The morning after: sexual politics at the end of the the Cold War.

• Author: Enloe, Cynthia

Now that the war is over, Esmeralda has had her IUD removed." What? I read the sentence again. It was from a 1992 article in Ms. entitled "Salvadoran Women Plan for Peace."

Esmeralda is a Salvadoran woman who spent many of her young adult years as a guerrilla in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the FMLN. She pounded out tortillas and washed her boyfriend's clothes; she also wielded a gun. Now it was the "morning after." Not of an illicit affair, but of a Cold War-fueled civil war. Her country's strife had been brought to an end by a peace accord signed by government men and opposition men up in New York, under the watchful eye of the men from Washington.

So Esmeralda was going to hand her gun over to United Nations peacekeepers and try to remake her life. One of her first postwar acts was to have her IUD taken out. During the war her guerrilla tasks had made it seem politically irresponsible to get pregnant. But now she was being urged by men in the political leadership to imagine her postwar life as one devoted to being a good mother.

Some Salvadoran women, however, had quite a different vision of postwar relationships between their country's women and men. They were imagining an end to police rape and domestic violence. Men's violence against women had escalated under the pressures of a civil war fueled by classic Cold War anxieties. These women were organizing to ensure that the peace accords, even if not designed by women on either side, would create economic opportunities for women more diverse than the conventional peacetime roles of wife and mother. Some of these Salvadoran women were investing their postwar energies in printing T-shirts that declared "Soy Feminista!" (I am a Feminist!).

Wars - hot and cold - are like love affairs. They don't just end. They fizzle and sputter; sometimes they reignite. Mornings after are times for puzzling, for sorting things out, for trying to assess whether one is starting a new day or continuing an old routine.

The civil wars in Central America and the global Cold War, which intensified so many local conflicts during the last forty years, have not come to a neat end. They must have ending processes, ones not as elegant or as conclusive as, say, an operatic grand finale. These messier processes may go on for years, even generations.

And so the Cold War is having a multitude of endings. Most of those endings aren't hosted by government officials or filmed by television crews.

The configuration of ideas and behavior on which we bestowed the shorthand label "the Cold War" existed because many people far from the public spotlight were willing to see, or were pressed into seeing, the world - and their neighbors - in a particular way. Thus, to end the Cold War is to make myriad transformations in the ways people live their ordinary lives.

Whom can I trust? What are my loyalties? Are there alternatives to the government's expectations of me? The Cold War began and was sustained as people individually came to have certain answers to these questions. The Cold War is genuinely ending only as people come to have fresh answers to the old questions.

These questions will not have the same meanings for women as they do for men. The Cold War depended on a deeply militarized understanding of identity and security. Militarization relies on distinct notions about masculinity, notions that have staying power only if they are legitimized by women as well as men. And the ending of a particular war cannot undo decades of deeper militarization.

The militarization that sustained Cold War relationships between people for forty years required armed forces with huge appetites for recruits; it also depended on ideas about manliness and womanliness that touched people who never went through basic training. It may prove harder to uproot those ideas than it was to dismantle a wall.

The regimes that were essential to perpetuating the Cold War had to convince their citizenries that the world was a dangerous place. Their citizens had to behave as if surrounded by imminent danger. Having internalized an acute sense of danger...