The Air Force has frequently taken the lead in opening opportunities to women—it was the first
service to train male and female officers together, the first to open ROTC to women, the first to
allow women with children to enlist, but it also kept women off of airplanes, limiting the aviation
positions in which they could serve beyond what the law against women in combat required.
The Air Force has the largest percentage of women, and, unlike the other services, its advertising
hasn’t promoted overtly militaristic forms of masculinity, but the small amount of advertising the
Air Force has done over the course of the all-volunteer force has mainly been aimed at a
technically-inclined young men, and women have been only a token presence.
On September 18, 1947, the Air Force, which had been a part of the Army, became an
independent branch of the US armed services. Even before then, during World War II, the
aviation components of each of the services were the most enthusiastic about the participation of
women. The aviation components didn’t have long-standing institutional practices or traditions,
and they were working with new technologies that weren’t firmly tied to gender roles.
The Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics was staffed with young, forward-thinking officers figuring
out how to work with new technologies, and in the months before WWII, they encouraged the
Navy to draft legislation to allow for the recruitment of women (Ebbert and Hall, 1993:28).
Nearly half of the women in the Army during WWII served with the Army Air Force (AAF) as
“Air-WACs.” About a thousand women served as WASPS—Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.
These women had civil, not military status, but they ferried military aircraft, towed gunnery
targets, and taught flying. They didn’t fly combat missions, but performed other kinds of
military flying to free male pilots for combat (Holm, 1992:64).
When women became a permanent part of the regular armed forces in 1948, they were
integrated directly into the Air Force, even as the Air Force’s parent service, the Army, kept
women in a separate corps. The Air Force’s decision not to segregate women into a separate
corps had less to do with ideas about gender than it did with a concern that the Air Force not
have any separate organizations. The new Air Force rejected the Army’s structure, with its
myriad units, like the Signal Corps, the Quartermaster Corps, and the Women’s Corps (ibid.:
122). As part of that integrated structure, Air Force women officers were incorporated into the
male promotion lists—up until a woman hit the legal ceiling at lieutenant colonel, when her male
contemporaries and subordinates would begin to pass her by—and while the direct competition
might be seen as a sign of equality, it had the practical effect of putting women at a disadvantage,
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Convention