When I was little, I asked my mom why girls couldn’t be soldiers.
“I think because the governments are afraid of girls. They would fight so hard, it would be too scary.” My mother always explained things in ways where I could see myself as strong. It was an empowering perspective, but I never actually wanted to fight scary hard.
Old photos and newspapers tell a different story from my mother’s. Women were delicate flowers, unable to defend themselves and their country—we can’t have them be soldiers! They’re too busy being wives and mothers! Our culture was (and still is) far more comfortable with images of young widows collapsing in tears than with images of women getting blown up along with their brothers.
Even moments when women were depicted as strong and capable, like Rosie the Riveter and women’s baseball, come from gendered war propaganda—the men were out fighting, so the ladies had to toughen up a bit and do “men’s work” until their fathers, brothers, and husbands came home.
This gendering of war strikes me as so absurd. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows that death does not just affect one person at a time; each death ripples through a community like an earthquake, bringing friends and family to their knees in hopeless sorrow. Even when death comes peacefully in old age, it sends close family members reeling with emotion. And when violent death comes to the young! Look at today’s photos from any article about Gaza—anguished weeping knows no bounds, no gender or age. Old men sob over family members just as hard as the beautiful widows whom the newspapers seem to love.
I came across a few articles from the mid-1990s critiquing the pacifism of feminists as clichéd and backward. They argued that, as modern feminists, we should push back against the trope of wives and mothers opposing war on moral grounds, and in fact that we should argue in favor of what we see as “just wars.”
I find this just as absurd as the idea that only women grieve over the untimely deaths that war wreaks. Striving for a lasting peace isn’t just a feminine value; it’s a human value. I see no reason to go around looking for “just wars,” simply because one presents as female.
War is horrible, and war is just as genderless as grief.
 
A meaningful fast to all who are fasting, and a prayer for a swift end to all bloodshed.