For a brief moment this morning it looked as if this could be the week of two landmark victories for women: the appointment of the first female bishop (all right, a suffragan bishop, but a signal and much-contested advance nonetheless) and the final go-ahead for women in the armed forces to serve on the front line.
Now, many will disagree, but I actually have more misgivings about the first than the second. So much of the content and symbolism of Christianity is, to use contemporary language, profoundly sexist, that admitting women, first to the priesthood and now to be bishops, could not but be disruptive. I understand why many traditionalists fought so hard against it, why people defected to the Roman Catholic church, and why the issue could still cause a schism, if not in the UK, then in the Anglican church worldwide.
The idea that women give birth and have a naturally nurturing disposition, or – more practically – that the death of a woman in battle could leave young children motherless, are not reasons to prevent women joining and progressing in the armed forces. If that is what a woman chooses to do, there should be no barrier – beyond the standard admission requirements – to her doing it. The notion that men are from Mars and women from Venus has harmed women’s prospects in all walks of life. Combat may be the last formal frontier.
A generally conservative public such as Britain’s also appears to be ready. When the first woman soldier – Corporal Sarah Bryant, a member of a psychological operations effects team – was killed in Afghanistan six years ago, it was a talking point, but not for long. What is more, the prevalent tone of the response was sadness and regret, not indignation that she was there at all. More female soldiers have died since. It appears to be accepted that if women serve, as they already do, in warzones, they are going to be at risk and some of them will die. In such circumstances, the ban on women serving in combat units seems outdated and illogical.
Yet it turns out that the Ministry of Defence is not actually going to change the rules right now. The gist of what the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, had to say when interviewed this morning was that the decision had been taken in principle, but there was to be a further review. Even though women are already serving in some capacities near the front line, fly fighter planes, command warships and have recently been allowed to serve on submarines, combat itself remains, it seems, a bridge too far.
The central question, it would appear, is no longer whether the very presence of women risks distracting the men or whether attachments could undermine military cohesion – the same arguments, by the way, that barred gay people from the military on both sides of the Atlantic for so long – but differences in physical strength and endurance. Which prompts two observations.
Fallon intimated that different physical tests might be introduced for men and women to serve in combat units. The justice, let alone the practical implications, of this could be hard to argue, unless it can be proved that the women are capable of serving on equal terms with men. There is, I accept, a basic difficulty here. But it may not be quite as great a difficulty as it seems. Combat is becoming ever more hi-tech, and much of the equipment is becoming smaller and lighter, as well as more complex. Brute force may be less necessary for the warriors of tomorrow than it has been in the past.
And the second observation is this. Physical differences may still be a hindrance to women serving in combat units. But the MoD and the top brass must be careful not to use this as an artificial pretext for keeping women back. The army of the future could be all the stronger for being co-ed.
