a consistency/fulfillment model. That is, it posits a drive to imitate the ideal, the same sex parent. This process would entail a system of contrast and adjust, contrast and adjust, which is essentially what Steinbruner (1974) spoke of when he discussed his “cybernetic” model of decision making. There is some state of balance that is the objective, and all other states are automatically and continuously amended to allow the system as a whole to be consistent with that objective.

“2. Through praise or discouragement: parents (and others) reward and praise boys for what they conceive to be ‘boylike’ behavior and actively discourage boys when they engage in activities that seem feminine; similarly, girls receive positive reinforcement for ‘feminine’ behavior, negative reinforcement for ‘masculine’ behavior (1974:1).”

Though the analogy is less clear, the aspect of tension between praise and discouragement, reward and punishment, would seem to indicate a conflict model of personality development, psycho-social version, wherein the world opposes the individual with its own set of requirements.

“3. Through self-socialization: the child first develops a concept of what it is to be male or female, and then, once he has a clear understanding of his own sex identity, he attempts to fit his behavior to his concept of what behavior is sex-appropriate (1974:1-2).”

In this model, the degree to which individual attributes are determinant infers a (self) fulfillment model.

Maccoby and Jacklin examined gender differences at both the individual and societal level. The following tables summarize the findings of their very thorough and extensive review:

Masculine and Feminine Behavior in Politics
Having reviewed the results of gender research in socio-linguistics and psychology, it seems fairly evident that they point to the same underlying differences: males as divisive, independent, competitive, and dominant; women as inclusive, interdependent, cooperative, and egalitarian. We might thus expect to see these features reflected in our political thought and the systems of political relations that have historically evolved. And, of course, we do. Especially in international relations.

As it is formally articulated, the field of international relations has been male dominant since its inception (Grant and Newland 1991). Thucydides, credited with laying the foundations of the field with his observations on the causes and conduct of the Pelopponesian War, wrote at a time and from within a culture where men ruled, and women served, on earth and in heaven (Pomeroy 1975). At this time in history, the last matriarchical societies were being exterminated. The Amazons -- warrior priestesses who served the Earth Mother and ruled and protected their tribes -- were being eradicated in the wars waged on them by warrior priests (Eisler 1987). As de Beauvoir (1993) has pointed out, men's greater size and muscle mass, and their freedom from the demands of child-bearing, gave them a decisive advantage when they decided to turn human society into a master-slave relationship, beginning with women.

The subjugation of the Amazons began the history of the subjugation of all women, and, eco-feminists argue (Runyan 1992), the concurrent, correlational subjugation of the earth itself. This is the "modern" world as we know it, a world whose history and philosophy was written by men (even if, as de Beauvoir [1993] has argued, women were enablers). Is this world characterized by the "masculine" ideals of division, independence, competition and hierarchy that are so clearly evident in research on language and psychological development?

The first firm division we see in the political history of Western Civilization is embodied in the Greek city-state, which had two separate spheres of existence: the "public" and the "private." The public was the realm of men, politics, war, and finance; the private, the domain of women, religion, children, and housekeeping. Greek women were strongly discouraged from leaving their house, where they served both men and gods with presumably equal devotion (Finley 1983; Plutarch 1899). This strict political division was later modified somewhat by the Romans, who had early-on in their history yielded legal rights to their Sabine women in exchange for willing conjugation and child-bearing (marriage) (Finley 1983). Eventually, as Aristotle (1958) might have predicted, the Roman Republic degenerated, first into (male-dominant) timocratic imperialism, then into (also male-dominant) oligarchic tyranny. The “Dark” (lawless) Age that followed, Hegel (1981) would argue, was simply the natural, dialectically logical antithesis of the “Enlightened” (lawful) age that preceded it. The Superstitious Brute rose to challenge the Legal Citizen.

Fortunately, not all the libraries were burned, and although brute force and superstition reigned supreme, the idea of rule by law was preserved by that most superstitious and brutish of institutions: the Christian Church. Through the monks that labored to reproduce the ancient manuscripts, and through the analysis and commentary of such authors as Augustine and Aquinas, and later, Calvin and Locke, Christianity - essentially a superstition -- maintained a dialogue with reason. Christendom, the “City of God” in its earthly manifestation (St. Augustine 1986), assumed the same male-female, public-private dialectical distinction as the Greek City State and the Roman Republic, with one difference. Previously, the male public domain had included politics, war, and finance, and the female private domain, religion, children, and housekeeping. In this new manifestation of the dialectic in history (Hegel 1981), religion was appropriated by the male domain, and made public.

