Book Review - Camouflage isn't only Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military

• Author: Colonel Fred L. Borch Iii
• Pages: 04

2000] BOOK REVIEWS 235

CAMOUFLAGE ISN'T ONLY FOR COMBAT: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND WOMEN IN THE MILITARY1

BATTLE CRIES AND LULLABIES: WOMEN IN WAR FROM PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT2

REVIEWED BY COLONEL FRED L. BORCH III3

Over the last ten years, sexual harassment, fraternization, and other gender-related issues have emerged as the biggest single challenge for Army leaders. As the percentage of female soldiers in the Army is likely to increase in the future, and since the Army is committed to a gender integrated force, it follows that commanders-and the judge advocates advising them-must understand what it means to be a woman in the military. This is because the men and women leading the Army, and those male and female lawyers counseling them, will arrive at better solutions for male-female problems if they understand the gender issues faced by women soldiers.

Two recent books about women in uniform, while very different in their subject-matter, are worth reading. Judge advocates looking to enhance their ability to deal with the thorny male-female issues that face today's Army will want to look at both. Not only will they be more effective in assisting commanders, but they may find that both books help them in managing and leading their own legal operations.

One cannot really understand the present, or begin to think about the future, without looking at the past. In looking for a broad survey of women in war, Linda DePauw's Battle Cries and Lullabies is a good place to start, particularly as it tries to compile just about everything known about females in armed conflict. DePauw, a professor of history at George Washington University, writes about women as warriors. She also examines

women as casualties of war, and as "camp followers" (wives, cooks, nurses, and prostitutes). Her narrative begins in prehistory with the Mesolithic epic (12,000 to 4500 BC), runs through Greek and Roman warfare (5th Century BC to AD 476), and conflict in medieval and early modern Europe and America (AD 1000 to 1900). The last 100 pages of Battle Cries and Lullabies focuses on Twentieth Century wars.

The greatest strength of DePauw's book is that she shows conclusively that women have been a part of military life-as soldiers and as noncombatants-throughout recorded history. This is an important point, as modern readers are often under the mistaken impression that, with a few exceptions, women combatants are a part of recent history only. Linda DePauw proves otherwise. She shows that in the Netherlands in the early 1600s, women fought alongside men in defending their walled towns. They helped to pour boiling tar from city walls, and two Dutch sisters put on swords and organized a battalion of 300 women who fought outside the walls. Similarly, hundreds of Russian women served in all-female "Battalions of Death"...