THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF GENDER,

WAR, AND THE U.S. MILITARY

The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military is the first examination of the
interdisciplinary, intersecting fields of gender studies and the history of the United States
military. In twenty-one original essays, the contributors tackle themes including gendering the
“other,” gender and war disability, gender and sexual violence, gender and American foreign
relations, and veterans and soldiers in the public imagination, and lay out a chronological
examination of gender and America’s wars from the American Revolution to Iraq. This
important collection is essential reading for all those interested in how the military has
influenced America’s views and experiences of gender.

Kara Dixon Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society
in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University.
 THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important
topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of worldre-
nowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be
judged.

The Routledge History of Gender, The Routledge History of Terrorism

War, and the U.S. Military Edited by Randall D. Law
Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic
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The Routledge History of Women in Christianity
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The Routledge History of the The Routledge History of Gender,
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Edited by William Caferro Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic

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and Mental Health American South
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Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown and Americans
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THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF
GENDER, WAR, AND THE U.S.
MILITARY

Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic

First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Kara Dixon Vuic to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Vuic, Kara Dixon, 1977- editor of compilation.
Title: The Routledge handbook of handbook of gender, war and the U.S.
military / edited by Kara Dixon Vuic.
Description: 1st edition. | New York : Routledge, [2017] |
Series: The Routledge histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001475 (print) | LCCN 2017026796 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315697185 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138902985 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States--Armed Forces--History--Social aspects. |
Women and war--United States--History. | Masculinity--United States--History. |
United States--History, Military--Social aspects. | Sociology, Military--United States--History.
Classification: LCC UA23 (ebook) | LCC UA23 .R768 2017 (print) | DDC 355.0081/0973--dc23
LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001475
ISBN: 978-1-138-90298-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-69718-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Integra Software Service Pvt. Ltd.
 CONTENTS

List of Contributors x
Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

PART I
Military Manpower: Gender, Service, and Citizenship in
American History 9

1 The Shared Language of Gender in Colonial North American Warfare 11

Ann M. Little

2 Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era and New Republic 24

John Gilbert McCurdy

3 Beyond Borders and Combatants: Wars of Empire and Expansion 41

Karen E. Phoenix

4 Beyond the Brothers’ War: Gender and the American Civil War 54
Carole Emberton

5 Gee! I Wish I Were a Man: Gender and the Great War 68

Andrew J. Huebner

6 “The Women Behind the Men Behind the Gun”: Gendered Identities and
Militarization in the Second World War 87
Sarah Parry Myers

vii
 Contents

7 Homophobia, Housewives, and Hyper-Masculinity: Gender and American

Policymaking in the Nuclear Age 103
Matthew W. Dunne

8 Gentle Warriors, Gunslingers, and Girls Next Door: Gender and the Vietnam
War 116
Heather Marie Stur

9 Transitioning to an All-Volunteer Force 131

Melissa T. Brown

10 9/11, Gender, and Wars without End 149

Anna Froula

PART II
Mobilizing Gender in the Service of War 165

11 Gender as a Cause of War 167

Robert Dean

12 Gendering the “Enemy” and Gendering the “Ally”: United States

Militarized Fictions of War and Peace 185
Tessa Ong Winkelmann

13 Gender and American Foreign Relations 202

Molly M. Wood

14 Gender and Militarism in U.S. Culture during the Long

Twentieth Century 215
David Kieran

PART III
Gender, Sexuality, and Military Engagements 231

15 “Patriotism Is Neither Masculine nor Feminine”: Gender and the

Work of War 233
Charissa Threat

16 U.S. Military Personnel and Families Abroad: Gender, Sexuality,

Race, and Power in the U.S. Military’s Relations with Foreign
Nations and Local Inhabitants during Wartime 247
Donna Alvah

viii
 Contents

17 Homos, Whores, Rapists, and the Clap: American Military Sexuality

Since the Revolutionary War 269
Donna B. Knaff

18 Rape, Reform, and Reaction: Gender and Sexual Violence in the

U.S. Military 287
Elizabeth L. Hillman and Kate Walsham

PART IV
Gendered Aftermaths 301

19 To Recognize Those Who Served: Gendered Analyses of Veterans’

Policies, Representations, and Experiences 303
Jessica L. Adler

20 Best Men, Broken Men: Gender, Disability, and American Veterans 323
Sarah Handley-Cousins

21 The Covert and Hidden Memory of Gender 336

G. Kurt Piehler

Conclusion 355

Index 358

ix
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica L. Adler is Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Health Policy &
Management at Florida International University. Her research focuses on the history of U.S.
health, social, and welfare policy. Her forthcoming book from the Johns Hopkins University
Press is about the origins and evolution of the U.S. veterans’ health system—now the nation’s
largest integrated health care system. She has written and spoken about her research in the
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, USA Today, and The Miami Herald, and on
National Public Radio. A former newspaper reporter, her stories were awarded prizes from the
Society of Professional Journalists and the New Jersey Press Association. In 2013, she earned
her doctorate with distinction in History from Columbia University and won the university’s
Bancroft Dissertation Award.

Donna Alvah is Associate Professor and Margaret Vilas Chair of U.S. History at St. Lawrence
University in northern New York. Her scholarship focuses on social and cultural aspects of
U.S. foreign relations, with a specialization in the Cold War. Her current projects are a book
manuscript on children and youth in the Cold War in the United States and abroad, and articles
on children, youth, and nuclear war, as well as on children, youth, and militaries in the Second
Indochina War. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. She is the
author of Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–
1965 (New York University Press, 2007) and has contributed essays on U.S. military wives and
families in the twentieth century.

Melissa T. Brown is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New
York—Borough of Manhattan Community College. She earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers
University. She is the author of Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in U.S. Military
Recruiting Advertising During the All-Volunteer Force (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her
research interests include the U.S. military and its relationship with American society, the
construction of gender by military institutions, and the impact of gender on international
relations.

Robert Dean is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University. He

specializes in Twentieth-Century U.S. History as well as gender and cultural history. He

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 List of Contributors

received his M.A. in 1988 and his Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Arizona. He is the
author of Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001) and has contributed articles to Diplomatic History and the Pacific
Historical Review.

Matthew W. Dunne is Instructor of History and Political Science at Housatonic Community

College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His first book, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and
Postwar American Society, was published in 2013 by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is
currently working on a social and cultural history of autism in the United States.

Carole Emberton is Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. Her book,
Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (University of
Chicago Press, 2013), was awarded the Willie Lee Rose Prize by the Southern Association of
Women Historians. She is currently at work on a study of ex-slaves’ memories of the Civil War
and emancipation.

Anna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville,
North Carolina. She has published on representations of gender and war culture in such venues
as Journal of War and Culture Studies, Global Media Journal, Cinema Journal, A Companion to the
War Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and numerous edited collections. She is co-editor of
Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (Bloomsbury, 2010), Terry
Gilliam: It’s a Mad World (Columbia UP/Wallflower, 2013), and American Militarism on the
Small Screen (Routledge, 2016). Froula is completing a project about United States Marine and
celebrity satirist Rob Riggle. She is also Associate Editor for Cinema Journal and the faculty
sponsor for ECU’s chapter of Student Veterans of America.

Sarah Handley-Cousins is a writer and historian specializing in nineteenth-century America.

She received her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Buffalo. She specializes in the history of
the Civil War, gender, culture, and medicine. She has written for digital publications such as
the New York Times Disunion, and serves as an editor of the culture and history website
Nursing Clio. She is the author of “‘Wrestling at the Gates of Death’: Joshua Lawrence
Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post Civil War North,” in The Journal of the
Civil War Era (June 2016) and “Disability in Civil War Medical Photography,” in The
Unfinished Work: New Perspectives on Civil War Veteranhood, forthcoming from Louisiana State
University Press.

Elizabeth L. Hillman is currently President of Mills College and former Provost and
Academic Dean at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She has degrees
in history, science, and law, receiving her M.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania
in 1994 and her Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2001. She specializes in the history of
women, gender, and sexual violence. She is also the author of Defending America: Military
Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton University Press, 2005) and has contributed
essays to journals and anthologies in sexual violence, gender, and war.

Andrew J. Huebner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. He

received his Ph.D. in history from Brown University in 2004 and then taught at Brown and
Harvard before joining the history department at the University of Alabama. He is the author
of The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era

xi
 List of Contributors

(University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and is currently writing a book on families and
public culture during the First World War titled Love and Death in the Great War: America’s Fight
for Home and Nation. Beyond the subject of the soldier’s image in the twentieth century, he has
published essays and journal articles on futuristic culture during the Cold War, dissent in the
1960s, propaganda in World War I, and writing history with emotion. He also serves on the
editorial board of the journal The Sixties. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

David Kieran is Assistant Professor of History at Washington and Jefferson College. He is the
author of Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Shaped American Public Memory (University of
Massachusetts Press, 2014) and the editor of The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the
War on Terror (Rutgers University Press, 2015). He is completing a book on mental health
during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, tentatively titled Embattled Minds: The Army’s Mental
Health Crisis (under contract, NYU Press) and is co-editing, with Edwin A. Martini, At War:
Militarism and U.S. Culture in the 20th Century and Beyond (under contract, Rutgers University
Press).

Donna B. Knaff is currently a historian at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in

Washington, D.C. She has also been a faculty member at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic
Institute and at the University of New Mexico, both in Albuquerque, and at the University of
New Mexico-Taos. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting
Command and served as the Chief Historian for the Women in Military Service for America
Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from
the University of New Mexico in 2006. She is the author of Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of
World War II in American Popular Graphic Art (University Press of Kansas, 2012).

Ann M. Little was raised in the Great Lakes region of the United States near the Canadian
border and educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. The author of
two books on warfare in the northeastern borderlands, The Many Captivities of Esther
Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016) and Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial
New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), she teaches early North American
history, women’s history, and the history of sexuality at Colorado State University in Fort
Collins. She also writes about history and sexual politics at Historiann.com, and lives with her
family in Greeley, Colorado.

John Gilbert McCurdy is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University in

Ypsilanti, where he has taught since 2005. McCurdy received his Ph.D. from Washington
University in St. Louis in 2004, and he holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago and B.A.
from Knox College. McCurdy is the author of Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the
United States (Cornell University Press, 2009). He has also contributed an essay to New Men:
Manliness in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster (New York University Press, 2011), and
articles in the Journal of Urban History, Early American Studies, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography. McCurdy is currently working on a book about the Quartering Act and
shifting notions of place in Revolutionary America.

Sarah Parry Myers is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Joseph E. and Shirley
J. Keirn World War II Collection and The Keirn Family World War II Museum at Saint
Francis University in central Pennsylvania. Her research interests include war and society,
women’s history, gender in the U.S. military, and public history. She contributed an essay to

xii
 List of Contributors

Gender and the Second World War: The Lessons of War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and she
is currently working on a manuscript about the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World
War II.

Karen E. Phoenix is currently the Clinical Assistant Professor at Washington State

University. She specializes in the U.S. in the World during the Gilded Age, Progressive Era,
and interwar period. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign in May 2010. Her current manuscript uses the U.S. Young Women’s Christian
Association as a case study to explore U.S. attempts at cultural imperialism. Her work has been
published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and she has presented papers at
regional and national conferences, such as the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the
American Historical Association, World History Association, and the Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations.

G. Kurt Piehler is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute on World War II
and the Human Experience at Florida State University. He received his B.A. from Drew
University in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1990. He specializes in war and
society, memory, oral history, and World War II. He is also the editor of the Encyclopedia of
Military Science (SAGE, 2013), consulting editor for the Oxford Companion to American Military
History, and associate editor of Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Homefront (Macmillan
Reference/Gale, 2005). He was the founding director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives of
World War II and has held academic positions at Baruch College of the City University of New
York, Drew University, and Rutgers University. He is the author of Remembering War the
American Way (Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995) and World War II in the American Soldiers’
Lives Series (Greenwood Press, 2007), and has also contributed articles to History of Education
Quarterly, Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, and the anthology Commemorations: The Politics
of National Identity (Princeton University Press, 1994).

Heather Marie Stur is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi
and a fellow in USM’s Dale Center for the Study of War and Society. She specializes in U.S.
foreign relations, the Cold War, modern Vietnamese history, and war and American identity.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 2008 and her M.A. from
Marquette University in 2003. She is the author of Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the
Vietnam War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and was a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam.
She has published peer-reviewed articles for Milwaukee History, The Sixties: A Journal of History,
Politics, and Culture, and Diplomatic History about American veterans and topics relevant to the
Vietnam War. Her next two books are Saigon at War: The Third Force and the Global Sixties in
South Vietnam, forthcoming from Cambridge, and Reflecting America: U.S. Military Expansion
and Global Interventions, forthcoming from Praeger/ABC-CLIO.

Charissa Threat is Assistant Professor of History at Spelman College, where she teaches
courses in United States and African American history. Her research interests are in race and
gender issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, civil rights, community activism, and civil-
military relations. She is the author of Nursing Civil Rights: Race and Gender in the Army Nurse
Corps (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and “‘The Hands That Might Save Them’: Gender,
Race, and the Politics of Nursing During World War II,” in Gender and History (August 2012).
Professor Threat’s current research focuses on black female pin-ups and the Second World
War. It examines home front activities and the Double-V Campaign, and investigates how

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 List of Contributors

images of African American women highlight debates about race and gendered identities and
relationships during and after the Second World War.

Kara Dixon Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society
in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University. She earned her Ph.D. in
History at Indiana University in 2006. She is the author of Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army
Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which won the 2010
Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing, and is
co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press “Studies in War, Society, and the Military” book
series. She has published articles and essays in Signs, Gender and Conflict since 1914; Nursing
History Review; Integrating the U.S. Military: African Americans, Women, and Gays since World War
II; and The Routledge Handbook of U.S. Diplomatic and Military History among others. She is
completing a manuscript titled The Girls Next Door: American Women and Military Entertainment
for Harvard University Press.

Kate Walsham is the Community Justice Clinics Lawyering Fellow at the University of
California, Hastings College of the Law. After graduating from the University of California in
2013, she has worked for the ACLU and the Transgender Resource Center in New Mexico as
the Pride Law Fund Tom Steel Fellow. She has experience practicing health and welfare law.

Tessa Ong Winkelmann is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. She specializes in modern U.S. history, imperialism, and ethnic, gender, and sexuality
studies. Professor Winkelmann received her M.A. in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State
University in 2008 and was a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines in 2011. She received her Ph.
D. in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. She is the author of a
forthcoming book in transnational and gender studies history tentatively titled Dangerous
Intercourse: Race, Gender, and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946.

Molly M. Wood is Professor of History at Wittenberg University, where she has taught U.S.
history and U.S. Foreign Relations history since 1999. She is completing a manuscript on
gender and American diplomatic representation in the first half of the twentieth century, based
on material generated by her award-winning article, “Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of
Domesticity and ‘the Social Game’ in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905–1941,” published in
the Journal of Women’s History. She has published numerous other articles and book chapters,
including “‘Commanding Beauty’ and ‘Gentle Charm’: American Women and Gender in the
Early Twentieth Century Foreign Service” in Diplomatic History and “The Informal Politics of
Diplomacy” in When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in United States History (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014). She also publishes regularly about teaching, including “Teaching Fear
and Anxiety in the Cold War, 1945–1989” in Understanding and Teaching the Cold War:
Essays and Resources (University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2017). She presents at
national and international conferences every year. She is a past president of the Ohio
Academy of History and serves on the Teaching Committee of the Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations.

xiv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I wish to thank each of the authors, who not only provided insightful
chapters but also demonstrated remarkable patience and resolve as this project came to fruition.
I cannot thank them enough for their dedication; I hope that they are as pleased as I am with the
end result. I look forward to their continued work on the history of gender, war, and the U.S.
military.
Several individuals have provided invaluable guidance and played a formative role in the
project. Meredith H. Lair was instrumental in the project’s development and design, and I
thank her for her contributions and insights. This project began with the enthusiastic support of
Routledge editor Kimberley Guinta, was shepherded along the way by editors Genevieve
Aoki and Margo Irvin, and was carried across the finish line by Eve Mayer. I am grateful for
their support, their patience, and their continued belief in this project. Routledge Editorial
Assistant Theodore Meyer provided invaluable assistance during the final stages of the project,
as did my graduate assistants Matthew Arendt and Sarah Miller at Texas Christian University.
Colleagues near and far offered astute advice and understanding counsel throughout the
process, especially Beth Bailey, Frederick Schneid, Rebecca Sharpless, Jodi Campbell, and
Gregg Cantrell. My husband Jason has lived with this project from its beginning, and his
support for it—and me—has sustained me throughout. Our son Asher brings enough joy to
sustain us both.
I came to TCU midway through this project, and into a position made possible through the
tremendous generosity of David and Teresa Schmidt, the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, the
Department of History, and countless individuals. I hope that this study of war, gender, and the
U.S. military will help to make good on their hopes for a bright and informed future.

xv
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 INTRODUCTION

In January 2016, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter announced that, following three years of
study, the Department of Defense was opening all military positions to women. The announce-
ment marked the end of a long, gradual, and halting process of integrating women into the U.S.
military. By the early twenty-first century, military policy held that women could serve in all
occupational specialties with the exception of units below the brigade level whose primary
mission was direct ground combat.1 However, the irregular nature of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan tested the practicality of this restriction, as women were regularly placed in combat
situations according to the needs of military commanders, despite the prohibition. Neither the
expanding presence of women in the military nor the realities of their participation in combat
operations stemmed resistance to Carter’s announcement. The decision to openly accept women
into all positions sparked a public conversation about the meaning of women’s service, and about
the dynamics between gender, war, and military service more broadly.
Secretary Carter explained the decision to integrate women into all military positions as a
matter of national security. “To succeed in our mission of national defense,” he reasoned, “we
cannot afford to cut ourselves off from half the country’s talents and skills.” In casting the military
as a “meritocracy” in which individuals would be assigned “based on ability, not gender,” Carter
framed gender as irrelevant to personnel assignments. At the same time, he subtly acknowledged
that gender did matter, both to military commanders and to the public. Several times during the
announcement, he addressed critics who had charged that women’s integration would lower the
standards required for combat positions and thus weaken military readiness by assuring that
everyone, “men and women alike—has to be able to meet the high standards for whatever job
they’re in.” Moreover, he noted that the U.S. military was engaged in warfare in places where
women’s equality was not assumed and that the services would need to take those perspectives
into consideration.2
The removal of restrictions on women’s combat service promises to spark significant cultural
change in the armed forces. It will also have a far-reaching and perhaps even more revolutionary
impact outside the military. When the last restriction on women’s combat service was removed,
the legal precedent that had justified women’s exclusion from Selective Service became moot.3
Congress quickly took note, and during the summer of 2016, the Senate and the House both
debated provisions to the National Defense Authorization Act that would require women to
register for Selective Service.4 Proponents, including Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic

1
 Kara Dixon Vuic

presidential nominee, supported women’s registration as a measure of women’s equality.

Opponents, including Republican President Donald Trump, derided not only calls for women
to register but also the opening of combat roles to women as mere political correctness and a
threat to military readiness. And in December 2016, Congress passed a defense authorization bill
that called for a review of Selective Service, not the required registration of women. The
contrasting viewpoints about women’s registration are grounded in understandings of gender,
and we wait to see how the opening of combat roles and the reconsideration of Selective Service
will alter public associations of military service with gender norms.
The Routledge Handbook of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military aims to provide a roadmap for
scholars, students, and those interested in understanding the long historical context of these issues
and debates. Wars have played a foundational and fundamental role in shaping the development
and boundaries of the United States and have been perhaps the most influential way the nation has
wielded power abroad. Both in wars and in peacetime, the military has functioned as an arbiter of
social and cultural concerns and has provided one of the most direct ways for men and women to
participate in the work of the state. And, as numerous scholars have demonstrated, gender has
formed an integral part of all aspects of political, social, and cultural history. This handbook brings
these histories together to reveal the ways gender has framed the experience of American military
service, as well as the roles gender has played in motivating armed conflict and inscribing its
memory.
As the chapters make clear, a rich and nuanced field of study has developed around the history
of war, gender, and the U.S. military, created by historians and scholars whose work has expanded
gender and military history in the past few decades. Women’s and gender historians, for many
years, failed to examine the military or wars as important topics in the consideration of gender
change. Many feminist scholars had come of age during the 1960s and 1970s, steeped in the
antimilitarist and antiwar movements that had risen up in opposition to the Vietnam War. For
them, the military was a patriarchal institution that stymied uniformed women and expanded a
militarized culture that oppressed all women. In similar ways, military historians whose work
examined tactics, leaders, operations, strategy, and command seemed reluctant to focus on
women who were officially excluded from soldiering or on gender, which they regarded as a
tangential matter at best.5
In both cases, gender and military historians were shortsighted. Beginning with the rise of
social and cultural history, however, historians of many stripes began to search for those who had
been lost in studies focused on great men and employed methodologies that enabled them to
uncover the experiences of common people. This shift led to dramatic changes in the writing of
military and gender history and brought the two previously separate and sometimes antagonistic
fields together. As this volume makes clear, military historians cannot expect to understand the
American war experience in its totality without considering the ways gender has informed not
only who can serve but also their experiences. They cannot fully grasp the history of wars without
considering how gender has been employed in calls to arms, the waging of battle, and wars’
commemoration. Similarly, gender historians cannot hope to understand why and how men’s
and women’s roles and experiences change, nor their place in the nation, without looking to the
ways wars and marital service have enlisted gender in the maintenance and expansion of citizen-
ship. In short, military historians and gender historians cannot understand the history of the
United States without looking to the ways the military, gender, and wars have functioned
together in American society.
Fortunately, since the 1970s, a growing group of scholars has woven together a variety of
perspectives and methodologies that demonstrate how much military and gender historians have
in common. Many of these scholars operate in the framework of “new” military history or the

2
 Introduction

study of war and society, both of which apply the methods of social and cultural history to the
military and war in their broadest contexts, on the battlefield and on the home front, for
uniformed personnel and civilians alike. Still many other scholars would not consider themselves
military historians, whether new or old, even as their topics of research focus on the military or
war. This handbook brings all of this work together, to reveal the breadth and depth of the
scholarship on war, gender, and the U.S. military, to highlight the bridges that have already been
built, and to call for new queries that will lead to even more fruitful analyses.
The dedicated study of gender, war, and the U.S. military began in the 1970s with scholars who
examined the historical experiences of women in war. These foundational works grew out of the
rise of social and cultural history, and particularly the growth of women’s history, with their goals of
recovering women whose histories had been previously overlooked by scholars. The decade was
also an opportune moment for historians to consider war’s impact on women. In the wake of the
Vietnam War, the U.S. military transitioned to an all-volunteer force that relied increasingly on
women and dismantled a longstanding expectation that men uniquely owed military service to the
state. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the military service academies to admit women, and the
army dissolved its separate women’s corps and integrated women alongside men in basic training. In
this milieu, scholars began to investigate the many ways women had participated in wars and
provided labor for the military, if often in unofficial and sometimes unexpected ways.
This focus on women’s martial past expanded the focus of war and the military to include the
home front, civilians, and families. Adding women to the war story highlighted the connections
between warfronts and home fronts, especially as the distinction between the two collapsed
during wars that occurred within the nation’s borders and especially during the twentieth century
as a militarized culture took hold. In similar ways, considering women pushed historians to
expand the notion of wartime and military service. As a number of studies noted, women have
contributed their labor, emotional support, and voluntary services on the home front, as well as
their martial service in war zones. In and out of uniform, women’s wartime work demanded a
broader definition of wartime and military service.
Relatedly, the study of gender, war, and the U.S. military also complicated the periodization
of war. Some of the earliest women’s historians observed decades ago that women’s history does
not always align neatly with the chronological mileposts that mark political events.6 As historians
have learned more about the intersections of gender and the nation’s martial past, this observation
continues to ring true. Mobilizations and demobilizations have proven as disruptive and trans-
formative for gender as have the days bookended by wars’ declarations and armistices. Studies of
postwar reconstructions and occupations, of memory and commemoration, of disability and
rehabilitation, all suggest that women and men struggle to reconcile gender changes wrought by
wars and military service long after war’s end.
In these studies, women were not a footnote, nor tangential, but an essential part of the war
story. In works about women’s military participation, volunteer efforts, and home front labor, we
see the ways women have used military and wartime service to press for equal citizenship, military
pensions, greater social and financial equality, expanded professional recognition, and advanced
education and job training. While restoring women to American marital history, many of these
initial works also evaluated how wars had affected women’s lives. How had wars changed
governmental expectations of women, as well as women’s own expectations? What functions
did women’s labor serve, both for war efforts and for larger national concerns about the security
and stability of the home front? What rationales explain women’s integration into the military,
and how did women adapt to military life and culture? Did these wartime changes survive? And,
how was martial service connected to women’s broader political and social concerns, such as
suffrage and work?

