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Throughout history, women have been shielded from the heat of battle, their role limited to supporting the men who do the actual fighting. Now all that has changed, and for the first time females have taken their place on the front lines. But, do they actually belong there? A distinguished military historian answers the question with a vehement no, arguing women are less physically capable, more injury-prone, given more lenient conditions, and disastrous for morale and military preparedness. Groundbreaking and controversial.
- Sales Rank: #1392908 in Books
- Published on: 2002-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.24" h x 6.40" w x 9.50" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
A sometime consultant to the armed forces and defense ministries of the U.S., Canada and Sweden, among other countries, Hebrew University historian van Creveld (Technology and War, etc.) sees women as no less susceptible than men to war's excitements and no less capable of being aggressive, competitive and dominant. Yet women's direct participation in conflict has, he finds, overwhelmingly involved a spectrum of supporting roles even in the era of total war. Van Creveld is masterful in discussing the modest realities supporting such contemporary legends as Israel's female soldiers and the women pilots of Soviet Russia. Instead, he provocatively links the current rise in the numbers of Western women in uniform to the emergence of nuclear weapons: the less a state believes it will have to fight a meaningful conflict, the more women it accepts into its armed forces and the more it expands their roles. Women's systematic participation in turn makes military service correspondingly less attractive to men, van Creveld argues, because even in the modern age men accept the risks of becoming soldiers in order to assert their identities as men. And feminized militaries become less relevant, he contends, to conflicts increasingly sustained either by relatively small, male-defined combat elites like the U.S. Marines and special operations forces or by "privatized," irregular non-state agencies. And should a real threat emerge, van Creveld bluntly concludes, "the expanded role of women in the military will vanish like the chimera it is."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Martin van Creveld is Professor of Military History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is an internationally acknowledged military historian whose works have been translated into nine languages.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined ...
By Chuck
Martin van Creveld's "Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line?" is an academic look at the historical presence of females in militaries by an expert military historian and analyst.
I saw this book as Dr Van Creveld's search for his own and personal answer to the question "Do Women Belong in the Front Line?". The book is written as an a fairly low-key academic review rather than as a document directed at convincing the reader of the author's conclusions. Additionally, the book is one of several written by the Dr Van Creveld in his effort to understand the rapidly changing ways that women participate in the world.
Van Creveld's conclusions might be considered revisionist to some. Frankly, I had the feeling in reading him, that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined conclusion. I also felt, that he would welcome thoughtful and well considered counter-points to any of the conclusions he arrived at. Interestingly his conclusions are in line with those of World War 2 veterans that I knew.
I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the account of a well respected and well known academic who has studied and written about many aspects of military history for many decades.
35 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and informative but uneven and lacking passion
By Jack Maybrick
You can often tell the value of a work by the enemies that an author has made.
This book, which opposes women in military combat, written by Martin Van Creveld, is readily compared with Brian Mitchell's similar work. Van Creveld acknowledges his debt to Mitchell.
But Mitchell's work is written with the passion of an activist and of an ex-soldier, and Van Creveld's work is written with the passion - well, of a historian.
For the high crime of being opposed to women in combat, Mitchell actually lost his job with the oil company that employed him. How Van Creveld's work stands him in academia is anyone's guess, but this doesn't read like the sort of book that would cost anyone his job.
Van Creveld IS a historian, of course, and he cannot be blamed for his academic tone, but it's fairly easy to surmise which of the two books is more readable.
This book IS informative, and gives a pretty thorough summary of the history of women in warfare.
He runs the gamut from their roles as objects of conquest and instigators (yes - as instigators, good news; contrary to feminist realpolitik, men are actually no more to BLAME for wars than are women), as commanders (largely monarchial women born into the position), to combat support personnel (administrators, nurses, suppliers, etc.), participants in uprisings or against them, and the occasional female foot soldier and/or unit.
Really, the text often reads like it was written by a supporter of women in combat since it utilizes the familiar argument that this has happened throughout history.