The masculinization of religion changed its nature. In the domain of women, religion was passionate, a place of overwhelming and sometimes uncontrollable desires and actions (Aeschylus 1985; Sophocles 1956). This passion is still evident in St. Augustine of Hippo (1986), who argued, in the 4th century A.D. that the principal civic virtues in political society are base humility, compassionate forgiveness, and boundless love. The source of these virtues sprang from the heart, the true City of God, and not the intellect, which was incapable of comprehending the Grace of God. However, by the time St. Aquinas (1965) began to address the subject and source of virtue, eight centuries later, it had been firmly relocated as a quality of mind.

With the onset of Modernity , the rise of the Individual in opposition to the Universal, the importance of God slowly receded. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's," God had said. And, since God was most definitely a Spirit, God obviously meant there to be a strict division between religion and the state. As God ruled supreme in heaven, man should rule supreme on earth. The settlement at the end of the Hundred Years’ War - “who rules, his religion” - firmly established that policy.

As a consequence, the issue of God and Man -- that is, of someone and/or something greater than Man, with its own separate purpose for the world -- became a peripheral philosophic pursuit to the (almost exclusively male) intelligentsia. Instead, the most absorbing focus for political philosophy became the antithesis between Man and the State, a problem that continues to this day (e.g., Hobbes 1986; Locke 1960; Mill 1972; Waltz 1959).

If this short summary of the history of political philosophy has acceptable validity, and if Western Civilization is indeed overwhelmingly a history of men's words and men's deeds, then we must also accept that men seem to be driven by a principal of dialectical deconstruction: they must break things down into their component parts to discover what they are and how they relate, and categorize the relationships in hierarchical terms of "greater than," "less than," or "equal to." Corollary is the drive to piece back together what they have taken apart: to "fix" things; especially, to create new and different forms of relationships between the objects to render them more beneficial, more profitable, for man.

If we also agree that Western Civilization is overwhelmingly a history of ambition, aggression, and war -- which is the principal assumption and focus of study in the field of international relations (Beer 1981; Schelling 1966; Small and Singer 1985; Wright 1964) -- we must also reach the conclusion that conflict and competition, if not beneficial as Machiavelli (1950) has argued, is at least inevitable, and should be planned for (Morgenthau and Thompson 1985). This conclusion both reflects and strengthens the conclusions about "masculine" behavior derived from a review of socio-linguistics and psychology. It also seems to infer that the traditional field of international relations assumes a conflict model of human personality. Traditional IR teaches that war is only a matter of time. It should never be asked whether aggression will take place; but only when, and under what circumstances?

When a conflict model is used as an assumption upon which to construct a system of political associations, a serious problem arises: the system will actively and forcibly perpetuate conflict. At the individual level, Seidler (1991) argues that ascribing a natural violence to men leaves them no alternative except to be violent. It no longer becomes a matter of whether violence will occur, but (1) under what conditions; (2) the form(s) that it will take; and (3) who will be the target. This is partly due to the fact that, if they believe that male violence is natural, men will tend to feel inadequate if they are not violent or aggressive, for they are therefore unnatural. At the political level, it has been argued that the acceptance of conflict as natural guarantees that societies will evolve through violent means, which in turn ensures that the means for violence will be structured into the new system (Gandhi 1982; Arendt 1969; Sharp 1972).

This brings us back to Women's Standpoint Theory. As a political theory (Givens, Norris, & Lovenduski 1994), it makes assumptions about the nature of human beings and the world around them, and then hypothesizes about the political relationships that are possible, given the constraints and possibilities. This researcher argues that Women's Standpoint Theory -- at least in political science -- synthesizes the conflict and fulfillment models of personality development by locating the origins of conflict in the nature of man qua man, rather than man qua Man; that is, division, independence, competition, and dominance come from being male, and inclusion, interdependence, cooperation, and egalitarianism, from being female. "It's in the chromosones," it has been said. "There's nothing anyone can do."