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 Kara Dixon Vuic

Scholars arrived at different conclusions about the nature of wartime change. While some
argued that wars and military service dramatically altered women’s lives, others suggested that
postwar periods witnessed the revival of prewar norms that curtailed any gains women had made.
Still others suggested that wars opened a window for women to create new roles for themselves,
even if prevailing norms constrained the scope of change that was possible. In a 1987 essay,
Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet employed the image of a double helix to
explain that while women might perform new roles during wartime, those roles are still devalued
in comparison to men’s. Thus, while women might find their social status elevated by their
wartime work, the overall significance of that work is nonetheless limited by men’s also elevated
social status.
The double helix metaphor highlights the ways that an initial focus on women was transition-
ing to broader questions about gender. This focus on gender also owes an enormous debt to two
now-classic works that called for scholars to investigate the relationships among gender, militar-
ism, and power. Political theorist Cynthia Enloe argued in her 1983 Does Khaki Become You? that
gender and militarism go hand-in-hand. Militaries need women, but only if women conform to
feminine gender roles that support the extension of wars and militarized societies as masculine
endeavors. Joan W. Scott made a similar point in her essay “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” in which she called for historians to see gender as a means of constructing and
waging power, often through wars. Scholars in many historical sub-fields applied these analytical
lenses to studies of the military and wars in ways that deepened our understanding not only of
women’s experiences, but also of men’s, as well as how gendered constructs of power have
framed both wartime and peacetime.
As scholars integrated gender studies into their methodologies, works on women and war
expanded to investigate the ways that wars and military service have drawn upon and realigned
existing gender norms for women and men, uniformed and civilian. Their scholarship began with
the understanding that gender is a social construct that changes over time, varies by situation and
need, and is dependent upon other categories such as race, ethnicity, class, generation, region, and
sexual orientation. In these works, we see how the military relied not only on women’s and men’s
labor but also on women and men filling particular kinds of gendered functions. Although
military and government officials often characterized gender as binary—as being either masculine
or feminine—historians have problematized that simplistic division and revealed a myriad of ways
women and men have thought of themselves and acted as gendered beings. Simply, what began as
the study of women and war is today a much more complex and diverse field that understands
gender as a fundamental part of conflict. As Civil War scholar LeeAnn Whites put it in 1995, war
is often a “crisis of gender.”7
Scholars’ attention to gender has proven especially insightful in illuminating the ways in which
notions of martial masculinity have changed over time and been contingent upon a variety of
ideological, cultural, social, and military factors. Until the past few decades, much historical
scholarship—whether intentionally or unintentionally—characterized war as a masculine,
aggressive, and violent endeavor, simply because it was a conflict initiated and fought mostly
by men. This rendering relied on a narrow definition of war that focused almost exclusively on
combat, even as the percentage of military personnel in the combat arms declined precipitously
throughout U.S. history. These works often lumped all military men together as having experi-
enced war and combat in the same way, and thus failed to consider not only the many different
ways men have labored in wars but also their many varied and complex understandings of their
experiences as men. In the past few decades, however, scholars have interrogated the ways
Americans developed their ideas of masculinity through cross-cultural contact during wars and
conflicts, through the delineation of military labor, in conjunction with the changing nature of

4
 Introduction

military conscription, and in comparison to other kinds of wartime service. These works have
complicated the martial history of the United States by parsing the different ways Americans have
understood manhood based on their race, ethnicity, age, and historical context and by revealing
the ways martial masculinity has changed over time, contingent with varying wartime needs and
larger social and cultural contexts.
Historians continue to debate the consequences of martial gender change. Scholars have noted
the ways that—because of the close connections between military service and citizenship—
military and wartime service has been a crucial site of contention for those seeking access to state
power and benefits. And while numerous histories document the ways that martial and wartime
service has proven effective for some groups who secured full citizenship because of their service,
others question the nature of these victories. Historians and scholars who note the growing
militarization of American culture have highlighted the ways that militarization frequently
reinscribes conventional gender norms. And so, at this historical and historiographical moment,
we are left with the questions raised by Secretary Carter. Is the U.S. military a place of gender
equality, gender difference, or a bit of both?
Developments in the study of U.S. foreign policy have proven similarly beneficial in deepen-
ing our understanding of the ways gender and power combine in the waging and conduct of wars.
Part of the “cultural turn” in diplomatic history, scholars in the 1990s and 2000s broadened the
study of foreign relations to consider informal means of diplomacy and the influence of culture on
ideologies and decision-making. Historians thus investigated women’s roles in engaging foreign
populations and governments, as well as the ways that policymakers, military commanders, and
everyday citizens have mobilized contemporary ideas of gender in diplomatic measures, conflict
resolution, the extension and maintenance of empire, and as a tool of waging war. These studies
demonstrate the centrality of gender to the ideologies, fears, tensions, and conceptions of enemies
and allies that have led to war and point to the ways gender has functioned as a tool for waging and
legitimizing violence. Additionally, they brought a transnational and cross-cultural focus to the
study of gender, war, and the U.S. military by revealing how U.S. gender norms were often
constructed in relationship to others and exported by military and diplomatic personnel.
In the 1990s, as news broke about military sexual scandals and abuse and as the military enacted
a formal ban on the service of openly gay personnel, a wave of scholarship began to uncover the
long history of wartime and militarized sexuality. Growing out of a larger historiographical focus
on sexual history, scholars drew our attention to the ways the U.S. military and American wars
have mobilized sexuality in the service of the wartime state. Histories of various military
engagements have highlighted the ways national forces mobilized heterosexuality to encourage
military enlistments, motivate and sustain service, “contain” otherwise disruptive social patterns,
rehabilitate disabled veterans, and restore antebellum gender orders. Likewise, histories of
homosexuality revealed complex patterns of tolerance and regulation tied to concurrent person-
nel needs and understandings of sexual identity. These studies suggested that sex and national
security have been intimately connected throughout U.S. history and that sexuality has been one
key way of defining membership in the state. Moreover, the study of wartime sexuality intersects
with the study of foreign relations in histories that investigate the sexual habits of military
personnel. Scholars have shown that sexuality is often one of the most direct ways that
American military personnel engage—in ways both fleeting and long term, violent and con-
sensual—with foreign peoples and, thus, that sexuality often functions as a means of power in
wars and occupations.
The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed profound changes in the military’s
policies on gender and have made this moment not only a critical juncture in history but also a
watershed moment in the history of war, gender, and the U.S. military. In 2011, the U.S. military

5
 Kara Dixon Vuic

rescinded a decades-long ban on the service of openly gay personnel, in 2016 the Secretary of
Defense opened all combat roles to women, and in 2016 the Department of Defense announced
that the services will accept transgendered individuals. Each of these changes has had and will have
significant ramifications both in and outside the military. But while the military has become more
welcoming of the service of all Americans, sexual violence remains a troubling aspect of military
and wartime service for women and men, military leaders continue to frame belligerent actions as
masculine enterprises, and gender continues to inform the experience of conflict for all involved.
As Americans contend with recent changes and contemplate new ones, the study of the past can
illuminate a broad history of similar contention over martial gender roles and provide the kind of
context, analysis, and framework that will facilitate a considered and fruitful public discussion of
these important issues.
The handbook is organized into four parts that together provide readers with a roadmap to the
historical and scholarly literature on these matters. The first part, “Military Manpower: Gender,
Service, and Citizenship in American History,” provides a chronological overview of the history
of American wartime and martial gender roles that takes readers from the pre-contact era through
the ongoing wars in the Middle East. The ten chapters within this part allow readers to gauge how
the relationships among war, gender, and the U.S. military have both changed over time and
proven resistant to change. As the chapters demonstrate, gender has played a fundamental role in
the nation’s rationale and preparations for war, the conduct of war, and war’s lasting conse-
quences. It has also proven essential to military organization, labor, recruitment, and culture, both
during wartime and during peacetime.
Three thematic parts follow, each of which investigates gender’s function in American wars
and the U.S. military in more specific ways across time. Part II: “Mobilizing Gender in the
Service of War” seeks to understand gender’s integral part in conceptualizing war and militarism.
The chapters examine how scholars have analyzed gender’s place in calls for war, understandings
of enemies and allies, U.S. foreign relations, and the development of a militarized culture. Part III:
“Gender, Sexuality, and Military Engagements” moves to military culture and the conduct of war
to investigate the ways that gender and sexuality have proven central to war-making and military
life. Chapters highlight the gendering of wartime and martial work, the enlistment of family and
gender to further wartime aims, the regulation of sexuality within the military, and the centrality
of sexuality and sexual violence to military and wartime cultures. The handbook concludes with a
final part that considers the lasting entanglements of gender, war, and the military. Part IV:
“Gendered Aftermaths” reviews the ways gender has been central to war’s legacies and memories
through the development of veterans’ policies, national efforts to rehabilitate those disabled by
war, and the development of memorials and commemorative practices.
By design, there is much overlap among the chapters, and so readers should consult both the
chronological and thematic chapters that relate to their interests. Likewise, readers will discover that
many chapters discuss the same books and historiographical debates, though they do so for different
ends. Taken together, the chapters reveal a variety of approaches and perspectives to understanding
the many ways gender, wars, and the military have intersected throughout U.S. history. The
chapters also seek to stimulate new ways of thinking about the topic and to suggest new approaches
and perspectives that can continue to help illuminate these complex relationships.
The authors who have contributed chapters to this handbook come from a variety of
disciplinary homes. Although most are historians, others are legal scholars, political scientists,
and scholars of film, media studies, and gender. The diversity of perspectives that they bring to the
handbook reflects the field at large and brings together the many methodologies and inquiries that
are shaping its direction. Similarly, while several authors are accomplished scholars who have
written several books and articles, others are burgeoning scholars whose first works have brought

6
 Introduction

new insight to the subject. Whatever their station, each of the authors has helped to shape the
study of gender, war, and the U.S. military, and each of them is helping to lay out a path for its
future.

Notes
1 Memorandum: “Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule,” January 13, 1994,
available at http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/031910d1.pdf.
2 Ash Carter Remarks on the Women-in-Service Review, December 3, 2015, available at http://www.
defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech-View/Article/632495/remarks-on-the-women-in-service-review.
3 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1981 that women could be exempt from required registration
because they could not serve in combat. Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U.S. 57 (1981).
4 The Senate passed a version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that included a provision
to require women to register for Selective Service, but the House version did not approve that
provision.
5 See Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4–5.
6 See Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2
(Autumn, 1975): 5–14.
7 LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1995).

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 PART I

Military Manpower
Gender, Service, and Citizenship in American
History

This collection opens with a series of essays that trace the historical scholarship on the evolution of
women’s and men’s wartime and military roles, beginning in the pre-contact era and continuing
through the ongoing wars in the Middle East. The ten essays in this part each offer a close look at
the ways historians and other scholars have investigated the changing nature of martial gender
roles at particular moments in U.S. history. While many of the chapters focus on singular
wars, others consider a broader period. All speak to the fluid boundaries between wartime and
peacetime and the essential role that postwar periods play in making sense of wartime changes.
Together, these chapters suggest that studies of military and wartime gender roles are central to
understanding the armed forces and U.S. wars. As warfare proved a regular part of U.S. history,
and as the military grew increasingly central to American life and culture, scholars have shown
that gender has been inseparable from these events and transformations.
Although it is tempting to think of wartime gender roles as developing in a historical
continuum, this part reveals the faults of such an approach. Each chapter chronicles how wartime
needs produced gender change by demanding military and domestic labor, requiring increased
martial service, and by disrupting normal patterns of life. In turn, these needs prompted
Americans to broaden their understandings of particular kinds of labor as narrowly gendered.
Often, however, scholars note that wartime changes were temporary, retracted at the war’s end to
accommodate returning veterans’ needs for jobs and society’s broader cultural need for security
and familiarity. Even as wartime gender roles retracted, however, scholars have noted the ways
that wartime changes had lingering effects on postwar societies.
In this way, the chapters reveal that martial gender roles not only adapt to meet military need,
but also are intimately connected to the broader patterns and changes in women’s and men’s lives,
to legal precedents and developments, to cultural and social milieu and transformations. Thus,
scholarship has shown that martial gender roles are inseparable from race, ethnicity, class, religion,
age, and region. Moreover, as the authors note, scholars have pointed to the ways wartime gender
ideologies are constructed in relationship to others, not only by contrasting men’s and women’s
roles but also by contrasting American gender roles with those of enemies and peoples in
occupied lands and nations.
As the chapters reveal, martial gender change also occurred and was felt on the individual level.
While national needs often precipitated change, scholars have shown that women and men often
pressed for change that responded to their expectations and met their demands, thereby

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 Kara Dixon Vuic

transforming national understandings of the meanings of service. Thus, the chapters point to
works that investigate gendered motivations and expectations, as well as how military and
wartime service shaped individuals’ understandings of themselves as women and men, both
during and after wars.
Together, the chapters demonstrate that the history of the U.S. military and American wars is a
history of both great change and staunch resistance, often in the same historical moment.
Through these historiographical studies of the evolution of martial gender roles, we see the rise
of the citizen-soldier ideal, claims to military service as a vehicle to citizenship, and the eventual
rise of an all-volunteer force. These competing understandings of service have had significant
consequences for gender, for men’s and women’s political and economic status, and for the
national consciousness.

10
 1
THE SHARED LANGUAGE OF
GENDER IN COLONIAL NORTH
AMERICAN WARFARE
Ann M. Little
colorado state university

Gender as a category of analysis is vexing for many scholars, but perhaps especially for historians.
While historians prioritize the study of change over time, almost nothing in history worldwide
resists change more than ideas and assumptions about gender—how we define men’s and
women’s roles in a particular society, and common assumptions about the biological fixity of
gender roles that make historicizing them a challenge. This is perhaps especially true when we
turn to military history, because only recently in modern global history have women been invited
to serve in the armed forces, and modern militaries have struggled with their integration. Given
the very modest official roles women played in early American military history, some might
believe that gender is peripheral to the history of warfare. However, over the past twenty years,
American historians have challenged this view with fresh research and arguments about the
salience of gender in military conflict and diplomacy: First, some have demonstrated that the
contested nature of masculinity is especially rich and fraught in all-male, sex-segregated institu-
tions like monasteries, universities, and militaries, and second, others have shown that women
and women’s labor were centrally involved in American military conflict.1 As we will see,
assumptions about gender and the gendered nature of military prowess were commonly held
by Europeans and Native Americans in the age of European global expansion, and they served as a
common language that was cross-culturally understood in the history of warfare in early America.

Gender, Sexuality, and Contested Masculinities

Over the past twenty years, a number of pioneering studies about the history of men and
masculinity have made it possible for historians to think specifically about the ways in which
men’s gender roles and competition among men have shaped the military history of early North
America. Beginning in the 1990s, historians argued that white men in early America had a
specifically gendered history that varied with the life cycle and across time and space.2 In the
2000s and 2010s, scholars of warfare have added to this literature by elaborating on masculinity as
it varied not just over time but across different ethnicities and cultures as well.
When we think of American history, most Americans think of history as moving from East to
West as we follow the progress of English-speaking peoples from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Pacific. However, it was scholars of the Spanish empire and Indian country in the early southwest
who published some of the signal studies in this field in the 1990s. Significantly, scholars of Native

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 Ann M. Little

Americans pioneered the field. Furthermore, Spanish conquistadores landed a century before the
first permanent English colonies were successfully established, and some of them made it as far
west as New Mexico and California well before the plantations of Jamestowne and Plymouth
were secured on the Atlantic coast.
Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European
Conquest of the Americas (1995) makes a provocative argument about the sexualized nature of
the Iberian invasion of the Americas. He begins with the sixteenth-century Iberian fascination
with the use of anal rape by Native men as a tool for subjugating and humiliating their enemies
and the existence of male transvestism in some Native American communities. These men were
known as berdaches, and they assumed both the social and sexual roles of women in their
communities. Trexler notes that in both Native and European attitudes towards homosexuality,
opprobrium was reserved for the passive victims of rape and conquest, not the powerful
penetrators. Yet, he observes that “the massive recent literature on homosexual behavior has
often been in denial, uncomfortable with questions of power,” and instead has portrayed berd-
aches as Native American forerunners of gay liberation and trans embodiment. Trexler’s view of
the berdaches is that they were for the most part selected and socialized as children to transvest and
perform women’s work and to offer sexual services to male warriors when Native practices of
sex-segregation in preparation for war prevented sexual congress with women. His study ranges
from the sexual exploitation of eunuchs and slaves in the Mediterranean world to present-day
evidence of the sex trafficking of young children, demonstrating compellingly the ancient roots of
the sexualized nature of military conquest as well as the transhistorical vulnerability of children to
sexual abuse by adults.3
Ramon A. Gutierrez’s pioneering study When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:
Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (1991) argues that gender and sexuality
were central to the violent disruptions of both the military invasion and the operations of the
Catholic missions. Indeed, the Spanish invasion was characterized by the intentional unity of
military and religious authority as exemplified by the mission-presidio complex: Soldiers and
priests traveled and worked together to reinforce one another’s authority, establishing military
forts and missions on the same sites. Albert Hurtado’s Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in
Old California (1999), like Gutierrez’s book, demonstrates how sexuality and gender were woven
into the violent colonialism of the successive Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. invasions of California.
From the Spanish missions to the Gold Rush, California in Hurtado’s telling was a brutally
exploitative environment for Native Americans and for Euro-American women. Virginia Marie
Bouvier’s Women and the Conquest of California: 1542–1840: Codes of Silence (2001), published just
a few years after Hurtado’s Intimate Frontiers, makes the sexualized conquest of California’s native
people the central theme of her book, with Catholic priests and Spanish and Mexican soldiers
playing interchangeably brutal roles. These three books aren’t centrally concerned with warfare;
however, given the importance of the mission-presidio complex in the conquest of el Norte and
the demands of Inquisition courts to enforce Catholic orthodoxy among conquered Native
peoples, their discussion of mission life is an important aspect of Spanish and Mexican imperial
expansion.4
A fuller consideration of the gendered nature of military and diplomatic relations between
Indian people and Spaniards or Mexicans in the North American plains and southwest appeared
only in the 2000s as early American women’s and gender history moved into the history of men
and masculinity. In Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands (2002), James F. Brooks argues that the shared honor culture of Indios and
Peninsulares was built on the ownership and control of women and children. The raiding and
trading of livestock and slaves became the basis for a colonial economy that linked the people of

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 Gender in Colonial North American Warfare

the pastoral borderlands—Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards alike—
from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Although the slaves who were the basis of
this economy were mostly women and children and the raiders and traders almost exclusively
men, Brooks relegates most of his discussion of gender to the first chapter of the book. In an
important article in the Journal of American History, titled significantly “From Captives to Slaves:
Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands” (2005), Juliana Barr offers a gendered analysis
of Native women slaves as well as a thorough comparison to the better-known Atlantic World-
centered experience of African and creole African American chattel slavery. Unlike studies of
captivity in the northeast among Algonquian and Iroquois communities, which focus on captives
as adoptive family members, Barr argues that southwestern slavery was in fact more comparable to
African and African American chattel slavery. Echoing Trexler’s concern that historians aren’t
always attuned to the power dynamics involved in captivity, Barr notes that “in seeking to redeem
the humanity of [captive women] and to recognize their important roles in trade and diplomacy,
scholars have often equated agency with choice, independent will, or resistance, and de-empha-
sized the powerlessness, objectification, and suffering that defined the lives of many.”5
Barr takes this sensitivity to Native American cultures and power dynamics into her book,
Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007), in which
she makes a strong argument for the importance of gender in mediating all cross-cultural contacts
in the colonial southwest, from diplomacy and trade to mission life and military conflict.
“Because gender operates as a system of identity and representation based in performance—not
what people are, but what people do through distinctive postures, gestures, clothing, ornamenta-
tion, and occupations—it functioned as a communication tool for the often nonverbal nature of
cross-cultural interaction.” Gender, she argues, was even more important than race because the
Texas borderlands remained Indian country into the nineteenth century: “[G]ender prevailed
over [race], because native controls prevailed over those of Spaniards. The Spanish documentary
record makes this clear: [T]hey did not get to call their own tune even in their own record
books.”6
Gender factored heavily into both diplomacy and violent borderlands encounters. As Barr’s
title suggests, the presence of women could suggest the peaceful intentions of an approaching
party, just as the absence of women could cause alarm. Even if the only woman in a Spanish
delegation approaching a Caddo village was the image of the Virgin Mary on a banner, she
signaled peace; reciprocally, women’s hospitality was central to Caddo diplomacy.7 But women’s
presence in the borderlands did not necessarily guarantee peace. In addition to taking enemy
Indians—women, men, and children—as captives and keeping (or selling) them as slaves, she also
discusses the violent and frequently sexualized attacks and postmortem insults that Spanish and
Indian men dealt one another in battle: For example, Apache warriors stripped Spanish bodies and
scalped them; Spanish soldiers “severed the heads of Apache men before taking their wives” as
captives and likely rape victims.8
In Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (2007), I argue similarly that we
must attend to Native as well as Euro-American gender roles in order to understand the
experience and memory of warfare in the early colonial northeast, which means focusing on
masculinity as well as women’s roles in borderlands warfare. English men who came of age in the
era of European religious warfare and the English Civil War were like Native American men who
survived early French, English, and Dutch colonialism and the Fur Trade Wars: They each
inherited a martial cult of masculinity and would perpetuate these in North American wars in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While they agreed that military matters were men’s affairs,
they differed as to the correct performance and display of masculinity. For example, Native men
prized stoicism in the face of pain or even torture until death and judged Euro-American men

13
 Ann M. Little

unmanly because “‘they died crying, and made sower faces, more like children then [sic] men.’”
Anglo-American men questioned Native masculinity because they refused to meet them on an
open battlefield: “‘[N]o Indians would come neere us, but runne from us, as the Deere from the
dogges.’” But all men understood the universal insult of being called “all one like women.”9
Beyond this cross-cultural contest of manhood, I argue that the historical record on border-
lands warfare was saturated with gendered insults and boasts uttered by French, Native, and
Anglo-American women and men alike. The Native practice of taking war captives and stripping
and re-dressing their captives, as well as forcing them to function in new families with different
gender and work expectations, outraged Anglo-Americans. The fact that hundreds of Anglo-
American captives—especially girls and young women—chose to remain with their Native or
French-Canadian adopted families further destabilized Anglo-American families and challenged
their assumptions about the durability of Protestantism and patriarchal authority in the colonial
borderlands. Similarly, European-style total warfare that included attacks on and even the
immolation of entire civilian populations horrified Native allies of the English and enemies alike.
In R. Todd Romero’s Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism
in Early New England (2011), he argues that understanding the religiously based nature of both
Native and Anglo-American masculinities is essential to fully understanding the Anglo-Indian
military conflicts of the seventeenth-century northeast, principally the Pequot War (1636–37)
and King Philip’s War, or Metacom’s War (1675–76). “Religion filled gender identities with
meaning, however differently they were understood… For both Indians and settlers, everyday
life unfolded within enchanted worlds charged with spiritual power, sacred meaning, and some
mystery.” Romero’s careful reading of material as well as textual sources reveals new layers of
meaning in the symbolic language of diplomacy and the tools of war like the “‘bundle of new
arrowes lapped in a rattle Snakes skin’” sent by Narragansett Sachem Canonicus to Miles Standish
of the Plymouth Colony in 1622, or the musket butt owned by a Praying (Christianized) Indian
that was inlaid with wampum in the shape of a cross. Both of these symbolic goods suggest “the
interconnections between manhood, warfare, and religion for Native men.” The rattlesnake skin
evoked the Algonquian god Hobbomock, who frequently appeared as a snake in vision quests;
English Christians, on the other hand, saw a diabolical purpose in the use of the snake skin.
Similarly, the musket butt is a very masculine object whose alteration with wampum beads
suggests a unity of spiritual and military power in the mind of the Algonquian Christian owner.
Romero’s book also makes important contributions to the history of childhood and youth in
his attention to the means by which young Anglo-American and Algonquian boys became men,
when they would be judged according to both the major features of masculine achievement in the
seventeenth century: courage in war and alignment with supernatural forces. As I do in Abraham
in Arms, throughout the book Romero emphasizes similarities as well as differences between
Native and English gender ideologies: “[W]hile both parties shared some cultural ground—the
importance of religion to gender identities, to cite one important example—they rarely recog-
nized such commonalities, often focusing instead on differences.” Yet the differences are more
salient to Romero because of his focus on youth and the life cycle instead of just warfare and adult
manhood: “Manhood was something to be accomplished. Native and Anglo-American manly
ideals came closest in holding physical accomplishment and skillful oratory in high regard; other
practices such as gaming and hunting demonstrate how differently manliness could be figured
across the divide.”10
Two essays in New Men: Manliness in Early America (2011) extend these arguments about the
central importance of warfare to Native men’s masculinity in the colonial southeast and Ohio
Valley through the eighteenth century, especially Cherokee men. Tyler Boulware writes in “‘We
Are MEN’: Native American and Euroamerican Projections of Masculinity During the Seven

14
Figure 1.1 Although Mary Rowlandson never described using any weapons against the Native people
who attacked Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1675, the trope of the warrior woman became so
popular in the eighteenth century that Revolution-era reprints of her captivity narrative like
this 1773 edition published by John Boyle featured woodcuts that show her shouldering a
musket.
Source: Printed by John Boyle: Boston, 1773. Wikimedia Commons.
 Ann M. Little

Years’ War” that “both Indian and British men used manly language to reinforce their own identity
as warriors and to question the martial capabilities of each other.” Like Romero, Boulware is
sensitive to generation and the life cycle insofar as age was incorporated into the universally
understood language of gendered insults among southeastern Native men, such as “boy” or “old
woman.” In her essay “Real Men: Masculinity, Spirituality, and Community in Late Eighteenth-
Century Cherokee Warfare,” Susan Abram makes an even stronger case for the heightened
importance of warfare to Cherokee manhood over the course of the eighteenth century. As the
deerskin trade with Anglo-Americans produced only more debt for their clans, and as the accel-
erating cycles of warfare called them to avenge the “crying blood” of relations killed or taken into
captivity, Cherokee men were drawn from hunting to warfare as their primary occupation. Like
Romero, Abram focuses on the intimate connections between Native American men’s spirituality
and warfare, and carefully analyzes the rituals before and after a war party did its work of blood-
letting and taking captives. Blood rituals such as menstruation among women and warfare among
men demanded segregation from the rest of the community and consultation with the spirit world
in order to properly channel the volatile spiritual power of this bodily fluid. Additionally, Abram
demonstrates that the postmortem maiming and scalping of their enemies, which Anglo-American
observers saw as shocking corpse desecration, was connected to the Cherokee belief that “by
disfiguring the physical body, the enemy became degraded, unworthy, emasculated men.”
“Scalping was a direct assault against the ‘soul of conscious life’ that resided at the top of the
head. By preventing the enemy from reaching spiritual fulfillment, scalping allowed Cherokee
warriors to prove and enhance their worth as real men through martial success.”11
In her 2012 book Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial
Southeast, Michelle LeMaster too argues that gender was central to the cross-cultural encounters
between Anglo-Americans and the Native people of the southeast—principally the Creek
(Muskogee), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Catawba—not just in warfare, but also in
diplomacy, trade, and intercultural marriages. All in all, LeMaster’s portrait of southeastern
Anglo-Indian relations demonstrates the economic and familial intimacies shared by the Anglo-
American and Cherokee communities, as well as the kinds of violence that only intimacy makes
possible. Unlike the New England-based studies described above, LeMaster finds not just gendered
martial rhetoric but also the sexually violent insults and attacks in early southeastern Anglo-Native
warfare that Abram’s essay hinted at. For example, LeMaster cites a 1736 incident in which
Chickasaw warriors staked up their male captives and “‘heated barrell’s of Guns and thrust them
into their private parts’ before burning them to death,” and notes the sexually suggestive post-
mortem poses in which the Tuscarora left one Anglo-American family’s corpses in 1711. As in New
England, where a man called another “woman” or “boy” to insult him, maturity and sexual
potency were even more clearly linked to political and military power in the minds of Native men,
for whom “the most derisive term was eunuch.” LeMaster also finds a great deal more coercion in
the experience of southeastern captivity for Anglo-American and Native war captives alike, noting
the region’s longstanding traffic in African as well as Native American slavery.12

Women and Warfare

Although most of the energy in the past fifteen years has been directed at describing the contest of
masculinities revealed in military conflict, women’s historians have also documented and analyzed
the involvement of women in warfare in early America. Merrill Smith offers useful overviews of
women and warfare along the Atlantic littoral in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in two
chapters in her recent surveys of women’s lives in colonial America. These chapters focus for the
most part on Anglo-American and Native American women, although other European colonists

16
 Gender in Colonial North American Warfare

Figure 1.2 This illustration accompanied John Underhill’s account of the 1637 Mystic massacre of
the Pequot Tribe by an English raiding party and their Native American allies. All
Pequots in the village, including women, children, and the elderly, were killed
indiscriminately.
Source: John Underhill. STC 24518, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

and African Americans come in for a little attention as well. Smith nods to elite women’s leadership
roles in early American conflict, especially the role that Native women played in deciding which
captives would be adopted and which tortured and executed, but until she reaches the American
Revolution, she focuses not on women’s leadership in warfare but on the trauma that warfare
inflicted on its female victims. When she reaches the Revolution, Smith also writes about the role
that women played as citizens and camp followers in vital troop support roles.13
Smith’s contributions remind us that dislocation, dispossession, captivity, and sexual exploitation
were common fates for the many women whose lives were disrupted by warfare, and she makes it
clear that warfare became more rather than less common over time in colonial America. This is an
important fact to remember when thinking about war in the colonial era as a whole, considering that
the tale we early Americanists usually spin is one of early colonial environmental shock and
precariousness yielding to hard work and determination.14 Although tales of the descent into savagery
caused by the disease and starvation faced by the earliest European colonists and their Native
neighbors still appall and titillate, we should bear in mind that the lives of their great-grandchildren
and their descendants were at much greater risk to be interrupted by—or ended in—violent conflict.
Eighteenth-century wars were bigger and longer, and involved European standing armies as well as
North American warriors and volunteers by the middle of the century. Eighteenth-century North
American warfare was an early rehearsal for the nationalist levées en masse (mass conscriptions) and total
war that characterized the Western world at the turn of the nineteenth century.

