On pilots, I’d agree that the need for physical strength meant that only a minority of women might have been suitable in WWII. But Britain had a small but significant number of experienced female pilots such as Amy Johnson. Despite the urgent need for pilots during the Battle of Britain, they were assigned jobs as ferry pilots while inexperienced men were sent on combat missions. You could argue that Johnson was too famous to risk losing in combat (although she died in a plane crash anyway) but the same goes for Charles Lindbergh, who was given much more responsibility by the USAAF (and his performance in combat proved that experience in long distance flights easily transferred to being handy in a dogfight).

I’m not really assuming anything here, I’m just suggesting lots of possibilities. You’re welcome to suggest more.

It occurs to me that hunter-gatherers are rarely in any position to assign roles to anyone – least of all to someone capable of taking to the field of battle. They are in no position to force anyone not to fight – and certainly cannot force them to fight. It might be better to look to the advantages to be gained by an individual who chooses to fight, bearing in mind the risks involved.

Another possibility is that the need to preserve patriarchy in general overrode the need to win particular wars.

If they were all that concerned, you might have at least expected them to ban women from the throne. Remember Queen Elizabeth?

To defeat WW1 Germany, the British state made enormous sacrifices of money, power and, of course, blood. Great campaigns raged across the Continent. To defeat the suffragettes, they could hardly be bothered to launch a press campaign.

These comparisons, and others, suggest that any such perceived need was slight, compared to the perceived need to win wars.

This should not be a surprise as, historically, those societies that did not put victory first, soon ended up without the power to put anything first.

But I wonder if anyone actually did these kinds of calculations.

They probably did not. But they met men and women every day, which should give a pretty good idea of their strengths and weaknesses. (Although what people say is true, what they believe they believe is true, and what they actually believe to be true, are not always the same.)

And I would still like to know if Goldstein’s figures include comparisons of man and women who are old, sick or otherwise ineligible for combat even in 1918. Because if he did not say he excluded them, I have no reason to believe he did.

Incidentally, note that second guessing the decisions of people distant in time and space, and assuming that in case of disagreement it must be them that made the mistake, is a little dangerous. To take your comment about WWII pilots: in those days the flight surfaces were still moved by the pilots muscles (via metal wires), NOT by a mechanism under his command. So the physical strength of the pilot certainly was an issue, especially in combat where small disadvantages were lethal.

This is why I assume that the people on the spot know better than me. They might be wrong, but the fact that I think differently, does not prove me right.

Another possibility is that the need to preserve patriarchy in general overrode the need to win particular wars. The people for whom winning a war is good are the governments of states, and therefore likely to be mainly men (even more so in the past than in the present). Maybe they calculated that the small advantage they might get by recruiting women was outweighed by the potential threat to the established order by calling into question the assumption that men were superior and women inferior.

But I wonder if anyone actually did these kinds of calculations. In early-modern England it was just assumed that women were “the weaker vessel”. Nobody had, needed, or wanted empirical data about average size and strength to support that assumption. I think there’s a lot more work to be done on the tyranny of averages. Is it something built into people’s brains? Treating individuals according to group averages seems to be a powerful thing even when people probably hadn’t scientifically quantified those averages.

Also we should consider the possibility that there are different reasons for women’s exclusion from combat at different times and in different places. There’s certainly a lot more work to be done in this area. Goldstein has started something that one book couldn’t possibly finish, so there are lots of opportunities for new research here.

The idea that everyones war effort has been dominated by gender ideology, to the detriment of that war effort, implies that any good honest cynic, more interested in his own conquests than his societies “gender ideology”, would have gained a distinct advantage over the neighbours. And if this ever happened, it would tend to spread, as other powers would be compelled to follow suit.

Any ideology that is actually put into practice has to survive contact with the real world. And if it spreads world-wide, and lasts for thousands of years, it has to work very well. But doing something that almost always works, might as well be called pragmatism.

Of course, if circumstances change, it may stop working so well. And then even pragmatists will take some time to realise.

It’s also important to remember that the size and strength statistics mainly affect infantry. Things are very different for pilots. Goldstein points out that small people make better pilots. Their heads are closer to their hearts, which means they can withstand g-force better without passing out, and aircraft manufacturers prefer designing small cockpits because they allow better aerodynamics. In the Second World War the RAF refused to allow experienced pilots like Amy Johnson to fly combat missions. That’s got to be ideological.

I don’t like to assume that there’s a good reason for anything unless I actually know what that reason is. Gender ideology relies on assumptions that there must be a good reason why women are treated worse than men. Even if there is a good reason, you have to ask: who is it good for?