“W” Stands for Women: Feminism

and Security Rhetoric in the

Post-9/11 Bush Administration
Michaele L. Ferguson
University of Colorado, Boulder

Feminist criticisms of the Bush Administration distinguish its feminized security rheto-
ric, which claims to support women’s rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, from its actions at
home and abroad, which undermine hard-won gains for women. This distinction between
words and deeds obscures, on the one hand, the tremendous progress that feminists
have made in framing women’s rights as an issue that ought to be taken seriously and,
on the other hand, the way that this rhetoric is itself a significant form of political
action: It aims to influence how Americans will conceptualize the struggle for women’s
rights. I correct for these problems by developing a political theory of what I call the
“framing effect” of rhetoric—its power to shape our worldview. Frames, I suggest, are
related to one another dialogically: They build on one another by transposing old rhe-
torical frames into new contexts. The Bush Administration draws on existing feminist
rhetoric, but transforms it by combining it with two other kinds of discourse: a rhetoric
of chivalrous respect and a rhetoric of democratic peace. I show that in both rhetorical
frames, the Bush Administration bases its concern with women’s rights abroad upon
the presumption that the women’s movement in the United States successfully achieved
its goals long ago. My analysis of how current security rhetoric frames women’s rights
can help us to understand both how the Bush Administration is able to use feminist
ideas in new and nonfeminist ways and how we in turn might redeploy the Bush rhet-
oric so as to challenge the presumption that women at home already enjoy their full
rights.

The author would like to thank Karen Zivi, Jill Frank, Alison Jaggar, Iris Young, the editors and
anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender, as well as fellow panelists and audience members at the
Midwest Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, and the Center for Values
and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder for their comments. She would also like to
thank Steve Chan for his encouragement. This project was funded, in part, by the University of Colo-
rado at Boulder Graduate School CRCW Small Grant.
Published by Cambridge University Press 1743-923X/05 $12.00 for The Women and Politics Research
Section of the American Political Science Association. © The Women and Politics Research Section of
the American Political Science Association. Printed in the United States of America.
DOI: 10.1017/S1743923X05050014

9
10 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

[T]he worldwide advancement of women’s issues is not only in

keeping with the deeply held values of the American people; it
is strongly in our national interest as well.
—Secretary of State Colin Powell, March 7, 2002

S ince 9/11, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric on national security

has been sounding more and more feminist. The invasion of Afghan-
istan in 2001 was justified not only in terms of the war on terror but also
in terms of restoring the rights of women mistreated under Taliban rule.
The U.S. government has openly supported the codification of women’s
equality and participation in both Afghani and Iraqi interim govern-
ments and constitutions, on the grounds that women’s inclusion in these
emerging democracies is essential to our national security. The U.S. Mis-
sion to the United Nations sponsored Resolution 58/142, which was
passed by the General Assembly in December 2003 and expresses a com-
mitment to women’s equal political and economic participation around
the world based on its importance to international security. Arguing for
these policies, Bush Administration officials sound almost indistinguish-
able from feminist activists.
Feminists have responded to this new security rhetoric in two ways.
Not surprisingly, many feminists are cynical. They have dismissed the
rhetoric as mere rhetoric, noting that the Bush Administration has a
pattern of saying it supports women’s rights, while at the same time it is
actively dismantling feminist political gains, especially in the areas of
reproductive health, AIDS policy, and violence against women.1 One
commentator has referred to this as “stealth misogyny” (Goldstein 2003).
This disjunction between rhetoric and reality has led numerous femi-
nists and others to be deeply skeptical of the administration’s increasing
use of feminist rhetoric to support its policies abroad.2 The concern is
that the Bush Administration is not actually committed to women’s equal-
ity and rights, but has cynically used this rhetoric to increase support
for its foreign policy and to win reelection by appealing to women voters.3

1. For a sampling of feminist views on Bush, see the collected essays in Flanders 2004c.
2. For example: “Even though Bush used Afghan women’s rights to drum up support for his war,
this did not lead to a sustained commitment to Afghan women” (Bunch 2002).
3. “Bush has feebly attempted to use feminism to justify invasion [of Iraq], fantasizing that a
‘democratic’ Iraq would show ‘that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Is-
lamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond.’ But feminists aren’t buying
it; few see reason to hope war will relieve the miserable condition of the Iraqi people, women in-
cluded” (Featherstone 2003). She is quoting here from Bush 2002. Laura Flanders examines the
cynical use of women within the Bush Administration in her book (2004a).
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 11

What is surprising is that a coalition of feminist groups—the Center

for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), the Feminist Majority, and
the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)—
has greeted the Bush Administration’s rhetoric on women and security
with praise. In their periodically updated “Global Women’s Issues Score-
card on the Bush Administration,” they have given the administration
grades for its rhetoric about women in Iraq and Afghanistan that have
risen from Bs and Cs in August 2003 to a peak of straight As in March
2004.4 In their most recent report, the grades for rhetoric range from A
(for “Women in Political Decision Making in Afghanistan and Iraq”)
down to C (for “Women’s Security in Afghanistan and Iraq”). Yet even
they have been deeply skeptical of the administration’s willingness to
act accordingly. The Global Scorecard’s grades for what they call the
“reality” of the Bush record on women’s issues in Afghanistan and Iraq
are strikingly lower than those for the “rhetoric”: Its grades here have
been consistently Ds, Fs, and Is for “incomplete.” 5
It is my contention that neither of these responses is adequate to a
feminist analysis of the Bush Administration’s feminized security rheto-
ric. Both reactions rest on a distinction between words and deeds that
obscures the very political work that words do in framing how we see
the world.6 For example, when we dismiss the Bush Administration rhet-
oric as a cynical strategy to get votes, we overlook how it is an indica-
tion of the success that feminists have had in altering security rhetoric
in recent years. The Bush Administration’s use of feminized security
rhetoric is only possible now because feminist and other peace activists
have been struggling for decades to reframe how political actors con-

4. The grades fell for the first time to a mix of an A, a B, and a C in June 2004, the last date for
which there is a report (Center for Health and Gender Equity, Feminist Majority, and Women’s
Environment and Development Organization 2004a). The Web page is designed to mimic a child’s
report card. This site also reports on the Bush Administration’s performance in other policy areas, in
which notably it has scored less well. Most significant of these are issues having to do with popula-
tion control and women’s reproductive health, as well as CEDAW—the Convention on the Elimi-
nation of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In these areas, the Bush Administration has
earned grades of C, D, and Incomplete for its rhetoric.
5. Center for Health and Gender Equity, Feminist Majority, and Women’s Environment and
Development Organization 2004c. In August 2003 and again in March 2004, the Iraq reality re-
ceived an I for “incomplete.” When Iraq has been grouped together with Afghanistan, the reality
has always received D and F grades.
6. It may be that these feminists are not actually committed to the idea that words are not deeds,
but are simply using this idea for political purposes. Even in this case, I would argue that this is
politically problematic for feminists because this rhetoric aims to shape how others should under-
stand the Bush Administration in terms of words vs. deeds. Regardless, then, of the assumptions
these feminists make about the ontological status of words, their own rhetoric performs a separation
of words from deeds that I consider to be problematic for reasons I discuss here.
12 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

