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Lessons from the Underside:
A Conversation with Elise Boulding

Elise Boulding's endeavors have invigorated the field of peace research for many years. She was introduced to the world of social science when she married economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding in 1941. Through the years, she raised five children and earned a doctorate for her research into the effects of modernization on women's roles. Dr. Boulding is Professor of Sociology, Emerita, at Dartmouth College and was a recipient of the BRC's first Global Citizen Award in 1995. Her book, The Underside of History, contributed significantly to the emerging field of women's studies in the 1970s. More recently, Dr. Boulding has been exploring the ways in which women "make peace." The following is an abbreviated version of our interview with her conducted for the BRC by Rosemary Loomis in 1997.

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RL: As you started pursuing what you call the "underside" of history—women's history—you emphasized the idea that women's roles are not biologically determined, but rather that women's social experience has enabled them to approach peacemaking tasks in a different way. You've mentioned that women, being outside the mainstream, have a certain creative advantage. How is this so?

EB: The fact that women are not considered part of the mainstream structure or the public policy structure of society means that they are indeed outsiders, or on the underside. Because they're not invested in the way things work, they see it more clearly. I think we all recognize how that works. If we get so deeply into something, we lose our perspective—all we can see is the way we have framed it. For example, there's a certain way the issue of national security has been framed, and military defense is absolutely essential to it. Because of women's outsider role, it was much clearer to them that armies were not defending people, they were creating violence and death and they were not providing security. So I think that outsider role gave a kind of clarity to that.

I'll give you two examples of a woman's outsider perspective creating an unusual situation. During the Oslo peace process, there happened to be a husband and wife team in the Norwegian foreign office. It was the wife's idea to invite the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to their home, and their two-year-old played on the floor during the negotiations. The effect of the child's presence on getting them down the road would never have occurred to a male diplomat.

Alva Myrdal has always been one of my heroines. I was blessed in knowing her, not well, but our paths crossed enough so that I was very conscious of her life history and the way she approached raising children. She put a lot of energy into the best kind of nursery situations for young children, and then into the education of teachers. In other words, she started right at the nursery and developed her own professional understanding of each of these levels. She became thoroughly aware of how women's situations develop over their lifetimes, how they are thrust into their domestic and child-bearing role without comparable opportunities to those of their brothers. When she became a disarmament ambassador, she carried the insights from all those years spent studying how children, boys and girls, develop. Because she was an outsider, she could see things that other people couldn't see.

RL: You've said that it is important for men and women to share their "experience worlds" for the sake of human development. How do you envision this occurring? How does an outsider get to share with an insider?

EB: I would say, after all, women do manage to sometimes get into men's experience worlds more than men get into women's worlds. There's a certain initiative that women have to take. It may be easier for my generation to see this, but women have historically been rather possessive of the kitchen, the household, and the children, so there has been the circumstance of women keeping the men out. I do notice, however, that there is a broader culture change. It's very slow, but I can tell. I see more men carrying babies and toddlers than used to be true. If women want to be partners and inhabit the same world, then they have to let men into the nurturing roles. Not only that, but they also have to be willing to teach them. It takes a more conscious sharing of the birthing experience and teaching on the part of the mother.

I'm convinced that the peaceful world of the future is going to depend on most men having the same experience that most women have with infants and small children, because the kinds of things you learn by being close to a small child you don't learn any other way.

I also think that there needs to be more development of community feeling and neighborhood events. To the extent that these are intergenerational, you've got the grandparents of the neighborhood and the parents of the neighborhood and the kids in the neighborhood all sharing social space in neighborhood events. That's a shared experience world for men and women. I think we have to work at all those different levels, but it's easier not to, you see. So it takes social effort to make those things happen.

RL: Women's social efforts for peace have evolved from the early establishment of international nongovernmental organizations to more recent efforts such as the "Great Peace Journey," the women's global peace service, and the "Zones of Peace" movement. What movements today are particularly successful?

EB: This is a hard time to be asking that question because in fact the peace movement has been in a trough. We had a peak in the previous decade, but it has been in a trough recently. So I think that probably as we approach 2000, people are beginning to come back together out of all the different places they retreated to, and I think we'll have that level of activity again.

I see some steady progress in women contributing to making policy. In the beginning of the Women's Strike for Peace, they brought flowers into Congress; now they simply insist on sitting in on summit meetings and asking very tough questions—but with great sensitivity and focus. There are other examples of women's leadership that don't get characterized as movements but are very important in what's happening in our society, such as conflict resolution efforts in schools and the peer mediation movement—that's very much a women-led movement. I think these efforts have been crucial in changing the climate in communities where they are taking place, and the results are clear: kids are getting better at handling conflict.

Another movement, started by Faye Honey Knopp, a wonderful Quaker woman who has since died, is a prison visitation movement. It's a program of going into prisons and spending time with prisoners, talking and sharing and helping change their concept of themselves so that when they get out of prison, they reconnect with society.

