And there is a lesson that this issue has taught: The higher a woman aspires in the leadership pyramid, be it military or civilian, the greater the sacrifices she must make in her personal life. This dilemma no doubt stems from the traditional paradigm of a single working spouse in a family. If a woman sought to advance higher in her field, she was often on her own. Fortunately, as we enter the Information Age in which work is being radically redefined, and workplace policies are becoming more family-friendly, the formerly rigid choice between family and professional achievement is resolving.
In the Army today, this situation is still quite dynamic. But change is moving in a positive direction. For example, in 1969 when I entered the Army, less than 1 percent of all lieutenants who were commissioned were women. Today, 19 percent are women. When I was commissioned, less than one third of all enlisted soldiers were married; today, more than two thirds are married. Almost 15 percent of the Army's officer corps are women. For the past twenty years, the Army has been energetically responding to this cultural change by introducing such programs as Army Family Team Building and Army Family Action Plan (a comprehensive plan to improve life for soldiers and family members of all ages). The Army Joint Domicile Program is a fledgling effort to keep married Army couples assigned within fifty miles of each other.
But when I was a young captain, none of these programs existed, nor was there support for such an effort. As with other officers, the Army required that I move frequently. Even though I was assigned a stable three-year tour of duty after my year in Korea, like all married military couples we could only look forward to a continual pattern of disruption and displacement that would preclude my husband from finding any meaningful professional work. In other words, from the beginning of our marriage, our situation would require him to play down his ambition and take lesser jobs, just as similar conditions had imposed themselves on countless Army wives over the years. For that reason, those wives who did choose to work concentrated on the most portable professions and skills—nursing, teaching, and secretarial work. But even if an Army wife were teaching, and she had her own children in school, her husband might be abruptly reassigned, and she and the family would be expected to follow him dutifully to the new post. Leaving Fort McClellan for Arizona in August 1975, I was aware that I was embarking on a difficult journey that would challenge the romance of a young marriage with the unyielding realities of our situation.
As I noted, however, more than twenty-five years later, the prospects for military women having both a successful career and a civilian (or a military) husband seem better. This is due in part to the sheer increase in the numbers of married military women and is also partially due to the evolution in our attitudes about “men's” work. With the Information Age, a small but increasing number of men have chosen to remain at home where they can combine telecommuting over the Internet—anything from day trading to managerial consulting to scientific research—with child care. This frees their wives to assume full- or part-time positions in the traditional corporate workplace. Because there is slightly less pressure on men to take the dominant career path than there was in the 1970s, there is more flexibility in the possible combinations of work patterns married couples can devise, so that both partners can pursue satisfying careers. Just as the spread of e-commerce has allowed a growing number of men to leave traditional corporate life for self-employed consulting, where they can work at home and become better domestic partners with their wives, many women professionals have chosen flextime work arrangements that allow them more hours each hectic week with their husbands and families.
Unfortunately, the plugged-in professionals who can profit from the Information Age still represent just a small minority of the executive workforce from which America's civilian leadership is selected. Today, any woman or man who chooses to remain physically remote from the power center in order to devote more time to their marriage and family is virtually excluded from the company's rapid promotion consideration. Loyalty to the organization—as opposed to one's family—is still seen as an indispensable virtue; a senior leader, whether woman or man, is expected to be available to devote her- or himself unequivocally to the company when called upon, just as military officers were and are required to go where they are ordered.
As Suzanne Braun Levine has insightfully written in her recent book
Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First,
the “second half” of the feminist revolution never happened; women went into the workplace, but men did not become equal partners at home. In an interview with columnist Judy Mann, Levine cited data on the “insidious forces” that are aligned against men who try to break the traditional mold—simply by leaving work on time, by requesting their legal paternity leave, even by playing with their kids in the park on a weekday morning when people think they should be at work. The message is clear: Real men don't act like women. And that message doesn't come just from the boardroom. Levine found widespread impatience with surrendering control to their husbands among working women who had perfected the difficult task of managing both a job and a household. She found that these women had struggled so hard without the man's help that they were sometimes loath to tolerate his inefficient attempts at doing laundry, shopping, or cooking when he finally did decide to leave work at a decent hour and become less of a stranger to his wife and kids.
Perhaps some of the resistance that Levine has documented in her admirably frank book stems from the fact the women recognize that men are still elevated to positions of leadership far more often than women simply due to their gender. And the fact remains: It is still difficult if not impossible for a married woman to rise to the very top of her profession while devoting the time and emotional energy required to nurture a fulfilling marriage with children. But this is not the time for pessimism; it is the time for creative solutions to how we structure our lives at work and at home. I firmly believe that finding these solutions is not just the responsibility of individual men and women, but rather should be shared by their employers' policymakers. The 1993 Family Medical Leave Act set the national stage for a sweeping cultural movement that continues to improve the lives of American children and families. Subsequent government and private sector programs, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and First Star, a civil rights foundation for children created by film producer Peter Samuelson, are two such efforts.
If women are ever going to assume positions of leadership in more than just token numbers, the private sector will simply have to make work more accommodating to families. Flextime is certainly a good beginning, so are shared partnerships in which two professionals can spend part of each week at home and part at their firm. In that way, they retain their professional identity while their children are young and are ready to move on to higher leadership challenges when the children have flown the nest. Quality child care in the right location—near or at work, or near home—is of vital importance as well.