17
 Ann M. Little

Some of the titles discussed above on gender and warfare focus on women as much as men and
masculinity, such as Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, my Abraham in Arms, and
LeMaster’s Brothers Born of One Mother. On the surface, there are many similarities in their
discussions of women, which tend to focus on both Native and Euro-American women as
victims of wartime raids and captivity. However, they describe very different kinds of captivity—
some forms were akin to chattel slavery, as in Barr and LeMaster’s description, while I describe a
captivity that was frequently temporary or even voluntary (in the case of girls and women who
chose to remain with their Native or French captors as kin). Importantly, I found no evidence of
rape or sexual exploitation in the colonial Northeast, whereas Barr and LeMaster’s accounts make
it clear that sexual exploitation was probably intrinsic to the enslavement of women in the
southern borderlands. LeMaster and I also document a few examples of Native women’s political
and military leadership, something missing from Barr’s southwestern borderlands accounts. The
reasons for these differences are not entirely clear, although I think the progress of colonial
invasion and exploitation (lesser in my book, greater in LeMaster’s and Barr’s books) and the loss
of authority and stature of women over time in the colonial Americas are important to consider,
as is the reduced role of slavery in the colonial northeast versus the southeast and the southwest in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.15
Other scholars have developed the theme of the woman warrior much more fully, however,
both in terms of Native women’s political leadership in war councils and in battle itself. The
evidence for pre- and immediately post-contact women’s involvement in Native American
warfare is much stronger than the European and Euro-American evidence, which tends to
focus on exceptional women who transvested in order to serve as soldiers (and in one case, as
an officer). Theda Perdue writes about “war women” in Cherokee Women (1998), women who
“distinguished themselves in battle” and “occupied an exalted place in Cherokee political and
ceremonial life.” While other Cherokee women carried water and supplied food to the male
warriors, war women were honored for notable deeds in battle with special food served only to
men and with a lifelong political role in their communities as a “Queen or Chief of the nation.”
War women were also permitted the honor of deciding what to do with war captives, and of
relating tales of their bravery in the Eagle Dance, in which Cherokee warriors recounted previous
victories in battle. In spite of the rewards given to women who crossed gender lines to become
celebrated warriors, they were small in number compared to “most women whom war touched
directly,” who “became its victims.”16
However, to date there is no full-length monograph on this subject for Native American
women of any nation, and aside from Perdue’s Cherokee Women and some of the other books on
war and gender mentioned earlier, there have been only a handful of articles that address the
importance of Native women in politics and war councils. Recently, Gina M. Martino-Trutor
argues that Weetamoo, one of the so-called Algonquian “squaw sachems” in leadership at the
time of King Philip’s War (1675–76), was such a formidable political and military force that both
King Philip (or Metacom) and the English sought her alliance in the conflict. The English at the
time estimated that she had nearly three hundred warriors loyal to her—a substantial army
considering that they estimated Metacom’s forces to number about the same. Martino-Trutor’s
work suggests that there are undoubtedly stories like Weetamoo’s that bear re-examination for
their importance as military leaders, especially because unlike the Cherokee or Iroquois, there
was no institutionalized role for women’s political or military leadership among Algonquian-
speaking peoples. According to Martino-Trutor, Weetamoo achieved her position as leader of
the Pocasset Wampanoag by rank, but she kept it through skillful leadership.17
There are also examples of warrior women among Euro-American women in colonial
America, although their stories tend to share many of the generic conventions of European

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folk tales and the penny press of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dianne Dugaw’s Warrior
Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 offers some context for Anglo-American warrior
women by noting the long English tradition of girls who transvested as men to go to war and
then became folk heroes for their exploits. These adventures were designed more to shame men
who shirked their military duties than to praise the women’s “Amazonian” courage, although
their patriotic service to the empire in the long eighteenth century was certainly applauded.
Similarly, the bawdy picaresque Lieutenant Nun by Catalina de Erauso, one of the earliest known
secular autobiographies of a woman, furnishes evidence for this tradition among Iberians in both
their Old and New World ventures. As a young nun from a prominent Basque family at the
convent of San Sebastian the Elder, Catalina slipped away from the cloister after fashioning her
underclothes into a man’s suit and joined in the Erauso family tradition of military service in the
New World in 1603, fighting and flirting her way across Chile for twenty years before returning
to Europe to tell her story. Catalina de Erauso was a higher-status version of her contemporary
Thomas/Thomasine Hall, a recent immigrant from England who was tried in a criminal court in
1629 for wearing both men’s and women’s clothes and claiming to be both a man and a woman.
As described in Mary Beth Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming
of American Society (1996), Hall was raised as a girl, but after adolescence “‘Cut of[f] his heire and
Changed his apparell into the fashion of man and went over as a souldier in the Isle of Ree being
in the habit of a man,” and also dressed as a man on the journey to Virginia a few years later.
Military adventurism, although officially open only to young men, clearly knew no sex in this
period of early imperial expansion.18
Scholars of Anglo-American women have also noted that women who committed shocking
acts of violence against their enemies were sometimes celebrated like Cherokee “war women.”
In Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750
(1980), Laurel Thatcher Ulrich recounts the 1697 slaughter of ten Wabanaki Indians, six of
whom were children, by Hannah Duston (also spelled Dustan). The adults had taken Duston, her
nurse, and a boy captive a few days earlier from Haverhill, Massachusetts. Duston’s bloody self-
redemption from captivity was only the most dramatic tale among dozens of women’s captivity
narratives that were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Best-sellers in their
day, these books reassured English-speaking audiences of the fortitude of Anglo-American
womanhood as well as of the superiority of English civilization and Protestantism over Indian
“savagery” and French Catholicism. Although problematic because of their highly ideological
nature, they remain some of the few primary sources that were written by women who
experienced war in early America, and moreover they are some of the only sources that give us
insight not just into the family lives of Anglo-American victims but into the lives of their Native
American captors’ families as well.19
Tales of warrior women and the more common experience of working the supply lines for
one army or another became more numerous during and after the American Revolution because
of the unprecedented mobilization on both the loyalist British and the Whig American sides.
Holly A. Mayer documents the extent to which civilian men’s and women’s work was vital to the
health and well-being of the Continental Army in Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and
Community During the American Revolution (1996). Stereotyped in popular memory now as sex
workers, camp followers were in fact a diverse coalition of wagoners, sutlers, smiths, farriers,
laundresses, seamstresses, and other “artificers” who provided the food, transportation, main-
tenance, and repairs needed to keep the army on its feet. In Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early
America, Kathleen Brown argues that Revolutionary soldiers’ insistence that laundry was
women’s work probably imperiled their health and earned them a reputation for being dirty
and disease-ridden in the early years of the war. But the link between cleanliness and virtue was

19
 Ann M. Little

complicated: Whig officers were wary of the reputation of washerwomen as sexually suspect,
thus introducing moral pollution into the ranks while cleansing the men’s filthy linens, which
were nevertheless key to their health and morale. It took professional Prussian military
discipline, as imposed by Baron Frederick Von Steuben at Valley Forge, to clean up the
Continental Army after he was appointed inspector general of the Continental Army in May
1778. Brown writes that he effectively introduced better discipline in “camp sanitation, dress,
cleanliness, and health… Journals from the later years of the war reveal stronger military
discipline and higher standards of cleanliness,” mostly because Von Steuben overcame the
American reluctance to hire washerwomen, not because he was able to convince soldiers to do
their own laundry.20
As in the earlier wars and imperial ventures described above, the Revolution had its share of
women who transvested to serve as soldiers. The most famous of these women is probably
Deborah Sampson, who served two seasons “in the Massachusetts line” at West Point as
“Robert Shurtliff” and was wounded by a musket ball in her thigh and a gash to her head by
a saber in “a number of small skirmishes.” Her story is most thoroughly examined and
documented by Alfred F. Young in Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson,
Continental Soldier (2004). He explains how she evaded detection through these battle injuries,
only to be discovered while suffering from smallpox in Philadelphia. Sampson was then
discharged in the autumn of 1783, seventeen months after her enlistment, but her true fame
came twenty years later in 1802–03, when she toured New England and upstate New York
with an autobiographical performance in which she transformed herself from a middle-aged
goodwife into a Revolution-era soldier. Sampson had married a farmer and raised a family with
him, but they struggled to make ends meet, so she developed a performance in which she would
tell tales of her wartime adventures while dressed in women’s clothing. The highlight of the
evening was at the end, when she took the stage “equipped in complete uniform, [and
performed] the Manual Exercises, attended by a company of officers,” offering a vivid illustration
of just how skillfully she had “played the man during the war.” She petitioned Congress for a
veteran’s pension twice in the 1790s and 1800s, and was eventually successful. Young’s
definitive biography offers a lively account of gender roles and relations in the Revolution
and early U.S. republic, as well as a full consideration of all of the women who were publicly
revealed to have transvested and enlisted as men. No one appears to have served as long or as
valiantly as Sampson, and no other biography of a warrior woman comes closer to connecting
the myth and the flesh-and-blood woman than Young’s Masquerade.21

Future Directions in Scholarship

Feminist histories of warfare that focus on its gendered nature and effects on the peoples of early
North America have done an excellent job at describing the stakes for men and competing
masculinities, but the most recent studies by scholars like Martino-Trutor suggest that a return to
women’s stories and their involvement in warfare is overdue. In particular, the lives of Native
American and other non-English-speaking women on the margins rather than at the centers of
colonial Euro-American occupation offer opportunities for examining women not only as
victims of warfare, but as military leaders and decision-makers as well.
Recent essays in Thomas A. Foster’s recent collection Women in Early America (2015) by Joy A.
J. Howard, Karen L. Marrero, and Susan Sleeper-Smith argue that Euro-American, Native
American, and Métis women offer promising opportunities for understanding the roles that
women played in the many wars and fragile peace that characterized the northeastern border-
lands. Howard’s essay, “Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American

20
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Borderlands,” tells the story of an Anglo-American child taken in the Deerfield raid of 1704. She
lived at the Catholic Mohawk mission village of Kahnawake and raised a family there before
returning to New England in her thirties. Ashley eventually married an Anglo-American trapper,
and in her forties served as a translator for Congregational mission towns in western Massachusetts
until her death in 1757. Marrero’s essay, “Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power
in Early French America and Detroit,” suggests that French language sources reveal a fur trade
absolutely dependent on the innovations and energy of Native, French Canadian, and Métis
women alike in the Great Lakes region. And in “The Agrarian Village World of Indian Women
in the Ohio River Valley,” Sleeper-Smith demonstrates that Huron, Potawatomi, and Odawa
women’s cultivation of the landscape made their farms and orchards irresistible targets of the U.S.
army as it pushed westward to defend its occupation of the lands in the Northwest Ordinance.22
Attending to particular stories and places may show us the way forward as they add richness and
nuance to the existing bibliography.
Scholars who read languages other than English will find new archives and fields of study open
to them, and this can only enrich our understanding of gender and warfare in early North
America. For example, my book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (2016), focuses on the
story of one Anglo-American captive and her journey through Acadia among Catholic Wabanaki
to Québec, where she became an Ursuline choir nun and eventually the Mother Superior
immediately after the British conquest. I argue that the connections and continuities of women’s
lives in the northeastern borderlands—Wabanaki, Anglo-American, and French Canadian—
were wrapped up in the near-constant wars of the eighteenth century, but also foundational to the
two centuries of peace that have characterized the U.S.-Canadian border since then. A great deal
of Many Captivities is set inside the Ursuline convent in Québec, so I offer an explanation of the
attractions of religious life for French Canadian women, who aside from marrying and giving
birth to enormous families had no other means to serve the King and the empire. Their brothers
could join the army or become colonial officials but they could not, so we should see religious life
as a parallel institution to the military, with military-like hierarchies and discipline. Monasteries
were organized like barracks, and both the troupes de la marine and nuns wore distinctive costumes
that identified them as such. Accordingly, religious life was the most direct means by which
women could serve both God and the French state.23
All of these trends—looking harder at Native American women’s history, seeking out new
archival sources in languages other than English, and taking a serious look at Catholic women and
men in North American history—may enliven what has become a rather flat focus on men and
masculinity in military history that considers gender. According to scholars (myself included),
masculinity is always “in crisis” or “imperiled” in studies that span the sixteenth through the
twentieth centuries, and yet it remains dominant in U.S. history and historiography. Protestant,
Anglo-American masculinity in particular appears relatively changeless, built as it is around the
mastery of others (inside the household as well as on the battlefield) and on avoiding labor
performed by women and nonwhite peoples.
Perhaps what the intertwined histories of gender and military history teach us is that it is
men’s and not women’s history that proves so resistant to change over time. Ideas about
masculinity have changed over the past five hundred years since the European invasion of
North America, but much more slowly than ideas about women’s roles in war and peace.
Indeed, even a layperson today still understands that comparing a man to a woman is an insult in
popular discourse, but comparing a woman to a man can be read either as a compliment or an
insult. The persistence of such tropes is ironic, given historians’ assumptions about the
supposedly changeless nature of women’s lives and bodies and their imperviousness to historical
change.

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Notes
1 See for example Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993); Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of
Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Leeann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender:
Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Nicholas L. Syrett, The
Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2009); Jennifer Thibodeaux, ed., Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks, and Masculinity in
the Middle Ages, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
2 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of
Men in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Anne S. Lombard, Making
Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
3 Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the
Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), quotation from 5. See also Trexler, “Making the
American Berdache: Choice or Constraint?,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 3 (2002): 613–47.
4 Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in
New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Albert Hurtado, Intimate
Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1999); Virginia Marie Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840: Codes of Silence
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).
5 Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,” Journal of
American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 19–46; quotation from 20.
6 Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), quotations from 11 and 289.
7 The Caddo nation is a confederacy of southeastern Native American tribes.
8 Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, chapters 1 and 4; quotation from 170.
9 Ann M. Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), quotations from 12, 19, and 44. For information on the Iroquois-led Fur
Trade Wars and its implications for gender relations among Algonquian peoples in the Great Lakes
region, see Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the
Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
10 R. Todd Romero, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early
New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), especially 137–191; quotations from
7, 20, 141, and 145; musket depicted on 171.
11 Tyler Boulware, “‘We are MEN’: Native American and Euroamerican Projections of Masculinity
During the Seven Years War” and Susan Abram, “Real Men: Masculinity, Spirituality, and Community
in Late Eighteenth-Century Cherokee Warfare,” both in New Men: Manliness in Early America (New
York: New York University Press, 2011), 51–70 and 71–91; quotations from 53 and 79.
12 Michelle LeMaster, Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial
Southeast (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 66–77 and 91–107; quotations from
69 and 72.
13 Merrill D. Smith, Women’s Roles in Seventeenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2008), chapter 6, and Women’s Roles in Eighteenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2010), chapter 5.
14 For a recent example of early American trauma literature, see Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery:
Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013).
15 Barr, “From Captives to Slaves”; Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, passim; Little, Abraham in
Arms, 29–34, 99–102, and chapters 3–4; LeMaster, Brothers Born of One Mother, chapter 3. See also
Alice Nash, “‘None of the Women Were Abused:’ Indigenous Contexts for the Treatment of
Women Captives in the Northeast,” in Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America,

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ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 10–26, which suggests that
Wabanaki male captors may have enslaved and sexually assaulted their pre-contact Native captives,
although she agrees that there is no evidence for the sexual assault of Euro-American captives in the
post-contact era. On the loss of Native American women’s status over time as a result of European
colonial invasion, see Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chapter 1.
16 Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 38–39 and chapter 4; quotations from 38 and 87.
17 Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 3 (1991):
39–57; Ann Marie Plane, “Putting a Face on Colonization: Factionalism and Gender Politics in the
Life History of Awashunkes, the ‘Squaw Sachem’ of Saconet,” in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–
1816, ed. Robert Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 140–65; Gina M.
Martino-Trutor, “‘As Potent a Prince as Any Round About Her’: Rethinking Weetamoo of the
Pocasset and Native Female Leadership in Early America,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 3 (Fall
2015): 37–60.
18 Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir
of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1996); Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of
American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 183–97. See also Julie Wheelwright, Amazons
and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (London:
Pandora, 1989), and Kathleen Brown, “‘Changed...into the Fashion of Man’: The Politics of Sexual
Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6
(1995), 171–93.
19 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England,
1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 167–83. The literature on gender and
Anglo-American captivity and of the narratives that followed is vast. See for example June Namias,
White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993); Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives
(New York: Penguin, 1998); Lorrayne Carroll, Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and
the Writing of History (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007); Little, Abraham in Arms, chapters
3–4; and Teresa A. Toulouse, The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal
Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
20 Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in
Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press), 161–83; quotation from 182.
21 Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); quotations from 4, 123, and 205.
22 Joy A. J. Howard, “Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American
Borderlands,” 118–38; Karen L. Marrero, “Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power
in Early French America and Detroit,” 159–85; and Susan Sleeper-Smith, “The Agrarian Village
World of Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley,” 186–209, all in Women in Early America, ed.
Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
23 Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016),
chapters 4–5, especially 146–47.

23
 2
CITIZEN-SOLDIERS IN THE
REVOLUTIONARY ERA AND NEW
REPUBLIC
John Gilbert McCurdy
eastern michigan university

In the summer of 1776 Private Joseph Plumb Martin contemplated how military service affected
his gender. Having joined the Continental Army more for adventure than political grievances,
Martin found himself exposed to the deeply gendered nature of warfare. When he remained silent
despite a lack of rations, his masculine self-control was praised by an officer, prompting Martin to
remember “I felt a little elevated to be stiled a man.” Martin also observed the performance of
gender by those around him. He praised the “worthy young ladies” who covered the faces of
fallen Americans, rebuked a Tory woman he suspected of poisoning soldiers, and dismissed an
“old negro woman” who acted as a surgeon.1
The gendering of war and its participants was certainly not unique to the American
Revolution. However, the Revolution fundamentally changed the notion of who should
fight, and why, by valorizing the citizen-soldier, which tied political participation in the new
nation to martial notions of masculinity. The citizen-soldier has since proven a powerful ideal
despite the fact that participants in the Revolution and the wars that followed were not always
citizens or men. Martin’s experience reveals not only the importance of women in the war, but
that as a landless sixteen-year-old, he had no vote in the nation he was fighting to create.
This chapter explores the most important recent scholarship on gender and warfare in the era
of the American Revolution. First, it examines the participants of late colonial-era wars,
especially the men who fought in the French and Indian War. Second, it turns to the diverse
participants of the American Revolutionary War and how the interpretation of their actions has
changed over time. Third, it follows the creation of American citizenship, its military and
gendered dimensions, and how this was challenged by women in particular. Fourth, it measures
the effects of the Revolution by turning to the participants of the War of 1812 and antebellum
conflicts. From 1750 to 1850 warfare changed dramatically in the United States, leaving a legacy
that persisted long after Joseph Plumb Martin had won his country’s independence.

The French and Indian War and Imperial Crisis

Warfare was an ever-present part of many Americans’ lives in the late colonial period. Militia
service was required of nearly every man while service in provincial or regular armies was a
recurrent possibility for those seeking money or adventure. Euro-Americans and Native
Americans on the frontier faced the constant fear of skirmishes, as did members of both groups

24
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living on the fault lines of empires, while the institution of African-American slavery was built
upon physical and psychological violence. In 1754, after nearly three centuries of colonial-
indigenous conflict and imperial contests for the continent, North America erupted in a con-
flagration known as the French and Indian War (1754–63). Much has been written about this
conflict, which was the North American theater of the global Seven Years’ War. Readers
wanting a detailed narrative are best served by Fred Anderson’s compelling Crucible of War.2
In contrast to earlier periods of colonial warfare, scholars have only begun to scratch the
surface of the role that gender played in the French and Indian War. The most revealing look at
British regulars is Redcoats in which Stephen Brumwell rescues common soldiers from the
ignominy to which contemporaries and historians have long consigned them. Brumwell argues
that British soldiers were effective warriors, portraying them as rational actors driven by displace-
ment and lack of opportunity in a rapidly changing British economy. Most had worked in textile
production or had been unskilled manual workers such as laborers and husbandmen before
enlistment. A majority hailed from Scotland and Ireland, places even harder hit by economic
change than England. Many saw the army as a vocation, as the average soldier entered in his early
twenties and remained for the better part of a decade. Some fought for the promise of land in
North America, an opportunity they did not have in Britain, although the army later reneged on
such promises, providing little civilian masculine privilege for veterans.3
The French and Indian War also highlighted the extreme contrast between British regulars
and provincial soldiers. Fred Anderson’s A People’s Army examines the motivations and experi-
ences of one colony’s provincials. For most Massachusettsians, military service was a uniquely
male obligation that began and ended with quarterly militia drills. However, in the French and
Indian War, many young and propertyless men saw provincial service as a means to profit through
pay and plunder as well as to champion the Protestant cause. Fighting as much for ideology as
economics, Anderson’s provincials stand apart from Brumwell’s regulars. While the military
became a vocation for redcoats, it remained an avocation for provincials who joined for short
periods and possessed a contractual notion of service under which they left the army when officers
violated their rights.4 Works on Virginia and Pennsylvania provincials have largely ignored
questions of gender, and more should be written on the men who fought in the late colonial
era to better appreciate the regional varieties of martial masculinity.5
A not inconsiderable number of Americans joined the British army instead of provincial units.
Alexander V. Campbell’s The Royal American Regiment reveals that almost ten percent of the 60th
Regiment of Foot were native-born Americans, while a majority were recently arrived immi-
grants, mainly German Protestants. Campbell does not explore gender but it would be interesting
to know how the motivations of colonial redcoats compared to those of Britons as well as how
German masculinity informed service in an Anglocentric empire.6 The Royal Navy also attracted
a large number of colonists. Jesse Lemisch has emphasized the class-based nature of these “Jack
Tars,” offering an implicitly gendered reading of dispossessed male colonists who found both
economic opportunity and political ascendancy in the navy and the merchant marine.7 However,
more Americans entered the Royal Navy involuntarily through a process known as impressment.
In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman offers many new insights on the institution, including the
pressed sailors’ manhood. Impressment was an emasculating experience not unlike forced
servitude whereby sailors lost their civilian rights, specifically the freedom of movement.
Brunsman also discovers that many impressed sailors remained in the navy, creating what he
terms an “impressment paradox.” Although they lost liberty, sailors gained masculine privilege
through homosociability which reinforced their status above women and children.8
Masculine privilege also came to British and American men who took up as pirates. Marcus
Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea suggests that piracy could bring even more male

25
 John Gilbert McCurdy

privilege and quasi-Marxist equality to the poor than the Royal Navy. So long as they went
uncaptured, pirates were able to live out a masculine fantasy, raping and pillaging across the
Atlantic. Many elected their own leaders and shared booty in ways that contrasted with the
deference and inequality demanded of colonists and members of formal military units.9
Location and context also influenced the gender of the military’s participants. Ships were all-
male enclaves, a fact that has led B. R. Burg to speculate about the prevalence and even tolerance
of homosexuality among seamen, especially pirates.10 Brunsman also considers “impressment
widows” and the increasing pressure on the Royal Navy to allow longer periods of shore leave.
By contrast, the British and American armies were hardly a masculine preserve. Women had long
followed armies, and many accompanied husbands, lovers, and fathers to the colonies during the
French and Indian War. Brumwell’s Redcoats and Paul E. Kopperman’s “The British High
Command and Soldiers’ Wives in America, 1755–1783” offer some insight into the role of
women in the late colonial British army, although the subject of camp followers and female
warriors in the late colonial era certainly deserves greater scholarly attention.11
Perhaps surprisingly, we know much more about the gendered dimensions of warfare among
people of color in the late colonial era. Greg O’Brien’s Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age explores
Native American warriors in the Southeast United States, detailing not just why men fought but
also how a gendered discourse gave meaning to war. Specifically, men had to prove themselves
through hunting or warfare which, in turn, entitled them to spiritual power. Women, however,
had access to spirituality through their inherent femininity.12 In Brothers Born of One Mother,
Michelle LeMaster investigates gendered rhetoric in the late colonial Southeast, detailing how
notions of masculinity and femininity informed not only war between Indians and settlers, but
also less violent interactions such as diplomacy, trade, and intermarriage.13 Scholars might
investigate similarly gendered discourses and rhetoric to better understand white warriors.
Although African Americans did not play a large role in the French and Indian War, some
effort has been made to understand the gendered nature of late colonial black warfare, specifically
in the Stono Rebellion of 1739. John K. Thornton has investigated the African side, arguing that
the rebels were recently enslaved Kongolese soldiers who brought martial knowledge with them
to South Carolina.14 Edward A. Pearson has looked at the American side, suggesting that the
Carolinas’ recent transition to a plantation economy reordered gender relations and thus Stono
was a moment when male slaves articulated their masculinity. Specifically, they inverted the ritual
brutalization of slavery by decapitating white planters and claiming the masculine privilege of
violence that they had lost in enslavement.15
Scholars have largely ignored the gendered dimensions of the Imperial Crisis (1763–75),
although two forthcoming monographs should reveal more about the relationship between
men, women, and warfare in the events that triggered the Declaration of Independence. The
presence of fifteen regiments of British regulars in North America kept martial concerns at the
forefront of many colonists’ minds. Serena Zabin’s soon-to-be-published book on the Boston
Massacre of 1770 shows the intimate connections between soldiers, their families, and Bostonians
during the years immediately preceding the Revolutionary War. My forthcoming book on
quartering British troops in America during the Imperial Crisis interrogates how changing
notions of space reframed ideas of military power. By the middle of the eighteenth century,
the home was understood as a place of domestic privacy where female dependents were
protected. This led to a prohibition on billeting in homes (achieved through Parliament’s
Quartering Act of 1765) and resulted in the creation of new martial spaces like barracks.
Having evicted redcoats from their homes, Americans then debated whether British soldiers
belonged in their cities or borderlands, before ultimately evicting them from the country
altogether. Scholars might also derive new insights into gender and warfare by investigating the

26
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era’s smaller conflicts such as Pontiac’s War (1763–66), Regulator Movement (1765–71), and
Lord Dunmore’s War (1774).

