Either you need these women or you do not: Informing the debate on military service and citizenship

Gender Issues

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 5-32

  Fenner, Lorry M ^a  

^a USAF   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247426948     PISSN: 1098092X     EISSN: 19364717     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12147-998-0020-2     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Margaret Chase Smith, Congressional Record: Hearings on H.R. 5915, 9 May 1946, pp.3334-35.
2. Smith, irate with the House Military Affairs Committee which was trying to restrict military women to reserve status, told the committee to either integrate women fully and give them the benefits and stability of regular status or to exclude them altogether.
3. Mona Charen, Eight Good Reasons to Oppose Women in the Military, Boston Globe, 27 August 1997, p.21.
4. Cal Thomas, "Crashes: Symptom of Weakened Military?, Long Island Newsday, 23 September 1997.
5. The conditions of service for women which have been debated for over fifty years include, among others, requirements or limitations on age; height; weight; physical and intellectual ability; appearance; marital status; dependents; rank levels; managerial and leadership/command levels; number ceilings; pay and benefits; spousal and dependent benefits; auxiliary, reserve or regular status; and occupational qualifications and opportunities (including combat and combat support positions), among others. These conditions/requirements have changed over time; have often been different for men and women (and minority and white men); and have sometimes been different for women depending on which service they belonged to. This situation, of changing restrictions and conditions, has led to the belief that the requirements have not been based on any real standard required for military performance or combat service. It also leads to a personnel policy credibility gap in general.
6. My dissertation contains an enormous amount of material on military women from contemporary popular culture sources between 1940 and 1973, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor Magazine.
7. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
8. May has suggested this Cold War terminology, "containment, for post-World War II American women's social, political, economic and cultural condition.
9. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives (London: South End Press, 1983), p.212.
10. Enloe suggested the use of the term "camouflage for the ideological and rhetorical acrobatics required to cover the military necessity of changing women's conditions of service under prevailing gender "norms." Trivialities included regulations on make-up, underwear, and dating. Women were objectified in articles in which they were constantly identified by their physical attributes. Comedic treatment included stereotypical jokes about women and sitcoms like the battle between the sexes."
11. Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women's Army Corps (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1954), also called the Whisper or Rumor Campaign.
12. Women were brought into the Army in 1942 as auxiliaries in the WAAC. Women were brought into the Navy in reserve status in the WAVES. When the Army realized that auxiliary status would not be conducive to effectiveness it had to readdress the issue and finally gained legislation for the WAC in 1943. Utilizing World War I experience and inter-war studies would have prevented this fitful start. And still the conditions of service and pay/benefits differed for Army and Navy women as well as for nurses in both services. Women pilots were hired as civil servants in the Women's Air Ferry Service (WAFS) and Women Airforee Service Pilots (WASP), only gaining military/veterans status in 1979.
13. Some supported only reserve status rather than the option of regular status for women. Regulars ate not as vulnerable to involuntary separation and are usually promoted faster and higher than reserves.
14. Jerome Boltz, former enlisted Army medical technician and Air Force officer nurse, and others. Boltz said he was either assumed to he gay or to be a doctor. Patients also mistook female doctors for nurses despite his repeatedly pointing out that he and the other nurses wore white uniforms while doctors wore their Air Force blue uniforms with white lab coats.
15. Unfortunately, when it looked like the ERA would finally pass, cultural anxiety about gender role changes was increasing, and a nascent backlash could be detected. ERA resisters claimed the measure would require conscripting women (at 50 percent of required manpower) and that it would require that women be assigned to combat.
16. Military specialties are divided into "line" and non-line occupations. The latter would include medical personnel and legal personnel. Officers in these professions, because they don't generally go through as rigorous or as lengthy a military training program, are not considered fully "military."
17. Cynthia Enloe's discussion of these changing definitions, or the expanding and contracting battlefield, is instructive as to the expediency of military vocabulary.
18. In 1993 SECDEF Les Aspin changed the "or" in the Risk Rule to "and, allowing for even wider assignment of women.
19. Unfortunately, some equated minority men and Category IV enlistees.
20. Some, like Brian Mitchell in Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military (Regenery Gateway: Washington D.C., 1989), blame women for AVF recruiting difficulties.
