Introduction

Supreme Court, and the lawyer arguing on behalf of the female lieutenant was none other than Columbia Law Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later became a member of the Supreme Court. At the time Ginsburg argued the case in 1973, the court was solely male. However a plurality of eight justices agreed with the plaintiff that the preferential treatment given to military men in the form of pay and benefi ts was unconstitutional. The sole holdout was William Rehnquist, who later served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. During this same period servicewomen also challenged the common practice of fi ring a woman who became pregnant. When the Army notifi ed a Reserve nurse that she would have to resign her commission because she had given birth to a son, she fi led suit in a California court, claiming that she was still ready and able to fulfi ll her Reserve duties. The court issued an injunction ordering the Army to stop the discharge proceedings. Defense Department lawyers concluded that if servicewomen chose to challenge the automatic discharge for pregnancy policy in the courts, the military services would fi nd the cases unwinnable. The lawyers believed that the policy violated the Fifth Amendment because no other temporary physical disabilities resulted in mandatory discharge. In 1975, DOD ordered the services to drop the waiver policy and allow those women who wanted to remain in uniform after giving birth to a child to remain in the service as a matter of course. The Navy also found itself in an untenable legal position during this period when a female interior communications technician recommended for assignment to the U.S. Naval Survey Ship Michaelson saw the assignment disapproved because the Navy’s Judge Advocate believed it would be in violation of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which prohibited Navy women from serving aboard any vessels other than transports and hospital ships. The female technician and six other Navy women took the Navy to court in a class action suit. In 1978, Judge John J. Sirica of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled on behalf of the plaintiffs and ordered the Navy to proceed with “measured steps” and make individualized decisions regarding women’s capabilities with respect to their roles in the Navy. Although the judge did not order the Navy to take immediate action, he did indicate that the courts would no longer tolerate automatic blanket exclusions based on gender alone. The Navy, realizing that if it did not quickly begin assigning women to sea it would soon be ordered to, and undoubtedly told how to do it as well, decided to proceed at its own chosen pace. In 1978, the Navy assigned women to the Vulcan, a repair ship. The women comprised 10 percent of the ship’s crew. When few problems occurred, the Navy began to move a bit faster. By the end of 1979, 17 ships had women serving aboard them. Integration continued without fanfare, and in 1987 there were 248 women aboard the USS Acadia when it was deployed to the mined waters of the Persian Gulf to repair the crippled USS Stark, damaged by Iraqi missiles. Obviously, the status of servicewomen during this time could tell historians a great deal about the place of American women in society. However, the above court cases have been all but forgotten by historians. Unfortunately the study of servicewomen throughout the 1980s, when their numbers were growing exponentially in the Armed Forces, fares little better. During the 1980s women participated in Operation Urgent Fury (the invasion of Grenada in 1983) and Operation Just Cause (the invasion of Panama in 1989), but not without hesitation and confusion on the part of military commanders, some of whom were uncertain of the legality of sending women into the battle theater along with the

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units with which they had trained. Although offi cial records and oral histories pertaining to these military operations are available to researchers, very little has been written on the military women who deployed during Urgent Fury and Just Cause, and these women have been disinclined to write about and publish their experiences. The same cannot be said about the women who deployed to Southwest Asia during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. By 1991 women represented more than 11 percent of the U.S. Armed Forces, and this statistic was refl ected in the number of women soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who deployed to Saudi Arabia with their units. Women began writing about their experiences in the desert as soon as they returned home, and memoirs from this historic and pivotal period are still being published. Historians interested in this era also have at their disposal numerous newspaper and magazine articles featuring women service members. The press, refl ecting the American public’s fascination with uniformed women who deployed to the Gulf during the war, wrote prolifi cally about the women who toiled alongside their male colleagues building hospitals and latrines, guarding perimeters and driving convoys and maintaining aircraft. Press and public were also inordinately interested in uniformed mothers forced to leave their children behind when they deployed. Much attention was focused on family care plans, single mothers in uniform, and dual military parents. Although the sexual harassment cases of the 1990s also received scrutiny and have been much written about, servicewomen’s contributions during the numerous contingency operations of the 1990s, including those to Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans, have failed to receive much attention. This lapse is particularly unfortunate because during this period military commanders were attempting to navigate the vague, confusing and sometimes contradictory Combat Exclusion Laws created by the Department of Defense and the individual services to keep servicewomen safe in the combat theater. To date, military women’s participation in the current War on Terror appears to be receiving signifi cant press, and already a good number of memoirs have appeared in print. Although it is far too early to assess how history will view women’s contributions to national defense during this period, it appears that there will be no lack of material for historians to work with. Whether scholars will continue to view servicewomen as a separate subset of the Armed Forces is a fair question to ask at this point in time. In the eyes of this historian at least, as long as servicewomen are treated differently from servicemen during selection, assignment and promotion processes, they must be viewed as a distinct part of the U.S. Armed Forces. Women’s place in the military continues to be driven by their place in society as a whole. Although in recent eras tremendous progress has been made in achieving legal, economic and social parity for women, today both servicewomen and civilian women remain separate and unequal under American law and within both American society and its military services.