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Chapter 2, The Nature of Female Involvement:
Motivations of the Hutu women who perpetrated violence cannot be understood in separation from Rwanda’s pre-genocide gendered social situation. Women’s roles in both the wider historical spectrum and the immediate years prior to genocide were primarily subservient. Rwandan women were secondary citizens in society and inferior in status within the family. In this regard Rwandan women were seen as the property of both the men in their family and of their ethnic group as a whole. Pre-genocide Rwanda had a patriarchal culture, demonstrated by the fact that only a small minority of women held positions in governmental institutions. There are a number of popular Rwandan proverbs which allude to women and perfectly encapsulate the temperament of a disparate society based on gender boundaries: ‘the hen does not crow with the cocks’; ‘in a home where a woman speaks, there is discord’; and ‘a woman’s only wealth is a man,’ are a few examples. Evidence to validate the argument that women were objects in Rwandan society is demonstrated by the fact that some Hutu soldiers raped women and girls of their own ethnic group. Sometimes sexual violence towards Rwandan women, in spite of ethnicity, was perpetrated during the genocide. Hence, Tutsi female victims were not only sub-human because of their ethnic group, but were also objectified as women, and this made them specifically prone to assault. Rwanda was, and still is, religiously dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Women are socially limited in their control over labour, land, resources, property and surplus of production. These limits are backed up by law and served as an impetus to the dehumanisation which was a necessary step in steering the country towards genocide.
Rwanda had a diverse mix of inter-ethnic relationships. Marital unions between Tutsis and Hutus were not uncommon in the years prior to genocide. Much more common though, were marriages between Tutsi women and Hutu men rather than unions between Hutu women and Tutsi men. Ethnicity was defined on patriarchal lines, meaning that children of Tutsi women and Hutu men were legally classed as Hutu. Even though these offspring were awarded the full benefits of Hutu citizenship they were still perceived by extremists as racially impure. These marriages not only produced children whose ethnicity was dubious in the eyes of the extremists, but also added to the jealousy some Hutu women felt towards Tutsi females. Miscegenation between Hutu men and Tutsi women, more or less accepted up until the onset of genocide, began to be viewed with resentment. Ironically though, many Hutu men, including some extremists, either had Tutsi wives or Tutsi mistresses with whom they had sired children. Some Hutu women were involved in the violence as they believed it was their obligation to do so in order to halt unions of this kind.
Female involvement was not contained merely to ordinary villagers, housewives or the un-educated. Many professional women also took part, including Government ministers and administrators, journalists, medical professionals, academics, nuns, nurses and school teachers. According to Sharlach 'female killers included anyone from prostitutes mobilized to kill children, to schoolgirls who killed their classmates.' Moral responsibility for many scholars of the genocide lies with the educated women who took advantage of their experience and standing in the community to incite less prosperous women and men to violence. But, attributing moral blame to one division of female society in this way diminishes the responsibility of many ordinary women who sanctioned, took part, or condoned the violence. Through an examination of the motivations which compelled female leaders and ordinary Rwandan women to perpetrate genocide, this dissertation hopes to establish that regardless of class or education, there was a pervasive hatred towards Tutsi women which justified and sanctioned female on female violence in Hutu perceptions.