Arms And The Enlisted Woman

Conclusion

Conclusion When he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1984, Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr., said, "The greatest change that has come about in the United States Forces in the time I've been in the military service has been the extensive use of women.... That is even greater than nuclear weapons, I feel, as far as our own forces are concerned." I Is this credible? Can a handful of young, unprivileged women be more unsettling than nuclear arms? This book began as a story about pioneering women, a tale of bold, independent women prepared to challenge taboos, take risks, and venture where few had gone before. It turned out, of course, that enlisted women are ordinary women, most of whom are just trying to do their job-with dignity. Few of them wish to change the world, and fewer of them think they are doing so. Enlisted women, then, have more in common with Rosa Parks than with Susan B. Anthony. Yet, merely by insisting upon their own validity and impinging on men's consciousness, they create disarray in the world's mightiest military organization . Much of this volume has been descriptive. The overview, the narrative, the historical account of generational change and backlash, and even the chapters on military and public opinion have sought to present the enlisted woman's experience in context, while emphasizing the variety of that experience. Enlisted women serve in four services, in many countries, in hundreds of jobs, and under thousands of commanders, who have a substantial amount of discretionary power. Enlisted women's culture is multiracial, but it is relatively homogeneous with regard to education and social class, and it is very age-stratified. Women who enlist make a nontraditional decision. Once in service, though, they encounter the men in our culture who are most devoted to polarized roles for women and men. * Moreover, since sex integration, these very men have had to lead and command women, including lesbian women. Having to police womanto -woman relationships has been difficult for some men, and their discomfort may have had the effect of driving what were previously (tacitly) *1 believe "polarized" is a far more accurate description than is "traditional" for roles which prescribe distinct and different activities for men and for women. - 235 Copyrighted Material 236 - Conclusion accepted relationships into the closet, and of disrupting the bonds between straight women and straight and lesbian women. Thus, integration has probably affected the bonds between women as much as it is said to have affected those between men, yet as the military integrated, it did little (at least self-consciously) either to assess this loss or to foster male-female bonding in the enterprise known as "soldiering." Sociologists may be able to use this volume to examine theories relating to social change, group proportionality, double and conflicting roles, and socially influenced perception. My interest, though, lies with the policies related to women, and especially with the justifications offered for those policies as they have developed through law, research, and bureaucratic decision making. If one assumes that women are as competent as men to serve in their nation's defense, and that as citizens they are equally obliged to do so, and if one also assumes that the nation can and should be militarily defended, one must conclude that current policies do not make much sense. The tedious sifting of the military's own documents, rationales, and evidence leads to this conclusion, and the chapters on litigation and legislation, research, accessions, and biology and family are the fruit of that labor. The Navy's discomfort with women on ships, the disjunction between Army research findings and the policies pushed by commanders , and the elaborate formulas created by the Air Force for women's accessions suggest that defensiveness rather than sense drives much of the policy on women. A great deal of military time and effort has been consumed by women's issues during the last fifteen years. In part, the "women problem" may have served as a welcome diversion from the need to reflect on the lessons of Vietnam and the difficulties of maintaining a volunteer, peacetime military with an ambiguous mission. Indeed, women may have been just the right problem-not too large, not too serious-and, in addition, they were new, they rarely made demands, and their congressional and other allies lacked sustained, intense interest. The solution to the problem, it was often implied, was to get rid of the...