Thought experiment:
Picture an American hero.
Imagine a person actively fighting for freedom. What do they look like? Where are they? What are they doing?
If you’re anything like me, you pictured a soldier on the beaches of Normandy in WWII, a pilot patrolling the Soviet border in an F-16, a Marine fighting extremism in Afghanistan, or a National Guardsman helping keep the peace at home after a natural disaster. And that person was almost certainly a man.
It would seem popular imagination can’t handle the truth about who is and can be an American hero.
More than optics in Hollywood war movies and the contents of high school history books, the question of who serves and who’s service is seen has profoundly impacted American society.
In many ways, the capacity to participate, or not, in the military has historically helped define who was viewed as a full citizen. It is no coincidence that women gained the right to vote after supporting WWI as nurses and auxiliary personnel on the homefront and the battlefront. The Civil Rights Movement followed the heroic service of many Black Americans during WWII. Gay marriage became law soon after LGBTQ+ folks were able to enlist in the military openly.
Our country seems to agree that if you are willing and able to give that last full measure of devotion to your country, you should be a full citizen with all the rights that entails. Regardless of the validity of that logic and however paradoxical, the military has often been the vanguard of societal change.
Yet the totality of societal change capable of being engendered by changes in military code is dependent on their visibility. That is, can people see who served and how they, in their individual and collective efforts, were heroic?
Despite the gains to women’s rights during WWI, women’s participation and infinite value to the military is rarely recognized to its full extent - especially when we extend our gaze back from our contemporary moment even into the recent past, let alone our origin as a nation.
But, as my guest this week on The Female Body Politic, Major General (Ret.) Jan Edmunds points out, the truth is that women have been serving their country in arms since (wo)manning the guns during the Revolutionary War. Yet their stories - her stories- are rarely included in the national imagination of what it is to be an American hero fighting for freedom with a musket or nurse’s uniform, assault rifle or welding gun, aeronautical engineering degree or Apache helicopter.
Receiving her first Army commission right out of college in 1975, Major General Edmunds is living proof of women’s heroism in the US Armed Services. She is also working to change the narrative in the hearts and minds of Americans through her work as Board Chair of The Military Women’s Memorial Foundation, a one-of-a-kind tribute to America’s Servicewomen past and present that features an education center, interactive exhibits, and a world-class collection of military women’s stories.
Major General Edmunds and I got into all this in our conversation this week, along with the DOD’s recent removal of many - and replacement of some images depicting the US Armed Forces’ diverse history and history of diversity. We also touch on Elon Musk’s role in the government both as a central figure in the aerospace and defense industry as well as his role at DOGE - since any time I get to talk to someone as smart and accomplished as Major General Edmunds, I want to ask them about everything.
Tune in and drop your thoughts below.
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