Rejecting Patriarchy for Equivalence in the US Military

Abstract

This article is a response to Anthony King’s “Women Warriors: Female Accession to Ground Combat.” King rightly asserts that the accession of women to combat roles is a notable historical departure in warfighting. He critiques Brownson’s conceptual ideal of “equivalency” as a potentially profound force of transformation of gender relations in the military. While conceptually progressive, he errs in framing the potential transformation within the concept of “patriarchy.” Further, King is unable to recast binary gendered language to acknowledge fully the concept of “kinship.” For females to maximally succeed in the military, and particularly in combat roles, patriarchy as the defining explanation for male–female interaction must be discarded and the enabling concepts of equivalency and kinship must be embraced. The continued strength of military organizations and the individuals within them emerges from the reciprocity of these two concepts.