Conclusion: Women's Agency & Voice in War Reconsidered

Summary

Looking Back

Feminist arguments

This study of women in Chiweshe illuminates our understanding of women's participation in revolutionary wars. My engagement with revolutionary resistance was grounded in the explanatory theses of peasant/guerrilla relations arising from the liberation war in Zimbabwe and in the bittersweet narrative of women's participation and the transformation of gender relations through revolution that has emerged from feminist writings. I highlighted the limitations of these approaches by providing a full and critical account of women's participation in, and experiences of, revolutionary struggle. My critique called for a gender analysis that explored the lives of women in revolution and the difference between them. In the specific context of the liberation war, I challenged the meta-narrative of revolutionary resistance as romantic nationalism through the differentiation of peasant consciousness and the problematisation of women's experiences that were noticeably absent or not fully explored in their own right.

The importance of context in understanding the complexity of women's consciousness and agency contributes to feminist analysis and understanding. Women's revolutionary consciousness is revealed in this study as a differentiated series of political and personal understandings of oppression and change. This moves us beyond the restrictive explanations of women as victims or heroines of war or occupying public or private space in terms of war-related activities. The assumed causal relationship between the roles women take up in war and revolutionary political consciousness is substantially weakened by the differences found between and within women who performed such roles in the liberation war in Zimbabwe.