The American Revolutionary War

In April 1775 American minutemen engaged British regulars at Lexington and Concord,
Massachusetts, touching off the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). There are several
excellent overviews of the war. Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause is a comprehensive
treatment of the causes, course, and conclusion of war, while two good shorter versions are
Edmund S. Morgan’s The Birth of the Republic and Gordon S. Wood’s The American
Revolution.16 For an examination of the military, specifically the Continental (U.S.) Army,
readers should begin with The War of American Independence by Don Higginbotham and America
Goes to War by Charles Patrick Neimeyer.17 There has been considerably less interest in the
British army in the Revolution, although Matthew H. Spring’s With Zeal and with Bayonets
Only attempts to remedy this.18 There are also accounts of every major battle and many
minor ones.
It is estimated that nearly 200,000 Americans served in the Continental Army during the
Revolution and that almost as many served as militiamen. Exactly who these soldiers were has
stirred controversy since the Revolution itself. Patriot leaders like John Hancock envisioned an
army of citizen-soldiers fighting “for their houses, their lands, for their wives, their children.”19
However, veterans of the conflict challenged this view, including Joseph Plumb Martin whose
memoirs remain the best first-hand account of daily life in the war.20 Martin made it clear that it
was poor men like himself who did most of the fighting, receiving little compensation for their
effort. In the 1970s historians joined the debate. In A Revolutionary People at War, Charles
Royster argues that a rage militaire filled the country early in the war, leading to a broad cross
section of men to take up arms in pursuit of liberty in the first year of fighting. The number of
volunteers narrowed thereafter, especially as the army became increasingly professionalized and
disciplined, although Royster insists that subsequent soldiers nonetheless fought for republican
ideals.21 However, studies of recruits from Maryland and regulars from Massachusetts, New
Jersey, and Virginia challenged Royster’s Neo-Whig interpretation by observing that it was
mostly men on the margins (the poor, immigrants, and African Americans) who enlisted.22 As
James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender argue in A Respectable Army, many Americans
fought for less noble ends than liberty, such as money, the promise of land, and their own
freedom, not unlike their British counterparts.23
Asking who fought the Revolution has led some historians to contemplate issues of manhood.
In the social histories of the 1970s these discussions were largely implicit. The Minutemen and
Their World, Robert A. Gross’s outstanding community study of Concord, Massachusetts, reveals
a town beset by generational tensions caused by a lack of land for sons to inherit and the hope that
wartime service could improve poorer men’s lots.24 Two newer monographs have explicitly
considered manhood in the ranks. In The Soldiers’ Revolution, Gregory T. Knouff argues that
soldiers from Pennsylvania constructed a “localist white male nation” based on their divergent
regional and racial identities. Specifically, he discerns several manhoods including the masculine
resistance of Philadelphians protecting homes and families, and the “Indianized warrior identity”
of western Pennsylvanians who sought to demonstrate manly courage.25 In Becoming Men of Some
Consequence, John A. Ruddiman pursues the implications of the fact that most Continental
soldiers were in their teens and early twenties. For these young men, military service allowed
an opportunity to perform manhood since the qualities of a good soldier (“bravery, stoicism, and
energy”) were the same qualities that earned civilian men masculine privilege. Ruddiman also

27
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argues that American officers employed the young soldiers as props to construct their own manly
identities as beloved patriarchs.26
Knouff and Ruddiman only scratch the surface of the gendered nature of military service in
the American Revolutionary War. We need to know more about the diverse manhoods of the
soldiers and how civilian gender identities connected to motivations for and experiences of
wartime service. This is particularly true for the war’s African-American participants. Since the
publication of Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution more than fifty years ago,
scholars have appreciated the role that thousands of African Americans played in the Continental
Army, some fighting voluntarily as freemen and others as slaves sent as substitutes. Especially since
many Americans believed that military service made emancipation a moral imperative, the
gendering of black soldiers deserves greater attention.27 Much the same can be said of British
regulars. To date, the only social history of the men who served in the British army is Sylvia R.
Frey’s The British Soldier in America. Frey discovers that many, if not most, redcoats were “victims
of economic misfortune” like laborers and displaced agricultural workers. Although Frey does
not offer a gendered analysis of the British soldier, she discovers that many were attracted to a
martial type of manliness when other routes (like property, family, and wealth) were
unavailable.28
The manhood of military and civilian leaders has attracted considerable attention and yielded
some impressive results. Lorri Glover’s Founders as Fathers investigates the rhetorical and literal
structure of fatherhood as a means of understanding the politics and legacies of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason. She argues
that “these Virginians became founders because they were fathers,” suggesting their patriarchal
duties to care for their families, slaves, and other dependents led them to seek American
independence. However, fatherhood also constrained these same men, leaving them unable to
reconcile the gender and racial inequality of paternalism with the democratic promise of the new
nation.29 Cassandra A. Good’s Founding Friendships looks at non-sexual relations between elite
men and women like Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams, arguing that the Revolution’s
staunch commitment to egalitarianism allowed such intimate connections to thrive for the first
time in American history. Good argues that these connections were both deeply personal and
politically significant, allowing women access to power through their platonic relations with
important men.30 Thomas A. Foster shines a spotlight on the sex lives of the Revolutionaries in
Sex and the Founding Fathers, an attempt to understand not just their private lives but how we
remember them. He contends that Washington’s childlessness, Jefferson’s interracial liaisons, and
Hamilton’s adultery are like Rorschach tests that tell us as much about ourselves as the founders.31
All three books demonstrate the rich possibilities of examining the war’s leaders. Given the
extensive and easily accessible documentation of men like Washington and Jefferson, scholars of
gender and warfare are wise to direct their creative questions toward the founders when a lack of
evidence stymies inquiries of lesser-known men.
There remains a great deal of work to be done on the queer aspects of the American
Revolutionary War. In The Drillmaster of Valley Forge, Paul Lockhart raises the unanswerable
question about Baron Friedrich von Steuben’s homosexuality. Rumors that the Prussian officer
had “taken familiarities with young boys” was a main reason that Steuben sailed for America and
offered his services to the Continental Army, although Lockhart finds circumstantial evidence to
both confirm and contradict Steuben’s homosexuality.32 In the best recent account of the British
military and civilian leaders during the Revolutionary War, The Men Who Lost America, Andrew
Jackson O’Shaughnessy provides insightful biographies of Generals Howe, Clinton, and
Cornwallis. He also reveals that Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord George Germain lived
openly as a homosexual.33 More should be done to pursue non-traditional gender and sexuality in

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the ranks and the officers’ corps. Scholars might follow Janet Moore Lindman’s work on military
chaplains. Lindman argues that the Continental Army paradoxically relied on chaplains to inspire
the martial masculinity of soldiers even though these men themselves avoided combat and
eschewed the violence that typified Revolutionary manhood.34
Those who opposed the Revolution (Loyalists or Tories) have attracted the attention of
scholars of gender. Some connect loyalism to masculinity, with Gregory T. Knouff emphasizing
how Loyalists’ manliness was grounded in sacrifice and adherence to order, while Mark E. Kann
details the rhetorical unmanning of Loyalists as a form of political propaganda.35 A man’s Tory
identity could also adversely affect the women in his life. Linda Kerber draws attention to the
ways in which wives of Loyalist husbands lost their property and dignity when their husbands
fled.36 More is needed on both the rhetorical and the actual experience of Tories, especially in
light of recent work on the international dimensions of Loyalism and the large numbers of African
Americans and Native Americans who threw their lot in with the British army.37
Of course, the Revolution was not fought by men alone. Women played key roles as both
participants and non-combatants, and their experiences have long captured the imagination of
historians. In 1848, Elizabeth F. Ellet wrote the first history of women in the Revolution, offering
sketches of women who helped create the nation both on and off the battlefield.38 The academic
study of women in the Revolution began a century later with Linda K. Kerber’s Women of the
Republic and Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters.39 More recent and popular accounts are
Carol Berkin’s Revolutionary Mothers and Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers.40
Women’s roles in the Revolution can broadly be divided into two groups: participants and
non-combatants, with scholars giving the two about equal attention. Among the former, the
stories of Margaret Corbin, Mary Hays (aka Molly Pitcher), and especially Deborah Sampson
receive the most attention. Corbin and Hays were female Cincinnati: dutiful wives who assumed
their husbands’ positions on the frontline minutes after they were widowed. Deborah Sampson
took the less conventional route, disguising herself as Robert Shurtliff to enlist, only to be twice
wounded in battle. All three were heavily praised for their bravery, and Sampson even earned a
veteran’s pension. Typically, historians have argued that these women were allowed to perform
such bloody acts because the exigencies of war inverted gender norms; thus female participants
could perform masculine acts without violating their feminine identity. Of the three, only
Sampson has received a full-scale biography: Alfred F. Young’s Masquerade. Although Young
compares Sampson to other passing women of the era, a queer reading of this transgendered
person, especially his role in war, is still needed.41 Off the battlefield, the supporting roles of
women have been explored, including spies like Emily Geiger and Sybil Luddington. Turncoats
have also attracted attention. There are two recent biographies of Peggy Shippen, the woman
who helped convince Benedict Arnold to betray his country, while in Paul Revere’s Ride, David
Hackett Fischer suggests that Margaret Kemble (wife of British Commander-in-Chief Thomas
Gage) may have tipped off the Patriots to the British march on Concord.42
The most consequential work on women near the battlefield is Holly A. Mayer’s Belonging to
the Army, which explores camp followers. Families, traders, and the curious typically trailed early
modern troops, and the army, needing companionship, provisions, and laborers, often made
room for them. The British army placed camp followers under military governance and even
allowed rations for a few. The Americans, however, resisted followers as burdens (George
Washington disliked them in particular), and the Continental followers’ provisions were notably
less generous. Mayer argues that these people created a “Continental Community” that proved
instrumental to American victory. She investigates the gender politics at work in camps, such as
how the women were suspected of being prostitutes (or simply easy) and how they contested
these accusations. She argues that women were generally welcomed because they did not

29
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transgress their gender status as supportive dependents. Opinions of camp followers were also
class-based, with officers’ wives praised for their gaiety and maternal influence. Despite hating
most followers, even General Washington warmly welcomed his wife Martha at camp.43
Other historians have examined women on the home front both as heroines and victims. In
Betsy Ross and the Making of America, Marla R. Miller concedes that there is no evidence that
Philadelphia’s leading flag maker actually sewed the first stars and stripes, but nonetheless uses the
biography of Ross to offer fresh insights into the lives of Patriot artisans and businesswomen as
well as how the Revolution changed their lives.44 Women also supported troops financially.
Esther DeBerdt Reed and the Ladies’ Association of Philadelphia raised $300,000 in paper
currency for American soldiers. However, when Washington advised the women to purchase
coarse linen for shirts with the money, Reed ignored the Commander-in-Chief, preferring to
give the soldiers hard money to spend as they pleased. Other women supported the cause by
managing households while their husbands were away. Abigail Adams endured disease, quartered
soldiers, and farmed in a depressed economy when her husband left to govern, and her story has
been told numerous times.45 Less famous women suffered through the same and worse as the war
passed from state to state. Mary Beth Norton turns to even darker subjects, recounting how the
women on the home front contended with deprivation, disease, and even rape.46 Perhaps the
most insightful published source by a woman is The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, in which a
Philadelphia Quaker details her experience with war in the contested city. The autobiographies
of Sarah Osborn, Anna Oosterhout Myers, and Hannah Sansom have also been published.47 The
story of a woman seduced and then abandoned by a British soldier was the basis for Susanna
Rowson’s 1791 novel Charlotte Temple, the first bestseller in U.S. history.48

Figure 2.1 Elizabeth Murray was an importer and retailer of British goods in Massachusetts on the eve of
the American Revolution. When war broke out, she remained in her home, quartering
British and then American troops. Here, she is depicted entertaining British officers, her
“strategy” being to protect her home and family through hospitality.
Source: Reproduction of painting by Percy E. Moran. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-6507.

30
 Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era

The Critical Period and the Federalist Era

Following the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, the United States entered a
time of uncertainty (dubbed the “Critical Period” by John Quincy Adams) that lasted until the
implementation of the U.S. Constitution in 1789.49 During this time, uncertainty arose over the
war’s participants and opponents. Bands of former officers and enlisted men protested and even
plotted against the Continental Congress as promises of pay and western lands went unfulfilled. In
Suffering Soldiers, John Resch details how forgotten veterans mobilized moral sentiment to agitate
for pensions. However, the U.S. government did not approve pensions for all Revolutionary
War veterans until 1832, meaning that many veterans passed away without reward for their
service.50 The fate of enslaved servicemen was equally muddled. At the end of the war, few states
could bring themselves to return African-American veterans to the plantations, thus slaves at least
won their freedom for service.
Participants of the American Revolutionary War also demanded civil rights for their service.
In a purposeful break from British law, the American states, and later the United States itself,
wrote constitutions that included broad swaths of the public as not just soldiers and taxpayers,
but voters and officeholders as well. In place of subjecthood (a feudal identity of unequal
obligation) a notion of citizenship emerged in which all citizens held equal rights in the polity.
Although the rise of American citizenship has intrigued historians for generations, it has been
studied with exceptional vigor since the rise of gender studies and the new social history of the
1970s. Many have investigated those excluded from citizenship in the early republic like
women and people of color or have traced the path by which people excluded from full rights
in the colonial era became citizens in the United States. Questions of citizenship after the
Revolutionary War intersect with examinations of military service, both for men and
women.51
Popular imagination and academic scholarship has long held that Revolutionary soldiers
received citizenship in exchange for their service. In part, this is a continuation of the myth
that the war was fought by property-owing patriots who put down their plowshares just long
enough to take up the sword. However, when historians discovered that most soldiers were
propertyless, immigrant, or black, the fate of veterans was subjected to new scrutiny. The link
between service and citizenship was certainly weakest for African Americans. Slavery was only
gradually abolished in the Northern states after 1780 and, even then, custom and law often
prevented black suffrage in most places. Although military service is often obliquely connected to
the end of slavery and the creation of black citizenship, a study of African-American veterans
becoming voters is sorely needed.
Far more is known about marginal white men who achieved citizenship for their service in
the American Revolutionary War. In Arms, Country, and Class, Steven Rosswurm examines
the “lower sort” of Philadelphia who heard the call of duty shortly after Lexington and
associated for the common defense. Before long, they organized the Committee of Privates
and demanded full rights of citizenship despite being propertyless or foreign-born. Although
the more radical elements of the privates’ agenda were coopted by conservatives, the
Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 nonetheless enfranchised all men who paid taxes.52 As I
explain in Citizen Bachelors, this primarily benefited propertyless single men who had been
paying poll taxes since 1693 without the right to vote. Young bachelors were the ideal soldiers
in the eyes of many state legislators, as their lack of dependents lessened the burden on the state
if they died in battle, and many states passed laws that enticed or conscripted single men to
serve. Although North Carolina and Georgia also enfranchised propertyless single men, not
all states were as generous. When Maryland’s attempts to draft bachelors led to riots, lawmakers

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softened the state’s conscription laws but never made any attempt to enfranchise landless
soldiers.53
Scholars outside of history have also linked American citizenship and martial manhood. In
Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors, R. Claire Snyder argues the founders built on classical and
Renaissance notions of civic virtue to construct citizenship as a performance of loyalty to the
community and masculinity via military service. Snyder takes a long view of U.S. history, tracing
the demise of the citizen-soldier at the hands of nationalism and individualism, as well as asking
how the inclusion of women as both citizens and soldiers at the end of the twentieth century
complicates this founding principle.54 Mark E. Kann also contends that martial manhood
informed citizenship in the early republic in A Republic of Men. Building on R. W. Connell’s
notion of hegemonic masculinity, Kann insists that there were multiple masculinities at play and
that through a “grammar of manhood,” the founders signaled that some were more acceptable
than others. Disorderly men who chose selfish pleasures over duty (like bachelors and slaves) were
excluded from the polity, while those who had served their country in war were entitled to
citizenship. The veterans-cum-fathers became voters, officers became legislators, and the hero,
George Washington, was elected President of the United States.55
If men received citizenship because they had been soldiers, then women missed this oppor-
tunity because they were excluded from military service. Although several historians have made
this observation, Linda K. Kerber’s No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies offers a sophisticated
account of the politics of gender and military service. Kerber argues that American citizenship
should be understood as a series of obligations and rights such that performance of the former
entitles one to the latter. While women in the nineteenth century claimed that as taxpayers they
were entitled to suffrage, it was harder for them to use military service to similar ends. Indeed, it
was not until the 1970s that women began to challenge the citizenship advantages that derive
from military service such as preference in hiring.56
If women did not receive citizenship because they were not soldiers, then how did the
Revolutionary War change their place in American society? As Joan R. Gunderson notes in To
Be Useful to the World, “for many years women’s historians have debated whether the American
Revolution improved women’s status or not.” Because warfare was defined as a uniquely masculine
endeavor, it is hard to see how prizing citizen-soldiers helped women. Indeed, even those women
who fought in the war like Deborah Sampson were not enfranchised. Gunderson observes that
women were increasingly cast as dependents after the Revolution, no doubt a point reinforced by
the prevailing myth that Revolutionary soldiers were men who fought to protect their homes and
families.57 As Rosemarie Zagarri details in Revolutionary Backlash, American independence opened
many possibilities for citizenship, and at least one state (New Jersey) enfranchised unmarried
women who paid property taxes. However, as the Spirit of ’76 waned, gender politics became
increasingly conservative, and women lost the political rights they had gained, including suffrage in
New Jersey.58 Instead of being voters and warriors, women were recast as “Republican Mothers”
whose patriotic duty was to provide moral support to their husbands and sons.59 Cynthia A. Kierner
illustrates this point effectively by studying female petitioners in Southern Women in Revolution,
1776–1800. While white men abandoned petitioning after the Revolution, choosing instead to
exercise their citizenship rights by voting, women were “neither citizens nor subjects” and had to
employ deferential rhetoric for redress.60
Connected to legal changes were rhetorical and symbolic ones that influenced how Americans
connected gender and warfare. In Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty, Benjamin H. Irvin considers
how the Continental Congress’s vision of a nation was received by people “out of doors,” that is,
outside of the halls of power. Gendered order proved instrumental to the symbols and rituals that
emerged in Revolutionary Philadelphia such that when Francis Hopkinson requested payment

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for some design work in the form of wine, the Treasury found his “Labours of Fancy”
insufficiently masculine.61 In Sealed with Blood, Sarah J. Purcell observes that gender influenced
how Americans remembered the sacrifices of their Revolutionary heroes. Women’s commem-
orations were marginalized to make room for more manly tributes.62 Although the
Revolutionary War challenged the gendered order, it did not permanently or radically change it.
The Critical Period was followed by the Federalist Era, named for the dominant political party
of the 1790s. The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick and Empire of Liberty by
Gordon Wood provide good introductions to the period.63 Although the country was not at war
in the 1790s, military affairs nonetheless dominated the decade. The first real test of the new
government was its struggle with Joseph Brant’s Western Indian Confederacy for control of
Ohio. While good accounts exist for the failed missions of Arthur St. Clair and Josiah Harmar, as
well as the successful campaign of Anthony Wayne, gender has not been a primary focus of any of
them.64 Likewise, the gender dimensions of the Whiskey Rebellion have not been interrogated.
That Western Pennsylvanians opted to defy the Washington administration’s excise tax on
distilled spirits by taking up arms certainly raises questions about military masculinity and the
challenge of citizen-soldiers in peacetime.65

Jeffersonian Republicans and the War of 1812

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was formally at peace but it nonetheless
engaged in a military exploits. A Federalist Congress created the U.S. Navy in 1798 when the
country entered the Quasi-War with France. Five years later, when the Federalists had been
replaced by the Democratic-Republicans, President Thomas Jefferson authorized incursions
against the Barbary States of North Africa. Meanwhile, the United States kept a wary eye on
Great Britain as its former colonial overlord impressed American seamen into the Royal Navy
and stoked the hopes of Native Americans that redcoats would one day return. In June 1812
Congress declared war on Great Britain, launching a long, bloody, and largely pointless conflict
known as the War of 1812 (1812–15). Among the better recent overviews are Donald R.
Hickey’s The War of 1812 and Troy Bickham’s The Weight of Vengeance, while Alan Taylor’s
The Civil War of 1812 emphasizes the borderlands nature of the conflict and Jon Latimer’s 1812:
War with America presents the war from British and Canadian perspectives.66
Among the more popular topics of the War of 1812 is citizenship, effectively continuing the
discussion spawned by studies of the Revolutionary War. In effect, historians have cast the War of
1812 as a test of the ideal of the citizen-soldier, suggesting that the citizenship of U.S. servicemen
both induced the conflict and proved one of the war’s most insurmountable challenges. Paul
Gilje’s Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights explores how naval personnel in the early republic had been
reimagined. In place of the Jack Tars of the colonial era, the U.S. sailor had emerged, imbued
with the full rights of citizenship. Indeed, it was because Britain continued to impress American
seamen and thus treat them as subjects that the United States was so terribly aggrieved.67 Others
have pursued the actions of militias in the War of 1812, a group that because of the excessive
praise of citizen-soldiers had come to be seen as instrumental to battle. In a tradition that predated
the Revolution, Democratic-Republicans feared standing armies and slashed the U.S. military,
expecting the state militias to pick up the slack. However, the militias were poorly trained and
highly conscious of their rights as citizens. As a result, they proved an unreliable fighting force,
famously choosing to abandon the field instead of crossing into Canada, thus handing the British a
key victory at the Battle of Queenston Heights in 1812. C. Edward Skeen has detailed these
challenges in Citizen Soldiers in the War of 1812, noting that the state militias performed so poorly
that the states seriously contemplated creating their own armies. Although this did not happen, it

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sufficiently tarnished the citizen-soldier ideal that even the militia’s biggest defenders, like John
C. Calhoun, called for a professional army.68
The gendered dimensions of the War of 1812 have attracted some attention, but nothing
comparable to the Revolution. Henry S. Laver portrays the War of 1812 as part of a mythical past
for antebellum Southerners who looked back on the conflict as a golden age when men
demonstrated their masculinity through open violence. For this reason, the young men of
Kentucky continued to valorize the militia and joined it in regional conflicts despite its growing
irrelevance at a national level.69 Tom Kanon also considers Southern manhood in Tennesseans at
War, including the rhetoric of leaders like Andrew Jackson who saw the War of 1812 as an
opportunity for American men to defend their masculine honor as well as their country’s
honor.70 To date, the only book-length exploration of women in the War of 1812 is Dianne
Graves’s In the Midst of Alarms. Like popular histories of women in the Revolution, this is a wide-
angle view of women in the war as participants, officers’ companions, and wives left at home. As
such, the book fails to assess how gender influenced participation and changed with the war.71
The War of 1812 and the Jeffersonian Era have spawned several insightful works on the
gendered dimensions of warfare. Nicole Eustace’s original 1812: War and the Passions of
Patriotism investigates not why Americans fought in the war, but why the public supported it.
Examining newspapers that demanded war and the dramas that followed it, Eustace discovers
that “in American popular culture, in the era of the War of 1812, war stories and love stories
intertwined.” She argues that it was Americans’ valorization of fecundity that led the country to
want to expand its borders and to exterminate Native Americans who resided within them.
Men were expected to be warrior-fathers to the children women were expected to
reproduce.72
African Americans in the War of 1812 have also garnered scholarly attention. Alan Taylor’s
The Internal Enemy traces some 3,400 slaves who fled plantations in the Chesapeake to join the
British Navy, finding that many did so to preserve families that were being broken up by
the vagaries of the Southern economy.73 While Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800 is the central
event of Ploughshares into Swords, James Sidbury’s investigation of race and identity in turn-of-
the-nineteenth-century Virginia nonetheless offers important insights into the intersection of
war, gender, and race at that time. Detailing the “oppositional culture” of Virginia’s free and
enslaved African Americans, Sidbury describes a world of fluid and non-conjugal households
headed by women. Black women also claimed public space as workers, although the racial and
gendered transgressions of this arrangement brought constant retribution from white men.
Accordingly, Sidbury suggests that black male violence can be traced to notions of black
masculinity and the impulse to defend black women’s honor.74 Historians of the War of 1812
would do well to imitate Sidbury’s attention to gender as well as his insistence of understanding
black and white gender notions in relation to one another.
The literature on gender after the War of 1812 is extensive. Readers are encouraged to begin
with the aging but still insightful American Manhood by E. Anthony Rotundo and The Bonds of
Womanhood by Nancy F. Cott.75 Some forays have been made into gender and warfare in the
antebellum era, although much of this is still preliminary.
The role of gender in the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–48) is best explored in A Wicked War in
which Amy S. Greenberg traces the nation’s decision to attack its Southern neighbor through
biographies of political leaders such as James K. Polk, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln. These
men were self-conscious of their gender performance and strove to prove their resolute yet
rational manhood. War against peoples they deemed inferior—be they Indians, blacks, or
Mexicans—was one way of accomplishing this. Greenberg also indicates that antebellum man-
hood had become increasingly reactionary, suggesting that war was a consequence of white men

34
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fearing that their manhood was being threatened. Historians might ask if such concerns apply to
the Revolution and if participation in earlier wars was motivated by gender insecurity.76

Conclusion
By the time Joseph Plumb Martin published his narrative in 1830, the American Revolutionary
War had been over for nearly a half century. In that time, gender and war had changed
dramatically, with the citizen-soldier defining the ideal of both manhood and military service.
However, as Martin observed, the ideal did not match reality. Landless recruits, transgender
heroines, camp followers, runaway slaves, and anxious patriarchs also joined the fray, thoroughly
complicating gender and war in the Revolutionary era.
Although scholars have interrogated many of these topics, much more work remains to be
done. In addition to the directions already suggested in this essay, three overarching topics are
worthy of future research. First, we need to ask more about gender and the military at peacetime.
The focus on war alone skews our perception, and we run the risk of allowing an extraordinary
event to mischaracterize the everyday experience. Perhaps more work on the gendered dimen-
sions of the small conflicts such as Pontiac’s War, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Quasi-War
with France would address this. Second, we know a lot about the average soldier, but we need
to know more about exceptional and unusual men. In this, scholars of men might take a page
from women’s historians’ interest in figures like Deborah Sampson. By knowing more about
homosexuals, chaplains, and men who refused to fight, we might gain a more comprehensive

Figure 2.2 This romanticized view of the Continental soldier’s “Departure” and “Return” appeared in
Harper’s Weekly on July 8, 1876, for the centennial of the Declaration of Independence.
While the man has been noticeably changed by the experience of war, apparently the woman
has not.
Source: Illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, 1876, July 8, based on wood engraving by Walter
Satterlee. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-
58264.

35
 John Gilbert McCurdy

understanding of manhood and its relationship to war. Third, the treatment of racial groups is
still too segregated. Although enslaved African Americans fought for different reasons than free
Euro-Americans, they nonetheless followed the same political allegiances (Patriot or Loyalist,
American or Briton) and sought citizenship in the same nations. Consequently, their stories, and
to a lesser extent those of Native Americans and Mexicans, were part of a larger gendered
discourse of warfare that should be united.77

Notes
1 Thomas Fleming, ed., A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and
Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin, (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), 22, 40, 50.
2 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America,
1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000). See also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Great War for Empire,
15 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1936–70).
3 Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and the War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4 Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
5 James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Joseph Seymour, The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777
(Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2012).
6 Alexander V. Campbell, The Royal American Regiment: An Atlantic Microcosm, 1755–1772 (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).
7 Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New
York: Garland, 1997).
8 Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 12.
9 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-
American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987).
10 B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
(New York: New York University Press, 1983).
11 Paul E. Kopperman, “The British High Command and Soldiers’ Wives in America, 1755–1783,”
Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 60 (1982): 14–34. Some useful direction might be
found in Barton C. Hacker, “Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A
Reconnaissance,” Signs 6 (1981): 643–71; Elissa Gurman, “‘Never did any Woman / more for
Love and Glory do’: Gender, Heroism, and the Reading Public in The Female Soldier; or, the
Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell,” Women’s Studies 44 (2015): 321–41; Myna Trustram,
Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984); Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French Army (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2010); Patricia Y. Stallard, Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian Fighting
Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
12 Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2002). See also Nancy Shoemaker, “An Alliance between Men: Gender Metaphors in Eighteenth-
Century American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi,” Ethnohistory 46 (1999): 239–63; Susan
M. Abram, Forging a Cherokee-American Alliance in the Creek War: From Creation to Betrayal (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2015).
13 Michelle LeMaster, Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial
Southeast (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
14 John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96
(1991): 1101–13.

36
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15 Edward A. Pearson, “Rebelling as Men,” in Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt,
ed. Mark M. Smith (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 87–107. See also Peter M.
Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York: Garland, 1993).
16 Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982); Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, 4th ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013); Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York:
Modern Library, 2002).
17 Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–
1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War:
A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
18 Matthew H. Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America,
1775–1783 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).
19 Paul D. Brandes, John Hancock’s Life and Speeches: A Personalized Vision of the American Revolution,
1763–93 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996), 215–16.
20 See also Robert Bray and Paul Bushnell, eds., Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution,
1775–1783: An Annotated Edition of the Military Journal of Jeremiah Greenman (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1978).
21 Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–
1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). See also John Shy, “Hearts and Minds
in the American Revolution: The Case of ‘Long Bill’ Scott and Peterborough, New Hampshire,” in
A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, rev. ed. (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 163–79.
22 Edward C. Papenfuse and Gregory A. Stiverson, “General Smallwood’s Recruits: The Peacetime
Career of the Revolutionary Private,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 30 (1973): 117–32; Mark
Edward Lender, “The Social Structure of the New Jersey Brigade: The Continental Line as an
American Standing Army,” in The Military in America: From the Colonial Era to the Present, ed.
Peter Karsten (New York: Free Press, 1980), 27–44; John R. Sellers, “The Common Soldier in the
American Revolution,” in Military History of the American Revolution: Proceedings of the Sixth
Military History Symposium, USAF Academy (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1976),
151–61.
23 James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, “A Respectable Army”: The Military Origins of the
Republic, 1763–1789, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
24 Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).
25 Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American
Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), xiii–xiv, 40.
26 John A. Ruddiman, Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary
War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 66. See also Caroline Cox, Boy Soldiers of the
American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
27 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1961). See also Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary
Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Michael Lee
Lanning, Defenders of Liberty: African Americans in the Revolutionary War (New York: Citadel Press,
2000); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
28 Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). For accounts of individual soldiers, see Don N. Hagist,
British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2012); Don
N. Hagist, ed., A British Soldier’s Story: Roger Lamb’s Narrative of the American Revolution (Baraboo, WI:
Ballindalloch, 2004).
29 Lorri Glover, The Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3.

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30 Cassandra A. Good, Founding Friendships: Situating Friendships between Men and Women in the Early
American Republic, 1780–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Richard
Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
31 Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2014).
32 Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 42.
33 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American
Revolution, and the Fate of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
34 Janet Moore Lindman, “‘Play the Man … for Your Blooding Country’: Military Chaplains as Gender
Brokers during the American Revolutionary War,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed.
Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 236–55.
35 Knouff, Soldiers’ Revolution; Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered
Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998). See also Timothy
J. Compeau, “Dishonoured Americans: Loyalist Manhood and Political Death in Revolutionary
America,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Western Ontario, 2015).
36 Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 115–36.
37 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011);
Ruma Chopra, Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2013).
38 Elizabeth F. Ellet, The Women of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848).
39 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980).
40 Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York:
Knopf, 2005); Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (New York:
HarperCollins, 2004).
41 Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York:
Knopf, 2004).
42 Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical
Men They Married (Boston: Beacon, 2013); Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case, Treacherous Beauty: Peggy
Shippen, the Woman behind Benedict Arnold’s Plot to Betray America (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2012); David
Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
43 Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 3.
44 Marla R. Miller, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (New York: Holt, 2010).
45 Edith Belle Gelles, Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992);
Lynne Withey, Dear Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Woody
Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2010); Joseph J. Ellis, First Family: Abigail and John
Adams (New York: Knopf, 2010).
46 Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 195–227. See also Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of
Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
47 Elaine Forman Crane, et al., eds., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3 vols. (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1991); John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the
War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf,
eds., The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
48 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986).
49 Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 393.

38
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50 John Resch, Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the
Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
51 Douglas Bradburn, “The Problem of Citizenship in the American Revolution,” History Compass 8
(2010): 1093–113. See also James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and
Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997).
52 Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and “Lower Sort” during the
American Revolution, 1775–83 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
53 John Gilbert McCurdy, Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2009).
54 R. Claire Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican
Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
55 Kann, A Republic of Men, 1. See also Robert A. Nye, “Review Essay: Western Masculinities in War
and Peace,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 417–38; Ronald R. Krebs, Fighting for Rights:
Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); R. W.
Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
56 Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
57 Joan R. Gunderson, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740–1790 (New
York: Twayne, 1996), xi.
58 Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
59 Kerber, Women of the Republic, 283; Gunderson, To Be Useful, 175.
60 Cynthia A. Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), xix–xx.
61 Quoted in Benjamin H. Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People
Out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 245.
62 Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
63 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early
Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
64 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Indian Unity, 1745–1815
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Armstrong Starkey, European and Native
American Warfare, 1675–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); David Andrew
Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American
Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Adam Joseph Jortner, The Gods of
Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012); Robert M. Owens, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in
the Anglo-American Mind, 1763–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015); William
Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2015).
65 Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986); William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington,
Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New
York: Scriber, 2006).
66 Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial ed. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2012); Troy Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and
the War of 1812 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812:
American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Knopf, 2010); Jon
Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2007).

39
 John Gilbert McCurdy

67 Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
68 C. Edward Skeen, Citizen Soldiers in the War of 1812 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999).
See also Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the
War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
69 Henry S. Laver, “Refuge of Manhood: Masculinity and the Militia Experience in Kentucky,” in
Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, eds. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri
Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 1–21. See also Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “‘What It
Means to Be a Man’: Contested Masculinity in the Early Republic and Antebellum America,” History
Compass 10/11 (2012): 852–65.
70 Tom Kanon, Tennesseans at War: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014).
71 Dianne Graves, In the Midst of Alarms: The Untold Story of Women and the War of 1812 (Montreal:
Robin Brass Studio, 2007).
72 Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2012), xiii.
73 Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013);
Gerard T. Altoff, Amongst My Best Men: African-Americans and the War of 1812 (Put-in-Bay, OH: Perry
Group, 1996); Gene A. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
74 James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 55.
75 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformation in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern
Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1993); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in
New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). See also Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Richard Stott, Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak:
Women, Education, and Public Life in American’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006); Natasha Kirsten Kraus, A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in
Antebellum America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
76 Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New
York: Knopf, 2012). See also Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldering, and Citizenship in the Mexican-
American War of 1846–48,” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 23–46.
77 The author would like to thank Ann Little, Kara Vuic, Richard Nation, and Jason Storey for their
insightful comments and suggestions. He is also indebted to Eastern Michigan University History MA
student Adam Franti for his astute research assistance.

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 3
BEYOND BORDERS AND
COMBATANTS
Wars of Empire and Expansion

Karen E. Phoenix
washington state university

Scholarship on the Wars of Empire and Expansion has generally followed the larger trends in the
historiography of U.S. diplomacy/foreign relations, as well as military history. Initially, historians
began with examining the U.S. empire in Puerto Rico, Cuba (to a lesser extent), and the
Philippines. This was a narrow construction of empire, which limited analysis to those areas
that were under formal U.S. military control, and in which scholars focused on military engage-
ments and colonial institutions, from a largely top-down perspective.1 With the emergence of
cultural history and a “new” military history that privileges consideration of culture and social
issues, combined with an increasing awareness of imperial and transnational power dynamics,
scholars have expanded their view. Historians have worked to extend the definition of imperi-
alism beyond occupation of physical colonies (boots on the ground), and under this broader
definition, we can see the ways that the United States and the U.S. military have sought to
advance and protect U.S. interests abroad. This perspective allows for a much greater field of
inquiry, however there is still a tremendous amount of work yet to be done.

Gender and Soldiers in Colonies

If we think of the topic of gender and the military in U.S. wars of empire and expansion in its most
limited sense—soldiers in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, during the period of roughly 1898 to
the 1930s—the field is essentially non-existent. The work that comes closest to this definition is
Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti, which deals with the 1915–1934 occupation of Haiti, in which Haiti
did not become an official colony of the United States.2 In this vibrant and interesting book,
Renda uses diaries, letters, and memoirs from military personnel to analyze the gendered
dynamics of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1940. She discusses the initial
reaction of some of the Marines to landing in Haiti, the ways that they used concepts of
paternalism to justify the occupation, and the problems that this mindset created. Renda then
turns to the ways that the U.S. occupation was internalized by the American people, particularly
through news articles, memoirs, and public arts projects during the Great Depression. Taking
Haiti is particularly valuable for Renda’s use of personal and private materials from soldiers
themselves. Few scholars have used these types of sources when addressing U.S. imperialism
from a military perspective. Yet these records allow us to see the ways that gender informed both
their self-perceptions and their actions vis-à-vis the local people. Renda’s use of public/popular

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sources for the United States is also innovative, particularly in the chapter “Mapping Memory and
Desire.” Here, she uses travel narratives and the accounts of journalists imbedded with U.S.
troops to demonstrate that “white Americans grappled with the cultural and material implications
of occupation” and didn’t simply replicate the types of paternalism that government officials
espoused.3
In addition to Renda’s work, historians have also examined the ways that gendered rhetoric
shaped U.S. engagement in colonialism during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notable here is
Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood.4 Hoganson contends that concerns about
masculinity—both individual masculinity and the strength and vitality of the nation—provided
a basis for politicians to advocate for imperialism. Masculinity included the chivalrous “saving” of
a feminized Cuba and a paternalistic “civilizing” of a childlike Philippines. Hoganson also
demonstrates, however, that anti-imperialists similarly marshaled manliness to their cause by
emphasizing diplomatic and military restraint.
Like Hoganson, Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization is also important for those working
on U.S. imperialism.5 Although Bederman does not directly address gender within the military,
the book provides an excellent overview of racial and gendered discourse during the 1890s and
early 1900s. Manliness and Civilization has influenced many scholars of imperialism and gender by
providing a glimpse into the ways that politicians, activists, and public thinkers within the United
States wove race, gender, and civilization together. Chapters 3 and 5, which deal with G. Stanley
Hall’s work on racial recapitulations and neurasthenia, and Theodore Roosevelt, respectively, are
of particular interest. Bederman’s and Hoganson’s works are useful to historians of military/wars
because they address the ways that gendered rhetoric and concepts of masculinity led to the wars
of empire and expansion from a domestic perspective. The desire of politicians not to be seen as
“weak” or “cowardly” on the political home front fundamentally shaped the way that the United
States engaged in foreign affairs.
While Renda, Hoganson, and Bederman offer valuable assessments of gender and the military
in the official U.S. colonies, there are two critical concepts that have tended to limit the field in
which they are writing. The first is that imperialism only occurred in formal colonies (a legacy of
the rhetoric of American exceptionalism), and the second is that military history is limited to
troops in combat operations (a legacy of “old” military history). Some scholars have begun to
push the boundaries of both of these fields individually, and yet there is still relatively little
historiography on their intersection: a “new” imperial history that would also encompass “new”
military history, particularly featuring gender as a main category of analysis. However, there are
some scholars who are engaging with issues of empire, gender, and the military in new and
promising ways, which is evident in less conventional time periods and geographic areas.

Looking Beyond 1898 and the Formal Colonies

Scholars from a variety of temporal fields have begun to question the idea that imperialism only
occurred from 1898 to the 1950s. As scholars have demonstrated for earlier time periods, the same
imperial processes occurred in the expansion of the United States in North America, in both the
dealings with Native Americans and ideologies such as Manifest Destiny. Three studies of early
relations between Native Americans and Anglo-European settlers in the northeast colonies stand
out for their discussions of gender and war. The first is Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, which
focuses on King Philip’s War in New England during the 1670s.6 Lepore examines the extensive
writings of English combatants in order to illustrate the ways that the English constructed their
identities in relation to the “savage” Native Americans. Here, gender—what it meant to be
masculine or feminine in war and captivity—was one part of how Algonquin and New England

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colonists defined themselves and each other in the face of a brutal war. These interactions set the
tone for U.S./Native American relations for more than two hundred years. The second work,
Ann M. Little’s Abraham in Arms, examines roughly the same period as Lepore, but places gender
squarely at the center of analysis.7 Little argues that gender and masculinity were foundational to
claims to self-rule. She also extends her argument to later relations between New Englanders and
Canadians, where New Englanders used the same types of gendered rhetoric to attempt to
discredit Canadians from controlling U.S./Canadian borderlands. Both of these works demon-
strate that gender played an important role in the ways that settlers and Native Americans
constructed categories of civilized and savage in the very early wars of U.S. empire and expansion.
R. Todd Romero offers a slightly different perspective from Lepore and Little in Making War and
Minting Christians.8 Romero focuses specifically on masculinity and warfare as the backbone of
both native and English men’s identities. Native American masculinity was formed in part by
men’s physical prowess—sports, hunting, warfare, and healing. For the Puritans, masculinity was
less physical and a more spiritual sense of godliness. Like Lepore and Little, Romero addresses
King Philip’s War, but he emphasizes material culture, such as when Indian men adorned the
handles of their weapons with sacred beads. This perspective adds another “archive” to the study
of the military and gender, and it allows us to consider how dress, adornment, and décor factored
into masculinity and war.
In considering the early colonial period, it is also helpful for scholars to look at the Spanish
influence in what would become the U.S. Southwest. Just as the colonial powers came from
different cultures and assumptions about gender, so too did the native peoples. Richard C. Trexler’s
Sex and Conquest focuses on Spanish military and colonial officials and Native Americans, and
notions of sex and gender.9 He examines notions of masculinity, particularly the complex con-
struction of masculinity as Spanish conquerors encountered native peoples, especially those groups
whose gender norms incorporated “two-spirit” people (whom the Spanish saw as male transvestites
or the pejorative “berdache”). Within this context, gender played a central role in the military
conquest of native peoples, as conquistadores imposed patriarchy and property rights over women,
used sexual behavior to dominate younger men, and cast native men as weak and effeminate.
Trexler’s work demonstrates that historians must also take into account different notions of gender
in the communities with which the military and settlers came into contact.
The intersections of war, gender, and empire were also central to the U.S. conflicts with
Native Americans and westward expansion in the early- and mid-1800s, although there is not
much scholarship that combines these three areas of focus (most scholars fall into only one of the
three).10 Of interest here are works on the ways that U.S. conquest shaped Native American
gender relations, particularly the status of women as seen in Theda Perdue’s Cherokee Women.11
Perdue finds that while U.S. settlers attempted to assert patriarchy, Cherokee women retained
their power, including key wartime roles such as raising men to be warriors and serving as “war
women” who had power over the fates of captives. Perdue’s work therefore reminds us that while
contact and war did bring cultural changes, U.S. power was not hegemonic, and many gender
practices remained the same.
It is also important to remember that there were a variety of gender roles and sexual
orientations on the frontier. Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp illustrates that gender and
nationality intersected in the homosocial environment of the Gold Rush, as groups of men
from different nations took on what had been traditionally defined as women’s roles.12 For
example, the Anglo-American men stereotyped French men as being good cooks—a feminine,
although valued, skill set. While the military had more structured allocation of tasks, a similar
gendered analysis could yield very interesting results in the role of class and racial hierarchies
within the category of masculinity.

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In addition to the ways that notions of masculinity helped shape U.S. involvement in the War
of 1898, masculinity also shaped the idea of Manifest Destiny, as Amy S. Greenberg illustrates in
Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Greenberg examines the ways that Manifest
Destiny influenced masculinity and the notion that land and the peoples on that land should be
violently subdued in the mid-1800s. She distinguishes between two types of masculinity during
this period: restrained manhood and martial manhood. Restrained men were more paternalistic
and “grounded their identities in their families, in the evangelical practice of their Protestant faith,
and in success in the business world.” They were temperate and generally did not participate in
the blood sport culture of the time. In contrast, martial men tended to take pride in heavy
drinking and their prowess in blood sports. They “believed that the masculine qualities of
strength, aggression, and even violence, better defined a true man than did the firm and upright
manliness of restrained men.”13 Greenberg traces these two concepts and the ways that men and
women dealt with gender and national identity (through Manifest Destiny) in their military
dealings with people in Latin America and the Pacific.
One of the valuable contributions of Greenberg’s book is that she explicitly deals with
filibusters—groups of private U.S. citizens and mercenaries who invaded or formed units of
troops that were parts of military exercises in other nations (these tended to have the support of
the U.S. public, even if formal support from the U.S. government was not forthcoming). There
were a significant number of these types of military exercises in the antebellum period. For
example, William Blount, Governor of Tennessee, and former Vice President Aaron Burr were
both accused of attempting to mount military expeditions to take land for themselves in the late
1700s and early 1800s. There were also filibuster exercises to Ontario in the 1830s, Nicaragua in
the 1850s (where U.S. Southerner William Walker would briefly serve as President), Cuba in the
1840s and 50s, and Sonora and Baja in the 1850s. One could also consider the U.S. invasion of
Florida in the early 1810s and the revolution in Texas in the 1840s to be filibuster exercises, as
were the military campaigns into Mexico (Tamaulipas and Coahuila) in the 1850s. Greenberg’s
work is the most nuanced of examinations of the filibusters’ notion of gender, in which aggressive
white masculinity justified aggressive U.S. geographic expansion, although Robert E. May’s
Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, Charles H. Brown’s Agents of Manifest Destiny, and Frank L. Owsley
and Gene A. Smith’s Filibusters and Expansionists are also good resources for more information.14
Nicaragua, and in particular William Walker’s military exercises there, have been the subject
of several scholarly works, although Michael Gobat has the most sustained gender analysis of the
impact of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua in his book Confronting the American Dream.15 Gobat
examines how the United States intervened in Nicaragua, and how Nicaraguans reacted to this
intervention, including the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–1933. Most notably, Gobat examines the
ways that Nicaraguans (particularly elites) dealt with the tensions between wanting prosperity and
development like the United States while eschewing North American cultural imports, such as
the “modern” woman. While Gobat does examine some aspects of gender from both the U.S.
and Nicaraguan perspectives, his focus is generally upon class differences. Still, his analysis should
be useful for examining the love-hate relationship that many people in Nicaragua had with the
United States (particularly in terms of military intervention) during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Given the U.S. “soft power” imperialism of the twentieth century, and the military occupa-
tion of Germany and Japan after World War II, we must also consider gender and U.S.
imperialism after the 1930s. In addition to the works discussed above, we need to therefore add
the existent scholarship on the post-war occupation of Japan and Germany. For Japan, Yashuhiro
Okada examines the race and gender relations of African-American soldiers with the Japanese
at Camp Gifu, Naoko Shibusawa looks at the ways that U.S. occupiers recast Japanese as an

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American responsibility instead of an enemy, and Mire Koikari discusses the spread of feminism
under the U.S. occupation.16 For post-war Germany, Maria Höhn’s GIs and Fräuleins and Petra
Goedde’s GIs and Germans examine the interactions between U.S. soldiers and Germans.17 Both
works place gender centrally in their analysis. For example, in GIs and Germans, Goedde argues
that as U.S. soldiers formed relationships with German women and feminized the defeated
Germany, Americans transformed the way they saw Germans, from enemies to victims of the
Nazi regime.
Gender relations between U.S. military officials and enlisted men and local women continued
during the Cold War, as Katharine H. S. Moon illustrates in her study of the U.S. occupation of
South Korea. In Sex Among Allies, Moon argues that U.S. and South Korean military and
governmental leaders sought to use prostitutes as “political ambassadors.”18 Moon draws on
the work of Cynthia Enloe, who argues in several works that gender, sex, and the family were
central to the U.S. military and government.19 Of particular note is Globalization and Militarism, in
which Enloe questions how different ideas of femininity and masculinity have been used by the
United States to justify military intervention to “protect” “vulnerable” populations abroad.
In addition to the works above, Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D.
Salvatore’s Close Encounters of Empire is particularly useful for those beginning to work on U.S.
activities in an imperial context. The essays within the anthology provide an example of “new”
imperial history, in which the U.S. role in foreign relations was neither hegemonic nor uncon-
tested. This is an important consideration for those studying U.S. military history, in which the
U.S. military was often far technologically superior to its targets. The essays in the first and third
parts provide a good introduction to the theoretical concerns of empire, particularly Emily S.
Rosenberg’s “Turning to Culture.”
Several other anthologies will be helpful for those beginning to wade into imperialism as a
subfield, even though many of the essays address gender or the military, but not both.20 Scholars
will find the essays in “Part 7: US Military” in Colonial Crucible particularly useful because they
illustrate the connections between the United States and other countries as military personnel
traveled to fight, and the myriad problems of occupation (including colonized peoples gaining
citizenship through service, and the treatment of subaltern military personnel). These types of
issues are foundational to understanding imperial contexts and will help scholars understand some
of the gendered dynamics of colonial encounters.

Looking Beyond Combat

The second way that scholarship has been limited is that historians tend to use a narrow definition
of the military, which only encompasses troops who were actively engaged in combat or its direct
support. This is reflective of a persistent tension within the field of military history itself. For
example, in his 2007 overview of military historiography, Mark Moyar defends the productivity
and relevance of work within “the traditional realm of military history.” In the process, he
excludes any works that he sees as not having “a connection to armed force,” which he argues
“should be characterized solely as cultural or social history, for nothing of substance differentiates
them from other works of cultural or social history.”21 However, despite his narrow definition of
military history, there are historians who have demonstrated that governmental and military
personnel played an important role in non-combat operations and were involved in a variety of
functions that were key parts of extending U.S. influence and control.
Building from Renda’s work on U.S. Marines in Haiti, one way that military personnel aided
in the expansion of U.S. control was through their role in setting up local police forces and even
governments. For example, the United States established constabularies based on the U.S. model

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in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In Nicaragua, the U.S. military not only formed the
basis of the constabulary, but military officials also served as election officials. Gobat argues that
these election boards were specifically geared to try to decrease the power of the caudillos (the
landowners). He argues that the caudillos presented themselves as paternal figures and enjoyed a
type of patronage relationship to the local population, particularly the poor. To U.S. officials,
there was very little possibility that the caudillismo system could be democratic, and U.S. admin-
istrators sought to minimize candillo influence by regulating the electoral process. In the process,
the military personnel appear to have placed themselves as the interveners and protectors of the
poor.22
Another way that military officials were involved in wars of empire and expansion is clear from
the strong links between the military and medicine, particularly for the eradication of disease and
the study of tropical medicine. As Mariola Espinosa illustrates in Epidemic Invasions, the U.S.
government used concerns over the spread of yellow fever to the southern United States in order
to invade Cuba in 1898 (as part of the Spanish-American War) and again in 1902. Here, the U.S.
occupation government concentrated not only on sanitation efforts, but also on attempting to
understand the causes and transmission of yellow fever. Public health and sanitation systems were
included in the Platt Amendment, passed in 1903, which stipulated the conditions for the
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Cuba. Among these was the demand “that Cubans maintain
the public health measures instituted by the U.S. occupation government and raised the threat of
U.S. intervention if Cuban sanitary conditions declined.”23 Although Espinosa does not speci-
fically label it as such, this was a paternalist stance in which U.S. officials saw intervention as an
unqualified benefit for local people.
While Espinosa’s work is valuable in terms of the military and imperialism, she does not
explicitly deal with gender in the way that Warwick Anderson does in Colonial Pathologies.24
Here, Anderson examines the role of male colonial health officials in classifying and patholo-
gizing Filipino bodies, and the fragility of the colonial officials themselves. He illustrates that
colonial public health was a key part of the military, and that, with germ theory, colonial health
officials shifted their emphasis from the environmental causes of disease (miasmas) to person-to-
person transmission, particularly during cholera outbreaks. Here, colonial officials saw the
Filipino body as needing to be contained and policed, so that it did not spread disease to white
bodies. In this framework, the white body itself could be susceptible to contagion. As Anderson
explains, U.S. officials also viewed their own body as potentially fragile in the tropical climate,
and “The White Man’s Psychic Burden” often meant that officials had to have periods of rest in
Baguio (a hill station) to recuperate.25 As this analysis illustrates, in a colonial context, U.S.
officials constructed the male body (themselves) to be susceptible to the diseases of “civiliza-
tion” such as neurasthenia, instead of the contagious diseases of “barbarism” and thus strength-
ened their own claims to rule.
Limiting the focus to just military personnel involved in active combat also obscures their
connections to the domestic sphere. This is important not only for understanding the ways that
male soldiers constructed gender roles, but also the role of domesticity to “normalizing” military
campaigns abroad. For example, in Tender Violence, Laura Wexler examines the use of photo-
graphy to capture domestic images of U.S. imperialism. Wexler focuses on six “New Women”
photographers, including (most importantly for our purposes) Frances Benjamin Johnson’s
photos of sailors from Admiral George Dewey’s ship, Olympia, in 1899.26 The photographs on
the Olympia show the military at rest, and as Wexler states, “not only … represent it as the seat of
an unassailable power, but … represent that unassailable power as a home.”27 This comfort with
their own power and masculinity thus buttressed the idea within the U.S. public that U.S.
military power over other peoples was natural and inevitable.

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U.S. military and colonial official wives were also key parts of the imperial process. As
Vincente Rafael demonstrates in White Love, U.S. middle-class white women in the
Philippines were critical to creating “colonial domesticity in the tropics … meant to protect
white men from the dangers of racial corruption symbolized by the native concubine.”28 As
Anderson explains, gender was also a factor in cleanliness as policed by U.S. colonial official
wives, who attempted to regulate, control, and contain the Filipinos—mostly male servant men
—who entered their homes.29 Official wives could also serve as a type of domestic missionary for
the local people, as Anne Perez Hattori demonstrates in her analysis of the Susana Hospital for
Chamorro Women in Guam, which was founded after a fundraiser by navy officer’s wives
(although as Hattori argues, native women also preserved some of their own traditions).30 As
these examples illustrate, white colonial women who were connected to U.S. military and
governmental officials played an important role in U.S. imperialism.
Interestingly, there has been relatively little scholarship by historians on female nurses in
imperial military contexts, despite female nurses being a part of the military in 1898.31 These
works, such as Catherine Cenzia Choy’s Empire of Care and Sujani K. Reddy’s Nursing and Empire,
reveal the transnational links between disparate areas of the world, as well as the connections
between “health,” gendered work roles, and imperialism.32 However, it would be interesting to
examine the role that gender played in the military healthcare structure, where it appears to have
paralleled the larger professionalization of medicine in which nursing became feminized in the
late 1800s. For example, although professional nursing was in its infancy in the late nineteenth
century, as Richard J. Westphal points out in his brief sketch “Remember the Maine! Remember
the Men!,” nursing was already being gendered as a female occupation within the military. There
were male nurses in the Navy in the War of 1898, but ten years later, they were excluded by law;
only women could be “nurses” until 1965. Men could still be hospital corpsmen, however.33 The
other branches of the military had similar timing; although men could be nurses in the reserves
beginning in 1955, it wasn’t until 1966 that they could join the regular Army.
One aspect of U.S. imperialism and the military that has been explored in a relatively
substantial way is the connection between military occupation and religion (although much of
this scholarship has not dealt explicitly with gender). For example, in the period of U.S.
expansion in continental North America, both Lepore and Romero discuss the ways that
British colonists used religion to distinguish themselves from the Native Americans. This had
implicit gender components, as godly men and women had distinct roles and places within the
New England Protestant hierarchy. Violating those roles eroded distinctions between English
and Indian, necessitating the colonists’ policing of gender boundaries for both groups. Susan K.
Harris addresses religion in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in God’s Arbiters. Harris argues
that “most speakers in the debates [over aspects of imperialism], no matter what position they
defended, believed that the United States was a nation of white Protestants under a special
mandate from God to represent freedom and fair dealing to the rest of the world.”34 Important
here was that U.S. imperialists did not consider Catholics to be Christian, and as Gobat also
argues, imperialists in Catholic countries talked about conversion as much as they did in non-
Christian countries. Harris’s analysis, along with several others, adds a religious dimension to the
paternalist qualities of imperialism, in which U.S. officials saw colonized peoples as inferior.35
Christianity was also an important aspect of how U.S. military officials thought about
themselves. As Clifford Putney has asserted in Muscular Christianity, U.S. leaders (both civil and
military) were concerned about the perceived decline (and deleterious effects of civilization) of
the white male body and advocated a commitment to health and manliness. While Putney has
demonstrated that “muscular Christianity” was important within a domestic U.S. context, the
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association

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(YWCA) have not been studied within an imperial setting (although there are several excellent
works on these groups in World War I).36 The YMCA in particular expanded with the military
into colonies, as military officials brought the organization to help provide “constructive”
entertainment for troops. For example, soldiers in Manila founded the first YMCA in the
Philippines in 1898, as a site for recreation and sports programs for enlisted men.
Traditionally focused scholarship has also tended to ignore are the creation of infrastructure in
counterinsurgency efforts and the use of technology. Here, technological experts were often
men, and their status as scientific experts formed part of their identity as U.S. men. For example,
Eric Paul Roorda examines the use of airplanes by the U.S. military during the Trujillo Regime
(1930–1961) in the Dominican Republic in “The Cult of the Airplane among U.S. Military Men
and Dominicans during the U.S. Occupation and the Trujillo Regime.”37 Roorda does touch
upon the masculinity of the pilots as daredevils and masters of technological machines and nature,
but he does not fully explore the ways that the U.S. or Dominican pilots constructed their own
masculinity.
Other scholars of technology and the military have not examined gender as fully. Steven C.
Topik studies the use of what could be called military theatrics by U.S. merchant Charles Flint,
who used “a twelve-ship flotilla to defend the Brazilian government of Marshal Floriano Peixoto,
which was under severe attack from a naval revolt and civil war in 1893 and 1894.”38 Michal Adas
also examines the confluence of technology and military intervention in Dominance by Design,
which looks at the uses of technology in the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars.39 Both of these are
worth reading for the general context of the United States’ use of technology in foreign relations,
and they could spark ideas for further studies that incorporate gender, particularly in examining
the U.S. (male) military technological expert.