ceptualize security (Blanchard 2003; Grant and Newland 1991; Peter-

son 1992; Tickner 1992, 2001). Over the past decade, we have witnessed
signs that their activism is beginning to have an impact. In 1998, the
International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia set a prec-
edent that found rape to be a war crime. In 2000, the UN Security
Council passed Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace, and Security,”
which draws an explicit connection between women’s rights and inter-
national security. Now, the officials of the most powerful government
in the world seem so conversant with this feminized security rhetoric
that their words often appear to be indistinguishable from those of fem-
inist activists. Even if we accept the claim that the Bush Administration
has been using this rhetoric only to get votes, we should still see this as
a sign of the progress feminists have made: A neoconservative adminis-
tration believes that feminized security rhetoric is viable enough to attract
voters—unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. If we dismiss the rhetoric as
mere words, then we fail to appreciate the work feminists have done to
make the connection between women and security sound reasonable
and mainstream to our contemporary ears.
Similarly, when we praise the rhetoric of the Bush Administration
for being feminist, we risk missing the work that this rhetoric is doing to
frame women’s rights in a particular way. This is why I refer to it as
feminized, rather than feminist—to leave open the question of whether
what sounds at first to be feminist rhetoric is indeed so. As the diversity
and contention within feminist scholarship demonstrates, there are many
different ways of arguing for women’s rights, each of which brings cer-
tain political issues to the foreground while others recede to the back.
When we simply accept that this rhetoric is feminist, we stop asking
critical questions: How is it feminist? How does it frame women’s issues?
How does it shape which issues appear salient and which do not? How
does it constrain and limit possible discursive responses?
Neither of the responses that has emerged so far provides the analyti-
cal tools necessary to think about how rhetoric works, since each partici-
pates in the myth that words are not also deeds. Accordingly, we end up
with a Manichaean set of alternative evaluations: Either the language of
the Bush Administration is feminist (and therefore gets good grades), or
it is a cynical co-optation of feminist ideas (and therefore must be re-
jected). However, when we think about the framing work that rhetoric
performs, it is impossible to read this as either an unqualified success or
a complete failure for feminism. By shifting our attention to framing, I
hope to open up space to consider successes and failures where we did
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 13

not think to look for them before. I want to appreciate how the Bush
Administration rhetoric is a particular kind of response to the growing
influence of feminist ideas about security—and as such, it represents both
a failure and a success.
In the following section, I situate my argument within the interdisci-
plinary literature on framing. I then analyze the Bush Administration’s
feminized security rhetoric by showing how it draws not only on feminist
ideas about women’s rights but also on discourses of respect for women
and democratic peace. I conclude by making some suggestions about
how these two feminized frames have shifted the terms of discourse on
women’s rights in the United States, and how feminists might effectively
respond in this climate to the administration’s policies on women at home
and abroad.

FRAMING REALITY
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own real-
ity. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you
will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you
can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s
actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.
—A senior Bush adviser in a 2002 interview
with Ron Suskind (2004)

I assume in this analysis that how issues of women’s rights and equality
are framed matters—and it matters even more when the framing is being
done by the spokespeople for the world’s most politically, economically,
and militarily dominant state. Rhetoric is never merely rhetoric; it con-
structs a particular (if incomplete) worldview that enables us to see cer-
tain connections, yet occludes others. Like a picture frame, the rhetorical
framing of political issues shapes and contextualizes the perspective of
the audience.
This idea of “framing” has been theoretically elaborated in a number
of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and political science.7
While scholars have not reached consensus about how precisely to de-
fine the term, they converge on the basic idea that frames are concep-
tual structures that enable us to make sense of information by selectively

7. Two interesting attempts to survey and synthesize the insights of these different fields are Ent-
man 1993 and Pan and Kosicki 1993.
14 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

presenting it from a particular viewpoint. This concept primarily has been

used to explain how journalists frame stories in mass communication
(Iyengar 1991) and how surveys frame questions in social science re-
search (Kahneman and Tversky 1984), although the concept broadly un-
derstood has relevance to a variety of applications. For example, Robert
Entman describes framing as a feature of “a communicating text” (1993,
52). This suggests that the analysis of framing may be helpful for under-
standing speeches, protest signs, literature, advertisements—in short, any-
thing that we can characterize as a text.
The empirical literature on framing confirms my contention that
frames do matter because they affect audience perceptions.8 However,
this does not mean that when issues are presented to us in a particular
way, we simply adopt that perspective uncritically. Rather, as research-
ers have noted, we respond to frames on the basis of our existing per-
spectives.9 Accordingly, we should not expect that the Bush Admin-
istration, nor any other source of framing discourse, will succeed at
imposing a single perspective on its audience. Different people will
respond to the same framing rhetoric in different ways.10 Drawing on
this work, I characterize frames as constructions that enable a particu-
lar view of the world but do not guarantee that audience members will
adopt it.
While to this extent I follow the general trends of the literature, I also
add to it an account of an aspect of framing that has been largely under-
theorized: its dialogicality.11 Rhetorical frames are introduced into an
existing discursive context in which other frames are already operative.
Like interlocutors in a dialogue responding to what the other says and
how it is said, agents attempting to frame an issue respond to the framing
discourse that has preceded them. This response is neither identical with
nor wholly unrelated to what has come before. Rather, it makes use of

8. The clearest examples of the impact of frames on audiences are found in research on surveys.
Numerous studies have shown that how a survey question is asked—that is, how the problem is
framed—can significantly affect responses. See Kahneman and Tversky 1984; McClendon and
O’Brien 1988; Schuman and Presser 1982.
9. For example, Pan and Kosicki write that frames “will interact with individual agents’ memory
for meaning construction” (1993, 4). See also Entman 1993, 53.
10. One surprising finding is that “political knowledge and sophistication, whether narrow or
broad, do not insulate one from the effects of framing . . . but rather seem to promote framing
effects” (Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997, 235).
11. I should note that I do not expect that my theoretical addition of dialogicality would be con-
troversial to many scholars of framing. Indeed, some research seems to presuppose certain elements
of dialogicality as I present it here: that framing rhetoric takes place in an existing context, and that
it shapes options for the future. Nonetheless, to my knowledge these aspects of framing have not
been explicitly theorized until now.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 15

and redeploys existing modes of discourse. Indeed, even where a frame

is intended to construct an entirely new issue for an audience, it is intel-
ligible as a frame only insofar as it builds on narratives and ideas already
in currency.12 We might think of this in terms of how William Sewell
has described human agency: as “the capacity to transpose and extend
schemas to new contexts” (1992, 18). In political discourse, we use exist-
ing rhetorical frames, but we also transform them as we apply them to
different situations.13
Furthermore, influential framing rhetoric does more than just respond
to what has come before: It also shapes the discursive context to which
future actors will have to respond. Clever framing disarms opponents
by making likely lines of attack seem illegitimate or morally question-
able. Consider how opposition to Senator Eugene McCarthy’s witch-
hunt was immobilized for a long time by the rhetorical threat of being
named un-American. Or consider how opponents of abortion reframed
their position as pro-life, a frame which has the effect of placing pro-
choice activists on the moral defensive. Even the most hegemonic of
discourses never completely forecloses alternatives, but it does help to
shape the terrain for resistance. Accordingly, attention to dialogicality
shows that framing rhetoric does work, not just by placing limits on
how we view the world but also by placing limits on how our interloc-
utors may respond to our worldview.
This dialogical understanding of frames can help us to analyze the
Bush Administration’s feminized security rhetoric as a kind of political
action that aims to shape how Americans think about women’s rights. It
accomplishes this by drawing on an already existing feminist rhetoric of
women’s rights. However, I hypothesize that the Bush rhetoric on women

