American women have participated in military operations since the American Revolution, although sometimes in disguise, often without uniforms, and they typically were dismissed once the war was over. In some Native American tribes, women accompanied men to war. White women were allowed inside the regular ranks of the U.S. government's military only in World War I. The WACs, WAVEs, and SPARs of World War II were disbanded in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s women compose a high percentage of the U.S. military's total uniformed personnel during peacetime—11.8 percent in 1993.
The armed forces also include a high proportion of women of color. While women of all ethnic and racial backgrounds have participated in the armed forces in the past, the 1990s mark the first time that tens of thousands of African American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women wear the U.S. military uniform, follow orders, and give orders. By 1993 Hispanic women made up 5.2 percent of all women in all three branches on active duty, while Asian American and Native American women together composed 4.4 percent of the women in all three branches. Notably, the Defense Department's 1993 figures about African American women showed that they compose 33.6 percent of all active-duty women and 48 percent of the total 59,668 enlisted women serving in the army. This is a stunning figure to consider, when in the U.S. population, African American women constitute only 12 percent of all women.
The year 1972 marked the turning point for women's entry into the military, particularly women of color. Beginning that year the numbers and percentages of women soldiers on active duty began to climb steadily upward. Also beginning that year African American women began to enlist in especially high numbers. At first glance, one might think that the cause was the second wave of the U.S. women's movement, because the 1970s saw a new national mobilization of women advocating equal rights. But assigning too much weight to this coincidence may tempt one to underestimate the military's own strategies. It also eludes the question of whether women's increasing participation in the military was a sign of genuine liberation for all U.S. women. Some historical background may shed light on the subject.
In 1972 the U.S. government surrendered in Vietnam. While thousands of U.S. women, especially military nurses, had fought in that war, a legal ceiling on the percentage of women who could be accepted as volunteers meant that most U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were young male draftees. In the early 1970s there was a public call for the end of the draft. But continued cold-war ideology presumed that the U.S. military would have to remain large. In this atmosphere Congress and the Defense Department lifted the ceiling on women, calling for more recruits.
Male civilian and military policymakers saw the expanded recruitment of women volunteers as a way to reconcile their desire for a large, educated superpower military force with their political need to end the male draft. They did not give much thought to racial politics regarding women soldiers. The next twenty years' steep rise in the proportion of African American women among all military women went virtually unnoticed by the Pentagon, by Congress, by white feminists, by feminists of color, and by the civil rights and Black nationalist movements. Black women's motivations for enlisting varied, though some speculate that the obstacles facing young poor and working-class African American women in a discriminatory civilian work force were a principal factor.
Even after the draft ended, men were still required to register on their eighteenth birthdays. In Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court upheld the government's decision to keep a male-only military registration system. The National Organization for Women objected to this all-male system, arguing that because many Americans thought military service was the touchstone of patriotism, male-only draft registration deprived women of first-class citizenship. Conservative women such as Phyllis Schlafly opposed NOW's position, stating that national well-being depended on a firm division between feminine and masculine public duties. Many progressive women, especially those who had become feminists in the 1960s' antiwar and civil rights movements, were either unaware of Rostker v. Goldberg as central to women's liberation or explicitly disagreed that women's registration for potential future military conscription would be a step toward first-class citizenship.
Over the next two decades the divisions among women's rights activists persisted. Nonetheless, conservatives in the Pentagon, the White House, Congress, or veterans' organizations sought to restrict military women's duties to traditional noncombat medical and administrative jobs. Feminist representatives in the House of Representatives, particularly Patricia Schroeder, Barbara Boxer, and Beverly Byron, launched successful efforts in the 1980s and early 1990s to dismantle the masculinized "combat" barrier that had prevented so many women from rising to senior ranks in the military. When parts of the formidable conservative alliance tried to cover up sexual harassment perpetrated by Navy pilots during their 1991 Tailhook Convention, a broad alliance of feminists backed Senator Boxer and her colleagues as they pressed defense officials to treat sexual harassment seriously. They and others noted that women soldiers had reported rapes and sexual harassment by their fellow male soldiers for decades without those complaints being taken seriously. "Tailhook '91" was a scandal but not an anomaly.
When President Bill Clinton proposed in 1993 to end the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, his action provoked a national debate. Heretofore women military personnel had been more likely than men to be investigated on charges of homosexuality, perhaps because service commanders wielded the "gay ban" as a misogynist weapon against all women in uniform.
Despite feminists' antisexism consensus, there remains a profound ambivalence toward women's role as soldiers. Should the post-cold war era expect feminists to roll back U.S. militarism in all its forms—including the presumption that being a soldier is the best way to prove one's patriotism and gain first-class citizenship? Some committed women's advocates were not convinced. They believed that militarism wasn't the issue; masculinism was. They began to lobby to keep the reduction in military personnel from providing an excuse for cutting women out of the military. They also saw the declining interest among young men of all races to enlist as a chance for women to enter all four military branches. Their efforts bore fruit: 1993 figures showed that as the military was being "downsized," the trend for women soldiers was heading upward.
The 1990s are a time when U.S. women's roles in the military pose international, not simply domestic, political questions. The 1995 United Nations Conference on Women, in Beijing, was the site of an international debate between advocates who saw women's increased participation at all levels of military service to be a step toward the "demasculinization" of public life and advocates who saw militarism as violent imperialism and thus concluded that pride in soldiering is an essential building block of patriarchy, even when it is women who feel that soldierly pride.
Amanda Maisels and Patricia M. Gormley, Women in the Military: Where They Stand (Washington, D.C.: Women's Research and Education Institute, 1994); Office of the Inspector General U.S. Department of Defense , , The Tailhook Report (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Rand Corporation , , Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1993).
Cynthia Enloe
See also
Aviation; Wars:
1900 to the Present.
