During the first Gulf War in 1991, the first major United States battle since the Cold War, Desert Storm, occurred and Gerry Milligan was a first-year in college. Back then, the United States government was seriously considering reinstating the draft. Milligan remembers how he sat in his small, cramped dormitory with his roommates, and how one of his roommates burst into tears at the thought of fighting in the war. “I don’t want to go to war,” his friend said, “I don’t want to die.”  

Gerry Milligan is now Dr. Milligan, Ph.D., director of the Honors Program at the College at the City University of New York, Staten Island. As Milligan explained to the students packed into the DiMenna-Nyselius Library Multimedia Room for his Nov. 12 presentation on “Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature”, this moment is what sparked his interest in what would later become a major research project on war and gender. Even as a college first-year, he wondered why it was that men were supposed to fight and women were meant to be protected?

As Milligan explained during his talk, the modern debate over women’s roles in war mirrors the first sustained debate in 16th century Italy. During the 1500s, Italy was invaded by France, and men were blamed for the loss. After this loss, there were two camps of belief: Plato and his followers who were in favor of women fighting in wars, and Aristotle and his followers who were against women fighting in wars.

Plato believed that, in a just city-state, men and women should share responsibility because it would be a waste to have women purely in the domestic sphere, so military defense should be a shared duty. In contrast, Aristotle, in his “History of Animals,” wrote that women were “timid and weak and should not fight” in wars. As Milligan said, Plato and Aristotle’s opinions and beliefs were seen as scientific fact in their day.

After discussing Plato and Aristotle, Milligan moved into a discussion of women warriors during the Italian Renaissance, such as Joan of Arc and Catarína Sforza, an Italian noblewoman who was the Countess of Forlì and Lady of Imola. In 1531, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a story about Catarína Sforza that continues to survive until this day.

Machiavelli wrote that, in 1488, conspirators captured Catarína, her children and her mother. Catarína convinced her captors to let her go inside her castle, and they let her go because they had her children. She marched to the top of the castle wall, and declared that she would not give her castle away. “Besides,” she said, “I can have more children.” This powerful statement convinced the captors to give her back her children, and they eventually left the castle. Due to Catarína Sforza’s strength and courage, she was able to successfully stop these invading conspirators.

No historian has ever been able to find any truth to this story about Catarína, yet this remains a lasting myth in her legacy. At the end of his discussion, Milligan concluded that he favors “literary discourse over historical discourse,” as the importance of literature lies in people’s reactions to the events depicted in literature, regardless of whether or not they were actually true. Stories of female warriors were popular in the Italian Renaissance because they dealt with the duality of gender roles, showing how a woman can be simultaneously strong and vulnerable at the same time.

After his presentation, Milligan was asked how the discussion of women, gender and war in the Italian Renaissance influences us today.

“I think that the conversation about women’s inability to fight in the war in combat, hasn’t changed for 2,000 years,” Milligan said. “Whether women can, that aspect has changed, but the conversation about why they shouldn’t fight, it’s the exact same statements from 2,000 years ago. Why? That’s what we need to think about.”

 

About The Author

Contributing Writer

Mimi Loughlin is a recent graduate of Fairfield University, where she majored in English/ Digital Journalism.

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