Regina F Titunik. Armed Forces & Society. Volume 26, Issue 2, Winter 2000.
In November of 1996 allegations of sexual misconduct ranging from inappropriate grabbing to rape surfaced at the Army’s mechanics training school at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The accusations were made by young women trainees against the male drill sergeants who were in charge of them. These revelations of sexual misconduct gave rise to an immediate public furor, to which the Army responded by extending its investigation and opening an 800 number for reporting other cases of sexual harassment. What was frequently described as a “torrent” or “flood” of phone calls and further accusations were reported through the 800 number. Subsequently, investigation spread to other bases and the top enlisted man in the Army, Command Sergeant Major Gene McKinney, was accused of sexual harassment. What arose from this morass of scandal was a pervasive image of the military establishment as a cauldron of sexual misconduct and hostility toward women.
Before the Aberdeen Proving Ground revelations, concern about the consequences of integrating women into the military had been festering for more than two decades. Since the advent of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, women have entered the military in record numbers. As their number increased in the ranks, an awareness began to dawn that women were becoming essential rather than ancillary in the armed forces. The significance of their growing participation became particularly evident during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. About 40,000 women were deployed to the Persian Gulf, representing approximately 7 percent of the forces,’ the largest deployment of women soldiers in American history, and it resulted in significant changes in women’s status in the military. In 1991, in the wake of the war. Congress removed the restriction on women in combat planes (Public Law 102-190). However, although the restriction was removed, there was no requirement that the armed forces actually place women in combat aviation. Then, in April of 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin ordered the services to end the ban against female combat aviators and requested that Congress allow women to serve on Navy combat ships. Congress rescinded the law excluding women from combat ships in November of 1993, and in March of 1994 the Navy assigned the first women to the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower. In January of 1994, the “risk rule” that excluded women from high-risk combat support positions was rescinded and replaced with the Direct Ground Combat Rule, which narrowed the range of occupations associated with ground combat that were closed to women and restricted women only from direct ground combat defined as:
engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force’s personnel.
Thus women were no longer excluded from support units that operate with combat forces. Due to these changes, more than 47,000 new jobs became available to women in the military.
Presently, women are excluded only from small amphibious vessels such as submarines and direct combat positions in infantry, artillery, and armor, but are (or were) inching closer to these final restricted domains. Thus, before the scandal broke at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the role of women in the military had become a source, as previously noted, of subterranean anxiety — in both military and civilian circles — that erupted with the unfolding of the scandal.
After the Aberdeen Proving Ground events became public, proponents of an expanded role for women in the military claimed that the integration of women in the military had not gone far enough. Because they are still excluded from combat roles — and the prestige and promotions associated with them — women will inevitably continue to be seen as inferiors and suffer the indignities associated with this subordinate status. Women’s current “second class-citizenship” in the military, it was claimed, accounts for their vulnerability to sexual abuse. Representative Pat Schroeder was one notable proponent of this position, and she voiced the expectation that the problem would be alleviated “the faster we get [women] mainstreamed and the faster we get them promoted. Proponents of expanded opportunities for women in the military initially hoped the incident and the resulting public outcry would help open up the last positions from which women are excluded. Just as public outrage over the 1991 Tailhook Convention of Naval and Marine aviators — during which twenty-six women were reportedly mauled and molested when forced to pass through a gauntlet of male aviators — contributed to the policy changes enacted in 1993, this scandal might also advance the interests of women in the military. That strategy backfired, however, as opponents of women in the military also advanced the idea that sex is an intractable problem in the military. They viewed the unfolding sex scandal as evidence that integration of women in the military represented a failed social experiment and demonstrated that sexual mixing in the armed forces is necessarily disruptive. As a result of concerns raised by the Aberdeen episode, a panel appointed by Secretary of Defense William Cohen to study the issue of women in the military made a number of recommendations, the most noteworthy of which was that the Army, Navy, and Air Force should keep men and women apart at the platoon level in basic training (or division or flight level in the Navy and Air Force). (The Marine Corps never integrated men and women in basic training.) Overall, the report was favorable to military women, but this recommendation seemed to convey that gender integration has failed in the military and that some backtracking is necessary.
What was remarkable in the whole debate that arose over the Aberdeen scandal was the fundamental consensus on all sides that these incidents of sexual misconduct were not isolated or anomalous, but reflected a deeper, systemic problem in the military connected with the integration of women.
