We all should live so long to see the conditions and the state of our species by the end of this century. Then again, we probably wouldn’t want to.
Our aversion to drafting women for combat is historical, traditional and non-rational. However, that aversion is real, and there are primal reasons for it. Child-bearing would be a plausible choice; getting Dawkins’ “selfish gene” passed on and all that.
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We don’t “know” that. It has been proposed more than once by more than one person (including President Obama, I believe) that American young adults serve a period of time in “national service” before they begin their career paths. This “national service” is much broader than just military service, of course; but a draft of sorts will be needed to administer it.
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But you wouldn’t have to look a long way back - just 100 years to see the population and social devastation in Europe that wiping out a generation of young men in WW1 and WW2 exacted. You can include Russia/Soviet Union in that look-see.
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No, kid, that’s not why women didn’t have to register for the draft or be drafted. We aren’t hunter-gatherer tribes any more. And while I wasn’t drafted in Vietnam, that was because it was late in the war and I drew a safe number in the draft lottery so the Army didn’t even bother giving me a physical.
Part of patriarchal values is that women aren’t allowed to be soldiers or serve in combat, though in the 20th century they were grudgingly allowed to be nurses or sometimes do other non-combat roles, and it’s only recently that that’s changed. (Killing the other side’s women and children is just fine, of course, and we still bomb them in the Middle East today, but it’s only recently that women have been allowed to do combat roles in the US Army.) And if they weren’t going to be cannon fodder, there was no reason to draft them, and therefore no reason to have them register.
Politically, having a bunch of American girls killed in the Vietnam war would have been suicidally unpopular, and the kinds of politicians who liked wars of choice were more likely to be against equality for women than anti-war politicians, so they weren’t going to make a much more significant social change than Truman integrating the Army racially.
But economically, it’s less trouble if you get equal numbers of men and women killed than if you only kill off men, though that was a much smaller effect in Vietnam, which only killed about 50,000 Americans soldiers, than in the World Wars or the Civil War. Otherwise you’ve got a bunch of young women who can’t find husbands, and young widows with children who have to support them, and while we didn’t have polygamy (the traditional solution), we also had an economy and social structure that wasn’t friendly to working women, especially single mothers with children.
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Seeing that America hasn’t had a draft for 45 years, nor a population intensive war since WW2, the onus is on the readers who didn’t consider the historical perspective, not AllieBean. Perhaps she assumed that we TPM commenters would pick up on that as a matter of course.
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The only time you need a draft is when politicians want to have a war and can’t get free citizens to volunteer, and can’t even get voters to approve enough money to pay mercenaries, so they resort to slavery.
Draft registration is useful for more things, though - it’s an excuse for keeping more control over your population, tracking where they live, providing legal leverage against political malcontents, as well as insurance that if the politicians DO ever decide to have a draft, you can find everybody easily. It never should have been restarted after the Vietnam War ended, and has no place in a free society.
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We’re a country of prudes even if same sex marriage is legal and transgender people are in the mainstream. Just so the gent puts down the lid I’m okay.
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Thank you. This is exactly what I assumed.
I didn’t say it was the only reason. However, everything you wrote and what I said is called benevolent sexism. It was absolutely part of the reason. It simply boiled down to women had the reproductive capability. Whether men were economically more important at that moment, they were not capable of reproducing and securing the economic future. It all goes back to the idea that women were considered the weaker sex, that men had to do the heavy lifting, but from a practical standpoint, no one was reproducing, supporting entitlement programs or paying taxes if you are killing off the women of reproductive age.
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Seeing that Americans can’t vote until they are 18, how about doing selective service registration and voter registration at the same time/same location. Since selective service registration is already mandatory, and some federal benefits depend on doing so, voter registration would also become mandatory, de jure and de facto. Heck, make the registrars issue mandatory federal photo IDs, good for any and every election, at the same time!
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Grammar is the last refuge of the …?
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On the contrary, make it mandatory for all 18 year-olds, but combine the experience with mandatory voter registration at the same time, culminated by the issuance of a federal photo ID, most efficacious in every election.
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In a roundabout way, you validate AllieBean’s argument. And biologist E.O. Wilson, for one, would argue that our “hunter-gatherer” values are passed down to us as non-rational memes by epigenes.
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So is there a current good reason that women shouldn’t have to register for the draft now?
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Really? The question asked by the OP was, “Is there a good reason for women to be exempted from the draft?”
Not “was there.” Not historically. That question, taken along with the present day issue raised in article in question, clearly wasn’t referencing the past.
Nope. I’m against the draft in general anyway, but I personally have no problem with it in that regard.
It’s a historical question because there is no draft and hasn’t been for 45 years(see @OccamsRazor2 much more eloquently put post) . It only becomes a current question if we institute a draft. That’s highly unlikely. The politicians would be too afraid.
So the question is really should women have to register for selective service. Yes. Register everyone and register everyone to vote automatically too.
McHugh also said selective service will be decided by Congress, and he expects a “pretty emotional debate and discussion.”
Why does the Army Secretary expect a “pretty emotional debate and discussion” in 2015-6? If strong emotions are evoked and staunchly defended, then you can be sure that non-rational, traditional cultural values are threatened. What might trigger such visceral reaction to “drafting women”? I suggest that primal, existential fear about reproduction and group survival, which long predates “historical”, is still real and still within us – arguably all of us.
Is that a good reason to exempt women from the military draft? Not to me on a rational and negotiable level, which many of us wish described normal political relations. Still, I feel uneasy about women in frontline ground combat units, which may be vestigial fear for group survival. Remember, the appendix is considered just a vestigial organ, with no obvious function; yet all of us are still born with one.