Fake Feminist "Equality" in the Military

by Phyllis Schlafly

April 9, 2003

When the U.S. military sent nursing mothers of six and eight-week-old babies out to fight the Gulf War in 1991, the American people recognized this as the ridiculous result of the feminist dogma that women can do anything men can do. Even Sally Quinn accused the feminist movement of having become a fringe cause, anti-male, anti-child, and anti-family.

The feminist demand for "equality" in the U.S. military is a sham based on quotas and gender norming (which means faking the test scores). The 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces found that, in the scoring of physical tests at the U.S. Naval Academy, a "B" grade for women in the 1.5 mile run is roughly equivalent to the "D" grade for men. The women's "A" grade in push-ups is the same as a "C" grade for men. In the field obstacle course, men jump over a wall two feet higher than women have to jump.

In the Marines training regimen at Parris Island, males run 1.5 miles in 13.5 minutes at the beginning of training, while women run 3/4 of a mile in 7.5 minutes. At the conclusion of training, men run 3 miles in 28 minutes, while women run 1.5 miles in 15 minutes. Only one woman out of 100 can meet a physical standard achieved by 60 out of 100 men.

At any given time, up to 10 percent of Navy women are pregnant, and the figure is 10 to 15 percent in the Army. Since pregnant servicepersons must be kept within six hours of a medical facility, this causes great disruption at the time of unit deployment. This year, women will comprise 20 percent of our Armed Services, so the pregnancy problem is bound to get worse.

Nearly every week we hear a new news story about Pentagon decisions to "open new slots" and "expand career opportunities" for women on ships and aircraft. Even the Marines have surrendered and announced that they will put women on warships, with commanders telling the press this will "give them more flexibility."

Anyone who understands human nature could have predicted the current signiticant drop in male enlistments; real men don't seek to serve in a feminized military. The number of men who say they are likely or very likely to join the military has dropped fiom a 1990 high of about 35 percent to about 25 percent.

Phyllis Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative movement since the publication of her best-selling 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo. She has been a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972, when she started her national volunteer organization now called Eagle Forum. In a ten-year battle, Mrs. Schlafly led the pro-family movement to victory over the principal legislative goal of the radical feminists, called the Equal Rights Amendment. An articulate and successful opponent of the radical feminist movement, she appears in debate on college campuses more frequently than any other conservative. She was recently named one of the 100 most important women of the 20th century by the Ladies' Home Journal.