Gender and the Military

Women in the Armed Forces of Western Democracies

Helena Carreiras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134176434
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This is the first comparative, cross-national study of the participation of women in the armed forces of NATO countries. Along side an analysis of this key topic stands a critique of existing theoretical models and the proposal of a revised analytical framework.

Unlike previous works this new study employs mixed-methodological research design combining quantitative and qualitative data - a large N-analysis based on general policies and statistical information concerning every country in the sample with more in-depth case-studies.

This volume includes original empirical data regarding the presence of women in the armed forces of NATO countries, proposes an index of 'gender inclusiveness' and assesses the factors that affect women's military roles. The book also presents two new key case studies – Portugal and the Netherlands - based on both documentary sources and in-depth interviews of both men and women officers in the two countries.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, gender and women studies and military history.

1 Women in the military

A global overview

Women and warfare in historical perspective

The association of women with peace and men with warfare has had deep roots in most cultures throughout history. Stereotypes of men as “just warriors” and women as “beautiful souls” have been used to secure women’s status as noncombatants and men’s identity as warriors (Elshtain 1995).¹ The pervasiveness and trans-cultural persistence of this imagery are well documented and reveal the extent to which male and female identities have been forged around the matter of collective violence.

In contemporary Western societies there have been attempts – especially by feminist scholars, women’s movements, and interest groups – to transform this prevailing association. These attempts have been made either by redefining what is believed to be a special relationship between women and peace or by denying the specificity of this link and supporting the full access of women to military organizations. In all cases, the symbolic network of gender, peace, and war has been operating at the core of political fights over women’s social roles and emancipatory strategies.

However, since war has usually been defined as a male activity and highly valued masculine characteristics are often associated with it, the image of women warriors has been seen as inherently unsettling, entailing a symbolic rupture with the dominant gender order based on the separation of male and female (Macdonald et al. 1987; Gherardi 1994).

Curiously though, the disruptive identity of female fighters has been frequently used to sustain that same hegemonic order of gender. The myth of the Amazons is the best example of this instrumental use of the disturbing image of “unnatural” women. Amazons, the archetypal female warriors, have been depicted in many different ways – as much as heroines as unnatural, masculine, and warmongering (Kirk 1987; Hardwick 1996), but always as marginal and ambiguous in relation to accepted classificatory schemes.

Confounding the normally distinct categories of warrior (men) and women, amazons represented a transgression of the ideal social order, thus defining the limits of society. Amazons, it is said, “were the opposite of the ideal Athenian women: they did not marry, they controlled their own offspring, they were warriors and they lived outside,… on the borders of the known world; they were neither virgins nor married; they desired men but did not want male babies” (Kirk 1987: 31). Androgyne and liminal, they acted as a metaphor for unmarried Athenian women as they were either killed or made into “proper women” through marriage. This is why it has been argued that, by talking of the Amazons, it is the male Greek polis that is being defined in terms of its opposite (Kirk 1987: 30). But the mythology of the Amazons does not only underline the opposition of dual categories. It also supposedly documents the transition from a system of thought that organized the experience of difference in terms of polarity and analogy to one based upon a relatively rigid hierarchical scheme (Dubois 1991). According to Dubois, this scheme entailed gradations of superiority and inferiority – Greek, master, male, and human as opposed and superior to barbarians, slaves, women, and animals respectively – that have continued to influence Western political thought (Dubois 1991).

Many other examples of women warriors fill the history books. They go from legions of warrior queens such as Boadicea – the British warrior queen who led her people to battle against the Roman invaders (Macdonald 1987), through Jinga – the majestic and murderous black queen who fought the Portuguese in seventeenth-century Angola (Fraser 1990), Jeanne d’Arc – who has been depicted as a heroine, a saint, and a witch (Pernoud and Clin 1993), to the women in the Inca battlefields whose involvement in ritual fights has been used by the Spanish conquistadores to underline the primitive character of Andean societies (Dransart 1987). The paradoxical ways in which these exceptional figures have been described and their activities have been recorded or forgotten show the importance of the role they played in “symbolically articulating” the social order and its values (Macdonald 1987: 6).² Their alternative and contradictory portraits supply a focus for the “proper behavior” of women, and by establishing the social limits of war they guarantee the possibility of postwar normalization.

