Many people say that women should not be able to combat alongside men because men are more capable. Women should be allowed to combat for their country based on whether they can pass the test. Women are just as capable as men to fight for our country. People view women as too fragile to complete some of the same tasks as men. Many women in our history have proven to be just as capable as men.
Women were allowed to work under the WAAC program (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps), so why not let us work for the entire military? In 1943, women enjoyed the same pay as men and were ranked the same as men. During peacetime, women were only allowed to serve as nurses. Thousands of women served their country during World War II but were expected to go straight into civilian lifestyle, but the men weren’t. During World War II 1948 this all changed, they needed more soldiers than ever before, and they started to recruit women into the military but only for non-combat positions. Some of the positions were linguists, weather forecasters, and telephone operators, they were accepted through WAAC. Nevertheless, some people thought the program was a Nazi plot to undermine the armed forces.
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In 2011, 214,098 women served on active duty in the military, which was 14.6% of all active-duty personnel. For the Marines, 6% of soldiers were women. Although in 2016, the active military was composed of 2.2 million men and women, it has decreased to 1.29 million and under. Another way to look at it would be less than 0.5 percent of the US population. The last recorded data for how many soldiers were on active duty was in 2016. The Army was composed of 36.6% or 471,271 soldiers, the Navy was composed of 24.8% or 320,101, the Air Force was composed of 24.3% or 313,723, and the Marines were composed of 14.2% or 183,501. The Army had the most recruitments since there are many more army bases, so families go with tradition and tell their kids to enlist in the Army. Even though the Army has more recruitment, the Marines have 84% of recruits ages 20 and younger. In 2016, the top five states for recruitment were California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and New York, mostly because of their large populations; each state had at least 6,000 recruitments.
Many people are scared of the possibility of ‘mothers’ coming home in body bags. Another reason why people don’t want women to be serving on the front lines alongside men is because of the sleeping quarters and sexual crimes that come along with that. For example, a corporal in the Marines was at military occupational specialty school and was raped, which to the military causes problems, leading them to decrease job opportunities for women; so they have less of a chance of sexual crimes.
In 2012, the Department of Defense announced new policies that opened more than 14,00 military job opportunities. However, 14,000 is only 7% of the 200,000 plus positions offered to men. There are roughly 237,000 positions women have been barred from, according to the Pentagon, “They have started looking to qualify women to fill these roles”.
Army General Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to serve as a four-star general in the Army. She joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1974, then was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1975. She employed more than 69,000 employees across 145 countries. “It was Ann’s most recent role, as commander of the AMC, in which she unified global logistics in a way [that has never] been done”, said Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Ray Odierno. “Over the last 11 years, I’ve had the honor to serve with many of the 250,000 women who have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan on battlefields where there are no clear lines, battlefields where every man and woman had to be a rifleman first. And today, women are in combat, that is just a reality. Thousands of women have been decorated for valor and 146 have given their lives. Today, what was once a band of brothers has become a band of brothers and sisters” (Army Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody).
Some accomplished women in the military who stood out to me were Lt. Marina A. Hierl, Harriet Tubman, and Sgt. Chanelle Taylor. In September 2017, a Marine officer passed the rigorous requirements to become the first female infantry officer. First Lt. Marina A. Hierl is the first female leading an infantry platoon.
Harriet Tubman is best known for leading slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. However, that isn’t all she did, she served as a cook, nurse, and spy for the Union during the Civil War. She was the first woman in American history to lead a military expedition. Reporting on the raid to Secretary of War Stanton, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton said, “This is the only military command in American history wherein a woman, black or white, led the raid, and under whose inspiration it originated and conducted”. Tubman was only paid $200 during her three years of service; and then was denied a pension for her spy work.
Women can handle themselves, everyone needs to stop restricting them just because they think they might get hurt. If they do get hurt, they will either stop doing the activity or they will learn and fix what they did wrong. In the U.K., they did a study about soldiers who had fought in Iraq and there were no differences in genders in veterans who had post-traumatic stress disorder. During this study, they found that women were more resilient to its effects compared to male soldiers. Many female soldiers were on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan as medical support. However, women were not formally in combat roles but still experienced front-line combat just as much as male combat medics. Sgt. Chanelle Taylor was the first soldier to kill an enemy up close in Afghanistan.
The Royal Army Medical Corps was a way for women to experience the frontline. “I lifted my head and found myself staring straight at one of the insurgents who attacked us”, Chantelle recalls. “Others had already been hit. My training kicked in. I took a deep breath as I aimed, and then I engaged. I couldn’t see where I was hitting him so I kept firing ’til he dropped. I was there to save lives, not take them, but I don’t regret what I did, and I don’t lose sleep over it. Warfare is different now”, stated Sgt. Chanelle Taylor. The Red Cross isn’t respected anymore. Combat medics are targeted just like everyone else. Sgt. Taylor broke the rules that state a combat medic can only fire in anger to protect herself or her casualties, however, Taylor volunteered to join the mortar team to protect everyone. “I didn’t take the decision lightly, but I thought about us being overrun by the Taliban, and the newspaper headlines ‘Female medic among the dead, unable to man the mortar’. I will always upset someone: weak if I die surrounded by munitions, wrong if I use those munitions because I choose to survive”, she claimed. Sgt. Chanelle Taylor took a huge risk in volunteering, but she did the right thing.
While many people say that women shouldn’t be able to fight alongside men because men are supposedly more capable, I take a different view. Women should be allowed to fight for their country because they are just as capable and strong-minded, and the examples of famous women mentioned in this work are just proof of that.
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