12. This idea does find articulation in the literature on framing in the idea of “cultural reso-
nance.” This is the notion that frames must resonate with “words and images highly salient in the
culture, which is to say noticeable, understandable, memorable, and emotionally charged” (Entman
2003, 417, emphasis in original).
13. In this way, frames that aim at opposing worldviews may not be mutually exclusive: One
frame may transform and thereby co-opt the discourse of another, blurring distinctions between
them. This is an important feature of framing discourse that is often occluded by the neatly opposi-
tional examples used in the literature, which give the impression that there are always only two
possible ways to frame an issue. The classic case of this is Kahneman and Tversky 1984. Nelson,
Oxley, and Clawson also give an example of this while discussing different ways of framing the
conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1997, 222). This dyadic thinking sometimes seems to be a feature
of our thinking about framing: Competition over how to frame an issue or a situation is often de-
scribed as if there are only two competitors. For example, Entman writes, “Successful political com-
munication requires the framing of events, issues, and actors in ways that promote perceptions and
interpretations that benefit one side while hindering the other” (2003, 417, emphasis added). I can
see no reason to presume that such competition will always be restricted to only two parties.
16 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

is not a straightforward repetition of feminist discourse (whether cynical

or sincere); rather, it represents a different way of framing women’s is-
sues. We should not presume that just because this rhetoric often sounds
familiar, it is necessarily feminist. The Bush Administration, as I argue
here, makes use of existing discourses of respect, democratic peace, and
feminism; yet it alters each of these discourses by combining them in
novel ways and extending them to new contexts. Accordingly, we should
not assume that the administration’s use of the rhetoric of women’s rights
will look exactly like preexisting modes of feminist discourse: We should
expect to find differences.
However, many political actors might attempt to reframe women’s
rights without achieving any results. What makes the Bush Admin-
istration’s rhetoric worthy of study is the likelihood that it has had and
will have significant influence over how women’s rights and equality are
framed. This is likely since, at least within American public discourse,
the Bush Administration has enjoyed a kind of hegemonic authority to
set the terms for discussion of women’s rights and status—because of its
access to media, political, and budgetary resources. While this authority
is not unchallenged, we can expect that the executive branch has the
opportunity to shape how many Americans think about women’s rights
and feminist issues.14 In particular, as a right-wing administration with a
reputation for social conservatism, the current government may have the
capacity to influence citizens who would not give credence to argu-
ments for women’s rights coming from feminist organizations or leftist
politicians. While there is no reason to suppose that the Bush Adminis-
tration rhetoric will be uniformly influential on Americans, there is rea-
son to suppose that it can have some effect on how many citizens view
their world. The coalition behind the Global Scorecard, for instance,
has seemingly accepted this rhetoric as feminist.
When we examine the Bush Administration’s words from the perspec-
tive of framing, then it is clear that these are not mere words but, rather,
a form of political action—one that aims to change how we think about
women’s rights. Consequently, separating criticism of words from criti-
cism of deeds, as many feminists have done, is an ineffective response.
We need to reveal that these words are deeds—that the Bush Administra-
tion is engaged in the very political act of shifting the discursive terrain
for women’s rights. As the official quoted at the beginning of this section

14. Entman 2003 makes a similar argument about the influence of the administration in framing
9/11 and the war on terror.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 17

states, “we create our own reality.” Insofar as this is the reality in which
feminists now find themselves, we need to analyze its logic as fully as
possible. Accordingly, in the remainder of this essay I engage in interpre-
tive analysis of the Bush Administration’s feminized security rhetoric in
order 1) to reveal how it frames women’s rights, and frames them in a
way that is different from what came before; and 2) to contest it by iden-
tifying what kinds of responses it renders ineffectual and what kinds it
enables.

A METHODOLOGICAL NOTE

Before turning to the analysis of the Bush Administration’s rhetoric, I

should clarify the methodology I have used to identify it. First, by the
term “Bush Administration” I mean to refer to a collection of individuals
in prominent positions in the executive branch under President George
W. Bush: These include Bush himself, First Lady Laura Bush, cabinet
members, and other top executive branch officials and political advisers.
I focus on the leadership because I assume that of all the people working
in the administration, these few will have the greatest access to the me-
dia to convey their message, and they will be perceived as the most au-
thoritative by their audience. In short, I expect the leadership of the
administration to have the greatest influence on how citizens frame their
world.
I take the statements of these officials as indicative of the position of
the administration as a whole. I do not presume anything about the
intentions of any particular individual, about whether he or she is a
sincere or cynical advocate of women’s rights.15 I find it reasonable to
suppose that most if not all public comments made by these people
have been approved as representing the position of the administration:
They are spokespeople for the administration and so can reasonably be
expected to be expressing a somewhat coherent, consistent, and coor-
dinated position on the issues—regardless of their individual motives or
beliefs about the language they use. Indeed, the rhetorics used by these
officials are consistent enough that it is either extraordinary chance that

15. I find it entirely plausible to believe that some (if not all) among the Bush Administration do
believe in the importance of women’s rights in and of themselves, rather than simply as a rhetorical
tool to achieve policy and electoral goals. The question, then, is—regardless of their intentions—
what is the effect of the particular way in which they frame women’s rights and its relation to na-
tional security?
18 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

they are so coordinated or they really have intentionally coordinated

with one another.
This feminized security rhetoric has become commonplace in the
administration, so much so that it is typical for an official who gives a
speech about American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan or about the
U.S. policy of promoting democracy around the world to draw the con-
nection to the pursuit of women’s rights. Accordingly, I have focused
my attention here on speeches and other texts that are focused on
women’s issues or that announced new policies or initiatives regarding
women. These include a variety of official and public documents pro-
duced throughout Bush’s first term in office, from both before and after
September 11, 2001. I have examined documents posted on white-
house.gov, the official White House Website (such as speeches by the
President and the First Lady, policy reports, and press briefings); op-eds
and other opinion pieces written by members of the Bush Administra-
tion; interviews and quotations reproduced in the media; and other pol-
icies and public speeches available from additional sources (such as
former UN Ambassador John Negroponte’s speeches before the Secu-
rity Council).
The majority of these texts are attributed to President Bush, Laura Bush,
or former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The most surprising absence
from these texts is Condoleezza Rice, who served as National Security
Adviser during Bush’s first term in office. As a woman in charge of national
security, we might suppose her to be an obvious choice to be a spokesper-
son for this rhetoric. However, where she has talked about the relation of
women’s rights to national security, it has been only as a passing refer-
ence in a speech focused on some other matter (e.g., Rice 2002). She is
often mentioned in speeches as an example of the success of women’s
rights in the United States,16 but she was never the one who introduced
any new policies or initiatives on women. Rather, Laura Bush is the
woman who most frequently represented the administration on women’s
issues. Rice’s relative silence about women may be due in part to her role
as National Security Adviser. For example, at the G-8 Summit in 2004,
she attended the meetings, while Laura Bush hosted a separate event about
women’s issues for the other wives of world leaders (Rice 2004).
However, having Laura Bush be the primary female spokesperson for
women’s rights may also be a strategic choice on the part of the admin-

16. This was a part of Laura Bush’s stump speech on the 2004 campaign trail. As a sample, see L.
Bush 2004.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 19

istration.17 Whereas Dr. Rice is a single, childless, and ambitious career

woman, Mrs. Bush is a wife and mother who quit her job to raise her
children. She has evidenced no career aspirations at odds with those of
her husband. Through her role as First Lady acquired by virtue of her
marriage to the president, she literally embodies the notion that women’s
primary identification should be with her family. Consequently, she seems
comparatively nonthreatening as an advocate of women’s rights since
her personal choices to date seem to correspond with relatively tradi-
tional gender roles.

