Living Legends and Full Agency

WOMEN AND WAR  I 

To say that women and war are incompatible elements of society, as the naysayers suggest, is to conveniently ignore women’s past and present performance as a collective and as inherent parts of the milieu. Since the beginning of time and throughout ourstory, women have always fought alongside their brethren in battle to such a degree that DePauw (1998) considers women and war to be inextricable. Yet, modern-day rhetoric, at least within the United States, would have us believe that even with the recent repeal of the combat exclusion policy, the notion of women fighting in war is not only at best culturally unacceptable but at worst reckless. As Mazur (1998) puts it, war then always becomes this novel act in which women partake, ...