![]() Women in National Serviceby Margaret Mead - 1971 If there is explicit recognition of tasks which are appropriate for either sex, tasks appropriate for one sex or the other, and tasks which require the complementary presence of both sexes, this should serve to reduce the kind of polarization over occupation, whether coming from Women's Liberation or from those conservatives who feel strongly that women's place is in the home, or at least at homelike tasks dealing with individuals, teaching, nursing, safeguarding, listening. National service in any form, voluntary or compulsory, including
the more usual form of the draft and the now familiar form of the
Peace Corps, arouses anxieties. Young people not yet regarded as
either mature or responsible will leave their homes, the
supervision of their parents, the constraints imposed by their
peers, and be plunged into situations which are variously seen as
dangerous, frightening, filled with temptation and
opportunities for mental and moral corruption. The spectacle of
armies of youth marching away recalls the phantasy of the Pied
Piper, the image of the Children's Crusade, a final break between
young and old, between present and future, the death of all the
young or, in reverse, the death of all the old. Patricide and
filicide are two sides of the same coin. What will happen to the
young, and, if something does happen to them, if they come back
changed into single-minded Utopians or monsters of guerilla warfare
techniques, what will happen to us? These themes can be seen in all
the discussions of the draft, of draft age, of breakdown in the
armed forces, of the advisability of the Peace Corps and in the
willingness to turn against the Peace Corps and prove it did only
harm, or the counterphobic avoidance of Peace Corps scandals after
the excessive publicity given to a single post card from an amazed
young American in Africa. The United States—and Britain—have been
characterized by excessive and obsessive attitudes towards
children's work, by pictures of the horrors of child labor in mines
and factories, and the final decision to treat children at least as
well as animals, which marked the formation of The National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a decade after the
formation of its animal predecessor—in England. But once we
have flourished our abhorrence of child labor, we then willingly,
half-consciously, dreamily permit 500,000 children in the United
States to engage in child labor—as the children of migrant
laborers whose families could not make a "living wage" without
involving their young children under the pitiless broiling
sun. Excessive sentimental idealism has a way of creating its
opposite—excessive cynical realism—(the price of
everything as opposed to the value of everything), and this swing
between polar opposites is very American, perhaps partly
because so much of what was American was seen by poor
immigrants as the un-welcomed opposite to their poverty-ridden
past, white bread in the castle as opposed to black bread in the
cottage. So we have swung as a people between a sentimental regard
for "our boys"—not men as soldiers who are in other
countries—to the callous disregard of the present war,
when the draft is there to catch the young idealists who are trying
to stop the war or find alternative forms of service, and
reflexively, draftees leave town without a flag or bugle to speed
them on their way to an unheroic death. Discussions of national service, voluntary, selective, or
compulsory, underwritten by federal agencies, international
or national, for all use or only for some use, alternative to
military service or additional to it, like the discussions of the
professional rather than a conscript army can be usefully viewed
within this context of extreme ambivalence towards the young.
Should national service be compulsory and the military be an option
within it? There is an immediate outcry that this is
compulsion and what would we do with those who objected. The reply
that there could be a place for conscientious objectors doesn't
satisfy them because that is not what they are really talking
about. Somehow national service must be not a service that includes
the military service once provided by the draft, but instead, the
opposite of the draft. But what is the opposite of the
draft? Voluntary happy service to one's country in peace and
constructiveness instead of involuntary unhappy service to
one's country in an undeclared, unbelieved in war? But how about
pay; the armed services are paid abominably. Well, then, let's have
a professional, well-paid army and a national service, poorly paid,
involving real dedication (sic) that is badly paid. These ambivalences, so close to the surface, involving such violent swings in emotion, are about the relationship between young and old, exploiting old and exploited young, or frightening young, fiercer, more single-minded, more idealistic than their elders. It is an unstable, explosive climate of opinion, subject to sudden tornadoes of feeling, to outcries against any reform, to the violence of the mother who wrote me at the time of the Conference on the Draft in Chicago, December 4-7, 1966, "Is my son's life to be subject to the flip of a coin?" To the equally impassioned arguments for the lottery, and the discovery that somehow the lottery was not a lottery because the draw was not properly arranged. When the question of sex is added to the discussion, this whole
unstable mix of conflicting emotions is heated to a boiling point.
It behooves those who are doing the background thinking for the
future to be extremely conscious of the emotions that are stirred
by the sight of women in uniform, daughters away from home, women
commanding men, women free to make their own decisions about sex.
Even in Israel, aflame with patriotic zeal, drafting women had to
be tempered to the conservatism of those orthodox groups who could
not trust their daughters away from their watchful
eyes. It is reasonably clear that the sentiment for treating women
even-handedly is rising throughout the country, from both sides of
the argument, from Women's Liberation which advocates the abolition
of all protective discrimination now seen as barriers against full
participation in society, to angry men who see women as
privileged, not subject to the draft, men who must work to
accumulate income for the widows whom they will leave behind. So
neither universal national service nor selective voluntary
service is likely to be feasible without the continuing inclusion
of women. The more extensive the service demanded, the more there
is a possibility that emotion about the inclusion of women will
mount. Armed Services Therefore, I believe it will be the better part of prudence to
think through very carefully what the conditions might be in a
universal national service for both sexes, within which the armed
services constitute one option. If this is to be the case, there
may well be a compensatory effort to differentiate the armed
services from civilian services by making the armed services
more masculine, more conspicuously dedicated to the attributed
masculine virtues of physical courage, toughness, and capacity to
kill righteously, as opposed to the attributed feminine virtues of
mercy, caring, and rejection of violence. It is not accidental that
the Marines do not accept draftees. Nor is it accidental that the
American Armed Services—in contrast to the
European—were so unwilling to accept women doctors in
World War II. Where masculinity is most ambiguous, it is also most
easily threatened and most vociferously guarded. There may
well be a demand that the voluntary armed services, contained by an
option within a universal draft, be very male indeed, and that
women either be excluded or confined to auxiliary services with a
parallel incorporated hierarchical system. This should be thought through; the experience of those rare
occasions when women have been given full military status in
permission to kill offensively, as well as defensively, should be
evaluated. It is possible that the historic refusal to give women
weapons, except very briefly and under exceptional circumstances,
may be due not to a rejection of putting the power of death into
the hands of those who give life, but rather because women who kill
on behalf of the lives of their children are more implacable and
less subject to chivalrous rules with which men seek to mute the
savagery of warfare. It may be that women would kill too thoroughly
and endanger the negotiations and posturings of armies, through
truces and prisoner taking, with which nations at war eventually
manage uneasy breathing spaces between wars. If it should be decided that women are to play a very little, if
any, part in a volunteer army, there will then be the danger that
civilian alternative services will be regarded as feminine. The
long hair of many of our young conscientious objectors has been
equated with femininity, with the abrogation of male
pretensions, and this might spread; and as a result, there
might be a dichotomy in which civilian services to the old and the
young, the sick, the unfortunate, to the ravished land and the
young new forests, might all be seen as feminine, and so
denigrated. The relegation of any activity to women, however noble
in itself, has never had very good results, just as the arrogation
of any activity wholly to men has never had good results. The male
slaves who nursed the Roman legions were succeeded by Christian
widows who nursed the outcastes; each resulted in a distortion of
the nursing process which then oscillated through the ages and is
continuing to oscillate as questions of status, professionalism,
women's role, the place of men as paraprofessionals continue to
confuse the issue. The core of nursing is not who does it but how
it is done, and the appropriate nurse is one who is willing to care
for another human being, regardless of sex, class, race, or
character, with his or her hands. Complementarity can be introduced
in cases where men are more comfortably cared for by men, or women
by women, or men by women; and complementarity within the armed
services can similarly be achieved by giving to the services that
women perform the same status as, but different style from, those
asked of men. Women can be armed defensively and given a wider
medical role, men armed offensively and given a wider combat role,