TWO RHETORICS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS

When I began to examine how the Bush Administration was framing

women’s rights issues in relation to national security, I realized that there
is not one but multiple rhetorical strategies at work. This is because Bush
and his spokespeople draw upon different preexisting discourses to express
a commitment to women’s rights: first, a discourse of chivalrous respect
for women, which reinforces the administration’s contrast between the civ-
ilized world and the barbaric Taliban and Hussein regimes; and second,
a discourse of democratic peace, which reflects the administration’s pol-
icy of seeking to build democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. I distinguish
two different rhetorics, corresponding to these discursive sources. While
these rhetorics are often used separately, they are also frequently deployed
in the same speech or statement. Consequently, I feel justified in treating
them as if they are each different components of the same overall framing
strategy.
These two rhetorics share one very important feature in common: They
both position Americans as superior to some particular others in terms of
their treatment of women; accordingly, both rhetorics motivate and jus-
tify intervention in other countries in the name of women’s rights. How-
ever, whereas the rhetoric of democracy clearly positions women’s rights
as a national security concern, the rhetoric of respect draws no similar
connection. This is significant because it means that, in the current po-
litical climate in which national security is of prime importance, the
rhetoric of democracy is much more rhetorically powerful in making
women’s rights a central (rather than a marginal) concern in U.S. for-
eign policy. I treat each of these rhetorics in turn.

17. This conjecture is supported by the fact that none of the other women in Bush’s cabinet
during his first term acted as spokespeople for women’s rights.
20 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

The Rhetoric of Respect

Respect for women is a Bush Administration foreign policy
priority.
—“U.S. International Women’s Initiatives Fact Sheet,”
March 8, 2004 18

There was little discussion of women’s rights by the Bush Administra-

tion before September 11.19 Women’s rights were generally mentioned
only on ceremonial occasions celebrating women (e.g., G. W. Bush
2001e), they were usually mentioned by Laura Bush rather than her
husband, and they were mentioned as an achievement that had suc-
cessfully occurred in the past.20 The primary message of these early
speeches is that women’s rights have already been achieved in the United
States; gender inequality no longer exists. Insofar as women’s rights are
today only imperfectly enjoyed, this is simply a function of a lack of
enforcement of the existing laws.21 No new laws, no new rights are
necessary. Consequently, the women’s movement is always referred to
in the past tense—women struggled once upon a time for their rights,
and inequality is a matter of the past (G. W. Bush 2001e; L. Bush 2001b).
Suffrage is an achievement that we should all be proud of, but there is
no continuing need for women to organize and struggle for rights—at
least in the United States. Indeed, reading through the statements by
the president and the First Lady during the first 233 days of the admin-

18. United States Mission to the United Nations 2004.

19. The Bush campaign in 2000 used the slogan “W stands for women” to capture Bush’s support
for women’s rights. This support does not seem to have translated into any meaningful discourse
about women’s rights until after 9/11. See Flanders’s analysis (2004b). The slogan has also been
used in the 2004 campaign.
20. Laura Bush on one occasion says: “For our girls, women’s suffrage is ancient history. They’ve
never known the inequalities that women had to endure and overcome a couple of generations ago.
That’s why it’s so important for us to be vigilant in our remembrance, and vocal in our celebration
of women’s history—because we owe the great women in our past for the opportunities that we
enjoy today” (L. Bush 2001b).
21. Bush notes that “my 2002 budget requests increased funding for Federal initiatives to combat
violence against women and to continue the guarantees of basic civil rights and liberties for women”
(2001d, emphasis added). He also notes that women’s equality is not yet achieved, but he does so
with such a positive spin that there does not seem to be any need for activism or radical change. The
tone is one of reassurance: We are already on the right track, even if we haven’t reached complete
equality between the sexes: “More than 150 years later, we are closer than ever to realizing Margaret
Fuller’s dream. Women account for nearly half of all workers. Today, women are ‘captains’ of their
own destinies, and they will continue to help shape our Nation’s future. Women hold 74 seats in the
United States Congress, more than at any time in our country’s history, and women own more than
9 million businesses employing more than 27.5 million workers. Through their tireless service on a
daily basis, the women of our Nation have woven the fabric of families and communities. They
contribute immeasurably through faith-based and community organizations” (G. W. Bush 2001d).
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 21

istration, one might never know that the women’s movement is still
quite active.
Immediately after 9/11, this narrative of women’s rights as already
achieved in the United States appears in Bush Administration discourse
in the context of a rhetoric of respect for women. Our respect for women
at home should motivate us to care about the status of women abroad.22
This rhetoric predates 9/11, but it does not seem to have been explicitly
connected with women’s rights until afterward.23 After September 11, the
recognition of women’s rights is figured as a sign of respect for women.
Civilized nations and civilized peoples respect women, and therefore treat
them with dignity and recognize their rights. The United States clearly
respects its women since it has for almost a century now recognized
women’s rights. Afghanistan, by contrast, did not respect its women under
Taliban rule. Accordingly, Afghanistan was uncivilized and needed to be
brought under control and domesticated. This rhetorical strategy works,
then, by redeploying an existing conservative narrative of chivalry: Those
who respect their women are civilized; those who do not are barbarians.24
Laura Bush delivered a key speech that connected this rhetoric of re-
spect to U.S. national security policy on November 17, 2001, in the first
presidential radio address to the nation delivered in full by a First Lady.25
In her brief speech, Bush catalogs the horrible acts committed or threat-
ened by the Taliban against Afghani women: “Women have been denied

22. This logic of American superiority justifying foreign intervention is at work, for example, in a
speech given by Lynne Cheney that expresses the idea of respect in the language of the desert. She
stated, “The United States is a land where women are free, and we are defending the freedom of our
daughters as well as our sons against a foe that has decided that women do not even deserve to go to
school” (Cheney 2001).
23. The rhetoric of respect is tied to the Bush Administration’s faith-based initiatives. Pre-9/11, it
emerges in discussions of faith-based groups that are teaching boys to have respect for women. See,
for example, G. W. Bush 2001b, 2001c.
24. The connection between respect and civilization has often been made without specific refer-
ence to respecting women. Consider one of Bush’s major speeches in the months following 9/11:
“This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists
ruthlessly destroy it. We value education; the terrorists do not believe women should be educated or
should have health care, or should leave their homes. We value the right to speak our minds; for the
terrorists, free expression can be grounds for execution. We respect people of all faiths and welcome
the free practice of religion; our enemy wants to dictate how to think and how to worship even to
their fellow Muslims. . . . We wage a war to save civilization, itself. We did not seek it, but we must
fight it—and we will prevail” (G. W. Bush 2001a).
25. She had on previous occasions joined her husband in giving the address. While much has
been made about the historic nature of this event, it really was not a new role for Laura Bush.
Certainly the fact that she was the sole speaker performatively underscores the content of her speech:
that Americans, and the U.S. government, and the Bush Administration in particular, already re-
spect women. Indeed, George W. Bush respects women to such a degree that he will allow his wife
to perform a (relatively symbolic) presidential task in his stead.
22 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

access to doctors when they’re sick. Life under the Taliban is so hard and
repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed—children aren’t al-
lowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud.
Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by
themselves” (2001a). Yet she is quick to tell us that this disrespect is a
characteristic of the Taliban regime in particular, not of Islam in gen-
eral, which we learn is a civilized religion that emphasizes respect for
women: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women.
Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s finger-
nails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Af-
ghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those
who seek to intimidate and control” (2001a). The Taliban have shown
themselves to be uncivilized not only because they have harbored terror-
ist organizations but also because they lack respect for women.
Listening to her speech, we learn that we should therefore equate the
struggle for women’s rights with the war on terror: “The fight against ter-
rorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (2001a). We are
instructed by her model to feel a kind of instinctual, natural outrage at
the Taliban. This is what her example of having one’s fingernails pulled
out does: It elicits a visceral revulsion, a kind of Rousseauean pity at the
pain of another.26 We should do more than just feel outrage, however. We
should also speak out about it. We should speak out against the Taliban,
which is to say that we should speak out in support of the U.S. military
action against the Taliban. This is what civilized people do: Like
chivalrous knights in shining armor, they rush to the aid of defenseless
women and children everywhere: “Civilized people throughout the world
are speaking out in horror—not only because our hearts break for the
women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we
see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us. All of us
have an obligation to speak out” (L. Bush 2001a). Here the language of
respect enters the picture: “We respect our mothers, our sisters and daugh-
ters. Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression
of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a
commitment shared by people of good will on every continent” (L. Bush

