women and men working in partnership

Women In Combat Roles

by Lesley Abdela
First Published by The Guardian (UK) www.guardian.co.uk
9th Jan. 2001

Challenging Established Perceptions

On just this one small planet so many contrasting and irrational postures are struck and enforced, by law or fist, on the proper role of the human female. So much blaring of trumpets, so much unease, so much resistance, so much absolute blithering nitwit nonsense.

Until now, German women have only been allowed to join musical and medical regiments. This month, after threat of legal action, the German military announced that women will be allowed to join combat units. The German magazine Der Spiegel responded with an article titled "What do we do when women cry?"

Victorians believed learning mathematics would "overheat" a woman's brain and she should be protected from it. Hardly more than a decade ago an RAF pilot told me that he and his colleagues believed a woman could not become a fighter pilot because if subjected to more than 3g her womb would be sucked out of her body.

Here in the UK the Liberal Democrats' Menzies Campbell said his party is opposed to women performing ground combat duties because the British public is "not ready" for women to take on this role. "I have considerable reservations about putting women, however qualified and motivated, into the frontline," he opined.

Yet women elsewhere are already in the frontline of combat, as I have seen in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Last May I was a speaker at the annual conference of the Committee on Women in the Nato Armed Forces, at Nato HQ in Brussels. Boarding the coach taking conference participants from the hotel to Nato HQ, a trim woman wearing an immaculately tailored US army uniform brushed past me. She looked like an American female business executive - manicured, varnished nails, groomed blond hair. "I forgot my purse, make sure the bus waits for me," she ordered colleagues.

"That's the general, ma'am," an awestruck junior male officer whispered to me.

The United States has women flying FI6 jet fighters in combat roles and female coast guard commanders. The US coast guards use messages printed on emery boards to encourage women to join a service which often engages in shooting matches with drug smuggling gangs.

Yet Pentagon brass do not allow women to enter the male preserve of submarines. Below the sea's surface the tradition of "full fathom five thy father lies" continues. However, Norwegians have had women submariners for years. At the conference a Norwegian female submarine commander sat across the table from the Italian military contingent. Italians only permitted women to join the armed forces for the first time in 1999.

Differing national attitudes to gender stereotypes are not confined to the military. When Tony Blair reshuffles his cabinet he might like to note that the three most powerful cabinet posts - chancellor, foreign secretary and defence secretary - have never been held by a woman.

In Finland, not only have women been secretary of state for defence, finance minister and foreign secretary, but in the February 2000 presidential elections Tarja Halonen was elected president of Finland after she campaigned on a feminist manifesto.

The EU enlargement process will throw up more discrepancies. Job ads that discriminate against women have been illegal for 30 years in EU member states. Yet in the EU candidate states of Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Czech Republic, ads say: "We are looking for a receptionist with pretty legs." Or "Women with children should not apply for this job." I saw an ad for a J Walter Thompson subsidiary in Slovenia stating: "We are looking for a marketing manager with balls and braces."

The norm in one place is often a non-negotiable taboo elsewhere. In many African countries religious and traditional rulers (mostly male) are implacably opposed to women's right to inherit property. In a recent court case in Cameroon the judge ruled against a woman being allowed to inherit property, saying: "Women are chattels. How can property own property?"

It is sometimes averred that attitudes towards women's roles change when men and women are literate and educated. In Russia and Ukraine, despite well educated populations, the attitude of the Orthodox Church to the role of women remains medieval. Many highly qualified female scientists and engineers live in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, a key missile-manufacturing centre closed to outsiders in the Soviet era.

On a tour of the newly reopened cathedral I met the local Orthodox bishop. I asked when he thought the Orthodox Church would have women priests. His reply? "How can women ever be priests when once a month they are unclean and therefore unfit to enter the church at that time?"

In colonial, slavery and apartheid days, the most effective strategy for the ruling group to retain power over another group was to make the disparity seem the natural order of things. It still happens to women. It denies adulthood to more than half the world.

lesley.abdela@shevolution.com

View this article at: www.shevolution.com/articles_and_talks/abdela_archive/women_in_combat_roles.html