McCain's long-standing opposition to women in combat has raised questions among his critics about his commitment to women's rights.
Women's groups say he has a weak legislative record on such issues as equal pay and workplace discrimination, and his support has lagged among female voters.
As a lawmaker, critics say, McCain sometimes has had strained relations with women in power. Former Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who spearheaded the effort to grant women the right to fly in combat, called McCain a product of a "guy culture."
"He has always had trouble dealing with women as equals," Schroeder said.
By his own account, McCain was shaped by traditional military values.
He was a young naval officer in the 1950s, when it was nearly unthinkable that the nation would send women into combat. As a pilot he was immersed in a macho subculture. And McCain grew up in a family with a military tradition extending back to the Revolutionary War.
McCain's views may have been influenced, too, by an acute sense of what a prisoner, man or woman, would face. He spent 5 1/2 years in captivity in a Hanoi prison camp, where he was tortured. He returned home in 1973 having missed the U.S. cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In an interview with Navy public relations officials after his release, McCain said women should never be allowed to enter combat. "Some of the people that might capture them can be pretty mean," he said.
Three decades later, female troops often find themselves serving in dangerous areas. In the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents' attacks have blurred the boundaries between combat and noncombat zones. Women are carrying rifles, shooting at the enemy and earning combat pay. Some have risen to senior command positions.
Meanwhile, troop shortages, and the widespread reluctance to reinstate a draft, have created pressure to open all military jobs to qualified women. "In the next two years, all the restrictions are going to be lifted," predicts Lawrence J. Korb, a defense analyst who was assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration.
The Air Force's most senior female fighter pilot, Col. Martha McSally, has even called for eliminating dress code and grooming distinctions.
"Women's hair should be at least cut extremely short upon entering basic training in all services," she wrote in a Duke University law journal last year. "Uniforms should be standardized, and skirts, high heels and pantyhose should be removed from the military uniform."
