After Liberation
War offers opportunities for women to liberate their communities and build a better life for themselves. When women join rebel groups, they often take on new roles, cultivate new social networks, and develop new skills. These rebel women often gain the respect of rebel leaders, their comrades-in-arms, and the communities they're fighting for. When the guns are silenced, however, women have struggled to maintain the progress and prestige that they gained during war. Hilary Matfess investigates the gendered legacies of conflict and considers why it is so difficult for female veterans to defend the gains they made during war.
This book explores how both individual female veterans and former-rebel political parties balance the incentives to continue their wartime activities or moderate them to succeed in the postwar period. The particular balance struck—by party elites and by female veterans—shapes women's rights and representation after war. Drawing on cross-national statistics and in-depth qualitative case studies of rebel groups—from Ethiopia, Namibia, El Salvador, and Nepal—Matfess advances a theory to explain the postwar legacies of women's participation in rebellion at both the individual and the organizational levels. This book helps us understand why women that were once lauded as the backbone of the revolution are so frequently relegated to the backburner after war.
"Leftist rebel groups may be willing to incorporate women into their fighting ranks, but do not count of them to free women. Through an in-depth analysis of the Ethiopian civil war, Hilary Matfess unveils a disturbing truth: after liberation, as the rebel victors sought to transform their group into a broad-based electoral coalition, they sacrificed women's rights on the political altar."—Dawn Langan Teele, Johns Hopkins University
"Guerillas driven by revolutionary ideals may win their wars, but they have a mixed record of liberating their societies from patriarchy. Hilary Matfess explores the neglected question of what happens to female combatants when liberation movements transition to political parties in power. This is an extraordinarily thorough study that is destined to become the go-to reference on this topic."
—Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation
