In honor of its 125th birthday, Vogue magazine has been photographing and highlighting American women from coast to coast. This month, the American Women project profiles female members of the armed forces.
Women have, officially or not, been serving in the U.S. armed forces since the American Revolution, when Deborah Sampson bound her chest and fought the British under the name Robert Shurtleff.
Today, more than 214,000 women serve on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, making up 14.6 percent of the 1,430,000 active-duty service members, per Statistic Brain.
With the lifting of the ban that barred women from formally serving in combat jobs, more women will be serving on the front lines. 
Photographer Jackie Nickerson photographed some of this generation’s women in service and stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, among other places.
"It was a privilege to be able to meet and photograph these U.S. service women," Nickerson told Military Times in an email message. "I came to this story with no preconceptions, and the women I photographed were clearly highly professional, ready, and totally committed to protecting the Constitution."
Mackenzie Wolf is an editorial intern for Military Times.
