BETHLEHEM, PA. —

When Jenny Pacanowski took the floor, she stood tall, looked straight into the crowd and told her story just like this: When she — a former combat medic in Iraq — goes to veterans’ events, she gets “that crossover handshake.”

“You know the one, right?” she said. “When some guy reaches right over me to shake hands with a nearby guy. ‘Thank you for your service,’ they say to the man next to me!”

“Even though I’m the Iraq War veteran,” she said, her voice rising almost like a preacher’s. “I’m the one who drove a military ambulance through the Sunni Triangle.”

She grew so frustrated that she had “Combat Veteran” tattooed on her right forearm. “I shoulda got it tattooed on my forehead,” she told a group of female veterans gathered in a creaky farmhouse in this old steel town.

Pacanowski, a poet and writing coach, is part of a growing national movement to bring the unvarnished experiences of women who have served into mainstream popular culture. As a result, more female veterans are attending memoir-writing retreats, learning new storytelling skills at workshops for stand-up comedy, screenwriting and improv, and performing in poetry slams and plays.

Pacanowski's workshop takes place about once a month, with several women huddled with notebooks and laptops near a crackling fire while her puppy naps atop blankets. Books filled with Vietnam War-era poetry are strewn across a table.

Wars are remembered with monuments and memorials, but also through the words of the people who fought them. Yet the most famous books, films and television shows about war are about men. Think “Platoon” and “Band of Brothers” and reading-list classics such as “The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Things They Carried.”

Women have served in every American conflict dating back to the Revolution. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, female units first known as “Team Lioness” and later called Female Engagement Teams were able to search and connect with women in areas where it was largely taboo for unrelated members of the opposite sex to touch.

Under pressure to acknowledge that female service members were often already in combat, the Pentagon officially opened all jobs to women in 2015. Women are now the fastest-growing group in the military, and there are nearly 2 million female veterans in the country.

Yet when Americans think about war, they still typically think of men, said Peter Molin, a retired Army infantry officer who deployed to Afghanistan and now teaches writing at Rutgers University.

“It’s definitely an entrenched male tradition in the country’s popular mind. And it’s just wrong because it hides their outstanding contributions,” Molin said.