26. It also suggests that one of the rights we should be fighting for is the right of women to wear
nail polish without fear of persecution. While I do not mean to trivialize the violence women have
faced for a variety of “crimes” having to do with their personal appearances, I think it is worth noting
that the crime in question here is that of conforming to a particular standard of female beauty
associated with feminine weakness and vulnerability. This example, then, reinforces the notion that
women should have the right to beautiful nails—a symbol that resonates at least in the West with
the fragile femininity that requires a chivalrous, male protector.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 23

2001a). Unlike the Taliban, we respect our mothers, sisters, and daugh-
ters. This is a sign that we, unlike they, are civilized people.
This rhetoric obviously was politically useful at the time; it helped to
demonstrate that the Bush Administration was not anti-Muslim, only an-
titerror; it also helped to construct an image of a natural solidarity among
“civilized peoples” who ought to support a U.S.-led war on terror. This
language does so not only by drawing a distinction between civilized and
uncivilized people but also by calling for a vague course of action: re-
spect for women. Laura Bush does not specify a catalog of rights that
women do or should have; she simply calls for respect. This is a language
that is not threatening to those U.S. allies who do not themselves fully
recognize women’s rights but who do claim to respect women.27 In other
words, this language of respect is only contingently connected to women’s
rights: There are lots of ways to respect women, only some of which in-
clude recognizing women as rights-bearing subjects.
However, this language of respect is also consistent with other ways
of conceptualizing women. As I have been suggesting, Laura Bush invites
us to imagine ourselves as the chivalrous masculine protectors who must
defeat the misogynist enemy and show Afghani women the respect that
the Taliban refuses them. Women are victims, vulnerable, in need of
masculinist protection, here embodied in the figure of the United States,
which is willing to intervene and protect them from the indignities suf-
fered at the hands of the Taliban.28 Women are identified with the
family: They are mothers, sisters, and daughters—rather than citi-
zens.29 They are conduits of civilization and culture: The Taliban men
are uncivilized, but there is no corresponding concern that the Afghani
women are also uncivilized. Rather than being a radical rhetoric in
unconditional support of women’s rights, the rhetoric of respect is only
contingently related to rights, and it reinscribes traditional gender roles
of chivalrous male protectors rescuing female damsels-in-distress.

27. Karen Hughes, at the time a counselor to the President, gave remarks in a press briefing that
are typical of the Bush Administration rhetoric on Muslim countries at the time. In response to a
question about the treatment of women in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, she said: “Well,
first of all, I would encourage you not to make a comparison. No other countries, for example, don’t
allow nine-year-old girls to be educated or to learn to read. And in many other Muslim countries,
women are, in fact, greatly respected. And women in most of those other countries have the oppor-
tunity to work outside the home and to be—certainly, none of those other countries forbid women
or little daughters at 9 and 10 years old from literally learning to read” (Hughes, Conlon, and Len-
kowsky 2001).
28. I take this language of “masculinist protection” from Young 2003.
29. This is, of course, reinforced by the fact that it is the president’s wife who delivers the message—
rather than the president himself, or the secretary of state or defense, or even (if it must be a woman)
a female cabinet member.
24 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

Not only is this rhetoric contingently connected to rights but it is also

only contingently connected to national security. In other words, in an
era immediately following 9/11 in which security concerns dominated
and legitimated all kinds of political programs, women’s rights were be-
ing framed in terms having little or nothing to do with security. We can
see this by looking at the September 2002 “National Security Strategy”—
the document that outlines the Bush doctrine of preemptive war. It con-
tains only three passing references to gender in 35 pages of text.30 The
most important of these is found in a list of eight “nonnegotiable de-
mands of human dignity” that the United States must “champion”: the
rather ambiguous demand of “respect for women” (2002, 3). Although
respect for women is nonnegotiable, it makes no other appearance in
the document. The message is that national security is not really related
to respect for women—or to women’s rights—in any significant way.31
The failure of the Taliban to respect women simply demonstrates how
uncivilized they are; the Taliban do not pose any particular threat to the
United States on account of disrespecting women. The fight against ter-
rorism may also be a fight for the rights and dignity of women, but ac-
cording to the logic of this rhetoric, it is simply unclear whether
supporting women’s rights would be an effective way to fight terrorism.

The Rhetoric of Democracy

Ensuring women’s rights benefits individuals and their fami-
lies, strengthens democracy, bolsters prosperity, enhances human
rights and advances religious tolerance. It is at the core of build-
ing a civil, law-abiding society, which is an indispensable pre-
requisite for true democracy. The advancement of issues of
concern to women has been a long-standing American goal.
This administration has intensified that pursuit.
—Under Secretary for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky 32

The connection between supporting women’s rights and achieving na-

tional security is made explicit in the second rhetoric: a rhetoric that
relates women’s issues to the creation of stable democracies around the

30. These include references to the importance of educating children—male and female, and to
fathers and mothers who “want their children to be educated and to live free from poverty and
violence”—the first in Bush’s introductory remarks and the second on page 3 (“National Security
Strategy” 2002).
31. Indeed, protecting women’s rights is not mentioned at all in the four action points suggested
in response to these eight demands.
32. Office of International Women’s Issues 2004.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 25

world. The framing logic of this rhetoric differs from that of respect in
several important ways. First, whereas the rhetoric of respect was only
contingently connected to women’s rights and a conception of women
as rights-bearing citizens, the rhetoric of democracy is unmistakably a
rhetoric of women’s rights. Second, this rhetoric ties women’s rights di-
rectly to U.S. national security. This has the effect of making women’s
rights an issue that (rhetorically, at least) is central to U.S. foreign policy.
This is the kind of language that has earned the Bush Administration’s
rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan good grades from feminist groups for
over a year: it is a rhetoric that takes women’s rights seriously.
As an example of this rhetoric, consider an op-ed entitled “Women in
the New Iraq.” The article was written by Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz and appeared in the Washington Post on February 1, 2004.
Wolfowitz begins by discussing a new women’s center in Iraq dedicated
to women’s rights. Soon, however, he gets to his main point: democracy.
The women he met on his recent visit to Iraq want to protect their rights.
Yet, by his account, these women want their rights not so much for them-
selves but because they understand that women’s rights are necessary in
order to create and maintain democracy in Iraq, and in order to make the
world as a whole safer. While in Iraq, Wolfowitz met with a delegation of
women leaders, who “told us that if Iraq is to become a democracy, women
must have an equal role and more women should be included in Iraqi
governing bodies and ministries.” 33 These women have numerous con-
cerns, among them being a concern “that if women are not involved [in
drafting a new constitution for Iraq], women will not be guaranteed equal-
ity under the law,” but this concern is hardly the most important one for
Wolfowitz. As he notes, “they also pointed out that we are now engaged
with Iraqis in seeking a far greater prize: a chance for lasting change in
the region that will help make our country and the world safer.” 34
Wolfowitz clearly agrees with the logic of this delegation as he reports
it. Women’s rights are not to be protected qua rights, but rather because
they are an important indicator of the democratization of a state: “A gov-
ernment that does not respect the rights of half its citizens,” Wolfowitz
continues to write in language that evokes feminists all the way back to
Mary Wollstonecraft, “cannot be trusted to safeguard the rights of any.”
It is because we need to be able to trust other governments to be demo-

