For a while there — especially during the tense days between Obama’s victory and Clinton’s belated exit — it looked as if American feminism might not recover from the Democratic primary contest.

The media were spotlighting feminist mothers and their “post-feminist” daughters bickering like, well, mothers and daughters. Hillary was holding hostage her “18 million voters,” the most coveted of whom were her fierce female supporters. Those supporters were behaving like unpleasant children, by turns petulant (“Hillary for V-P — or else!” read a typical graffito) and compliant (“We want you to continue to be our leader,” was the overwhelming message of 350,000 emails reportedly sent to the candidate that week).

The candidate who had run mostly away from gender — except to flash her cohones as a potential Commander in Chief — was being defended by this diehard sisterhood because she was a woman. They excused her vote for the Iraq war, her vow to “obliterate Iran” should it menace Israel, her Bushesque fear-mongering in that red-telephone advertisement. They even excused the racism (more on that later). The constituency that global-feminist activist and writer Ros Pachesky called “uterine feminists” excused Hillary because Hillary is a woman. And when she lost, in step with their ruthless leader they blamed a vast sexist conspiracy in the press.

Feminists, at least those most visible in the media, were coming across as a bunch of doddering, doctrinaire altecachers, the sexual-political equivalent of unreconstructed Bolsheviks.

Of course, that sexist conspiracy existed (watch this YouTube clip, for instance), even if its exact vastness is still in dispute. But not far from HRC headquarters or the viewfinder of Fox News’ cameras, a critique of another sort was going on: other feminists — not the aforementioned doddering ones — rumbling about what went wrong with Hillary and the groundswell she’d mobilized.

Besides her militarism, that wrong could be summed up in a word: racism. During a contest that was universally described as “a woman versus an African-American,” Hillary did nothing to challenge the assumption that she wasn’t just a woman but a white woman. “The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness,” wrote anti-racist feminist Zilla Eisenstein in a blog posted round the world. “She presents herself as a woman, but her real power . . . is as white.”

Worse than passively taking advantage of white privilege, Clinton chose to deploy racism to win votes — most glaringly when she lobbied superdelegates with the argument that she could win among “hardworking . . . white Americans,” and Obama could not. Many heard those words as not just description but prescription.

Then there was the red-telephone TV ad, which began with a ring in the middle of the night in a world where “something is happening” and ended with a confident Hillary, in suit and glasses, picking up the phone, protecting America. Orlando Patterson, writing in The New York Times, discerned racism as ominous as the phone’s ring. The sleeping children were blond or “vaguely Latino,” he noted; the threatening “something” was never named as “external terrorism.” The message: “An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience.” Rather, as a black man, “Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.”

Women who have struggled to erase the assumption of a universal white sisterhood and to forge a movement linking sexual, gender, racial and economic justice with international solidarity heard African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s words echoing back over a quarter-century: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.” The last part of Lorde’s sentence — “but some of us are brave” — decidedly did not describe Clinton. After all, what would it have cost her to ask for votes not because she is white but because she was the better candidate?

Clinton didn’t deserve feminist support, Eisenstein argued; she “does not share a political identity with women of all classes and colors and nations simply because she has a female body. She first needs to claim that body and demand rights for it — reproductive, day care, health, education, etc. She has no multi-racial woman’s agenda because she has no anti-racist agenda.”

That she appealed to a multiracial “uterine feminist” constituency only complicated the picture, Petchesky said at the June conference of the National Council for Research on Women. Visiting Las Vegas during the Nevada caucuses, Petchesky was struck that most of the people carrying Hillary placards were Asian-American and Latina hotel workers. When she asked a fiftysomething Filipina why she was supporting Clinton, the woman “looked at me like I was stupid and replied, with great gusto, ‘Because she’s a WOMAN — and WOMEN have the POWER!’”

Young feminists of all races were hipper than that. For instance, feministing.com, the blog that gives voice to millennial feminists, hosted a lively, supersmart gabfest lacing together race and sex during the entire primary season — and it’s still going on. The bloggers admirably resisted divisiveness, repeatedly calling Hillary on her racism, but also praising her when that was due. For instance, Courtney Martin, writing graciously on Hillary’s concession speech, described herself as a Clinton supporter and an Obama voter.

