Women in the Military

Women in the Military. The role of women in the U.S. military has changed significantly over the last 200 years, but the greatest change has come since the initiation of the All‐Volunteer Force in 1973. Throughout American history, the expansion of women's roles has come about when the military faced a shortage of male recruits, usually in times of war. Historically, women's participation has occurred mainly in medical and administrative support positions, thus releasing male soldiers from desk jobs to fight in combat. However, the excellent performance of women in support roles in combat zones during the 1980s and 1990s spurred extensive public debates about opening combat positions to women and about women's duties and rights as citizens. This debate focused attention specifically on the contribution women soldiers have made to military readiness and efficiency, rather than simply on the older notion that a woman's military role was to free up men to fight.

From the Revolutionary War to the present day, women have served in the armed forces. Until World War I, however, their roles—as laundresses or nurses, for example—were generally informal and seldom institutionalized. A handful of women disguised themselves as men and fought alongside male soldiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In World War I, 21,000 women served in the U.S. Army and Navy Nurse Corps, and another 13,000 volunteered for clerical positions in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. All except the nurses held a quasi‐military status and were discharged from active duty immediately after the war ended. At the outbreak of World War II, the shortage of military personnel led to the first large‐scale recruitment of women and the formation of the women's auxiliary military branches. During that war, more than 350,000 women served primarily in the medical and administrative fields, although the services also employed women as pilots, mechanics, truck drivers, gunnery instructors, and electricians. Women were not used in combat roles, but rather to fill support positions and thus release male soldiers for combat.

The end of World War II brought the demobilization of large numbers of servicemen and ‐women and a corresponding diminution in women's roles. In 1948, Congress passed the Women's Armed Services Integration Act, which provided the first ever legal basis for and legal limits to a permanent role for women in the military. Allowing for women to hold full military rank and privilege, the 1948 act also placed caps on women's enlistment and promotion, and excluded them from combat service. Women were not to exceed 2 percent of active duty personnel in each service and could not be promoted beyond lieutenant‐colonel or commander. The combat exclusion requirement remained more or less in effect into the late 1990s (aside from exceptions in the early 1990s for female pilots), but the enlistment and promotion ceilings were repealed in 1967, when the Department of Defense again needed to ease a recruitment deficit at the height of the unpopular Vietnam War. Coinciding with the expanding role of women in the labor force and calls for equal rights more broadly, women's participation in the services grew gradually over the next few years (in 1971, 1.6% of active duty personnel were women; in 1976, 5%), and the first women were promoted to general officers in 1970.

When the end of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia resulted in the elimination of the draft in 1973 and the initiation of the All‐Volunteer Force, the military began planning how to recruit more women to compensate for expected shortages of qualified male volunteers. Congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (1972), as well as a number of court rulings in favor of equal treatment across gender lines in the services, led to changes in personnel policies that allowed women to command units composed of both men and women; eliminated rules that required the automatic discharge of pregnant women soldiers; ended segregated training of male and female recruits; and equalized dependents' entitlements for married servicewomen and servicemen. In 1973, the first women naval aviators earned their wings (followed by women pilots in the army in 1974 and air force in 1977). In 1976, the first women cadets were admitted to service academies; in 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed a new law allowing navy women to be assigned to sea duty aboard noncombat ships.

During the 1990s, women participated in all major military deployments of U.S. forces, and some combat specialties opened up to them. In 1989, 800 women soldiers served among the 18,400 U.S. troops sent to Panama for Operation Just Cause. From August 1990 to February 1991, 41,000 military women were deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In the Persian Gulf War, women constituted 7 percent of all U.S. military personnel deployed; 13 U.S. women were among the 375 U.S. soldiers who died, and 2 women were captured and held as prisoners of war. In April 1993, Air Force 1st Lt. Jeannie Flynn was the first woman to complete a combat training course to fly advanced fighter aircraft.

By 1996, 197,693 women were serving in the armed forces, constituting 13.4 percent of all active duty personnel. At the junior officer levels, women were represented relatively proportional to their numbers in the services. However, there remained a “glass ceiling” inhibiting promotion at the senior levels. In 1996, no women held three‐ or four‐star rank, and only 2 of the 277 two‐star officers and 14 of the 430 one‐star officers were women.

Media coverage in the 1990s led to increased public debate about the role of women in the armed forces. In arguing for equal treatment of all individuals in the military, some senior women military officers and liberal feminists, including Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of the Armed Services Committee, have pressed for opening combat roles to women as part of a larger program to give women full citizenship rights and responsibilities. Furthermore, women's advocates note that combat exclusion reinforces the glass ceiling that blocks promotion to the most senior ranks in a system that favors combat experience over support roles as a condition for advancement. Those opposing women's assignment to combat roles argue that combat effectiveness will be compromised because men will be more likely to defend their female colleagues than to destroy the enemy; that unit cohesion might be undercut by tensions between the sexes; and that the problem of pregnancy makes women soldiers not deployable in times of emergency. Some observers have suggested that the line between combat and noncombat roles will become increasingly arbitrary as support functions put women in the line of fire (as in the Persian Gulf) and as the armed forces prepare to fight noninfantry, high‐technology wars.

The issue of sexual harassment has caught public attention in recent years. Starting with the 1991 Tailhook Conference, at which at least 83 women were assaulted by drunken male navy fighter pilots, harassment scandals have rocked the services. In 1997, a number of female soldiers at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland alleged that their army drill instructors harassed them during their training. Subsequently, a sexual harassment hotline set up to field anonymous calls from women in the armed forces yielded hundreds of reports of abuse of rank and privilege by senior male noncommissioned officers and commissioned officers. The sexual harassment issue remains controversial as the armed forces attempt to establish fair procedures to adjudicate complaints in organizational environments hostile to change.
[See also Families, Military; Gender: Female Identity and the Military; Gender and War; SPARS; WAC; WAVES.]

Bibliography

Jeanne Holm , Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, 1982; rev. ed. 1992.
Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces , Report to the President, 1992.
Martin Binkin , Who Will Fight the Next War? The Changing Face of the American Military, 1993.
Ruth H. Howes and Michael R. Stevenson, eds., Women and the Use of Military Force, 1993.
Laura Miller , Feminism and the Exclusion of Army Women from Combat, 1995.
Richard D. Fisher , et al., Keeping America Safe and Strong: Keeping the Armed Forces Focused on the Military Mission, 1996.
Office of the Secretary of Defense , Department of Defense Selected Manpower Statistics, Fiscal Year 1996, 1996.

Mary P. Callahan