Beyond myths and tales of female warriors, the participation of women in actual war fighting or their presence in war arenas reveals a historical pattern of exclusion and omission. Women, as protagonists – not as victims, supporters, or opponents – have been systematically excluded from “regular” war and combat activities. The only thoroughly documented account of female involvement in a regular army before the twentieth century is that of Dahomey, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West African kingdom. Originally a praetorian guard sworn to celibacy, the Dahomeans developed into a force of around 6,000 women warriors and were granted a semisacred status (Alpern 1998; Edgerton 2000).

Despite the intensity of this account, the fact is that it remains a historical exception. The tendency for the disarmament of women is recognized as prevalent in most societies. This explains, at least partially, the invisibility of women’s participation in the historical study of military institutions.³ And yet, women’s presence on battlefields has been extremely significant for centuries. According to Hacker “from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, if not earlier, women in armies were not only normal, they were vital. Armies could not have functioned as well, perhaps could not have functioned at all without the service of women” (Hacker 1981: 644). During the entire early modern period in Europe, women camp followers constituted a real logistic force, which was essential to the very existence of military formations. Like the soldiers in the ranks, they were drawn from the lower social classes and most of them were soldiers’ wives or widows performing tasks as housekeepers, sutlers, whores, nurses, laundresses, cooks, and even soldiers (Hacker 1981; Williams 1988; Leonard 1993).

Women’s roles changed throughout this long period and various exclusion measures were imposed during the eighteenth century. The end of the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which completed a cycle in military history, brought with it both the elimination of the last vestiges of nonmilitary support services and the total exclusion of women. Hacker states that “as armies became more professional and bureaucratic – as they became in fact more exclusively military – they also became more exclusively male” (Hacker 1981: 666). The new industrial era provided women with work opportunities of a different kind. For some authors this gradual exclusion of women from armies is as meaningful as their prior participation, since it contributed to one of the most relevant characteristics of the modern economic order: the separation of the spheres of work and family life (Nef 1968: 210–11).

In sum, despite the importance of the roles they performed, women tend to “disappear” from historical accounts of military enterprises. As Hacker puts it, “like the women healers who had vanished from the history of medicine or who were recalled only as witches, the female camp followers of early modern armies vanished from military history or were recalled only as whores. And just as the loss of the history of women healers made the rise of professional nursing and of limited places for women doctors in the nineteenth century seem novel, so the loss of army women made the rise of military nursing and the opening of restricted careers for uniformed women’s auxiliaries appear as something new” (Hacker 1981: 671).

However, after the Crimean War, with Florence Nightingale and her nursing corps, there was a new kind of relationship between women and military institutions. Motivated by patriotic and humanitarian feelings, these women were now recruited from the middle classes and their presence in war theaters anticipated the progressive institutionalization of female support roles during the two world wars. The formation in 1881 of the Army Nursing Service in Great Britain paved the way for a growing presence of women in the armed forces during the First World War. Their presence was particularly important in Great Britain and the United States. The case of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was rather exceptional in that women formed an exclusively female combat battalion, the “Battalion of Death,” under the command of Mariya Bochkareva. The constitution of this battalion, authorized in 1917 by the provisional government, aimed at providing soldiers with an example of military virtue to shame and humiliate deserting men (Griesse and Stites 1982). According to Griesse and Stites, “it was certainly the first instance in modern history in which women were used in all-female fighting units as models of military valor and performance in order to check desertion and fraternization with the enemy” (Griesse and Stites 1982: 64). In general, though, women have been demobilized at the end of the conflict.

