American Foreign Policy and Women’s Rights

Abstract

In the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq, feminist scholars have been quick to assess the increasing references and seeming importance of women’s rights in US foreign policy. A substantial body of scholarship has emerged which has critiqued this linkage between women’s rights and US foreign policy.¹ Emily Rosenberg has surveyed the efforts of the Bush administration and the US media to publicise the position of Afghanistan women in advance of the US invasion.² Jan Jindy Pettman has similarly argued that the use of women’s rights in US justification of invasion in Afghanistan drew on a ‘familiar romance, an international triangle, our men setting out to rescue their women from their men’.³ More broadly, the association of the promotion of women’s rights with a neo-conservative agenda of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is part of a recent association of women’s rights with aggressive US military intervention. Journalist Virginia Heffernan adroitly identifies the position of ‘Feminist Hawks’, who make a specific link between the rights of women, particularly in Muslim countries, and a US project of regime change, advocating, ‘the use of force to liberate Muslim Women from persecution and the burka’.⁴ Phyllis Chesler, proud to be described as the ‘godmother’ of the Feminist Hawk ideology, has succinctly described her position, ‘As a feminist, I have long dreamed of rescuing women who are trapped in domestic and sexual slavery against their will with no chance of escape.’⁵