But such successful experiments are not yet widespread. I hope that the younger generation reaching high executive levels in the private sector and senior command in the military will remember the conflict inherent to the role of being a successful professional woman who is also a wife and a mother when these executives themselves make important decisions. Men who have already accepted household responsibilities will have no trouble remembering.
Yet many men military officers and civilian professionals
appear
to integrate successful careers and marriage with ease. In virtually every one of these success stories, it has been the wife who has dutifully performed her traditional supporting role, subordinating whatever ambitions she might have had for the good of the marriage and the family. But times are changing.
Army personnel managers, for example, now recognize the need for greater stability in the lives of couples in which one spouse is in the military and one is a civilian. The Cold War is over; the Army itself is much smaller, and the number of possible permanent assignment locations has been greatly reduced so that it is somewhat more likely that a dual-career couple can establish a quasi-permanent home base for the family. Army couples are buying permanent homes in communities near posts where their branches have large contingents and they can anticipate frequent assignments. If the husband is the soldier, he can expect to rotate back to that post throughout his career, so that his civilian wife can pursue her profession in the area. Deployments create a new source of instability.
For women soldiers, either NCOs or officers, married to civilians, the balancing act between the Army's need for mobility and their husband's professional requirement for stability still presents a dilemma. If she wants to be on the promotion fast track, she must take reassignments as frequently as they come, no matter how inconvenient. The alternative is to remain on what we call the “due course” promotion track. These people are certainly not plodders, but it's well established that they will never rise to the very top. One way to stay in the middle of the pack is to be unwilling to move whenever and wherever the Army dictates—often because of the inconvenience this imposes on family life. The trade-off for less family disruption has been and remains less career success.
An old Army joke is a case in point. An officer complains that a reassignment poses a dramatic upheaval in the life of his high school senior son. His assignments officer replies without sympathy, “If the Army had meant for you to have a high school senior, we'd have issued you one.” As humor often does, this joke reflects an underlying reality. There was a cultural maxim in the Army until the time of the post-Cold War force reductions and the emphasis on retention of highly qualified officers and NCOs: Go where your duty sends you no matter the personal cost. Now the Army and other services are making a real effort to accommodate their career management to a more stable family life.
Another significant factor is the growing number of men officers who have civilian wives whose careers demand greater stability. The Army wants to retain its best officers, especially combat leaders and those trained in technical fields who could earn double or triple their military pay in today's booming civilian economy. So the service is proving to be more flexible in trying to help married officers weave together the competing aspects of their personal and professional lives.
There remains the controversial issue of Army captains leaving in ostensibly high numbers. The year 2000 retention rate for captains was allegedly at a record low since the dramatic Army downsizing of the 1990s. Captains were said to be leaving the Army because they had been deployed overseas too frequently on peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations and their family life consequently suffered. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been over forty Army deployments for the full spectrum of military operations, including combat, peacekeeping, and humanitarian efforts. Soldiers have been involved in almost every one, from Mogadishu, to Bosnia, to Haiti, to Kosovo. Often these soldiers were sent from their home posts in the States as individual “augmentees” to serve for six months or more with a unit deployed at an overseas trouble spot. Some of these soldiers completed their overseas assignments away from their families and returned to the United States only to find their home units deployed on another peacekeeping or humanitarian operation.
Without doubt, this pattern of repeated unaccompanied overseas assignments negatively affected family life. And many soldiers found their careers disrupted when they could not train in their specialties or attend courses needed for professional advancement.
The Army worked hard to rectify the problem, principally by drawing on the reserve component (Army Reserve and the Army National Guard). As these Reserve and Guard units assume increasing responsibility, the burden on the Active Army and its individual soldiers has been somewhat relieved.
I personally do not believe that the repeated deployments of the 1990s were the principal cause for junior officer attrition. Young captains who were already ambivalent about an Army career would have found the deployments a convenient pretext for resigning. On the other hand, some of these very captains might have discovered much deeper meaning in their profession during their operational duty overseas, and in the process strengthened their commitment to an Army career. It is more than likely, I believe, that many of the captains the Army lost in the 1990s would have resigned a few years later as majors. Conversely, the more deeply committed captains who have honed their leadership skills in the often frustrating operational conditions of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo will make committed and experienced majors and lieutenant colonels.
Interestingly enough, the “record” attrition of Army captains in the year 2000 may have been a politically motivated fantasy. The facts reveal a different story, which has not been publicized. In 2000, 12.5 percent of Army captains did resign, undoubtedly a high figure. But that figure is misleading because, for the past eighteen months, the total pool of Army captains has expanded and now includes first lieutenants who were promoted six months earlier than in the past. In reality, the attrition rate for both lieutenants and captains taken together has remained stable. But few Americans will learn the complete and accurate story.
One of the first challenges I faced was entering Military Intelligence as a former WAC captain with seven years' service who knew virtually nothing about my new branch. Some of my male peers at the MIOAC at Fort Huachuca had completed the MI Basic Course as lieutenants and had served in the branch since then. There were about sixty of us in Class 76-AA-1, all captains. Six of us were women, three of whom were married. With the exception of Carol Martini and Katie Van Tilburg, who'd had some MI background, the other women in the course knew as little about Military Intelligence as I did. The Army expected us to catch up quickly in our professional knowledge. Traditionally, any junior officer changing branches between the Basic and Advance Course did the required remedial work individually. And the Army didn't provide supplemental training for women entering MI or any other branch from the WAC in 1975.