In addition to the extremely rare cases of all- female military units, evidence of women’s combat potentials appears in cases where mixed- gender military units have engaged in combat. Although main combat- designated units are nearly always all- male, some units not designated primarily for combat have included women, in a variety of cultures and time periods. These units, trained in the use of arms, sometimes find themselves engaged in combat, with the women participating. We have evidence from guerrilla organizations, from the few NATO countries that currently allow women into combat positions, and from the present- day US experience with gender integration. Guerrilla armies. Guerrilla warfare provides a rich source of data on mixed- gender combat units. Women fighters are not uncommon in guerrilla armies (see Figure 2. From the Cold War and post- Cold War eras alone, scholars have illuminated women’s crucial roles in a variety of wars, including in Vietnam, South Africa, Argentina, Cyprus, Iran, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Israel, Nicaragua, and others. Figure 2. 3 Kurdish women guerrillas, 1. Italy, Greece, France, Poland, and Denmark. They took part in street fighting, carried out assassinations, and performed intelligence missions. Kate Brown's positions on gun safety. In Italy, reportedly 3. In the French Resistance, women were much more excluded from combat roles (although they played many dangerous support roles). Only a few women were “full- time, gun- carrying women fighters.” Because of prejudice in France against women fighters, one of the few women who had a leadership position in combat often pretended to be a representative of a male leader when organizing the Resistance. The Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision of Peruta v. This is an article from Shooting Times magazine on a review of the Savage Model 720 Shotgun. PREVIOUS SAC; 1855:1881; Russian Great Reforms, cultural flourish & resistance; 1857:1870; London Another was excluded from participating in armed attacks because the uniformed army of de Gaulle opposed giving guns to women, even though local Resistance men considered her an equal comrade. Most notable among the World War II women partisans were those of Yugoslavia, a country where centuries of tradition allowed some role for women as fighters, and where conditions were nearly as desperate as in the Soviet Union. Most women’s work in the mass resistance to Nazi occupation was in traditionally feminine support roles. Nonetheless, just over 1. National Liberation Army were women. They received the same kinds of minimal basic training as men (but first aid or medical training more often than men), and the official communist ideology declared them equivalent. In practice, women tended to remain at low ranks and to be concentrated in medical tasks. 34 Chinese gold miners were slaughtered by a gang of outlaws at Deep Creek on the Snake River, at the border between Idaho and Oregon. Some of the horror was captured. ORDER OF BATTLE The American order of battle was as follows: OLYMPIA - (5870 tons, four 8' guns, ten 5' guns, 21 secondary rapid fire guns, six torpedo tubes, 381 men). San Juan Heights: July 1, 1898 At the sound of Lawton's guns at El Caney in the early morning hours of July 1, Sumner's dismounted cavalry followed by Kent. USS Oregon (BB-3) was a pre-dreadnought Indiana-class battleship of the United States Navy. Her construction was authorized on 30 June 1890, and the contract to build. In one set of units studied, 4. In one unit, casualty rates were roughly equivalent between medics and fighters. By official count, 1. National Liberation Army and partisan units so thousands must have been fighters. Overall, women were killed at more than twice the rate of men (2. Despite the limits on their participation, the women of the Yugoslavian resistance acquitted themselves well in combat, showing above- average bravery and stamina. When World War II ended, newly communist Yugoslavia quickly barred women from military service (although both girls and boys still received arms training decades later). The Vietnamese communists’ war against the French and Americans shares several features with the World War II Yugoslavia case – a communist- led “people’s war” in a country with some tradition of women warriors (see the Trung sisters, p. This tradition was updated, in the “war of liberation” (1. Vietcong woman with a baby in one arm and a rifle in the other. As in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the image of women fighters symbolized the mobilization of the entire society for the cause. Behind the image, propaganda aside, was a hard reality of women’s participation. One Vietnamese military historian estimates that 6. In the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) in the 1. The women soldiers served in both all- female and mixed- gender units. Reportedly, the latter experienced some problems regarding male attitudes, and the men often considered the women inferior in combat. Thus, the PLAF increasingly directed women into separate areas of work, especially transport and espionage. North Vietnamese women were mobilized into the war effort in the mid- 1. Even those within the army itself mainly worked on medical, liaison, antiaircraft, or bomb- defusing tasks. In the South, meanwhile, more women were recruited by the communist army, but mainly for support functions. Women did apparently participate in combat during the 1. Tet offensive. But as guerrilla war gave way to conventional war, women