Then I think of the important work that Pat Mische has been doing with the Earth Charter movement. There was a wonderful seminar when I was Secretary General of International Peace Research Association. In one program, I put Pat together with two other peace researchers who specialized in defense and security issues, to talk about whether environmental security was a legitimate security concern for peace researchers. The two men were arguing that it was not, and she was saying that it was central. She was very eloquent, and it was beautiful example of the women's perspective being more holistic than the men's perspective.

The big exciting newspaper headline type of women's movement is not what is happening now, but I think all of the different things that were happening in the peak period of the movement are still going on at a less visible level, and some of them are really changing the quality of community life. Changing the quality of foreign policy is harder, but there's some progress going there, as well.

RL: Are young women aware of the need for systems transformations? How can we nurture young women to join in peace-building efforts?

EB: I'll tell you one thing that really worries me about young women. I think they're more vulnerable to the sex hype of TV and our general culture. Something has spilled over into their psyches which is inauthentic, and that worries me very much. For those who are most vulnerable, this influence can make them less sensitive to social issues. But then boys are also growing into an inauthentic world of competiveness and macho, so I'm not saying it's only girls. But I think in some ways girls are more vulnerable. I don't think enough women mentor young women. Except for teachers, it's not likely that women are paying attention to the younger women, to girls, pre-adolescent as well as adolescent. That is troubling.

I once interviewed a junior high class on issues of peace and security and then had them come with me to a Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development session and tell the rest of the group what they had told me. One of their complaints was "adults never talk to us, they don't include us in their conversations about foreign policy issues." The audience was absolutely overwhelmed because they didn't believe what they were hearing. I have tried to do that in a variety of different settings, to get adults to hear what they were missing by not conversing with kids.

There are some international movements of people who do know how to partner with kids; for example, the Voices of Children. They have workshops on how to ask parliamentarians and legislators questions about foreign policy and other topics. They had an all-day session with members of the Australian parliament recently, and evidently, it was an eye-opener. And then there is another group called Rescue Mission Planet Earth, which is based in England. They have a newsletter and they get kids to start environment clubs in their schools and persuade their teachers to use materials they wouldn't otherwise use. These kinds of movements do exist, but relatively few people are aware of them, and the rest of society ignores them. That's unfortunate.

RL: You've noted that "male-dominated social structures" still provide a frustrating impediment to women's efforts, and you point to a partnership of social feminism and equity feminism as a way to effectively challenge this. What has each of these approaches accomplished, and what will an alliance of the two look like?

EB: Because of the generation I'm in, I can identify in some ways more easily with the social feminists, who came out of the previous century and the early part of this century. They recognize social injustice and the brutality of war and realize that these were social inventions that had to be stopped. Their whole energy was to work on the world, but they discovered that nobody listened to them—they didn't have a vote. So then there was this sort of awakening: we've got to do something about the status of women.

The lack of equity, the pervasiveness of discrimination against women on every level in every situation you can imagine, is absolutely overwhelming. Once you really start looking at the conditions of women, then you realize this is a huge issue that needs a lot of energy. The fact is that the vote made relatively little difference in terms of equity, so it's a much more complicated issue than just women's suffrage. In those early days, women thought if they just had the vote, everything would be all right, but the tentacles of patriarchy reach into every aspect of life and condition both men and women, and start conditioning children very early. For example, a Norwegian friend of mine noticed that the accident rates compiled by insurance companies were much higher for young men than for young women. She started observing the behavior of women caring for toddlers. She found that the women didn't rush out to rescue a boy child in trouble. If it was a girl, they were there in a minute. There was a big difference in the rearing of boys and of girls. Women helped create this world.

However, the pervasiveness of the equity problem is such that if you are a strategically committed social feminist who wants to do away with war and save the environment, you can't do it without an alliance with your equity partners. They have to work together.

RL: You make the distinction in your writing between "power with," which you call empowerment, versus "power over." What kind of empowerment will enable us to transform our patriarchal warrior culture, as you've named it, into a peace culture?

EB: If I think of it in terms of the social energies that every human being has, some of that energy goes into one basic human need, which is to bond with other people, and some of that energy goes into an opposing basic human need, which is to have one's own space. So you've got the tension between the need to bond and the need to have one's own space. Every human being and every society has to deal with that balancing.

Creative energy is released out of the right balance of this autonomy and bonding—when you are secure enough that you have your space and people respect you. When you are secure enough that your autonomy energy can meld with the bonding energy, then you want things to be good for everyone. But if you are not secure, if you are disempowered yourself, then your own autonomy becomes absolutely primary. You've just got to make your space.

A lot of people assume that humans are naturally violent just because they see this violent, autonomy-seeking behavior. But that need for autonomy does not have to express itself violently. On the other hand, the people who see bonding as the main impulse say, well, people are just naturally loving. They're overlooking the fact that people do have this need for their own space and expression of their own individuality. So I can only think the release of a "power with" rather than a "power over" comes out of recognizing the tension between autonomy and bonding, and the creative balancing of the two.

