Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 6, 1976. First women at Anapolis.: The first women to do so entered the United States Naval Academy. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II began a "Bicentennial tour" of se...
We ran this a few days ago.
And now we see this article:
It's no secret that Pete Hegseth is hostile to women in combat (one of the very few things I agree with Pete about), but that's not the same thing as not noting this milestone, which is pretty darned close to saying that women don't have a place in the Navy.
Well, actually, it's exactly the same thing as saying women don't have a place in the Navy.
Women have been in the Navy since March 21, 1917, as we noted on the anniversary of that occurrence:
Incorporating women into the Navy has been sort of a peculiar problem in some ways, and those ways are heavily biological, although honesty compels us to note that it's not as problematic now as it once was, or would be suspected as being.
Approximately 75% of all sailors are assigned to sea-intensive ratings rather than shore duty ones. Only about 19% to 20% of the active fleet is deployed or underway at any one time, however. About 20% of the Navy's manpower if female, with that figure applying to both the enlisted and officers. There are instances you can find of ships that end up with a problematic number of female sailors pregnant, but on average only 0.7% to 1.5% of a female crew find that to be the case.
Not that there are not problems.* Having young men and young women in that level of close proximity is going to cause problems. Again, I'm not in favor of women in combat and while I don't think of the Navy all that much, about any ship at sea can be a combat vessel in some fashion.
The Navy changed its billeting policy in 2024 in order to allow pregnant female sailors to find land billets more easily than it had previously, so the Navy, in pre Hegseth Department of Defense it was moving towards being more accomodating.
So what's going on here?
I don't know, but it's part of a sub silentio drift in the DoD. If the Hegseth run DoD just wants women out, or out of some roles, it can move in that directly openly. Instead, it's been sort of just being hostile to them, of which this is one example.
And its not just female sailors, or servicemembers. It's being silently hostile to minorities as well. People who normally would have been promoted to senior positions are not being if they're women, or black, etc. A portrait of a legendary senior black Air Force officer was removed from display without explanation.
Without explanation, it has the appearance of a harassment campaign to quietly discourage women and blacks from joining the service.
And I have to wonder, to some degree, if the DoD is trying to make it through November before it takes a formal step of eliminating women from all combat roles. It can't eliminate blacks from the service, of course, but it's also allowing Evangelical Protestant campaigning in the service, which is hostile to various religions, including various Christian religions. At some point that has the effect of telling Catholic Hispanics and African Methodist blacks maybe they aren't welcome, or at least that they don't want to hang around with a bunch of troops who look and act like Confederate Partisan Rangers.
Or maybe it's not that extreme. Be that as it may, the treatment of women in this fashion is hard to ignore.
Footnotes
*In recent years the bigger problem has been with the Department of the Navy's female Marines, who had to be expressly told to wear shirts while doing PT overseas. Their omission of shirts clearly wasn't because it was just hot where they were.
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