128. DEEP DIVE: Jenny Mathers on heroism, gender and war - in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
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Welcome to the War in Ukraine update from Kyiv podcast.

I'm Jessica Gnawa, a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Flinders University in Australia, and I'm delighted to be talking today with Dr Jenny Mathers. Jenny is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Aberystwyth University and is an expert in gender, security and war, with a particular focus on Ukraine and Russia. Jenny is also co-editor of the book Heroism and Global Politics, together with Veronica Kitchen.

And I'll link to that really interesting book in the show notes. In light of International Women's Day on March 8th, I'm really pleased to have an opportunity to chat with Jenny today about these issues and themes of gender, how it intersects with security, heroism, the military and war. So thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today, Jenny. Great. Thanks very much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to it.

So in times of crisis, and of course war is a very particular type of crisis for an entire society, people often look for heroes, right?

to provide them with inspiration, to provide them with hope. So could you talk a bit about that relationship between society and heroes during times of war? Sure. So one of the things that Veronica and I really argued in the book and discovered in our research is that

War and other kinds of crises can be really moments when society defines itself, moments when a society decides or a nation decides this is who we are. And you can see that really when you look at how some of the different combatant nations from the Second World War

remember themselves as part of the Second World War. So in the United States, where I'm from, there's talk about the greatest generation. In Britain, where I live now, there's talk about, you know, the spirit of Dunkirk and the spirit of the Blitz and so on. So you have this whole sort of collective heroism in a sense that, you know, we look to how we perform in these kinds of crises. So that's at that general sort of a level. But there's also, of course, the specific moment when a society in a time of crisis or war identifies a

particular individuals as heroes. And of course, this is what really interests me and Veronica, because there are a multitude of possible heroes in any given conflict, in any given crisis, in everyday life, in fact. But it's who society chooses to pluck out and decide are their heroes, you know, who resonates.

with that society at that time and whose story also maybe resonates over a long period of time. So we still look back on them and we think of them as heroes, whereas others might have a brief moment of fame and then we forget about them. So I think what we found is that heroes do certain things which are fairly predictable. Like, for example, they tend to display courage. They tend to often display a willingness for self-sacrifice or often are willing to risk their lives

either in support of a principle like freedom or perhaps to try and save the lives of others. So you see certain sort of common features of heroes over time. But also what we found is that heroes are heroes for particular times and places and people. And so context is really important.

And the kind of a person, a kind of a story that might resonate with one society at a particular moment might not resonate with them later or might not resonate with a different society. So, for example, the hero is often the person who embodies or exemplifies or demonstrates

the values which the society finds most impressive, most compelling, most important at that particular time. And it's that link with values and the way that we see ourselves and our heroes, right? So our heroes are our best selves.

They're the ones that we think in that situation, we would hope that we would behave in that way, right? Be that self-sacrificing, be that courageous, put those principles really front and center. And so I think these are the reasons why heroes have this enduring, endearing ability to

command respect, that we continue to look for them. We think of ourselves in the 21st century as modern people, but still this idea of heroes and heroism, I think it has a lot of purchase still, particularly, as you say, in times of war. Yeah, I guess in that sense, as you mentioned, because heroes are often people who we look up to, we want to exemplify, they can also be the ones to lead the societal direction.

How are heroes involved in sometimes leading societal change? So, of course, heroes can be important forces for stability, but they can also be important forces for change. And so these moments of transition, these moments when societies define themselves, you know, these are the times when we kind of need those heroes to help us remind ourselves of what we stand for. So if you think about a society that was facing an enormous transition, one example is South Africa.

making that transition from apartheid into a post-apartheid world, which would enable, you know, people of different races to gain positions of power and authority and have a say in how the society goes forward. And of course, Nelson Mandela was a crucial figure in that period. He was a crucial figure during apartheid as a symbol for people who were

oppressed by the system, who wanted to have someone to look up to because he was imprisoned. He made that sacrifice. And what's interesting, one of the many things that's interesting about Mandela is the way that he helped to craft his heroic narrative from prison. So he worked with his colleagues in the ANC who were

not in prison, to get a message out, particular messages out about himself and his principles and his vision for the future, which helped to hold that kind of anti-apartheid movement. It helped to give them that vision

vision and that inspiration. And then, of course, when he was freed, when he became the leader of South Africa, you know, again, he's a sort of a symbol of what it's possible to be and how it's possible to be persecuted very harshly by the old regime and nevertheless look to the future and want to move forward. So I think here's

Heroes can be very, very important in showing us the way to make transitions, to undergo change and for society to be able to hold itself together at those times and to see a vision for the future. Yeah, that really makes sense. And I can see how Nelson Mandela particularly had a sort of a unifying effect on the quite fractured South African society. And in some ways, competing groups, whilst they might not have particularly liked each other, all sort of respected

Nelson Mandela as a figure that they were willing to follow during that time. So as I mentioned at the top, you do look at this intersection between gender and the security domain. So what is that sort of relationship between gender and heroism? How do they intersect?

It's a really good question and really, really fascinating because it tells us a lot about how society thinks about a hero, especially in a wartime setting. So you do have the acknowledgement of women's heroism, but it often is collective in wartime. So the women who...

went into the munitions factories and kept everything going so that the war could still be fought or the women who went to the front as nurses or the women who went on the land to make sure that the agriculture could still be, you know, the land could still be worked. So we tend to have this sort of collective image of women as heroes. But when it comes to individual heroes in wartime, very often they are men. And I think one of the reasons is that we think of as the main activity of war, which is the fighting. Of course, it's predominantly women.

undertaken by men. And it gives men more, shall we say, opportunities to demonstrate the kinds of features, characteristics that we think of, associate with as heroes. So courage and self-sacrifice and bravery under fire and all these kinds of things. These are the kinds of things that are really the bread and butter of life as a soldier in wartime. So it's not a surprise that there's this sort of tendency to link heroism at the individual level with individual soldiers.

So what I find really interesting, though, is what happens when a society chooses a woman as a war hero. It doesn't happen that often. It does happen from time to time. It doesn't happen that often. And when it does, what I found in looking at various historical examples is there's a tendency to celebrate in the short term. And so in the short term, the woman is celebrated for doing something actually quite masculine. But as time goes on, that story tends to change.

about her. And she tends to be given all of these sort of feminine characteristics become emphasized, emphasizing the femininity. Whereas that doesn't happen, of course, with men, you know, because there's no distinction, there's no, there's no gap between being a hero in war and

being masculine, being a man, because those things tend to go together quite naturally, we think. But for a woman, you know, it's quite a bit different. So how can you be a feminine woman if you've been doing this very masculine thing in the war? So we try subsequently to knit these things together. So a really good example of this in relation to the war in Ukraine is during the earlier phase of the war, which is before the mass invasion of the past year, during the sort of the part where the war was mostly concentrated in the Donbass region between 2014 and

in 2022, there was a woman in Ukraine who was very, very prominent and who was widely regarded as a war hero. And her name is Nadia Shevchenko. Today, she's totally vanished from public, you know, the public imagination. But at the time, she became very famous because she was actually a member of the armed forces in Ukraine as she asked to be sent to the front when the war broke out in 2014. The Ministry of Defense in Kiev was not comfortable with sending women to the front at that point. And so she took a leave of absence to volunteer.

And while she was volunteering near the front lines, she was, according to her story, kidnapped by Russians, taken across the border, interrogated and put on trial and prison. But what's important for her heroism is that her interrogation, the video of her being interrogated in Russia, became a sort of overnight YouTube sensation in Ukraine. It went viral and

And, you know, she was very defiant. She was very clear in her statements to the Russians, not only during her interrogation, but also in her trial subsequently, that, you know, she was a proud Ukrainian and the Russians had no business being there. And, you know, she really articulated those messages of defiance very clearly. And she also looked

quite masculine. It was wartime. She had short hair. She was wearing camouflage clothes. She was dressed for the activity. Her manner was very brusque. She used lots of swearing and so on. So it was quite masculine in her behavior. And yet Ukrainian society really took her to their hearts for a period because

She became our Nadia and she became this kind of figure of hope and defiance that, you know, if she could defy the Russians, then Ukrainian society could defy the Russians as well. And and so she was this amazing hero figure. And then she was released in a prisoner exchange and came back to Ukraine.

And that's where the story really changes because she had a sort of a change of heart after she came back. And she started arguing that the Ukrainian government should negotiate with the separatists in Eastern Ukraine and that there should be a peaceful end to the conflict and they shouldn't just try and fight until the last man.

that message did not resonate with Ukrainian society at all. And she was not only criticized for that, but she was criticized for behaving in a too masculine way, which of course, she was celebrated for that earlier on. So for example, she would wear trousers, she didn't wear makeup, she kept her hair cut short, she swore, she smoked cigarettes, you know, she did all kinds of things which were not conventionally regarded as feminine. And she was really, really criticized very heavily for it. But if you contrast her with the figure of President Zelensky, who

is now regarded quite widely, not only in Ukraine, but globally as a hero. And he has absolutely shown an enormous amount of courage, personal courage. He's risked his life by staying in Ukraine. He goes close to the front line on a regular basis. He is clearly in danger, and yet he carries on. He's been the symbol of sort of uniting society against the Russian aggression. And again, exemplifying the values of defiance and courage, but also democracy and freedom

and liberal values and tolerance, all these kinds of things. And of course, there's no concern about him being too masculine. It's such an interesting contrast over such a short period of time in the same country. Yeah, that's right. And also that intersection between the context and an individual's behavior. Like in some ways, Zelensky, I mean, clearly he does have those character traits, I think. And

And yet he only sort of rose to become perceived as a hero when Russia engaged in that full scale invasion of Ukraine. Talking about the Ukrainian context, obviously, Ukraine is now engaged in a full scale war. So what is the role that Ukraine's women are playing here?

in this war? Yeah, so I think it's fair to say that they're playing every kind of possible role that you could imagine anybody playing in a war. So a large number of the women of Ukraine have actually fled the war, either to other parts of Ukraine that are less at risk or abroad. And that is very much in the context, I think, of not just saving themselves, but saving children. And so the vast majority of the

Ukrainian IDPs and refugees have been women accompanied by young children. Huge exodus. And so in many ways, their contribution to the war is trying to preserve elements of Ukrainian society from the war for a post-war Ukraine. And so their job, which is enormously difficult, is to be separated from many of their family members, to go to places that may be very unfamiliar to them and

where they may not speak the language very well or at all, may not know anything about the local setting or local customs or anything. And to make a home for themselves and their children, while both integrating and ensuring that the children integrate enough to be able to function and survive, but at the same time, maintaining that link back home and keeping the language alive in their families as their children learn to speak German or French or English or whatever, making sure that they don't forget

to speak Ukrainian, making sure that they don't forget about family members, making sure they don't forget about their heritage and their traditions. So it's a very, it's a job that doesn't get a high profile when it comes to, you know, what the media covers in terms of the war. But it's a role which is incredibly important for the short term and the long term. And I think it needs to be mentioned and certainly kind of respected. So there's that aspect there.

Of course, many of the women of Ukraine have stayed behind and they do an enormous amount of work in terms of civil society work. So Ukrainian society has a very active civil society, I think, as we've discovered over the past year in particular, where people, they organize themselves, they spontaneously look around, they see what needs to be done, they come together and they do it. And so you have amazing efforts to

to keep societies running, whether this is through professional jobs, you know, making sure that the electricity gets turned back on again as quickly as possible and the trains run on time, or whether it's about volunteering. So collecting together donations and giving them to IDPs or sending them to the front, making camouflage nets has become something which communities of women get together and do. And this is something which has been happening for years, but it's

been particularly maybe a pressing issue over the past year. And this is something that anybody almost can participate in. If you're not able to kind of go and fight, or you don't want to, or you have caring responsibilities, you can still spare a few hours to go and work on making camouflage nets, which help to camouflage the soldiers and their camps, and it also helps to camouflage their weapons and so on. And of course, you have women who have

joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces as well. And that's getting a fair amount of publicity. And it's an interesting situation because it's something that you often see happening in war. It doesn't happen in every war, but it happens in many wars that the military will open up its doors to women in some fashion or other. And there's usually restrictions and sometimes they get relaxed as the time goes on and sometimes they don't. In the case of Ukraine, you

as I mentioned earlier in relation to the case of Nadia Savchenko, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense was quite reluctant to send women to the front in the early time after 2014. And there were not very many women who were in the Ukrainian Armed Forces in any case. But as that war continued, more and more women

decided they wanted to come forward and they wanted to make a contribution in the military. And so gradually the restrictions on women's roles began to be eroded. And so now actually there are no restrictions. Women can hold any role, any military role. And, you know, laws have been changed and regulations have been changed to ensure that that is, you know, there's a stable foundation for that to continue, which is a very impressive thing for a society at war to do because very often legislation will follow

afterwards, sometimes generations afterwards. And so for all of that to happen so quickly, I think is quite extraordinary. So looking at the way that women have been integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces, you do tend to see them predominantly in certain kinds of supporting roles, which is typical of women in militaries around the world and over time, is you tend to find them concentrated in certain kinds of supporting roles. You have a lot of women medics

in the Ukrainian armed forces. That's where a lot of the women are. And they certainly are in and close to combat situations. Absolutely. You know, medics are needed in those circumstances. And so you have, you know, women because just because they're in a supporting role doesn't mean they're not exposed to danger, which is absolutely true. And I think we've also seen a shift in the way that the Ukrainian government thinks about and presents women in the military. For example, Zelensky now routinely talks about the men and women defenders

of Ukraine using the male and female version of the word defenders. Whereas in the past, you know, they might have only talked about the male version of the word defenders. So there are these kinds of symbolic differences as well, changes, which I think are important to a lot of the women. Of course, it's not saying that Ukrainian society has

totally transformed itself and that everybody thinks is great that women are fighting in the war. Plenty of people think it's not a good thing, think that the military is not the place for women and women should be away on the home front, they should be safe. So it's a society very much in transition and

ideas are changing. But we are seeing, I think, in some recent opinion polls in Ukraine, more and more people are accepting and approving of the idea of women being in the military. So there are signs that society's views are shifting a bit as this war goes on. And if we look at the

the Russian context, which seems to be quite different. So could you talk a bit about how you would characterize the role of women within Russia, within the military or during wartime? Yeah, absolutely. So it is fascinating because it's such a sharp contrast. And whereas in Ukraine, Zelensky is in some ways sort of leading the

the idea that it's acceptable, it's normal for women to be part of a military effort. In Russia, Putin is absolutely heading in the wrong direction. So he is very much presenting, he and his officials are very much presenting the war as men's business.

And women's roles in this war are to be the supporters. And so women are called upon, you know, the wives and the mothers, the mothers in particular are called upon to support their sons who go off to war and to give them moral support and to, you know, send them care packages and all these kinds of things. And there are gestures that are made by the Ministry of Defense in Russia, by the government, by Putin himself towards women.

You know, Putin back in November, I think, had this very well publicized meeting with mothers of mobilized soldiers where he was sitting at a big table with the women and talking to them and so on. But it was very carefully stage managed. And so everything was was very carefully planned. It was even scripted and rehearsed in advance. And so the women were there literally playing playing a part.

And so this is the public view. This is public face. This is the Kremlin's narrative is that, you know, men go off to war and women support them. But in reality, what's happening, I think, is that women in Russia are expected to do an enormous amount of picking up the pieces.

And so particularly there are some societies, some communities where a lot of the local men have been mobilized and the women are left to, you know, look after the families, keep the communities going, find the money somehow, maybe take an extra job or take a job elsewhere.

in the first place if they haven't been employed outside the home. So there's a lot of pressure on the women to keep everything going, keep everything moving, but absolutely not to be acknowledged in this way. So it's really, really interesting. It's very highly gendered, the way that the war is depicted by Putin and other officials. And you definitely get the impression that there's no room for women in this war, except playing a very marginal supporting role off to the side somewhere.

And it's interesting because back in the 1990s and the early 2000s, actually, women were joining the Russian armed forces in reasonable numbers and made up a proportion just over 10% at the peak of their joining. But it

It was really a bit of a fluke that they were there at all because it was in response to changing economic circumstances in Russia, where joining the military actually was one of the few opportunities for women in some communities to get a job. And the Ministry of Defence didn't know what to do with it.

They really didn't know what to do with these women. There was absolutely no effort to make any changes to legislation or policy or practice or anything. And the military in Russia was a very hostile place to women, which I think it still is. And so when circumstances changed in Russia, the supply of women pretty much dried up. And so you have very few women now. What's really interesting is they had this opportunity to draw upon a wider demographic to

to help to solve a personnel crisis. And they chose to look the other way because women were not the ideal soldiers. They did not fit the image of what the Russian soldier should be in the eyes of the senior people in the Ministry of Defense, in the eyes of Putin's regime. You know, we're back to the very traditional, almost sort of World War II, 1950s kind of ideas about what men's and women's roles should be. So as someone who has been following both Ukraine and Russia for

for a long time. How would you evaluate what we might be likely to see in terms of the trajectory of the war this year? I think we've got several themes and trajectories going on here simultaneously. So if we start with Russia, I think what we've seen is a real degradation of the Russians' ability to wage war in the sense of gaining militarily significant power

targets, achieving things which are militarily important, gaining significant ground, holding significant ground. We saw an effort just over a year ago to try and take the capital city and try and take the control of the whole country, which completely failed. And ever since then, it's been a matter of trying to sort of shift those strategies and tactics, trying to recover something from this real debacle of a war. And in the process, of course, Russia has lost an

most senior and experienced soldiers and commanders, it's lost a lot of capacity in that sense, which is difficult to replace quickly. So even though they've gone on this partial mobilization, bringing in hundreds of thousands of new troops, what they haven't been able to replace quickly is this depth of experience and knowledge

And so who is leading these people? Who is training these people? You know, this is where the gaps are really apparent. And of course, most, the vast majority of these newly mobilized are people who either have no military experience or their military experience was a long time ago. So if you look at the photographs of the newly mobilized, you will see a lot of men in their 40s and 50s and

And typically that is not what you think of as a fighting army. Typically you think of much younger men making up the bulk of the army. And it's really clear that Russia is struggling, even though they have a large population, because the start of this mass invasion and the announcement of the September mobilization created huge waves of people leaving the country.

And the vast majority of those people, especially after September, were young men. And some of the most well-educated, some of the most entrepreneurial, forward-looking, energetic young men have left. And many of them may never come back.

So at a stroke, you know, Russia has lost a huge resource, both for its war effort, but also for its economy, for its future. So I think what we're probably going to see in the coming months is going to be more of the same in the sense that Russia will put more numbers of troops into the field. This is what they can do. This is a traditional thing that the Russians have done in wars, you know, going back hundreds of years. They put large numbers of people into the field. The question of what they're able to do with those numbers is unanswered.

a kind of an open one because the Ukrainians, which have a smaller force, have been forced to be more innovative, shall we say, to be more strategic and more tactical and cleverer in the way that they use the forces that they have. And of course, they've been enjoying the advantage of being trained by NATO countries really almost since the beginning of the war in 2014. There's been some cooperation with NATO countries, there's been training, there's been various joint kinds of activities.

And so they've really, the Ukrainians have really been able to benefit from thinking differently, thinking very differently from their Soviet origins of the Ukrainian armed forces, which are now quite a long time ago. A lot of things have happened since then. And the Ukrainians have moved quite a long way away from those Soviet origins, whereas the Russians seem to be embracing them and really going back to them and thinking about this

as a conflict which is like the re-wound of the Second World War in lots of different ways, in the way that it's fought, in the way that it's thought about, talked about, and so on.

And so we're going to see this, I think we're going to see an increasing continuation of what we have seen before, which is two different ways of fighting war, two different ways of thinking about war. But while the Ukrainians are getting sort of fresh supplies of equipment and more and more advanced equipment and weaponry from the West, Russia is definitely struggling. It's struggling with capacity in terms of human resources, and it's struggling with capacity in terms of

of equipment, even though it's having to, you know, sort of go into its cold war stores and, and find, find stuff to bring out. And I guess the final thing I would say is that you've got a real difference in motivation and morale on, in the two sides, because the Ukrainians, you know, they're fighting to defend their own country. They're fighting against an aggressive evading force and they have everything to gain from a victory and everything to lose from a defeat. Uh,

And the revelations of what has happened to Ukrainian civilians and POWs under Russian control has been horrific. And it really just spurs the Ukrainians on to be even more determined not to leave any of their people to suffer in this way. The Russians, on the other hand, are fighting militarily.

in a country which is not their own, even though they're told continuously that this is a war of existential survival for Russia. It's still more difficult to believe when they've crossed the border, they have invaded. And of course, everything about the Russian armed forces is permeated with

the same problems that affect the rest of Russian politics, which is corruption, endemic corruption. And so some of the problems that Russia has had in the war have been a direct result of corrupt practices and cronyism and favors being exchanged and people getting lucrative defense contracts and then not delivering the goods when the time has come. And those are features of Putin's political system. And they're not going to change anytime soon. It's not something which can be easily cleaned up and fixed.

These are long term issues, structural problems, and Putin shows no sign of being interested in changing them. And so I think these are the reasons why I'm seeing, you know, Russian abilities to wage the war declining, Ukraine's abilities to wage the war increasing. There are a lot of moving parts to this conflict, obviously, as there always are in war. And a crucial part, of course, is going to be how Ukraine

other states, other societies continue to respond? Will international support for Ukraine hold up? Will it continue to be as strong as it has been? Will it fall apart at some point short of a Ukrainian victory? That's a big question. That's one that we don't know the answer to. Will Russia manage to rally some other countries to its support to a greater extent than it has? And of course, there's a lot of speculation right now about China, what China will do

So there are still a lot of big questions up in the air. But I think those are the general trends that I'm seeing. So I'm expecting to see the war continue. I'm sorry to say, certainly for the coming months, maybe even throughout the year, really depending on the precise conditions.

scope and speed of change in terms of these different factors that I've mentioned. Well, thank you so much, Jenny. This has been a really interesting discussion and I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Thanks for the conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. Thanks for listening and thanks to Gonca Varol for our theme music.