Arms and the Woman

Culled from Gail Collins's column today. (I also plagiarized her clever title.)

Women in the military are going to get to serve in combat. They killed the Equal Rights Amendment to keep this from happening, but, yet, here we are. And about time.

It’s hard to remember — so many parts of recent history now seem hard to remember — but it was the specter of women under fire that did more than anything else to quash the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in the 1970s.

The biggest safety concern for women in the military is actually not so much enemy fire as sexual attacks from fellow members of their own service.