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WOMEN WARRIORS
How
the Press Has Helped
— and Hurt — in the Battle for Equality
BY
CHRISTOPHER HANSON
The legendary Ernie Pyle wouldn’t recognize
a lot of things about the contemporary U.S. military, but the
biggest shock might well be broads suited up for battle, as he
probably would have put it back in World War II.
In the decade between the gulf war and the current campaign against
terrorism, women in the U.S. military have commanded warships
and air squadrons, piloted fighters and bombers. They have meted
death and died themselves alongside male colleagues in the present
Central Asia conflict. It’s not your father’s (or grandfather’s)
battlefield anymore, but that transformation is no longer attracting
much attention from the present-day Pyles out there dodging bullets.
In fact, the woman in uniform who captured the most news coverage
recently was not even fighting in Afghanistan. She was fighting
instead in the theater of public opinion — against an American
military policy she deemed discriminatory. Her allies were U.S.
news organizations, starting with USA Today.
In an April 2001 front-page interview with that paper, Lt. Col.
Martha McSally, the Air Force’s highest-ranking female fighter
pilot, accused the Pentagon of a unique form of gender bias against
U.S. military women in Saudi Arabia. When off the base, they were
required to wear Muslim religious robes and headscarves, known
in Saudi Arabia as abayas. U.S. military women, many of them pilots
like McSally, were also barred from getting behind the wheel of
a car. With her public contention that the Pentagon’s regulations
infringed on servicewomen’s rights to equal treatment and
religious freedom, the thirty-six-year-old aviator raised a media
stir that has continued off and on for the past year.
McSally is the latest in a decade-long khaki line of military
women who have sought news coverage as a means of blowing the
whistle on gender discrimination in the services. Her case is
G-rated compared to some, including the incident that started
it all: the infamous 1991 Tailhook convention, in which male aviators
assaulted dozens of female colleagues at a Las Vegas gathering
of military pilots.
Since the end of the draft in 1973, when the services were only
about one percent female, the Pentagon has relied increasingly
on women — now about 15 percent of the forces — to fill
its personnel needs. As more women have entered the services,
demands for equal opportunity have increased.
And through their coverage of outspoken military women, the news
media have played a direct and active — if in some cases
unintentional — role in this struggle. Ironically, it has
proven exceedingly difficult for news outlets to portray women
in military service fairly, without distortion, even as journalists
expose sexism and discrimination in the ranks.
One likely reason for the difficulty is that many Americans still
find the concept of a woman warrior disconcerting, even menacing.
The woman making war shatters quintessential categories of gender
and family, most fundamentally the notion that men fight and women
nurture. There is no ready category in our culture for the woman
as professional combat soldier; hence journalists, like many others,
struggle to fit the military woman into some familiar and comfortable
niche. What often happens then, according to the sociologist Melissa
Herbert, is that military women are reduced to one of two derogatory
labels. They are either threatening, super-macho “Amazons,”
whose femininity or sexual orientations are in doubt, or they
are frail, unreliable “Butterflies,” whose military
competence is open to question. It all makes Yossarian’s
Catch-22 seem like a simple proposition.
In covering female whistle-blowers in the military, news media
have frequently reached for the handy “Butterfly” stereotype:
the military woman as Damsel in Distress, requiring protection.
This tendency has caused not only problems of fairness and accuracy
in reporting but serious, practical difficulties for the women
who enter a partnership with journalists to expose discrimination.
That partnership has become well established over the past decade.
• First to go
to the press was Lt. Paula Coughlin. In June 1992 — exactly
ten years ago — she told ABC PrimeTime Live, World News Tonight
with Peter Jennings, and The Washington Post that the Navy had
failed to investigate vigorously the 1991 Tailhook convention,
where she was among those assaulted by male pilots. The Tailhook
story had been fairly abstract because no flesh-and-blood victim
had come forward to the national media until Coughlin, who described
in detail how she was pawed and attacked. She put a human face
on the scandal and turned it into a blockbuster story that shook
the Navy. In the two-month period before she came forward, there
were 176 stories on Tailhook in the Nexis news archive; in the
two-month period after she went public, the number shot up to
995.
