Quickpost: On the frontline – US women marines in Afghanistan

While pootling around on Jezebel today I found these extraordinary images by photographer Paula Bronstein of the all female Marine teams that the US is currently deploying in Afghanistan which are well worth a look.

Just the sight of women doing (relatively) frontline patrols in a war zone is an intriguing one. The UK recently reiterated its ban on women serving in close combat, arguing that ‘gender mixing’ could have grave consequences. This struck me, and other observers, as a statement which throws up more questions than answers (they’ve mixed in every other aspect of society, what makes the army so special?) but the issue remains one that the army and navy in both the UK and US struggle with. The female US patrols are interesting in that they are frontline but are directly tasked with issues that may be percieved as more ‘feminine eg health, childcare etc, the fighting remains largely elsewhere, and overwhelmingly male – watch Restrepo to see what happens to a group of male marines left to fester with no female interaction for months. However these women have engaged, albeit mostly superficially, with ‘the enemy’. So does this break down barriers, or merely reinforce gender roles?

You can also read a New York Times article on the teams here which I recommend (although the headline leaves a lot to be desired). There’s an interesting quote from one woman who serves in the team but leaves after a male colleague is killed. “[I’m] too much of a girl to deal with these guys getting killed” she tells the reporter. To me, this states less that women aren’t capable of doing the job, more than women are conditioned societally to believe they cannot.