Hidden History
We saw them carve out their space with surgical precision and brute force. We were on the outside of the glass and metal school for men. They made uniforms and fitness standards. They were "Our Little Gang" without the dog. We stood to one side in our A-line skirts and beehives saying, "We wouldn't want that anyway," while we answered their phones or calculated equations elbow-to-elbow with them.
When they split atoms in a desert and again over human history, maybe then is when we said, “They need us.” Maybe then we insisted, and Congress agreed until we were in the uniforms, too. We ran alongside them. We threw our hats into graduation air.
We, with our binary boobs jutted into their space. As we learned in our kitchens, pasta, when it’s cooked to perfection, sticks if flung on a wall. So, we found our toeholds, remade ourselves in their image, emerged into their world. They liked our pliability and set us against each other: divide and conquer. We were them, in skirts.
One day, in one of our spaces, like a bathroom where we sit to pee, we looked then locked carefully made-up eyes in the mirror. We saw each other’s coded fierceness. We emerged into their world, now secret, sleeper agents, disguised as them, but becoming us. We picked up an object here, set it down there. Just a few more moves and we could shift their world, make it ours.
In the breath before the release, before the change, they gathered their forces and rolled in the tanks. Not just soldiers, but women and children too, were blown out of this life, history before our very eyes.
Then we cried out, “Isn’t there another way?” But our high voices reverberated in their echo chamber, out of range, foreign and disregarded in our unintelligible tongue of peace.
War and its trappings are inherently masculine, especially considering the absence of women from military ranks in the beginning. I believe women make our own best allies. In my 26-year military career, I eventually understood that “they” pitted women against each other as we fought for progression in “their” world. But wouldn't women joining forces using our fierce competitiveness in a space “they” don’t have access to and demolishing “the way things have always been” be the best rebellion? My short piece, “Hidden History,” thinks about how the beginning of such a movement of women in the military would likely only be torn apart by the violence of war. I’m still asking if there isn’t a better way.—MaxieJane Frazier
