In another conflict, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, I spent quite a lot of time as a journalist with soldiers. And one of the bright ideas I had was to interview the women who were fighting.
It took a bit of time to track them down but I found some in the Croat and Serbian forces, though not in the Bosnian army. They were presented to me with some pride by their commanders. One Croatian girl looked like Little Dorrit, but was the best sniper in her unit (she worried about the effect it would have on her later). A striking Serbian soldier said that her father had been in the military; she had sworn on his grave to take up arms. Their girlfriends were all very supportive of them.
But back then, the overwhelming majority of those in the armed forces were the males of the community. If you were of military age and not incapacitated, the expectation was you’d be in the army. It was a bit like the Second World War, when my grandmother frogmarched my uncle off to volunteer for the Marines as soon as he was 18, in case the neighbours talked.
And fast forward to our own time, and what do we find? That by law, all Ukrainian men are obliged to offer their services to the army. Not that they need obliging, most of them; there are countless accounts of Ukrainians abroad, including in the UK, returning home to fight. But the same obligation does not apply to women. It is, overwhelmingly, the men who are in the Ukrainian armed forces and the women who are on the border with the children. Though among civilians there are some very spirited grandmothers in those taking on the Russians.
Overall, there are said to be 36,000 women in the Ukrainian armed forces. Among them will be the former Miss Ukraine Anastasiia Lenna, who has, it seems, joined the army, as well as deploying social media.
The same goes for the Russians on the other side, whom I feel very sorry for, fighting in a conflict that few of them will have wanted. Their special forces are overwhelmingly male; ditto the normal infantry. And this even though in the former Soviet army there were many women decorated for courage in WWII, aka, the Great Patriotic War.
So, where does this leave feminists? They have to take on board that when push comes to shove, when it’s a matter as basic as war, it’s back to traditional gender roles, to women and children first in the lifeboats — or rather, refugees on the borders. The conflict is, in other words, returning us to the old order whereby, to misquote Charles Kingsley, men must fight and women must weep. It reflects no discredit on either sex, but that’s how it is.
The whole world has changed in terms of gender roles since the Second World War — women are the dominant sex in many areas of contemporary life in the West. Yet now, when it comes to taking up arms and laying down lives, it’s mostly men who are doing it, just like it was in the old days. And no one’s complaining.
In other news...
Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has surfaced to explain his adultery. Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, he wanted to make clear that his famous embrace, recorded last June on CCTV, with his adviser Gina Coladangelo was not actually against the law, just against the guidelines on social distancing at the time.
And their affair? “We fell in love. And that’s something that was completely outside my control,” he said. Well, no doubt falling in love is outside our control; what we do about it very much is. And what two people with spouses and children might have done is registered their mutual attraction... and left it unconsummated.
Instead, they broke two families, humiliated two spouses and upended the lives of half a dozen children. Mr Hancock resigned because he breached the guidelines which he helped formulate. But truth is that it was his affair, and that clinch, that really sealed his fate.
What do you think about male conscription in the Ukrainian army? Let us know in the comments below.
