Women in the Military
sued the US Department of Defense to challenge the ban on women in US
military combat positions. The case never went to court because after a three-
year study, US military leaders agreed to open all positions to women if they
met the same standards as men. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said at
a press conference in December 2015, “Fully integrating women into all military
positions will make the US armed forces better and stronger but there will be
problems to fix and challenges to overcome.” Yet American women such as
Mary Jennings, Deborah Sampson, and Sarah Rosetta Wakeman have been in
combat roles. They have served unofficially and even by deception for nearly
250 years.
DEBORAH SAMPSON AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR (1775–1783)
Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a
man to fight with the Continental Army in
the Revolutionary War in the late eighteenth
century. She served under the name Robert
Shurtleff.
Deborah Sampson was about 5 feet 8 inches tall (1.7 m), very tall for a woman
of her time and taller than many men. Sampson was looking for adventure. In
1782, when she was twenty-two, she sewed a man’s suit of clothes and enlisted
in the Continental Army under the
name Robert Shurtleff. She joined
the elite Light Infantry Company of
the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. As
historian Don Higginbotham wrote,
Sampson used, “artful concealment of
her sex,” to keep her gender a secret.
“Her fellow soldiers simply thought
young Robert Shurtleff to be a young
whiskerless lad in his late teens.”
For her first duty, Sampson
went to New York to scout the buildup
of British soldiers in Manhattan.
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