Abstract
More American women fought in a war zone during the 1990–91 Gulf War than had fought in any American war since the Second World War. The 40,000 white, black, Asian-American and Hispanic American women who were deployed to Saudi Arabia during this nine-month military build-up amounted to four times the number of American military women sent to Vietnam over the entire decade of US involvement in that country. Three-fourths of those women were deployed by the Army. Only 3 per cent of Canada’s forces sent to the Gulf were women (though women make up 10.6 per cent of Canada’s entire active duty force), while Britain’s units were 1.5 per cent women (again lower than the 5 per cent level of its total military). France deployed 13 women in its 10,000-soldier force. Kuwait included 9 women among the 250 Kuwaiti volunteers sent to the US for military training in 1991.1
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Notes
Two recent explorations into the specifically American history of militarized thinking about citizenship are: L. K. Kerber, ‘May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation’, in J. E. Bethke and S. Tobias (eds) Women, Militarism and War (Savage: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990);
also M. E. Kann, On the Man Question: Gender and Civic Virtue in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
One of the best cross-national collections is: Eva Isaksson (ed.) Women and the Military System (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988.)
Other cross-national comparisons can be found in: S. Macdonald, P. Holden and S. Ardener (eds) Images of Women in Peace and War (London: Macmillan and Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Elshtain and Tobias (eds) Women, Militarism and War;
N. Loring Goldman (ed.) Female Soldiers — Combatants or Noncombatants? (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982). A useful bibliography of journal articles published in English between 1980–1990 on women and militaries appears in Journal of Women’s History, 3, 1, 1991, pp. 141–58.
A cultural analysis of the ‘Private Benjamin’ image came out of an international conference of European, Israeli and North American women, the results of which are contained in W. Chapkis (ed.) Loaded Questions: Women and the Military (Amsterdam and Washington: Transnational Institute, 1981).
For descriptions and oral histories of American women who served in the US military in Vietnam, see K. Marshall, In the Combat Zone (New York: Penguin, 1987);
K. Walker, A Piece of My Heart (New York: Ballantine, 1985);
L. Van Devanter, Home Before Morning (New York: Beaufort, 1983).
The Second World War and immediate postwar ups and downs of US military attention to, and harassment of, lesbians and gay men is charted in A. Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1991).
A provocative account of the demands on military wives and especially daughters to conform to those standards of femininity that best served American needs during the 1960s and 1970s has recently been published by a journalist who herself grew up as a military daughter: M. Wertsch, Military Brats: The Legacy of Childhood Inside the Fortress (New York: Crown, 1991).
For a detailed account of the intra-military debates over the definitions of ‘combat’ and thus over where only men could serve, see J. Hicks Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
A. Wright, Major US Army, ‘The Roles of US Army Women in Grenada’, Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, 2, 2, 1984, pp. 103–113. Minerva is the best journal covering US and other militaries’ use of women. Its address is: 1101 South Arlington Ridge Rd., #210, Arlington, VA 22202.
I have discussed in more detail the relationships between Saudi women’s politics and American military women’s politics in ‘The Gendered Gulf’ in Cynthia Peters (ed.) Collateral Damage (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
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© 1994 Cynthia H. Enloe
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Enloe, C.H. (1994). The Politics of Constructing the American Woman Soldier. In: Addis, E., Russo, V.E., Sebesta, L., Campling, J. (eds) Women Soldiers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23495-0_5
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