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Filmmaker Abigail E Disney’s latest project began with a simple

question, “What if you looked at war as though women mattered?” 

Disney’s answer to that question is Women, War & Peace, a bold

five-part PBS miniseries that highlights the stories of women in

conflict zones from Bosnia to Liberia, and Columbia to Afghanistan.

By inserting a female face, voice, and perspective into the dialogue

about conflict and security, Women, War & Peace challenges the

notion that these issues are only men’s domain.  

It all began at Stanford

Women, War & Peace is the newest chapter in Disney’s

longstanding personal and intellectual interest in the gendered

experience at war  – an interest that began for her at StanfordUniversity.

In the early 1980s, Disney came to Stanford to pursue a masters degree in English Literature. Her time at

Stanford proved to be a turning point in her life, said Disney, because “it really cemented for me that this was

what I needed to do with my life…study, think, talk,…be about ideas.” 

One idea that Disney was exposed to at Stanford was the importance of looking at the world through a

gendered lens.  At the time, Disney said, “everybody was looking at women and talking about women…the

gender seed definitely got planted [for me] at Stanford.” 

 Armed with this vantage point, Disney went on to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University. For her thesis, she

wrote about American war novels, finding that cultural representations of war are always told from a malepoint of view. When war is written about or talked about, said Disney, it’s as if “it is a locker room

conversation…a conversation by, for, and about men…with the presumption that nobody female is listening.” 

 After completing her graduate studies, Disney maintained a focus on women’s issues by playing a key role in

What if you looked at war as though women mattered? In conversation with filmmaker Abigail Disney 

by Marianne Cooper on Monday, September 19, 2011 - 7:35am  

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 several social and political organizations for over 20 years.

The accidental filmmaker 

 As the granddaughter of Roy Disney and grandniece of Walt Disney, Abigail Disney steered clear of the

family business for most of her life. However, a trip to Liberia in 2006 to show support for Africa’s firstwoman head of state, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, provided Disney with a reason to become a

filmmaker. While there, she heard the remarkable story of how a small group of Liberian women were able to

stop a civil war through nonviolent action. “It was horrifying to me that I had never heard of these women and

knew that it was going to be forgotten. Knowing something creates a debt in you —an obligation. I was in a

position to make sure their story was honored.”  

Disney’s desire to tell these women’s story culminated in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell , which

she produced with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, Gini Reticker. Pray the Devil Back to Hell won Best

Documentary at its premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival

and has gone on to win nearly 20 awards and honors. Disney

worked with Reticker again on Women, War & Peace , along with

Pamela Hogan, a producer/writer at the forefront of making

PBS’s Emmy-winning, international documentary series WIDE

 ANGLE, a standard setter in the coverage of global women’s

issues. Together, this team of seasoned film veterans took on the

challenge of producing this five-part series.

Coming full circle

With the launch of her new PBS miniseries, Women, War & Peace , several parts of Abigail Disney’s life come

full circle.

The miniseries marks a return for Disney to her interest in the gendered dynamics of war. In Women, War &Peace , Disney upends the usual way war is discussed by placing women at the forefront of the story. “Every

narrative has a central eye…an eyeball…through which all this narrative is filtered. And the eyeball in the war 

narrative has never, not been male. It has always been like you sewed a camera into John Wayne’s green

beret.” 

What Disney wanted to do instead was to see what war would look like thr ough women’s eyes.  “What would

happen,” Disney asked, if you “were…to sew the camera into a sari or a headscarf [of] a woman? How would

it look different? How would the vocabulary change, the ethics change? How would the cost-benefit analysis

look? What shifts? Because it’s a small thing to shift the central eye, but it can have radical consequences.

 And that’s essentially why I’ve taken this on.” 

By looking at war through women’s point of view,  Women, War, & Peace illuminates what Disney calls the

ignored, “second front” of war – and “that’s the fight of women’s lives,” Disney explained, “the fight to make life

continue…to find a way…to thrive as a family and as a community…while enduring [the] trauma of losing

loved ones, the worry…of watching their  sons go off and become not just victims but also monsters.” 

Understanding women’s experience of war is all the more important because of the changing nature of armed

conflict, added Disney. Gone are the days when war involved nation states with large armies. Today’s

conflicts are fought by informal groups – gangs, warlords, and insurgents. The post-Cold War proliferation of 

small arms has altered the landscape of war, with women becoming the main targets and bearing

unprecedented losses.

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