• Lt. Carey
Lohrenz appeared on Dateline NBC in 1996 and embarrassed the Navy
by alleging she had been forced out of her position as a carrier
fighter pilot because of gender discrimination. Her media exposure
contributed to bitter debates in Congress and the Navy over the
fair treatment of female aviators.
• Air Force
Lt. Kelly Flinn, the first female B-52 bomber pilot, used 60 Minutes
as a forum to complain that she was being singled out for severe
punishment on an adultery charge because she was a woman. That
and other news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington
Post, helped make her case that when male officers dallied, the
brass usually looked the other way. The publicity derailed the
appointment of Gen. Joseph Ralston as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff after the Post got a leak that he, too, had had an adulterous
affair.
• With help
from a media adviser, retired Sergeant Major Brenda Hoster convinced
The New York Times to air her complaint that the Army’s top
NCO had assaulted and sexually harassed her. Sergeant Major of
the Army Gene McKinney was in line to join an Army panel aimed
at curbing sexual harassment. The lengthy front-page Times story
on February 4, 1997, magnified by a Sam Donaldson PrimeTime Live
version, turned Hoster’s accusations into a huge national
story. Several women in uniform came forward with similar allegations
against McKinney, adding firepower to Hoster’s allegations.
The symbiotic relationship between news media and the whistle-blowers
has repeatedly yielded coverage that forced the military’s
hand. The resulting policies have generally been female-friendly,
beginning with a jumpstart of the stalled Tailhook investigation.
A number of senior naval officers were demoted or took early retirement
for not rooting out Tailhook abusers with sufficient vigor. Five
years later, Hoster’s allegations led to a public and well-covered
court martial. McKinney was cleared on eighteen counts of sexual
misconduct but he was demoted and forced into retirement as a
result of the trial.
Most recently, Lt. Col. McSally’s complaint unleashed a barrage
of coverage, including a 60 Minutes segment and dozens of newspaper
articles, and shared headlines with the Afghanistan campaign.
McSally thus forced the Pentagon to confront a paradox it had
wanted to fudge: How could the United States take credit for liberating
Afghanistan’s Muslim women from the burqa while forcing similar
garb on American women to appease our Saudi allies? The answer
was simple: it couldn’t. In January, the Pentagon announced
that it was rescinding the abaya orders.
For all the real gains that have resulted from the partnership
between the press and military women, this progress has come at
a high personal cost to those who spoke out. Coughlin, McKinney’s
accusers, McSally, and others came forward so that they and other
women in uniform could be fully accepted in the military. But
in the military mindset the very act of going to the press left
them open to being pilloried as unreliable “Butterflies”
who could not take care of themselves. Coughlin was ostracized
and got hate mail from Navy men, who regarded her as a weak, undependable
officer. She eventually resigned her commission in disgust. Several
of the active-duty women who testified against McKinney said they
would leave the service shortly thereafter, having been attacked
as unfit soldiers by McKinney’s defenders in and out of court.
After McSally sought a helping hand from the media, even her service
evaluations took a nosedive. She was accused of disloyalty and
being unprofessional by her commanding officers. In a 60 Minutes
interview, she acknowledged that her future in the Air Force was
unclear.
These whistle-blower stories posed difficulties of a different
sort for the journalists who presented them.
On the surface, many press accounts of female whistle-blowers
being discriminated against or ostracized are quite sympathetic
to the women. Upon closer analysis, however, many of these same
accounts reinforce the very stereotypes the women were fighting
against — especially the “Butterfly” notion of
military woman as victim. Obviously, the victim label is especially
damaging to a member of the armed forces. How can an officer help
defend the nation if she cannot even manage to take care of herself?
And yet this image of frailty has been a hallmark of reports on
military women.
This has been especially true on television prime-time magazine
shows, where one might have expected coverage with greater depth
and subtlety than typical brief evening news stories. As the media
scholar Richard Campbell has pointed out, the TV magazine formula
calls for the reporter to intervene on behalf of the story’s
imperiled protagonist. Indeed, the reporter comes across like
TV’s The Equalizer, a gallant man who uses his superior strength
to protect a woman. In this mode, Sam Donaldson stood up for Coughlin,
Morley Safer for Flinn, and so on. Unfortunately, the Equalizer
formula is a fount of sexist cliché. The reporters in these
segments, generally men, are the chief actors. They investigate
and protect. The women are Paulines in Peril, prey to all manner
of malevolent forces, although many journalists, both women and
men, who have covered the military would say that the typical
woman in uniform is quite capable of taking care of herself.
