Abstract
In the past century, women’s participation in war has changed dramatically, and it has remained the same. This seeming paradox results from increases in women’s official enlistment in armed forces typically governed by rigid and patriarchal gender cultures and power structures. When the US entered the First World War in 1917, there were no women in its armed forces. With the exception of Russia, which had several women’s battalions (Stockdale, 2004; Stoff, 2006), women were not permitted to serve in the militaries of major combatants, except as nurses (Grayzel, 2002; Hagemann, 2011; Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, 2013). In the last two years of the war several thousand women enlisted in the US Navy and Marines (Ebbert and Hall, 2002). Outside the military, women served on the home fronts working in industry, agriculture and volunteer organizations in all countries involved in the war. And women were sexually active in the war effort, sometimes willingly as sex partners or sex workers or spies, often unwillingly in desperation prostitution, survival sex collaboration, or as the targets of rape.
As the twentieth century progressed, women enlisted in armed forces around the world. A century after the start of the First World War, women comprise 14.5% of the US armed forces, and between 10 and 20% of the national militaries of major former First World War combatants (Australian Department of Defence, 2012; Mathers, 2000; News from Spain, 2006; North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2013). Women’s labour force participation outside the military also has expanded in these national economies throughout the twentieth century. At the centennial of the First World War, women comprise 50–60% in former combatant national civilian labour forces (World Bank, 2013). Despite these significant changes in women’s roles outside the home – in the military and in the economy – women’s sexual roles in wars have remained the same: sexual liaisons, sex work and sexual abuse. This is true for women both outside and inside the militaries involved in warfare.
In the twenty-first century, prostitution, rape and sexual exploitation still characterize civilian women’s relationship to militaries inside conflict zones, including their relationship to peacekeeping forces (MacFarquhar, 2011; Simic, 2012; UN News Centre, 2013). Inside the military, women have a new set of sexual duties, some voluntary, some involuntary, that parallel those of women in civilian life: sexual liaisons, sex work and sexual abuse. For service women these sexual assignments are not what they signed up for when they enlisted. But they are, nonetheless, women’s work in now feminized armed forces, especially in the United States.
The argument I’m making here is that when women entered the armed forces during the twentieth century, they found themselves facing many of the same types of sexual predation that have always been the fate of civilian women in war. Service women work a military sexual second shift – soldiers by day, sex partners by night. Civilian women in war have consensual and coerced sexual relationships with the troops, work in sex industries servicing the servicemen, and are targets of sexual abuse and rape by armed forces. Women’s entry into national military institutions has not changed their gender roles as consensual sex partners or as targets of sexual exploitation and violence. The major difference for women in the military is that both their sex partners and abusers are their fellow soldiers, sailors, marines, or airmen. When women volunteer for military service, many choose to enter into sexual relationships with other service personnel. But they do not choose to be in coercive sexual relations or raped by their comrades-in-arms.
Sexual harassment and assault seem to go with the territory for service women around the world (Gill and Febbraro, 2013; Pinch et al., 2004). Sexual abuse of women in the armed forces is perhaps the most widespread and/or most well-documented in the United States. In 1988, the US Department of Defense (DOD) conducted a survey of 38,000 military personnel from all branches of the armed services and found that 64% of women and 17% of men reported at least one incident of sexual harassment during the previous year (Martindale, 1990). Twenty-five years later, these findings are mirrored in a 2013 DOD study reporting 3553 sexual assault complaints in the previous nine months, a near 50% increase over the same period a year earlier (Steinhauer, 2013; US Commission on Civil Rights, 2013; US Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013). 1 The inability or intransigence of the US military to address the sexual abuse in its ranks prompted demands for changes in the prosecution of sexual assault to parallel those of many countries with much lower reported rates of military sexual assault (e.g. Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Israel) (Rosenthal and Korb, 2013; Rushing, 2013; Seitz-Wald, 2013).
This quantitative review of sexual harassment of women shows the scale and durability of a US military gender culture that fails to protect women from sexual harassment and assault. Like all military services, the US armed forces share a long history that enshrines masculinity and links manliness to the sexual subordination of women. But that is not the whole portrait I intended to paint in the title of this essay. It is not news that many, indeed the majority of women in the US military report being sexually abused. It is the strategic implications of women’s military service that I wish to emphasize.
Women represent a new sexual resource for the US military. Like armies throughout history, the US military has longstanding practices designed to provide sexual ‘release’ for the troops: shore leaves to sex tourism districts, military-facilitated, organized and inspected brothels, toleration or active participation in the establishment of sex industry zones encircling military bases in the US and abroad, low rates of prosecution for sexual assaults of civilian women (Kramer, 2006; Moon and Moon, 1997; Nagel, 2003). During much of its history, the US military had to rely on a sexual workforce outside its membership to provide comfort, intimacy, recreation and opportunities for enacting masculine sexuality. The day-to-day availability of service women, including in combat zones, has changed the sexual landscape of warfare. Civilian women in occupied areas still become part of traditional military-sexual exchanges and assaults, but the increased presence of service women in the military itself has made them a new resource in war armouries.
The scandal of sexual abuse in the US military has mobilized more resistance in the decade since photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison revealed sexual liaisons among service members and sexual abuse of prisoners. The photos exposed a new weapon in the US military’s arsenal: the deployment of service women’s gender and sexuality to keep up morale in the ranks and attack the enemy (Nagel and Feitz, 2007). 2 There is debate about whether the decision to allow women to serve in most combat roles in the US armed forces will reduce rates of sexual harassment and assault. Some argue that making women equal in all aspects of military service will make them less likely to be seen as sexual prey. I am not convinced that inclusion in combat will be a quick fix. Women Military Police have served for years alongside men in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet this combat duty seems to put women more at risk for sexual assault (Leardmann et al., 2013). A change in command structure governing sexual offences appears to have made sexual abuse less prevalent in the militaries of other countries. As Cynthia Enloe states, ‘Women in the military has never been an easy topic. It shouldn’t be. Sexism, patriotism, violence, and the state – it is a heady brew’ (Enloe, 2000: x). Added to that mixture is the hypermasculinity fostered by centuries of military tradition and hierarchy, toxic sexual cultures in US military service academies, and the continued sexual exploitation of civilian women in conflict zones. This combination does not seem easily rendered compatible with building equal respect for service women in today’s Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard. So, I conclude as I began, in the past century, women’s participation in war has changed dramatically, and it has remained the same.