Helena Carreiras, Gender and the Military. Women in the Armed Forces of Western Democracies, London: Routledge (Cass Military Studies), 2006, 262 pages.

Helena Carreiras’ book is a recent contribution to the study of what the author calls Women Military Participation (WMP). Far away from some militant works, it “contends that gender does not have an epistemological or ontological primacy in explaining social reality (no more than other category of social analysis)” (p. 203).As a starting point, in a review of the main works about WMP the author makes some specifications regarding her object (concept and measurement, explanatory factors, analy...