In the United States, women’s wartime contributions were largely forgotten after the war, but not without a certain amount of quiet debate. Their military service was intended to be temporary. In 1948, the year that women were first accepted as regular members of the armed forces, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower testified before the House Armed Services Committee that he was initially “horror struck” by the idea of women in the military but changed his mind after he saw them in action. During the war, Gen. George C. Marshall commissioned a study to measure the effectiveness of mixed-gender combat units. He and his staff were stunned by the finding that they performed better than all-male units. As the historian D’Ann Campbell discovered in 1993, the study was buried, because the general staff was concerned that the American public and Congresswere opposed to expanding women’s roles in the armed forces. This debate had nothing to do with what women were capable of, let alone what they wanted. It was a matter of men being bothered by changing roles, Rendell observed. “When women were brought in to do jobs traditionally done by men, men had a big problem with it. It affected their own sense of what masculinity was.”

The museum doesn’t take positions on current debates, Rendell said; even so, it’s impossible to not see parallels with contemporary issues. When I joined the military in 2009, ground combat jobs were still closed to women by Department of Defense policy. But the sprawling post-9/11 conflicts had no definite front lines and no end in sight, and operational realities led commanders to exploit every loophole possible to deploy women in combat roles, even if it wasn’t reflected in their official job titles. I spent three years in a special-operations unit whose primary mission was to deploy alongside Navy SEALs and Green Berets. Women’s presence was seen as a necessary inconvenience: These units needed intelligence, medical and logistical support, and often the best person for the job was female. In some cases, women were specifically recruited in order to work with the local population. In the United States’ war efforts, special operations have been gender-integrated from their beginnings under the direction of the secretive Office of Strategic Services during World War II. When all roles were officially opened to women, in 2016, it was a case of policy formally recognizing what had been practiced for decades. The commander of United States Special Operations Command at the time, Gen. Joseph Votel, released a video message supporting the policy, citing the role of women in World War II.