Feminists have traditionally viewed the military suspiciously as a bastion of belligerent sexual attitudes and practices that are often described, as “masculinist.” Law Professor Madeline Morris is one significant feminist voice in the debate about women in the military who portrays the institution as a culture that necessarily fosters hostility to women. She expressed this characteristic view in an article entitled, “By Force of Arms: Rape, War and Military Culture,” that appeared in the Duke Law Journal in February 1996 and received renewed attention after the Aberdeen fiasco. Morris adduced statistical data of military and civilian rates of violent crimes to show that rape is a particular problem in the military, but her statistics actually show that rape occurs less in the military, during peacetime, than in civilian life. “However, the data also indicate that peacetime military rape rates are diminished from civilian rates far less than are military rates of other violent crime,” she says, and refers to this as the “rape differential.” Morris suggests that this differential is sufficient to prove that sexually aggressive behavior is more pronounced in the military than in civilian life and then describes the ways in which the military induces a proclivity to rape. The military, she claims, promotes qualities of dominance, assertiveness, aggression, self-sufficiency, and competitiveness and thus fosters a constellation of rape-conducive attitudes, and this “hypermasculine” constellation of personality traits excludes or minimizes qualities such as “gentleness” and “compassion.” Her ultimate intention is to suggest ways of creating an “ungendered” military. But the interesting point is that her vision of the military as a bastion of aggressive masculinity has also been taken up by opponents of a wider role for women in the military. Walter McDougall, in the conservative journal Commentary, gleefully seizes on the feminist image of predatory military men. He suggests that of course “grizzled sergeants” are irresistibly tempted to abuse their authority when put in charge of “nineteen-year-old girls” and therefore women should not be in the military. Other opponents lament the “feminization” of this formerly macho, competitive, and aggressive environment. But all of these arguments rest on an unexamined and perhaps erroneous assumption: the military culture is antagonistic to women and adverse to values associated with “femininity.”
Both proponents and opponents of a wider role for women may be disinclined to scrutinize the assumption that the military fosters a predatory male culture because this image so conveniently furthers ideological agendas on all sides of the issue. First, the view of military men as sexual predators is expedient for liberal feminists, who aspire to expand roles for women in the military, because, as I have indicated, this misconduct can be attributed to the combat exclusion rules that bar women from participating on an equal basis with men. Likewise, the image of the military as an institution that fosters sexual aggression is congenial to more radical feminists, who see the military as the archetypical institutional embodiment of the dominant masculine culture. Conservatives, who are determined to roll back the participation of women in the military, also have an interest in encouraging the perception of it as a cesspool of sexual misconduct. These sexual imbroglios, from the conservative view, are the inevitable consequence of the reckless integration of women into the military. One critic of such integration expressed this idea in the wake of the Aberdeen scandal:
What no one is publicly saying (but what everyone in the military knows) is that incidents like these are bound to recur. In a military that is dedicated to the full integration of women, and to papering over the implications of that integration as best it can, sex and sexual difference will continue to be a disruptive force.
Thus political and ideological motives on all sides converged to exploit and inflate the sexual harassment scandal at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The image of the military as a den of iniquity is a politically expedient view, but, precisely because of that and of its general acceptance, it must be questioned.
First, we should ask why American policy makers and the American public have been so ready to suppose that military men are more sexually unrestrained than, say, lawyers or businessmen? One answer, as I have indicated, is that this is a political expedient view. But a second reason we assume the culture of the military to be especially hostile to women is because the idea seems intuitively correct or conforms with our accepted social construction of what war is and the characteristic it calls forth. The military is in the business of killing, so we assume that it fosters qualities of aggressiveness and violence. As the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Gilbert Casellas, commented in the wake of the Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal: “The military is training young men to be aggressive in combat and face life-threatening situations, yet they also have to realize that in dealings with female counterparts they have to switch gears.” The widely held assumption, expressed by this comment, is that military training and the qualities it inculcates produce an environment antagonistic to women. I want to scrutinize this assumption by considering war and its organization, and by elucidating the values, organizational techniques, and institutional arrangements that the enterprise of organizing for warfare calls forth. My aim is to examine theoretically military culture with a view to ascertaining whether its training and shared values shape a pattern of behavior that is inimical to women. With a fuller understanding of war and its organizational requirements, I then reexamine the issue of women in the U.S. Armed Forces and show that the experience of women there is far more involved, multifaceted, and positive than popular images convey.
The Art of War
The military is an organization whose ultimate purpose is to fight wars. War does not refer to all violent confrontations between human beings, but is specifically an activity involving the “the disciplined and socially sanctioned use of deadly force by one group of people against another.” War, as is often observed, is a paradoxical activity. It is paradoxical insofar as it is the most destructive and chaotic human activity, but it requires the highest degree of organization and cooperation. The art of conducting warfare consists in getting a large number of people to perform together like a machine:
War, the most violent of all enterprises, is also the most organized. In no other human endeavor — not in commerce, industry, education, religion, science, nor domestic politics — does collective action occur on such a large scale.
The title of this article recalls the “first wave” of Book V of Plato’s Republic. The discussion there, concerning the manner of living of the “guardians” or military class in Plato’s ideal city, proceeds in “three waves,” the first of which assigns women an equal status in the military class. Plato suggests that the “struggle for victory in war” is an “art” (374b) like any other art that requires a certain personality and a specified regimen of training. The type of personality that makes a person a good guardian is distributed among both men and women and therefore members of both sexes must be trained as defenders of the city (455d-456d).
My purpose in evoking Plato’s Republic is not to bring his authority to the side of women in the military, because his argument does not admit of such a simplistic interpretation. The interesting aspect of Plato’s Republic here is not simply or primarily that he includes women as equal members of the military class, but that he opposes the model of the relentless and indomitable individual warrior as this figure was represented in the earlier Greek literary tradition. Irrespective of whether its proposals about the equality of women were meant seriously or not, the Republic departs from the idea of war as combat between individual warrior heroes driven by an ardor for battle. In fact, Plato’s Socrates aims to subordinate aggressiveness to knowledge and spiritedness to rational guidance. The Republic, among many other things, suggests a movement in human history toward war as a “regularized collective activity.”