and by such arrangements distortions can be avoided. Civilian Services
So much for the possibilities of women in the armed services
which would form an option within universal national service,
and the hazards of three solutions, no women, women given a combat
role identical with men, and women included in equal status roles
which are complementary to men. When we come to the involvement of
women in the necessary civilian services, there is even more need,
perhaps, for care about the emotions that will be aroused in the
parental generation. After all, in the army women are in
uniform—and how happy we have been when we could keep
schoolgirls in unbecoming uniforms that denied their springing
attractiveness—and women would be disciplined, and the
idea of discipline carries with it the regulation, if not the
suppression, of sexual behavior. (We are much less willing to
instruct high school boys, seen as subject only to the partial
control of their parents and teachers, in matters of sex and
prophylaxis than we are the same boys once they are in the armed
services.) The army may be relied upon to discipline—in both
senses of the word—inappropriate sex behavior. It is, in
fact, not so much anxious civilian adults who worry about women in
uniform as men who see the problems of temptation compounded, even
as their exclusive fitness to wear the uniform of their country is
called in question. But in civilian service the images that are aroused are girls
away from home, unchaperoned, mixing with all sorts of people whom
it would be inappropriate for them to marry, likely to get
attacked, raped, impregnated, exposed to every sort of moral,
physical, and social danger. Throughout the history of
civilization there has been steady objection to women living
alone, unchaperoned, unprotected by male kin or husbands, without
the presence of a large group of other women, or in convents,
girls' dormitories, YWCAs, etc. The image of a woman away from home
frightens the protectiveness of fathers and arouses the phantasies
of men in general. Women should be at home, under somebody's roof,
and when men have gone abroad to hunt or fight, they should be
quiet. This demand is so old that it may well be traceable to some
very early period in evolution, perhaps when any sound made by the
women left at home in the camp might have brought on an attack from
predators. So the picture of girls at eighteen, lined up, stripped,
weighed, examined, within the brutal disregard of human dignity
characteristic of the boot camp, and subsequently sent to other
parts of the country, to the wild West, or the urban slum, the
race-conscious South, or the backwardness of a rural community,
hostile to all strangers, is bound to be
frightening. These fears will have to be taken into account and met. They
will be disguised in many ways, by fears that women's greater
gentleness will be tarnished by such coarse associations, by
outraged fathers alarmed at the danger to their daughters, and by
general objections to any form of compulsion for women. (This
objection is still embodied in the New York regulation that permits
a juror to claim exemption "as a woman.") If it were strong enough,
it might well wreck plans either for extensive publicly funded
types of national service, extensions of programs like VISTA, or
for universal national service. I suggest that some of these complications can be anticipated by
explicit designs for one sex corps, for coeducational corps
(on the model of the now spreading acceptance of
coeducational dormitories), and for corps of married young people.
By explicit recognition that all of these options would be provided
for, the program would be saying that the difficulties and dangers
were all recognized and treated. No father need send his
daughter into unchaperoned mixed company, and the explicit
recognition of marriage—as one of the circumstances of the
lives of young people eighteen years and over—would be
reassuring. Coeducational dormitories, when they are optional
and when one-sex dormitories are also provided, are obtaining
unexpectedly wide support on hitherto conservative campuses,
with the customary American flip over of a taboo. If there is explicit recognition of tasks which are appropriate
for either sex, tasks appropriate for one sex or the other, and
tasks which require the complementary presence of both sexes,
this should serve to reduce the kind of polarization over
occupation, whether coming from Women's Liberation or from those
conservatives who feel strongly that women's place is in the home,
or at least at homelike tasks dealing with individuals, teaching,
nursing, safeguarding, listening. The conference held under the auspices of the Russell Sage
Foundation on March 4-5, 1971, was notable in absolutely ignoring
the whole question of women in its entire
agenda.
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