PERSPECTIVE ON THE GULF WAR : Mothers of Babies, Not Battles : It’s a perversion of the chivalric ideal to have women in combat. The next generation will pay a steep price.

There was a poignant photograph published in the world’s press last November of an Army reservist, Ruth Monk of Kalispell, Mont., weeping as she bade farewell to her 3-month-old baby before joining her comrades to be sent to the Gulf. One British newspaper captioned this “Mother Courage.” Another reaction might be “Mother Wanting in Wisdom.”

What on earth is a woman--a mother--doing leaving her infant so as to serve as a soldier in the first place? It seems an entirely inappropriate choice, and it is not good enough to say, as modern society often does, that such choices are personal and private. When a child is neglected or abused, it is rightly considered a matter for public intervention. Depriving a tiny baby, who so desperately needs those early months of close bonding, of its mother in this way is a barbaric idea. Why applaud it?

In another report during the autumn buildup to the Gulf War, we were shown a woman soldier saying goodby to her 9-year-old son. “But what if you die, Mom?” the boy asked. Putting on a brave face, the mother replied: “Well, son, if I die, I die.” But she confessed that she wept all the way to the base, just the same. Then she darn well shouldn’t have gone!

It was inevitable with the participation of women allied soldiers in the Gulf War that a woman would be captured by the enemy, just as, I suppose, we must accept the doleful probability that some women in uniform will be killed. The assurance by the Iraqis that women prisoners of war “will be treated in accordance with Islamic law and customs” may be more cause for alarm than consolation. Will such women be made to don the chador? Accept that the punishment for adultery is death by stoning? That Western women will be treated according to sharia, Islamic law, highlights all too starkly the cultural differences with the West in this as in so many other matters.

Indeed, it seems to me that by sending women into the Gulf conflict as soldiers in the first place, we have betrayed one of the most elemental and civilizing ideas of Western, and Christian, culture--the chivalric ideal that women and children should be protected by the more brutish male, that women should be respected as higher human beings, morally, than the common run of men.

The basic male chauvinist thinking is often biological. Males as animals are bigger and stronger and, in any contest of strength or violence, the stronger and bigger animal triumphs. But Western Christian chivalry reversed that “natural” male chauvinism by insisting on the paradox that women should be valued, respected and treated gently because they were physically weaker. And children should be protected because they were vulnerable--not regarded as expendable since you could always make more of them. From this chivalric Christian idea grew, eventually, Western feminism. No other world ethical system challenged the fundamental male chauvinism that is part of the natural order. Islam certainly did not. It accords respect for women within the family but allows little leeway to women’s individuality outside a carefully controlled male system. (If Islam is liberal on divorce, it is because that has suited men.)

In wartime, women have done fine supportive work and, when a nation’s back is to the wall, both sexes have to pitch in as best they can. But it is still fundamentally repugnant to employ women at the battlefront, to expose them to capture by the enemy and indeed to increase their chances of dying--because women are needed more by the next generation.

People may argue that mothers in Britain had to accept being deprived of their children during World War II, when children were evacuated out of the cities and separated from their families, and so the problem is nothing new. But 50 years after that event, a great deal of psychological material is being published that shows how very damaging to early relationships that experience was. We now know it was a very bad idea to separate children from their mothers as they were during the 1940s.

And is it not a bad idea to separate children from their fathers, people might ask. Is it not sad to see a father saying goodby to his 3-month-old son? Of course it is sad, but young children need their mothers more than they need their fathers. Mothers are more important to young children. If we say that that is not the case then we lose all claim to maternal wisdom.

The battle must be joined; but men should do the fighting.