The power of the victim theme has also led journalists to blur
key distinctions between cases. Some women have approached the
press to expose wrongs, help their sisters in arms and seek justice,
even at the expense of their careers or reputations. Coughlin,
Hoster, and McSally are all members of that select group. On the
other hand, there are those who have used the media primarily
to advance their self-interest — Flinn, who wanted to avoid
court-martial and keep flying B-52s, and Lohrenz, who was pressing
for reinstatement as a carrier pilot.
Yet despite these crucial differences, the coverage has tended
to lump the women together as victims of bullying males. In one
1992 ABC segment, Coughlin, in her dress whites, was identified
with the label, “Victim of Sexual Abuse,” which pretty
much sums up what this courageous whistle-blower was reduced to
in most other reports as well.
Flinn was similarly portrayed as a victim of a sexist military,
despite her acknowledgement that she had disobeyed orders by continuing
her relationship with a married man. In a 1997 60 Minutes segment,
for instance, Morley Safer as Equalizer declared incredulously,
“It’s hard to believe that someone of her abilities
and her character could go to jail.” In a face-to-face with
Flinn, Safer backhandedly played up her vulnerability.
Safer: You’re a tough woman, yes?
Flinn (in uniform, weeping): Yes.
Safer: You could deal with that [prison]?
Flinn: (voice breaking): I would deal with it . . . . It’s
not something I really look forward (voice breaks) to facing.
. .
Here was the very picture of feminine frailty in uniform, the
Victim incarnate.
Why wasn’t Coughlin labeled more positively as a “Fighter
Against Sexual Abuse”? Why wasn’t Flinn labeled a “Bomber
Pilot Accused of Insubordination and Sexual Misconduct”?
Perhaps because “woman as victim” is such a powerful
archetype. So powerful, evidently, that it has prevented journalists
— many of whom are quite ignorant of military culture to
start with — from making the key distinction between the
fighter for justice and the delinquent officer fighting for her
own skin.
The risk of distortion is considerable not only because of the
archetypes that seem to exert a magnetic force on journalists,
but also because these whistle-blower exposés tend to draw
far more news play than accounts of progress toward gender equality.
The exposés have all the alluring elements of tabloid journalism
— sex, violence, depravity, and the inevitable fascination
with anything that freakishly defies traditional boundaries and
expectations — from cloned sheep to mothers who drown their
children. The woman warrior falls into this “transnormal”
category, even as journalists struggle to cast her as something
less sensational.
Success stories and trend pieces outlining gradual improvement
simply cannot compete. One such success story, Rosemary Mariner,
the Navy’s first female squadron commander and a frequent
spokesperson for the Navy, was mentioned in 102 news items in
the Nexis archive between 1978 and 1998. Another figure deemed
a pioneer by the media, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, once the highest-ranking
female ever in the Army, was mentioned 158 times. (This was before
Kennedy filed her own sexual harassment complaint against a fellow
general. She did not go to the press, but a leak launched her
news profile into the stratosphere in March 2000.)
In striking contrast, as noted in my 1999 Ph.D. dissertation,
Tailhook whistle-blower Coughlin was mentioned over 700 times,
McKinney accuser Hoster some 900 times, and Kelly Flinn nearly
3,000 times. It’s impossible not to question whether the
coverage has painted a distorted picture of women in uniform when
the errant and weepy bomber pilot Kelly Flinn makes by far the
biggest media splash of the decade.
The public was clearly learning much more about the harassed,
victimized, or fragile military woman than about the strong achiever
or routine careerist. And this despite indications that military
sexual harassment is actually on the decline. As USA Today recently
reported, the number of harassment complaints was down to 319
in 2000 from 1,599 in 1993. The Pentagon attributes the trend
to sensitivity training and growing acceptance of servicewomen.
This growing acceptance has been evident in air combat. American
women have flown combat missions over Iraqi “no fly zones,”
over Kosovo, and in the current Afghanistan campaign. What reporters
once covered as a novelty, they are now treating as routine. When
the Navy gave reporters access to combat pilots, including a female
code-named “Mumbles,” some U.S. news organizations mentioned
her only in passing. In two articles, The San Diego Union-Tribune
did not even identify her as female.
