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War and Its Surrogates: Male Combat Sports and Women's Roles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
War and the military life have traditionally been perceived in most cultures as a sacrosanct ex-periental world devoted to masculine maturation and bonding. By definition both these traditionally male organizations have until now excluded women, treating them as objects to be despised (if not feared), and also the target of active opposition. Note, for instance, the gleeful celebrations among cadets when Shannon L. Faulkner, the first woman admitted (after court order) to The Citadel, a single-sex military college in Charleston, SC, decided after one week in August 1995 that she could not survive the harassment, hi refusing to admit her the institution had claimed that her presence ‘would undermine a proud and legitimate tradition dedicated to molding the minds, bodies and spirits of young men’. The counter argument was that she was being denied equal opportunity to take part in ‘a unique academic environment that requires on-campus residence and that is being built around a system of hardship, competition and bonding, […and] also a lifetime of countless, less tangible benefits’. Such was also the basis of the US Supreme Court's majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1996) mandating the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. Though now federal government supported service academies admit women, nostalgia still exists in certain quarters for the days when the comment, ‘If the army had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one’ summed up the distinctly peripheral position held by wives, who were, and are still, classified as ‘dependants’. But now women are in the United States Armed Forces, in command positions and certain combat units, as well as in the medical corps. The transition is difficult.
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References
Notes
1. US Bumper Sticker, c.1970. I thank members of seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993, and the Stratford-upon-Avon Biennial Conference of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 1994, for helpful comments and encouragement.
2. Manegold, Catherine S., ‘The Citadel's 152-Year Tradition Clashes with an Age-Old Issue’, New York Times, 29 05 1994, Section I, 16.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., I, 16.
4. See Rayner, Richard, ‘Women as Warriors: The Historic Assumption That Men Do the Fighting Is Colliding with Modern Egalitarian Ideals. With More Women in the Ranks. Will the Military Be Strengthened or Emasculated?’, New York Times Magazine, 22 06 1997, pp. 24–9, 40–9, 53, 55–6.Google Scholar The inconvenient division of this article may well be symptomatic of establishment reaction.
5. Ranald, Margaret Loftus, Shakespeare and His Social Context: Essays in Osmotic Knowledge and Literary Interpretation (New York: AMS Press, 1987)Google Scholar, Chapter VII. Also see Rauchut, Edward A. Jr., ‘“Guilty in Defence”: A Note on Henry V, III.iii, 123’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1, Winter 1991, p. 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Ranald, , Shakespeare, Chapter VI.Google Scholar
7. This play is generally considered as a collaboration with Thomas Heywood. See Ranald, , Shakespeare, Chapter VI, and John Webster (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), pp. 104–9.Google Scholar
8. Quoted by Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will (1975; rpt. Bantam, 1976), p. 23.Google Scholar Jody chants are macho marching songs and those sung in the US military are pretty much unprintable. These songs were very frequent among, for example, paratroop trainees at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in the 1950s. See, below, n. 22. The Louis Gossett insult which sticks in memory is ‘Are you steers or queers?’
9. Dash, Irene, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 129.Google Scholar
10. See Jones, James, From Here to Eternity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), Book III, ‘The Women’.Google Scholar
11. Brownmiller, , Against Our Will, p. 76.Google Scholar
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16. Ranald, , Webster, pp. 78–9.Google Scholar
17. Tzu, Sun, The Art of War, p. 76.Google Scholar
18. Ryan, Cornelius, The Longest Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), p. 290.Google Scholar
19. Ranald, , Shakespeare, Chapter VII.Google Scholar
20. US Bumper Sticker, late 1960s.
21. Clark, Marcia, with Carpenter, Teresa. Without a Doubt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997).Google Scholar
22. A kind of jody chant—a locker room number in McGee's play goes as follows: ‘Here's to the girl that I love best/I love her best when she's undressed!/I'd hick her sitting standing lying/Why I'd even hick her as she lay dying./And when she's dead and long forgotten … /I'll dig her up and fuck her rotten’. This is sung alternately by Irish and Clean.
23. I am indebted to M. Geraldine Sims for this reference.
24. Matthew Arnold in his poem ‘Rugby Chapel’ (1857) celebrates this mystique, while its accompanying doctrine of ‘Muscular Christianity’ was promulgated in the immensely popular Rugby School novel by Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown's School Days (1856).Google Scholar Hughes was the inventor of the English public school novel, including among his successors, Dean Farrar in such novels as Eric, or Little by Little. Anyone visiting the great public schools of England must be sobered by the inordinately long lists of casualties in both World Wars I and II. In addition, J. R. R. Tolkien in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), underlines this ‘oppression’ of both wars: ‘By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead’ (p. 7). Similar feelings are evoked by any war memorial—with perhaps the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, the USS Arizona, and now the Vietnam War Memorial being for Americans the most shattering.
25. Terkel, Studs, ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).Google Scholar
26. Neill, Michael, Foreword to McGee, Graham, Foreskin's Lament (Wellington, NZ: Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1981), p. 10.Google Scholar
27. Paton, Alan, Too Late the Phalarope (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1953).Google Scholar This strangely beatific vision of football is impossible to communicate to citizens of the United States, for whom the game is a business. Believe me, this is true, because I have tried to teach this profoundly emotional work.
28. McGee recalls that when he was a hill back try-out for the All Blacks, newspaper editorials suggested that he should not be selected ‘until I got my hair cut’. Quoted in Finley Macdonald, with Photographs by Connew, Bruce, The Game of Our Lives: The Story of Rugby and New Zealand—and How They've Shaped Each Other. A Television Series (Auckland: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 95.Google Scholar I thank M. Geraldine Sims for bringing this book to my attention.
29. McGee, , Foreskin's Lament, p. 75.Google Scholar
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 96.
32. Ibid., p. 78.
33. I thank M. Geraldine Sims for finding this book, which more than corroborates my feelings.
34. I am indebted to Selwyn Tucker of Johannesburg, also Rodney Bicknell and Geoffrey H. Truman of CompuServe Pacific Forum, for specific information on this extraordinarily important and emotional occasion.