21. This very debate had taken place in the African American community before the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and during discussions of women's suffrage and participating in World War I.
22. Women were barred by law from positions classified as combat by the Navy and Air Force, but they were barred from combat positions in the Army only by that service's policies.
23. Rostker v. Goldberg, United States Supreme Court, 1981.
24. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
25. This is reminiscent of how African American men were treated at the start of the Korean conflict. They were given only menial positions but were thrown into combat without training when casualties were high and reinforcements had not yet arrived.
26. From conversations with Captain Sandra Keamey, USAF Reserve C-141 (cargo and troop carrier) pilot who participated in the Grenada mission, and Captain Debbie Dubbe, USAF KC-135 (refueler) pilot who participated in the raid on Libya.
27. Deployed military women's pregnancy rate was lower than that among the similar civilian population.
28. Tailhook 91: Part 2: Events at the 35 th Annual Tailbook Symposium" (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1993).
29. "The Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces" (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1992).
30. Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Tavris writes on the use of male standards to define arbitrary requirements, universalizing categories and using an artificial male standard.
31. Sociologist Charles Moskos claims that men bond across racial and other lines but that men will not bond across gender lines. Susan Jeffords and others disagree. I agree with her, Judith Stiehm, and Cynthia Enloe among others who believe that task orientation rather than gender or biological considerations are the driving factor in group bonding.
32. Those who support this viewpoint include self-proclaimed military experts Kate O'Birne and Elaine Donnelly.
33. Tailhook Report (1993). Also, Rangers in Somalia in 1993 sacrificed their mission for their male comrades.
34. Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment (Santa Monica: Rand, 1993).
35. Publicized cases include those of Watkins, Matlovieh, and Berg.
36. See also Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp.84-94.
37. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).
38. Alan Gropman of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, argues that this is how we turned the comer on racial integration. He applies the rubric to gender integration almost fully, but shies away from applying it to the debate on homosexuals.
39. Felons are presumed to have forfeited their rights and privileges. In the past they have been given the opportunity to serve in the armed forces rather than to serve their prison sentence.
40. Containment can he seen as an extension of men framing their participation in war as fighting "for our way of life" rather than a political ideology, i.e., Democracy. They are actually fighting in part for cultural precepts and say that they are protecting women. Really in the heat of battle they are fighting to protect themselves and their buddies, as much as masculinity and citizenslilp rights. Criminals might be given a chance to enlist; thereby they can symbolically regain adulthood, manhood, or masculinity. The "ways of life" individual men are fighting for can include racism, classism, political power, social privilege when instead soldiers are supposed to he defending national sovereignty (in the broad sense-economic freedom of action and territorial integrity), and fighting in the interest of political philosophies.
41. See Linda Kerber's work on citizenship obligations and reciprocity, including the point that obligations of military service rest differently on men and women.
42. Some argue that whether women would choose it or not is not the issue, but that the state's compelling interest (military effectiveness) is involved because men would naturally be adverse to a woman being wounded or captured so they would sacrifice the mission to take care of her. Or male POWs could be made to reveal classified information out of their willingness to try to protect female prisoners from abuse. Men's protective urge is posited as being natural or biological. Again, the Somalia incident is an example of men sacrificing the mission trying to protect their fellow male soldiers. The protective urge may not be gender-specific. There is evidence that in emergency situations some men protect neither their male nor female colleagues. And, in these discussions, there is usually little reference to men's domestic abuse of women or to Tailhook-like incidents.
43. Wayne Dillingham, "The Possibility of American Women Becoming Prisoners of War: A Challenge for Behavioral Scientists," Minerva, Winter 1990, pp. 17-22.
44. The classifications would not best be divided by group like gender, class, or race (as in the example I used), but based on individual talent and capability. In addition, obligations would have to be considered of equal value and to earn equal privilege, and privileges would be based on the obligation to perform "state service." Men's service usually is considered to have more value.
45. Men in men's fields gain status, women in men's fields don't always, nor do men in women's fields.
46. Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
47. Jean Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987)
48. Women, Militarism and War (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1990). See also Judith Stiehm's several works on women and the military.