Although no one knows exactly why Alfred Nobel, the chemical engineer best known for inventing dynamite, founded the famous annual award for peace, it is often considered a compensation of sorts for the military use of his explosive invention. Others say the prize grew out of Nobel’s relationship with radical pacifist Bertha von Suttner, who was awarded the prize herself 9 years after his death in 1896. Whatever the reason, the prize may very well have had to do with a woman. And with war.
Perhaps it’s clichéd that in times of war, women are often seen as harbingers of peace and of peacemaking, but in this case, there’s more to the committee’s choice; the three co-recipients were champions of women’s rights, as well.
Tawakul Karman, the first Arab woman peace laureate, is co-founder of Women Journalists Without Chains, which campaigns for the freedom of expression and against the oppression of women. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is the first female head of state in Africa. Now in her second term, she was commended for her fight against government corruption and for guiding Liberia through the end of its last civil war.
Which brings us to Leymah Gbowee. Also Liberian, she’s founder of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement. Operating out of a makeshift office, WLMAP gathered thousands of women together for months, to pray and sing until they forced then-president Charles Taylor to attend peace talks in Ghana. Their sit-in at the Presidential palace ended the war and led to Taylor’s exile.
The WLMAP took nonviolent resistance in an interesting direction. A former trauma counsellor, Gbowee called on women nation-wide to withhold sex from their husbands, who were fighting the war. “In 2003, fed up with the war, fed up with boy soldiers putting their hands in our underclothes searching for what they said were guns and pistols,” Gbowee said during a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, she decided to fight back. “In desperation, we went on a sex strike.”
Though it’s not the first time women have used abstinence as a weapon to end war – similar campaigns were launched in Columbia in 1997, in Kenya in 2009 and in the Philippines in 2011- WLMAP’s campaign marked the first time in recent history that one has been so successful.
It may seem like a far cry from the “make love, not war” slogans of the 1960s, coined during by young opponents of the Vietnam war – although it’s really just the other side of the coin - but the sexual revolution in this case is less about the liberty to take one’s clothes off and more about the right to disengage completely.
The idea is an ancient one. In the 5th Century BCE, Aristophanes’ black comedy, Lysistrata, which is set during the Peloponnesian Wars, follows its eponymous heroine is on a similar mission; to persuade her fellow Greek women to refuse sex with their warrior husbands on home leave. The legendary playwright would no doubt be tickled to learn that his heroine’s legacy lives on. “I am willing to wager, there’s not one here whose husband is at home,” Lysistrata proclaims at one point, “Oh women, if we would compel the men to bow to Peace, we must refrain…we must refrain from every depth of love.” Gbowee couldn’t have put it better herself.