To illustrate, consider Betty Reardon's (1985:4) assertion that: "feminine values, which nurture life and acknowledge the need for transcending competition and violence are needed to guide policy formation to avoid or abolish war." Her assumption is that "feminine values...nurture life and acknowledge the need for transcending competition and violence." This is distinct from her hypothesis, which is that such values "are needed to guide policy formation to avoid or abolish war."

If one accepts a fulfillment model, then indeed, there is nothing anyone can do. However, if one is willing to concede that humans create, and therefore can recreate, their external environment through the power of intellect, there is hope. This is what Devine (1991) offered us in her examination of the "inevitability of stereotype" hypothesis: we can overcome our socially-learned biases through a conscious effort, and so behave differently, thereby making the world different.

In the first few pages of Bananas, Beaches, & Bases, Enloe (1990:3) appears to contradict the fulfillment model and offer more of a cognitive explanation.
"The presumption that something that gives shape to how we live with one another is inevitable, a 'given', is hard to dislodge. It seems easier to imagine that something oozes up from an indeterminate past, that it has never been deliberately concocted, does not need to be maintained, that it's just there. But if the treeless landscape or all-women typing pool can be shown to be the result of someone's decision and has to be perpetuated, then it is possible to imagine alternatives. 'What if. . .?' can be a radical question.

"Conventionally both masculinity and feminity have been treated as 'natural', not created. Today, however, there is mounting evidence that they are packages of expectations that have been created through specific decisions by specific people. We are also coming to realize that the traditional concepts of masculinity and feminity have been surprisingly hard to perpetuate; it has required the daily exercise of power -- domestic power, national power, and...international power (1990:3)."


However, she quickly reverses this position to attribute the perpetuation of conflict to men and their calculated devices.
"Women's roles in creating and sustaining international politics have been treated as if they were 'natural' and thus not worthy of investigation. Consequently, how the conduct of international politics has depended on men's control of women has been left unexamined. This has meant that those wielding influence over foreign policy have escaped responsibility for how women have been affected by international politics (Enloe 1990:4)."

Thus, although she continues to lay claim to the idealist notion that things can and must change -- as is the case with all feminist theories - Enloe is really espousing what amounts to an idealist version of the fulfillment model of personality, with all its assumptions of inevitability. It is a fundamental contradiction in her work. Enloe (1990:5) rejects the "essentialist" argument that "men are men, and men seem almost inherently prone to violence," although she also admits that this argument has "the unsettling ring of truth (1990:5)." But she then turns around and posits that the cause of structural violence in international relations is due to the fact that men exclusively hold political power. Her subsumed assumption is that something in men drives them to dominate, to "sometimes coercively" keep women in a subordinate position.

And where are the women while all this is going on? Compliantly accepting what man has given them, or cooperating in the male dominant structure as junior accomplices. "If a Margaret Thatcher or a Jeanne Kirkpatrick slips through the cracks, it is presumably because she has learned to 'think like a man' (Enloe 1990:197)."

This "conflict-fulfillment" model of human personality was also adopted by Tickner (1992) in her feminist critique, Gender and International Relations. Although Tickner argues on the one hand that gender is a social construction, and not necessarily tied to biology, on the other she argues that the one thing men of all cultures have shared throughout history is their propensity for violent conflict and hierarchical organization, and their subjugation of women. If that propensity and subjugation are not inherent, where then, do the effects come from? Certainly, we cannot make the argument that the particular and the universal, man and his society, are independently or contingently related. Thus, the assumption is that violence, hierarchy, autonomy, and domination are wired in to the male of the species.
"Masculinity and politics have a long and close association. Characteristics associated with 'manliness,' such as toughness, courage, power, independence, and even physical strength, have, throughout history, been those most valued in the conduct of politics, particularly international politics. Frequently, manliness has also been associated with violence and the use of force, a type of behavior that, when conducted in the international arena, has been valorized and applauded in the name of defending one's country....These characteristics can and do vary across time and place. In this view, biology may constrain behavior, but it should not be used 'deterministically' or 'naturally' to justify practices, institutions, or choices that could be other than they are. While what it means to be a man or a woman varies across cultures and history, in most cultures gender differences signify relationships of inequality and the domination of women by men (Tickner 1992:6-7)."

