U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security: Implementation and De Tocqueville

Yesterday, the White House released the first-ever National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace, and Security, complete with an accompanying fact sheet and Executive Order.  The NAP is the outcome of a process that began over a decade ago with the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which encouraged the UN and its member states to integrate a gender perspective in all aspects of peace and security. In October 2004, a subsequent Security Council Presidential Statement called on the “development of national action plans” to further implement Resolution 1325. Before yesterday, thirty-two other countries had already released their own NAPs.

The Obama administration should be congratulated for recognizing the essential role that women play across the broad spectrum of peace and security issues, and for producing a long overdue NAP that clearly articulates a strategy for translating this rhetorical vision into practice. Four quick thoughts:

It should be noted that this underrepresentation exists—and is even worse—in other fields. In 1986, President Reagan proclaimed the inaugural American Business Women’s Day. At that time, approximately 3 percent of senior corporate managers were women, and there was only one female CEO of a Fortunate 500 company (Katherine Graham at the Washington Post). A quarter century later, the appointment of women in boardrooms has only marginally improved, as women currently comprise 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs (a record high) and only 16 percent of the top corporate jobs.

In closing, I include a passage from Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which includes a chapter that purported to explain and defend the inequality that he witnessed between men and women at all levels of society. This passage is worth remembering as an extreme example of the United States in the nineteenth century, when it was widely believed that the biological distinctions between men and women were a sufficient rationale to deny the latter the right to participate in the affairs of the state, either at home or abroad. The NAP—if fully implemented—is another step towards a world that facilitates the equitable inclusion of women in decisionmaking.

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or conduct a business or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand the exertion of physical strength.