Women soldiers in a transcultural perspective

Womensoldiers are present in many different countries all around the world.The paper deals with the vexata quaestio about women integration in military forces. To explain the trend leading to the entry of female personnel within armed forces an interdisciplinary viewpoint is unavoidable, since the topic itself calls for more than a single-discipline approach. To a certain extent, a Durkheimian view is followed in this paper, considering that on the one side many human sciences can apply to the topic of female participation in military affairs, and that on the other side an overall sociological outlook can give the necessary unifying vision to it. Among the disciplines actually having something to say about this topic, sociology, history, political economy, psychology, cultural anthropology, juridical science, gender studies, organizational science, political science are involved to a minor or major extent, and it would be a nonsense to give here a review of existing contributions in each discipline to the study of our topic. On the contrary, several disciplines outcomes are employed by many scholars dealing with the issue of women and the military, and this is evident when analyzing some major contribution to the topic. It is evident, in facts, that when trying to say something more than a mere description of the phenomenon and its various trends, factors and concepts from all the above mentioned disciplines are inevitably recalled. This last statement is cleared up in the paper by means of the use of some theoretical models created and proposed by different scholars, either for the specific topic of women position in the military either for general societal change process; these models are progressively interconnected in order to reach a general theoretical explanation of the variety and diversity characterizing the process of women and armed forces relationships.