First of all, the passage from Three Guineas in which My Country is the Whole World appears, is excerpted on p. 130. It expresses the idea that it is as outsiders that women have a special perspective on war and the institutions of war. Wolf means "outsider" in the sense of not privy to the councils of war. She also sees women as outsiders in the sense of outside positions of power within the main institutions of society - economic, political, educational, and ecclesiastical. Those institutions, Wolf argues, of private property, the church, the university, the family, have not been successful in preventing war.

On the contrary, through their acquisitive materialism and their hierarchies of rank and distinction, they have promoted the greed, competitiveness, and readiness to use force that give rise to war. By virtue of their distance from that power, women have less of a stake in the wealth, the pomp and circumstance, and the military glory of any country. Owing to their lack of power, women have not yet been corrupted by it; and from that position of powerlessness, they have the capacity for disinterested appraisal.

Cynthia Enloe, a contemporary feminist political scientist represented in the anthology, shares the view that women as out siders have a heightened critical consciousness.

Today women are acutely aware of the potency of officially sanctioned myths . Women therefore can be especially effective in challenging NATO. We can go beyond challenges to NATO's budget expectations and weapons strategies. We can question the basic assumptions about "Common interests." "team play" and "threats" without which NATO would dissolve (p.208).

But to give voice to independent opinion, critical of the prevailing justifications for war, a woman had to have economic independence, said Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas. and the Cambridge Women's Peace Collective agree. In their Introduction, they observe that "Those [women] who have achieved sufficient independence to speak their own minds have been few . . ." (p.4).

What militates against women's economic independence are the structures of dominance and subordination that are fundamental to patriarchal society; above all the pattern of male dominance and female subordination. Indeed, in Woolf's view, this pattern pervades society, both public and private, with the tyrannies of the private realm inextricably linked to the tyrannies of the larger world. The male's privileged access to the public sphere is premised on his assignment of women to domestic labor in the private sphere, just as men's dominance in the home is premised on women's exclusion from or restricted access to the world of paid work.

According to Woolf, it was this sexual and hierarchical division of labour which fundamentally gendered dominance as masculine and subordination as feminine. Furthermore, these social constructions of femininity and masculinity were what Wolf saw as so problematic and, like many thinkers excerpted in this book, so dangerously related to war. As anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, "The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness" (p.133).

The enormous risk that lies in the possibility of the head of state of a nuclear power projecting his image of himself as manly, and the requirements of manliness, onto the nation are sharply pointed out by the Pakistani Huma Ibrahim. According to a recent speech of hers, the President of the United States, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust because he believed that his "country's Manhood was at stake." Ibrahim calls that "concept of manhood demented ..."(p.223).

But if masculinity as currently constructed is problematic, so, in Wolf's view and that of many in this anthology, is femininity, for the two are functionally interdependent. This notion is elaborated, by Wolf and by many contributors to My Country is the Whole World, in conjunction with the view that women are not merely passive victims, but active, morally responsible agents. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf's feminist treatise of 1929, she wrote that "mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action" (the mode of expression of "unmitigated masculinity") and that women have for centuries been serving ''as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

In Three Guineas she called on women to withdraw that mirror from the brother (or father or husband or son) eager to go to war and maintain toward him instead "an attitude of complete indifference. " Barbara Deming agreed and wrote that women will have to stop "collaborating with the evil in men by supporting their egos" (p.l94).