Plato’s self-conscious departure from the traditional idea of the individual, aggressive war hero is first and most particularly evident in Books n and III in which Socrates disparages the way gods and heroes have been represented by the poets and recommends censorship. Homer, it turns out, is a main object the proposed excisions (see also Book X). The model of the insolent and proud warrior whom Socrates most emphatically denigrates is the figure of Achilles, hero of the Trojan War, to whom he refers repeatedly in Book III (388a, 390e, 391a-c). The stories about Achilles and his exploits, who served as a model of human greatness for the ancient Greeks, will be repudiated in Plato’s best city: “The dragging of Hector around Patroclus’ tomb, the slaughter in the fire of the men captured alive: we’ll deny that all this is truly told,” says Socrates (391c). “There is no room in Plato’s Republic for the war lover” driven by vengeance and the urge to annihilate.
The Republic may be viewed as a step in the process of rationalization of human relationships and institutions, as that process was conceptualized by the sociologist Max Weber. Weber viewed human history in terms of increased coordination and regulation of human activities through the application of standardized rules and procedures, and he thought that the origins of the art of coordinating and disciplining large numbers of people developed in war. Military discipline, he claimed, “is the ideal model for the modem capitalist factory.” As for the conduct of warfare, Weber discerned a contradiction in human history between the charismatic war hero and the disciplined warrior community and showed how the development of military establishments had been pushed in the more effective direction of discipline “with its prohibition of fighting out of line.” The unified mass of soldiers, e.g., the phalanx of the Greeks or the maniple of the Romans, proved to be the most technically effective way to defeat an enemy. Sun Tzu observes, in his classic The Art of War, that once “people are unified, the brave cannot proceed alone, the timid cannot retreat alone.” “Good warriors,” he says, “seek effectiveness in battle from the force of momentum, not from individual people.”
What war requires for successful prosecution is training, drill, and teamwork. Military parades, which appear irrational to the uninitiated, for example, are exercises in performing the same movements over and over until a group of people can act as a single body in a regulated, coordinated, and disciplined manner. The art of warfare consists of disciplining and molding groups of individuals into a single unit. Because of the centrality of discipline, the idea that the military culture promotes an “idealization” of aggressiveness appears faulty. “It is a large step from what may be biologically innate leanings toward individual aggression to ritualized, socially sanctioned, institutionalized group warfare.” Moreover, the violent, blood-lusting individual, glamorized by Homer and others, is, in fact, detrimental for an organized fighting force because such a person is uncontrollable and unreliable.
To illustrate the point that raw aggression is not sufficient for, and is even antithetical to, the effective deployment of military force, it is interesting to consider reports of the fighting style of the Cossacks during the nineteenth century. The Cossacks were bands of free-ranging marauders on the Central Asian Steppe who were used, not without difficulty, during the Napoleonic Wars in the Tsar’s regiments to fight the French. The Cossacks were undisciplined and erratic and did not fight in an organized manner. Rather, it was reported, they swooped down on stragglers among the enemy ranks and were exceptionally cruel to the weak that they managed to track down. The famous Prussian military leader and theorist of war, Karl von Clausewitz, witnessed some of these incidents and told his wife: “If my feelings had not been hardened it would have sent me mad. Even so it will take many years before I can recall what I have seen without a shuddering horror.” Despite their ferocity, however, the Cossacks fled in the face of danger. During the battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War of 1854,
two Cossack regiments were sent forward to oppose the charge of the Light Brigade; a watching Russian officer reported that, “frightened by the disciplined order of the mass of [British] calvary bearing down on them, [the Cossacks] did not hold, but wheeling to their left, began to fire on their own troops in an effort to clear their way of escape.”
Although they fully demonstrated “masculinist” qualities, including aggressiveness and assertiveness, this band of unruly fighters apparently lacked the key quality that organized warfare requires: the capacity to doggedly stand one’s ground in the face of assault. It is this capacity to maintain one’s position that military discipline aims to engender to replace natural inclinations of fear and blood lust.
Another key quality that induces human beings to resist the most fundamental human impulse — to flee in the face of danger — is a feeling of devotion to one’s fellows in battle. The most important element in military organization, observed by virtually every theorist and participant in warfare, is the cultivation of a feeling of mutual attachment or camaraderie among soldiers. According to Max Weber, “[t]he primeval way of creating trained troops — ever ready to strike, and allowing themselves to be disciplined was warrior communism” [emphasis in original]. Because war requires such a high degree of cohesiveness among members of a military unit, this most violent and aggressive of enterprises ironically requires qualities of submissiveness, obedience, and fidelity to one’s fellow comrades in arms.
In the Republic, Plato opens his exposition of the guardian class — whom he later refers to as “auxiliaries,” as distinguished from the guardians proper or rulers (414b) — by raising the question of how a fighting force can be kept from behaving pugnaciously to their own people. The aim of the training for the guardians is to make soldiers like “noble dogs … gentle as can be with their familiars and people they know and the opposite with those they don’t know” (375d; 416a-c). Despite the slightly satiric tone of Socrates in discussing these issues, the point is a serious one. The development of the art and organization of war requires and induces qualities of mutual devotion and gentleness toward one’s fellows. The training of the guardians that Socrates describes is directed to combining courage and gentleness. The result of this training, Socrates’ interlocutor concludes, would be to create a virtually invincible military force:
They would be best at fighting their enemies too because they would least desert one another, these men who recognize each other as brothers, fathers, and sons … And if the females join in the campaign too … I know that with all this they would be unbeatable (417d).
The importance of this sentiment of mutual devotion is widely acknowledged as the most basic requirement for success in combat. Undaunted by this elementary description of the character of war and its requirements, Madeline Morris asserts that the “normative standards of masculinity,” by which soldiers are socialized, exclude or minimize “sensitivity, gentleness and other stereotypically feminine characteristics.” Instead, she relies on inaccurate stereotypes to make the case that the military is a “masculinist” institution and misrepresents the culture of the military. Stephanie Gutmann, an opponent of further integration of women in to the military, also takes refuge in hackneyed stereotypes to deride their current role, and also, as a consequence, fails to understand the military. For example, Gutmann claims that the result of accommodations made for women in boot camp “has been a kind of feel-good feminization of boot camp culture, with the old male ethos of competition and survival giving at least partial way to a new (female) spirit of cooperation and esteem-building.” The “spirit of cooperation,” which Gutmann equates with femininity, is the most essential and necessary quality of a soldier. Like Plato’s “noble dogs,” soldiers are discouraged from acting belligerently or competitively toward others within a unit.
During the Second World War, the U.S. Army Research Branch Information and Education Division conducted a study of soldiers’ attitudes that was subsequently published in three volumes. One part of the study was devoted to determining what factors soldiers credited with bracing them in battle. When asked,
the proportion [of enlisted soldiers] who replied that thinking ‘that you couldn’t let the other men down’ helped them a lot, constituted a majority of the Infantry veterans in each theater and was second only to the proportion who said they were helped a lot by prayer.
For the officers surveyed, the thought that they “couldn’t let the other men down” was the most important motivation for persevering when the “going was tough.”
The soldiers did not indicate that a desire to annihilate or destroy played any significant role in spurring them to carry on. Interestingly, World War II soldiers showed that feelings of “vindictiveness” toward the enemy were relatively insignificant in relation to the other factors that the men reported as incentives to exert themselves in combat. In addition, the closer soldiers came to battle, the less vindictiveness they felt toward the enemy. The researchers speculate that this inverse relation between feelings of vindictiveness and proximity to battle can be attributed to “[the soldier’s] discovery that much dirty fighting which to the civilian and the inexperienced soldier seemed a special property of the enemy’s viciousness was actually a general characteristic of war.” Although warfare requires viciousness, actual participation in warfare also, ironically, appears to diminish qualities of anger, indignation, vengeance and aggression that are associated with “masculinity.” It is not a violent passion for revenge, but rather a feeling of mutual devotion that encourages human beings to hold their position in battle. According to the World War II survey, this sense of devotion was so acute that men who were hospitalized would go AWOL (absent without leave) to rejoin their units.
The survey also examined qualities in leaders that gave the soldiers confidence and disposed them to persist in the grueling conditions of war. The results indicate that the qualities that soldiers found congenial in a leader were indeed connected with masculinity, insofar as the men attached importance to “courage and coolness.” However, other qualities that were rated highly in officers are more stereotypically associated with “femininity.” Favorable comments about officers who had “encouraged” the men and showed “active concern for welfare and safety” were expressed by more than half of the men questioned. Similarly, Shils and Janowitz’s study of the Wehrmacht indicated that a conviction on the part of soldiers that their officers were concerned with “protecting them” and were duly considerate of their lives” were critical factors in motivating the men to follow their officers.” In the context of another war — the Persian Gulf War — an Army captain and a woman, Carol Barkalow, observed that “[I]eaders are entrusted with the care and well-being of their soldiers — they are called upon to play the role of a ‘nurturer,’ women’s supposed strength.” Sun Tzu’s admonition that the military commander “look upon your soldiers as beloved children and they will willingly die with you” reflects an ironic appreciation of this parenting aspect of military leadership.”
The characteristics typically thought to be the most pernicious in war are impulsiveness, impatience, arrogance, and bravado. The brazenly courageous individual who rushes headlong into battle undaunted by a fear of death is dangerous to his or her unit. To be sure, soldiers must be willing to spare their lives, but in a spirit of self-sacrifice for their fellows. The individual who holds his (or her) life of “no account” — in Hegel’s description of the master type in the battle for prestige, — (a manly ideal adulated recently in Francis Fukuyama’s work, The End of History and the Last Man) is actually the type of person who is indifferent to the fate of his or her fellows. Achilles, whose bruised sense of pride led him to obstinately neglect his duty to his fellow soldiers, is a classical prototype. Not only is the proud and pugnacious individual pernicious in the role of the ordinary soldier, but tends to make an inferior military leader and strategist as well. An apt example of such a flawed leader was the Russian General Jilinsky, whom S. L. A. Marshall blames for the Russians’ disastrous defeat at Tannenberg at the outset of World War I. As the Germans advanced on the Russian Second Army, the Russian Army General, Alexander Samsonov, sent a message to Jilinsky asking if he shouldn’t move his troops to avoid a buildup of German infantry columns. Jilinsky replied, “I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward. I insist that he continue the offensive.” Marshall observes of Jilinsky that:
[his] vanity had to be fed, though his troops stumbled forward half-rationed, half-armed, many of them unbooted, their feet bound in rags … Such unpleasant detail in no way eased the itch of his ambition.”
This example indicates that, to be successful, a military leader must avoid the temptation to pursue personal glory or to rush recklessly into battle. The leader must also have the ability to calmly and cunningly consider the best approach for defeating the enemy’s will to resist:
One of the factors that make a general great, and therefore make him rare, is that he can withstand the urge of the men to rush headlong into direct engagements and can see instead how he can go around rather than through his opponent.
As every theorist of war since Sun Tsu has observed, the leader’s deceptiveness is the quality that is most conducive to victory in war.
The consideration that I am driving toward is that the dominant image of warfare as a “machismo” enterprise appears increasingly chimerical as we look more deeply. It also becomes evident that our common cultural idea of war eclipses its most significant aspects. War and the organization for war bring forth many characteristics that we associate with women-tenderness, protectiveness, nurturing, self-sacrifice, and submissiveness (not to speak of “deceptiveness”) — and diminishes qualities associated with raw aggression. I do not wish to substitute, for a construction of the military as “macho” and aggressive, an image that construes the military as feminine, nurturing, and protective. To be sure, idealizations of “masculinity” are conspicuous in the military. But an exclusive focus on the norms and ideals connected with masculinity distort our understanding of both the military and the whole activity of warfare.
I have attempted so far to review the activity of warfare and the type of qualities and training it requires. The idea that the military fosters individual aggressiveness clearly oversimplifies and misrepresents the requisites of preparing for and fighting war. The prevailing assumption, according to which the military necessarily transmits a cluster of aggressive macho attitudes that generate an adversarial attitude toward women, appears insupportable.
Mixed Integration
Although the image of the macho military is misleading, the military, to be sure, has been a predominantly male institution (even though women have always been involved in war). War (and the preparation for it) has consistently been seen as “an entirely masculine activity” and the military experience as an initiation into manhood. The military establishment, more than any other institution, is based on and derives its identity from the idea of masculinity. But the military is also an institution that diminishes the importance of primordial and personal characteristics and creates a condition of communal solidarity that transcends individual distinctions. One central imperative of the military, as I have indicated, is group loyalty. The willingness to share common dangers and common goals is fostered by individual attributes becoming inconsequential after entrance into the service. Consistent with this prerequisite of unit cohesion, authority in the military is accorded to the rank and not to the person. Since authority is “depersonalized,” obedience is due to the individual bearing higher rank, irrespective of whether the bearer is black or white, male or female. James Webb, former Secretary of the Navy, observes that the military “relies on a code of conduct that demands egalitarian treatment in every aspect of discipline, recognition, and the subjection of its officers and its ranks to life-threatening risks.” Webb aptly characterizes the military institution as a “socialist meritocracy.”
Women, then, have been assimilated into an institutional environment intrinsically connected with masculinity on the one hand, but uniquely neutral to personal qualities on the other. Given these competing values, the process of incorporating women into this environment has not been unmixed or singularly fraught with resistance and hostility. While the primordial characteristic of “femaleness” is highly visible within this formerly male environment, the institutional imperatives of the military require that women be treated without regard to gender and in accordance with insignia and rank. The web of conflicting tendencies in which the integration of women has taken place has had both positive and negative results, but it has been the failures, rather than the successes, that have received public attention. Military participants in a 1997 RAND study on the effects of integrating women into units previously closed to them suggest that the military must be credited with successes in gender integration and express the desire to see “a more balanced portrait of military life that would include achievements as well as scandals.”
The paradoxical mix of success and failure connected with women’s involvement in the U.S. military is illustrated by one of the formative experiences that led to the integration of women in the armed forces — women’s participation in World War II. During the war, women were brought into the war theaters to staff the vast network of clerical support positions that accompany a modern military organization. Their participation met with some initial resistance, but, as Dwight Eisenhower pointed out, military leaders changed their minds about the usefulness of women in the course of the war. “Until my experience in London,” Eisenhower confesses, “I had been opposed to the use of women in uniform. But in Great Britain I had seen them perform so magnificently in various positions, including service in active anti-aircraft batteries, that I had been converted.” Eisenhower further reflects that the initial resistance to women in uniform was ironic, given the long acceptance of women as nurses in battle. But by the end of the war, even the “most stubborn diehards,” Eisenhower relates, became convinced of the helpfulness of women “and demanded them in increasing numbers.” In fact, women were so effective in the jobs they performed during the war-in addition to their eating generally only half as much as men — that consideration was given to drafting women in the United States for service. Thus women were eagerly utilized and resistance to their use diminished when their positive contribution to the task at hand became evident.
However, the inclusion of women in the American war effort at this time was not without problems. As women in uniform became increasingly visible, they also became increasingly vulnerable to invidious speculation about their morals and motives. Being relatively untouched by the horrors of war and imbued with a long-standing distrust of the military, Americans were willing to believe the worst about military women. A slander campaign directed primarily against the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was launched in 1943 and found fertile ground in which to spread in the soil of American public opinion. Large numbers of WAAC’s were rumored to have become pregnant and returned home on that account and one source claimed that the War Department intended to furnish WAACs with “[c]ontraceptives and prophylactic equipment.” The accusations-for which no evidence was ever uncovered-were so appalling that initially these aspersions were assumed to spring from Axis propaganda. But an Army Intelligence investigation, assisted by the FBI, concluded that the “rumors originated with ‘Army personnel.'” These rumors deeply hurt and demoralized the military women, who saw themselves as serving their country. This example of a slander campaign makes manifest the complex and contradictory nature of women’s involvement in the military, an involvement that generated both tremendous approval and painful derision.
The slander campaign notwithstanding, it became clear to American military leaders after the Second World War that women would be used again in future military engagements. These leaders spearheaded an effort to establish a permanent cadre of women soldiers that could be expanded in times of need. Supporters of permanent status for women in the military included General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, and Admiral Nimitz, among other preeminent military leaders. Eisenhower and Nimitz both testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services committee and strongly urged Congress to give permanent legal status to women in the services, praising women’s performance and noting that disciplinary problems with women had been “practically nonexistent.”
Women were integrated as full-fledged military personnel and given permanent status by the 1948 Integration Act (Public Law 625). However, the act put a number of limitations on women in the military: The proportion of women could not exceed 2 percent of the total forces, they could not be promoted to General or Admiral grades, and they could be discharged for motherhood. The 1948 Integration Act also prohibited women from flying combat aircraft and serving on combat ships. The act did not prescribe any limitations on ground combat because of the difficulty in specifying which ground positions would become involved in combat and which would not. Instead, the act left it to the discretion of the Service Secretaries to assign women so that they would not engage in direct combat on the ground. Gradually, from 1948 to the present, many of the restrictions required by the Integration Act were removed, and women’s participation in the military expanded. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, the 2 percent limitation on the number of women and the ceiling on women’s promotions to general or admiral were lifted. During the 1970s, other restrictions on women-discharge for motherhood, for example — were removed. Finally, all military positions have been opened to women since 1993, except those positions involved with direct combat and in small amphibious vessels.
Probably the single most significant change that affected the issue of women in the military was the end of the draft in 1973 and the creation of the AVF. Because enrollment in the military was now based solely on voluntary enlistment (and because of the disrepute into which the military had fallen since the Vietnam War), there were significant manpower shortages during the mid-1970s. The services began to rely increasingly on women to fill many of the positions for which the available, lower-aptitude men were not qualified. Consequently, the number of women in the military swelled, climbing from less than 2 percent of the combined forces to 11 percent in the 1980s to a level of 14 percent at the end of the twentieth century.
The increased numbers of women in the military is a result, as I have indicated, of the lack of qualified male personnel after the cessation of the draft in 1973. Again, as in the Second World War, women were recruited because they were needed. The increasing participation of women in the military after 1973 is an example of a tendency to rely on women when men are not available in sufficient numbers. Women’s presence was both welcome and haltingly accommodated in the post-Vietnam period. The difficulties associated with their inclusion in the military was evidenced by the variety of convoluted measures designed to prevent them from coming near ground combat. The Army attempted to develop a system of rating positions “in relation to their probability of being involved in direct combat” and to exclude women from positions with a high probability of exposure to combat. In 1987 the Army loosened the high probability standard and excluded women from positions entailing a high “risk” of combat. But, as future military engagements would show, these exclusions caused inordinate confusion in the midst of actual military operations. During Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989, highly skilled women were rashly removed from their units for fear that the units might encounter combat, and there was a great deal of uncertainty as to which positions the restrictions applied in actual military operations.
One event that occurred during Operation Just Cause demonstrated the difficulty of isolating combatants and noncombatants and also dramatized the paradoxes in which women become entangled as result of their integration into the military. During the Panama operation, Captain Linda Bray, commander of the 988th Military Police Company, unexpectedly encountered enemy fire and found herself leading troops in combat when her unit was directed to seize a dog kennel. She was subsequently hailed as the first woman to lead troops in combat and thrust into the glare of media attention. The publicity given to her involvement in this firefight caused considerable resentment on the part of fellow service members who did not feel that Bray’s simple carrying out of duty deserved to be singled out for special attention. The hostility directed toward her from fellow service members was so severe she finally resigned from the service. It was not Captain Bray’s gender, per se, that aroused the animosity; rather, it was the media attention she received that kindled indignation. Resentment was generated in the context of a culture that prizes communal values and spurns attention to individual achievement. Ironically, when women’s activities in the military are highlighted by the press (or other civilian institutions), they experience greater alienation within the military. According to the 1997 RAND study on the effects of gender integration, “[o]fficers and senior enlisted women also felt that the recent public spotlight causes problems where none may otherwise exist. One interviewee commented that the “more they do things like this, the more they set us apart.”
