Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider

About the Authors: Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider taught college courses for two years on American military bases for the University of Maryland’s Far Eastern Division. The following viewpoint is an excerpt from their book Sound Off! American Military Women Speak Out, in which the authors interview more than three hundred servicewomen.

“ . . . this male-dominated institution, this job that’s created for men.”

“I feel that our male counterparts are beginning to accept us as people they can really truly depend on and work with. It’s in the first stages of its . . . I don’t know what the word is. It’s metamorphosis.”

Its 220,000 women comprise about the same proportion of the American military—10 to 11 percent—as black people...