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I think it's less being old fashioned and more the idea of what we think gender roles should be or indeed are. While there is doubtlessly an advantage in terms

I think it's less being old fashioned and more the idea of what we think gender roles should be or indeed are. While there is doubtlessly an advantage in terms of efficiency in men fighting wars, due solely to physical strength (as far as I understand it), we get gender roles being an issue as soon as we start saying that women need to be protected and shielded - see for instance the degree to which we speak of "women and children" - to many, although they might not want to admit it consciously, they fit very snugly into a category together as something vulnerable. The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children or doing housework - to me this reads simply as another manifestation of what feminists since the 60s at the latest have been arguing against - the separation of women into the private sphere of life. There isn't much reason I can see why that should be further carried over to the matter of war. In the end, I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I must admit they are almost entirely ideological ones, based on new rationalizations of ancient ideas of 'the fair sex' and influenced by modern attitudes towards masculinity and femininity. There are two good papers on the topic of women and conscription and their actual experiences in places where it's practiced (e.g Israel): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538 https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1132&context=king https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refer... (see section V, "Analysis" on whether women are "different" enough to be exempt from conscription).

curun1r 8y ago
> The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children From a survival standpoint, it's not about raising the children but creating the children. Men went to war and the ones that came back fathered all the children of the next generation. Even heavy losses in battles wouldn't really affect the ability to grow the tribe's population that much. And the fathers of that new generation would be the strongest and most able to survive combat. A good example of this is Paraguay, which lost about 70% of its male population back in the 19th century in a war with its neighbors. But the population recovered in the course of 1-2 generations because the women mostly survived. But in militaries that aren't going to experience the kind of staggering losses that Paraguay's forces did and in societies that have no shortage of population like ours does, the policy of sending only men to war makes less sense.

curun1r 8y ago

> The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children From a survival standpoint, it's not about raising the children but creating the children. Men went to war and the ones that came back fathered all the children of the next generation. Even heavy losses in battles wouldn't really affect the ability to grow the tribe's population that much. And the fathers of that new generation would be the strongest and most able to survive combat. A good example of this is Paraguay, which lost about 70% of its male population back in the 19th century in a war with its neighbors. But the population recovered in the course of 1-2 generations because the women mostly survived. But in militaries that aren't going to experience the kind of staggering losses that Paraguay's forces did and in societies that have no shortage of population like ours does, the policy of sending only men to war makes less sense.