But Van Creveld parses neatly away from this argument by drawing distinctions between stories justified by historical evidence, on the one hand, and myths and anecdotes, on the other.
And for those stories that have a factual basis, he argues that it is precisely because the female involvement in military combat is isolated, infrequent, and often distant from the action, the historical examples serve as evidence AGAINST the idea and not for it.
He also borrows from other sources such as the Mitchell book to run through the usual physical advantages that men have over women that make them better suited to combat. These need not be repeated here.
But as one might expect from an academic, Van Creveld suffers from the same affliction that most writers making an anti-feminist statement suffer from (and that Brian Mitchell did NOT suffer from) - he is apologetic.
Apologetic anti-feminists go into battle (so to speak) with their morale tied behind their back and their objectivity damaged.
Van Creveld asserts several times, without providing any evidence, that women who have died in warfare have died as courageously as men. Maybe some of them, but the same process of human evolution which made most men bigger and stronger than most women also appears to have made men more aggressive and more willing to risk their lives.
One would not EXPECT women to display equal amounts of THAT type of courage, and for Van Creveld to suggest without evidence that they have sounds like a way of trying not to sound TOO stridently anti-feminist.
And even while enumerating in great detail the physical differences between men and women that Van Creveld says make it "criminal" (his word) to send women to the front, he concurrently and paradoxically maintains that the all-male nature of combat is based LESS on those differences than it is based on the desire of men to institute a rite of passage that excludes women. Oh, come on now!
He specifically states that if men and women were of equal size and strength, men might STILL exclude women from combat for "rights of passage" reasons.
Well, but if men and women really were similar, the species likely would not perpetuate, or if it did, the forces that sometimes drive men to distance themselves from women likely would not be nearly as prevalent, would they, Professor?
Again, I sense that this argument is Van Creveld's way of apologizing for pointing out that men really are more combat-ready. Vignettes like this show why he's less likely to lose his job than Brian Mitchell.
Interestingly enough, while Mitchell warns of imminent disaster if the women-in-combat policy continues, Van Creveld simply shrugs his shoulders and declares that per the historical record, women will always advance in the military during peacetime when they aren't needed and that when war breaks out, sanity prevails and the fighting is turned over to the men.
In my opinion, Van Creveld is making a mistake that others before him have made - assuming that human nature and common sense inevitably prevail. He doesn't take into account that the war on human nature and common sense being waged today is more ferocious than any such war waged before.
Still, written before 9/11/2001, this book is quite prophetic. As the war on terrorism progresses, women indeed have been pulled back from the front lines and Great Britain and Australia pull back from the policy of integrating women into combat forces.
Van Creveld also has interesting information for 1)reactionaries like me who blame feminism for the unfeminine ferocity demonstrated today by women in popular culture and 2) evil pro-feminist cultural mandarins who promote such imagery with the motive of warring on gender.
The information is that there is nothing new under the sun. History is replete with prior examples of warlike female imagery promoted either to titillate, to shame, or to provide inspiration or instruction. It has, says Van Creveld, little effect on how normal men and women conduct their lives.
Well, maybe. But I declare myself not really convinced.
In the end, Van Creveld's book, for all its good points, suffers from the same flaw that EVERY conservative, pro-military, and anti-feminist work (including Mitchell's) suffers.
It fails to answer two simple questions: 1) What exactly is there about Western society that is worth defending? and 2) What exactly is there about Western women that is worth protecting?
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Women, Warfare, White Feather Feminism and the Politics of Hypocrisy
By VEL – The Contemporary Heretic
History, 'Herstory' and Mythology
In Co-ed Combat, Kingsley Browne approaches the issue of the introduction of women into the armed forces from the perspective of biology, surveying the physiological and psychological sex differences which render women unsuitable for combat. In contrast, in 'Men, Women and War', Martin Van Creveld, as befits his background as a military historian, adopts an historical perspective.
Surveying the historical record, he points to the scarcity of female warriors. They exist in large numbers, he observes, only in mythology and fiction - which he comprehensively surveys from the Amazons of Greek mythology to 'Xena the Warrior Princess'.