33. Paul D. Wolfowitz, “Women in the New Iraq,” Washington Post, 1 February 2004, sec. B.
Emphasis added.
34. Emphasis added.
26 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

cratic (that is, to respect the rights of all of its citizens) that we need to
make certain that they recognize women’s rights. This, he tells us, is the
rationale for U.S. policy and funding to support women’s rights in Iraq.
President Bush himself, Wolfowitz reminds us, made the connection be-
tween women’s rights and Iraq policy clear in his State of the Union
address in January 2004, when he said that “our aim is ‘a peace founded
upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.’ ” 35
We can now trace out the reasoning that leads Wolfowitz to support
women’s rights in Iraq. First, it is essential to our national security that
other countries democratize. The peace that Bush refers to in the State
of the Union address is, as he himself notes, a democratic peace (G. W.
Bush 2004). In other words, the Bush Administration is appealing to a
long-standing view whose roots can be traced back to Immanuel Kant
([1795] 1991) that democracies will not go to war against one another.
The presumption made by Wolfowitz and others is that only if countries
like Iraq are democratic can we expect that their leaders will not seek to
go to war with the United States and will not harbor terrorists. Accord-
ingly, the security of the United States requires the creation of democra-
cies to replace failed and dictatorial regimes around the world. Second,
Wolfowitz’s argument rests on certain assumptions about what counts as
a democracy. Most importantly, a democracy is a form of government
that respects the rights of all of its citizens—whether male or female.
Therefore, it is in the interests of U.S. national security to support women’s
rights in Iraq in order to make sure that the new Iraqi government is
indeed a democratic one.
Women’s rights are then best understood as an instrumental good,
according to the logic of this rhetoric. They are instrumental first in
securing democracy: A state that recognizes women’s rights is a demo-
cratic state. In turn, then, women’s rights are instrumental in securing
U.S. national security. Yet the rhetoric often sounds more idealistic, as
if Americans ought to be committed to ensuring women’s rights as a
good in and of themselves. We can see this when we look at the larger
context of the quotation Wolfowitz takes from the State of the Union
address. Bush stated: “America is a nation with a mission, and that mis-
sion comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to domi-
nate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace—a peace
founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. Amer-
ica acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we under-

35. He is quoting from G. W. Bush 2004.

“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 27

stand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of
freedom” (G. W. Bush 2004).36 Here, Bush speaks idealistically of free-
dom and rights as if they are ends in themselves. Yet he simultaneously
reaffirms the realist premise that if rights are important, it is because
international peace requires the recognition of rights: Even as Ameri-
cans lead the cause of freedom, they do so with the aim of creating a
democratic peace.
In fact, it is characteristic of this rhetoric connecting women’s rights
to democracy that it conflates idealist and realist positions on rights. Con-
sider Laura Bush’s remarks on efforts to promote women’s human rights
globally on March 12, 2004: “For a stable world, we must dedicate our-
selves to protecting women’s rights in all countries. Farahnaz Nazir,
founder of the Afghanistan Women’s Association, said, ‘Society is like a
bird. It has two wings. And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken.’ With-
out women, the goals of democracy and peace cannot be achieved.
Women’s rights are human rights, and the work of advancing human
rights is the responsibility of all humanity” (G. W. Bush and L. Bush
2004).37 Women’s rights are human rights—but we must dedicate our-
selves to protecting them for a stable world.
The argument epitomized by Wolfowitz’s op-ed is only one version
of the rhetoric of democracy. I have identified three different argu-
ments that connect women’s rights to democratic peace, and it is in
these arguments that we can see the tremendous influence of feminist
activism on the Bush Administration. All three are present in the quo-
tation with which I began this section: “Ensuring women’s rights ben-
efits individuals and their families, strengthens democracy, bolsters
prosperity, enhances human rights and advances religious tolerance.”
The first argument is the Wolfowitz argument: Where women’s politi-
cal rights to vote and participate in self-government are recognized, there

36. Emphasis added. Many commentators suggested after Bush’s second inaugural speech that
he was unveiling a new direction for his second term in office: encouraging the spread of democ-
racy around the world. However, it is clear from this, as well as from much earlier speeches by Bush
and other members of the administration, that this doctrine of democratic peace was well estab-
lished long before January 2005.
37. She continues: “President Bush is firmly committed to the empowerment in education and
health of women around the world. The President knows that women are vital to democracy and
important for the development of all countries. And he has three very strong women at home who
won’t let him forget it.” Her words fill the function of reassuring the listener that George W. Bush is
committed to women’s rights both politically and personally—a part of the rhetorical strategy which
I discuss here. Her comments also paradoxically signal that the president needs three women at
home to keep reminding him of the importance of women’s rights. As with the rhetoric of respect,
Laura Bush’s remarks serve to remind us of the familial role of women, even as she is speaking of
women’s rights.
28 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

we can be assured is a democratic government. This claim is as old as

the movement for women’s suffrage.
The second line of argument takes the recognition of women’s rights—
political, social, and economic—to be necessary for sustainable prosper-
ity. As George W. Bush notes, “The economic empowerment of women
is one effective way to improve lives and to protect rights. Each year for
the past five years, the United States government has provided an aver-
age of $155 million in small loans, micro-loans. About 70 percent of
those benefit women. It turns out the world is learning what we know in
America: The best entrepreneurs in the country are women. In America,
most new small businesses are started by women. With the right help,
that will be the case around the world, as well” (G. W. Bush and L. Bush
2004).38 Entrepreneurial women, in turn, are the sign of a free market
economy, which is itself taken as a stand-in for a democratic govern-
ment. The connection between women’s enjoyment of their rights and
general prosperity—while it is not always linked to free market econom-
ics as it is here—has been well established.39 Indeed, feminist Katha Pol-
litt makes a very similar argument in her criticisms of Bush’s policies.40
The third line of argument is a bit more subtle. It connects the recog-
nition of women’s rights to a secular society—which in the context of
Afghanistan and Iraq means a society governed by secular rather than

38. Similar evidence is also cited in the UN Resolution on women’s political participation. Three
of the clauses read as follows: “Affirming that the empowerment and autonomy of women and the
improvement of their political, social and economic status are essential to the achievement of rep-
resentative, transparent and accountable government, democratic institutions and sustainable de-
velopment in all areas of life,
“Affirming also that the active participation of women, on equal terms with men, at all levels of
decision-making is essential to the achievement of equality, sustainable development, peace and
democracy . . .
“Recognizing also that women’s full and equal participation in the political process and decision-
making will provide a balance that more accurately reflects the composition of society, is needed to
strengthen democracy and promote its proper functioning, plays a pivotal role in furthering women’s
equal status, and contributes to redefining political priorities and providing new perspectives on
political issues” (United Nations General Assembly 2003).
39. The literature on gender and development shows this connection quite clearly. For an exam-
ple of arguments linking gender to various aspects of development, see World Bank Gender and
Development Group 2003.
40. Katha Pollitt’s articles in The Nation, which are critical of the Bush Administration’s policies
toward women, draw on the same kind of data. She writes, for example: “Where women are healthy
and well educated and self-determined, you can bet that men are too, but the situation of women is
not only a barometer of a society’s general level of equality and decency—improving women’s status
is key to solving many of the world’s most serious problems” (Pollitt 2002). She takes her argument
perhaps a bit further than the Bush Administration would, by arguing that aiding women also would
alter the gender inequality of the family: “Recognizing and maximizing women’s key economic role
would have a host of benefits—it would lessen hunger, improve women’s and children’s well-being,
improve women’s status in the family, lower fertility” (2002).
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 29