Nor did feministing.com’s contributors swallow the media depiction of the Clinton-Obama split among women as a generational divide. When Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, a senior feminist herself, suggested in The Nation that a Hillary loss should signal Boomer feminists to quit the scene, the blog’s political editor, Jen Moseley, rose to respect her elders. “Obviously I support young women (or a wider perspective attributed to younger women) playing a more important role in the feminist movement,” she wrote, “but that doesn’t have to mean older women are kicked out entirely. Sheesh.”

This proliferation of talk — not just in feminist cybercommunities and conferences but on Slate.com and in The Washington Post and The New York Times — is itself occasion to send up fireworks. Yes, Hillary Clinton had inspired the passionate intensity of the worst, on both sides. But her candidacy has brought out, and brought back, the best, too.

Jo Freeman, a white civil-rights activist who became one of the founders of the second-wave women’s liberation movement, said as much in a celebratory op-ed circulated online. “That [Democratic primary] voters chose a black man and a white woman over so many outstanding white men is something of which we can all be proud,” Freeman wrote. “It illustrates what is good about America, at a time when many find it hard to see the good. It demonstrates that we can overcome historic prejudices, that we can change deeply buried values and attitudes.”

And if the blogospheric cretins and frat-boy pundits hoped to bury the girls under a shitload of misogyny, they have instead had a Miracle-Gro effect. Everywhere, people are broadcasting the word shamelessly, intensely and voluminously: Feminism. Say it again. FEMINISM! Didn’t hear you! FEMINISM!

Journalist Amanda Fortini described the experience of her peers, young women for whom gender inequality was a women’s history course they took in college. “The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session, to use a retro phrase that would have once made most of us cringe,” Fortini wrote in, of all places, New York Magazine. “We’ve parsed the gender politics of the campaign with other women in the office, at parties, over email, and now we’re starting to parse the gender politics of our lives. This is, admittedly, depressing: How can we be confronting the same issues, all these years later? But it’s also exciting. It feels as if a window has been opened in a stuffy, long-sealed room. There is a thrill at the collective realization.”

The piece, headlined “The Feminist Reawakening,” ended with a question: “What next?”

And that’s where it gets really exciting.

First, to win those 18 million voters, Barack Obama has to speak about sex. So far, he has barely done so, though he leads by example — the proud son of a strong single mother, the husband of a powerful wife, the father of two apparently feisty girls.

He can reinject gender into those supposedly gender-neutral issues at the top of voters’ minds. Jobs, for instance. Yes, men are losing theirs. But even when employed, women earn less — and thanks to the Supreme Court, they now can’t do much about it. Last year’s ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber eviscerated a generation of anti-sex-discrimination law by requiring that a victim bring evidence of unequal pay within 180 days of hiring — in the real world, where paychecks are secret, impossible. The next president will have a lot of power to even the stakes when he nominates one, maybe two, new justices.

The mortgage crisis is another unequal opportunity afflicter. Writing in The Boston Globe, law professor Anita Hill showed how women — especially single, elderly and African-American women — are showing up disproportionately among those rooked by predatory lenders. Many of those women are losing their homes.

Nicholas Kristof suggested in the Times that Obama “show that gender issues are on his radar” by championing the combat against maternal mortality, “the orphan issue of global public health.” Yes, he should. But he can also embrace the broader issues of which maternal mortality is part: reproductive rights and even child care, which hasn’t been on “the radar” since Nixon.

Obama gets a 100 percent approval rating for his votes on choice; that’s why NARAL endorsed him. But it’s tough to find the word on his website (it’s hiding in the “Fact Check” section), and as far as I know he hasn’t uttered it since 2007, when he called abortion an “anguishing” decision involving a woman, her family, her doctor and her clergyperson. (It takes a village to have an abortion.) Say something about Roe, Barack. Hillary did, and it probably won her votes.

That’s what’s next for Barack Obama. What’s next for feminists?

How about this? We become what the Democratic Party has been longing for since the 2004 elections: its “moral-values voters.”

Not moral-values voters like “left-wing” anti-abortion evangelical Jim Wallis. Not the religion-on-your-sleeve values voters that Hillary called forth in 2004.