RL: What kinds of challenges have you had to overcome, and to whom have you looked for inspiration through the years?

EB: I think I'll start with my mother. We came to this country from Norway when I was three, and my mother was very unhappy here because she hadn't wanted to leave Norway. She felt America was a very materialistic society and people didn't really care much for the larger world. She use to tell me stories about her work with factory girls in Norway and talked about social care, health care, civics. I grew up thinking that Norway was the place where human beings were really at their best. I have a positive image of my mother as an activist in a country where everybody did everything right. Then I saw war movies about World War I, and they terrified me; so I developed a fantasy as a child that if ever there should be another war, I would go to Norway and be safe. When Norway was invaded by the Nazis in my junior year of college, that was a very major crisis for me. That was the point at which I became a peace activist. I realized that the world wasn't going to be a peaceful place unless I worked for it.

When I married Kenneth in 1941, I traveled with him wherever he went to give speeches. After each speech, he would be surrounded by people who eagerly peppered him with questions. I took up a little space somewhere on the outer fringes, but I was not part of the interaction. That bothered me. So I finally concluded that this was silly, that what I needed to do was to create some activities that I could do; there wasn't any point just standing on the outside of the circle. I began learning about NGOs—people's organizations—and that many organizations and churches were part of international networks, like the YWCA and the Red Cross. Each of the local groups that I started looking at and then working with were in fact part of international networks. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts particularly fired my imagination when I became a den mother. This helped push me into sociology, seeing the world as a network of people who lived in localities and were interested in making the world better. That became my role as it evolved over time.

And the people who inspired me: there was a British Quaker women, Irene Pickard, an experienced public speaker and international activist. I would hear her inspired talks and I would think, there is a person who has a place in the world where she can really work on the big issues. She was very important to me.

Then Margaret Mead and Alva Myrdal, whom I have mentioned. Margaret and I, and Alva and I, had enough encounters to really talk in depth about the things that mattered to us, so that I had a sense of the way they worked and thought. Sometimes I would be at consultations where Margaret would be vigorous participant, and she and I would have a chance to chew over the strategies that were being used in the consultation. I learned from two very brilliant and publicly able women how simply to take the place that's there, not by fighting, but by seeing something to do and going in to do it.

RL: Dr. Boulding, where are you—sociologist, futurist, peace activist, and scholar—placing your most concentrated effort now?

EB: The balance between activity and contemplation has been very important for me. The first days of my retirement involved, if anything, a higher level of activity than when I had been teaching, because I took on the Secretary Generalship of the International Peace Research Associated (IPRA), and also started the IPRA Foundation. At the same time, I got involved in a lot of peace-building activities in the Denver area. Toward the end of that ten-year period, when Kenneth was ill, I stopped everything else and we were just together. Although I've been talking about the things I have done, in fact, Kenneth and I always had closely parallel tracks, so we were always sharing what we were doing. Sometimes we traveled together, but we rarely did joint projects. We had very different temperaments. The quality of our journey together through life was a very special one, grounded in a deeply spiritual faith. We shared such a rich life. It was a very hard time for me after Kenneth died.

Then there came a day when I realized that I was what was left of us, and I had to carry on. That was when I became more keenly aware of the rising levels of violence and the inability of the UN peacekeeping forces to get things under control to create peace. I started a network of the groups I knew that were doing nonviolent, unarmed peace brigade, peace team-type work. I edited a network-creating newsletter for a couple of years. That was very rewarding but beyond what I could continue. As I came to realize that I was going to be leaving Boulder and coming here, I was able to pass on the newsletter task to an activist colleague in Bangkok, Thailand.

Peace team work in the Society of Friends seemed to me to be very important, so recently I've been working on that. These efforts came along with my awareness that in the long term we have to develop a base culture which will be a peace culture generating the kinds of behaviors that bring an end to injustice and war. Of course, there's always an interaction between structure and process, but as UNESCO was developing its Culture of Peace program and consulting with me, increasingly I came to see the importance of looking at it from the perspective of culture—how people relate to one another, how families operate, and how all our social institutions operate in terms of relating with others and dealing with difference. This approach to the process does not for a minute diminish the importance of working directly on disarmament and the many strategies for conflict resolution and peace-making. It is simply an additional approach at a different level.

So writing about peace cultures and making that agenda for people who are concerned about peace-building is my current project. Also, mobilizing interfaith communities to work globally on peace issues seems to fit very well with my main culture of peace concern.

I went to Sweden in September. The Swedish government held a conference on what NGOs can do in a nonviolent way in situations of conflict. I had a very exciting week there; they brought together a number of people who are working on peace-team efforts. So things come along and I'm trying to find the right balance. Solitude is very important and I'm blessed with having solitude here, but I can't use solitude well unless I also feel connected. It took me a while to realize that; it's just like the autonomy and the bonding. There has to be balance.

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