No job for a woman?

Julie Wheelwright on the forces that kept women out of the forces in Men, Women and War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line? by Martin van Creveld and War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System by Joshua S Goldstein
  • The Guardian,


Martin van Creveld

287pp, Cassell, £20

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System

Joshua S Goldstein

540pp, Cambridge, £30

There is an intriguing lack of comment these days about the phenomenon of the female soldier, which generated so much excitement during the Gulf war. American and British women, trained to fly combat planes and command warships, are now quietly serving in this new war on terrorism. If the conflict continues, women in uniform will serve closer to the front lines or in actual combat than in any other recent conflict. A woman in a flak jacket no longer turns heads.

But while the public may have come to accept women's role as combatants, the debate among experts still rages. Martin van Creveld's polemic, Men, Women and War, represents a contingent of military experts who decry the "feminisation" of their services and who have argued that the presence of women, especially in the American forces, has reduced the military's efficiency and status.

For van Creveld, a military historian and consultant to defence industries, biology dictates that during armed conflicts, women's place is in the home; we should venture out only to rally the troops or offer them comfort. Otherwise, men become emasculated and women, who make pathetic soldiers anyway, are in danger of losing their femininity along with their reproductive organs.

He trawls through recent theories of sociobiology and history to provide examples of female combatants before dismissing them as so exceptional or incompetent that they prove the rule. The numbers of American servicewomen, he argues, have increased only because major wars and the forces that are earmarked for waging them have been on the decline. "The influx of women into the military, far from representing some world-historical step in women's unstoppable march towards liberation, is both symptom and cause of the decline of the military in question." Women in armies, he says, turn training into a mockery and humiliate men while absorbing precious resources by demanding everything from separate toilets to pregnancy care and special uniforms.

As for those women who have engaged in guerrilla warfare in the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Colombia, van Creveld finds their fighting simply not up to scratch. "In not one of these wars do women participate any more than they have always done: that is to say hardly at all." The famed female warriors of 19th-century Dahomey, in west Africa, "had to surrender their womanhood, turn into men, and despise women... their fate was neither laughable nor enviable but simply tragic". Those rare creatures who participated on battlefields during the Napoleonic wars, in the Russian civil war and the American civil war, he warns, "very often did so at the cost of their femininity", by losing their child-bearing capacity, their looks or their traditional role.

Van Creveld relies largely on secondary sources and some rather curious anecdotes (he claims to know personally one woman who kept up with her fellow officers in the US army during a forced march at the expense of losing her ovaries). He does make an important point, however, in noting the dramatic decline in American military personnel. Professor Joshua Goldstein is a political scientist who has written a perfect counter in War and Gender, arguing that although the modern military employs fewer service personnel, the army is increasingly regarded as a career rather than a patriotic calling. The combination of this professionalisation with falling rates of male recruits has meant that virtually all military careers have now opened to women, including combat roles.

Goldstein says that the Gulf war marked a significant victory for those championing further military participation by women. Nearly 40,000 US women were deployed, their performance was capable, and the public accepted them as soldiers, casualties and POWs. But while women were proving themselves on the ground and in the air, their biggest opponents were often their own comrades in arms. According to a 1992 US Senate report, 60,000 women had been raped or assaulted in the military.

Van Creveld laments the passing of what he has correctly identified as one of history's most masculine professions; Goldstein offers a diametrically opposed view of the function of women's role in warfare. Bush's new war of the 21st century will be a proving ground for both perspectives.

· Julie Wheelwright is the author of Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (Rivers Oram/Pandora Press).

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