Not moral-values voters who will call for more censorship of pornography.

No, I mean the voters who care about everyday life — which is to say, all voters. Tom Franks was wrong in What’s the Matter with Kansas? The GOP didn’t distract people from the “real” issues with stuff like abortion and gay marriage. It reached people where they live.

People live in their bodies (thus the issues of abortion, racism, sexual and gender minority rights, health care, torture). They live in families and communities (gay marriage, immigration, child care, housing, food). They live as citizens and, increasingly, through symbolic communications (voting rights, “decency” and pornography, religion, the arts, surveillance).

I could go on — and hit numerous issues on which feminists do not agree (one fault line, especially for queers and people of color, opens along hate-speech laws). But the point is that feminists (and by this I mean internationalist anti-racist feminists) understand the intersection between the personal and political better than anyone — with the exception of conservative Christians.

So here’s my proposal: Feminists become for the Democrats and progressive politics what evangelical Christians have been for the Republicans and conservatism — its demanding, uncompromising base. Just as those religionists moved their party radically to the right, so can feminists push the Democrats — and if you can’t stand the Democrats, then progressives generally — more radically to the left.

I can imagine it now — politicians quailing before NARAL as they do now before the NRA. Teenagers wearing WWSTD (What Would Sojourner Truth Do?) bracelets. The first Vietnamese-African-American transgender president . . .

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

A women’s magazine I used to write for kept a large three-ring binder filled with story ideas. One section was called “Emo,” though, this being a women’s magazine, all the features were about emotions. Most of them were negative ones, which, presumably, the right shoes or handbag would clear right up (See: Accessories, page 116).

The problem was, the ideas rarely reflected anything like real life. At one point, the binder was stuffed with crying: “Have a good cry!” “There, there, don’t cry! “What if he cries?” And this one: “Women who cry at work.”

My editor was keen on the last one. “You know,” she said, “those girls who are constantly bursting into tears at the office.” I said I didn’t. After all, wasn’t holding it together for eight hours Job 1 for any employee? And if women were bursting into tears, might it be counterproductive to publicize that fact, given the still-fragile cause of workplace equality?

I didn’t do the piece. But I suspected then what I know now: that the media could generate endless copy (and ad revenue) keeping their sights on women on the edge, the edge between crying at work and rejecting the very idea of crying at work; between vulnerable, incompetent, manipulative or otherwise old-fashioned femininity and the sort of sexual equality that expects women to dish it out and take it, just like men.

I thought about those weeping workers when an exhausted Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up and — the pundits surmise — won the hearts of enough New Hampshire women to take the state’s Democratic primary. My first reaction was, What? Women voted for her because she cried? Had we gotten nowhere since the crying-at-work story? Maybe the anti-suffragists were right. Women are too sentimental to vote rationally.

Then I remembered that nobody votes rationally. In this most apolitical of nations, folks choose the person they’d relish having dinner with. It’s called “likeability,” and it’s apparently what won George W. Bush the White House in 2004. Even after Abu Ghraib, more than half the voters still wanted to eat a burger with the guy.

Gallup gauges our dinner-companion preferences with a “feeling thermometer,” whose scale of warmth and coolness ranges from zero to 100 degrees. In September 2007, Barack Obama was the only candidate whose readings averaged over 50 — 53, to be exact — among both Democrats and Republicans. But go figure: The vicious, petty and none-too-bright Rudy Giuliani was right behind him at 50, with Hillary trailing Rudy by a point.

Hillary’s scorching 82 degrees among Democrats was balanced by the coldest of cold shoulders nationally. The latter was surely an expression of sexism, nauseatingly evident on the Internet: “Stupid bitch,” her detractors call her. “Cunt,” “slut,” “lesbian,” “feminazi,” “Satan.” But even that 82-degree warmth wasn’t translating into the desire to vote for her. At least it hadn’t in Iowa.

The conventional wisdom about Hillary’s tears was that they “humanized” her. I don’t think so. I think they feminized her. Columnist and leading Hillary-basher Bill Kristol called the show of emotion stagecraft. But Clinton has been assiduously self-feminizing since Cookiegate, and anyone who’s paid attention can tell the real from the crocodile tears; these were authentic. Why, then, did she move so many women this time? My guess is they, too, were tired; and they saw in Hillary their own frustrations in the relentless, maybe futile, effort of balancing femininity and humanity. Let’s just say, feminism’s work is never done.