Despite some chafing connected with women’s integration into the armed forces, great progress overall has been made by military women since the 1970s, and their role has expanded dramatically in only a few decades. Women now serve in a variety of military occupations, including piloting combat aircraft and directing artillery. Currently, almost ” percent of military women are officers, the same ratio of officers to enlisted as among men.” Enlisted women are also advancing through the ranks, and more women “are serving in key command sergeant major and command master chief positions.” Although restrictions on women in direct combat persist and concerns about effects of integration on cohesion linger, the advances made by women in the armed forces from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the extent to which the military has enabled this progress, should not be overlooked. In fact, some military women express the view that they have greater opportunities for advancement and responsibility in the military than do women in civilian occupations. When asked for comments about their military experience in the wake of the Aberdeen scandal, two black women majors in the Air Force observed that: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a black woman is not going to get the kind of responsibility” that these military women have in the civilian world.
The advance of women in the military owes something to feminism insofar as the feminist movement fostered greater public acceptance of women in nontraditional occupations. But, in general, this burgeoning involvement of women in the military, until very recently, occurred outside the gamut of feminist activities. The feminist movement had grown up with the antiwar movement, and initially endeavored to avoid the issue of war and women soldiers. Overall, the attitude of feminists toward women in the military has been ambivalent:
Most American feminist groups have paid scant attention to the issue of women in the military. Indeed, it has been the emergence of peace activism within the 1970s-1980s women’s movement that has made the issue of women in the military either seem to be trivial or ideologically awkward.
This general aversion to the subject of war and military women reflects a deep-seated conflict in the feminist view:
[f]rom its inception, feminism has not quite known whether to fight men or to join them; whether to lament sex differences and deny their importance or to acknowledge and even valorize such differences; whether to condemn all wars outright or to extol women’s contributions to war efforts.
The conflict in the feminist outlook finds expression in Madeline Morris’ exposition and in Linda Bird Franke’s recent book. Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military. Both women view gender discrimination as inherent in the institution of the military, which necessarily promotes male dominance and, as Linda Bird Franke observes, “nothing has been discovered yet to defuse the dynamic of men in groups and the collective necessity to subordinate women.” In view of the depth and pervasiveness of the male culture in the military, the whole project of integrating women would appear to be futile. (This is exactly the position of opponents of women in the military.) Thus it remains unclear, in the feminist view, whether women should aim to participate equally in the military or spurn any involvement with this necessarily defective institution.
Just as feminists are uncomfortable with the issue, military women tend to spurn the appellation of “feminist” and are, in general, neither “crusaders nor radicals.” Military women, like military men, tend to be conservative in their ideological attitudes and to venerate the traditions of the military. Military women, like their male counterparts, seek the satisfactions of a way of life devoted to self-sacrifice and solidarity and tend to focus on duty rather than rights. One revealing example of the tension between feminists and military women is a conflict that occurred between members of NOW and female Annapolis midshipmen on 28 May 1990, an incident that is connected with an important milestone in the assimilation of women into the military: the admission of women to the service academies in 1976. The 1990 incident occurred when NOW members picketed Annapolis in response to a report that a female cadet had been chained to a urinal. Some female midshipmen confronted the NOW demonstrators, chastised them for their ignorance and insisted that the protesters were “doing a lot of damage.”
James Webb, whose observations about the culture of the military are quoted above, is a well-known and outspoken opponent of women in the military. He brings attention to the “unique culture” of the military “and its requirements of absolute fairness,” to show how damaging double standards for women are to the military culture. And, given the central importance of fairness in the military, Webb’s concern is valid. But the inference that his observations point to-and the inference that both he and the feminists avoid-is that women have made great strides in the military and inroads into nearly every domain of the armed forces because they flourish in a culture of fairness and egalitarian treatment. Their success in the military since the end of the draft is due, in part, to the fact that the women who have volunteered for the armed forces have tended to be better educated and have had higher aptitude scores than the available men. It appears that, in a particularly meritocratic system, women-like blacks-make advances beyond their civilian counterparts. Simply put, women’s achievements in the military have been earned by their merits in an environment that rewards merit. Thus, certain aspects of military culture have been congenial to women, and it may well be that, as women’s participation in it increases, the egregiousness of gender will decrease. This is not to say that women have not encountered or will not encounter obstacles or hostility, but their success in adapting to the military environment and the accomplishment of the military in incorporating women must also be given due consideration to achieve a more balanced representation of gender integration in the armed forces.
The Other?
Feminists who pigeonhole the military as a “masculinist” culture recognize the importance of group loyalty in military culture discussed above, but these observers do not conceive of military women as sharing in the sense of collective identity. On the contrary, as noted above, Linda Bird Franke attributes the subordination of women to the “dynamic of men in groups.” Similarly, Madeline Morris gives attention to the “affective bonds” that suffuse the military culture and create a “primary group” among members of a military unit. She is mainly interested in the way this primary group structure transmits and inculcates the masculinist norms of the military culture. Like Franke, she assumes that military women are excluded from these affective bonds. In her view, the supposed hostility to women in the military derives from “a military culture in which women are viewed as the ‘other,’ primarily as sexual targets.” This characterization of women as the excluded and victimized “other” again obfuscates the military by forcing our concept of it into a Procrustean bed of rigid binary contrasts. Are women necessarily viewed as “the other” in the military, or is there a more subtle and complex position that military women occupy?