These women’s corps were reconstituted only with the advent of the Second World War, but then in substantially increased numbers. There is a wide consensus that this moment represented a turning point in terms of female military participation (Binkin and Bach 1977; Goldman 1982; Reynaud 1988; Campbell 1990). During the conflict, women had access to a larger number of functions, including some nontraditional ones such as mechanics, repair, transmissions, radar, and antiaircraft defense. However, and significantly from a symbolic point of view, their action in antiaircraft defense was limited to the preparation and control of the firing, which they were barred from executing themselves (Goldman and Stites 1982: 30).

During the war, around 350,000 women served in the US armed forces and although without military status, 800 formed the WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots), flying all kinds of aircraft including combat planes. In England, more than 450,000 women represented 9.6 percent of the total force in 1943. This was one of the few countries, together with Germany, the Soviet Union, and later Israel, that instituted a female national conscription system at the time of war. Between 1941 and 1945 around 125,000 English women were conscripted for military service.

Other countries such as Canada, France, or Germany have also used women in their armed forces, but in more limited numbers. Germany, for instance, did not respond to manpower shortfalls by resorting to large-scale female recruitment. In both wars “a profound historical and cultural hostility to the use of women for military purposes has shaped the West German decision-making process. …The German pattern has been to resist the presence of women in the armed forces in anything but a marginal, preferably civilian, capacity” (Goldman 1982: 6).⁴

In Italy, Mussolini’s government created in 1944 the Servizio Ausiliario Femminile (SAF), which included up to 5,000 members. The constitution of this all-female corps, the first and only in the history of the Italian armed forces, resulted from a spontaneous mobilization process, initiated from the provincial basis of the party. According to the rules, these women could only perform their functions in nonarmed support services. The fall of the fascist regime in April 1945 signaled the end of this short female experience in that which would be considered the “wrong side of the war” (Bravo 1997; Spini and Isman 1997; Viganò 1997).

As happened during the First World War, the presence of women was particularly significant in the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Due to the lack of male manpower and the prolongation of the conflict, more than 1 million women were recruited to serve in all kinds of functions, including infantry, armored cars, artillery, and antiaircraft defense. The USSR’s utilization of women in combat was – at least until the Gulf War – the single major example of the large-scale use of women in combat in regular international war. However, unlike other countries where, despite the fact that women were generally demobilized after the end of the conflict, some of them remained in the armed forces with a special peacetime status, in the USSR women’s presence became irrelevant.

Thus, with rare exceptions, during the two world wars women did not bear arms or serve in combat. At the end of the conflicts their presence became residual in the majority of countries and the exclusion rule prevailed. The same happened with the omission rule. As stated by Mady Segal, “what has happened in the past in many nations is that when the armed forces need women, their prior military history is recalled to demonstrate that they can perform effectively in various positions. There is a process of cultural amnesia regarding the contributions women made during emergency situations, until a new emergency arises and then history is rediscovered” (Segal 1993: 84).

And yet, as clear as these exclusion and omission patterns is the tendency to include women in combat activities whenever exceptional circumstances require their participation. There is wide historical evidence that women have been effectively utilized in combat during revolutionary settings when a society is undergoing fundamental social and political changes. Whenever societies have confronted risks for survival women have entered the military domain as combatants and this participation was not only welcomed but also actively requested. This has happened during revolutionary movements and national liberation wars.⁵ Some well-known examples are the women warriors in Latin America – from the independence wars against the Spanish to the late-twentieth-century political struggles (Kanogo 1987; Bunster 1988; Harris 1988), the USSR during the 1917 revolution⁶ (Griesse and Stites 1982), Yugoslavia during the Second World War (Jancar 1982, 1988), the African liberation movements (Amrane 1982; Hélie-Lucas 1988), the various resistance movements in occupied Europe during the Second World War – particularly in France, Italy,⁷ Poland, and the USSR (Rossiter 1986; Bravo 1997; Spini and Ismani 1997), and the Israeli combatants during the war of independence (Yuval-Davis 1981; Bloom 1982).

