The TV images of US prisoner of war Shoshana Johnson, the mother of a toddler, have touched a nerve, reports Conor O'Clery in New York
The fear on the face of US Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson (30) as the Iraqis displayed her on television, with four other, male US prisoners of war, has haunted many viewers. That Johnson, a single mother, has a two-year-old child also touched a nerve.
Johnson, from the huge Fort Bliss military base in Texas, and other members of the 507th Maintenance Company were captured in an ambush on Sunday near Nassiriya, in south-western Iraq. A supply clerk, Jessica Lynch (19), and another woman soldier are missing. Johnson was not engaged in ground combat. Women soldiers in the US forces are not allowed to fight. The 507th is a resupply unit that took a wrong turning. She was there because since 1994 women have been authorised to serve in most military roles in the US armed services, other than in front-line infantry, tanks and special forces.
Her capture has stirred up a debate in the United States about the role of women in war. For a long time war was considered exclusively men's business in America. The first known cases of women in action came about through the time-worn method, dating back to Joan of Arc in the 15th century, of dressing like men. Margaret Corbin took the place of her fatally wounded husband in an artillery unit in 1776, in the War of American Independence, and Lucy Brewer passed herself off as George Baker to serve aboard a battleship in the War of 1812, becoming the United States' first woman marine. In the American Civil War, many women took up the gun to defend their homes, and heroines such as Clara Barton distributed supplies to wounded soldiers on the battlefields, but mostly the role reserved for women then was that of sewing uniforms and tending to the wounded.
Things began to change in the second World War, when women took factory jobs traditionally reserved for men and the perception of their role in society began to change. Many women joined the Red Cross as nurses and signed up to drive ambulances. Some lost their lives, and several were decorated for valour. During the second World War, the notion that a woman's place was behind her husband was further broken down. As men were recruited to fight German and Japanese armies in 1941, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was established. The idea was that men in non-combatant positions would be left free to go to the front lines while women worked as clerks and telephone operators.
In 1951, a volunteer civilian agency called the Defence Advisory Committee on Women in the Services was set up in the Pentagon to fight for equality for women in the services. Nevertheless, when the Vietnam War started, in the 1960s, little had changed. The 7,000 US women who saw service there again acted mostly as nurses. Nine women were killed in military roles in Vietnam, however, including two in the Army Special Services and two in the CIA, and 59 women died in civilian roles, including 38 in the 1975 crash outside Saigon of a US transport aircraft that was taking Vietnamese children out of the country.
During the following decades there was a move internationally to integrate women into the armed services. It brought change to many countries, including the United States. Many more women were recruited into the armed services, so that in the Gulf War, in 1991-2, more than 40,000 US servicewomen were deployed, with one in every five working in direct war support. During that brief conflict, the fatal crash of a helicopter piloted by Major Marie Rossi highlighted the more prominent role women were taking on the battlefield. It made headlines. "What I am doing is no greater or less than the man who is flying next to me," she had said.
Thirteen women were killed in the Gulf War, four from enemy fire. Two women were captured and held briefly as POWs: Army Specialist Melissa Rathburn-Nealy and flight surgeon Major Rhonda Cornum. There was no great public backlash to the deaths of the servicewomen, as some generals had feared, and a campaign got under way in the aftermath of the Gulf War to recognise that women were entitled to combat assignments and that by being barred their prospects for promotion through the ranks were severely curtailed.
In 1994, Leslie Aspin, as secretary of defence, redefined the Pentagon's direct-ground-combat regulation, eliminating "inherent risk of capture" as a reason to exempt women from serving in combat units, and he also got rid of the "risk rule", which was intended to exempt women in non-combat positions from being assigned close to front lines. President Bill Clinton subsequently signed an order lifting a ban on women on combat ships and in fighter aircraft. This made women eligible to apply for more than 90 per cent of professional jobs in the military - while also putting them at greater risk. Two women sailors were among the 17 victims of the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000.