It is necessary to observe, in the first instance, that the portrayal of military women as embattled victims of masculine aggression fails to take account of the attachment military women themselves may feel for their male counterparts, a feeling of attachment that is generated precisely by the military culture. Military women tend to resent the image of themselves as mistreated victims of predatory males and “simply do not find their male coworkers to be ‘the enemy.'” Interestingly, the alienation between feminism and military women may be due to the fact that women have fit extraordinarily well into the military culture and have quite successfully internalized its norms. As Laura Miller observes, “feminist arguments that are based on individual rights but do not mention women serving organizational needs may not speak effectively to an institution that subsumes individual rights for the ‘greater good.'” The feminist message, then, may not always resonate compatibly with the values of military women who also, as noted above, are communitarian in their orientation and place duty above rights.
The attachment of women to the values of the military is strikingly evident when female pilots in war zones adamantly eschew media attention to their individual achievements. In the recent Desert Fox operation, for example, “women aviators serving in the conflict have declined requests by the news media for interviews.” According to a Pentagon spokesman these women “don’t want to stand apart [from male squadron mates] because they consider themselves Navy aviators first and fore-most.”
The conspicuous “femaleness” of women presents some challenges to group cohesion in the military, especially insofar as sexual friction and unwelcome media attention result from their presence. But these factors do not seem to preclude the type of bonding that is such an essential part of military service. There is little information on the experiences of women and bonding in the military, and much of the information that is available is anecdotal. Still, what evidence there is suggests that women enter into the web of affective bonds that create group cohesion. The RAND study on the effects of integrating women into units previously closed to them, found that the cohesiveness of the units studied were not eroded by their presence. Overall, the study found that “gender integration is perceived to have a relatively small effect on readiness, cohesion, and morale.”
The sense of common identity experienced by soldiers seems to be based on their membership in a unit rather than in their gender identity. A women participant-observer of a Joint Chiefs of Staff exercise held in 1982 to test the rapid deployment force (RDF) reported, for example, that:
[in] this particular field situation, I observed cross-sex relationships, but these appeared to be exclusively in the form of friendships or “buddy relationships” rather than romantic involvements. I found myself feeling closer to my work group than to my gender group. Even though I was housed with the latter, most of my time-both on and off duty-was spent with my co-workers.
Similarly, more recent reports from high-stress field environments and war zones suggest that women are able to assimilate with their units and enter in the bonds of mutual attachment.[ 99] Captain Barkalow, a participant in the Persian Gulf war attests: “In the desert, I witnessed the same type of relationships forming between men and women as traditionally occur among men-mutual respect and caring born of enduring similar dangers and hardships.” Women who served in the Vietnam war also reported this same phenomenon: “Life over there was so real and in some ways much easier. There was no such thing as black or white, male or female. We dealt with each other as human beings, as friends. We worked hard, we partied hard, we were a unit.”
Available evidence also suggests that male soldiers view their female counterparts as respected colleagues and valued members of the unit. The authors of the RAND study on gender integration, for example, report that they “were repeatedly told of the high esteem in which senior male enlisted personnel held their female peers.” Furthermore, it was reported that the gender difference between men and women supervisors did not affect the perceptions of subordinates. Most junior personnel “asserted that there was no difference between men and women supervisors.” The survey also showed that the image of pervasive sexual harassment in the military is misguided: “Of all the personnel surveyed, the majority (both men and women) believed that sexual harassment was not happening in their unit.”
One factor generally ignored in the debate about military women is that they seem to have a high level of job satisfaction, which suggests that they find their work environment more congenial than is generally supposed. Data collected from the General Social Survey, University of Chicago, National Opinion Research Center in 1991 regarding job satisfaction show that white women soldiers are slightly more satisfied with their jobs than are white civilian women (46 percent versus 41 percent). Remarkably, however, the percentage of black women soldiers satisfied in their work is nearly double the percentage of comparable black civilian women (47 percent versus 25 percent). Black women, we should be aware, represent a large percentage of women in the military, accounting for 31.4 percent of all women in the armed forces (and 43 percent of women in the Army). In addition, black women, as a group, have the lowest attrition rate in the military. If the military culture is a boys’ club that necessarily marginalizes women, how do we explain the satisfaction and indeed success of black women, perhaps the most marginalized group in the civilian world? Commenting on the tremendous success of black women soldiers, Charles Moskos paints a different picture of the military than the one that has emerged from the recent scandals:
The military is the only major institution in America that is truly mixed-racially integrated, male and female, grass roots and middle class.
The considerations about the military presented above are not meant to suggest that women do not experience discrimination and encounter obstacles in the military.'” I have attempted, rather, to portray a fuller picture of gender integration in the military and to bring into question the one-sided assumption that military women are the embattled victims of aggressive male behavior. This widespread distortion minimizes the tremendous successes of women in the military and neglects the cultural characteristics of the military that have facilitated these achievements.