Welcome to the 16th exploration of the Planet of the Savage Strident DKos Feminist Supervixens!
"Feminist Supervixens" of every sex and gender are invited to participate in this feminists' circle. Our goal is to build a vibrant community of feminists here on Daily Kos. The emphasis here is on camaraderie and support, so if you're looking for an argument, we suggest that you go instead to room 12A, just along the corridor.
Previous "episodes" in this diary series have been written by hrh, with guest-host diaries from mem from somerville, Elise, righteousbabe, and irishwitch. Some more guest-hosts are waiting in the wings. Feminists who are interested in being a guest-host can email hrh at: feministsupervixens (AT) yahoo.com
This week's diary is a continuation of last week's introduction to some remarkable women in the US military.
Senior Airman Jennifer Donaldson, the first woman to be trained as a military sniper.
Senior Airman Jennifer Donaldson from the Illinois Air National Guard has become the first woman to be trained at the only U.S. military sniper school open to females. She was graduated April 14, 2001 from the National Guard Sniper School's first countersniper course for Air Guard security force personnel.
She was nicknamed "G.I. Jane" at Camp - Robinson in central Arkansas, near Little Rock. That's where the senior airman from the Illinois Air National Guard became the first woman to complete the only U.S. military sniper school open to females.
Donaldson and seven men graduated April 14 from the first countersniper program for Air Guard security force personnel conducted by the 8-year-old National Guard Sniper School.
[...]
Completing the course made Donaldson, a security forces specialist from the Air National Guard's 183rd Fighter Wing in Springfield, Ill., the first woman student for the National Guard's pilot training program for security people charged with protecting air bases and airplanes. "I've admired policemen since I was a little kid," Donaldson said. "I want to get as much training as I can get. This sounded interesting."
"Women can shoot better, by and large, and they're easier to train because they don't have the inflated egos that a lot of men bring to these programs," Dolan said. "Women will ask for help if they need it, and they will tell you what they think." Dolan has designed the countersniper program for Air National Guard security people, and he has no reservations about training women who can handle the 15-hour days of running and shooting and camouflage lessons in the woods.
Lt. Sarah Fritts, US Army helicopter pilot.
Lt. Sarah Fritts heard the first cracks of AK-47 machine-gun rounds targeting her Kiowa scout helicopter as she flew low over the central Iraqi city of As Samawah. Scanning the ground only 60 feet below, she saw a crowd of Iraqi civilians lining the banks of the Euphrates.
"Half the people were waving at us, and the others were shooting out of their homes, so it was a bad mix," recalls Lieutenant Fritts, a platoon leader with the 3rd Squadron of the 3rd Infantry Division's 7th Cavalry, known as the 3-7 Cav. "All along the river, fire was coming out of home after home."
Up ahead, another Kiowa crew spotted an Iraqi jumping out of a car with an AK-47 and running into a building. An attack on the building was ordered, and Fritts and the other pilots zeroed in with their rockets, completely flattening the structure.
It was the first combat of the war for Fritts and her platoon, but when she landed, she discovered that her reaction to the fighting was completely different from that of her male comrades.
"Everyone was like, 'Yeah, get them' and I was having trouble with that really aggressive attitude," she recalls. "People were saying, 'Yeah, let's go level that whole area.' And I was saying, 'There's no reason to go level 50 homes' - it just wasn't necessary."
[...]
...she rejects, on principle, the idea that a public aversion to placing women in harm's way should bar her from the front lines. "Why should I not be allowed to do something I want to do because some guy lying on a couch watching TV feels uncomfortable seeing me dragged through the street?" she says. "I don't see why a woman's life is so much more important than a man's life," she says. "For a woman to gain full citizenship, she should be able to die for her country."
Lt. Col. Martha McSally, USAF fighter pilot.
The Air Force had promoted fighter pilot Martha McSally to lieutenant colonel four years before her peers.
She had flown more than 100 hours in her A-10, known as the Warthog. She affectionally called it "an ugly down-and-dirty tank killer" with its single seat and its fast-firing Gatling gun.
