Women in the military: An unfinished revolution - Hardcover

Holm, Jeanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0891410783 ISBN 13: 9780891410782

Publisher: Presidio Press, 1982

Synopsis

A history of women in the United States military discusses the role of women in every military conflict since the Vietnam War, the significant advances made by women in the Armed Forces during the 1980s, and subsequent resistance to these reforms.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Holm has updated this standard work, originally published in 1982, by adding material on the role of military women in the Grenada, Panama and Persian Gulf campaigns, along with a discussion of the bitter ongoing debate over the combat exclusion laws and draft policies relating to women. A retired Air Force major general, she chronicles women's struggle for a proper place in the armed services in the face of the sexist male leadership, which tolerated their presence as nurses and office clerks but did not take them seriously as soldiers until such breakthroughs as the introductions of weapons training in 1975 and the graduation of the first female cadet from West Point in 1980. Holm describes how Operation Desert Storm in 1991 became the catalyst for demands to review in practical terms the role of women in combat. She shines both as scholar and as journalist, and her account of how women have earned the right to be treated as "members of the first team rather than as a protected subclass" is eloquent, inspiring and richly informative. Director of Women in the Air Force (WAF) from 1965 to 1973, Holm was the first woman to attain two-star rank in the U.S. armed forces.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Updated through Desert Storm, this revision of Holm's comprehensive history of women in the U.S. armed forces (originally reviewed in LJ 10/1/82) exemplifies advocacy scholarship at its best. Holm, a retired major general and former director of the WAF, marshals an impressive body of evidence to support her contention that the increasing number of women in uniform since the 1960s has diminished neither the American military's operational readiness nor its combat effectiveness. Holm concludes that the United States will be best served by gender-neutral policies matching individual talents with necessary jobs--including combat assignments. Though her case for the entirely artificial nature of gender-based restrictions on women's military roles is less than convincingly demonstrated by the limited evidence from the Gulf War that forms the core of her argument, this updated work makes a major intellectual contribution to a major national debate. This is recommended for all collections.
- D.E. Showalter, U.S. Air Force Acad., Colorado Springs
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0891410783
• ISBN 13: 9780891410782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 435