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Giving Peace a Chance?
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14117 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
2,294 Words |
| Author
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Phyllis Zagano
Phyllis Zagano is a contributing editor of Crisis. She has
served in the Navy. |
WOMEN AND WAR
Jean Bethke Elshtain
New York: Basic Books, 1987
288 pp., $19.95
This book is dedicated to the late John Lennon and notes in a concluding chapter that "peace is an ontologically suspect concept, as troubling in its own way as war." We are left to ponder the question of what other choices we have as the final page is turned and we no longer have the erudite company of political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Her tour through a supermarket of wartime memorabilia filled with films, popular novels, and newspaper accounts of military engagements begins with her appropriation of Hegel's concept of the "beautiful soul," which she says he characterizes as "a being defined by a mode of consciousness which allows him or her to protect 'the appearance of purity by cultivating innocence about the historical course of the world.'" Beautiful Souls are complimented by Just Warriors in her schema, and she apparently is attempting to argue that the Beautiful Souls are in danger of being co-opted by the Just Warriors so that the Beautiful Souls will no longer be beautiful and, therefore, feminine.
She argues against the two principal possibilities for the Beautiful Soul faced by the Just Warrior as presented in popular culture. The movie Private Benjamin, in which comedienne Goldie Hawn portrays a suburban "princess" whose image of the Army included sailboats and condos until she arrived at basic training, is her example of the corruption of the Beautiful Soul. Elshtain's criticism is
... (1997 of 13802 Characters)
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