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Elise Boulding:
Peace Researcher, Educator, Feminist and Futurist * |
Elise Boulding has been called the “matriarch” of the
twentieth century peace research movement. Sociologist emeritus from Dartmouth
College and the University of Colorado, she has been in on the ground floor
in the movements of peace, women’s studies and futures and has played
pivotal roles in each. Prior to her scholarly career, formally beginning at
age fifty, however, she was making major contributions in other areas, most
notably as a peace educator and an activist, a leader in the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and as a member of the Religious Society
of Friends (Quakers). Boulding has been the recipient of over nineteen awards
for her work in peace and was a 1990 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Boulding’s theoretical work on the role of the family in educating
toward social change, and the role women have played in peacemaking, predate
the later work discussing women’s unique capacities for connections, networking
and peace. The various stages of her life: child, student, young wife, Quaker,
activist, sociologist and scholar, retiree and elder have been bound together,
metaphorically as a hologram. Always eschewing dichotomy, her life has been
a constant attempt to integrate, both privately and in her public life, the
human needs for both autonomy and connectedness. Elise Boulding’s ideas
on transnational networks and their relationship to global understanding are
considered seminal contributions to twentieth century peace education thought.
Boulding was a key player in the beginning of academic peace studies
in the 1950s and early 1960s, continuing this work through the decades of the
1970s, when peace studies established itself as a legitimate academic discipline.
She has long advocated, often at professional peril for herself, for an integration
of peace education, research and peace activism. Early perceptions of peace
education were that it was education toward the abolition of war and that it
was an “arm” of the peace research movement. In the years following
the Second World War, and particularly in the latter part of the twentieth century,
new ideas have expanded the concept of peace education. Elise’s writings
and those of other feminist in the 1970s laid the groundwork for the work of
later educators who embraced ideas of connectedness, caring and imaging and
the importance of thinking globally and acting locally. Many of Boulding’s
ideas predated contemporary thinking on the importance of ecological sustainability
and the dangers inherent in “cultures of war.”
Elise Boulding’s contributions to peace and the grounding
she received for her subsequent theoretical work began in her early life, as
an immigrant child born to parents with high expectations, and in her marriage
to internationally known Quaker economist and poet Kenneth Boulding. Throughout
her life, Elise always used her immediate life experiences to add meaning to
her existence. She always grounded whatever she has done in the basic human
experience that begins with the child and involves the family. She, to paraphrase
a family friend, “is a person who has been able to stretch so far the
limits of human experience that she could address the United Nations with no
problem and then, in the next second, stoop to tie a child’s shoe and
be aware of the needs of both at the same time”. (Giffin, 1999)
Elise’s dynamic partnership with Kenneth Boulding together
with some of their conflicts, helped to contribute to her theoretical ideas
on cultures of peace. The grounding she received from her Quaker spirituality
has played an important role in influencing the focus and content of her work
in many areas.
In a field long dominated by men, Elise Boulding has left an indelible
mark and made major contributions to the ongoing theoretical work on peace and
social change, including the importance of linking individuals to their communities
and to the global world. Her life and work speak to the significant presence
of cultures and societies of peace, while most media attention and scholarly
publications focus on the extreme violence in today’s society. Her book
Cultures of Peace: the Hidden Side of History (Boulding, 2000) was written as
a recognition of her long time associations with UNESCO and with the United
Nations, the UN having designated the current decade (2000-2010) as the Decade
for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World.
Elise Boulding’s Contributions to Peace Education:
Some Historical and Conceptual Dimensions
Peace education is currently considered to be both a philosophy
and a process involving skills, including listening, reflection, problem-solving,
cooperation and conflict resolution.(Harris & Morrison, 2003) The process
involves empowering people with the skills, attitudes and knowledge to create
a safe world and build a sustainable environment. The philosophy teaches nonviolence,
love, compassion and reverence for all life. The Peace Education Commission
of the International Peace Research Association further clarifies the definition
to take into account both explicit and implicit peace education. (Peace Education
Commission, 1997) Explicit education, also sometimes traditionally associated
with peace studies is the processing of facts elicited from peace research.
