Contrary to popular assumptions about women's absence from the politics of national defense and war during the early Cold War era (1945–1965), women indeed participated politically, supporting and influencing as well as opposing American militarization. Venues for their activism included clubs, churches, unions, civil defense planning organizations, civil rights groups, and peace groups. Especially before the 1960s, however, women tended not to portray their activism in explicitly feminist terms, in many cases because they did not conceive of their causes as feminist, even when they empowered women to shape American society and politics, and in other cases because they feared a conservative backlash. Women in groups such as the Families Committee of Smith Act Victims (created in 1951) and Women Strike for Peace (founded in 1961) used women's traditional roles as mothers and protectors of families in portraying their opposition to McCarthyism and nuclear testing respectively.
The twentieth century's first wave of feminism culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, in 1920. The second wave
Patricia Schroeder.AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
emerged in the 1960s out of women's growing participation in the paid labor force, higher education, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft movements. Scholars have grouped women's rights activists into two primary categories. Liberal feminists, including women such as Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and founder of the National Organization for Women (1966), tried to achieve legal, political, and economic rights for women by working mainly within traditional institutions. Radical feminists were mostly younger women who organized in smaller groups, employing more controversial tactics than did the liberal feminists, and working toward more fundamental changes in society, political institutions, and the economy (many, for example, advocated socialism). Distinctions between liberal and radical feminists became blurred, however, as activists from diverse groups overlapped in their critiques of patriarchy, denouncing it as a social system that maintained racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression by means that included violence and war.
In the mid-1960s, during the Vietnam War, as troop numbers and bombings escalated so did feminists' condemnation of the war, which they saw as connected to patriarchy, sexual violence, racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Feminist, civil rights, and other New Left activists charged that the vast sums spent on the war would be better spent on social problems at home, including gender inequality, poverty, and racism. Yet sexism within the civil rights and antiwar movements themselves inspired many women to form consciousness-raising groups where they could discuss their experience of sexism in everyday life. Through these, they channeled the energy and know-how they had gained in political organizations into promoting women's rights, leading to the burgeoning of the women's movement in the early 1970s.
Despite feminist critiques of U.S. militarism, and even as women's peace activism carried into the last decade of the Cold War, a growing number of women chose to serve in the armed forces and attempted to achieve equal status within the military. Between the Vietnam era and 2004, the proportion of women who were active duty military personnel increased from 2 percent to just over 15 per cent. Disapproval of women's military service persisted, however, among those who opposed militarization as well as those who feared a feminized military. In the 1990s, women's enrollment at the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute, two previously all-male state military colleges, were met with controversy. Conservatives argued that women's alleged physical inferiority and other feminine traits would enfeeble the armed forces, distract male soldiers from their missions, and harm men's morale. Some feminists insisted on the women's right to participate as equals in military institutions. Other feminists objected to women entering the military on the grounds that it perpetuated patriarchy, a war mentality, and the militarization of American life and thus undermined rather than advanced feminist goals. Although most military positions were open to women by the 1990s, they were still barred from some combat roles. Nevertheless, women found themselves in the line of fire, as, for example, in the Iraq War (2003).
Conflicts over women's roles and gender relations in the military continued into the twenty-first century, with numerous charges of sexual assaults by men on women Air Force cadets and reports that female soldiers participated in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some critics blamed the women's rights movement for insisting on women's equal participation in the military, which they argued promoted fraternization and unruly behavior, undermined sensitive operations, and weakened defense. Feminists countered that the problems of sexual harassment and prisoner abuse stemmed from an authoritarian, masculine military culture that pervaded the still male-dominated armed forces and had victimized and coopted its women soldiers.