But when combined with the high-profile attention paid McSally,
the routine coverage of women on the firing line raises old concerns
about distortion. The McSally case was on the air and in the press
dozens of times during the early phases of the Afghanistan conflict.
From the coverage, it was easier to learn more about one example
of gender discrimination than about gender equality in action
as the country went to war.
As America faces a long battle against terrorism, how can news
media illuminate women’s growing role in the military without
distortions and stereotyping?
First, reporters need to recognize that not all military women
who go public are created equal. Kelly Flinn, eager to avoid what
may be an excessive penalty for a known infraction, was no Paula
Coughlin. In covering them both as “Damsels in Distress,”
journalists miss a crucial element of their stories and distort
what’s left.
Another part of the solution would be to complement coverage of
exposés on gender discrimination with pieces explaining
how far women have come in the military. Some print journalists
have provided such context.
The TV magazine programs, unfortunately, are not about context.
They are about “real life” packaged as drama. Narrative,
not nuance, is the key.
Given those limitations, it would be a step forward for TV magazines
to switch formulas. Instead of casting female whistle-blowers
as distressed damsels, why not cast the deserving ones as Al Pacino
in Serpico or Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back? In other words,
cast them as protagonists who stand on principle and will risk
a great deal to right a wrong or protect a comrade. It would be
closer to the mark than The Perils of Pauline.
Lesley Stahl flirted with just such a switch in formula in her
January 20, 2002, segment on Lt. Col. McSally. Stressing the officer’s
prowess in the air, physical toughness, and dedication to principle,
Stahl raises the issue of why McSally was willing to risk her
career over abayas and back seats when she had such a bright future
ahead of her as a pilot with “the right stuff.”
“I felt like I was in a unique position as the highest ranking
female fighter pilot — kind of a warrior in the warrior’s
world — to say this has got to go,” McSally says. “It
was more my obligation than any of the other gals [of lower rank].”
At the same time, unfortunately, Stahl assumes a kind of empathetic
Big Sister role and goes to great lengths to get an emotional
reaction from McSally. This is more in keeping with traditional
TV magazine stereotyping: depict the woman as vulnerable. Stahl
displays an abaya and asks McSally to don it. McSally refuses,
looking hurt, and says with a slight quaver: “I hope I’ve
worn it for the last time.” So Stahl herself puts on the
robe and headscarf and is soon covered in black. Only her eyes
and nose are visible.
Stahl : You won’t even demonstrate it for us because you
feel so strongly . . . . This is what you looked like? . . . Does
it bother you watching me? . . . Your whole face has changed .
. . . It’s emotional for you.
McSally (nodding sadly): Yeah.
Stahl plays up the pain and emotion, so that we see a scared,
even rattled, Martha McSally, not the unflappable lieutenant colonel,
in the most dramatic portion of her report. Still, given the context
of a decade’s worth of coverage, Stahl provides a relatively
sound model.
Another was Ernie Pyle, whose work was respected by the troops
and public alike because he understood the hardships of the ordinary
mud soldier and depicted him realistically, with few if any flag-waving
stereotypes. Today’s military reporters would do well to
follow Pyle’s example in depicting G.I. Jane, understanding
her travails, portraying her as she is, resisting the constant
pull of outmoded archetypes.
Sidebar
The
Changing Press Portrait of GI Jane
The law of unintended consequences was at work when the Defense
Department decided in the mid-1970s to help fill its post-draft
manpower needs by actively recruiting women. Pentagon planners
had hoped to confine women to non-combat jobs. But the policy
set off a gender war as military women, reflecting a trend in
society at large, pushed for equal opportunity across the board,
combating sexual abuse and harassment along the way. As this military
gender conflict unfolded, news media found themselves repeatedly
changing the way in which they characterized, or stereotyped,
the new breed of military woman:
Trialblazers. Until the U.S. military operations in Panama and
the Persian Gulf in 1990-1991, women in the services were frequently
cast as pathfinders breaking gender barriers. A typical piece,
“Women in Uniform: Can They Save the Military?” (U.S.