Peterson and Runyan (1993) also implicitly assume a “conflict-fulfillment” model of personality, in spite of their assertion that gender is a sociological, rather than biological, phenomenon. The dominant, repressive, and violent “masculinist” practices and system structures at work in the world, instill fairly rigid stereotypes of what it means to be male or female, and enforces behavior concordant with such stereotypes. In the United States, these gender stereotypes “depict men/masculinity as ‘strong, independent, worldly, aggressive, ambitious, logical, and rough’ and women/femininity as the opposite: ‘weak, dependent, passive, naïve, not ambitious, illogical, and gentle’” (Peterson and Runyan 1993:22)

But they do not directly address the source of the dominant, repressive, and violent “masculinist” practices and system structures. Instead, they leave the reader to make the inference that, inasmuch as “masculine activities are (always) more highly valued or privileged than feminine activities in most of the world (Peterson and Runyan 1993:18),” the source must be men themselves, who created the political practices and structures to their own advantage.
“(T)he privileging of masculinity is political insofar as relations of inequality, manifested in this case as gender inequality, represent men’s and women’s different access to power. In this text, the term masculinist refers to individuals, perspectives, practices, and institutions that are masculine in orientation (embodying and privileging the traits of masculinity) and, thus, engaged in producing and sustaining relations of gender inequality.

Like other social hierarchies, gender inequality is maintained by various means ranging from direct violence (rape, domestic battering) and structural discrimination (job segregation, inadequate health care) to psychological mechanisms (sexist humor, blaming the victim, internalization of oppressive stereotypes). And like many social hierarchies, gender inequality is ‘justified’ by focusing on physical differences and exaggerating their significance as determinants of what are in fact social, learned, behaviors” (Peterson and Runyan 1993:18)(emphasis theirs).

Reading between the lines, the male/masculine nature is revealed to be hierarchical and dominant (“engaged in producing and sustaining…inequality”), violent (sustaining itself through rape and battering), oppressive (enforcing segregation and lower standards of living), cruel (using sexist humor, guilt, and fear as a means of psychological control), and cunning, somehow managing to convince the female/feminine that this situation is natural and therefore justified. These practices and institutions merely reflect the fulfillment of the conflict inherent in men. The fact that (some) men also suffer from this form of domination does not negate the fact that men are the principal cause.

In fact, man’s active involvement in setting up the conditions for women’s oppression is a common theme in all approaches to feminism - liberal, radical, socialist, and post-modernist -- which logically locates the source of that oppression in men. Where they differ is in their solution to the problem, which is, like any philosophy, predicated on the characteristics assumed to be inherent in human nature, and the possible (new) political relationships that can be constructed from those characteristics. Using Peterson and Runyan’s (1993:116-121) classificatory scheme, “liberal” feminists assume that males and females are cognitive and behavior equals, in spite of their reproductive differences; i.e., that “they are essentially the same as men in regard to capacities for aggression, ambition, strength, and rationality.” Presumably, the reason liberal feminists give for the fact that women are oppressed is that men have simply been better at subduing and subordinating women than the reverse. They also argue that, given current political conditions, which essentially endow women with equal powers for the first time in history, all women need to change the structure of society is to make use of that natural aggression, ambition, strength, and rationality; to quit being afraid, and take the initiative (Harrington 1992).

Liberal theorists (Enloe 1993; Peterson and Runyan 1993) argue that women’s capacity to achieve political impact has been demonstrated over and over again in history, but, because that capacity and impact is often restricted to the grassroots level of politics, it is ignored or discounted. When women achieve national and/or international pre-eminence for their achievements, as in winning a Nobel prize, the achievement is discounted because the purpose of such achievement was to serve human welfare, a typically “feminine” concern anyway, and not of interest to traditional IR scholarship.

Radical feminists, including women’s standpoint theorists, assume that women are different from men, and better that way. Women do not oppress or suppress as men do. They’re better than that. The problem here is that the “better” nature of women seems to leave them vulnerable to the subordination they would transcend. As Thucydides (1982) argued long ago, the small, self sufficient, peace-loving entity will always come to be dominated by the larger, predatory, aggressive power, for that is by definition the nature of aggression. The conundrum is whether that “special something” women have can balance out aggression, to achieve some form of equilibrium. This is still an open question.

