Is there a “natural” fit between gender and the pacifist or military impulse? The article traces the trajectory of the thinking on this issue ever since the initiation of women into the peace movements of nineteenth-century Europe, placing it in the context of the general philosophical shift from essentialism to constructivism. It is argued that the demotion of “the maternal” -- the emblem of pacifism since the early 19th century -- took place in the later work of Virginia Woolf, well before the post-gender heydays of the 1980s. Although the term gender was obviously not available to Woolf, she undermined the conventional division between the sexes through her use of the term androgyny, which prepared her to take on the conventional discourse about aggression, war, and maternal pacifism. A contrastive analysis of the uses and abuses of sexual difference and the maternal metaphor in the works of Woolf and the 19th-century pacifist Charlotte Gilman shows that while amalgamating liberal and radical positions, Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) in fact anticipated – via its hostile dialogue with Freud – not only the gendering of peace and war but also the contemporary psycho-political analyses of the nexus of sexuality and nationalism.

January 2004: Yael S. Feldman is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education and Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, where she teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature and Gender Theory. She is Associate Editor of the literary journals Prooftexts and Hebrew Studies. The latest of her five books, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1999) was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. The Hebrew version, Lelo heder mishelahen (Hakkibutz hameuchad, 2002) won the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature (2003). Current research: the nexus of politics and psychoanalysis in theories of peace and in Modern Hebrew culture.