Elise M. Boulding
Encyclopedia
Elise M. Boulding was a Quaker sociologist, and author credited as a major contributor to creating the academic discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies
Peace and conflict studies
Peace and conflict studies is a social science field that identifies and analyses violent and nonviolent behaviours as well as the structural mechanisms attending social conflicts with a view towards understanding those processes which lead to a more desirable human condition...

. Her holistic, multidimensional approach to peace research sets her apart as an important scholar and activist in multiple fields. Her written works span several decades and range from discussion of family as a foundation for peace, to Quaker spirituality to reinventing the international “global culture”. Particularly of note is her emphasis on women and family in the peace process.

Elise Biorn-Hansen was born in Oslo
Oslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...

, Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 but moved to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 while still an infant. She and her family were greatly affected by the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 and the German invasion of Norway
Occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany
The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany started with the German invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, and ended on May 8, 1945, after the capitulation of German forces in Europe. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht...

. Elise became strongly convinced by living through the WWII years that violence was not the answer to the world’s problems and that if even her peaceful homeland was at risk, violence was truly a systemic world concern. In her youth, she became active in anti-war activities and converted to a historic peace church, the Religious Society of Friends
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...

 (Quakers). It was at a Quaker meeting that she met her future husband, Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993), a highly respected English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 economist who would collaborate extensively with Elise on her peace work.

The Bouldings raised five children, with Elise serving as both homemaker and activist. Her writing on the foundations of peace would reflect her valuation of women, children and family in the peace process. She believed the family unit, and especially the role of women within that unit, was crucial to the global peace movement. After working at Iowa State College (where she received her Masters degree in Sociology) and at the University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...

, she and Kenneth were invited to become Scholars in Residence at Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

 after Elise completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

. While at Dartmouth, she chaired the Sociology Department and developed the nation’s first Peace Studies program there. She is credited with greatly advancing the academic study of peace through her work at Dartmouth.

Boulding held many leadership positions in peace and social justice related groups, from chairing the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to creating the International Peace Research Association
International Peace Research Association
International Peace Research Association is a peace research organization founded in 1964. It is member of the International Social Science Council.-History:...

 (IPRA) to work with the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 through UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 and the University of the United Nations. She is considered to be one of the most influential peace researchers and activists of the 20th century. On June 11, 2000 the Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, Massachusetts
Sherborn, Massachusetts
Sherborn is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is in area code 508 and has the ZIP code 01770. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, the town population was 4,119. The assessed value of the town for the fiscal year 2005 is $1,008,146,994....

, awarded Elise Boulding with the Courage of Conscience award.

The Religious Society of Friends

Boulding’s Quaker faith played a vital role in her focus and development as a sociologist and peace activist. She found the Religious Society of Friends in young adulthood, but did not have a particularly religious upbringing. Though there was a church near her childhood home that had services in Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

 (her family had emigrated from Norway), her family did not attend. Her father would read the story of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 from the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 on Christmas Eve, and she knew the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian all her life. Despite the lack of structured religion in her youth, she claims she felt the presence of God as a young child, and when she was 9 years old she began attending a local Protestant church on her own. She developed a relationship with the minister’s wife, who served as a spiritual mentor of sorts for the young Elise. In her teens, however, she recalls a longing to know “god” (she often used a lowercase g in referring to God in her personal writings) but felt that “no religion can quite fulfill [her] needs, so [she] will make [her] own religion”. She also was strongly influenced by her mother, who in Norway had been involved in peace parades and was a social worker for girls who worked in Norwegian factories. Elise shared her mother’s nostalgia for Norway, and always thought of her homeland as a “safe place” until her last year of college when the Nazis invaded it. It was then that she embraced pacifism, and began attending Quaker meetings that she had been introduced to by college friends. She decided that if “safe places” were to exist in the world, she would have to work for them, and this was her calling as a Friend.