Much of this mythology, he observes, appears to be ultimately rooted, neither in reality nor even feminist fantasies. Rather it derives from a decidedly male fantasy of the sort which feminists usually disapprove of - namely male sexual fantasy.
"Owing partly to their titillating effects", he writes, "tales of warrior women have always enjoyed a certain popularity, with the heroines commanding the sort of admiration that freaks often do" (p169) and "as a very large number of pictures, TV shows, films, computer games and mud-wrestling contests prove... many people find the idea of female warriors titillating: especially if, by simultaneously brandishing their weapons and showing their breasts, they can combine ferocity with sex appeal" (p9).
The reality is regrettably less titillating. Those exceptional women who have pursued a military career were decidedly unfeminine. Joan of Arc famously cut her hair short and dressed like a man. Moreover, they often openly disparaged and sought to disassociate themselves from other women.
The best known of them are remembered primarily, not for their military achievements, but precisely on account of their gender. Thus, Boudicca, although her forces vastly outnumbered the Romans, was quickly defeated (p67), while Joan of Arc, although the achievements claimed in her name were substantial, played an important role in achieving these "neither as a fighter nor as a strategist", but rather as a mere figurehead (p21).
The Making of Modern Mythology
Recent cases of the successful integration of women into the armed services turn out to be similarly spurious. The most frequently-cited contemporary case-study is that of Israel. Van Creveld's discussion of Israel is particularly notable because he is regarded as Israel's preeminent military historian.
In 1949, Israel became, according to Van Creveld, the first country ever to conscript women during peacetime. However, the terms of their service are less onerous than those imposed on men.
Whereas male Israelis are now conscripted for three years, women serve only two or, in practice, "about twenty-two months" (p186). Moreover, "married women and pregnant women (including such as got pregnant while on active service) were exempt", as are "women who declared themselves to be religiously observant" (p186). By 1999, those claiming exemption on this ground reached "over 26%" (p208) and "it was always much easier for a woman to gain an exemption" (p188).
Women "were not expected to take part in combat or even in combat support" and "the first thing the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] used to do whenever war broke out was evacuate the female company clerks" such that "very few women Israeli soldiers have ever been killed in action since 1948" (p188).
Similarly, much is made of the contribution of Soviet women during World War Two. However, in reality, "the Red Army that defeated Hitler... was over 97% male", only men were conscripted (p140) and "in proportion to the size of the armed forces neither more nor less of them served than was the case in the United States and Germany" (p147). Of these, "the vast majority... worked in administration, health care and food preparation" (p147) and "fighting women formed only a single regiment" (p142).
Exceptionally, female pilots served in combat. However, "compared with the size of either the armed forces or the population, actually fewer Soviet women flew for the Red Army than did British and American ones for their respective armed forces" and women "probably amounted to about 0.7%" of pilots (p148).
In the case of both the USSR and Israel, propaganda has distorted western perceptions. Thus, several Soviet Service women "were sent on speaking tours in the west...mainly to propaganda reasons" (p142).
Similarly, the image of female Israeli soldiers is, according to Van Creveld, carefully cultivated by the Israeli armed services. It is, however, every bit as mythical as the ancient Amazons.
Sociobiology, War and Women
Although he emphasises that emphasises the historical scarcity of female soldiers, Van Creveld nevertheless claims, "it would scarcely be too much to say that women are what war is all about" (p38).
Perhaps full sense can be made of these conflicting claims by placing war in its sociobiological context.
As Van Creveld recognises, war is not uniquely human. Male chimpanzees raid and kill members of neighbouring troops. However, tellingly, they rarely kill reproductive-age females.
This hints at a conclusion Van Creveld hints at but never explicitly addresses - namely, in evolutionary terms, the ultimate function of warfare is reproductive (i.e. eliminating male competitors and capturing females).
