Gender: Female Identity and The Military

This entry is a subentry of Gender.

Gender—male and female identity—has both “always” and “never” been relevant to the American military. All societies make distinctions between women and men. Across societies, though, there is enormous variation between what men do and what women do except with regard to two activities. Everywhere, weapons belong mainly to men and care of the very young mainly to women. Warfare and child care have traditionally been reserved roles. However, there is an asymmetry in this specialization. Women's special role has a biological underpinning. Men cannot give birth to or physically nurse children. Women therefore do not have to defend or protect their special reserved activity. In contrast, women can fight, can wage war, and in fact their help in doing this is periodically sought. They then do have the capacity to do men's special work. This has meant that in this area men have a continuing need to defend, to separate, or to distinguish what they do from what women do. They have to prohibit—to bar—women, since “nature” does not.

The special task of the military is to fight. Fighters require a lot of support, which in the early years of the American military was provided by civilians, civilians who often included women who did laundry, sewing, cooking, and other tasks for the soldiers. Thus, some women have always been involved with the military. Some have unofficially fought in the military (in the early years disguised as men), others have officially helped support the military. Indeed, when the military did not have enough men to perform the required support tasks, it either employed civilians or recruited women who accepted these tasks, such as the temporary auxiliaries who served in uniform as military telephone operators or clerks in World War I.

Even before World War I, nurses were the military women's vanguard, the first group to crack the military's gender barrier. At the same time, they unequivocally maintained their female identity. It was only in the Civil War, in the North, that women began to work as nurses regularly in military hospitals. First brought into the military because of need, they served as auxiliaries with different rules, benefits, and compensation from men. For their performance, they were later rewarded with more “regular” status. But they were also kept in sex‐segregated units until long after World War II. This was a pattern replicated for other women as they entered the U.S. military.

In the second half of the twentieth century, guerrilla warfare and the threat of nuclear war made it clear that women could not be protected simply by keeping them out of uniform. Furthermore, once the draft ended in 1972, the military again needed women to help fill its ranks. This need coincided with a push by feminists for an end to all discrimination, all prohibitions, based on sex. Although men's reserved role shrank and its boundaries became somewhat ambiguous, in principle, the warrior role remained men's.

Equity arguments against exclusion continued in court and in public, but although many continued to argue against allowing women in combat roles, their argument was diminished by the fact that modern war claims as many or more civilian casualties as military casualties. Women could not be kept safe. The physical strength argument was diminished by the achievements of women athletes and by the reduced role of physical strength in technological combat such as is common in the air force and the navy. Indeed, the combat restriction was removed under President Bill Clinton for aviation and naval ships, a result in part of the navy's embarrassment over the sexual harassment of women at its aviators’ Tailhook Convention. The change was also supported by the public acclaim for the professional behavior of Maj. Rhonda Cornum as a prisoner of war during the Persian Gulf War, and the public's acceptance of American women casualties in that war.

Still, women at the end of the twentieth century remained excluded from ground combat. Much of the argument for maintaining this area of combat exclusion ultimately focused on combat effectiveness arguments related to group cohesion and individual performance—contentions that emphasized the need for male bonding and men's alleged inability to perform professionally in women's presence (arguments that were once applied to African Americans and that continue to be applied to homosexuals).

Some have argued that citizenship is linked to military service, and for men this has been true. But the United States was also founded in part on the argument that citizenship is linked to paying taxes (that taxation requires representation). Thus, it could be argued that women's early limited citizenship was associated not with their failure to perform military service but with their sparse property rights and consequent lack of status as taxpayers. Since the U.S. military is so clearly accountable to elected civilians, the resistance to women's full participation in the military probably lies not with the desire to restrict women's citizenship, but with the desire to maintain the role of the warrior as one still reserved for men.

Bibliography

• Cynthia H. Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women's Lives, 1983.
• Eva Isaksson, ed., Women and the Military System: Proceedings of a Symposium Arranged by the International Peace Bureau and Peace Union of Finland, 1988.
• Susan Jeffords, The Remasculization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, 1989.
• Judith Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 1989.
• Rhonda Cornum and Peter Copeland, She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story, 1992.
• Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, 1992.
• Miriam Cook and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk, 1993.
• Judith Stiehm, ed., It's Our Military, Too!: Woman and the U.S. Military, 1996