Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, opens this two-day conference on the
ways women and men experience the many aspects of war by quoting from the Iliad, "It is the
men who must see to the fighting." Today, she notes, the US Army still prohibits women from
ground combat.
Faust asserts that gender does indeed matter when it comes to war.
"War has, throughout human history, been an overwhelmingly gendered activity," she says,
"separating men and women into more sharply defined roles than almost any other cultural
activity." She charges conference participants with the task of addressing many issues
involving war and gender, including what happens when women become soldiers and war ceases
to make gender distinctions between combatants or between home front and battle front.
Faust then turns to the panel chair, Elizabeth Hillman, a former
captain in the US Air Force, and associate professor of law at Rutgers University, who
introduces each of the panelists.
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