This is most apparent in primitive cultures. Among the Yanomamö, Napoleon Chagnon argues, raiding is also ultimately predicated upon the capture of women. [Other anthropologists question Chagnon's interpretation, notably Chagnon's former student Kenneth Good, whose main claim to fame is to have married a Yanomamo girl, who was then twice abducted by raiding Yanomamo war parties, in a dramatic confirmation of Chagnon's theory.]
Mythological accounts of war also highlight its reproductive function (e.g. 'The Rape of the Sabines' and Homer's 'Illiad', where war is precipitated by the elopement of Helen and conflict over captured women leads to the rift between Achilles and Agamemnon). The kidnap or elopement of women also precipitates war in the Bible (Genesis 34).
Although wars among 'civilised' nations are likely to be economically or politically motivated, the underlying psychological motivation of individual soldiers may have changed little. Perhaps this is what Van Creveld means when he says, "women are what war is all about".
The Blame for War
Even if women can be said to be (in Darwinian terms) the ultimate cause of war, in that it is women over whom men choose to fight, this does not mean women are themselves to blame. After all, women cannot be blamed if men choose to fight over them.
However, women cannot be wholly absolved of responsibility.
Women have, Van Creveld observes, "always acted as instigators, causes, objects, victims and protégées" and "had it not been for women who, in reality as well as imagination, demand protection from their menfolk, cheer them as they march away, pray for them while they fight, wait for their return, embrace the victors, console the losers, dress the wounded, mourn the dead, and act... as spoils, war would have been both pointless and impossible" (p38).
Similarly, pacifist-feminist Helena Swanwick is quoted as observing, "although men made war, they could not have done so had women not been so adoring of their efforts" (Ibid: p86).
Van Creveld acknowledges, "by some modern accounts, female voters... tend to be slightly less inclined towards the use of armed force and in favour of peace than are men" (p16). However, "some female leaders are as aggressive, as competitive and as bent on exercising dominance as any males" (p236).
This is surely an exaggeration. There has never been a female Hitler or Genghis Khan.
However, Warren Farrell observes that women rulers like Elizabeth I, Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Mier have waged wars at rates comparable to their male equivalents, but that the one thing that "has remained consistent throughout history is that, whether or not the leaders were female or male, almost 100 percent of the troops they sacrificed in battle were male... Equality at the top - not at the bottom" (The Myth of Male Power: p78).
As civilians, women have also supported war. For example, during WWI, British women handed white feathers to men in civilian uniform. Self-styled champions of sexual equality, such as the suffragette-cum-terrorist Emmeline Pankhurst, were prominent in the 'White Feather Campaign' - hence the title of my review.
Neither is women's bellicosity unproductive. Van Creveld shows, "in myth - and, often enough, in fact as well - protecting women is one of the prime objectives for which wars are fought and for which men are expected to lay down their lives" (p37) and "the desire to gain the approval of women is one of the prime motivations that... make men desirous of going to war" (p18).
Thus, Joanna Bourke argues, "women satisfied their aggressive urges by pestering their menfolk to act on their behalf and decimate the enemy" (An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare: p149). In other words, they got men to do the dirty work while remaining themselves at a safe distance.
If men evolved to make because doing so increased their reproductive success, this may in part reflect enhanced opportunities for rape and the capture of women as booty. However, it probably mostly reflected enhanced opportunities for consensual sex.
Philosopher David Livingstone Smith theorises, "the masculine warrior mentality is a sexually selected trait bred into ancestral men by women who preferred warrior mates... like an inversion of the plot of Aristophanes' play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens and Sparta take peacemaking into their own own hands by depriving their men of sex until they agree to end the Peloponnesian war" (The Most Dangerous Animal: p87).
Certainly, in terms of the ultimate Darwinian currency of reproductive success, the bottom line is that, as Van Creveld observes, "most women at most times and places have expressed their approval of warriors in the best way they could: by sleeping with them" (p25).
Thus, "the only way to make men cease fighting is to cause women to cease to admire warriors" (p93).
