photo © Lynn Savarese
“Women will do everything they can to prevent war.”
—SWANEE HUNT, author, activist and former US ambassador to Austria (1993–1997)
The first time I walked into Swanee Hunt’s Washington, DC, home in May 2019, I felt like I was standing in a museum. Sculptures, paintings, and illustrations of various kinds were scattered throughout her home. A silk tapestry made from Indian wedding dresses hung on the wall alongside a proclamation naming Swanee ambassador to Austria signed by then President William Jefferson Clinton.
I traveled there from New York City to attend a symposium on the status of human trafficking in the US. As the founder and chair of Demand Abolition, an activist organization committed to eradicating the illegal commercial sex industry, Hunt had sponsored the event. “The solution to end sex trafficking is to end sex buying,” Swanee told the audience as she stood at the podium. “Men who buy sex create the demand that fuels the illegal sex trade. Without buyers, prostitution and sex trafficking would cease to exist.”
Her goal to end the illegal sex trade is an arduous one, but advancing feminism in the US and around the world is Swanee’s calling. From 1993 to 1997, when she served as ambassador to Austria, she hosted negotiations and international symposia and met with grassroots women leaders to help establish peace in the neighboring Balkan states. As the founder of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, she urged present and future leaders to create a more gender-equal world. Swanee consults with government officials and civil society leaders across the globe. She is most known for her work in increasing the participation and inclusion of women in peace processes around the world.
She greeted me at the door wearing casual, loose-fitting black pants with a matching shirt. She was barefoot. As I followed her through the long walkway to the kitchen, she introduced me to her two home companions, a spoiled snow-white cat named Zhivago and a small green parrot with a yellow beak named Mellow. “His name is very appropriate; he calms me,” she said as she fed him peanut butter with a tiny spoon. “It’s his favorite food,” she added, shooting me a grin. Swanee has been very much the gracious hostess on two occasions, and on this visit, like the last one, she invited me to stay overnight in her guest room.
Her passion to create social change is reflected in her extensive writing, mostly on the topic of gender. Some of her many commentaries have been published in Women’s eNews, including her September 2009 article, “She Speaks Serious Change, Carries Big Purse,” in which she explained how her determination to right society’s wrongs first developed.
She wrote, “When you grow up as I did with a father zealously committed to political change, it gets into your blood.” Swanee’s father, a famously conservative Texas oil tycoon, passed away when she was only twenty-four years old, but she carried on his passion for activism even as she made a hard left turn politically. She went on to write about how, in 1979, when she made a reservation for a table in the male-only main dining room of the Dallas Petroleum Club, no one knew she was a woman because of her first name. “When I arrived, the stately but flummoxed black maître d’ had to turn me away or lose his job. He and I had more in common than met the eye: Neither of us was welcome in the hallowed mess hall where deals might be made.”
In a March 2018 Women’s eNews article, “The Women, Peace, and Security Act: A Rare Milestone,” she described one of the “few hopeful moments in American politics that year.” “Passage of the Women, Peace, and Security Act was a quiet bipartisan landmark, the culmination of more than two decades of relentless advocacy to involve women in decisions on war and peace. But it was also just a first step toward turning this lofty goal into daily practice for the US government and its many agencies that deal with peace and security,” she warned.
In 2001, she authored “Rwandan Women Dying from Genocide’s Legacy of AIDS,” which explored and demystified the toll AIDS had taken over the previous twenty years, and predictions of the epidemic’s consequences, including real-life stories. “I met with women whose destinies were forever marked by the violence,” she wrote. “Among them was Solange, who was only eight years old when the militia kidnapped her. She and four other girls were kept for three weeks and raped repeatedly, each day. At the end, only two were alive. Upon her return home, she began to get sick. At the hospital, she received a death sentence: HIV. That’s a death sentence shared by many African women who were raped in the course of other brutal conflicts throughout the continent.” HIV AIDS is no longer a death sentence, but it was very real at the time.
Swanee has told the stories of many Rwandan women and their experiences, particularly about how some of them transformed their lives after the country’s hundred-day genocide in 1994.
In her 2017 book, Rwandan Women Rising, Swanee wrote of their successful transformation of their country, ultimately creating a parliament where women comprised 64 percent. She shared the stories of seventy women, revealing their immeasurable losses as well as the boundless challenges they experienced in working to rebuild their country, which they ultimately did. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in the book’s foreword: “These women’s accomplishments provide important lessons for policy makers and activists who are working toward equality elsewhere in Africa and other post-conflict societies. Their stories, told in their own words via interviews woven throughout the book, demonstrate that the best way to reduce suffering and to prevent and end conflicts is to elevate the status of women throughout the world.”
Swanee then lifted a book off the living room table. It was one of her own: This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, which she wrote in 2004. “While Rwanda was the greatest success, Bosnia was the greatest failure,” she said. In her book, she draws upon seven years of interviews in the 1990s to write about the experiences of twenty-six Bosnian women, each working to reconstruct their country after years of devastation from war. These included stories of a professor who survived the Holocaust, a college student resettling refugees, a businesswoman running nonprofit organizations, and many others. In each case, the women used their survival skills to rebuild a society which they agreed had been destroyed by political greed, and Swanee memorialized their stories. In contrast to Rwanda, the women of Bosnia were overlooked by policy makers charged with forging peace. Swanee says it’s not surprising that Bosnia, though no longer actively at war, remains a tinderbox.
As we moved into her living room to sit in front of the fireplace, Swanee asked me if I knew the term “soft power,” coined by Joseph Nye, former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She explained his concept, in which orders are not just handed down by a leader who is “king of the mountain,” but instead where visions are conveyed, emotional intelligence is used to reach out to others, and nonverbal communication is considered as important as verbal skills. “Without soft power,” Swanee told me, “we miss out on a crucial way to lead effectively.”
In her preface to This Was Not Our War, Swanee observed that in Bosnia—and she said this was true of war in general—“those who waged the war were selected to plan and implement the peace, a ludicrous tradition rarely questioned by otherwise enlightened leaders in the foreign policy establishment.” This book’s foreword was also written by a former US president, this time Bill Clinton. He wrote: “Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope … the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how.”
Swanee then closed the book, laid it back down on the table, and looked up at me. “People say that war is good for the economy? It fails the economy. Too often profits go to wealthy people building yachts instead of building schools. We need to know where the money is circulating. It is either circulating in ways that are positive or destructive. While some progressive countries are using money to ensure one hundred percent of its citizens are going to school instead of prison, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.”
Before our interview came to an end, I asked Swanee if there was anything else she wanted to make sure I included in my book.
“Yes,” she said. “What I am now working on most is my program Demand Abolition, whose purpose is to eliminate the purchasing of illegal commercial sex. I decided to approach the end of sex trafficking not by rescuing women and girls, but by going upstream from the problem, to end the demand. Research indicates that eighty-six percent of men who buy sex say they would stop if a family member were to find out.” She cited Sweden’s practice of sending postcards to arrested sex buyers’ homes showing a date for them to appear in court. This often enables a family member to see the card first.
She then laughed, saying, “I think we should use turquoise paper, so the card really stands out.” Swanee wants to see extensive training of US law enforcement to arrest the male buyers and not the girls and women in the sex trade, most of whom aren’t there of their own free will and are victims of sexual and other heinous violence. “The police now conduct a stakeout of a hotel room where they see the trafficked girl being brought into the room,” she said, “and watch as the buyers come in and out of the room, but they are not arrested. In too many cases, they arrest the victim, not the real perpetrator. I think the male police officers often identify with the guys, unfortunately.”
Swanee closed our interview on this note: “Who is going to do this work if I don’t? I am fortunate to have the wealth, the education, and the connections to make a difference.”
Swanee again opened her book on Bosnia to write a personal note to me inside. She handed it to me, and I placed in my briefcase alongside her book on Rwanda, which she had given me a year earlier. I then opened Rwandan Women Rising, and turned to my favorite quote in the book. “But after this interview,” I told Swanee as I pointed to it, “It holds even more meaning”:
Women understand most the importance of peace.
In conflicts, women are the ones hurt most,
so each will participate in the recovery some way.
Look at the key institutions in our country today.
Women are providing leadership.
There’s no way you can talk about the transformation
of society unless that group is involved.
Much as we want to benefit from this process,
we also want to be a part of it.
There’s no way you can avoid 55 percent of a
population and think they’ll be just recipients.
We have to be agents of peace.
We can’t just have peace delivered to us on a plate.
—ALOISEA INYUMBA, Rwanda’s minister for gender and family promotion (1964–2012)