Women Warriors: Female Accession to Ground Combat

In a recent article on female marines in the US Marine Corps, Connie Brownson has proposed the concept of equivalency rather than equality as a way of understanding their integration into the organization. Because of their almost inevitable physical inferiority to their male comrades, women cannot be regarded as fully equal in a Corps that prioritizes physical strength. However, they are respected and accepted as equivalent if they can perform their specialist military roles with competence and professionalism. This response examines the question of equivalence to assess its adequacy to contemporary gender transformations in the military.