Casualties
Notwithstanding the media focus on the deaths of 'innocent women and children', Van Creveld argues, "females have generally received better treatment and fared better than males" in war (p29) and "there is reason to think that women have come out of war much better than men" (p32).
Captured females are treated leniently. During the 1916 Easter Rising, Constance Markievicz "was 'reprieved 'due only to her sex'" while fourteen other leaders of Sinn Fein were executed (p123). Indeed, even the Nazis in Russia "hesitated to treat women as they did men" (p123).
He observes how "all over the ancient Mediterranean it was standard practice to kill the men of the cities taken by storm while selling the women and children" (p30). Thus, Thucydides in the 'Melian Dialogue' reports that, on conquering Melos, "the Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children".
Similar 'Gendercides' are reported in the Old Testament (Genesis 34; Exodus 1:22; Matthew 2).
Yet sex-selective massacres of males are not mere mythology. They are even written into our genes.
James Watson reports, whereas 94% of the Y-chromosomes of contemporary Colombians are of European ancestry, their mitrochondrial DNA shows a "range of Amerindian MtDNA types", concluding "the virtual absence of Amerindian Y chromosome types, reveals the tragic story of colonial genocide: indigenous men were eliminated while local women were sexually 'assimilated' by the conquistadors" (DNA: The Secret of Life: p257).
Neither are sex-selective massacres a mere thing of history. The targeting of male civilians - especially, but not exclusively, 'battle-age' males - is a recurrent feature of contemporary genocides (Jones 2000).
In contrast, targeting 'innocent women and children' represents the quintessential war crime. Injunctions to spare women can be traced back to the Old Testament. Van Creveld cites Deuteronomy 20: 10-15; but Numbers 31 contains a similar admonishment. Islamic aḥâdîth contain similar injuctions.
Van Creveld cites data that, in primitive societies, six times as many men are killed in violent conflagrations as compared to women (p30). He omits quantitative data for modern societies. However, Joshua Goldstein reports that adult men represent 58% of fatalities from war across the world - despite the fact that, once children are factored in, men represent a small minority of the population as a whole (War and Gender: p400).
Even in World War Two, where much is made of the large-scale bombing of civilian targets, "only countries under German occupation had suffered more civilian than military losses" and "these victims were predominantly men" (Howarth 2005: p998).
American Casualties
This disparity in casualty rates is inflated when combatants fight in theatres of operations far from their homes, as in most of recent US military history.
Van Creveld reports, in the First World War, whereas 75,000 Americans were killed, only 38 American women died - "mostly of flu" (p128). During World War Two 350,000 American women volunteered (p136), of whom only 4.7% were "in or near combat zones", only 3.5% were fired upon and only 2% were in "serious combat" (p138).
However, "Life magazine's commemorative issue on the Second World War carried the pictures of seven female heroes and ten male ones" (p214).
Similarly, "almost 57,000 American men, but only eight American women, died in Vietnam" (p191). (Of these, only one was killed in action, compared to 47,000 of the men: 'Co-Ed Combat': p13). However, "this vast discrepancy did not prevent the soldiers of each sex from getting their separate monuments on the mall in Washington DC, with each monument comprising exactly three figures" (p191).
In the Gulf War, just thirteen American women died, compared to 388 men, and deployed women were only half as likely to be killed as men (p203-204). The first female combat death was hardly heroic - she "trained her weapon at a suspect while standing at the end of a pier", then "backing off, she fell and drowned under the weight of her equipment" (p202).
Van Creveld's book predates the Iraq War. However, Warren Farrell in Why Men Earn More updates the data, explaining, "while women comprise approximately 15% of active-duty military personnel, and 10% of those deployed in Iraq, only a bit more than 2.3% of the soldiers killed in hostile action have been women" and women have "only about one-fourth the chance of being killed" (p30).
Physical Fitness
Van Creveld demonstrates that, physiologically, "keeping up with men is too much for almost all women" (p195).
The average US female army recruit is, not only shorter and lighter, but "had 16.9 fewer kiligrams of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat... only 55% of the upper-body strength and 22% of the lower-body strength" and are "at a significant disadvantage when performing aerobic activities such as marching with heavy loads and working in the heat" (p152).
