Word.ws English Dictionary

womenandchildren

womenandchildren noun: humanitarian language used as a justification to go to war.

Noun

womenandchildren (uncountable)

  1. Humanitarian language used as a justification to go to war.
    • Before the first Gulf War, anti-militarist academic Cynthia Enloe coined the one-word phrase “womenandchildren”, which was a rallying cry at the time for US involvement in Iraq – and is now so again in Syria.2013 October 2, Zillah Eisenstein, “The lie of ‘women and children’”, in Al Jazeera, archived from the original on 25 Mar 2025
    • They argue that “the difference between violence against ‘womenandchildren’ or violence against men relies on a discursive framework to determine if deaths are mourned and condemned,” and seeks to legitimise violence against men, regardless of whether they are a civilian or combatant.2021 June 10, Iona Cable, ““Women And Children”: The Role Of Innocence In Human Rights Reporting”, in Human Rights Pulse, archived from the original on 10 Jul 2024

Origin of womenandchildren

From women + and + children, coined by Cynthia Enloe in 1990.

Questions about womenandchildren

What does womenandchildren mean?
Womenandchildren means humanitarian language used as a justification to go to war.
What part of speech is womenandchildren?
Womenandchildren is a noun.

Words near womenandchildren in the dictionary

  1. women's troubles
  2. women's work
  3. women-born-women
  4. women-centric
  5. women-children
  6. womenandchildren
  7. womencentric
  8. womenchildren
  9. womenfolk
  10. womenfolks
  11. womenkind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: womenandchildren (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “womenandchildren.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/womenandchildren. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.