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3. The Creation of Army Officers and the Gender Lie: Betty Grable or Frankenstein?
- Temple University Press
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Billie Mitchell 3 The Creation of Army Officers and the Gender Lie: Betty Grable or Frankenstein? They say that in the Army the women are mighty fine, They promise Betty Grable and give you Frankenstein. Oh, I don't want no more of Army life, Gee, but I wanna go, But, they won't let me go, Gee, but I wanna go home. I Army Regulation 360-5 requires that soldiers submitting articles for publication must first have their work reviewed by an official "who know(s) the subject matter and audience" (1986,13). I complied in preparing this essay for publication. It was reviewed and heavily criticized by senior officials , and, although I was never ordered not to publish, neither was I given explicit clearance. They said the methodology was flawed and the argument weak. They doubted, in fact, that it was a scholarly paper at all. All this commentary was so authoritative that I became briefly convinced that the work was, indeed, deeply flawed. In the course of revising it, and in the hopes of trying to understand the speCifics oftheir objections, I found myselfengaged in a long conversation with one of the reviewers. Not only were most of my assertions unprovable by respectable quantitative means, he explained, but Copyrighted Material 36 Billie Mitchell my perceptions about what women think and even my own experiences were utterly false. He argued that there was equality between men and women throughout the Army, because the Army adheres to the Judeo-Christian ethic of "Love thy neighbor. "3 At West Point, the primary focus of my study, there is no room for gendered discrimination, since men and women are held to the same leadership standards. Responding to my experience that military men regard military women as both objects of desire and threats to their identity as soldiers, he countered that he had never heard any complaint of gender discrimination by the female officers he had worked with, and none of his male colleagues had ever been gUilty of harboring such thoughts. His experiences were true, mine were false, and therefore my essay lacked any foundation in reality. At this point, I knew I was on to something. The extreme, cathected fury with which he and his colleagues reacted-so out of proportion to the provocation offered by this unexceptionable piece of feminist writing-suggested to me just how deeply structures shape perceptions and what profound limits structures place on the imaginations of those who uphold them. I could not hope for a better illustration of what I call "the gender lie" at the heart of military thinking: the notion that because intentions are "good" and standards are "gender-blind," there cannot be any gendered tension in the military except in the pathological thinking of a female malcontent. This chapter has dual foci: the American Army's gender lie of the woman officer's equality, and how women respond to it. Inherent in these issues is the larger question ofwomen's relation to war. Susan Gubar has pointed out that although feminists have criticized warfare on the grounds of the "infinite sequentiality of world wars, technological advances in destructive capabilities , the obliteration of a safe homefront, the destruction of whole populations, and the ideological threat of fascism," they have also felt profoundly threatened by war as women: Why did literary women also fear that male vulnerability in wartime would result in violence against women? .. They were grappling with male-authored images that reified gender arrangements as rigidly as they had been demarcated in the Victorian period, but in a newly eroticized way. Even women occupied at vocational jobs that had never before been available to them could hardly escape the conclusion that the female community had been no less occupied than all the other foreign territories that had been laid waste. (Higonnet et al. 1987, 230) Copyrighted Material 8.234.202.202] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:31 GMT) The Creation of Army Officers and the Gender Lie 37 If women on the outside have felt the military as such a profound threat to their well-being, how can women on the inside cope? How do these two groups of women view each other? Military women, by and large, are not feminists, and feminists take a mixed view of military women. Odd. Military women are at the forward edge of the gendered battlefield but are generally not politicized and are concerned more with making a wage than with making a point...