Moreover, "intensive training, far from diminishing the physical differences between the sexes, tends to increase them further" due to "the superior ability of men to add muscle to their bodies" (p153).
Similarly, "shorter arms make is harder for women to drawn weapons from their scabbards, stab with them and throw them", while "a different brain structure renders them less adept at guiding or intercepting projectiles" (p153). Moreover, "large pendulous breasts... impede movement and require special protection" (p153).
Consequently, many female recruits are "[un]able to throw a hand grenade... to the minimum distance that they would not be blown to pieces" (p194).
Women are also vulnerable to injury. "Thinner skulls, lighter bone ridges and weaker jawbones provide them with less protection" and "at West Point in the early 80s, women suffered ten times as many stress fractures as... men", while in the Air Force Academy women "suffered nine times as many shin splints, five times as many stress fractures, and more than five times as many cases of tendonitis" (p153).
During the Gulf war, "women were considerably more likely to experience problems that prevented them from being deployed: one source puts the difference at almost four to one" (p202) and, once there, "they were more likely to be sent home because of illness or because they had become pregnant" (p203). Indeed, "at one point, about one in ten women in the services was likely to be pregnant" (p203).
Servicewomen are often not merely frequently ineffective soldiers, they are often a positive burden on the men they serve alongside, since "to compensate for women's physical weakness military men are often obliged to undertake additional hardship" (p215).
Preferential Treatment and Training
How does the military respond to this physiological inferiority? Clearly, "making women measure up to the same standard as men is grossly unfair" and "will lead to a massive waste of resources as a high proportion of women sustain injuries and/or drop out" (p195).
Thus, "in Canada, only 1% of women who entered the standard infantryman's training graduated" (p194).
On the other hand, "training all personnel to physical standards that most women can meet means that the men will get hardly any proper training at all" (p195). Meanwhile, the obvious solution - recruiting only men - is ideologically unacceptable.
Instead, the armed forces chose another 'solution' - imposing laxer standards for women than for men. For example, "at Britain's Sandhurst Military Academy... in an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the fact that women have an easier time of it, male and female cadets begin and end their training at the same locations but follow a different course in between" (p195-6).
This is not only overtly discriminatory, it also means female troops are, compared to males, unfit for purpose and, Van Creveld explains, "is why in some international military publications, female soldiers are put in brackets" (p196).
Beyond Basic Training
Yet special privileges do not end at basic training. Rather, "women tend to escape the more unpleasant aspects of military life, proceeding straight from a much softened form of basic training to comfortable jobs", "somehow it was always the men who found themselves doing the heavier and dirtier work" and "whenever women enter such high-prestige, extremely demanding fields as pilot training, the physical requirements made of them are invariably less, and the conditions in which they live invariably better" (p215).
Women are also relatively immune from discipline.
Thus, "whereas eighteenth century armies thought nothing of executing a man or flogging him to death, normally the worst that could happen to a woman was to be drummed out of the regiment" (p93). Likewise, during WWI, "no sooner had the first American women donned uniform than [the] Secretary of the Navy... made it known he took 'a dim view' of any attempt to court-martial them"; while, in WWII, "the worst fate any female member of the armed forces might face after committing an offence was to be dishonourably discharged", while "in the British forces women enjoyed better living conditions, more leave and laxer discipline" (p213).
Today, the situation is unchanged, and "all the forces that included women continued to give them preferential treatment" (p214). Even in the USSR, "servicewomen were exempt from the stricter forms of disciplinary action including arrest, details and transfer to punitive units" and "their accommodation was also superior" (p214).
Women are also often promoted faster. Thus, "in Switzerland they do considerably less service in order to gain promotion" (p214) and "in countries that conscript men but allow women to volunteer the latter are usually underrepresented in entry-level slots and overrepresented among NCOs" (p215).
