In Praise of Women Warriors

In the last days of the Gulf War, a newscast on National Public Radio reported that trucks and other transport flown into the Kuwaiti theater had come from Eastern European countries. That would be news in itself. But the further news was that many of the pilots of the large transport planes ferrying these vehicles were women. A positive outcome of this war has been to demonstrate how women have been able to do jobs normally reserved for men.

Some of my feminist colleagues at Stanford University, where I am spending a semester, are not happy with such news. Many of them were against the war. They do not regard women’s integration into armed conflict as progress. They were upset to learn that three of the soldiers killed were...