Socialist feminists do not attribute the existing inequality of power to a conflict in the nature of men and women, whom they, like liberal feminists, assume to be equal. For them, the conflict is (not surprisingly) a class conflict, arising from the historical manifestation of the material dialectic in history. However, socialist feminists concur with radical feminists in that, until recently, history has worn a masculine face (Peterson and Runyan 1993). The goal is to achieve a form of cognitive, perceptual, social, and political androgyny that maximizes the best in every individual without regard to pre-established gender categories.

Post-modern feminists take that goal one step further by seeking to abolish all social categories once and for all. Categorization of human beings is antithetical to the fulfillment of their capabilities as unique individuals. Post-modern feminism implicitly adopts an intra-social, rather than intra-psychic, conflict model. Struggle is assumed to be a natural and valuable aspect of social life, for it is only through struggle that any meaningful consensus can be achieved (Peterson and Runyan 1993:121). The principal struggle to be undertaken, however, is assumed to be the struggle against the oppression of women and people of color. Presumably, this existing state of oppression is attributable to the nature of white, Western, male civilization.

The point here is that all the above forms of feminism assume that the oppressive, hierarchical, and aggressively-competitive nature of most societies, characterized by conflict and struggle for power, is simply the political manifestation of the oppressive, hierarchical, and aggressively-competitive nature of the men who created and sustain it. In this sense, any “feminist“ theory regarding political relationships, including inter-state and transnational relationships, will automatically entail the assumption of a (male-driven) “conflict” model of personality development. As with conflict theorists in psychology, they simply differ on the prognosis and criteria for resolution.

In the review thus far, the literature in political philosophy and international relations has evidenced a complete dependence on the conflict fulfillment model of human personality. Have there been any consistency models offered as an alternative? Before that question can be answered, we need to ask what the assumption of such an approach might entail.

A consistency model would argue that although masculine oppression, hierarchy, and aggression seems to have characterized history, this domination is not attributable to any inherent nature on the part of man, but on some historical intervening variable, which changed the biological, ethological, social, and political values required for humans to survive. Perhaps it might once have been necessary for males (and females) to be aggressive, independent, and hierarchically-organized to survive. This is pure speculation, but if we measure the evolution of civilization, as Arendt (1970) suggests, in terms of decreasing dependence on the means of violence and increasing dependence on cooperation our ancestors may have had to arrange themselves to deal effectively with heavier and stronger neanderthals. At least, heavier and stronger male neanderthals. After all, it only takes one of any kind to create a war. In any case, the values inculcated by that evolutionarily-necessary form of social organization have been perpetuated, in more-or-less modified form, from generation to generation.

It may now be the time for a new Idea in history, which has only just been able to occur in Consciousness because the material conditions are right; i.e., that Self and Other not define themselves in terms of biologically-based differences (such as sex), but rather in terms of cognitively-based differences. Released from its material requirements, this new dialectic would be Consciousness coming to know itself as Consciousness - what Hegel (1981) terms absolute knowing. As a self schema, its content would be infinitely variable; continuously and self-reflectively defined and redefined by the individual on a moment-by-moment basis. In other words, one's personal identity would be acquired and maintained by informed, free consent, with all alternatives acceptable save those that are rejected as "harmful." This is essentially what post-modernists refer to as deconstructionist philosophy, though the choice of term was perhaps unfortunate, given its negative, scary connotations.

An example of this self-based consistency approach to international relations theory is Ashley and Walker's (1990) discourse on the question of sovereignty. Responding as guest editors of a special issue of International Studies Quarterly, “Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies,” Ashley and Walker (1990:367-368) state:
"(W)e do not try to bring the question of sovereignty to a close. We do not pretend to gather up and express an implicit consensus among contributors as to how the question of sovereignty might or should be answered. No such consensus exists. Indeed, if the present essays exhibit anything resembling agreement on the question of sovereignty, it is only that it must be regarded as just that, a question. In contrast to the vast preponderance of writings appearing in the Quarterly over the years, the essays in these pages share a suspicion of all assertions of sovereign privilege, and they assert none of their own. These essays do not presume to speak a sovereign voice, a voice beyond politics and beyond doubt, a voice of interpretation and judgment from which truth and power are thought to emanate as one. Instead, their marginality consists in their disposition to maintain their distance from all presumptively sovereign centers of interpretation and judgment. Their dissidence consists in their readiness to regard every historical figuration of sovereign presence -- be it God, nature, dynasty, citizen, nation, history, modernity, the West, the market's impartial spectator, reason, science, paradigm, tradition, man of faith in the possibility of universal human community, common sense, or any other -- as precisely a question, a problem, a contingent political effect whose production, variations, and possible undoing merit the most rigorous analysis."