Still, feminism has knocked down some of the most rigid of gender’s strictures. For proof, look not at Hillary Clinton but at her Democratic opponent Barack Obama.

So far, Barack has suffered none of the personal scrutiny Hillary has. He is, as she admits, one likeable guy. But is he presidential? If he is, it’s not in the mold of any of his rivals. Obama is not a war hero like John McCain. He is not a Christian patriarch like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. He’s not even a wise and world-weary father figure like Bill Richardson. He is not, in short, conventionally, presidentially masculine.

Indeed, I’d argue the quality that makes Barack Obama likeable — and potentially electable — is that he is not a particularly manly man. His youth makes him charismatic, but his is the youthful charisma of a generation that embraces metrosexuals and daddies with Snugglis. He is sexy, but he doesn’t swing his dick to prove it, like the strutting Dubya or the molasses-mouthed Bill Clinton or even like Obama’s hero, that other philanderer, Jack Kennedy. (The effect of this laid-back sexiness isn’t all pretty. It may also mitigate racist terrors among white men of the mythic hypersexual African.)

Hillary still must walk a skinny path between being a woman and looking like a (read: male) president. We’ve come a long way — she’s on the stump — but the story of her campaign would not be out of place in that Emo binder.

Meanwhile, the decades since the second wave of feminism have only broadened the emotional field for male politicians. One indicator: Since 1972, when an errant tear sank Edmund Muskie’s boat, the roster of presidents and presidential hopefuls who have wept includes Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Mitt Romney.

On this field, Obama is free to be both sweet and steely, diplomatic and belligerent. And if he wins the White House, his wife won’t have to squeeze her tall frame into the space left by the cuddly Laura Bush. Rather, Michelle Obama will assume the mantle of a professional, egalitarian First Lady, secured at considerable personal cost by her husband’s rival.

In the fickle calculus of American sexual politics, a female candidate may never hit the perfect balance between femininity and humanity. No wonder it moves so many of us to watch Hillary try, even when she looks clumsy doing so.

But I like her best when she stops trying. When she tells the world she’s just going to be herself: a woman, like most women and men of the 21st century, who lives somewhere between the genders. One of those moments came five days before the famous tears. It was during the last New Hampshire debate, when the moderator asked her to respond to critics who say she isn’t likeable enough to win.

“That hurts my feelings,” Clinton said, her mouth assuming a moue that both transmitted her vulnerability and parodied the very softness she was being condemned for lacking. Then she laughed and added, “But I’ll try to go on.” Not going on — that is, pausing to be wounded — may be tough for Hillary. But no one in that audience doubted she’d have to try very hard to go on. They laughed with her, the girl who refuses to burst into tears at the office.

Neither Clinton nor Obama is my ideal candidate (mine would never win in America), but I’ll be thrilled to vote for either of them. At this point, I’m leaning toward Obama because I believe he is marginally better on the war. But I’m trying to calculate how gender will factor in the final contest. Obama may be different enough from McCain to beat him, if McCain wins the Republican nomination. On the other hand, that Gen-X masculinity could be crushed by the machismo of the grizzled prisoner of war. Whereas Hillary may be man enough to beat McCain.

Early in the women’s movement, some wondered whether feminism would free men first. In this election we’re witnessing one way in which it has. I don’t begrudge Obama the advantage; I much prefer his brand of masculinity to the older kinds. But let it be acknowledged: The feminism that is an albatross around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s neck is giving Barack Obama wings.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The brochure is celestial blue with wafting clouds. Its cover is darkest, suggesting a lowering storm; each successive panel grows lighter. The logo is a dove. Last week’s two-day San Francisco conference “Reclaiming Fatherhood: A Multifaceted Examination of Men Dealing with Abortion” clearly hoped to move men in a heavenly direction.

But the presentations’ titles — “Forgiveness Therapy with Post-Abortion Men”; “Trauma and Abortion: When Men Hollow”; “The Masculine Side of Healing” — hint at the first task facing this gathering and the crusade of which it is part: to make men feel hurt by abortion.