This time around women are more embedded in the armed services than ever. They are drawn from the 200,000 women in the US forces, who make up 15 per cent of personnel, compared with 10 per cent in the Gulf War. Today women are dropping bombs and launching cruise missiles against Baghdad. The opposition to women in the front lines is still strong, however, and the capture of Johnson last weekend has given new voice to critics of the policy. The Washington-based Center for Military Readiness is a vociferous opponent of sending women to fight, based on the concept that women in combat units endanger male morale and military performance. Its president, Elaine Donnelly, said: "Advocates of women in combat often talk about sharing the risk of war, but the truth is that women face unequal and greater risks. Vulnerabilities unique to women can and probably will be exploited by enemy captors in this and similar situations."
Vulnerability to sexual assault is the most frequent argument put forward by conservative groups against allowing women to be exposed to enemy capture. Of the two women POWs in the Gulf War, Rathburn-Nealy said she was treated well by her Iraqi captors, but Cornum, an advocate of women in combat who went on to command an army medical unit in Bosnia, testified to a presidential commission on women in the military a year later that that she had been sexually molested by Iraqis during her eight-day captivity. She had said nothing in public at first because, she told the New York Times, she was concerned her mistreatment would be blown out of all proportion "and would be used by those who want to keep women out of combat". The rule today in the US military, an all-volunteer force, is that male and female members must be available for worldwide deployment.
Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist who believes the argument about women in combat ended with the acceptance without special outrage of the deaths of the two female sailors on the USS Cole, notes there was some angst in the higher ranks of the Pentagon about women leaving their babies to go to war. (Her column is reprinted, right.) David Segal, director of the centre for research on military organisation at the University of Maryland, disputes the proposition that women in the military put a greater burden on families than men. "This view seems to think it's OK for men who are fathers to leave their children," he said recently. "Military families adapt whether male or female members are in the military, and if they can't adapt they get out."
The US public appears to agree. But staying in or getting out can be decided by some as yet unconquered prejudices in the forces. Woman constantly have to assault the glass ceiling put in place by stone-walling commanders. Three years after President Clinton opened most military jobs to women, a study by the National Defense Research Institute, part of Rand, the private US think tank, found women occupied only 815 of 47,544 military jobs opened to them by his decision. Although the US navy and air force have opened up practically every combat post to women, the continuing ban on females from infantry, artillery and tank units still limits experience under fire and therefore potential promotion. One critic said the ban was aimed at "moving women back to the mess hall".
Then there are the conditions to which women are still sometimes subjected. Sexual harassment has been an endemic problem. More than 80 women were assaulted by naval personnel at a notorious symposium at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel in 1991, after which 140 officers were investigated for indecent exposure, assault and other charges.
In 1993, Shannon Faulkner became the first woman to enter the Citadel, in South Carolina, the United States' only government-funded all-male military college. The 18-year-old was accepted only after omitting gender references from her transcript. She was then turned away and took legal action, sparking a campaign of vilification from her classmates. The US Supreme Court later upheld her right to attend, although she had to endure what her lawyer called sanctioned hate. She was followed in 1996 by Nancy Mace, who became the first woman to graduate, in 1999. Currently, 111 women attend the Citadel, which is looking for more.
While the US media have been focusing on the actions of their forces in Iraq, a new sexual-harassment crisis has been playing out in Colorado Springs, where in recent months at least 12 current and former female cadets have claimed they were reprimanded for reporting sexual assaults at a big naval academy. The women said they faced indifference, inaction or retaliation.
Deborah Tucker, executive director of the National Training Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, a Texas-based organisation, said attitudes at the academy are largely based on the notion that boys will be boys. Typical of the complaints was that of Liz, a former cadet who said she was raped and sexually assaulted five times by an older student. Despite the warnings of friends, she reported the assaults to the air force's office of special investigations - and found herself reprimanded and charged with having "sex in the dorms". The Department of Defense established an inquiry into 39 complaints from women whose careers appear to have been ruined by reporting sexual assaults.
On Wednesday, the air force announced the removal of a general, a brigadier and two colonels, one of them a woman, at the academy. Air Force Secretary James Roche said they had to ensure in future that the families of young women "can believe that their daughters are OK, and also that the families of the male cadets can believe that due process is going to be applied in all cases".