were separated more from combat. Women participants in the war effort experienced it not in terms of glorious exploits but as a huge added burden on an already full basket of “women’s work.” Women carried most of the loads along the Ho Chi Minh trail to sustain the war effort. Although they might take part in fighting, especially in antiaircraft defense of their home communities, women’s main function in the war was to provide cheap labor. Women’s combat participation, although glorified during the war as a model of self- sacrifice for the nation, was downplayed and largely forgotten after the war, as in other countries. The image of the woman holding a rifle and a baby is found in liberation movements across the third world. It combines the roles of motherhood and war, harnessing women for war without altering fundamental gender relations. Cynthia Enloe finds in the image an expectation that, after the war ends, mothers will put down the rifles while keeping the babies. She asks: “Where is the picture of the male guerrilla holding the rifle and baby?”5. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua resemble the other communist revolutionary guerrillas. Women reportedly made up nearly one- third of the Sandinista front’s military. After victory, the front’s founder praised women for being “in the front line of battle.” Women were particularly attracted to the Sandinista front because, as a movement that grew up in a feminist era, the front had a strong women’s organization which advocated policies that helped women. Nonetheless, after victory, the “defense of women’s role in the military failed. After their victory in July 1. The director of Nicaragua’s leading military school explained the “need to train women separately” as being “not because of any limitations the women have. In fact, you might say it’s because of failings on the part of some men. Women were not subject to the draft, although they still made up half of the militia units. In some ways, the Sandinistas left traditional gender roles firmly in place. Women were mobilized around the image of mothers protecting their children as part of a divine order. One Sandinista official said in 1. In fact, however, good mothers were expected to be “Patriotic Wombs” that would provide soldiers for the revolution and happily send them off to die for the cause. The Sandinistas limited abortion and sterilization, among other measures to produce high birth rates, since a small nation at war needed more people. The FMLN guerrillas in next- door El Salvador in the 1. Cynthia Enloe highlights the story of a woman FMLN guerrilla in El Salvador who, with the end of the war there, is having her IUD removed – a transition from soldier to mother. In Africa, women guerrillas also have fought and then been pushed aside. For example, Joice Nhongo was the “most famous” guerrilla in the ZANLA forces that overthrew white rule in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She was known as “Mrs. Spill- blood Nhongo,” and gave birth to a daughter at the camp she commanded, two days after an air raid against it. After ZANLA took power, she became Minister of Community Development and Women’s Affairs – safely removed from military affairs. Thandi Modise was called the “knitting needles guerrilla” because she carried a handbag with a protruding pair of knitting needles while traveling incognito. She reports that in training camps, the women (under 1. She sees no contradiction in being a guerrilla and a mother, and argues that “Marriage and children are necessities, not luxuries.” Modise does, however, say that “As a woman I tried to avoid killing people.” Although male and female guerrillas received the same training, side by side, and women sometimes outdid men in discipline, sharpshooting, and running, women were excluded from traditional combat roles. As a male guerrilla put it, “Yes, a woman can be a soldier. Many women fight better than men. But I wouldn’t deploy women in the front line. Men go to war to defend their women and children.” Manliness played an important role for South African black male guerrillas, and even Nelson Mandela once said that the “experience of military training made me a man.”5. It is not only in communist revolutionary movements, such as in Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Nicaragua, that women participate in local militias. This phenomenon is widespread, because militias often constitute a last line of defense of home and family against external attack. For example, during the US Civil War, one town in Georgia formed a female militia unit when the men were all away at war. They drilled, practiced shooting, and in an “apocryphal story” supposedly faced down Sherman’s cavalry which had planned to burn the town. In Sri Lanka currently, women apparently constitute about one- third of the rebel Tamil Tigers’ force of 1. The Sri Lankan military reportedly believes half of the core fighting force of 5,0. She is the “symbol of the struggle” and their candidate for transitional President of Iran if they should ever seize power. Reportedly, the group is led by mainly female officers, and includes women among its fighters – although how many women is unclear. Members live in gender- segregated quarters and married couples suspend marriages to function as “sisters and brothers” in the group. The force engaged in combat in 1. The greater fluidity of gender roles in guerrilla as compared with conventional war is illustrated by the Republic of Congo war in 1.
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