At the tip of the trident: Integrating women into the fleet.

摘要

Women began serving in the United States Navy in 1917, and they served in the aviation and surface warfare communities in the fleet since 1978 on non-combatant vessels and at shore-based aviation commands. In 1994 Congress eliminated the combat exclusion laws, enabling navy women to deploy on combatant ships and in combat aircraft. The process of the integration of women first into the navy and subsequently into the operating forces of the fleet has been long, slow and contentious. This process has been influenced by the complex interplay of forces both internal and external to the navy as an institution, including cultural attitudes, political and economic trends, technological change and the exigency of war. The integration process unfolded in four distinct phases: militarization, the act of conferring military status upon women during the two World Wars; marginalization, the practice of restricting the numbers of women in the ranks, their range of duties, and opportunities for advancement; transition, the process of gradual expansion in the numbers of women in the ranks and their range of duties to compensate for the loss of conscripted male manpower following the establishment of the All Volunteer Force in 1973; and integration, the process of dismantling policy, statutory and internal institutional barriers to enable fuller integration of women into the combat roles and missions and command positions central to executing the navy's mission.; Employing the scholarship of women's history, especially the analytical frameworks for understanding the relationship of women to the state and within society first developed by Linda K. Kerber and Barbara Welter, the author utilizes government documents, including congressional records and testimony, federal court decisions, official records of the U.S. Army and Navy, as well as contemporaneous articles in newspapers and the popular press to illustrate how the factors outlined above influenced the evolution of women's roles in the navy throughout these four historical phases. While each of the identified factors exerted varying levels of influence at different points in the integration process, the exigent circumstances of war or military necessity proved consistently to be the preeminent factor advancing the integration process.