Soon after becoming a Quaker, Elise met her husband Kenneth, who was also a Friend. He was an accomplished academic economist, international peace researcher, and poet when the couple met, and Elise names him as her strongest influence throughout her life. Together they moved to different universities and colleges where Kenneth taught and began a family. All the while, Elise was involved in different peace organizations, such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was established in the United States in January 1915 as the Woman's Peace Party...

, and also introduced peace studies to public schools. Out of these experiences, Elise focused on the networking of international religious and/or peace organizations and education. She wrote several pamphlets on the Quaker educational philosophy. The Religious Society of Friends does not separate the spiritual and secular worlds, and see God as being present in all people.

Elise viewed listening as the key to advancing world peace and nonviolence. She published numerous works and gave frequent talks on this and related subjects. It is what she strove for in the many Friends’ organizations and newsletters she contributed to or developed, among them the American Friends Service Committee
American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee is a Religious Society of Friends affiliated organization which works for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world...

 and the Committee on Friends Responsibilities in Higher Education and Research.

The Theory of Peace as an Everyday Process

A major theoretical focus for Boulding was the idea of peace as a daily process. She challenged the idea of peace as a dull, static process and advocated for a concept she termed “peaceableness.” Her work emphasized “personal and interpersonal promotion of peace.” This peace theory involved shaping and reshaping understandings and behaviors to adapt to a constantly changing world and sustain well-being for all.

Boulding felt in order to accomplish peace, one must review the history of conflicts. No two human beings are the same and as a result conflict becomes an integral part of any social order. Struggles and conflicts over politics and religion have always been a part of society but the world’s expanding interdependence makes it necessary to promote openness and flexibility for the sake of coexistence. Peace culture welcomes differences, recognizing them as potential sources of conflict, but also as a starting point for progress. By reviewing the history of conflict, Boulding noticed that two groups in society were underrepresented who could address this new perspective on peace, especially beginning on the micro level of the family unit.

Women and children are vital and under appreciated players in the peace process. Boulding felt children “gentle” the human species. By this, she meant that adults respond to children generally with affection and compassion. She argued that it is crucial to long-term societal changes that children be involved. She felt that from the youngest of ages children should be socialized to approach conflicts and problems critically and non-confrontationally. Women, being mothers, have a great influence in setting the foundation for this peace culture by teaching their children.

“…We’re never going to have respectful and reverential relationships with the planet- and sensible policies about what we put in the air, the soil, the water – if very young children don’t begin learning about these things literally in their houses, backyards, streets and schools. We need to have human beings who are oriented that way from their earliest memories.”

Women’s role in history and the Peace Process

Boulding’s book The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time, first published 1976, explored the changing roles of women from Paleolithic
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...

 times to the present. She attempted to understand what she described as women’s “underlife” and men’s’ “overlife” in social roles. Boulding likened modern women’s roles to that of inmates: the household imprisons them and expects them to be “on call” at all times to provide for their husbands and children. Women are, in a sense, stripped of their identity, autonomy and privacy and considered “under” their family and husbands.

However, this needs not always be the case, Boulding asserts. In hunter-gatherer
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...

 communities female-male relationships were egalitarian. Men’s work was dedicated to hunting, providing about 20% of the food. Women, on the other hand, provided the other 80% of the food through gathering and capturing small game near their campsites; they were also what Boulding calls the ‘breeder-feeders,’ producing and feeding the family. In these communities, women thus filled the triple role of ‘breeder-feeder-producers'.

As communities moved from hunting/gathering to agricultural communities, women’s and men’s roles further differentiated. Women stayed close to where the crops were planted while men continued to hunt. Men were now away hunting for days while women stayed in the same spot. Men’s mobility allowed them to acquire a body of knowledge about distant places and people which women lacked. As men began to trade with other communities, women’s work was further devalued: men were able to supply their produce to other villages and gain otherwise unavailable goods in return.

Trading led to urbanization: men moved to jobs in cities, while women stayed at home with the family. This created a differentiation between women’s and men’s spaces: women’s space was private (dedans), men’s was public (dehors). When women eventually entered the wage market, they did so with unequal wages because their role in society had been devalued on the family level to the private sphere.