That is, the current nature of dissidence, the antithesis of doctrine, is to employ a methodology by which everything is a product of self-conscious, subjective evaluation.

It seems logical that male dissidents, rather than female dissidents, would come up with a theoretical antithesis to traditional "masculinist" ideology. After all, if a new stage in civilization has become reachable, given the evolution of a contemporary equivalent of homo sapiens, then for some segment of the male population there really is no truth to the proposition that males are responsible for the world’s conflict and oppression. This, I believe, would provide ample motivation to discredit that proposition as false. It is a hard thing to be wrongly-labeled, particularly by those with power to directly affect one’s life.

However, although male feminists have succeeded in clearly stating the problem, they do not seem themselves able to solve it. Either because they are male or because this is just the way intellect seems to work, they cannot help but think and speak in dichotomies. For example, they argue that two voices respond to the dialectical confrontation between positivism and post-positivism, science and (de)constructionism. Where are the "margins," the boundary lines that separate them? They are continuously mediated in a discourse between two voices. One speaks in a "celebratory register of freedom"; the other, in a "religious register of desire."
"Where, again, are the margins? They are all those boundless, unnameable regions of activity where an itinerate religious desire immediately struggles to marginalize paradoxes of time, space, and identity; where this active and artibrary work of marginalization is higher visible and cannot be forgotten; where, thanks to the visibility of the struggle, desire necessarily fails; and where, as a result, the sovereignty of a discipline or paradigm becomes a strange and rarefied ideal, a question never finally answerable, a paradoxical task that cannot be one's own. This is what 'marginality' means. It can mean no more.

"For works of thought that issue from the margins, therefore, only a celebratory posture can take seriously life's real possibilities and limitations. In the marginal site, only the register of freedom -- a register that affirms and exploits ambiguity, uncertainty, and the transgressability of institutional boundaries -- can effectively speak to the paradoxes, dangers, and opportunities immediately unfolding (1990:389)."

That is, you either like the new, or cling to the old, depending, presumably, whether the idea is "like" or "unlike" you, self-schematically speaking. Either, or; thesis, antithesis. This is a re-iteration of traditional political analysis. For example, the above dichotomy between registers posed by Ashley and Walker very much reflects the emergence of "vanguard" (environmentalist) vs. "rearguard" (industrialist) political postures toward social change posed by Milbrath (1986), or the "radicalist" vs. "reformist" cleavage in belief systems noted by Lipset (1983).

The researcher picked up on two other typically masculine gender biases in Ashley and Walker's analysis. One had to do with their lexicon. The other, with their attributions of characteristics to the "Other."

In the first case, in imagining the feminine counterpoint to the masculine voice of international relations, Ashley and Walker (1990:394) state that it would:

"(E)ncourage a patient labor of listening and questioning that seeks to explore possible connections between the strategic situations of others and one's own, always sensitive to the problem of expanding the space and resources by which the ongoing struggle for freedom may be undertaken (emphasis mine)."

Here it is again: an emphasis on struggle, expansion, and independence. Patience does not require struggle. That is its virtue. One simply is patient. If there is a struggle, one is not patient; one is merely trying to become so.

In the second case, the assignment of a feminine pronoun to a set of traits in opposition to traditional (hierarchical) authority came off sounding gendered. If the new perspective is a cognitive artifact, constructed purely from individual experience, and if sex is not determinate of that cognitively reconstructed experience, then why the female voice? Just to make clear the contrast? At one level, it is easy to understand the convenience. But at another level, it might confuse as much as clarify. Moreover, the attributes are too close to stereotypical gender attributes for comfort.
"'Her' situation is intrinsically ambiguous. 'Her' position knows no necessary boundaries. 'Her' self-understanding is very much in question and deeply involved in an indeterminate process of change. 'Her' attitudes toward events of crisis and dissidence are ambivalent, conforming fully neither to a celebratory register of freedom nor to a religious register of desire

In other words, by definition, "She" is: ambiguous (mysterious, undefined, inscrutable), unboundaried (unlimited, unconfined), indeterminate (vague, inconclusive, irresolute), and ambivalent (having conflicting emotions).
Table 5 presents a summary of this review.