A Few Good Women
America's Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In this riveting narrative history, women veterans from the world wars, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq tell their extraordinary stories.
Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee spent fifteen years combing through archives, journals, histories, and news reports, and gathering thousands of eyewitness accounts, letters, and interviews for this unprecedented chronicle of America’s “few good women.” Women today make up more than fifteen percent of the U.S. armed forces and serve alongside men in almost every capacity. Here are the stories of the battles these women fought to march beside their brothers, their tales of courage and fortitude, of indignities endured, of injustices overcome, of the blood they’ve shed and the comrades they’ve lost, and the challenges they still face in the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Foreign enemies are less challenging than domestic ones in this earnest history of women's struggle for entry into and acceptance within the armed forces. Ex-army psychologist Monahan and ex-navy nurse Neidel-Greenlee (coauthors of And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II) argue that while America has increasingly relied on women to perform crucial military tasks, sometimes under fire, reactionaries in the military and Congress, citing feminine delicacy and other hoary sexist myths, have resisted according them the status, equal pay, opportunities, and respect they deserve. The authors adorn their chronicle of hard-fought institutional change with the generally gung-ho recollections of women soldiers, from WWII's WAACs and WAVEs to today's female machine gunners and paratroopers. The authors reserve their heaviest fire for those who oppose putting women in combat roles, especially Sen. James Webb; in a vitriolic critique, they conjecture that God invented death for the express purpose of ridding the world of people like Webb "who prefer subjective opinions to objective facts...." This is an occasionally inspiring, but often plodding and doctrinaire account of America's women in uniform. 83 photos.
