Gender

Gender. This entry consists of two articles, each of which deals with the issue of gender and the military from a different perspective. The first, Male Identity and the Military, examines the concept of men as warriors and protectors. The second, Female Identity and the Military, emphasizes the relationship that women have had to war and the military. For more detailed related discussions, see Combat Effectiveness, Gays and Lesbians in the Military, Gender and War, Military Ideals, Sex and the Military, Sexual Harassment, Women in the Military.Male Identity and the MilitaryFemale Identity and the Military
Gender: Male Identity and the Military Male identity in the United States, except in certain pacifist groups, has generally been closely tied to the socially defined role of warrior and protector. Throughout American military history, the manipulation and exploitation of this gender identity has been among the most important means of persuading men to join the service or informally coercing them to participate. This process has served three major purposes: first, it draws huge numbers of men into uniform without having to resort to widespread physical coercion by the state; second, it serves a military useful role by defining behavioral standards that make for effective combatants and contribute to post‐service reintegration; and third, the gender roles fostered by the military bolster and legitimize gender roles in society as a whole. The agents of this manipulation have been as diverse and pervasive as their message, including politicians, military leaders, commercial interests, and religious and educational institutions.

The creation of male gender identity has been tied explicitly to a warrior role and military service for the local community and the state. That this was a product of the natural order went virtually unchallenged throughout the colonial and early national periods, and military service for men was explicitly tied to rights and obligations of citizenship. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, with the rise of industrialization and urbanization, the closing of the frontier, slowly expanding roles for women, and the influence of social Darwinism, this assumption came into question. To reaffirm it, some Americans like Theodore Roosevelt openly embraced war with Spain in 1898 in part to restore the individual and collective masculine virtues apparently eroded by modern, materialistic, urban society.

The twentieth century has witnessed a dynamic of ever stronger attacks on traditional, polarized gender identities, and increasingly extreme retrenchments of the male warrior identity. As women's roles in the workplace and the military expanded with national mobilization in two world wars, they directly challenged the underlying assumptions of male‐warrior exclusivity. If women were allowed to step into uniform, as temporary auxiliaries in 1917, in segregated branches of the armed forces in 1943, and integrated into the force beginning in 1978, their specialties and geographic assignments were still carefully circumscribed away from combat in efforts to protect the male‐warrior status.

As the reserved male domains shrank, definitions and defense of those domains became more polarized. When the military as a whole was an exclusively male sphere, there was no need to draw gendered distinctions within it, but as women entered the military, gendered distinctions sharpened between the warriors and supporting personnel. This also marked the rise of concern over sexual orientation, which threatened further to subvert the traditional male identity. In training and indoctrination of male recruits, gendered behavior emphasized boundaries and fostered extreme behavioral standards. The hypermasculine ideals espoused and often embodied by drill instructors and unit leaders fostered effective battlefield performance, especially among various airborne, amphibious, and aviation elite forces. But while such indoctrination served short‐term institutional needs and provided individual affirmation of male gender values, it also promoted behavior increasingly incompatible with gender relations in society as a whole. This has been seen in dramatic fashion in the last twenty years with the integration of the services and the incremental lifting of many restrictions on women serving in combat.

The integration of women in the military has exposed the false premise of the traditional male gender identity, which insists that the role of warrior and protector must be an exclusive province of men. The myths that have long underpinned this identity are deeply interwoven into the fabric of American society, and efforts to redefine gender roles have encountered widespread resistance from many sources. If men are no longer to hold exclusive control of sanctioned organized aggression and violence, then the basis for individual and collective roles and behavioral standards will require fundamental change, such change is unlikely to come about without intense and protracted conflict.

Bibliography

Morris Janowitz and and Roger Little , Sociology and the Military Establishment, 1959; 3rd ed. 1974.
Jean Bethke Elshtain , Women and War, 1987.
Judith Hicks Stiehm , Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 1989.
Elisabetta Addis, Valeria E. Russo, and Lorenza Sebesta, eds., Women Soldiers: Images and Reality, 1994.
Linda Bird Francke , Ground Zero: The Gender War in the Military, 1997.
Melissa S. Herbert , Camouflage Isn't Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military, 1998.

Craig M. Cameron

Gender: Female Identity and The Military 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 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.

Judith Hicks Stiehm