By Mark Lawson (THE GUARDIAN, 12/05/06):
Three years into an unpopular war, it's unusual for a single military casualty to make a front-page splash, but the death this week of a flight lieutenant has gained the headlines. This was because Flight Lieutenant Sarah-Jayne Mulvihill was, as the editorial emphasis stressed, the first British woman soldier to die in action in Iraq.This sudden feminine or feminist perspective recalled the recent murder in Bradford of Sharon Beshenivsky, which was reported at a level far beyond the attention given to the numerous male officers killed on duty. Sky News even provided live coverage of her funeral.
On both occasions there seems to have been an assumption that it is more tragic for a woman than a man to die, even when both have knowingly signed up for a potentially fatal profession. So the coverage of PC Beshenivsky and Flt Lt Mulvihill suggests a culture struggling with the idea of equality, an ideal in which the two women presumably believed and can now be seen to have died for.
Yet the concept of equal military opportunities is complicated. Women in the British forces are still kept from forward combat positions (this week's casualty was on the downed helicopter as an observer) and are eligible for only around three-quarters of posts in the army and navy. In America, there is a more level battlefield: statistics show that 11 military women suffered "hostile deaths" between 1980 and 1999.
The arguments against treating female fighters equally can be arranged, though with occasional overlap, into three ranks: bigoted, biological, operational.
Under the heading of prejudice come those who believe that women cannot fight or, more benevolently, that they shouldn't - an extension of the old convention that women and infants left blazing buildings first. But such sentimental protection is hardly relevant to those who sign up to serve, although - given that John Reid, when defence minister, admitted that sexual harassment was a serious problem among UK troops - there seems to be a regrettable question over whether men are yet equal to serving with women.
The biological objections are that there is a disparity in strength - although this prejudice is increasingly questioned in, for example, tennis and athletics - and, more subtly, that women are less dispensable than men: the view presumably underlying headlines weeping disproportionately for the female dead. In the case particularly of PC Beshenivsky - who had three children - there seems to be a perception that it is worse for a mother to die than a father and that, by extension, it might be reckless for them to take the risk.
This instinct is not entirely social conditioning or historical tradition. Outside of masculinist lobby groups, most fathers know in their hearts that, if a putative gunman burst into the family home and announced that he would murder one parent, they should probably let the children have their mother. Pregnancy, parturition and nutrition are, perhaps, finally a deeper bond than fertilisation, although preventing women from joining the army on this basis is no more tenable than refusing to let mothers drive cars in case they crash.
The operational considerations are probably the most interesting. Some army top brass argue that officers would be less willing to order ladies into danger or to leave them wounded on the field of war. There is also an unspoken suggestion that battalions might spend the nights shagging each other senseless while the enemy marches across unguarded borders.
Recent events in John Prescott's office and various City law firms make clear that new issues of discipline do arise in mixed working environments, but police forces have found a way of officers living and dying together and a modern army will simply have to follow.
But, while some of those highlighting Flt Lt Mulvihill's tragedy may do so because of sexism or sentimentality, the publicity given to her death is also driven by what might be called the Vietnam or Belfast factor: the process by which military deaths become ordinary to the public and the media.
However hard we try to know everyone for whom the bell tolls, the corpses in a sustained war soon blur into a crowd, mentioned only if they represent some special terror. In a few months, most civilians struggle to name any soldier killed in Iraq, but will perhaps retain a vague memory of Corporal Gordon Pritchard (the 100th to die), Fusilier Gordon Gentle (whose family condemned Tony Blair) or, now, Flt Lt Mulvihill.
Both Corporal Pritchard's and Fusilier Gentle's deaths were taken up by opponents of the war and this may also be the motivation for some of the space given to the first female tragedy: now Blair is killing women. But this position is completely illogical, especially for liberals.
The death of a woman in combat is the ultimate test of whether we really want or have achieved an equal society. Flt Lt Mulvihill's sacrifice is either heroic or futile, depending on perspective, but it does not become more or less so because of her gender.