Girls in the Armed Services have been very much in the forefront of media attention. A whole variety of issues have arisen, from the rights or wrongs of selling a story and giving interviews; to whether women should be on the front line; to why recently killed service women get more attention than the men who died alongside them.
In this post feminist era we are having a discussion about women which is blind to the fact of women's involvement in military action throughout history.
Going back into the mists of history - Bronze Age women warriors are well documented with supporting Central Asian archaeology. Then there is the woman war leader, Deborah of biblical book, Judges. More recently we have the startling case of Joan of Arc . Whilst this young girl stands outside the norm of what we would consider appropriate to Medieval Women it is our view of the past that flies in the face of the history and in the face of what many saw as appropriate female behaviour at the time. Throughout the middle ages women led militarily often protecting castles or overseeing rearguard actions in support of their men who were on military campaigns elsewhere.
Only as patriarchy has extended it's control of the roles of women, have we began to question the role of women in war. We see it as civilised of us to keep women away from front line action. This is probably a view which extends back into the nineteenth century and is dressed up as chivalry.
These ideas allow us to overlook the role of women on the front line in WWII Russia, both as soldiers and as civilians; the squadrons of Soviet Women Pilots some known as Night Witches. All can be conveniently ignored along with the many women partisans in wartime Europe because as a culture we subscribe to the belief that women are never directly involved with war.
Warfare has however always included women as front line civilian fodder - as well as children, the elderly and the frail. There is a sickening hypocrisy, a shadow of Victorian chivalric whimsy, the idea that women should be kept from the horrors of war. Which women would that be? Certainly not the women of the enemy; chivalry only extends to one's own women, not your enemy's women. Which then extends in the question about women as the property of men.
And so you manage to keep the little woman away from the Front, for around two centuries, if we consider British history. Is this a legacy of colonialism, where very often the Front was thousands of miles and months of travel away?
About these women thousands of miles away from the Front, were they any less cushioned than the men? Dealing with daily grind of the Home Front; dreading the telegram. I don't think so somehow. When a women receives the news of the death of her father, husband, lover, brother or son she dies too.
And then there are the women who really are on the Front; the military nurses, the modern day women in all the Armed Services and the local women and girls.
I wonder whether Iraqi and Afghan women consider themselves to be in the front line of a war?
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