News & World Report, June 5, 1978) described how women were
filling the post-draft manpower shortfall as sailors, parachute
riggers, pilots, Minuteman missile crewmembers. In my 1999 Ph.D.
dissertation, I examined some 250 articles published between 1978
and 1998 on women in the military. About half of the 31 articles
that appeared between 1978 and 1990 dealt with strides made by
women in uniform.
Threat to Military Readiness. In 1990 and 1991, the United States,
which had essentially been at peace since the mid-1970s, went
to war in Panama and the gulf. Female soldiers were definitely
in harm’s way so woman at war was no longer an abstraction.
All of society’s doubts about women in combat rose to the
surface —including the old idea that women in war are sexual
distractions, misfits, or “weak sisters.”
According to the study, around half of the 51 articles that ran
in 1990-1991 dealt with women in combat, often focusing on controversies
like sex in the ranks. One Newsweek article declared, for instance,
that 1,200 military women had been evacuated from the gulf war
zone due to pregnancy. But as Linda Bird Francke pointed out in
her book Ground Zero, the Pentagon could not confirm the figures
and later said pregnancy had not undermined gulf war readiness.
Much coverage focused on military women who left young children
behind, with far less attention to fathers who had to do the same.
(See, for instance, “Battle Over Moms at War,” USA Today,
February 12, 1991.) This news emphasis bolstered the stereotypic
breakdown of gender roles in war: men fight, women keep domestic
life going.
Perhaps most striking was the press preoccupation with two American
women captured by the Iraqis — Army Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy
and Army Major Rhonda Cornum. They received far more media attention
than did male captives. Indeed, some 480 news accounts dealt with
the capture or release of one or both women, according to a Nexis
search. This was roughly the same number of references as appeared
about two of the U.S. Army’s most influential, accessible,
and quotable gulf commanders — Lieutenant Generals Gus Pagonis,
who handled the crucial logistics front, and Calvin Waller, deputy
commander of the entire force. That two relatively low-ranking
women prisoners matched them in publicity reflects real unease
in the media and American society about women at the front.
Gender War Victims. Shortly after the gulf war came Lt. Paula
Coughlin’s decision to blow the whistle on the stalled Navy
investigation of sexual assault by male aviators at the Tailhook
convention. The story broke at a time when news media were displaying
a robust appetite for sex scandal. Coughlin’s story drew
huge news play and inspired a string of other aggrieved military
women to tell their tales of mistreatment of male colleagues.
Thus was born Military Woman as Gender War Victim, a media stereotype
whose drawbacks are discussed in the accompanying article.
Mainstream Warrior? News coverage of the initial military conflicts
of the twenty-first century suggests that a more balanced portrayal
of women as mainstream members of the U.S. armed services might
finally be emerging. When a Navy plane made a forced landing in
China after colliding with a Chinese jet fighter in 2001, for
instance, the Chinese held captive a crew including three women.
In contrast to the gulf war, reporters did not single out these
prisoners for coverage because they were women.
A number of news stories about the Afghanistan campaign have reported
that women in warfare is no longer a contentious issue within
the military. “Here on the front lines of the war on terrorism,
that argument is over,” according to a February Newhouse
News Service story. “They’re Not an Experiment Anymore,”
declares the headline of a January 11, 2002, USA Today piece.
Still, the issue of motherhood continues to smolder. In a November
2, 2001, Dateline NBC segment, reporter Ann Curry asks a mother
of three if she has sleepless nights missing her kids during a
combat tour on an aircraft carrier. “Oh, yeah,” the
Navy electrical technician says wistfully, “[when I] make
the mistake of thinking about singing bedtime songs.” Curry
is not shown asking similar questions of any of fathers on board.
The Newhouse piece quotes a female soldier who left a two-year
old daughter behind saying, “Yesterday I took a shower and
caught myself thinking about her and I just cried and cried.”
No forlorn fathers are quoted.
In the future, perhaps we’ll see coverage of military fathers
answering such questions, or the absence of such queries altogether.
Either would be preferable to putting the spotlight on weeping
Moms in foxholes. — C.H.
CJR contributing
editor Christopher Hanson covered the military during much of his
twenty years as a newsman. This article is based in part on his
1999 Ph.D. dissertation. Click here for a summary of how the press
image of U.S. military women has evolved.
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