She was a champion triathlete. She had a master's degree in public policy from Harvard, and she'd been a White House Fellows finalist. She had patrolled the no-fly zone over Iraq and would later direct search-and-rescue missions inside Afghanistan.
She was quite a success story for the modern military, which had worked hard to knock down barriers to female achievement.
Then she landed at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in November 2000.
Exactly what that would mean for McSally became clear immediately. In a briefing right after she arrived, officers matter-of-factly laid down the rules for travel off base, even on official business: All female personnel would wear the customary head-to-toe gown, the abaya and its matching head scarf, similar to the Afghan burqa. They could not drive. They would ride in the back seat. They would be escorted by males at all times.
Officials said they had constructed the policy to keep from offending conservative Saudi leaders and to protect U.S. troops from terrorist attacks. But to McSally, the directive, with its different instructions for men and women, "abandons our American values that we all raised our right hand to die for."
More on the story in this Salon article.
McSally eventually sued, took the case to the Supreme Court and caused enough of a ruckus that the abaya-wearing rule was struck down by both the House and the Senate:
It was pretty overwhelming actually to be sitting up in the gallery of the United States House of Representatives and be listening to representatives of Congress speak so strongly on this issue and then to have this legislation pass after seven long years of being told that I'm the only one who cares about this issue, that I need to get over it.
She told Terry Gross in an interview, quoted in this article: "I'm a fighter pilot and we tend to have an in-your-face, you know, type-A personality that, you know, raises issues and confronts them when they're nonsensical."
Yeah! My kind of Supervixen!
In January of 2006 she became the first woman to head up a
USAF fighter unit:
The 354th Squadron, known as the "Bulldogs", has 22 A/OA-10 aircraft and 55 pilots and crewmembers performing combat, search-and-rescue and other missions. The squadron is located at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Rear Admiral Michelle Howard, the first black woman to command a US Navy combat ship.
[W]hen asked about the academy and what it was like for women in 1978, her first year and the third for women, Howard pauses.
"Challenging," she says, with a somewhat inscrutable smile. She declined to discuss how except to say that she experienced racism and sexism. The people who treated her poorly aren't worth discussing now, she says.
"There was inappropriate behavior that occurred when I was there," she says. "And so you deal with it and move on."
[...]
Upon taking the helm of the USS Rushmore, she often sought out [a young Marine Corps lance corporal's] opinion, since he had his ear to the ground and wouldn't hold back if she asked how things were going.
One morning, he approached her on the ship's bridge. She does her best imitation of his New Jersey accent while she recounts what he said: "You know, me and the guys were talking and you know, when you first got here we weren't sure about the woman captain thing," she remembered. "But we got to saying, you got us to Iraq, there, and you got us back safely. And that's a good thing."
Then, he added: "Because, yeah, it must be that maternal instinct thing."
She thanked him for his comments and had him escorted off the bridge.
Gen. Claudia Kennedy, three-star general and the highest-ranking woman in the Army before her retirement in 2001.
She read The Feminine Mystique in college after it was suggested to her by one of her professors:
I [...] found it very courageous for Betty Friedan to say out loud what many thought but were unable to put into words, that it simply was not enough for a woman to devote her life to being a wife and a mother. Every argument she made was not only rational, but captured the sense of what is the essential struggle in our lives, the two competing demands of family and work. I grasped her viewpoint instinctively--as did countless millions of other young American women over the coming decades. We were not inherently less capable or ambitious than the boys and young men we had grown up with. But until Betty Friedan spoke out, women as a group were simply expected to truncate their lives due to their gender, not fulfill their individual talents or aspirations.
Gen. Kennedy came forward in 2000 to accuse a fellow general of improper sexual advances four years before. He was in line for the post of deputy Inspector General, in which he would have overseen investigations of sexual harassment claims. He was not given the post.
She has been outspoken on behalf of military women's access to abortion. She has also been a big supporter of gays in the military and an advocate of rescinding the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.
I like this wise quote of hers:
"I don't let anyone else judge me, which means I don't absorb the flattery, the compliments or the praise, but I also don't absorb the criticism and the things that are very negative from others. I have to judge myself."