Implicit peace education is the attempted means of approaching a peace culture
and the process of educating students toward this. Betty Reardon of Columbia
University offers what is probably the most comprehensive definition of peace
education and discusses the purpose of peace education as the promotion of the
“development of an authentic planetary consciousness that will enable
us to function as global citizens and to transform the present human conditions
by changing social structures and patterns of thought that have created it.”
(Reardon, 1988, p. x) Reardon believes that at the center must be the potential
for transformation, both inward and outward. UNESCO has defined peace education
as “international by nature, global in perspective and action-oriented
in its aspirations.” (UNESCO, 1981)
These contemporary views on peace education reflect the evolution
of the concept from the beginnings of what we now know as the current peace
movement, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. During this time peace education
was seen as the process of propagating the findings of research. Peace research
in the modern sense began in the decades following World War II with the establishment
of various research institutes for the Study of Peace. One of the first was
that established by Johan Galtung in Oslo, Norway in the late 1950’s.
These institutes were founded as independent entities because finding universities
that would support such projects was nearly impossible. The International Peace
Research Association, founded in part by Elise and Kenneth Boulding, began in
1965, an outgrowth of work done by the Quakers and the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom with funding from UNESCO. Peace research institutes
were founded in order to study war, its causes and cures. The key players in
these institutes were overwhelmingly male.
Early scholars of the peace movement recognized the inherent relationship
between peace research, education and activism. Elise Boulding, in her writings,
often has used metaphor to relate her conception of this relationship. She believes
that peace research and action can be related metaphorically to medical education
and practice. Whereas doctors train to heal patients, peace people train to
heal the world. Elise essentially makes no distinction between the importance
of peace research, education and action. Quoted in an interview in the 1990s
with Judith Porter Adams, Elise stated “My goal has been to initiate a
dialogue between the action and the research perspectives.....my mediation role
has been between peace researchers and peace activists, each of whom think the
other is failing to address the real needs of our time.” (Adams, 1991,
52) The founding of COPRED (The Consortium on Peace, Research, Education and
Development) in 1970 by the Bouldings was a conscious effort to unite these
three disparate elements.
Earlier, peace education in the late nineteenth century had begun
in earnest in the U.S. by social reformers such as Jane Addams and Fanny Fern
Andrews. Addams, as a founder of WILPF, was one of the first to make the connections
between the social conditions underlying the oppression of women and families
and the violence propagated in communities and in the world. Elise’s early
ideas on educating for peace were inspired and grounded in the work of these
women reformers.
Later evolving ideas of peace education, including its relational
and transformative potential, arose partly as a result of the women’s
movement and its influence on the field of peace studies. Feminists such as
Elise Boulding, who taught women’s studies at the University of Colorado,
were concerned about the emphasis in the peace movement, largely dominated by
males, on the technical aspects of the arms race, to the neglect of the more
human and personal consequences of violence. Boulding’s research project
on the women who participated in the Women’s Strike for Peace in the early
1960s showed that women were overwhelmingly concerned about these social issues.
Elise discussed this research in a report to UNESCO in the early 1980’s.(UNESCO,
1981)
In the 1960s there was intense discussion among academics of the
relationship between peace and feminist issues, largely lost from the earlier
nineteenth century work of reformers such as Addams and Andrews. The Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, of which Elise was international
chair in the late 60s, again took up the banner of pacifism in relation to women’s
issues. (Alonso, 1993) Connections were seen between poverty, racism, children,
ecological danger and physical, structural and psychological violence. Peace
began to be seen as a state of harmonious relationships, intra-personal, inter-personal
and inter-global.
At that time, some “second-wave” feminists felt that
peace studies was a diversion from liberation from oppressive structures. However
in the early 70s a generation of feminists came into “new ways of knowing.”
(Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986) Different ways of looking
at connectedness and it relation to nurturance and how women learn and process
moral thinking provided the grounding for the work by such thinkers as Elise
Boulding, Betty Reardon, Birgit Brock-Utne, Nell Noddings and Sara Ruddick.
Elise at this time was teaching and writing about women. Her work celebrated
women’s capacities as peacemakers, mediators and nurturers and discussed
the fact that the peace work of women goes largely unnoticed, particularly in
the developing world. She has called this part of the globe the “two-thirds”
or the “five-sixth world”, thus placing “development”
in its proper perspective. Elise was also struggling, as were many feminists
such as Jean Baker-Miller and Carol Gilligan not to exclude men in their thinking
These views of women as nurturers and caretakers and as carriers
of the values of their culture came to be seen by some, with the rise of feminism’s
third wave (postmodernism), as “essentialist.” The essentialist
position, as defined, is that women are inherently different from men in a relational
sense and that they possess characteristics such as the capacity to nurture,
to care and to connect in ways that men do not. Because of this, women are expected
to be kinder and gentler than are men. A few of her associates felt that some
of Elise’s ideas were out of touch with part of the current feminist thinking
at that time. In fact, the criticism of some of her views did not alter her
belief that men have much to learn from women, about partnering, nurturing sharing,
and connecting and she countered the critics by vehemently denying that she
was essentialist.
In 1996 Elise received the first Peacemaker of the Year award given
by the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder, Colorado. This poem
was written for and read for the occasion by the Center’s long-time founder
and director, LeRoy Moore, and in some sense may be considered a summation of
the life and work of Elise Boulding.
Elise, how do I prize you?
Is if for the breadth and depth of your knowledge?
for your wonderful curiosity?
for your love of children?
or for your great rolling laugh?
or is it that you speak for women?
or that you champion those who are despised
and misunderstood?
and what about your insistence that action
without reflection is empty
but that nothing changes without action?When I hear your name
so many words, thoughts, images come to mind-
“the 200 year present” you say we carry with us,
development, whether of the child, the global civic culture,
the economy--none really separate from the others
simplicity
sustainablity
“the family in the world and the world in the family”
play: as essential for adults as for children
--is it true that the revolution you seek
is one where you’ll be absent if you can’t play?
the trinity of thinking, feeling, acting
your challenge that we explore cracks in the technological shield
that separates us from the essential reality
of our own bodies, our own souls, our earth house
INGO, no not Bingo, but INGO:
international non-governmental organizations,
the abundance of which you have charted,
some of which you have chartered, many charged.
You remind us, Elise, in this age
when the nation-state is simultaneously
so destructive and so outmoded,
so predictable, yet so predatory-
you remind us that we already are creating.
References
• Adams, J. P. (1991). Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists.
Boston: Twayne Publishers.
• Alonso, H. H. (1993). Peace as a Woman's Issue: a History of the
U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press.
• Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women's
Ways of Knowing: the Development of the Self, Voice and Mind. New York:
Basic Books.
• Boulding, E. (2000). Cultures of Peace: the Hidden Side of History.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
• Giffin, H. (1999). Interview in Boulder, CO.
• Harris, I., & Morrison, M. L. (2003). Peace Education revised
2nd edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co.
• Peace Education Commission, I. (1997). Peace Education Miniprints.
Malmo, Sweden: R and D Group, School of Education.
• Reardon, B. (1988). Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for
Global Responsibility. New York: Teachers College Press.
• UNESCO. (1981). UNESCO Yearbook on Peace and Conflict Studies.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Additional References
• Boulding, Elise. (1988). Building a Global Civic Culture: Education
for an Interdependent World. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Boulding, Elise. (1989). One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on
Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Press.
• Boulding, E. (1992). The Underside of History: A View of Women Through
Time Revised, 2nd edition. (Vols 1 and 2). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Press.
• Boulding, E. (1995). Feminist Inventions in the Art of Peacemaking.
Peace and Change, 20, 408-434.
• Morrison,
M.L.(2005). Elise Boulding: a Life in the Cause of Peace. Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland and Co. Available at the conference with a discounted price.