Home/Fronts: Women and the Realities of War

Kristin Henderson is a highly respected and eloquent author, journalist, and military spouse known for her writings about military issues and military families. She is the author of While They're At War: The True Stories of American Families on the Homefront (2006). A practicing Quaker, she was born in New York City, raised in the South, and now lives in Washington, D. C. and at the duty stations where her husband is posted. She is the wife of a Navy chaplain who has served in Afghanistan and in Iraq with the Marines. She works closely with the Marine Corps' Key Volunteer Family Readiness Program, and with Compass, the Navy's spouse mentoring program.

 

Ms. Henderson, who studied broadcasting production at the University of Florida, also has published compelling cover stories in the Washington Post Magazine. The recipient of a prestigious Bread Loaf nonfiction fellowship, she has published short fiction in several literary journals and is the author of Driving By Moonlight: A Journey Through Love, War, and Infertility, a critically acclaimed memoir that chronicles her experiences when her husband was deployed to Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks, as well as her own struggles with infertility. 

 

Erin Solaro is the author of Women In the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military. A former Army Reserve Officer, she lives in Washington state with her husband, writer Philip Gold. She earned a B.A. degree in History from Indiana University and an M.A. in Diplomacy and Military Science from Norwich University. Ms. Solaro made her first journey to Iraq in the summer of 2004 and she traveled to Afghanistan in the winter of 2005. Her sobering and illuminating articles on the war, military experiences of women in the field, and military policy have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Sun, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Naval Institute Proceedings. She is the director of Aretean: A Writers Group that is comprised mostly of military writers. Her current work in progress is entitled All the Sisters and All the Brothers: Civic Feminism for the 21st Century.

 

Brenda Moore is a nationally recognized sociologist whose research and publications focus primarily on military sociology, race and ethnic relations, and gender and social stratification. An associate professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo, she earned her B.A. in Sociology from SUNY-Stony Brook, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the field from the University of Chicago.

 

A native of Long Island, New York, and former member of the United States Army, Dr. Moore is the author of To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II (1996) and of Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military During World War II (2003). She has completed research for a forthcoming book, entitled Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military During World War II. Dr. Moore enjoys a wide range of scholarly interests, and served as a contributor to the edited book, African Americans and the Rise of the Post Industrial City, writing a chapter on the class status of Blacks in Buffalo.

 

President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Moore in 1994 to the American Battle Monuments Commission, the entity charged with commemorating the U.S. Armed Forces in the locations where they have served since 6 April 1917. In addition, she is a Presidential appointee to the Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, and has testified before Congress on race and military-related issues. She served as an Equal Opportunity Specialist with the U. S. Department of the Army from September 1973 through January 1979. A member of the Women's Army Corps Veterans Association, she is the associate editor of Armed Forces and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

 

Megan Smith is a former U.S. Army Corporal who was deployed during Operation Enduring Freedom to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2004-2005.  She acted as a non-commissioned officer in charge of a military police team and housing.  Ms. Smith has also served in the U.S. Army Reserves, and is currently a Security Officer with the Department of Homeland Security, and a Port Security Specialist Third Class with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves where her duties include safeguarding vital and critical ports of entry and commerce.  She has been awarded numerous medals, including the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Armed Forces Reserve Medal with Mobilization Device, National Defense Service Ribbon, and Army Good Conduct Medal.

 

Lisa Thomas-Prowell, '97, currently resides in Arlington, Texas with her husband and two children.  At Mount Holyoke College, she majored in Psychology with a self-designed minor of the Social Roles of U.S. Minorities, completed two independent studies with Dr. Sherry Turner, and served as President of the Psychology Club. Her husband, Kerry, is an active duty Major in the U.S. Army Acquisition Corps.  His twelve years of service with the Army have included a three year assignment in Germany that included a six month deployment to Bosnia, communications and electronics officer for the 204th Forward Support Battalion of the 4th Infantry Division, company commander in the 13th Signal Battalion of the 1st Calvary Division, as well as a Test and Evaluation Officer with the U.S. Army Operational Test Command.  During her husband's tenure as a company commander, Ms. Thomas-Prowell led the Company's Family Readiness Group, which offered support to the 248 soldiers and their family members. She completed her Master of Science coursework in Counseling Psychology in August 2005 at Tarleton State University, where she also was a member of Psi Chi. Part of her core requirements for this degree included a two-semester internship with the U.S. Army Family Life Chaplain's Training Center at Fort Hood, Texas. There, she conducted individual, marriage, and family counseling with military members and their families. The Center was designed to equip Military Family Life Chaplains to counsel, as well as, train future chaplains in counseling skills.

 

Civil Rites: Family, Partnerships, and Same-Sex Unions

 

Katherine Arnup has been hailed as one of Canada's most respected scholars on same-sex marriage. A historian at Carleton University in Ottawa, her research and writing have focused on the history of the family and on lesbian and gay relationships. She has published widely on the history of motherhood, marriage and the family, and on child rearing. At Carleton, she also serves as Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her published works include Lesbian Parenting: Living with Pride and Prejudice, and the prize-winning book, Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth Century Canada, a study of the ideology and experience of motherhood, as well as numerous articles on lesbian and gay parenting. One of her two current research and writing projects is a comparative study of same-sex marriage in the United States and Canada.

 

Mary Hunt is an established scholar, lesbian feminist theologian, and co-founder and co-director of W.A.T.E.R., the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual. Based in Silver Spring, Maryland, the LGBT-friendly organization offers a diverse range of programs, projects and publications on feminist issues in religion. Dr. Hunt earned her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union and has earned M.A. degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. Her writings have appeared in major scholarly journals and anthologies such as Catholicism and Sexual Diversity edited by Patricia Beattie Jung, and she also is the author of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (Crossroad, 1991), a book in which she proposes that the most adequate relational paradigm for adults is not marriage, but friendship. She currently serves on the national board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion, is an LGBT Religious Archives Network advisory board member, and member of CLOUT (Christian Lesbians Out) and of Dignity.

 

Pedro Julio Serrano is with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a respected leader in the Latino LGBT movement who, in 1998, became the first openly gay political candidate in the history of Puerto Rico to run for office. He previously served as coordinator for Voices of Equality for Freedom to Marry, and as the political and media director for the Human Rights Foundation in Puerto Rico. He is co-chair of the National Latina/o Coalition for Justice which advocates for gay marriage, and founded the social justice organization Puerto Rico Para Todas (Puerto Rico for All).  He is a steering committee member of Unidas, an effort to construct a new national Latina/o LGBT voice.

 

Nancy Whittier, an associate professor of sociology at Smith College, focuses on the contributions of social movements to changes in public policy and culture, the construction of collective identity in social movements, connections between cultural and institutional social change, and transformations in feminism over the past 30 years.  She earned a BA in Women's Studies and a PhD. in Sociology from Ohio State University. Her areas of interest focus on the sociology of gender, social movements, and women's movements. Professor Whittier's forthcoming and recent publications include The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Feminism, Social Movements, And The Therapeutic State (2008), and Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement (1995), which examines questions of political generations among feminists and lesbian feminists, and the development of the U.S. radical feminist and lesbian feminist movements from the 1960s to the 1990s. She is co-editor of Feminist Frontiers, an anthology in the sociology of gender, and of Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State, which focuses on new directions in social movement theory.