Forces suggested that women not fly combat mis-
sions but still serve on some combat ships. In 1993,
amid the press’s diligent attention to gender in U.S.
armed forces academies, Secretary of Defense Les
Aspin authorized nearly 260,000 military posi-
tions open to women (67.2 percent of all the mili-
tary’s authorized positions), single-handedly chang-
ing women’s accepted roles in the military. While
the nation publicly celebrated, the Air Force Acad-
emy’s female students attended mandatory brief-
ings to learn proper make-up application and simi-
lar strategies helpful in addressing professional
issues. Against this backdrop, journalists drew paral-
lels between the battles for women’s rights in the
armed forces and homosexuals’ struggle for fair
treatment in the military. Some newspapers at the
time estimated that as many as 25 percent of all mili-
tary women were gay.
The Mid-1990’s: The Struggle Continues By 1994,
13 percent of military personnel were women. Sup-
port groups for battered military women began ap-
pearing across the United States, most adopting
the name “Women Active in our Nation’s Defense,
their Advocates and Supporters,” or Wandas. A num-
ber of women graduated from military academies;
in July, two female Navy lieutenants became fully
qualified female F-14 Tomcat pilots. Jobs such as
infantry, artillery, and arms-related positions re-
mained off-limits to women, a regulation known as
the Combat Exclusion Policy. In
1995 and 1996, several all-female
military schools opened, including
a training program at the Virginia
Military Institute and one at The
Citadel military college in South
Carolina—historically all-male insti-
tutions. In March, 1996, President
Bill Clinton nominated the Ma-
rine’s Carol Mutter to be a lieuten-
ant general in charge of man-
power and policy planning. She was
the first woman to achieve a three-
star rank in the history of the mili-
tary.
In 1997, the long-awaited Women
in Military Service for America Me-
morial was completed. It is located
at the entrance to Arlington Na-
tional Cemetery. Around this time,
female basic training recruits filed a growing num-
ber of sexual harassment reports against drill in-
structors, and women fought for equal eligibility in
all military jobs as more journalists turned a critical
eye toward men’s role in keeping women at the bot-
tom of the military hierarchy.
The Late 1990’s: Ending Strong In 1998, the Army,
Navy, and Air Force continued to train men and
women together; only the Marines maintained gen-
der division throughout training. That year, female
Air Force fighter pilots participated in air strikes
against Baghdad. Flight uniforms were redesigned
to fit women’s bodies. In May, 1999, Nancy Mace be-
came the first woman to graduate from the presti-
gious Citadel, a school with only forty-two women of
seventeen hundred total cadets. That year, the press
recognized the perpetual struggle for gender equal-
ity, but the major newspapers focused on the positive
changes at the end of century, not the decade’s neg-
atives.
Impact In 1998, a U.S. Government Accountabil-
ity Office (GAO) report claimed that neither the
general public nor Congress was prepared to see
women in combat. Because of publicity surrounding
women’s roles during the Gulf War, the Bosnia con-
flict, and the Iraq War, the American public began to
view women’s roles in combat more objectively. The
fight for combat inclusion during the 1990’s paved
the way for the battle between female military per-924 Women in the military The Nineties in America
Nancy Mace, right, receives her Citadel diploma from her father, James Mace, during
commencement on May 8, 1999. She became the first woman to graduate from The
Citadel.(AP/Wide World Photos)