The accompanying picture, which is captioned “Patriot Missile Team,” shows a woman and two
men in front of a control panel. One man, with a headset, sits at a keyboard. The woman,
standing above him, holds a clipboard and points to a screen as the other man, leaning over her
shoulder, looks on. The image of a missile launching and lines of computer code are
superimposed over the picture. The woman is subtly feminized, with makeup, a ring, and
manicured fingernails, but she is clearly in a position of some authority, and she is linked to
technology, and specifically to a weapons system.
While the ad’s imagery prominently features a woman, without looking carefully at the
ad copy, a viewer wouldn’t necessarily think this is an ad aimed at women, and by glancing at
the picture and the most prominently displayed text on “the will to succeed” might just absorb a
general message about the Army, technology, and success which isn’t clearly linked to gender.
In some ways then, this ad affirms that women are a regular part of the Army.
Women, in fact, could theoretically be a more regular part of the Army after changes in
policy in the early 1990s. While small numbers of women soldiers had participated in the
invasions of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) in 1983 and of Panama (Operation Just Cause) in
1989, more than 40,000 women (about 30,000 of whom were in the Army), or a little more than
seven percent of the total US forces, were deployed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The
military’s experiences in that war and the election of the Clinton administration led the Pentagon
to rescind the Risk Rule, which had set the parameters for women’s military participation, in
1994. The rule change allowed women to serve in more combat support positions, including
more than 32,000 new positions in the Army, while still keeping them from direct ground
combat (Women’s Research and Education Institute, 2003). The 1990s brought allegations of
rape and sexual harassment at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds, as well as concerns in
Congress over whether gender-integrated basic training was weakening the military. The 1990s
also saw women serving in “peace operations” in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
The Army’s advertising campaigns of the late 1990s rarely used images of women. My
ad sample, in fact, only includes a single ad with a woman (the ad appeared three times in 1997
and 1998) from 1997 to 2000. This ad was one of a series about what the potential recruit will
be in the Army. For instance, the ads claim: “You’ll learn to be focused. So when you get
$30,000 for college, you’ll be ready”; “You’ll be the one others look to. You will be a leader”;
“You’ll succeed as a team and thrive as an individual. You will be a soldier.” The ad picturing
a woman reads: “You’ll be pushed to the limit. And discover you have no limits. You will be a
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Convention