Moral engagement depends on moral agency—both inhibitive moral agency (refusing to let others push one into immoral behavior) and proactive moral agency (actively pursuing moral goals even in the face of threat and danger). For generations, women have expressed both forms of agency in anti-war poetry.
Julia Ward Howe, in her poem “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” recommends inhibitive agency when she first tells women,
“Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.”
Howe invokes proactive agency in the conclusion of her poem when she urges women to gather together:
“To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.”
Poems have a remarkable power to promote compassion and empathy. See these expressed in the work of a marvelous anti-war poet of the Vietnam era—Denise Levertov—in this YouTube production.
Can inhibitive moral agency promote peace? Listen to the magnificent Palestinian American woman, Suheir Hammed, tell you what she won’t do (“kill for you”) in her poem, “What I will” (shown above).
Does this poem leave you feeling energized and motivated to resist the war machine?
Can women poets take on generals, Presidents, Pentagons to reject the propaganda and the evils of war? Read “The low road” by Marge Piercy.
We think you will answer “Yes” to both questions.
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology
