Centering Womanpower in U.S. Foreign Relations

Abstract

Historian Tanya L. Roth’s study of female service members’ integration and fight for equality in the U.S. military during the Cold War serves as a welcome addition to the growing number of studies exploring issues of gender and sexuality in military history. Her Cold War is a multi-faceted entry into the intersecting goals and strategies of politicians, military leaders, and women in uniform during the postwar era. Roth’s inquiry examines how the military’s use of the term “womanpower” as opposed to “manpower” indicated its approach to equality through a gender difference lens that isolated women and types of work they conducted (1). As the feminist movement grew and gender sameness became a more prominent approach to understanding labor equality, Roth asserts that scholars began to overlook the earlier advancements women made during the Cold War military. She writes, “Between 1948 and the early 1970s, servicewomen did not immediately see gender-based limitations on their service as discrimination or inequality, although that does not mean that women always accepted limitations without question” (6). Roth’s assessment of how definitions of equality adapted and changed unevenly for different women throughout the Cold War, including women of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community, adds valuable complexity to our understanding of gender integration in the military.