YOU'RE IN THE ARMY NOW. It is hard to believe there was once controversy over American women fighting on the front lines. "Now when a woman comes back from Iraq in a body bag, nobody says anything," a female officer who spent a year in Baghdad told me recently. "That's the way we want it, too." A reservist living in Edmonton, Kentucky, seemed to agree: "You're expected to do everything a guy can," she told me. She said she didn't want to be treated any differently than male soldiers. Then she took out a trunk, still dusty from her tour of Iraq, and placed jackets and medical kits on the carpet in her living room. She wanted to show me she had all the same stuff that men carry in battle. Today, "women make up 14.4 percent of enlisted personnel and 15.9 percent of the officer corps," writes Holly Yeager in her excellent article, "Soldiering Ahead," in Wilson Quarterly. "That is a marked increase from the 1.6 percent of the military that was female in 1973, when the draft ended and new recruitment goals for women were set." But despite the enthusiasm of female soldiers, and their rapidly increasing numbers, some things have not changed -- namely, the difficulties of pursuing a military career for women. Male officers, according to a 2001 RAND report cited by Yeager, offered researchers three main explanations: "Women are inherently less capable, physically and mentally, to perform a military job and lead troops." In addition, she writes, "The men also said that male superiors fear that they will find themselves unable to refute an unwarranted charge of sexual harassment and therefore hold back from interactions, such as mentoring, with female subordinates." Simply being female, it appears, will hold women back -- regardless of how what kind of gear they carry in their trunk. --Tara McKelvey
