Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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Women in the Military
Chapter Twenty-Five

Some analysts have said that World War II was the real turning point for the women’s movement in America. During four long years of war, while millions of U.S. servicemen were fighting and dying on foreign soil, American women secured the front lines of industry, supporting the war effort in hundreds of jobs previously handled by men. The scene of Rosie the Riveter, in her steel helmet tossing red-hot rivets in the nation’s aircraft factories and shipyards, is a lingering image of the rugged and resourceful female doing a man’s job when times were tough.

Other such images entered the public consciousness in the years following the war, including Margaret Bourke-White’s photos for Life magazine of sturdy old babushkas in Soviet Russia manning jackhammers and driving gravel trucks in the streets of Moscow. The lined, hard, colorless faces of those communist women were surprising to Americans of that day, who found the idea of women doing such dirty, manual jobs laughable and offensive. Most people in the fifties still felt that that kind of work was demeaning to women.

But at some point, something changed. Women’s roles changed. Motherhood changed, and the demands of the workplace began to blur the old lines between "the need to work" and "the right to work." Little by little, over the next forty years, the attitudes of liberals and intellectuals toward "women’s rights" were redefined to the point that the most outspoken activists were coming to the conclusion that putting girls on the front lines in armed combat was the next logical step for "women’s liberation."

The Women’s Army Corps (WAC), created by an act of Congress in 1942, gave women a chance to serve in military jobs during wartime. At its peak the WAC was made up of some 100,000 women in uniform, of whom 17,000 served overseas during World War II, and 12,000 during the Korean War. The Women’s Army was dissolved in 1978 when women were integrated into non-combat roles in the regular Army.

In the late 1970s women began training as flight officers, and flew as combat pilots for the first time in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. In 1990 there were 69,000 enlisted women serving in the Air Force and 55,000 in the Navy. Since 1976 women have also been admitted into the military academies, and West Point graduated its first class with female officers in 1980.

Escalating Hostilities

When Defense Secretary William Perry announced the opening of 80,000 military jobs to women in 1994, it meant that from the time Bill Clinton became Commander in Chief in 1992, 250,000 positions previously filled by males were now to be filled by females. By law, any such decision must be approved by Congress. Perry had not bothered to take that step; but seeing that the Defense Department had the backing of the president and an aggressive women’s movement, Congress did not press the issue.

In every poll of the American people over the last 25 years, a majority say they do not want women subject to the military draft. But insiders predict that with 80 percent of all military positions now open to females, the prospect of mandatory combat roles for women, and a mandatory draft for women, in wartime, is virtually guaranteed. At present, more than 99 percent of Air Force jobs and 94 percent of Navy jobs are open to women. Due to their specifically ground-combat mission, the Army (at 67 percent) and the Marine Corps (at 62 percent) offer fewer billets to females. But that, too, may change.

Is this progress for women? Is it what women want? And is combat, or even close ground support, the role God envisioned for those He created to nurture the next generation? A 1992 Roper poll found that most Americans prefer to "go slow" in making such radical changes. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said women should have "special exemptions" from combat. While 44 percent said they supported a woman’s right to serve in combat, 47 percent were opposed. The poll reported that 93 percent of respondents oppose pregnant women serving in direct combat roles, and 69 percent would not want single mothers to serve in such roles.

At the time of the Vietnam War, just 2 percent of military personnel were female; by 1991, at the start of the Persian Gulf War, the total had risen to 11 percent. In Vietnam, 90 percent of women served in traditional female occupations as nurses, doctors, clerks, and administrative personnel. In the Persian Gulf, however, fewer than half of female personnel held traditional roles.

The greater exposure of women to hostile fire and possible capture and torture raises many disturbing questions. In another Roper poll, commissioned by the Department of Defense to determine the attitudes of military personnel to the prospect of women in combat, 41 percent of respondents indicated that the presence of women in combat would have a negative effect on "how well the military is able to defend the nation." Just 19 percent said the presence of women in combat would have a positive effect, and 38 percent were undecided.

Perhaps the most interesting finding comes from the women who are currently serving in the armed forces. While 79 percent of enlisted women and 73 percent of officers thought women should be allowed to volunteer for combat roles, only 12 percent of enlisted women and 14 percent of female officers said they would do so if given the chance. Seventy percent of enlisted women, 79 percent of non-commissioned officers, and 71 percent of commissioned officers said they would not volunteer for combat arms.

When asked about drafting women already in the service into combat arms and compelling them to serve there, only 14 percent of military women said they would definitely remain in the service; 27 percent said they would probably stay; 19 percent would probably leave; and 33 percent (or one third of all respondents) said they would definitely leave the service if compelled to serve in combat. Finally, when asked if combat readiness standards should be the same for both men and women, 52 percent of men said the standards should be the same, while 81 percent of women said they should be different.