Historically there have been various alternatives to the familial roles for women: celibacy
Celibacy
Celibacy is a personal commitment to avoiding sexual relations, in particular a vow from marriage. Typically celibacy involves avoiding all romantic relationships of any kind. An individual may choose celibacy for religious reasons, such as is the case for priests in some religions, for reasons of...

 (monasticism
Monasticism
Monasticism is a religious way of life characterized by the practice of renouncing worldly pursuits to fully devote one's self to spiritual work...

), beguinage
Béguinage
A béguinage or begijnhof is a collection of small buildings used by Beguines. These were various lay sisterhoods of the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 13th century in the Low Countries, comprising religious women who sought to serve God without retiring from the world.-Description:A...

 (female urban secular communes), hermitesses (isolated single women as sages/healers) and vagabonds. However, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these roles disappeared because they were often seen as threats to a male-dominated society (as in the case of hermitesses accused of witchcraft and murdered).

The Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 and Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 furthered male domination through discoveries about the nature of man and men’s organizations, creating individualism and less concentration of the family.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries women worked to gain power and move from the dedans to the dehors. Women started to recognize the fictions of male guardianship and many rebelled. Boulding considers the foundation for peace to be empowering women to deconstruct a history of patriarchy and devaluation and reconstruct truly equality, appreciating certain differences, between the sexes.

The Role of Family in the Peace Process

Boulding claimed that families are the “practice ground for making history”. Boulding emphasizes family as the environment that grounds individuals for all their future endeavors. As a family sociologist, Boulding believed in the inherent worth of every child. This belief stems from her devotion to Quakerism. (See below) From her own experience as a mother, as well as the knowledge she acquired through research, Boulding developed an ideology that places importance on the influence children have on the greater society. She believed that children would be co-creators of a reformed visionary future if adults would accept their influence. Boulding believed that within the dynamics of a family parents must take their children seriously, listen and converse whole-heartedly, and finally fully accept their ability to influence parents own social imagination

Boulding has a collection of writings, but none represent her views on the importance of family quite as well as One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist. This writing of hers represents in a most complete sense, her thoughts on families, parenting and the important relationship that exists between the family, God and the individual’s Quaker worship. She also emphasizes the importance of the “personhood of children”, the acknowledgment of time in solitude, and the need for interactions across age gaps

Boulding suggests that networking and partnerships built between men, women and children are what will cultivate the peace culture.

“We must look towards societies that set a high value on nonaggression and noncompetitive ness, and therefore handle conflicts by nonviolent means. We can see how child rearing patterns produce nurturing adult behaviors.”

Building a Global Civic Culture

Boulding offers Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent as a holistic first step towards solving international conflicts. She envisions a “global civic culture” as not simply made of nation states but as a global community of human beings. The book enforces the idea of thinking globally on a microcosmic level to facilitate solving problems in a peaceful international order. Boulding believed that a civic world order could become a reality, while acknowledging the strife that exists now. "Building a Global Civic Culture" is geared toward addressing the world’s problems and offering ideas for solutions.

To create peace, Boulding believes that we must all become teachers and develop new learning communities. Everyone, old and young, will teach. Age groups will teach each other from their respective generations. How we perceive events unique to our generation shapes the lens through which we each see later events. We need to know what the world looks like to young and old alike. Boulding believes all will be teachers.

In order to do this, we must learn to think outside of the box. Humans are intuitive, creative animals with cognitive-analytic reasoning abilities. We as human animals can grasp complex wholes from partial sets of facts. Boulding states that for most of us, education has been tied to the maxim “stick to the facts, no need for imaginative thinking.” We are taught in school that imagination and intuition are virtues of the daydreamer, not the true student. To the contrary, Boulding states we need to harness both intuition and imagination to solve world crises. Ultimately this book encourages us to become both teachers and problem solvers and includes exercises to lead the way.

Works

  • The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (New York, NY: Halsted, 1976)
  • Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1988)
  • One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist (Philadelphia, PA: Pendle Hill Press, 1989)
  • Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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