Women Veterans

This inspiring anthology is the first to convey the rich experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words, from the Revolutionary War to the wars in the Middle East.

Written by retired Air Force major general and former director of the WAF, this updated edition includes Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf campaigns.

This handbook provides an historical and contemporary overview of the service by women in all branches of the U.S. military, tracing the causes and effects of evolving policies, issues, structural barriers, and cultural challenges on the record and in the future of the accomplishments by women warriors. Over a century of accomplishments of military women are included, from the Civil War to the wars in the Middle East.

Reveals the different ways women navigate the traditionally masculine environment of the military Drawing on surveys and interviews with almost 300 female military personnel, Melissa Herbert explores how women's everyday actions, such as choice of uniform, hobby, or social activity, involve the creation and re-creation of what it means to be a woman, and particularly a woman soldier.

This new, revised edition of the path-breaking first history of the female members of the U.S. Navy has been updated to include the recent integration of Navy women into the crews of combaant shops and tactical aviation squadrons, and the contributions of Navy women to the space program. It is a comprehensive chronicle of inspirational service spanning nearly the entire century.

This ground-breaking study of women in the military during World War I shatters the misconception that women's role in the war was limited to nursing. From 1917 to 1920, some 12,000 enlisted women served in the U.S. Naval Reserve and 305 in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. Carefully researched and engagingly written, the book explores a surprising variety of military duties carried out by women, including a number of non-clerical, highly specialized billets.

In 1918 the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France to help win World War I. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges these patriotic young women faced in a war zone where male soldiers resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Back on the home front, they fought the army for veterans' benefits and medals, and won.

Examines women's motivations for fighting for full citizenship rights both on and off the battlefield. The war provided chances for women to participate in the military, but also in other male-dominated career paths. Intense discussions of methods of protecting women, rape, and proper gender roles abound as Kimberly Jensen draws from rich case studies to show how female thinkers and activists wove wartime choices into long-standing debates about woman suffrage and economic parity.

Winner of 2014 Amelia Bloomer Top Ten List. The stories of African American women who did extraordinary things to help their country during World War II and helped lay the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement by challenging racial and gender barriers.

"A soaring tale in which, at long last, these daring World War II pilots gain the credit they deserve." - Liza Mundy, bestselling author of Code Girls. While not authorized to serve in combat, the WASP helped train male pilots for service abroad, and ferried bombers and pursuits across the country. After the war, the program was disbanded and the women were sent home. But the bonds they'd forged never failed, and over the next few decades they came together to fight for recognition as the military veterans they were--and for their place in history.

By the end of the war, over 400,000 American women had served in the armed forces, eclipsing all but the most optimistic projections, and paving the way for the permanent integration of women into the U.S. Armed Forces. In Defense of a Nation takes a close look at the women who served, their leaders, the conditions under which they served, and the wide variety of roles filled by these women pioneers.

An account of the experiences of women soldiers relates the author's decision to enlist, her relationship with a Palestinian boyfriend, her witness to the events of September 11 as portrayed on Arabic television, and her deployment to Iraq.

Winner, 2010 Lavinia L. Dock Award, American Association for the History of NursingAn American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year in History and Public Policy. Vivid personal accounts abound in historian Vuic's compelling look at the experiences of army nurses in the Vietnam War. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, nurses tell their own captivating stories, from their reasons for joining the military to the physical and emotional demands of a horrific war and postwar debates about how to commemorate their service. Vuic also explores the gender issues that arose when a male-dominated army actively recruited and employed the services of 5,000 nurses in the midst of a growing feminist movement and a changing nursing profession.

Claudia J. Kennedy retired as the Army's first female three-star general and the highest-ranking woman ever in that branch, overseeing 45,000 soldiers worldwide. During her 32-year career she witnessed the dramatic advances made by military women, and she was a long-time champion for fairness and equality in the Army.

In 2010, the Army created Cultural Support Teams, a secret pilot program to insert women alongside Special Operations soldiers battling in Afghanistan. The Army reasoned that women could play a unique role on Special Ops teams: accompanying their male colleagues on raids and, while those soldiers were searching for insurgents, questioning the mothers, sisters, daughters and wives living at the compound. Their presence had a calming effect on enemy households, but more importantly, the CSTs were able to search adult women for weapons and gather crucial intelligence. They could build relationships--woman to woman--in ways that male soldiers in an Islamic country never could. In Ashley's War, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon uses on-the-ground reporting and a finely tuned understanding of the complexities of war to tell the story of CST-2, a unit of women hand-picked from the Army to serve in this highly specialized and challenging role.