sharia law. Dobriansky suggests, for example, that ensuring women’s rights
also ensures religious tolerance. The institutionalization of women’s rights
is in direct contradiction with the imposition of sharia law; therefore, the
support of women’s rights and political participation is a way of support-
ing secular government, government that tolerates a variety of religions.
This, again, is a claim made by feminist activists, Muslim and non-
Muslim alike.
In all three of these logics, women’s rights are taken to represent
democracy: whether these rights signal women’s political participation,
women’s social and economic participation, or the absence of sharia
law. Indeed, the Bush Administration goes so far to connect women’s
rights and democracy that they are often treated in speech as if they
were synonymous: The one stands for the other. Speaking on global
women’s human rights, George W. Bush tells us that “[t]he advance
of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately insepara-
ble” (G.W. Bush and L. Bush 2004). And so, in his remarks, Bush
slides back and forth between talking about women’s rights and
talking about democracy, as if he is always talking about the same
thing. I quote from his speech at length to show how he constantly
shifts from women to democracy and vice versa—as if they really were
the same:
By radio and television, we’re broadcasting the message of tolerance and
truth in Arabic and Persian to tens of millions of people. And our Middle
East Partnership Initiative supports economic and political and educa-
tional reform throughout the region. We’re building women’s centers in
Afghanistan and Iraq that will offer job training and provide loans for small
businesses and teach women about their rights as citizens and human be-
ings. We’re active. We’re strong in the pursuit of freedom. We just don’t
talk a good game in America [sic], we act.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council is developing projects
to improve the education of women, and to train the leaders of tomorrow.
You heard Laura talk about her deep desire to help train women to be-
come teachers, not only in the cities, but in the rural parts of Afghanistan.
We’ll succeed. We’ll follow through on that initiative. We’re pursuing a
forward strategy of freedom—that’s how I like to describe it, a forward
strategy of freedom in the Middle East. And I believe there’s no doubt that
if America stays the course and we call upon others to stay the course,
liberty will arrive and the world will be better off.
The momentum of freedom in the Middle East is beginning to benefit
women. That’s what’s important for this conference. A free society is a
society in which women will benefit. (G. W. Bush and L. Bush 2004)
30 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

What are the rhetorical effects of equating democracy with women’s

rights in this way? To begin with, this way of framing women’s rights has
the effect of occluding the fraught relationship between real democra-
cies and women’s rights. Even a cursory look at the history of democracy
shows that there is no necessary connection between democracy and
women’s rights: Most democracies have not recognized women’s rights,
or at least have only partially done so. Furthermore, the elision of women’s
rights with democracies makes it difficult to see any tension within con-
temporary states between the realization of democracy and the realiza-
tion of women’s rights.
Bush’s words are also very reassuring to Americans. His equation of
women’s rights with democracy means that if the United States has
already successfully achieved women’s rights, then it must be a democ-
racy; and if the United States is a democracy, then it must already rec-
ognize women’s rights. He accomplishes this in his speech through a
variety of techniques. First, he begins by showing his audience that
women are present in the highest levels of U.S. government. He makes
a point of introducing all of the female cabinet members, as well as
other women serving in the administration who are present at the meet-
ing. (Three of the women he mentions are his sister, Dick Cheney’s
daughter, and Donald Rumsfeld’s wife, all of whom hold their posi-
tions arguably because of patronage and nepotism—but he shows no
trace of irony in referring to these women as examples of women’s rights
and democracy at work.) He demonstrates that women have arrived in
the United States—just look at how many of them he can show us! We
are reassured that women can rise to the top and that, therefore, we
must live in a democratic society.
Next, just as Laura Bush listed the train of Taliban abuses against
women in her radio address, George W. Bush reminds us of what women
suffered under the Taliban and Saddam Hussein—and that they no lon-
ger suffer because of U.S. military intervention. By contrast, his list of
abuses reminds us that women in America really do seem to enjoy their
rights after all. In the United States, we know that women and girls can
become educated. In the United States, women can already receive the
training to become teachers. In the United States, we do not have rape
chambers or torture chambers. In the United States, women are not forced
to wear the burka or to stay in at night. The United States seems to be an
egalitarian paradise by comparison with these oppressive regimes—what
could women have to be concerned about here? Therefore, his narrative
reassures us that women in the United States have their full rights—there
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 31

is no additional work necessary to achieve them—and consequently, the

United States must be a democracy.
Correspondingly, this narrative motivates us to be concerned about
women’s rights and democracy abroad. We are liberators, agents of civ-
ilization, progress, democracy; because we have already achieved these
things for ourselves, we must now bring them to others. In a new way,
this rhetoric lands us in the same place as does the respect rhetoric: We
need to act as masculinist protectors of women’s rights around the world.
We can see this in a story that Bush recounts of being hailed by an
Iraqi woman (and member of the Iraqi Governing Council) as “my
liberator,” just before she burst into tears. Her tears provoke laughter
from Bush’s audience—a gentle laughter. Yet when he admits that he
himself cried in response, he is greeted with enthusiastic applause.41
This is the appropriate response to the rhetoric of democracy: We must
feel compassion for those around the world who do not have rights or
democracy, and we must be motivated to bring it to them—for the sake
of national security.

SHIFTING THE FRAME

Now that we have taken a closer look at the logic of the Bush Admini-
stration’s feminized security rhetoric, we can turn to analyzing what this
way of framing women’s rights does. Recall that frames are sources of
meaning; they help us to structure and make sense of our world. Conse-
quently, the successful reframing of an issue alters how many people per-
ceive it. It creates, as the Bush official suggested to Ron Suskind, a new
reality. How we perceive “reality” in turn affects our priorities, our alle-
giances, and our decisions. So what kind of a reality is created by this
rhetoric?
I suggest that it can be captured by two narratives.42 The first of
these is a narrative of masculinist protection. We are superior to you
(because we are civilized, or because we have a democracy), and there-
fore we must take on the role of your protector. We will go to war
against those who would hurt you, and we will bring you civilization

41. A transcript of this speech is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/

20040312-5.html. A Webcast is also available from this page.
42. I take my understanding of narrative from Patterson and Monroe 1998. They describe narra-
tives as the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world. Narratives differ from frames
in that frames do not require a narrator. In other words, narratives are stories that reflect my
self-understanding.
32 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

and democracy. As Ann Tickner (2001, 57) suggests, a variant of this

narrative has long been used to motivate military forces: Men must
fight wars in order to protect innocent women and children. Here, the
feminization of the victims of the Taliban and of Saddam Hussein serves
to masculinize and justify U.S. military actions. The second narrative is
that of international women’s liberation. Women’s rights were achieved
for Americans long ago, and so there is no need for feminists to agitate
for them at home. The work to be done is to be done abroad. Even if
there are still problems that American women face—for example, sex-
ual harassment, domestic violence—these are nothing compared to the
atrocities that women suffered under the Taliban and in the rape camps
of Saddam Hussein. So our attentions are best directed toward liberat-
ing women in other countries.
Both of these narratives are problematic from a feminist perspective.
The first is troubling because it trades on notions of men as protectors
and women as victims that feminists have long criticized. In particular,
by casting the United States as a protector, it obscures the many ways
that our military actions increase the insecurity of women in the coun-
tries where we wage war and try to install democracy.43 The second is
disturbing because it undercuts the motivation for domestic activism.
Feminists clamoring for rights at home are more likely than not to be
seen as privileged whiners who cannot appreciate how good they have it,
in comparison to the brave women of Iraq and Afghanistan who struggle
against true adversity.
Yet even as the Bush Administration rhetoric frames women’s rights
in these objectionable ways, I do not believe that we should simply
condemn it, for there are also reasons to celebrate this feminization
of security. I celebrate this rhetoric not because it is feminist (as the
Global Scorecard coalition seems to think), but rather for the perverse
reason that it represents the co-optation of feminism. The Bush
Administration’s repeated insistence on its record of standing up for
women’s rights demonstrates how feminists have successfully reshaped
the worldviews of many Americans over the years. Appeals to women’s
rights are no longer treated as completely marginal, nor are they voiced
primarily by members of the Democratic Party. Rather, Bush—a
very socially conservative Republican—ran for re-election in 2004
in part on his record of pursuing women’s rights in Afghanistan and