Further Directions for Research

As the above demonstrate, the field of military history in the context of expansion and imperi-
alism contains excellent scholarship. However, much of the field is largely untapped, particularly
in the analysis of gender and the military. While scholars of U.S. imperialism have engaged with
ideologies and discourses of gender, they have not predominantly dealt with the military, and vice
versa. This has meant that even within the subfields discussed above, there is room for new studies
that explore gender and the military.
The scope of this field becomes evident when we look at the range of places and times that the
U.S. military was involved overseas. For example, the United States had “protectorates” in the
following countries and time periods: Cuba, 1898–1934; Haiti, 1915–1934; Dominican
Republic, 1903–1938; Panama, 1903–1938; Nicaragua, 1910–1933; Japan, 1945–1952; and
Germany, 1945–1955. In addition to these “protectorates,” the U.S. military has been involved
in other areas of the world. One example is the “Polar Bear Expedition” force, which David E.
Greenstein discusses in “Between Two Worlds: Americans and Soviets After the Bolshevik
Revolution.” This recent dissertation examines how U.S. troops remained in Bolshevik Russia
after the end of World War I, trying to influence foreign policy from within the new Soviet
federation using consumerism, occupation, and humanitarian aid.40 The U.S. military was also
instrumental in the expansion of U.S. trade. The most obvious example is Commodore Perry’s
“opening” of Japan in 1853.41 However, practically from the founding of the United States, the
military has been protecting trade in engagements that have tended to be ignored by scholars of
imperialism, gender, or the military. A short list includes: the Barbary Wars and other actions
against pirates in the early 1800s; U.S. military support of U.S. claims in the Northwest (Oregon
and Washington) in the 1810s; military actions in the Pacific and Asia (Sumatra, Indonesia; Fiji;

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China; and Japan) in the 1840s–1860s, including the Opium Wars; and the presence of U.S.
forces in Siberia, particularly Vladivostok after World War I. Military officials and commercial
agents often worked closely together for pragmatic reasons—merchants knew the local cultural
and political contexts, which could be invaluable for military maneuvers. In addition to the
formally U.S.-sanctioned military exercise, there were also the filibuster exercises discussed
previously. William Walker’s exploits in Central America have been the most well examined
of these, but the rest of them have been largely neglected. Like Greenberg’s analysis of the
filibusters, the study of other geographic areas and time periods may also yield interesting results
in terms of how U.S. military (and quasi-military) officials constructed gender vis-à-vis the local
people.
Because imperialism can easily allow for comparative or multi-sited scholarship, there are
several larger questions that can potentially lead to fruitful study of gender and the U.S. military.
First is the change in the roles of different service branches overseas. Mary Renda points out that
the Navy protected trade in the early and mid-1800s, but with the outbreak of war in 1898 and
the acquisition of formal colonies by the United States, the Army and Marines were more
involved (the Army in Panama and the Marines in Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and Dominican
Republic) in projecting American power abroad.42 We might therefore ask, how did they
construct their roles differently vis-à-vis the different missions and different locations? These
are Latin American/Caribbean countries, but were there differences in the ways that the military
branch interacted with local gender norms? When U.S. male military personnel encountered or
fought female insurgents/revolutionaries, what gendered assumptions did they bring to the
interactions? Conversely, what assumptions did the women bring? For example, Gobat has an
intriguing photo of “[f]emale combatants in the civil war of 1926–7” that he does not discuss.43
Who were these women? Were there others in other conflicts and geographic areas? How did the
U.S. military men construct their masculinity vis-à-vis these local women fighters? This also
brings up questions of gender and paternalism in places where the United States was establishing
new regimes or protectorates. What were the gendered constructions of citizenship? How did U.
S. military officials see themselves and the people with whom they were interacting? What did it
mean to be an “enforcer” or “enabler” of U.S. gender norms in this context, and what gender
norms did they enforce/enable? How did women in or attached to the U.S. military—particu-
larly wives and nurses—construct their own gender roles in these situations, and what goals did
they aspire to?
Additionally, we might ask how U.S. military personnel’s conceptions of gender compared
with that of other nations. Paul Kramer addresses part of this for colonial officials in his article
“Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” but he does not examine the military specifically.44
Donna Amoroso also investigates this in “Inheriting the ‘Moro Problem’: Muslim Authority and
Colonial Rule in British Malaya and the Philippines.”45 She explores the ways that the British and
U.S. imperial officials and military addressed authority vis-à-vis the local populations. In the case
of the Philippines, Army officers drew upon their knowledge and experience fighting Native
Americans as they encountered the Muslim Moro people. In these instances, U.S. military
officials labeled the native peoples as “wild” and therefore subject to U.S. control and domination
(which would presumably be by “civilized” Christian white men). One of the keys to getting at
gender within these contexts is to look more at the individual experiences of enlisted men, to see
how they internalized gender norms, as Mary Renda did in her study of Marines in Haiti. As has
been the case for many of the scholars above, historians can also look at sources that are perhaps
more the domain of cultural and social historians than operational military historians, such as
command directives and other pieces of cultural production like recruitment materials and
training films. María del Carmen Suescun Pozas’s article, “From Reading to Seeing: Doing

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and Undoing Imperialism in the Visual Arts,” serves a useful model for how to look at non-
textual sources.46
Finally, scholars can also look at the work that has been done in terms of gender, war, and
imperialism for other empires. The most common (and perhaps most logical) point of comparison
is with the British Empire, although as some of the articles in The American Colonial State in the
Philippines demonstrate, there are also fruitful comparisons with Japan and China. Here, scholars
might look to works such as Verity G. McInnis’s “Indirect Agents of Empires,” which compares
the military wives, and the homes that they made, of British India and the U.S. West, and argues
that the home was at the center of imperial efforts.47 Also of interest is Robert McLain’s Gender
and Violence in British India and Heather Streets’s Martial Races.48 McLain addresses the role of
masculinity in both the British and Indian troops, particularly in the context of Indian participa-
tion in World War I and rising nationalist movements which questioned the British character-
ization of native men as effeminate. Streets’s Martial Races also addresses masculinity and war
among colonized people. These types of comparisons illustrate that not only was the United
States far from exceptional in the ways that it interacted with colonized people, but also that U.S.
officials were actively learning from other imperial administrations.
As the above works illustrate, there is a lot of really good work to be found on the issue of
gender, the military, and U.S. wars of empire and expansion. However, scholars must expand their
view beyond narrow concepts of the military and U.S. imperialism, in which the United States was
only involved in the Philippines and Puerto Rico starting from the late nineteenth century. If we
stay with this limited perspective, we are locked into a very narrow field. However, when we look
beyond the wars of 1898, and the Philippines and Puerto Rico, we see exciting scholarship that is
bringing interesting methodological tools and diverse perspectives to examine the issue of gender
and the military. With these, we can begin to question the ways that the military impacted (and was
impacted by contact with) notions of gender among a diverse range of peoples.

Notes
1 For diplomatic history, see the article series in the March 2009 issue (95, no. 4) of The Journal of
American History, particularly Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of
the Field.” As Kristin Hoganson points out in her reply to Zeiler, however, scholars who incorporate
this “global” focus “have pushed the field of U.S. foreign relations history in new directions and not
without resistance.” For military history, see Mark Moyar, “The Current State of Military History,”
The Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (March 2007): 225–40.
2 Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
3 Renda, Taking Haiti, 231. Those interested in using popular culture sources should also read Christina
Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003).
4 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
5 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York:
Vintage, 1999).
7 Ann M. Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
8 R. Todd Romero, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early
New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

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9 Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of
the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
10 See also Chapter 5, “‘Pacified by Paternal Solitude’: Indian Wars as an Expansionist Movement” in
Frank L. Owsley, Jr. and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny,
1800–1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).
11 Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998).
12 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton,
2000).
13 Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 11, 12.
14 Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives
and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Owsley, Jr. and
Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists. For specific areas, see Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso López and
the First Clandestine U.S. War Against Cuba (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Joseph
Allen Stout, Schemers and Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University
Press, 2002).
15 Michael Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005).
16 Yasuhiro Okada, “Race, Masculinity, and Military Occupation: African American Soldiers’ Encounters
with the Japanese at Camp Gifu, 1947–1951,” The Journal of African American History 96, no. 2 (Spring
2011): 179–203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.2.0179; Naoko Shibusawa,
America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006);
and Mire Koikari, “Exporting Democracy?: American Women, ‘Feminist Reforms,’ and Politics of
Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no. 1
(2002): 23–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347272.
17 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and
Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
18 Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
19 See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London:
Pandora Press, 1898); Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
20 Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993); James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Robert G. Lee, eds. Race, Nation, and
Empire in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Alfred W. McCoy
and Francisco A. Scarano, eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
21 Moyar, “The Current State of Military History,” 226.
22 Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, Chapter 8.
23 Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
24 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) primarily addresses white male colonial officials and their
connection to the military. For a discussion on the white women who were the wives of colonial
officials (although civilian rather than military), see Vincente Rafael, White Love and Other Events
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
25 Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, Chapter 5.
26 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000). Another book that looks at similar issues (although not in a military

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context) is Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
27 Wexler, Tender Violence, 32.
28 Vincente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), 55.
29 Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical
Inquiry, 21 (1995): 640–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343940.
30 Anne Perez Hattori, “‘The Cry of the Little People of Guam’: American Colonialism, Medical
Philanthropy, and the Susana Hospital for Chamorro Women, 1898–1941,” Health and History 8, no.
1, History, Health, and Hybridity (2006): 4–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40111527. Bonnie
McElhinny also has a similar article on material welfare and child-rearing for the Philippines. See
Bonnie McElhinny, “‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him’: Infant Mortality, Medicine, and
Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 2 (June
2005): 183–94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567737.
31 Ann K. Frantz, “Nursing Pride: Clara Barton in the Spanish-American War,” The American Journal of
Nursing 98, no. 10 (October 1998): 39–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3471570. Julia Irwin’s
Making the World Safe uses the Red Cross as a case study to explore the ways that the United States
began to see aid as key to U.S. foreign relations. See Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American
Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
32 Catherine Cenzia Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003). Choy examines the period of imperialism in order to explain the roots
of the post-1965 migration of Filipina nurses to the United States. See also Sujani K. Reddy, Nursing
and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2015).
33 Richard J. Westphal, “Remember the Maine! Remember the Men!,” The American Journal of Nursing
103, no. 5 (May 2003): 77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29745090.
34 Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 13.
35 See Joshua Gedacht, “‘Mohammedan Religion Made It Necessary to Fire’: Massacres on the Imperial
Frontier from South Dakota to the Southern Philippines,” and Patricio N. Abinales, “The U.S. Army
as an Occupying Force in Muslim Mindanano, 1899–1913” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making
of the Modern American State, eds. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2009). For a more recent focus, see Melani McAlister, “Rethinking the ‘Clash of
Civilizations’: American Evangelicals, the Bush Administration, and the Winding Road to the Iraq
War” in Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, eds. James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl,
and Robert G. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
36 During World War I, the YMCA and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) essentially
served as a United States overseas organization supporting male soldiers, female telephone operators,
and nurses while providing hostess houses at cemeteries abroad. See Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men
Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996). For the
YWCA in World War I, see Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers and the American
Expeditionary Forces, 1917–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
37 Eric Paul Roorda, “The Cult of the Airplane among U.S. Military Men and Dominicans during the
U.S. Occupation and the Trujillo Regime” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of
U.S.-Latin American Relations, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D.
Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
38 Steven C. Topik, “Mercenaries in the Theater of War: Publicity, Technology, and the Illusion of
Power during the Brazilian Naval Revolt of 1893” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural
History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo
D. Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 173.
39 Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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40 David E. Greenstein, “Between Two Worlds: Americans and Soviets After the Bolshevik
Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015).
41 For more information (although not with a gendered analysis), see Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the
Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Penguin, 1991). Amy
Greenberg has a small section on Perry, with more of a gendered analysis, in Manifest Manhood.
42 Renda, Taking Haiti, 97.
43 Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 142.
44 Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and
United States Empires, 1880–1910,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1315–53.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2700600.
45 Donna Amoroso, “Inheriting the ‘Moro Problem’: Muslim Authority and Colonial Rule in British
Malaya and the Philippines” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, eds.
Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
46 María del Carmen Suescun Pozas, “From Reading to Seeing: Doing and Undoing Imperialism in the
Visual Arts” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations,
eds. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998).
47 Verity G. McInnis, “Indirect Agents of Empire: Army Officers’ Wives in British India and the
American West, 1830–1875,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 3 (August 2014): 378–409. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2014.83.3.378.
48 Robert McLain, Gender and Violence in British India: The Road to Amritsar, 1914–1919 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British
Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

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 4
BEYOND THE BROTHERS’ WAR
Gender and the American Civil War

Carole Emberton
university at buffalo

It has become axiomatic among scholars of the American Civil War to think of that conflict as
precipitating a “crisis in gender.” Early on, much of the new gender scholarship explored the
expanding roles and increased public authority for women that resulted from wartime mobiliza-
tion. More recently, however, historians have widened their focus to consider how gender
shaped not only why war broke out in 1861, but also how the war was waged on the battlefield, in
the halls of Congress, and in private homes north and south. As a result, investigations into the
gendered dimensions of warfare have pushed the boundaries of military history, from what was
once a narrowly defined field focused on commanders and engagements to more expansive and
imaginative studies of the dynamics of military households, life in camp, and guerrilla warfare.
The last two decades of historical scholarship on Reconstruction have also greatly enhanced our
understanding of the intersections of race and gender in post-war struggles to democratize the
former Confederacy and protect the civil and political rights of freedpeople. In sum, Civil War
historians no longer assume a single crisis in gender but multiple, often overlapping crises that
transformed the war and its meaning.1
The war transformed American ideas of gender, too, forever altering what it meant to be a
man or a woman. Returning veterans, both Union and Confederate alike, struggled to come to
terms with the effects of war on their bodies and minds. Debilitating physical injuries crippled
many, making it difficult to work, support their families, and maintain the independent existence
required of men in the nineteenth century. Psychological wounds could be just as debilitating,
but the lack of medical understanding of these conditions and the social stigma attached to them
sentenced untold numbers of men to isolation, institutionalization, and in many cases, death.
Nearly one-quarter of southern men of military age had been killed, and the survivors returned
home as conquered, not conquering, warriors. Defeat dealt its own psychic wounds that affected
how southern men and women viewed each other as well as their drastically altered economic
and political states. The wartime emancipation of 4.5 million enslaved people, tens of thousands
of whom had shouldered arms for the Union, further complicated the meanings of manhood and
womanhood in the South, as freedpeople attempted to claim gendered prerogatives that had
previously been reserved for whites. This transformation held implications for the entire nation,
not just the South. In antebellum America, citizenship was synonymous with “white male.” But
if black men and women were now free and, by virtue of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, citizens possessing certain civil and political rights, including the right to vote,

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how did the meanings of manhood and womanhood change to reflect the nation’s new racial
dynamics?
The Civil War exposed long-simmering tensions about the proper roles of men and women,
blacks and whites, but it also reshaped those meanings in lasting ways. Once commonly portrayed
simply as the “brothers’ war,” the Civil War now appears to be a wide-ranging conflict fought by
women as well as men, in bedrooms as well as battlefields, and with ideas as well as artillery.

Gender and the Sectional Crisis

A sustained gender analysis of the sectional conflict is long overdue. However, there are some key
areas where scholars have examined how gender contributed to the growing political tension
over slavery in the 1850s. Primarily, this work has centered on abolitionism, particularly the
growing radicalism of women abolitionists and their maternalist critique of slavery. Typified by
slave narratives like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and sentimental novels like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the maternalist critique of slavery presented the South’s “peculiar institution”
as an inversion of the ideal, nurturing, middle-class home that prized and protected motherhood.
Under slavery, lascivious masters and overseers defiled black womanhood, and the domestic slave
trade tore children from their mothers’ arms.2
Not only did slavery deny black families the domestic security enjoyed by white families in the
North, it also corrupted white southern families in their relations to each other. Northern readers
of antislavery literature learned how southern men flaunted their sexual conquests in the slave
quarters, bestowing favors on their mixed-race offspring as well as the women who bore them, all
in the face of their humiliated wives and white families. “The poor girls,” Jacobs wrote of
slaveholding women, “[t]o what disappointments are they destined!” Reeling from her own
disappointment that Mrs. Flint, her owner’s wife, refused to protect her from her husband’s sexual
advances, Jacobs came to realize that both she and Mrs. Flint were trapped. “The young wife soon
learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage
vows,” Jacobs explained. “Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies,
and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred
enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness.” Those wives, unable to direct their
pain at its source, displaced it onto the slave women and girls, equally helpless to rectify the
abusive situation. Mistresses tormented the recipients of their husbands’ unwelcome advances,
placing them under constant surveillance, having them whipped or their children sold away. By
debasing white womanhood in this way, slavery threatened white families as well as black. This
was a narrative of domesticity imperiled.3
For their part, women slaveholders balked at the self-righteous condescension they read in the
maternalist critiques of slavery. Mary Chestnut of South Carolina scoffed at the “holy New
Englanders” who thought themselves paragons of virtue and domestic bliss. Chestnut believed
that if those women were “forced to have a negro village walk through their house whenever
they saw fit,” they might change their tune about planation mistresses’ presumed cruelty.
Obsessed with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chestnut
lambasted what she claimed was Stowe’s romanticized view of enslaved people. Hardly the
innocent victims of their owners’ avarice and cruelty, Chestnut argued they were “hard,
unpleasant, unromantic, undeveloped savage[s]” whose unremitting presence in her home was
enough to make any southern woman “hate slavery worse than Mrs. Stowe.” Plantation
mistresses, in Chestnut’s opinion, were naturally antislavery.4
Ensconced in the fineries of white supremacy, plantation mistresses like Chestnut could never
mount a legitimate critique of patriarchal domination, even while they lamented their husbands’

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behavior and the position it put them in. As Elizabeth Fox Genovese and others have noted, their
sympathy lay with other elite white women; the circle of southern sisterhood was exceedingly
small. Still, the resentment they harbored toward their husbands, choked down during slavery’s
heyday, would boil over during the war, when they were left to run plantations on their own and
pick up the pieces of a defeated society after the guns had ceased.5
The paternalist ethos upon which slavery rested, where the slave master ruled kindly over his
family black and white, was a myth, and southern women saw through the veil of benevolence
better than most. In fact, the slave South was a society infused with “patriarchal rage” directed not
only at women and slaves but also other white men. Like all honor-based societies where male
individual autonomy is prized over all else, the antebellum South was riven by violence, both
individual and collective. The code duello exemplified this credo, but the relative impunity with
which a slave master might “correct” an errant wife or slave with physical punishment or even
death also was testament to the depth that the patriarchal domination infused southern culture.
This overwhelming power, vested in both custom and law, masked an overwhelming fear – the
fear of losing control, of being inadequate, of “political neutering.” Slave masters saw challenges
to their dominance everywhere, from their wives, their children, their slaves, other slaveholders,
the government. “Constantly challenged from above and from beneath,” writes Kenneth
Lockeridge, “theirs was indeed a thin hegemony, stretched by many challenges, at once brittle
and supple.”6
The paternalist ethos, however, was not limited to elite slaveholders, as Stephanie McCurry
reveals in Masters of Small Worlds. Even small farmers, many of whom owned no slaves at all,
understood their positions as fathers and husbands to be connected to the politics of mastery.
Because “governance of a household and command of its dependent members were the coordi-
nates of a freeman’s public identity” in the antebellum South, yeoman farmers supported the
plantocracy even if it undermined their own economic interests. Poor white men might not own
slaves, but they had wives and children, and as slaveholding politicians and ministers repeatedly
asserted at Fourth of July barbeques and in their Sunday sermons, women’s obedience to men
mirrored the obedience of slaves to masters. If the latter crumbled, so too did the former. In this
way, southern men regardless of social class understood slavery as the foundation of their domestic
lives as well as the broader social and political world of the South.7
But with those worlds under constant attack – from abolitionism, woman suffrage, marriage
reform, temperance, or just plain old party politics – it is little wonder, then, that slaveholders
guarded their national political dominance so jealously and reacted so violently to any perceived
threat to slavery’s ascendency. Constitutional safeguards, Congressional gag orders, sympathetic
executives, new federal legislation – nothing seemed adequate to guarantee that slavery would be
protected in the states where it already existed but also be allowed to expand into the western
territories. As Randolph B. Campbell notes, war with Mexico in 1846 had resulted largely from
the tendency of Texas slaves to run away into Mexican territory, where they would be free. The
“empire for slavery” that resulted from the U.S. victory momentarily satiated southern desires to
see slavery stretch to the Pacific and beyond.8
In many ways, the Mexican War, along with numerous filibustering campaigns in Latin
America and the Caribbean, represented a kind of rehearsal for the Civil War. These military
engagements resulted not simply from slavery’s economic imperatives but also from a violent
masculine ethos that permeated American society. According to Amy Greenberg, many nine-
teenth-century Americans justified territorial expansion because it offered men an alternative to
the ideal domesticated environment of the middle class. Military and paramilitary activities
“offered opportunities for heroic initiative and for success in love and war which seemed to be
fading at home.” This narrative of aggressive expansionism spoke to southern men’s sense of

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honor and individuality as well as many northern men’s rejection of the restrained masculinity
that seemed to be taking hold at home. Unable to succeed in the commercial world of business,
and unfulfilled by the perfectionist religious principles, northern white men, like their southern
counterparts, yearned for a means to achieve individual success and forge a collective identity that
reflected the world as they understood it.9
The aggressive masculinity generated within the culture of conquest may have united white
men across the sectional divide in the belief that the West was theirs for the taking, but the
bugbear of slavery’s presence in those territories remained as problematic as ever. Expansion
intensified rather than pacified the slavery crisis, and gender influenced why that crisis came to a
head in the violent decade of the 1850s. In Kansas and Nebraska, the same aggressive masculinity
that guided American expansionist policies in Mexico led to a murderous competition between
pro-slavery and “free state” forces. The policy of “popular sovereignty,” where the first group to
get a majority at the constitutional convention would decide the fate of slavery in that state, was
the official credo for what was, for all intents and purposes, an internecine guerrilla war.10
The man most emblematic of this conflict, abolitionist John Brown, earned the praise of
northern abolitionists when he dragged five pro-slavery men out of their beds and hacked them to
death near Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856. Still reeling from the brutal caning of
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, north-
ern abolitionists applauded Brown’s manly actions in Kansas, seeing the murders as vindication
for Sumner’s assault. The precipitating event for Brooks’s attack on Sumner had been the
Senator’s speech the previous day in which he impugned the manhood of two leading pro-
slavery senators, Stephen A. Douglass of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks’s
cousin. In “The Crime Against Kansas,” Sumner called Douglass vulgar and in need of a bath. He
also commented on the Little Giant’s “squat” stature. But his worst insults were reserved for the
slaveholder Butler. Mocking the southerner’s gentlemanly pretensions, Sumner charged Butler
with taking “a mistress … who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in
the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight – I mean,” explained Sumner, “the harlot, Slavery.”
Sumner chose to couch his accusation that Butler served the “Slave Power” in sexualized
imagery; abolitionist literature featured the sexual exploitation of female slaves as irrefutable
evidence of the way that slavery debased southerners and gave lie to their charade of domestic
tranquility and benevolence. Brooks attempted to punish Sumner for his public exposition of the
supposedly private relations within slaveholding households. Sumner may as well have pulled
Butler’s nose and called him a liar, both of which would have resulted in a duel – a resolution
Brooks initially sought. But Sumner’s refusal to recognize the rituals of aggrieved southern
manhood led Brooks to take a less formalized course of action.11
The gendered framework through which so many participants viewed the sectional conflict
intensified during the secession crisis in the winter of 1860–61. Slaveholders interpreted Lincoln’s
election as an affront to their honor as men. Beginning with South Carolina on December 20,
1860, slave state after slave state voted to leave the Union and establish “a republic of white men,
defined by slavery and the political exclusion of the mass of the Southern people,” namely
women and slaves. In the Confederate vision, Stephanie McCurry tells us, the citizen was male,
but the state was female. Southern men were called forth to protect the new Confederate state as
they would their wives and mothers; this “trope of protection” infused the secession conventions
with an urgency that compelled southern lawmakers to cast aside all doubt as to the expediency of
this highly unusual and risky course of action. “The specter of rape loomed large in [secessionist]
appeals,” writes McCurry, as “fire-eaters” sought to ensure planter loyalty to their cause. It was
“racial fear mongering” in its baldest form, an act of desperation, a sign that the success of their
proposed coalition was anything but assured, according to McCurry, but it worked.