“Reclaiming Men,” which was organized by the National Organization of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing (NOPARH) and funded by the Catholic Knights of Columbus and the San Francisco Archdiocese, was billed as the inauguration of a new anti-abortion ministry — the rescue of “male victims of abortion.” Announced at the National Right to Life convention in June, the campaign is already gaining steam. YouTube features several anti-abortion videos aimed at men, which share an elegiac tone and a heavy reliance on fade-ins and fade-outs. Many anti-choice websites now include sections on “other victims” of abortion, besides the fetus and the woman. According to NOPARH, the would-be baby’s siblings experience survivor guilt; cousins, aunts and uncles grieve. Even friends of an aborting woman may turn inward or engage in “serious risk-taking behavior,” hauling around “a burden of concern” for years.

The addition of men to the casualty list is only the most recent stroke in a broader anti-choice strategy. After a decade of equivocal progress using a sin-and-punishment rhetoric, the Christian Right took a page from modern psychology: They translated sin into psychological illness, trading in a punitive tone for a compassionate one.

Thus, in 1981, a new affliction was born — “post-abortion syndrome,” or PAS, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder following abortion. Its symptoms include anxiety, depression, flashbacks and suicide. If women before were made to feel bad — ashamed and guilty — about having abortions, PAS allowed them to feel only sad. No longer murderers, they were now the victims of a murderous society that places expediency and economic gain above the welfare of women, children and families. If you remove the Right’s named perpetrator of this immorality — feminists — it’s a cultural critique not unlike feminism’s.

The “discovery” of PAS dovetailed with the construction by conservative evangelicals of a sort of parallel universe to the secular practice of psychotherapy. Within a church movement that stresses a direct, emotional relationship with God, Christian counselors applied to troubles from adolescent disaffection to sexual dissatisfaction a mixture of New Age philosophies, addictionology, Bible study and prayer, as well as conventional psychological techniques and language. Many secular therapists, especially psychoanalysts, eschew connecting their patients’ distress to phenomena outside the self or the family — medicalization, the view that psychological problems result from chemical or hormonal imbalances, is the most extreme form of this trend. Yet Christian therapists have no trouble diagnosing their clients’ misery as symptoms of the social and moral scourges they are politically committed to eradicating: pornography, “promiscuity,” feminism, homosexuality and abortion.

Already, “pornography addiction” and the “disorder” of homosexuality could pull men into their offices, but post-abortion syndrome lay more or less outside the male psyche. If a kinder, gentler approach worked with women, why not exonerate men, too, who were long portrayed by anti-choice forces as seducer-abandoners abetted by abortion law?

Like loaves and fishes, the books, workshops and weekend retreats with the words men, abortion, and healing in their titles began to multiply.

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Post-abortion syndrome is not a medically recognized disorder. The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association do not recognize it, and PAS is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact, a large body of data strongly refutes the notion that abortion raises the risk of depression, drug abuse or any other psychological problem any more than does having an unwanted pregnancy — or, for that matter, a baby.?

Still, grief is historical. In medieval times, parents did not generally grieve the death of human infants, since so many babies died. Could they have predicted the proliferation of 21st-century “pet-loss grief support” institutions, including funeral homes, where Americans mourn the deaths of their dogs and fish as profoundly as those of their parents? Grief is permitted — you might say encouraged — within certain cultural contexts. Research shows that women whose religions condemn abortion — and one in five pregnancy-terminators fall into this category — are most likely to suffer psychologically afterwards. Even if PAS is caused by the Vatican and not by vacuum aspiration, it is real for some women.

Will men agree to succumb to post-abortion syndrome? Their numbers on marches and in clinic-bombing arrests indicate that men constitute a substantial portion of anti-abortion activists. But the role they play is heroic, manly: protecting innocent women and children from the evil abortion merchants. Victimization, on the other hand, is feminine; even grief is a little sissified.

The lost-fatherhood ministers seem to have thought through this gender problem. “These guys are in crisis,” Gregory Hasek, a licensed family therapist and director of the Misty Mountain Counseling Center in Portland, Oregon, told the Right to Life convention about the men in his practice. “They don’t hold up signs saying, ‘Hi, I’m post-abortion,’ but one of the pains in their lives is abortion.”