43. Tickner 2001 describes many ways that militarization and military action increase women’s
insecurity in the stated interest of national security.
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 33

Iraq.44 As uncomfortable as some of his policies may make feminists,

we have to allow ourselves to recognize the gains we have made in
framing women’s rights as an important political issue for the Left and
the Right.
We should also be heartened by the Bush Administration’s ability to
co-opt feminist concerns, because this suggests that we, in turn, might
co-opt their concerns for feminist ends. Rhetorical frames, as I have ar-
gued, are transposable. Our worldviews are not fixed once and for all,
but may be shifted. Just as the Bush Administration has lifted elements
of feminist rhetoric to suit its own agenda, we in turn can lift pieces of its
rhetoric and redeploy them in new contexts for feminist ends. This, I
expect, is a difficult process, especially since feminist groups have con-
siderably less influence and power than the office of the president. None-
theless, I believe that we need to embrace the struggle to frame women’s
rights in a feminist way as an important political activity. This is an ac-
tivity in which many feminists are already engaged, but it is an activity
that is devalued and undermined when feminists themselves insist upon
drawing a stark division between words and deeds.
What my analysis suggests is that the more effective strategies of resis-
tance will be those that respond to and directly contest the shift in the
rhetoric of women’s rights effected by the Bush Administration. For ex-
ample, if we are told that women’s rights are instrumentally valuable for
national security, then feminists might do well to reframe their demands
in terms of security. In other words, the Bush rhetoric gives women’s
groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States a powerful lever to
use against Washington’s foreign policy. Insofar as women’s rights are
seen as instrumental to national security, they have a kind of centrality
and rhetorical purchase in the war on terror that they have not had in
the past—especially with a conservative administration. If feminists can
frame their concerns as concerns about security, they may be able to
expand their domestic audiences. The feminist scholarship in inter-
national relations on the concept of security provides an example of what
this might look like: It aims to replace a notion of state security with one

44. See the campaign’s official 2004 “W stands for women” page at http://www.georgewbush.com/
women/. The Republican National Convention in 2004 also featured a special “W stands for women”
event, at which various female family members of Bush and Cheney spoke of their record. Accord-
ing to one report, the event focused upon “boasting of President Bush’s character, his appointments
of women to high positions and his decisions to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq” (Enda 2004).
Furthermore, in the presidential and vice presidential debates, both Bush and Cheney mentioned
the administration’s achievements for women’s rights in Afghanistan. For transcripts, see Commis-
sion on Presidential Debates 2004a, 2004b.
34 MICHAELE L. FERGUSON

of personal security for women—that is, security from war, from domes-
tic violence, and from rape (e.g., Tickner 1992, 2001).45 To demonstrate
that many women in the United States lack this personal security is to
undermine the Bush logic that women at home no longer have anything
to complain about, for it reveals the continuity between our grievances
and those of the women of Afghanistan and Iraq.46 Yet mainstream fem-
inist activists in America have been surprisingly reluctant to take advan-
tage of the power of security discourse. Insofar as they have made use of
it, they do not seem to make any attempt to resignify or challenge the
dominant understanding of security.47
Another approach might be to resist the Bush Administration’s fram-
ing of women’s rights by redeploying the rhetoric of democracy. Recall
that part of the logic of this rhetoric is that the recognition of women’s
rights and the realization of democracy are equivalent. Why not take this
equation seriously and use it to examine democracy in the United States?
If a democracy is a government that recognizes women’s rights, then can
we say that the United States is truly democratic? After all, if we restrict
our notion of equal rights to political rights, American women are signif-
icantly behind women from other countries. Consider that Iraq and Af-
ghanistan have equal rights provisions written into their constitutions,
and they have quotas for female representatives that far exceed the cur-
rent percentage of women in Congress.48 The administration has sup-
ported these attempts to institutionalize women’s rights—abroad. Why
not leverage the administration’s record of supporting women’s rights in
new democracies in order to pressure it to support similar provisions at
home: an Equal Rights Amendment and legislative quotas? 49
Furthermore, we could use the rhetoric of democracy to critique
Bush’s domestic policies regarding women. Insofar as his domestic pol-
45. She also includes economic and environmental security in her resignification.
46. In fact, one of the organizations that has deployed this kind of rhetorical strategy to great
effect is the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq. For more on how this organization is
contesting the Bush Administration’s rhetoric of women and security, see Ferguson 2005.
47. The Global Scorecard is a good example of this failure to interrogate the meaning of security.
The commentary on the F that the Bush Administration received for the reality of the security
situation for women and girls in Afghanistan and Iraq distinguishes between “personal security” and
“security,” with the latter referring to a conventional understanding of security as the exercise of
sovereign authority and of the state’s monopoly over violence. See Center for Health and Gender
Equity, Feminist Majority, and Women’s Environment and Development Organization 2004b.
48. Both countries’ constitutions include equal rights statements, as well as quotas for women in
the legislatures as high as 25%. See the Global Database of Quotas for Women, http://www.
quotaproject.org.
49. Barbara Ehrenreich makes a related argument in an editorial calling on John Kerry to counter
Bush’s efforts at machismo on the campaign trail with a greater commitment to feminism (“The
New Machismo: Feminism,” New York Times, 29 July 2004).
“W” STANDS FOR WOMEN 35

icies undermine women’s rights, the logic of his own rhetoric would
suggest that they simultaneously undermine democracy in the United
States. So, for example, we might argue that the administration’s under-
funding of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) encourages the
violation of women’s rights. Since American women’s security in their
own persons is denied by a government that does not actively seek to
eradicate gendered violence, women cannot be expected to enjoy citi-
zenship equally with men. Accordingly, the United States under Bush’s
rule, while it aspires to be democratic, is actually wide of the mark.
Both of the rhetorical strategies I have only briefly outlined here re-
fuse to accept the Bush Administration premise that feminism at home is
irrelevant. Yet they do so in ways that importantly acknowledge the power
of words to shape our way of seeing the world. They contest and redeploy
the dominant framing rhetoric by transforming it anew into a rhetoric
that is feminist.
My analysis does not point to a wholly new strategy or course of
action for feminists. Indeed, it confirms the value of some of the actions
that many feminists are already taking. It helps us to understand better
why we should be engaged in rhetorical struggles over the framing of
women’s rights in relation to national security. This struggle is difficult—
but we should be heartened by the power and influence feminism has
had in framing public discourse, given that Bush clearly thinks he needs
to talk about women’s rights in order to woo women voters. We should
also be heartened by the example that the Bush Administration gives us
of how the terms of discourse can be shifted through co-optation and
transposition. Understanding that the Bush Administration’s rhetoric nei-
ther wholly embraces feminism nor completely rejects its accomplish-
ments gives us reason to be optimistic—cautiously optimistic—that we,
too, can again have a significant impact on how women’s rights are
framed, at home and abroad.

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