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Confederates’ “fraternal unity” rested upon their control of female dependents, and by making
the case that Lincoln’s election signaled the imminent loss of that power, secessionists crudely
maneuvered their way out the Union.12
The gendered language of family provided Americans with a means to interpret the unfolding
dissolution of the nation. This was especially true in the Border States like Kentucky, where the
metaphor of the “house divided” manifested itself most dramatically. As Amy Murrell Taylor
demonstrates, families with divided loyalties “took what was unfamiliar – wartime division – and
made it familiar by cloaking their arguments in the existing vocabulary of domestic conflict.”
Thus, when sons from Unionist households left to join the Confederacy, they rebelled not just
against their country but also against their fathers. The implications of such betrayals reverberated
through families, altering relationships among both actual and fictive kin, and making the stakes
of going to war that much higher.13

Gender on the Battlefield

War is often perceived as a masculine endeavor. Until very recently in the United States, women
have been prohibited from combat action even though small numbers of them have, from the
earliest conflicts in the colonial era, performed heroic military service on behalf of their country.
Scholars like Elizabeth Leonard estimate that more than four hundred women disguised them-
selves as men and joined both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Some had
been living as men before the war and joined up with their workmates and friends when recruiters
came calling. Others followed sweethearts, husbands, or brothers into the service, hoping to stay
near to the ones they loved. Still others searched out adventure, as did many young men who
answered the call to war. War has always been “an ordinary man’s opportunity to escape from the
ordinary.” That some ordinary women longed for more excitement than rolling bandages and
knitting socks should come as no surprise.14
The Civil War provided a “test of manhood” like no other. It was a test, writes Stephen Berry,
that “an appalling number welcomed as an opportunity to measure up to their own standards for
themselves.” And not just southern men, for whom questions of personal honor and self-worth
were intimately connected to a man’s social and political identity. Historians such as Stephen
Berry and Reid Mitchell demonstrate that Union men, too, sought to earn their manhood – and
it was a status to be earned, in one’s own estimation as well as that of the larger community, not
just assumed when one reached a certain age. And a vast number of men who would end up
fighting the Civil War were adolescents and young men; in fact, eighteen-year-olds represented
the largest age group in both armies. War offered these young men multiple ways to test their
readiness for manhood. It brought them the attention and adoration of women, who urged them
to enlist and waved them on their way with kisses and waving handkerchiefs. Once away from
home, life in camp offered young soldiers new manly pursuits, namely “liquor and prostitutes.”
Drinking, sex, and aggressive male camaraderie provided a much-needed “escape from small
town morality.”15
As a number of scholars have shown, such activities accounted for but one aspect of nine-
teenth-century American manhood. While army men of all classes enjoyed these diversions, it
was also important to cultivate the self-discipline required of good soldiers. Above all else, a good
soldier needed courage – to stay and fight when your every instinct told you to flee, and to endure
suffering, pain, and the fear of death. A good soldier – a good man – became hardened to the
privations of war and the suffering he witnessed all around him. He was no longer shocked or
saddened at the death of his friends; nor did he fear the likelihood of his own. He mastered his fear
if only by learning to ignore it, to push it down and bury it deep within himself. Of course, not

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everyone was able to meet the emotional and psychological demands of wartime manhood. In
their respective works on suicide and disability, scholars such as Diane Miller Sommerville and
Sarah Handley-Cousins demonstrate that war could be an ennobling experience, or it could be
disillusioning, or even debilitating. Often, it was all of these things for each man who experienced
it.16
But the social expectation that war made men dominated nineteenth-century American
culture. This was especially true for African-American men for whom the war was both a test
of manhood and war of liberation. Military service provided the vehicle through which black
men, long denied the attributes of men, could demonstrate their worthiness to stand as equals
alongside white men. Frederick Douglass put it most eloquently when he declared in 1863, “let
the black man get upon his person the brass letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a
musket on his shoulder … and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that
he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” For Douglass, the uniform and the
musket provided black men with a sense of self-respect as well as ennobling them in the eyes of
white Americans, many of whom doubted that they would make good soldiers. Black troops’
valorous performance on Civil War battlefields like Fort Wagner and Port Hudson proved that
they could meet the demands of wartime masculinity.17
Yet despite the praise their commanders and President Lincoln heaped upon black regiments,
Stephen Kantrowitz and I argue that there remained a deep ambivalence among many white
Americans about the implications of military service for black citizenship. Although the war
helped abolitionists to imagine “collective, armed struggle both as a form of virile rebelliousness
and as proof of disciplined respectability,” some felt that black martial manhood posed certain
threats to the republic. The same politicians who lauded black soldiers for saving the Union also
feared black rebellion; the specter of St. Domingue still haunted American politicians seventy
years later. Worries that the Civil War would fast become a “servile war” revealed the class as well
as racial implications of arming ex-slaves in the cause of freedom. And base racial prejudice,
evidenced by the belief that any nation that relied on black soldiers was not worthy of a white
man’s loyalty, continued to circulate though perhaps less virulently than before the war. Thus, the
connection between military service, freedom, and citizenship, although strengthened during the
war, did not result in the inextricable bond that Frederick Douglass and many others hoped
would emerge from black men’s service and sacrifice.18
The co-mingling of manhood, military service, and freedom in the era’s political discourse
also shaped the ways that women could advance their citizenship claims. As Ellen Carol DuBois
documents, although female abolitionists and woman suffragists had waged parallel and often
intersecting struggles in the years before the war, leading suffragists agreed to shift their focus to
abolition once war erupted. Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the most well-
known woman suffragists of the antebellum period, believed that eradicating slavery would
ultimately lead to the eradication of other artificial distinctions that made women second-class
citizens in the United States. For woman suffragists like Stanton and Anthony, whose under-
standing of power and hierarchy emerged from their antislavery work, the slavery of sex and the
slavery of race were different sides of the same coin. Thus, as Faye Dudden and others argue, their
decision to table the “woman question” reflected their firm belief that abolition would naturally
lead to a breakthrough for women’s rights.19
They also expected their devotion to abolition and Unionism to be rewarded politically. In
1863, Stanton and Anthony organized the Woman’s National Loyal League (WNLL), which
proposed a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery and mounted a massive petition drive
that mustered popular support for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
In her speech at the organization’s first meeting, Stanton infused her calls for an abolition

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amendment with the language of patriotism and loyalty. Equally important, she claimed that
women were particularly suited for this work, and that it was an extension of the war itself. She
argued that the work of northern women on behalf of the amendment was equivalent to “the
purpose for which our grand army now bleeds and dies.” Stanton portrayed the WNLL as a kind
of army, its female members as soldiers, in the cause of liberty the same as their brothers and
husbands. She also answered critics who believed that their decision to momentarily set aside the
movement for woman suffrage was misguided. “As the inspired Joan of Arc led the French armies
to victory,” Stanton proclaimed, “so the women of this Republic, scorning mere worldly
wisdom and unitedly demanding freedom for all … would nerve the strong arms in the field
and clear the confused, conflicting counsels in our Capitol.” Stanton’s message was clear: We
have, against our better judgment, placed abolition before woman suffrage with the expectation
that a grateful nation, once victorious, will recognize our sacrifice accordingly.20
Stanton also made another important point: Women make war. Her invocation of Joan of Arc
reminded listeners of the important military contributions women had made throughout history.
Even when they did not stand side by side with their men on battlefields, scholars have shown,
they made war in their homes, storefronts, churches, and other domestic spaces. They did not
simply wait at home for their men to return. They organized sanitary fairs, volunteered at
hospitals, and ministered to the wounded and grief-stricken. Even working-class and rural
women, often overlooked in the historiography of Civil War women, “picked up the plows in
the field and the tools in the workshop,” contributing in their own ways to the war effort. Poor
women sought relief and aid from private charities and state coffers alike, and in so doing shaped
the ways that benevolent organizations and governments, both Union and Confederate, viewed
women and their political concerns.21
In a few cases, women even made war against their governments. As Stephanie McCurry
points out, women-led bread riots in southern cities like Richmond, Virginia put the
Confederacy on notice that soldiers’ wives would suffer only so much for the sake of their nation.
Confederate women in Union-occupied areas resisted Yankee authority through a variety of
tactics ranging from the venomous to the vulgar. LeeAnn Whites and Joseph Beilein show that in
Border States like Missouri, where guerrilla warfare was rampant, women were not just victims of
guerrilla warfare – they waged it themselves. Women fed, clothed, and hid Confederate partisans
who sabotaged and raided Unionists civilians as well as federal troops. When New Orleans came
under Union control in April 1862, the city’s women displayed their disdain for the occupiers by
dumping their chamber pots on the heads of soldiers as they walked below their windows, as
Alecia Long documents in her essay examining Gen. Benjamin Butler’s notorious Order No. 28.
Also known as the “Woman Order,” Butler’s edict declared that any woman showing contempt
for a Union soldier would be considered “a woman of the town plying her avocation” – a
prostitute. The implication of this order was anything but subtle, Long maintains. A “hostile”
Confederate woman was assumed to be sexually available and unworthy of the manly protection
a soldier would otherwise owe her. She was liable to be raped. Of course, rape had been a weapon
of war used against women for millennia. But no modern, self-consciously democratic nation had
so openly embraced that historical truth. Not surprisingly, the southern press pilloried Butler,
calling him “The Beast.” The British, too, under the heavy influence of southern diplomats who
used the Order to fan the fires of Confederate sympathy, lambasted Butler, in particular, and the
Union war effort, in general. The bad publicity overseas, in part, led to Butler’s removal from
command of New Orleans soon thereafter.22
Along with the forcible evacuations of civilian populations in certain areas of the Confederacy
and military policies allowing Union troops to confiscate property and take provisions from
civilian homes, the controversy over Order No. 28 highlighted the dark side of the Civil War’s

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domestic politics. With the line between the battlefield and the home front blurred, antebellum
gender conventions that held a distinct separation between home life and public life were shorn of
their meaning. Of course, not all women and families had enjoyed the veneer of tranquil
protection that the white, middle-class ideal had projected. The vulnerability of enslaved
women and children, after all, had been the centerpiece of antislavery feminism for decades.
But civil war tore the curtain back on the Victorian model of domestic peace in profound ways
that ultimately shaped the outcome of the conflict.
The ability to preserve and protect domestic spaces and the people within them in no small
way determined who would win the Civil War. As Lisa Tendrich Frank demonstrates in her
study of Sherman’s March, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman intended to show
Confederate civilians that their government was unable to protect their homes and property
when he marched his army of eighty thousand across Georgia and up through the Carolinas in the
winter of 1864–65. That protection had been the Confederacy’s raison d’être, as politician after
politician stated during the secession crisis. Lincoln and the “Black Republican” abolitionists
would take southern property and unleash a collapse of the region’s entire social and political
structure, secession commissioners informed the state legislatures who would vote on whether or
not to leave the Union. Freed slaves would raze plantations and “outrage” white southern
women. They presented the act of secession not simply as a means to secure the planters’
economic and political hegemony but rather as a call to southern manhood to protect hearth
and home. This was the Confederacy’s appeal to non-slaveholding men, argues Stephanie
McCurry, and in the end, its Achilles heel.23

Gender, Race, and Reconstruction

The politics of gender and domesticity continued to shape the post-war period as the nation
struggled to incorporate 4.5 million freed slaves into the body politic and transform the South into
a wage labor economy. The question of what, if any, political rights freed slaves would have
competed in importance with the matter of how to revive southern agriculture, namely the
production of its most lucrative staple – cotton – without the coercive practices that had guided it
under slavery. While lawmakers and planters debated these matters, freedpeople set about
establishing their own lives and livelihoods in ways that demonstrated both their reluctance to
continue working for their former owners and their enthusiasm for modes of production that
allowed their families to achieve the domestic ideal that abolitionists had promised would follow
the destruction of slavery.
Many of the grassroots freedom struggles in the former Confederacy centered around issues of
women’s labor, marriage, and family. Historians now reject the long-held proposition that
freedwomen withdrew from wage labor into the “privacy” of the domestic sphere – poverty
simply made such a withdrawal impossible. Instead, scholars of Reconstruction focus on freed-
women’s struggles to meet the demands of wage labor and the need to care for their families,
which was itself a form of labor rather than escape from it. As Jacqueline Jones, Tera Hunter, and
Leslie Schwalm demonstrate, freedwomen’s labor was crucial to the ability of their families to
attain any real measure of freedom. Cooking, sewing, raising a garden, tending livestock, caring
for the sick or elderly – freedwomen performed these essential tasks in addition to working in the
fields. Their efforts to mitigate the exploitive nature of labor in the Reconstruction South met
with stiff resistance from planters, who attributed freedwomen’s willingness to quit a job that
demanded too much of their time as evidence of their inherent shiftlessness. But, as Tera Hunter
points out, black women “labored according to their own sense of equity, with the guiding
assumption that wage labor should not emulate slavery – especially in the arbitrariness of time and

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tasks.” Hunter’s examination of freedwomen’s pursuit of leisure deepens the politics of class and
labor in Reconstruction historiography.24
The right to control the terms of their labor was closely related to another important right for
freedpeople: the right to marry, as Laura Edwards and Nancy Bercaw argue. While marriage
continued to legitimize and naturalize any number of inequalities, marriage rights formed the
foundation of black struggles for formal citizenship. Encouraged by Union officials as a way to
ensure black men who had enlisted in the army assumed financial responsibility of the women and
children who often followed them to camp, marriage served to legitimize family bonds formed in
slavery. For the most part, freedpeople embraced marriage; after all, it was the path to status and
respectability as well as material gain. Wives could make legal demands and gain hearings from
white officials at the Freedmen’s Bureau or in court. Freedwomen who sought pensions from
their husband’s army service needed the state to recognize their relationship, and the best way to
do that was with a marriage certificate. But freedwomen sometimes found marriage oppressive if
their husbands imagined it to be a form of ownership that entitled them to dominate their wives
in much the same way that slaveholders once had. Households, both black and white, had come
into “public” view in new ways that challenged a man’s unmitigated control over his dependents,
but marriage remained, at heart, a patriarchal institution.25
Freedpeople’s households became sites of resistance to white domination as well as the focus of
attacks on black independence. Much of the racial violence associated with Reconstruction took
place in and around black homes, notes Hannah Rosen, where black women were subjected to
sexual assault in full view of their husbands and children. By violating the supposed sanctity of the
home and demonstrating that black men could not protect their families, white vigilantes like the
Ku Klux Klan “righted a world turned upside down” by emancipation.26
Thus, the politics of Reconstruction revealed the many ways that the household constituted a
public, political space. Freedwomen’s participation in the parades, rallies, and events surrounding
party politics was not divorced from their roles as mothers, wives, and workers. Although unable
to cast votes, freedwomen nonetheless formed a core of black political life during
Reconstruction, leading some historians to argue that freedpeople understood the vote as a
collective rather than individual possession. Necessity required freedpeople to eschew the
gendered divisions of white political culture, and in so doing, they achieved for a time a level
of mass participation and a depth of democratic purpose that has been rarely seen in American
history.27
Southern whites’ response to this unprecedented display of democratic fervor from their
former slaves was predictable, given the violence with which they had guarded their masterly
prerogatives before the war. The white supremacist backlash against Reconstruction rested on a
sense of imperiled white manhood that necessitated a violent effort to “redeem” the South from
supposed dangers of emancipation. Here again, the trope of protection animated the call to arms
for southern white men who, having lost the war, looked to win the peace. As Crystal Feimster’s
work reveals, southern newspapers overflowed with stories of black violence against whites, and
it was in these pages that the myth of the black rapist was born. The protection of white
womanhood and the elevation of white manhood necessitated, according to the self-styled
Redeemers, the violent suppression of black manhood. Although this gendered ideology
would flourish a few decades later during the Jim Crow era, furnishing the primary justification
for thousands of lynchings across the South, its roots lay in the crisis of Reconstruction politics.28
White women played important roles in the redemption of southern manhood. As Karen Cox
and Caroline Janney demonstrate, organizations such as the Ladies’ Memorial Association (LMA)
and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) channeled southern women’s wartime
frustrations, grief, and resentment into a movement to valorize the South, its men, and their “Lost

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Cause.” While southern women had been among the Confederacy’s most vocal critics during the
war’s lean years, they became its most ardent champions during and after Reconstruction. By
building monuments to fallen soldiers, writing school textbooks, and creating a grassroots net-
work of Confederate descendants, the LMA and the UDC created a mythic narrative of southern
innocence that heralded the manly sacrifice of its armies as well as the purity of its women. They
purposefully wrote slavery out of this narrative, insofar as the Lost Cause only recognized the
institution’s supposed benevolence and the contentment of its charges. Southern women’s
success in rewriting the history of the Civil War and its aftermath continues to shape the way
Americans understand the war and its significance.29
The crisis in gender stemming from Reconstruction politics spilled over from the South into
the rest of the nation. Anxieties over manhood fueled the rise of American imperialism in the late
nineteenth century as the nation looked to extend its influence over its “little brown brothers” in
the American West as well as Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines. Americans were “obsessed with
the connection between manhood and racial dominance,” writes Gail Bederman, an obsession
that manifested in a variety of ways, from bodybuilding competitions and debates over child-
rearing practices to race riots, lynchings, and colonial conquest. Thus, questions of race and
manhood were not simply matters of individual performance but rather collective issues of
“civilization” and its reach throughout the world. The middle-class ideal of pious restraint that
had guided antebellum debates over manhood gave way to the competing logic of martial
masculinity that had exploded during and after the Civil War.30
If anything can be said overall about the multiple, overlapping crises in gender that both
precipitated and evolved from the Civil War, it is perhaps that violence became more accepted as
a means to express what it meant to be an American man and an American citizen. The conflict
between restraint and aggression in the antebellum period dissolved as a result of the national
bloodletting of 1861–65. The death, destruction, and suffering only stoked the need for men to
demonstrate their worthiness for inclusion in the body politic through violent performances of
martial masculinity. This has been, perhaps, the most lasting yet unacknowledged legacy of the
“new birth of freedom” that arose from the Civil War.31

Questions for Future Scholarship

The emerging field of Civil War disability asks exciting new questions about the relationship
between gender, the body, and American nationalism. How did war wounds shape not only
veterans’ self-image and their sense of manhood but also the nation’s perception of what
constituted a full citizen? Did different kinds of wounds have different meanings for veterans
and their status as national heroes? How did veterans reestablish their wounded manhood in the
face of social and cultural mores that prized able-bodiedness above all other qualities in a man?
These questions animate a growing field of scholarship that seeks to merge Disability Studies with
the American Civil War.
Much of this new work challenges the assumption that Civil War veterans overcame their
physical limitations. In her exploration of Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s
debilitating injury, Sarah Handley-Cousins writes, there is “a consensus that while Union
veterans were changed and challenged by their wounded bodies, they overcame disability by
drawing meaning from their afflictions and focusing on hard work.” National discourses of manly
heroism and sacrifice ostensibly provided men like Chamberlain a means through which they
could set aside their physical limitations and live a full, meaningful life. However, as Handley-
Cousins points out, many veterans, including Chamberlain, did not think of their wounds as a
“patriotic sacrifice.” Chronic pain and recurring infection, as well as the emotional trauma these

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conditions incurred, made it difficult if not impossible to enjoy life at home. “Invisible wounds”
that masked disability and led to the presumption of able-bodiedness forced veterans to submit to
humiliating physical examinations in order to receive pensions and other forms of support. The
inability to work and earn a living compounded the emasculation veterans experienced, many of
whom turned to drink, narcotics, or even suicide – a tragic fate historians have acknowledged for
the defeated Confederate veteran but one that Handley-Cousins argues applied equally to the
victorious Union veteran.32
Demonstrating the physical and emotional scars of war is a contentious project that has elicited
sharp rebukes from some established Civil War historians. Leading scholars, such as Gary
Gallagher and Earl Hess, have argued that the new focus on disability presents an unrepresentative
picture of the overall experience of Civil War veterans who, for the most part, viewed their
contribution to the war effort with pride despite its costs. Lamenting this turn toward the “dark
side,” Gallagher and his co-author Kathryn Shively Meier insist that “no scholar steeped in
sources would suggest that most soldiers committed atrocities, exhibited cowardice in combat …
or suffered debilitating physical or psychological traumas that prevented their moving past
military service to live productive postwar lives.” Peter Carmichael further adds that this darker
historiography “suffers from a presentism that appears as a desperate attempt to connect with
contemporary affairs.” While these critiques are not explicitly gendered, a preference for a more
traditional narrative of manly heroism and sacrifice reflects in their discomfort with stories of
unredeemed American manhood.33
The ways that gender history has disrupted the conventional narratives of Civil War histor-
iography makes some scholars uneasy, but overall, the works discussed in this essay have deepened
the field and made it more dynamic. By bridging the battlefield and the home front, gender
historians demonstrate the complex interrelationships that connected the political, military, and
social worlds of mid-nineteenth-century America. As this work evolves in the future, we can
expect to learn more about the ways in which gender shaped the experience of war and vice versa.

Notes
1 LeeAnn Whites coined the phrase “crisis in gender” in her essay of that name in Catherine Clinton
and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992): 3–21 and three years later in her book The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia,
1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). However, the scholarship on women in the
Civil War goes back much further, beginning with Elizabeth Massey’s foundational study Women in
the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
2 On the general expansion of women’s domestic authority, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True
Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly (Summer 1966): 151–74; Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973);
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ann Douglass, The Feminization of American Culture (New
York: Noonday Press, 1977); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County,
New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On women abolitionists and
the domestic/maternalist critique of slavery, see among others Jean Fagin Yellin, Women and Sisters:
The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Lori D.
Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century
United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Jean Fagin Yellin and John C. Van Horne,
eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996); Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

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3 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Jean Fagan Yellin, ed. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000): 36.
4 Chestnut quoted in Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: 5. Chestnut’s diary is an indispensable
source for understanding elite southern women’s perspectives on slavery and the war. See Mary
Boykin Chestnut, Mary Chestnut’s Civil War, C. Vann Woodward, ed. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981). Another important source in this respect is the diary of Gertrude Thomas, a Georgia
plantation mistress, whose diary spans the antebellum, wartime, and Reconstruction periods. See
Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). For an extended discussion of the gendered
dynamics among white women and enslaved women within plantation households see Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
5 Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household. On slaveholding women during and after the war, see
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (New
York: Vintage, 1996).
6 Kenneth A. Lockeridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and
Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University
Press, 1992). Although Lockeridge is focused on mastery in an earlier period, the scholarship on
southern honor echoes his conclusions. See most notably Bertram Wyatt Brown, Southern Honor:
Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th Anniversary Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
7 Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political
Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 19.
8 Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
9 Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005): 3.
10 On “Bleeding Kansas,” see James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1990):
145–69.
11 Sumner quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: 150.
12 Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010): 25–28.
13 Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005): 5.
14 David Blight, “No Desperate Hero: Manhood and Freedom in a Union Soldier’s Experience,” in
Clinton and Silber, eds. Divided Houses: 58. On female Civil War soldiers, see Elizabeth D. Leonard,
All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
15 Stephen Berry, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003): 9; Reid Mitchell, “Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern
Volunteer,” in Clinton and Silber, eds. Divided Houses: 44–46.
16 On competing conceptions of manhood, see Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood,
Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010). On courage
and its cultivation during the Civil War, see Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of
Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987). On disillusionment and disability, see
among others, Blight, “No Desperate Hero”; Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress,
Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Diane Miller Sommerville,
“‘A Burden Too Heavy to Bear’: War Trauma, Suicide, and Confederate Soldiers,” Civil War History
59, no. 4 (Dec. 2013): 453–91; Lesley J. Gordon, A Broken Regiment: The Sixteenth Connecticut’s Civil
War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves:
Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Sarah Handley-
Cousins, “‘Wrestling at the Gates of Death’: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible
Disability in the Post-Civil War North,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 2 (June 2016): 220–42.
17 Frederick Douglass, “Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army?,” Douglass’s Monthly (Aug. 1863).

65
 Carole Emberton

18 Stephen Kantrowitz, “Fighting Like Men: Civil War Dilemmas of Abolitionist Manhood,” in
Catharine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds. Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 19. See also Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes
Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no.3 (Sept. 2012):
369–93.
19 On the relationship between abolition and woman suffrage, see Eleanor Flexnor, Century of Struggle
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1959); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an
Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Wendy
Hammond Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Woman Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1991); Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and
Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
20 Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Loyal Women of the
Republic, held in New York, May 14, 1863.” https://archive.org/stream/proceedingsofmee00-
wome/proceedingsofmee00wome_djvu.txt, accessed August 1, 2016.
21 Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 9. See also Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern
Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On the important role of
army wives and their domestic labor, see Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon, eds. Intimate Strategies
of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
22 On the bread riots, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: 180. Also on women and Confederate
domestic politics, see Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention; George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis
of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). On guerrilla women, see LeeAnn
Whites, “Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil
War on the Western Border,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no.1 (Mar. 2011): 56–78; Joseph Beilein,
Jr., “The Guerrilla Shirt: A Labor of Love and the Style of Rebellion in Civil War Missouri,” Civil
War History 58, no. 2 (June 2012): 151–79. On Butler and New Orleans, see Alecia P. Long, “(Mis)
Remembering General Order No. 28: Benjamin Butler, the Woman Order, and Historical
Memory,” in LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds. Occupied Women: Gender, Military
Occupation, and the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009): 17–32. For a
more general treatment of rape during the Civil War, see Crystal Feimster, “‘How Are the Daughters
of Eve Punished?’: Rape during the Civil War,” in Elizabeth Ann Payne, ed. Writing Women’s History:
A Tribute to Anne Frior Scott (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011): 64–81.
23 Lisa Tendrich Frank, The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning.
24 Tera Hunter, To’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997): 27. On freedwomen’s work, see also Jacqueline
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family from Slavery to the Present (New
York: Vintage, 1985); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South
Carolina, 1860–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard
Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1997). See also Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age
of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Nancy Bercaw, Gendered
Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2003); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The
Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
25 On the politics of marriage and households in the Reconstruction South, see Laura Edwards, Gendered
Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
and Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms. For a more national view, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to
Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
26 Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the
Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 181. See also Kidada

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 Gender and the American Civil War

Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from
Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Carole Emberton,
Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013).
27 See Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Black Public Sphere: African American
Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 107–46.
See also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to
the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
28 See Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
29 Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Karen Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United
Daughters of the Confederacy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003).
30 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. See also Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for
American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Cecilia O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American
Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
31 The phrase “new birth of freedom” is taken from the “Gettysburg Address,” which Abraham Lincoln
delivered on Nov. 19, 1863. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/gettyb.asp.
32 Sarah Handley-Cousins, “‘Wrestling at the Gates of Death’”, 223–24. See also Miller, Empty Sleeves:
Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Frances Clark, War
Stories; Susan-Mary Grant, “Reconstructing the National Body: Masculinity, Disability, and Race in
the American Civil War,” Proceedings of the British Academy 154 (2008): 273–317; Lisa Long,
Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On Civil War suicides, see Diane Miller Sommerville, “‘A Burden Too
Heavy to Bear;’” David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War North
Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
33 Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier, “Coming to Terms with Civil War Military History,”
Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 492; Earl Hess, “Where Do We Stand? A Critical
Assessment of Civil War Studies in the Sesquicentennial Era,” Civil War History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 2014):
371–403; Peter Carmichael, “Relevance, Resonance, and Historiography: Interpreting the Lives and
Experiences of Civil War Soldiers,” Civil War History 62, no. 2 (June 2016): 182.

