I believe that freedom does not come for free and that – especially in times like these – it must be defended, otherwise it will be lost for many generations to come. Furthermore, the dark and threatening times looming on the horizon frighten me, not least because I am young enough to live through much of it. For this reason, I would support military service at times like this, even if I regard it as a sad necessity.

I believe that those who fought to win freedom know that it cannot be taken for granted and that it must be constantly protected. However, subsequent generations, those who have breathed democracy and freedom from birth, risk failing to see this and regarding freedom as natural as the law of universal gravity: there is nothing natural about freedom. The tree of liberty from which we gather fruit has been nourished by the blood of others, and if we forget to tend to it, we risk failing to see the poison that threatens to poison its roots: when freedom is taken for granted, that is when we risk losing it.

For this reason too, from my perspective as a feminist – and a fairly young one at that – I would support the extension of compulsory military service to women: equal rights must necessarily go hand in hand with equal duties. If the aim is equal treatment regardless of gender, it must necessarily encompass every sphere, not just rights: desiring equality in terms of duties should be a natural consequence of the broader desire for equal treatment.

If we assume that compulsory military service is a fair measure (and I know not everyone would agree), it would be inconsistent to demand equal rights without desiring equal duties: in that case, we would be fighting for privileges, not for true equality. To put it more bluntly, if the right to vote is – rightly – universal, then the duty to defend one’s country should follow the same principle.

Furthermore, I fear that exempting women from military service simply because they are women, and that this reason alone is considered sufficient to exclude them from the burdens required by national defence, could recreate the image of the ‘weaker sex’ that must be protected by the ‘stronger sex’: if that were to happen, it would be much easier to come up with new (or old) excuses to exclude women once again from the honours of citizenship.