Christinne Muschi for The New York Times
Lt. Col. Shirley M. Robinson, top, was a consultant for a tribunal that integrated women into combat roles.
OTTAWA — When Sheila A. Hellstrom first joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1954, she was limited to one of three roles: nurse, dietitian or administrator. As the decades passed, she would become the first Canadian woman to reach the rank of general and the Canadian military would integrate women into combat roles.
On Thursday, Brigadier General Hellstrom, who retired a year after a human rights tribunal ordered the full integration of women in the Canadian military in 1989, said that the debate following the Pentagon’s decision to allow women into combat was both familiar and frustrating.
“People are bringing up the issues we had to deal with then,” said General Hellstrom, who is 77. “We have shown here that we can do it.”
Opening the Canadian military to women followed a protracted debate, but the questions over the suitability of women as combat troops have now all but faded from the nation’s collective memory.
“It doesn’t even enter into conversation anymore,” said Capt. Jaime Phillips, a female artillery officer who commanded not only Canadian men but male American and Afghan combat troops in Afghanistan. “It’s just so ingrained in my generation that it seems silly to hear the same old arguments again.”
Those arguments included concerns about battlefield fraternization, worries about the difficulty of providing field accommodations, and fears that male soldiers might feel compelled to protect female soldiers at the expense of military objectives. While Captain Phillips and others inside and outside of the Canadian military now view those objections as outdated and disproved, reaching that point was not an easy process.
The move to allow women into combat roles in Canada began with recommendations issued in 1970 by a government commission that conducted a sweeping examination of the place of women in Canada. The military started with a series of trials to see what combat roles were suited for women. Lt. Col. Shirley M. Robinson, a nurse in the Royal Canadian Air Force who was deputy director of women personnel at the time, said the trials were more of a stalling exercise to put off integrating women, a move that the military leadership opposed.
“Those trials should never have happened,” she said. “Women had already been out there in harm’s way.”
As the military delayed, and an internal report recommended allowing combat roles for women only in a relatively small number of helicopter squadrons, four people, three men and one woman, took advantage of Canada’s relatively new Charter of Rights and Freedoms to launch a formal challenge. The tribunal’s 1989 ruling opened all combat roles to women except for those in submarines. That restriction vanished in 2001.
Colonel Robinson, who retired from the military to consult with the tribunal before returning as a civilian consultant, said that the record since then has been largely positive. “We did not lower standards,” she said. “We put appropriate standards on every job in the armed forces. It had nothing to do with gender. A lot of men can’t meet the standards either.”
Women make up about 12 percent of the total military force but Canada’s Department of National Defense did not disclose how many of them are in combat roles. A study presented in late 2011 by Krystel Carrier-Sabourin, a doctoral student at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, found that 310 women filled combat roles in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011.
Captain Phillips, who is now an adjunct at an artillery school in New Brunswick, said that she found herself commanding soldiers from both the United States and Afghanistan.
“They were not used to it, that’s for sure,” she said of those troops. “You could tell it was a curiosity for them and they were of the mind of ‘that’s fine for you guys but it’s not our way’.” Nevertheless, Captain Phillips said that her orders were always obeyed and she was never the subject of overt hostility.
Cpl. Katie Hodges, whose time with an infantry unit in Afghanistan was partly documented for the film “Sisters in Arms,” said that it is important to note that combat roles are voluntary for both men and women in the Canadian military.
“I went because I wanted to,” she said. “I wanted to be in the exact opposite of an office job.”
During her training and once she was deployed to Afghanistan, Corporal Hodges shared sleeping accommodations with men, like all women in the infantry. The only time she experienced separate quarters, she said, was when she went down to an American military base for joint training. In the Canadian military, only showers are segregated by gender.
Corporal Hodges, who is now a military photographer stationed at a base northwest of Toronto, is among those surprised that there has been any controversy in the United States about including women in combat roles.
“It’s hard to believe that there is a such a draconian attitude,” she said. “I certainly don’t want to sound offensive but the U.S. is far behind.”
Afghanistan is also notable for another waypoint in the history of women in the Canadian military. On May 17, 2006, Capt. Nichola Goddard, an artillery officer, was in a light armored vehicle when it was hit by two rocket-propelled grenades. She was the first female member of the Canadian military to die in combat.
Her father, Tim Goddard, an educator who lives in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, said that he believes she partly joined the military because a recruiter at her high school only directed his attention to the boys.
Mr. Goddard rejected the argument that women should not be placed in combat roles to shield them from harm.
“I can assure you that a mother misses a son as much as a father grieves for a daughter,” he said. “Grief has no gender.”
Armed Forces in Canada Resolved Issue Long Ago
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