| In the 1980s and 1990s, American women veterans of the Vietnam war sparked a social movement that asserted the claims of women veterans to government benefits, to respect within the national veteran community, and to public acknowledgement of women's military service. Vietnam women veterans built their case for recognition by making their war stories public, asserting their presence in veteran organizations and memorialization projects, and lobbying government agencies to address women veterans' needs.;These veterans did not come to their advocacy from feminist activism. They were, however, part of a generation of women and men transformed by second-wave feminism's egalitarian gender outlook in the 1970s. As a result, women veterans challenged other Americans by the 1980s to rethink a tenacious cultural notion of gender disparity: that men alone had the responsibility and the capacity for military service and therefore had a superior claim to the respect and the debt of the nation as veteran-citizens.;The conservative movement in the 1980s sought in significant ways to limit women's military roles and roll back the agenda of feminist activists, but conservatives' embrace of patriotism, particularly in the military realm, opened a window for women veterans to assert their claims in a way that feminism did not, since significant strands of feminism espoused anti-militarism. Whereas Americans in earlier decades understood military participation as an appropriate expression of patriotism for men but as deviant behavior for women, Vietnam women veterans persuaded the nation to incorporate women's military service into a national vision of patriotic action.;Doubts about military women's capacity to function in war were easily fed in the years between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, when the government downplayed women's presence in combat. Vietnam women veterans' accounts of their war service challenged these doubts by demonstrating that women had already proven themselves in combat zones Their organizing efforts also spurred other women veterans to activism and encouraged wider public awareness of women's significance to the American military. In these ways, Vietnam women veterans helped lay the groundwork for public acceptance of women's expanding roles in the military by the 1990s. |
