Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House

8: The Tailhook Tale

The year  had been a milestone for both Schroeder and the U.S. armed services. For Schroeder, it marked her transition from firsttime candidate to freshman congresswoman. For the military, it marked the end of the draft and the beginning of the All-Volunteer Force. It was clear from the start that the All-Volunteer Force would not be able to attract enough male recruits to meet all the nation’s needs.Thus, of necessity, the military services would have to open their ranks to more women and integrate them more thoroughly than ever before.They did so reluctantly and with the understanding that women would not become members of combat units. In the army, infantry, artillery, and tank units were off limits. In the air force, piloting fighter jets and other combat aircraft was forbidden. In the navy, combat ships would go to sea without women. Further, the prestigious military service academies—the training grounds for future military leaders—remained exclusively male. Women have served in the U.S. military in one capacity or another since the Revolutionary War. Some women even dressed as men, concealing their gender as they soldiered. World War I marked the first war in which women served openly in the army, navy, and marine corps, primarily as nurses and clerical workers. The role of women in the military expanded greatly during World War II. Women continued to serve as nurses, office workers, cooks, and bakers, but they also worked as noncombat pilots, auto mechanics, truck drivers, radio operators, and cryptographers , freeing up more men for combat. Despite being barred from official combat positions, women were sometimes exposed to hostile fire. Army nurses in the Philippines, for example, worked through Japanese bombing raids and spent the remainder of the war as prisoners. By the war’s end, , women had served their country in uniform. The Women’s Armed Services Act of  established a permanent   8 The Tailhook Tale place for women in the military. Over , women served in the military during the Korean War era, but only  women actually served in Korea. Over , women served inVietnam. In both Korea andVietnam, women served primarily as nurses, sometimes working in close proximity to front lines and under harsh conditions. Six women were killed under fire while serving in Vietnam. In the debate over the role of women in the armed services afterWorld War II, military leaders gave several reasons for banning women from combat , including a fear that the public wouldn’t stand for women’s coming home in body bags or being mistreated as prisoners of war, potentially weakening support for military action. Another argument was that women could not physically meet the demands and training required for combat —that most women simply didn’t have the strength of most men. Another fear was that men and women living in close quarters under rough conditions would cause embarrassment, lowering morale. But perhaps most significantly, there was a widely shared belief among the military hierarchy that combat was a uniquely male occupation and that all-male fighting units were necessary to good morale and teamwork. Throw women into the mix, they reasoned, and all kinds of problems could occur. Relationships and jealousies might play havoc with morale. Some men might take unnecessary risks and exercise poor judgment either to protect women or to impress them. Usually unspoken, but intrinsic to the debate over the role of women in the military and their exclusion from combat, was the innate sexism of a military culture in which women are symbolically denigrated, vilified, humiliated, and used as scapegoats in the promotion of male bonding. Reducing women to sex objects through crude jokes, the prominent display of pornography, and the sexually graphic cadence calls of drill sergeants were an ingrained part of military life. In her  book Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military, writer Linda Bird Francke cites the example of a marine platoon graduating from recruit training in  who proudly posed with their drill instructor for a formal photograph holding an enlarged picture of a naked woman and a sign reading, “kill, rape, pillage, burn.” “Many individual men in the different services work well with women and respect both their contributions and authority,” Francke wrote. “But individuals don’t count in the military. The military culture is driven by a group dynamic centered around male perceptions and sensibilities, male psychology and power, male anxieties and the affirmation of masculinity. Harassment is an inevitable...