Revolutionaries, Regulars, and Rebels: Women and Non-Western Armies Since World War II

This chapter centers on women's military work in both regular and irregular armed forces in the non-Western world since the end of World War II. Women's military work could be direct and formal, as performed by uniformed female members of the Russian and Chinese armies, or in any number of guerrilla armies around the world. More often, especially with irregular forces, women's rnilitary work was indirect and less formal, in a variety of indispensable support and maintenance activities that recall the age-old interaction of women and armed forces described in the first four chapters of this volume. Although women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries began playing larger combat roles than they normally had earlier, the fact remains that most militarily active women did not participate in frontline combat. Neither did most men. Armies are complex social organizations that employ workers in a wide variety of jobs other than fighting. The women engaged in such jobs were just as much soldiers as male clerks or quartermasters. Yet the quantum leap in women's frontline numbers, from 1 in 20 in the 1950s to 1 in 3 in the 1970s and after, cannot be easily discounted. [Author]