That pain, Hasek implied, is related to the theft of their masculinity. “God created the need for men to get up and care for women and children,” he continued. “Women look to men for decisions. Women often equate sex with love and choose love from a man over having a child.” In other words, sensing the man doesn’t want a child, a woman may choose to abort — and that implicates the man in the sin of killing the fetus.

If the woman ends the pregnancy without consulting him, the man can suffer PAS without guilt — and in a hairy-chested way. “Men use anger as a way of processing grief,” explained Hasek, who was also a headliner at “Reclaiming Fatherhood.” “Abortion makes a lot of men angry, and the men who are kept out of the decision are the angriest. They need to talk about what it would have meant for them to have had the child.”

Reporting on Hasek’s talk in the newsletter of the think tank Political Research Associates, Eleanor Bader noted, “To hear him . . . tell it, the country is filled with men longing to be fathers” and “deadbeat dads are rare birds.”

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In this, the lost-fatherhood ministry is like the rest of the men’s movement, whether the guys are singing hymns with the Promise Keepers or beating drums with Robert Bly. Aside from a few pro-feminists, not many talk about their brothers on the lam. More commonly, they resent the bad rap the deadbeats give men in general, which they believe accounts for an unjust pro-mother bias in divorce court. Even if men want custody of their children, say “father’s rights” activists, judges won’t give it to them. And the epitome of fatherhood denied is abortion unilaterally procured.

Although conservative Christians male and female claim never to have met a baby, born or unborn, whom they didn’t want to take home, other men’s rights activists are equally peeved about the opposite situation: Legally powerless to intercede in a woman’s decision to bring a pregnancy to term, men are nevertheless held to paying child support once the kid is born. Writer Cathy Young summarized this concern: “Women have reproductive rights, and men have reproductive responsibilities.”

Considering this asymmetry in 2005, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum floated a proposal: “If abortion is to remain legal and relatively unrestricted — and I believe it should — why shouldn’t men have the right during at least the first trimester of pregnancy to terminate their legal and financial rights and responsibilities to the child?” This sounds reasonable to me, if the man could prove in court that he hadn’t been with the program at the start and only belatedly got cold feet.

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The scant research on the subject suggests that, at least within committed couples, most decisions to have or not have a baby are made jointly. But the law protects rights and apportions responsibility when consensus can’t be reached. Who decides? That is the fundamental question of abortion law and, by extension, about having children, too. Daum did not dream up her opt-out clause randomly; Samuel Alito was undergoing his Supreme Court confirmation hearings at the time, and she was responding to his opinion, as a circuit court judge, that spousal consent for abortion was OK.

Thinking about Alito, the lost fathers of Christendom start to make me nervous. What happens when they no longer feel satisfied with a therapeutic shoulder to cry on? When reclaiming fatherhood turns toward legal efforts to reclaim fathers’ “God-given role” of family patriarch?

We pro-choicers are absolutists for a reason: Abortion law is all about slippery slopes. So let’s imagine sliding, shall we? The Roberts court rules spousal consent constitutional. After a while, an unmarried boyfriend sues, claiming unequal protection, and boyfriend consent gets the go-ahead, followed by sperm-donor consent. Eventually, Roe is overturned. Doctors — and maybe women, too — are convicted of murdering fetuses. Judges start adding years to their sentences based on the victim impact statements of bereaved fathers. Then legislatures encode payback for paternal grief in mandatory minima. The scarcity and danger of illegal abortion increase.

And, once again, women’s bodies are crushed under the law of the father.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Say the word and emotions rush forth. I’m not just talking about the love and guilt that moved 152 million Mother’s Day cards off the shelves last year. As an email from Jane Williamson of Ferrisburgh’s Rokeby Museum reminded me, motherhood is more than personal. It’s symbolic, religious . . . and political.

“The original call for Mothers Day was as a day of peace,” Williamson wrote. Its founder was the suffragist and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who broadcast her “Proclamation for Mother’s Day” in 1870.

“Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage / For caresses and applause,” declared Howe. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn / All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. / We, the women of one country, / Will be too tender of those of another country / To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Women’s peace movements still echo these sentiments. Anti-Vietnam War women reprised the Lysistratan refusal to make love with warriors, with a more sex-positive spin: “Girls say yes to boys who say no” (to the draft). Earlier, in 1961, Women Strike for Peace assumed the mantle of child-savers in calling for a nuclear test ban. Their “Pure Milk, Not Poison” campaign publicized the radioactive element Strontium 90, which would be released by nuke tests into soil, and then grass, cows, milk and children.

This Mother’s Day, Code Pink is evoking a sisterhood of mothers, beyond nation or ideology, whose breasts beat as one in resistance to violence. The Pinks are writing letters to Laura Bush, “to appeal to her own mother-heart” to ask Hubby to bring the troops home from Iraq.

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If your response to Code Pink’s tactic is, As if, you have located the crack in the theory that women have a special instinct, and therefore a special responsibility, for peacemaking.

Back in Howe’s Day, this idea was unproblematic. Everyone, including women, considered the two sexes to be different species. A female body, they thought, rendered every woman naturally nurturing and home-loving: potentially a peacemaker.

Modern feminism, or one strain thereof, smashed that assumption. This strain — cultural critic Kate Stimpson called us the “minimizers” of gender — insist that men and women are more alike than different, and biology isn’t destiny. If woman is not born but made, then woman and man can be remade, by history.

On the other side of the divide are the “maximizers,” who argue that women are essentially, and extensively, different from men. What to do with the difference? Reclaim it from denigration, celebrate and use it in activism, art, spirituality or sex, often separate from men.

Now, minimizers know, too, that women’s social position does make us different. With rare exceptions, such as Condi Rice, we’re barred from the rooms in which foreign policies are crafted and wars prosecuted. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with all things domestic, from laundry to education. You don’t have to be a fan of wymmin’s music festivals to want to promote the homely values that are trampled at the front lines. Besides, there’s fine antiwar imagery to be found around the house: In 1981, women protesting the installation of U.S. cruise missiles at England’s Greenham Common disabled a military vehicle by sticking a potato in its tailpipe.

You can also reject the idea that having a womb makes you peaceful — or assigns you the job of peacemaker — while recognizing that doing motherhood may teach peacemaking skills. The feminist Sarah Ruddick argued that mothers’ daily resistance to hurting the small, powerless and often annoying creatures in their care constitutes a practice of nonviolence. Mom could teach the U.N. a thing or two, Ruddick suggested.

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Julia Howe’s “The Proclamation for Mother’s Day” may seem a curious emanation from the pen that produced “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” only eight years earlier. With its “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” its “Hero, born of woman, crush[ing] the serpent with his heel,” and the rest, the Hymn is hardly “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

But Howe’s life was long; she joined nearly every monumental political struggle of America’s 19th century. The wife of a man who may have helped finance John Brown’s insurrection, she wrote the Hymn to embolden Union soldiers to “die to make men free.” Then, surveying the post-war devastation, she disavowed violence as a political solution.

In the 1890s, Howe abandoned pacifism to support the Armenians, who were being slaughtered by the Turks. She died in 1910. Perhaps World War I would have changed her heart again, as that imperialist bloodbath birthed a new internationalist pacifism.

Howe, incidentally, had six children. Motherhood made her neither belligerent nor pacific. Or maybe it made her both.

Other cultures embrace this contradiction. Kali, the Hindu mother goddess, is both life-giver and destroyer; she wears a necklace of skulls on her blood-smeared breasts. The Aztec Earth goddess Coatlicue, about to be slain by her progeny, popped another son from her womb to whack his wicked siblings. Cybele, the incestuous Greek deification of Mother Earth, had an all-male cult that culminated its rituals of dancing, drumming and sword-clanging with self-castration, cross-dressing and the assumption of female identities.

I leave you to deconstruct that last one. But if Cybele’s pagan trannies were trying to get into a peace group, they needn’t have removed their testicles at the door. Men, said Ruddick, can “mother,” and end wars, too.

So let’s find another date for Julia Howe’s day of peacemaking. After all, isn’t Mother’s Day supposed to mean less work for mother?

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.