2024 WPS Symposium: Elective Panel 2B - Historical Perspectives

ELECTIVE PANEL 2B: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Iran: Gender Inequality, Climate Change, & Environmental Security
Mr. Jody Prescott, University of Vermont and Ms. Saloumeh Torani, British Columbia Prosecution Service
The Islamic Republic of Iran subjects women and girls to intense gender discrimination, essentially denying them any formal political role, sharply circumscribing their economic and professional opportunities, and trampling their human rights. Historically, it was not always like this. During the 1960s and throughout the majority of the 1970s, women’s rights were expanding and comparable to the rights of women in Western states. The Islamic Revolution in 1979, however, resulted in quick action by the new religious government to remove women from most areas of public life. The killing of Mahsa Amini while she was in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022 led to massive protests against the regime’s practice of gender inequality, but these were violently suppressed by the state’s security forces.
Over the same time period, the religious government’s mismanagement of scarce water resources and its inability to meaningfully address often dangerous levels of air pollution in its growing urban centers means that the country is already experiencing forecasted effects of anthropogenic climate change in the Middle East and North Africa region. These effects are having gender-differentiated impacts upon women’s and girls’ health now. If current trends in climate change effects and environmental degradation continue, these impacts will become ever more disparate as compared to what men and boys experience, and will compound the negative effects of Iran’s official practice of gender inequality upon women and girls.
Arctic Explorers and National Security
Dr. Mary Thompson-Jones, U.S. Naval War College
The Age of Polar Exploration usually features stories about men in man-against-nature sagas spurred by the quest for glory. But the work of women - Indigenous, European, and North American - directly contributed to national security by providing domain awareness. Indigenous women worked as pathfinders, translators, cooks, and seamstresses. European and American women drew maps, took photographs, collected specimens of flora and fauna, and raised public awareness by publishing and lecturing.
One wealthy Californian, Louise Arner Boyd, organized seven Arctic expeditions between 1928-1941 and took thousands of photographs of Greenland. The U.S. government hired her to return to the Greenland coast to obtain radio and nautical data, much of it done in secret for the War Department, which had little to no data. As the undisputed American expert on Greenland, her role was pivotal after the Nazi invasion of Denmark and the United States’ subsequent custodial role in Greenland.
This study explores the stories of five women who traveled in the Arctic between 1871 (the first written record of a woman on an expedition) and 1941 (after which the field gradually opened). Their accounts, contrasting with usual heroic narratives, normalized the idea of women working and researching in the region. Their focus on science, the environment, and local inhabitants contributed to domain awareness and proved that rather than “conquering” the Arctic, it was a region worthy of study in its own right.
Cold War Over the German Woman: The United States’ Most Strategic Move
Ms. Cornelia Weiss
“In the cold war over the German woman,” a 1949 Washington Post article proclaimed, “this country’s most strategic move - one that the Soviet Union is unlikely to duplicate - is to bring influential German women here and let them freely see all of American life.” The first group of leaders that the U.S. Army Reorientation Program enabled to be brought to the U.S. was not men, it was women. The broader effect of the most strategic move by the U.S. may have been that it eviscerated the leadership gap imposed by the dozen Nazi years by enabling German women, through leadership programming, to be in a comparable position with Britain and the United States. Yet subsequent programs during the Cold War give the appearance that the U.S. believed it had “checked the box” with regard to women leaders. The Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships, “the most effective international exchange program, leader for leader, in the world,” restricted its program to only men. Programs that did not limit eligibility to only men were, however, still overwhelmingly “men’s programs.” The United States, with this history now excavated, has the opportunity in implementing the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 to re-vitalize the forgotten legacy of the Army Reorientation Program: making as its first priority the combat against anti-democratic gendered leadership gaps.

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