All these cases show that “when war intrudes into society – as in the case of invasion and colonialism – it may become very difficult to maintain the traditional social order, and boundaries, such as those of gender, may well break down” (Macdonald 1987: 9). There is, however, great debate as to whether the obliteration of conventional definitions of male and female roles in times of war represents structural or rather circumstantial changes. In other words, the debate is on whether gender boundaries really undergo fundamental reconfiguration or are only temporarily “suspended.” This discussion applies both to women’s participation in irregular partisan warfare, resistance, and liberation movements as well as to women’s status during the world wars.

A common idea is that the world wars have been watersheds for women. This view stresses the new opportunities that opened up for them during the war: skilled jobs in heavy industry, new positions in government bureaucracies, educational institutions, and the armed forces, as well as the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities, skills, and power. In both world wars women gained economic independence and postwar constitutional changes gave them the right to vote. Women received formal citizenship in England, the United States, and Germany after the First World War and in Italy and France after the Second World War.⁸

For some, these changes were irrevocable and fundamental (Chafe 1972); others believe that they had an illusory nature and that women changed their roles “only for the duration” of the conflicts (Milkman 1986; Higonnet and Higonnet 1987).⁹ Although many historians agree that the two world wars had an equalizing effect on the societies of the belligerent nations, some have shown that men and women benefited unequally and that in war, as well as in peace, there were sharp differences in the activities and status of men and women (Higonnet et al. 1987). They underline the fact that while women’s situations changed, relationships of domination and subordination were retained. For instance, in Mobilizing Women for War, Leila Rupp maintains that neither the Nazi mother making munitions for her son, nor America’s Rosie the Riveter had a significant impact on women’s economic status or on the public’s basic beliefs about women’s nature in either society respectively (Rupp 1978). D’Ann Campbell has gone even further, holding that during the Second World War women – housewives and demobilized workers alike – anticipated and helped to promulgate the dominant ideal of postwar domesticity (Campbell 1985).

The central question here is thus to understand why “acquiring the vote or taking up new employment did not readily translate into social and political power, and women everywhere suffered the effects of postwar gender backlash,” or why no mass-based feminist movements arose to preserve women’s wartime gains (Higonnet et al. 1987: 6–7). Some have proposed that the answer is to be found in the contents of ideological discourses concerning objective changes, which systematically gave meaning to women’s new activities in ways that limited their potential to transform gender relations: “although wartime propaganda exhorted women to brave unfamiliar work, these appeals were contained within a nationalistic and militarist discourse that reinforced patriarchal, organicist notions of gender relations. It stipulated that women’s new roles were only for the duration and that wives and mothers must make heroic sacrifices ‘for the nation in this time of need’ ” (Higonnet et al. 1987: 7).

Likewise, “for many Western feminists, the consequences for women’s roles and status of the majority of revolutions and independence-movements has been disappointing” (Macdonald 1987: 9). Even when women participated in military conflicts as combatants, at the end of the war they were expected to give up military roles and return to their traditional domestic sphere. Additionally, the image of armed women has frequently been mythified and used to mobilize men to combat. The image of revolutionary combatants in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, carrying a child in one arm and a gun in the other has been used to promote mobilization for armed conflict. According to Judith Stiehm, the implicit message of these images – that is, that “if even women fight …” – was a form of blackmailing men into service, as well as a spectacular demonstration of a nation’s determination to self-defense (Stiehm 1988: 96).

All these perspectives underline a similar pattern, one that different studies on female fighters throughout history have also systematically stressed: after entering the military domain, it is the definition of these particular women that is altered,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Women in the military: A global overview
• 2. Gender relations, gendered organizations, and the military
• 3. Social and political dilemmas of women’s military service
• 4. The military institution and social change
• 5. Gender integration in the armed forces: A cross-national comparison of policies and practices in the NATO countries
• 6. Portugal and the Netherlands: Military and social contexts
• 7. Interpersonal dynamics of gender integration: The case of the officer corps
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index