Women in the Military in WWII
US, German, Soviet, and French Militaries and Female Soldiers
Sep 1, 2008
Women and men both shared unique political, intellectual, and cultural challenges in the Second World War with the increase of women serving in uniform. The US felt secure from direct threats to its continental boundaries, removing the political necessity of placing women in combat positions, according to D'Ann Campbell in her 1993 article "Women in Combat" in the Journal of Military History. Also, in the US, states Campbell, the politicians bowed to the political pressure which ensured the safety of women from the deprivations of combat. Politically, then, men saw themselves as protecting women in the US from combat while in Britain and the Soviet Union Campbell states that politics stepped in, reassigning women in uniform to combat units in order to send men to the front.
Cultural Barriers for Women in the Military, WWII
Culturally women competed with the Western ideal of the passive female. Men, in turn, needed to remain the dominant of the two genders, asserting their dominance culturally on the field of battle. Campbell uses the anecdote of Nazi Germany even used a female infantry battalion in an effort to force frightened men into bowing to the Western ideal of the masculine. Campbell also illustrates how the act of killing served as the largest, insurmountable cultural barrier for women in the British and American militaries. While female French Resistance fighters faced cultural resistance of their own, some did engage in fatal combat, as seen in the book A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, edited by Gerard J. DeGroot, and Corinna Peniston-Bird. Various essays in A Soldier and a Woman show how part of this resistance resided in Western gender expectations, and partially in France’s history of, and faith in Roman Catholicism. Soviet women, according to Paul Addison and Agnus Calder in Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945, while participating in combat still found themselves thrust into the traditional, cultural role of caregiver (medic/nurse), even during combat. When the demands of the war slipped away, states Professor Reina Pennington in an essay at Norwich University, the cultural demands of the masculine over the feminine reasserted itself, and the military institutions of the Allies stood again as bastions of masculinity.
Cultural Expectations on Female Soldiers, 1939-1945
DeGroot and Peniston-Bird's work shows how the Soviet Army, in spite of its acceptance of females as soldiers, emphasized the woman’s need to leave the military and return to the duties of motherhood and labor. Campbell also states that in Britain women found themselves removed from anti-aircraft batteries and placed within the institutionally acceptable positions of clerks and nurses. America sought to reinforce the masculinity of the services through the masculinization of language and behavior. In the end, according to DeGroot's article "'I Love the Smell of Cordite in Your Hair': Gender Dynamics in Mixed Anti-Aircraft Batteries during the Second World War", women needed to remember their femininity, and politics, culture, and institutions sought to establish this firmly with the conclusion of the Second World War. Men, for their part, desired a return to what they viewed as the cultural, political, and institutional norms. Of the nations reviewed the Soviet Union achieved the highest standard of female integration into the armed services, yet it too quickly sought the familiarity of pre-war culture, politics, and institutions with their comfortable masculine superiority.
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