Female Soldiers: Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Female Soldiers: Combatants or Noncombatants? is the fruit of an international symposium on the role of women in the armed forces, sponsored by the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and held at the University of Chicago in October 1980. The symposium was conducted in conjunction with the Twentieth Annual Conference on Armed Forces and Society. Participants from the United States and a half dozen foreign countries presented their findings, which were then critiqued and discussed. The unusual interest that the symposium elicited at the conference was striking evidence that the issue of women in the armed forces has come of age--in academic and military circles as well as for the general public. The papers that are most relevant to the issue and most representative of the variety of national experiences are reproduced in this volume. Although the broader context of women in the armed services is treated in all the papers, the principle focus is on the history of and the present-day experience of women in the armed services and on the prospects of women serving in wartime combat.