March 6 and 7, 2003
Jan Maher combined the study of theater education and neuroscience for her Ph.D. from the Union Institute. She now teaches at Heritage college鈥檚 Seattle extension campus. She visited Milwaukee to direct a recent performance of her musical, Most Dangerous Women, which documents the international women鈥檚 peace movement.
On Thursday, March 6 and Friday, March 7, the Center for 21st Century Studies, in conjunction with the Center for Women鈥檚 Studies, sponsored performances of Most Dangerous Women as part of 鈥淲ar and Gender/Gender and War II.鈥� After the Friday morning performance, Maher participated with Susan K. Kent of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Rose Daitsman, 51猎奇 emeritus, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, 51猎奇 Professor of History and Director of the Center for Women鈥檚 Studies, in a panel discussion of the play.
Most Dangerous Women consists of peace songs and speeches, mostly by women, in a narrative structure of headlines beginning with World War I and the founding of the Women鈥檚 International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1915. Maher wrote the play and produced the first performance to celebrate the 75th anniversary of WILPF in 1990.
On Friday afternoon, Susan Kent gave a lecture entitled, 鈥淎t a Loss for Words: British Responses to the Ibo Women鈥檚 War, 1929-1931.鈥� She described events in Nigeria, then a British colony, in which women protested a proposal to tax them. They demonstrated at the office of the local colonial administrator, singing, baring their breasts, and using other sexually provocative gestures and acts. Troops dispersing the crowd fired shots, killing roughly 30 women. Eight more drowned in the resulting melee.
Kent noted that these events received virtually no coverage at all in the English press, in sharp contrast to the Amritsar massacre in India only ten years before. Borrowing from the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, Kent suggested that many Englishmen, especially colonial administrators and other officials, suffered a significant fear of dismemberment — return to the 鈥渃orps morcel茅e鈥� of early infantile development in Lacanian theory — as a result of the trauma of World War I. The sexual aggressiveness of the Ibo women鈥檚 protest, in this view, triggered that fear, leaving Englishmen speechless.
