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This study examines reader responses to opinion editorials about women in combat and contributes to the literature on women in the military by explaining how contests over sex–gender essentialism and diversity underlie public debates about individual rights and military effectiveness. Comments in favor of women's ground combat exclusion use a logic of averages to promote essentialist thinking about men and women. They categorize women as inferior soldiers and argue that desegregation puts individual soldiers and the nation at risk. Conversely, comments in favor of integration advance a view of sex–gender diversity that places men and women along a continuum with overlapping qualities, suggesting further that giving exceptional women the freedom to serve in ground combat will advance both equality and military readiness. We argue that public commentary about women in combat concerns more than the military, underlying this discourse are distinct conceptions and expectations of men and women.

This study examines reader responses to opinion editorials about women in combat and contributes to the literature on women in the military by explaining how contests over sex–gender essentialism and diversity underlie public debates about individual rights and military effectiveness. Comments in favor of women's ground combat exclusion use a logic of averages to promote essentialist thinking about men and women. They categorize women as inferior soldiers and argue that desegregation puts individual soldiers and the nation at risk. Conversely, comments in favor of integration advance a view of sex–gender diversity that places men and women along a continuum with overlapping qualities, suggesting further that giving exceptional women the freedom to serve in ground combat will advance both equality and military readiness. We argue that public commentary about women in combat concerns more than the military, underlying this discourse are distinct conceptions and expectations of men and women.

What should we know about the roles of women in armed conflicts? I review the existing literature on women's roles in regular and irregular conflicts to identify gaps in our understanding of the significance of female combatants. I draw on contemporary and historical cases of women's combat participation across world regions and, in so doing, I challenge existing assumptions about the limits of women's participation in armed conflict. Examining women as a group and expecting conflict to affect this group in predictable and easily identifiable ways only reinforces existing assumptions about women and war. To understand the range of motivations underlying women's decisions to fight or to not fight, we should give greater attention to opportunity structures and other social conditions rather than simply assuming that women have different incentives than men.

When I heard Leon Panetta's announcement about lifting the combat restrictions on women in the military, I immediately thought of former Army National Guard Sergeant Paigh Bumgarner. Bumgarner had deployed to Iraq, where she had served as a convoy gunner in a unit that came under fire. "Once we got through," Bumgarner recalls, "they tried to hit us with a VBED [vehicle-borne explosive device], but I ordered 'No one gets close to this convoy, so it was taken out, a confirmed kill." Bumgarner told me, in a interview for my book, When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans, that she put the remains of her best friend in a body bag. She got the medics to bandage up the soldiers who had sustained shrapnel damage. As she recalls, "I remember during the craziness of everything, the first sergeant [we were escorting] came up and tried to take over, and I was like, 'I'm in control of this convoy….After that, all the guys were like, 'I'll go anywhere with you. I'll follow you anywhere.'"

Drawing on interviews with 100 women soldiers about their experiences in combat, this text asks what insights are gained when we take women's experiences in war as our starting point instead of treating them as 'add-ons' to more fundamental or mainstream levels of analysis, and what importance these experiences hold for an analysis of violence and for security studies. The work provides different perspectives about why it is important to explore women in combat, what their experiences teach us, and how to consider soldiers and veterans both as citizens and as violent state actors - an issue with which scholars are often reluctant to engage.