Pregnancy-Problems
Van Creveld reports, "at one point [during the Gulf War], about one in ten women in the services was likely to be pregnant" (p203). Indeed, pregnancy was incentivised - "female service personnel could... obtain a homeward ticket by neglecting to use contraceptives and getting pregnant" - whereas "men who voluntarily incapacitated themselves would be court-marshalled" (p216).
The fate of the first Aircraft carrier to accept women as crewmembers illustrates the scale of the problem. Millions of dollars were spent to modify the washrooms, accommodation etc. Yet, although the changes introduced included bringing gynaecologists and contraceptives on board, "none of this could prevent thirty-nine women - just under 10 per cent of the total - from getting pregnant during the cruise and consequentially having to leave the ship" (p206).
Van Creveld caustically concludes, "if it is true that their absence did not affect operations, as the navy claimed, one might well wonder what they were doing on board in the first place" (Ibid.).
'Sexual Harassment'
Although exploiting authority to coerce sexual favours has always been a disciplinary and criminal offence, in the 70s a new concept - 'sexual harassment' - was invented and soon "stretched beyond recognition until it included anything a women might not like... even if there was no physical contact; even if it did not include pressure of any sort; and even if it did not damage her career" (p217).
In response, "hotlines were opened to enable female soldiers to inform on their male colleagues" (p219) and this "provided military women with a formidable weapon for use against their own side" in the battle for promotions (p217).
Consequentially, armed forces, "first in the US and then in other countries as well... were torn apart" by the issue (p217). In Australia "a major scandal (followed by a major investigation and the inevitable male casualties)... may be expected every two years on average" (p219).
Soon, "sexual harassment was turned into a one-time offence that led to the immediate discharge of those convicted" (p219). A married couple was jailed because "during the period of courtship, the woman had been under the man's command" (p219). Acquittal was no defence as "even if the charge failed to stick, the man's career would probably be over... as happened... when President Clinton had a navy captain and admiral designate who had just been acquitted taken off the promotions list" (p218).
Thus, "in organizations long noted for their coarse language... all of a sudden for drillmasters to refer to a person's gender or bodily parts constituted sexual harassment" (p217) and "anyone caught touching... a female soldier with the aim of straightening a tie or adjusting a belt while on parade put himself at risk" (p217).
By the turn of the century, he reveals, "US army recruits actually spent more time on [sensitivity training] than on learning to use their weapons" (p220).
Strict discipline and hierarchy are essential in an effective armed services. Likewise, 'hazing' and initiation rituals function to develop the bonding and trust necessary in a cohesive combat unit. Such methods are, Van Creveld observes, "often used as a deliberate tool to humiliate new recruits and make them more amenable to disciple" (p217).
The result was that, exempted from this treatment, female soldiers were, far from being 'integrated', effectively "put out of bounds" (p219).
The Right to Vote and the Obligation to Fight
Van Creveld does not evade from the wider implications of his discussion for the feminist project as a whole.
When wars were still frequent and bloody, Van Creveld observes, "nobody, least of all feminists, had hit on the idea that women could not be free and equal unless they served in the one human institution that is most hierarchical and which, prison apart, allows its members least freedom" (p133).
Rather, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst argued, "it was not necessary for women to go to 'the trenches'... since it was women who brought children into the world and thus perpetuated the human race" (quoted in `Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography' by June Purvis: p269).
Yet the issues of enfranchisement and conscription are intimately linked. Van Creveld reports:
"In the Western world since the French Revolution the right to vote was often a direct consequence of, or at any rate went together with, conscription. But women were able to obtain the former without being subjected to the latter; for them to be put on an equal footing with men would have meant an end to their greatest privilege" (p210).
Yet, in the UK, the enfranchisement women occurred immediately after WWI. Thus, while women metaphorically 'fought' for the right to vote, men literally fought in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun.
Perversely, the enfranchisement of women was explained as a 'reward' for women's 'contribution the war effort'. Yet, besides handing out white feathers, this 'contribution' consisted of industrial and agricultural work of the sort which men had had to do even before the war.
