Last week Captain Karen Tait of the Royal Military Police launched a tribunal claim against the Army alleging sexual discrimination after being sent home from Afghanistan following a lesbian affair. Outside the court, the army spokesman Major Tim Osman dismissed the claim, stating that the Army had a “zero tolerance” approach to all forms of discrimination.
Except one, enshrined in its own rules. In June 2008, Corporal Sarah Bryant became the first British woman soldier to die on active service in Afghanistan, when her Land Rover was blown up by a roadside bomb. Bryant was a Pashtu-speaking officer in the Intelligence Corps performing vital translation and liaison duties, especially with the women of the region. Good enough to die, it seems, but not good enough to fight. On November 30 2010, the Ministry of Defence published a report lauding the “valour ... and initiative” of female members of the Armed Forces, but confirming its longstanding ban on women serving in the front line, where they would be “required to close with the enemy, and kill face to face”.
This decision bars women from joining the infantry or serving in small combat teams, both key areas in which the rising stars of the military can shine: promotion rarely attends pen-pushers or backroom boys. Instead women are to remain deployed in “logistics, artillery and engineering” — backing up the men.
“There is no question that some women would be able to meet the standard required of personnel performing in close combat roles,” said the Minister for Defence Personnel, Andrew Robathan. Nevertheless, “a decision was made to ... maintain the current [ban]”.
Many would agree. Deep-rooted convictions demand the protection of women from danger or death. From prehistoric times, their role as the bearers of new life has always meant that their safety and survival were the concern of the whole tribe.
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Designed for childbearing as the caring, nurturing sex, it is inferred, women inevitably lack aggression, the essential prerequisite for killing and courage in action.
In the most famous examples of women who did go to war, nobility and self-sacrifice dominate as themes, never raw aggression or the thrill of a good scrap: Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale are the archetypes here. But mainly women are seen as non- participants. Military historians such as Professor Martin van Kreveld insist that they enter the annals of warfare only as hapless bystanders, camp followers, or the degraded spoils, always subordinate to men.
Views such as these, which block women’s advancement in the military, can be sustained only on the basis of blind prejudice and peerless ignorance. The briefest glance at the roles women have played in war during the past 3,000 years gives the lie to this.
Let’s start with the big myth, that men make war to defend the precious female. From Homer onwards, men make war for property, pride or territory. They do it for themselves. This definition of war also implies some natural gallantry, in which men preserve women from harm. But who protected the women in the 1937 Rape of Nanking, in which one American missionary reported “Rape! Rape! Rape! At least 1,000 cases a night”?
The idea, too, that women are just too weak, too womanly to fight, collapses under the testimony of those who have seen them in action. At the battle of the Paris Commune in 1871, the eyewitness Georges Clemenceau, then Mayor of Montmartre, reported that the women on the barricades “fought like devils, far better than the men”.
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In the Second World War, Selwyn Jepson, a recruiter for the newly formed British Special Operations Executive (SOE), persuaded Prime Minister Winston Churchill to sanction the use of women as undercover agents for the “cool and lonely courage” that made them “very much better for the work than the men”. Fidel Castro agreed: “In every revolution, women are more revolutionary than the men.”
Women have fought in every theatre of war since the dawn of time. An unbroken line connects the Iron Age Amazons of early Central Europe, buried with their full-body armour and weapons, with the United States Air Force Colonel Martha McSally, the first American airwoman to command a combat squadron in Afghanistan. At the battle of Uhud in 625, the prophet Mohammed recalled of one woman warrior, Umm ’Umara, “I never looked to the right nor to the left without seeing [her] fighting to defend me.”
Nor were these anomalies of prehistory or myth. Female soldaderas fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico — with one, Petra Herrera, rising to the rank of colonel by 1917, commanding her own brigade. In the First World War, the Bournemouth vicar’s daughter Flora Sandes commanded a troop of Serbian infantry in the Balkans with such distinction that she was awarded the Kara George medal, the highest Serbian award for bravery in action.
Female rulers, from the 10th-century Saxon warrior queen Aethelflaed to Margaret Thatcher pursuing victory in the Falkands, are ex officio war leaders too. Often they are more hawkish than the men. However, commanders attest that what matters in any combatant is not sex but attitude.
The extraordinary Special Operations Executive agent Pearl Witherington commanded a 2,000-strong Resistance army on key sabotage missions in France in the Second World War, and later turned down the paltry civil decoration of an MBE because she “had never done anything civil in her life”.
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The characteristic spunk that made Witherington a military success is a human, not a masculine trait, and to be found in women everywhere. Logistics Private Kayla Donnelly soldiered on through active service in Helmand until September of last year, and became aware of her unexpected pregnancy only when she gave birth to a healthy son two weeks after returning from war. And as one contributor to the Army Rumour Service drily observed: “Nobody who has ever had to clear the Naafi Families Bar at 11pm on a Saturday night will ever doubt the fighting qualities of the ‘weaker sex’.”
Inevitably, aggression in women can spill over into violence when they are given the power to inflict it. The women who were enrolled to staff Nazi concentration camps were accorded a grotesque form of empowerment. A classic case was Hermine Braunsteiner, dubbed “the stomping mare” for her steel-studded jackboots and preferred method of dealing with her victims.
But the Second World War also displays the many positive aspects of women’s aggression. Fighting for its life and unable to contemplate the luxury of a “weaker sex”, the USSR sent almost a million women to the front, where they comprised some 40 per cent of the operational force. While Red Army women served as snipers and drove tanks, Red Air Force women formed the feared bomber squadrons of “night witches”, or like the air ace Lily Litvak, flew fighter planes many achieving the highest decorations for bravery.
These women and millions more have put their fighting instinct to the service of their country. Every one of them makes nonsense of the MoD’s piffling claims that women are not suited to the front line.
As long as war exists, the women who choose to pursue it deserve a fair crack of the whip. “We ask no favours for our sex,” observed the 19th-century feminist Angelina Grimke. “All we ask is that men will take their feet from off our necks.” All together, then, gentlemen of the MoD: by the left foot, lift . . .
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Rosalind Miles is the co-author of Warrior Women: 3,000 Years of Courage and Heroism