Those Who’ve Been There

Among those asked to testify before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, Dr. M.E. Bradford argued that the concept of placing women into dangerous and potentially lethal combat roles is contrary to the American character and experience. As an authority on Southern values, Bradford said that putting women at risk would be grating on the sensibilities of Southerners, who make up a sizable majority of career military personnel.

"Our own people," he said, "would lose much of their self-respect" if women were sent into combat. Further, Bradford said, society itself would suffer if the "egalitarian rigor of our times required equal treatment between women and men (in such roles)." Buckner Fanning, a Baptist pastor from San Antonio, Texas, who was among the first military personnel into Nagasaki after the atom bomb was dropped, warned that the effort to enforce political correctness on the nation risks destroying moral values at the same time. "The ultimate jury of society will be our children," he said.

David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, described the aims of the radical feminists and university intellectuals behind the push to put more women in the line of fire. Despite sex scandals, such as the fiasco in Las Vegas now known as the "Tailhook Scandal," and ongoing investigations of rape and sexual harassment of female recruits, feminists insist on proving not just their equality with men, but their superiority. The idea that any job can be off-limits to women, regardless of the physical demands, drives the activists berserk. Horowitz claimed that feminists had exploited recent sex scandals to intimidate the Commission and the public into acceding to the idea of placing women in dangerous combat jobs when, at any other time, simple logic would tell us that taking such a step would be sheer folly.

Among the most interesting testimony was that of Dr. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli authority on warfare, who reported that, "Contrary to the myth, we have no women in combat [in Israel]. "On the contrary," he said, "the whole point of having women in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is to free men for combat." Women in the IDF are actually part of a separate corps, and any weapons training they receive is "entirely symbolic." Women have many important jobs in the Israeli army, but combat and close combat support are not among them. Van Creveld said there is "no question of giving any woman in the IDF the kind of training you need to become an infantryman."

As the Jewish scholar observed, most of what feminists and liberals have been saying about women in combat is a myth. The boasts about valiant women warriors on the Golan Heights is just an idealistic mirage. No one would argue about the contribution women can make in the military. Just as Rosie the Riveter was vital to the war effort in the 1940s, there are roles that women can serve in keeping the nation strong.

Unfortunately, the feminist agenda is not equality or fairness or improving the natural order, but the grinding down of traditional moral values and the eradication of the family as we know it. Mothers already have the single most important job in the world—bearing, rearing, and nurturing the next generation. For thousands of years civilizations have sacrificed to make the role of wife and mother a valued and respected position. Angry, embittered, secular liberals have come a long way in tearing down the pedestal on which women have been placed, and at the present rate they will shove our daughters and granddaughters into the line of fire as sacrificial lambs to their outrageous utopian dreams.

In testimony before the President’s Commission, Col. John Ripley, a combat veteran, expressed concern about the collapse of American character and the decline of the Western idea of womanhood. Physical limitations, sexual tensions, and the certainty that women and mothers will be tortured, raped, and killed by our enemies, should show us how absurd this argument has become. Ripley said the American people will rise up in rebellion if their daughters are forced to go to war. But one has to wonder if that is even true in this day of intellectual tyranny. Do we really care about such things anymore? Do we cherish the role of wife and mother? Or will we simply allow the feminists to sacrifice the innocent young women of this nation in the name of liberation, and thereby make a mockery of all we hold dear?

Officers who have resisted the feminizing of the military have been discharged by military courts. No other nation on earth, especially our enemies in Asia and the Middle East, have female armies. No other nation assigns women to combat. No other nation has assumed that women should be thrust into harm’s way. Yet, from 1992 to 2000, the Department of Defense and the Clinton administration redefined many of the historic conventions of military service, particularly regarding roles of women.

If you are concerned about this issue, we urge you to stay informed and let your voice be heard. But remember, as long as we elect leaders whose plans for America are radically different from our own, we can anticipate outrages even worse than those we have already endured. There can be no better reason to get involved politically, culturally, and spiritually in the battle for America and the soul of the nation.

You can contact these organizations

Center for Military Readiness
P.O. Box 2324
Livonia, MI 48151
(313) 464-9430

Concerned Women For America
370 L’Enfant Promenade SW, Suite 800
Washington, D.C. 20024
(202) 488-7000

For further reading:

Carol Wekesser, Matthew Polesetsky (Editors). Women in the Military: Current Controversies. Greenhaven Press, 1991.

Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Women in Combat: A Report to the President. Brasseys, 1993.

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.