Meanwhile, those men whose 'contribution' was equivalent - namely conscientious objectors - were actually deprived of the vote for several years as a punishment.
Van Creveld concludes, "had women been asked to share the burden of conscription as the price for price for citizenship most might well have preferred to do without" (p229).
As evidence he cites the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the US constitutional amendment which was defeated after conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly observed that it would abolish women's legal privileges in relation to, not only the draft, but also matrimonial law and child custody.
Thus, Van Creveld concludes, "faced with the choice between maintaining their traditional privileges and obtaining equality, they preferred the former" (p211). In other words, "being treated equally with men was the last thing most women wanted" (p211).
This controversial conclusion is expanded in a more recent work by Van Creveld, in which he contends that, far from being 'oppressed', women are in fact "The Privileged Sex".
The Decline of War
Van Creveld sees the integration of the armed forces as a symptom of their decline. In recent times, "the armed forces of no developed country have fought a major war against a major opponent who was even remotely capable of putting its own national existence in danger... all they have done is engage in skirmishes... in places hundreds if not thousands of miles away against enemies who were often so small and weak they could hardly be located on a map" (p11-12).
"As major inter-state war began to retreat and the armed forces of developed countries entered a long decline," he writes, "paradoxically women for the first time gained a permanent place in those forces" (p180).
Actually, this is no paradox. Rather, the decline of war is a direct cause of the rise in the role of women.
Only a nation with no imminent threat of invasion would risk the feminisation of its armed forces. Thus, "the more superfluous they have become... the more both society and its leaders feel able to treat them, not as fighting machines, but as social laboratories for some feminist brave new world" (p11).
Moreover, "it was hardly by accident" that growing calls for the inclusion of women in the military "coincided with the switch from conscription to all volunteer forces" (p210). It was one thing for women to demand the 'right' to serve - quite another to be coerced into doing serving.
Finally, only where the risk of death or serious injury to service personnel is sufficiently minimal is a society likely tolerate the spectre of women soldiers. If and when the bloodbath begin and the bodybags start arriving, the project will surely be swiftly abandoned.
Proof of the association between the decline of war and the integration of the armed forces is found, Van Creveld reports, in those parts of the world where there has been no such decline - namely "the five sixths of the world... known as 'developing'", where "wars are frequent, bloody and devastating" (p12). Here, "in not one of these wars do women participate any more than they have always done; that is to say hardly at all" (p12).
Instead, "because the belligerents regard these wars as a matter of life and death... the last thing that enters their heads is to bow to the kind of social political and juridicial constraints that have compelled the armed forces of the developed world to take in women" (p226).
Moreover, "unlike their sisters in the developed countries, who have enjoyed peace for over half a century on end and consequentially no longer have the slightest idea of what war is really like, women in war-torn developing ones all over the world" want no part of what is "of all human activities... by far the most nasty... the most dangerous... [and] physically the most demanding" (p227).
Conclusion
The special privileges afforded female enlistees mean that, far from representing a triumph for sexual equality, the move in western countries to permit the enlistment of women, has actually been a case study in preferential treatment.
Thus, Van Creveld concludes:
"Women's attempt to improve their social position by joining the military has not only failed but backfired. Instead of showing they are equal to men, it has shown they cannot do without male protection" (p234).
The Future?
In 'Co-ed Combat', Kingsley Browne views the feminisation of the military as an illustration of the old adage that 'generals always fight the last war'. Thus, whereas recent conflicts have involved the US fighting third-rate powers or stateless insurgents, such that the integration of the armed services has proven a costly but not insurmountable burden, this will not necessarily be true in the future.
In contrast, Van Creveld views changes in the nature of war as likely to be permanent (see The Transformation of War).
We can only hope that Van Creveld is proven right.
________
References
Howarth (2005), 'Women at War'. In ICB Dear & MRD Foot (eds.), `The Oxford Companion to World War II', (pp997-1002). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Adam Jones (2000) 'Gendercide and Genocide' Journal of Genocide Research 2:2:185-211.
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