Silenced Majority by Tamara Bralo

One morning in 1989, New Yorkers woke up to bus billboards depicting a famous nude from an Ingres painting resting on a provocative question: ‘Do women need to be naked to get into the Met. Museum’?
The billboards were presented courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls (a Banksy before there was a Banksy;) an anonymous, iconoclastic feminist art collective offering a poignant social commentary.

Just below the question, the billboard cited statistics that clarified why the question was asked: ‘less than 5 percent of artists in the Modern Art Section are women, but 85 of the nudes are female.’  The project was part of their mission in which they set to expose – in their words - ‘systematic biases against women and people of color in the art world’, often using statistics as a prop.

The tally of these two approaches in representation of women as subjects and as objects; seems to suggest that women in art may be seen, but not heard. 

The comparison to women’s role in war may not be an obvious one, but it’s nevertheless strangely appropriate.  Here, too, statistics can help to paint a somewhat unexpected picture:  despite our perception of war as a male and militant domain, the ones affected the most are women and children. Widely cited UN and EU estimates suggest that the noncombatant death in wars of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were at about 50 percent.

The trend started changing with World War II, where two thirds of deaths were estimated to be those of noncombatants. By the end of the 1980s the figure was at almost 90 percent.  

Modern war, like modern art; portrays women as objects where both art and war are somehow bestowed on them: tacitly, without agency: women endure, they do not create or participate. And while it’s easy to see why one should argue for better representation of women in the art world, it may be more difficult to grasp why we should add women’s voices to the theatre of war. Yet, it is hardly an abstract point: viewing conflict as a domain of men, means assigning validity to a single point of view: that of a man. Without a right to a narrative of their own, women in war become a footnote in history, a picture so wildly out of focus and incompatible with the main narrative, that it is simply dismissed as an incomplete and fragmented picture of the totality of war. Like the parable of the six blind people trying to conceptualize an elephant while each touching a different part of it, our findings are so different they cannot be reconciled.

When a dominant narrative exists, any account of a different point of view is dismissed as false and therefore written out of history, denying the validity not only of perspective, but of experience as a whole.

This has significant practical consequences. As Amy Madsen writes here, because of it, any subsequent attempts at resolution of war fall under same – male - jurisdiction, as they alone claim the ‘true’ experience of it, silencing all other voices. Without expanding how we collectively perceive war, as experience that goes beyond the militarized, and the masculine; women will continue to be denied a role in creating peace.

With wars that disproportionately effect women and children, taking their stories out of history doesn’t just make the majority silent. It has been silenced.