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 5
GEE! I WISH I WERE A MAN
Gender and the Great War

Andrew J. Huebner
university of alabama

The Americanist scholarship on gender and the Great War remains relatively underdeveloped,
especially compared to Europeanist analogues. In the 1990s, though, historians of the United
States began redressing that imbalance. Their work, along with other scholarship implicitly about
gender, shows that the war exposed and invested with fresh urgency long-simmering tensions
over the proper character and roles of American men and women—tensions between what we
might call gender tradition and gender upheaval.
Both the tradition and the upheaval, of course, fluctuated widely by region, social class, race,
time period, and other variables. But broadly speaking, the guardians of traditional gender roles—
many of them white middle-class reformers, political officials, journalists, religious leaders, and
other public figures—favored a world steadied by sexual restraint and separate spheres for men
and women. They believed in male stewardship of politics, work, war, and familial protection, in
female dominion over children, the home, and moral virtue. Traditionalists perceived in almost
every trend of the period before 1917 a challenge to these standards. Immigration, women’s
work, industrial wage labor and its supposedly softening impact on masculine vigor, urbanization,
the atomizing consequences of transportation, the “closing” of the frontier, threats to children’s
safety and health, the woman suffrage campaign, the alleged loosening of sexual morality and its
expressions in popular culture—all seemed to some Americans to imperil the family and
conventions of gender. Though again this varied greatly by time and place, the state and its
surrogates responded to these things by monitoring, fretting over, or policing the behaviors, roles,
and identities of men and women. Many of those men and women, in turn, resisted such
manipulation of their lives.1
World War I, when the United States intervened, generated new questions involving such
basic tensions over gender and power. Private citizens, public commentators, and government
officials alike asked how the war would or ought to affect those tensions. Should personal
morality be a public matter? What constituted masculine and feminine propriety? How should
obligation to family rank against obligation to nation? How to order citizenship along the lines of
gender? Who should work and at what kinds of jobs? Although the war opened space for new,
challenging answers to those questions, the academic scholarship tells us it ultimately reinforced a
conservative vision of gender roles. Tensions between change and stasis, however, marked nearly
every aspect of the intervention, at home and overseas.

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 Gender and the Great War

Gender and the War’s Meaning

When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a vote of war in April 1917, he spoke in the high
vocabulary of democratic principles but also cited the Kaiser’s “unmanly” U-boat attacks on
civilians. Since 1914, Americans had read a great deal about Germany’s infamous contempt for
the standards of masculine behavior. As Gail Bederman writes in Manliness and Civilization (1995),
civilized white men were expected to protect the home and the innocents inside. They should be
restrained, resolute, and decent, violent only when stirred by threats.2 Yet the Germans, accord-
ing to conventional wisdom at the time as well as recent scholarship, exhibited flagrant sexual
aggression and even depravity.3 American press coverage of the “rape of Belgium” by German
troops flooded the American imagination with maimed children and defiled women. In their
spirited endorsement of Wilson’s war measure, members of Congress cited that record—along
with a great variety of other moral, commercial, legal, and geopolitical justifications.4
Some in the antiwar minority likewise grounded their position in familial protection. But they
argued American women and children would face certain devastation from war rather than uncertain
devastation from remaining neutral. Several scholars observe that the progressive reformer Jane
Addams, the Woman’s Peace Party, and Rep. Jeannette Rankin understood war delivered violence,
deprivation, and rape, not protection. War likewise offered men none of the regenerative benefits,
they said, typically assigned it by bellicose voices—the core rationalization for preserving politics for
males. Others, like Robert La Follette, refused to sacrifice American boys for the nefarious business
interests they saw driving the intervention.5 Mothers wrote congressmen to register their disap-
proval, evoking the themes woven into two of the period’s popular songs of antiwar maternalism,
“Don’t Take My Darling Boy Away!” and “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” But these and
other arguments against war’s redemptive value were drowned out in 1917 amid the administration’s
demand for absolute loyalty from a public deeply ambivalent about the intervention.
Scholars have yet to fully investigate whether gender politics provoked Wilson’s decision to ask
for war or lawmakers’ willingness to give it to him—to do for World War I, for example, what
Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood (1998) does for the wars in Cuba and the
Philippines.6 Nevertheless, few scholars miss the inundation of wartime culture with images of
German gender perversions. The “Hun” as rapist and pillager, many scholars note, were stock
themes of contemporary recruiting posters, liberty loan drives, popular music, and much cultural
and educational output and advisory material from the Committee on Public Information (CPI).7
Major works on the American home front experience—David Kennedy’s Over Here (1980),
Ronald Schaffer’s America in the Great War (1991), and Robert Zieger’s America’s Great War
(2000)—likewise acknowledge with varying degrees of thoroughness and explicitness the gen-
dered character of wartime persuasive culture.8
Yet even as propagandists charged the war with chivalric purpose, they assigned it deeper
regenerative implications for American gender relations and family health—a pattern of thinking
scholars notice in other contexts and which will drive my own forthcoming Love and Death in the
Great War.9 Coming as it did amidst the era’s threats to gendered order, the war offered to some
advocates an opportunity to restore men and women to their proper roles—to figuratively as well
as literally protect the family. Good sons served in the military; good wives or parents waited
patiently and stoically. Visual culture often pictured approvingly this militarization of family—
and made clear what this war was for (see Figure 5.1).
Country is mentioned here, but the family is the star. In another manifestation of this renewal,
Kathleen Kennedy and Susan Zeiger show how officials mobilized “patriotic motherhood” to
demand women channel their reproductive functions and nurturing instincts to the purposes of
the state, joining an established literature on the association of women’s civic virtue with

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Figure 5.1 Victory Liberty Loan poster, 1918.
Source: Library of Congress
 Gender and the Great War

their motherly roles.10 These impulses yielded a new anthem of patriotic, not pacifist,
maternalism—“America Here’s My Boy.”
The strict clampdown on free opinion of which these pressures were part is the subject of a wide
literature. But until the appearance of Kathleen Kennedy’s Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens
(1999), most histories of dissent in World War I missed its gendered dimensions. In a war laced with
chivalric and familial meaning, opponents seemed traitors not only to their country but also to
motherhood. As Kennedy and Zeiger argue, women who agitated against the draft appeared
misguided, unpatriotic, and above all unwomanly. Propaganda films condemned “bad mothers.”11
In real life, women’s flaunting of gender conventions cost them the protections of chivalry, as they
suffered beatings at the hands of police and prosecution in the courts. In one striking example, from
the legal scholar Geoffrey Stone, the radical editors of the journal The Masses ran afoul of the
Espionage Act, in part for imagining conscription as family death, not salvation. The journal’s
editorial drawing, “Conscription,” which pictured women and children as the victims rather than
beneficiaries of war, ran into the teeth of a powerful information management campaign that
thoroughly conflated gender propriety and patriotic verve.12 Sacrificing sons for the nation was the
proper, motherly thing to do. Military service, as the overwhelming balance of popular culture and
official policy had it, was not a disruptor of domestic harmony but its logical culmination.

Gender and Conscription

Anyone who believed the war might bring stability to families, however, faced a profound irony
—the conflict itself disrupted everyday rhythms and gender roles. War threatened to pull men out of
the workforce and push women and children into it; to drive soldiers away from the civilizing
influence of family and into the notoriously degrading environment of the military; and to leave
orphans and widows without breadwinners or protectors. Federal and military officials as well as
progressive reformers worked hard to minimize these threats to gender stability.
Military service in times of war had long been a proving ground for manhood, especially in the
two decades or so before World War I, when many influential voices called for sharpening
America’s martial vitality. But in April and May of 1917, too few men were volunteering to field
the army modern war required. President Wilson called on Congress to pass the Selective Service
Act, which he signed on May 18, 1917. In a process Christopher Capozzola aptly terms “coercive
voluntarism” in his book Uncle Sam Wants You (2008), the state required all males between the ages
of twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft.13 North and South had tried conscription during
the Civil War, but not on this scale—WWI draftees wound up constituting seventy-two percent of
all soldiers in the army.14 On June 5, 1917, the first national registration day, draft officials and
newspapers branded those who failed to appear unmanly traitors to the nation. Self-appointed
arbiters of masculine virtue and patriotism, the American Protective League among them, worked
to expose “slackers.” Women played a prominent public role in shaming draft dodgers—a potent
lesson in a war widely imagined as a defense of women, children, and the home.15
Although all men of the proper age were required to register, the military conscripted only
twelve percent of registrants. The way the state winnowed down those numbers said much about
how gender intersected with race, class, and labor. According to John Whiteclay Chambers’s To
Raise an Army (1987), and later, Jennifer Keene’s Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of
America (2001), the state used the draft to minimize the war’s disruption of American families and
gender roles. Married men with dependents garnered the largest number of exemptions from
service—forty-three percent of all registrants won such reprieve.16 But as Jeanette Keith and Gerald
E. Shenk explain, those exemptions were most likely to go to families with a single male
breadwinner, gainfully employed—the preferred model of the white middle class. In Rich Man’s

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War, Poor Man’s Fight (2004), Keith argues that Selective Service directed boards to grant dependent
exemptions to men with hard-to-replace (that is, high) incomes, thus leaving poorer men with
families more vulnerable to conscription. Throughout the war, in fact, twenty-five percent of
married men called for examination were conscripted.17 African Americans were overrepresented
in those ranks, Shenk adds in “Work or Fight!” (2005). National policymakers and local draft boards
had difficulty imagining black men as sole providers for anyone—and they could cite chronically
low black wages to prove it. This combination of white prejudice and the exemption rules thus
protected both the safety and claims to masculinity of white, property-owning patriarchs.18 The
message was clear: If you hadn’t demonstrated your manly usefulness as a breadwinner, whether
you were poor or black or both, you’d be summoned to prove it another way.
In short, the connections between manhood and military service were flexible and dynamic in
practice, however firm they appeared in public culture, and they often reflected or reinforced
existing arrangements of power and privilege. Evidence suggests the general public also harbored
a more elastic understanding of masculine duty than the state might have wished or than public
culture incessantly modeled. Although most draft-age men willingly registered for conscription,
several scholars of the draft argue, great numbers evaded service by legal and extralegal means.19

Wartime Politics of Gender and Race

Some of those evaders were African Americans, who refused to fight for a nation that treated
them as outcasts. Yet many other black men, as several scholars maintain, regarded army service as
a route to otherwise elusive manly honor and political citizenship.20 The racial terror and daily
indignities of Jim Crow had been undermining black masculinity since the Civil War. White men
sexually assaulted black women with impunity; black men were lynched at the slightest alleged
breach of racial and gender etiquette; mainstream opinion endowed black men with none of the
sexual restraint associated with masculine respectability; and systematic discrimination and
segregation offered daily doses of humiliation and exclusion.21 A large number of African
Americans, as Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy (2010), saw military service as
an opportunity to vindicate “the broader manhood of the race”—and, they hoped, to reap the
rewards of citizenship and dignity the broader culture associated with veteran status.22 If military
service was now an obligation of the virtuous male citizen, as Capozzola argues, many of the
370,000 drafted African-American men wanted the rights and respect that went with it.
And if wartime culture freighted the uniform with chivalric obligations, black men had ample
reason to take that charge literally. Protecting white women from the Germans was hypothetical;
protecting black women from white assault was real. Williams, as well as Adriane Lentz-Smith in
Freedom Struggles (2009), write about how the war emboldened black men to assert their masculine
virtue. In August 1917, a soldier of the all-black 24th Infantry stationed in Houston, Texas,
witnessed the abusive arrest of a black mother of five. African-American soldiers investigating the
incident were beaten or arrested. When word reached nearby Camp Logan, one hundred members
of the 24th marched into town to attack the police. In the ensuing violence, at least fifteen white
people and two black people died. African-American women in Houston and around the country
applauded the soldiers for defending their honor. That fall, when white sheriff’s deputies arrested
several black women on false prostitution charges in Waxahachie, Texas, a crowd of black draftees
gathered to plot their rescue. One of their leaders saw the defense of black women as the first step in
a march for manhood and citizenship that would ultimately take them to France. Though these
soldiers shared with white people a protective vision of manliness, authorities not surprisingly
regarded their actions as unforgivable impingements on white privilege. For their offenses in
Houston, nineteen black men were hanged.23

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 Gender and the Great War

War and the Family Man

Those optimists who hoped the American intervention of 1917 would restore or showcase familial
strength, or would produce better citizens and fathers, fretted about the potentially corrosive impact
of war on male morality. Past wars had separated men from wives, mothers, and the home, thought
by many middle-class arbiters of respectability to be the guarantors of masculine virtue.
Progressives, already worried about moral slippage in working-class and immigrant men, sensed a
chance to inculcate middle-class masculine restraint among the training camps’ gathered masses.
The Wilson administration needed the support of mothers nervous about martial stewardship of
their boys’ character. And of course the military wanted its soldiers fighting fit.
The central organizational response to these apprehensions, launched by the War Department
just two weeks after Wilson’s April war address, was the Commission on Training Camp
Activities (CTCA). Many studies of World War I acknowledge the agency’s mission to supervise
and discipline soldierly behavior in the cantonments.24 Those written since the late 1990s draw
on Nancy Bristow’s Making Men Moral (1996), which put the CTCA at the center of wartime
progressive impulses to improve male character. Mark Meigs, in the same period, devoted a
chapter of his Optimism at Armageddon (1997) to the doughboys’ sexual attitudes and practices.25
The key CTCA strategy was diversion. Trainees in the camps could sing, play sports, watch
magic shows, and write letters home in specially designated areas. They also received frank
instruction about the consequences of sexual deviance. As Bristow shows, although soldierly
preparedness clearly animated such programs, the CTCA and other officials made constant appeals
to the doughboy’s obligation to family. He was reminded again and again that he’d bring shame to
home by dalliances abroad. If these warnings failed, the CTCA sponsored chemical prophylactic
stations at the camps and threatened the lapsed doughboys with courts-martial if they didn’t use
them quickly after a sexual encounter. For the high proportion of immigrants in the army, officials
translated sex education films, pamphlets, and speeches.26 The Selective Service Act, meanwhile,
prohibited the sale of alcohol to men in uniform and facilitated the banning of prostitution around
the camps. As Elizabeth Clement argues in Love for Sale (2006), prostitutes seemed more menacing
than ever in the wartime climate—they were scapegoated for the sexually transmitted diseases that
threatened martial and moral fitness—and had their activities increasingly criminalized.27
Meanwhile, with draftees pouring into the cantonments, the federal government worked on
stabilizing the families they’d left behind and ensuring veterans a smooth postwar reintegration.
Fearful of social chaos now or later, officials began debating a program of soldiers’ insurance—a
process both rooted in and revealing of idealized gender roles. According to Stephen Ortiz’s Beyond
the Bonus March and GI Bill (2010) and Beth Linker’s War’s Waste (2011), policymakers considered
the Civil War veterans’ pension system a negative model that was rife with corruption, nepotism,
and inconsistency. Equally ominous, it supposedly discouraged proper gender roles by under-
writing a generation of non-wage-earning men dependent on an inadequate dole.28 Thus in August
1917, federal lawmakers proposed what eventually became the War Risk Insurance Act (WRIA),
passed that October. First, the bill provided for the wartime financial support of a soldier’s
dependents through “allotments,” compulsory payments drawn from his own army salary, and
“allowances,” supplemental payments from the government. Second, it delivered compensation to
a soldier and his dependents in case of death or disability, in accordance with the severity of the harm
done and the size of the man’s family. Third, it mandated government-funded rehabilitation
services for the wounded. Fourth, it offered voluntary life insurance to servicemen at reduced rates.
Supporters of the war insurance bill rooted their advocacy in gratitude, but just as compelling
were the opportunities it offered to sustain traditional domestic roles, as Linker and Ortiz as well as
Erika Kuhlman note.29 These were the very motives underpinning contemporary state welfare

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 Andrew J. Huebner

spending for single mothers, one of the first major commitments in American history of public
resources to familial and by implication national health. “Normal family life is the foundation of the
State,” said an advocate for widowed mothers’ pensions in 1914, “and its conservation [is] an inherent
duty of government.”30 To those ends, the framers of the WRIA hoped to use policy to preserve the
respectable family. Compulsory savings and affordable life insurance promised to stop women from
working and children from becoming public wards; both also functioned to funnel soldiers’ money
homeward rather than to bar and brothel. Rehabilitation would return men quickly to the work-
place, while compensation for the grievously injured would keep women and children out of it.

Sex and the Soldier Over There

As the doughboys left for Europe, the campaign against sexual misbehavior traveled with them.31
Gen. John Pershing held unit commanders responsible for their men’s venereal disease rates,
facilitated medical services for French women near American troops, favored continuing diversion-
ary programming, punished ill doughboys, and, of course, supplied prophylaxis to every regiment.
By September 1918, the rate of venereal disease among doughboys was less than one per thousand—
though this is quite different, of course, from saying sexual activity stopped.32 Partly for that reason,
Bristow judges the efforts of the CTCA a failure in the long term, despite the disease-rate victory. She
argues that reformers could never enforce the moral homogeneity they desired in such a diverse
population of soldiers, many of whom resisted their variously heavy-handed, sanctimonious, coer-
cive, and exclusive agenda. Even as they upheld the sexual double standard—doughboys spent lots of
time worrying about home front infidelity—promiscuous soldiers challenged expectations of proper
male restraint. These claims of resistance put Bristow in the general company of Jennifer Keene,
whose Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America argues that drafted citizen soldiers
pushed back against official attempts to control them and viewed conscription as a contract whose
terms they should help set. Mark Meigs agrees that doughboys visited prostitutes and otherwise
challenged efforts to manipulate their character, but he also highlights their acquiescence to the
officially preferred ethos of patriotic abstinence. Meigs likewise concurs with David Kennedy that
venereal disease education helped open sexuality for public discussion, suggesting military policy’s
importance as a locus of moral instruction as well as opportunities for future research.33
Anyone who writes about the doughboys’ erotic lives, however, is limited by the available
sources—letters, diaries, memoirs, postwar surveys—which discretion and the awareness of censor-
ship left rather bare of sexual discussion. As Susan Zeiger points out, most of what historians know
comes from army reports and investigations.34 Thus we still lack a thorough, ground-level study of
sex and the doughboy along the lines of Mary Louise Roberts’s book set in the Second World War,
What Soldiers Do (2013). Drawing on a rich evidentiary base in France and the United States,
Roberts connects the behaviors and attitudes of American World War II GIs with official,
sexualized framings of the war.35 We also have yet to see a study of American soldiers’ homoeroti-
cism like Chapter 8 of Paul Fussell’s towering achievement, The Great War and Modern Memory
(1975), which surveys the subject in British memoir and literature.36
A number of scholars, though, write about the fraught interplay between white soldiers, black
soldiers, and French women. African Americans reported a comparatively favorable reception
from English and especially French people, though that impression likely owed more to the
severity of American racism than to its absence abroad. Still, black men enjoyed a freedom of
interaction with white women surpassing what was possible in much of the United States. This
enraged white doughboys bent on exporting their cherished hierarchies of sexual privilege. Black
men who fraternized with white women found themselves victims of violence, subjects of rape
rumors, and defendants in criminal cases. The black 92nd even was known, for a time, as the

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“rapist division.” The demagogic Sen. James Vardaman later famously authorized white violence
against “those military, French-woman-ruined negro soldiers” suspected of sex crimes.37 The
army, encumbered with the same white supremacist fantasies, disciplined the 92nd Division and
other African-American units. As Chad Williams reports, eight of eleven American soldiers
executed in France were black, and all were charged with rape. One man, William Buckner, died
in the noose for what he insisted was a consensual encounter with a French woman. Despite such
familiar perversions of justice, black men continued to pursue amorous relationships and friend-
ships with French women, occasionally marrying them.38
Those war marriages occupy Susan Zeiger’s attention in Entangling Alliances (2010). Military
leaders in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) initially opposed doughboy marriages to local
women, driven in part by the same stereotypes about predatory and lustful French women that
had long colored American opinion and now worried so many American parents. But the
doughboys persisted in pushing the limits of army regulations. What was more, French and
British officials objected to the abandonment of women and babies by American soldier-fathers.
Thus by early 1919, Gen. Pershing had revised policy to accommodate and facilitate soldier
marriages. Roughly five thousand Americans brought home European war brides by the early
1920s. Although some observers welcomed these women as symbols of American internation-
alism, many others viewed them with suspicion, finding in their reputed “gold digging” fodder
for isolationism and immigration restriction.39

Masculine Virtue at War

Scholars continue to produce impressive studies of the doughboy’s mental universe and battle-
field experience, but few explicitly scrutinize the ways he consciously or unconsciously incor-
porated war into his ideas about masculinity. Some works do, however, offer tantalizing or
implicit hints on the topic. In his 1997 book, Mark Meigs argued briefly against the allegedly
emasculating impact of modern warfare among Americans. Michael Adams, in The Great
Adventure (1990), more thoroughly identified masculine fulfillment as an expected and realized
feature of war in Britain and the United States. In the same vein, in Doughboys on the Great War
(2014), Edward Gutiérrez writes without much elaboration on the doughboy’s hopeful and
successful fight for his own “manhood,” an assertion that serves his broader corrective argument
against disillusionment as the primary experience of the American soldier.40
Scholars of the African-American experience are particularly attuned to the ways black men
regarded combat as a way to prove—or more aptly, to showcase—black masculinity. The black press
broadcast widely the martial exploits of men in France even as most African-American servicemen, to
their disappointment, were relegated to noncombatant roles. Adriane Lentz-Smith, in a chapter called
“Men in the Making,” offers an especially thorough account of black men’s uphill pursuit of martial
masculinity. Though most black soldiers were barred from combat, many found that France’s relative
desegregation invigorated their manly independence. In fact, she argues, the very denial of equal
treatment or the promise of citizenship rights galvanized and strengthened black men in the army.41
Finally, Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight (2010) touches on the various religious inflections
of combat masculinity. One of the axioms of dominant gender ideology held that rugged
manliness meant control—that a man could, through his actions, determine his own fate. This
was one of the ways factory labor had undermined masculinity; modern warfare posed a far
graver threat. “When the whistle blew and the barrages began,” Ebel writes, “rugged indivi-
duals saw firsthand that their survival did not depend on works, merit, or muscularity.” In the
place of those masculine virtues, some doughboys threw their faith to God—or a secular
version they called “Fate, chance, [or] luck.” Others merged their devotion to masculine

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virtue with their belief in the hereafter, feeling they must die bravely—die like men—in order
to earn eternal grace. And more generally, many doughboys blended their devotion to God,
country, and manly virtue in regarding themselves as righteous warriors, heralds of a
“Christianity of the sword.”42
Even works without explicit pretensions to gender analysis, if they use soldiers’ diaries, letters,
questionnaire responses, or memoirs, inevitably reveal doughboys wrestling with the terms of
masculinity—with the ways fear, courage, shell shock, pain, and death affected them as men.43 It
remains for someone to conduct a sustained study of those sources with masculinity at the center
rather than the margins. There is also space for more thorough examination of the war’s radiating
emotional impact on soldiers, marriages, and families. Scholars of other countries, and non-academic
authors writing about the American experience, are quicker to excavate the character of those
relationships.44

Women and Gender on the Home Front

Back at home, women’s contributions to mobilization, and the impact of those contributions on
interrelated questions of gender and citizenship, have inspired a growing scholarship.45
Collectively, they tell a story of temporary change and ultimate disappointment, of stretching and
contracting boundaries, of new roles governed by old expectations. The war opened opportunities
for women, one early essay collection on the subject suggested, but the state and its surrogates
quickly deployed strategies to minimize the disruptive potential of those opportunities.46
For Americans protective of traditional gender roles, the “safest” arena for women’s participa-
tion was home front voluntarism. To coordinate it, President Wilson formed the Woman’s
Committee of the Council of National Defense, which drew from the rich network of established
women’s clubs. Clubwomen helped with draft registration, identified deserters, and sold war
bonds. Some leaders on the committee hoped for an equal partnership with government, but
were disappointed in that ambition. And more broadly, appeals for women’s assistance funneled
them overwhelmingly toward contributions at once domestic in character, subordinate to the
“real” male work of war, and congruent with respectable, middle-class attitudes about women’s
civic involvement. Christopher Capozzola writes, for instance, that female Red Cross volunteers
knitted millions upon millions of garments and hospital items. Housewives signed pledges
promising to conserve food in the kitchen and self-ration commodities like meat and wheat.
Of course the state urged women toward these behaviors with the same coercive energy driving
other wartime obligations. Those who avoided the new burdens might earn the epithet “women
slackers”—shirkers of both patriotic and gendered duties.47
Women who pursued more direct involvement in the war found the lines of gender even more
rigidly policed. As Susan Zeiger explains in her book In Uncle Sam’s Service (1999), almost seventeen
thousand women went overseas either as members of the army, employees of it, or workers for
affiliated welfare agencies in France. The majority who went to Europe worked as nurses, in
soldiers’ canteens, or in clerical jobs. On the home front, at least twelve thousand women joined the
navy and marines, while tens of thousands labored in military offices and hospitals. While some of
these women hoped to break free of domestic constraints through their war work, they faced
constant pressures to fulfill domestic functions and to remain traditionally feminine. Part of the
broader campaign to safeguard the doughboy’s virtue, in fact, entailed surrounding him with
canteen workers and other “auxiliary women” to remind him of (not distract him from) his
sweetheart at home. Soldiers’ welfare workers were expected to offer sympathetic companion-
ship to men at nighttime army dances, just as nurses were expected to provide emotional succor
alongside medical care. Many war workers, Jonathan Ebel argues, embraced these demands,

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seeing in their war service expression of a “usually domestic, broadly Christian womanhood.”48
But the women who invested their work with transformative potential chafed under the same
expectations. Nurses, for instance, campaigned for military rank and better compensation.
Whether of conservative or progressive temperaments, though, women war workers occupied
marginal, subordinated, or segregated positions within the armed forces.
Kimberly Jensen, in Mobilizing Minerva (2008), builds upon Zeiger’s work, adding female
physicians and women-at-arms to the story. Some of these women enlisted with professional,
civic, or personal advancement in mind. Others hoped not just to join the military but also to change
it. Jensen’s doctors established all-female medical units in Europe for women impacted by rape,
disease, and deprivation. Nurses, as Zeiger also notes, faced discrimination and even hostility from
men in the war zone, and fought for military rank to stabilize their professional status and institutio-
nalize respect for their contributions. On the domestic front, women learned to shoot and joined gun
clubs, preparing themselves to defend their homes and implicitly claiming the rights of citizenship
that flowed from martial competence—even as other woman suffrage advocates were working to
decouple military service from political citizenship. All of this activity, of course, challenged the very
foundations of the wartime “gender bargain,” whereby men fight to protect women.
Julia Irwin identifies some of the same patterns in Making the World Safe (2013), her study of
the American Red Cross (ARC). For whatever professional or personal fulfillment ARC nurses
sought in their work, many people assumed they didn’t belong in the war zone and would shrink
in moral character once exposed to it. ARC leaders had to contend with rumors of sexual
adventurism and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Perhaps in part to offset such stereotypes—to
reassure American parents, officials, and donors that women at war were properly womanly—
national publicity often framed the ARC’s work in maternalist terms (see Figure 5.3).
This iconography of the nurturing woman aligned well with broader attempts to minimize the
war’s disruptive impact on gender roles, to domesticate and make familiar the jobs women were
doing in the male terrain of war. Yet Irwin also argues that the ARC’s magazine stressed the
organization’s institutional competence, efficiency, and other supposedly masculine attributes,
attempting to attract men to humanitarian service and make it an avenue of patriotic obligation.49
Along similar lines, Susan Zeiger adds that the Red Cross Nursing Service released a postwar
report on its activities that explicitly rejected the “angels of the battlefields” image in favor of one
stressing a detached, professional record of service.50
Wage labor formed the final important venue of women’s wartime work. Most scholars agree
that while some married women joined the labor force, the overall number of new women
workers was low. Single or poor women had worked before and continued to work.51 Robert
Zieger, the accomplished labor historian and author of America’s Great War, does add that those
women already employed experienced dramatic changes. Women in traditional roles—domestic
servants, laundresses, seamstresses—quickly joined the ranks of clerks, telephone operators, and
transportation and factory workers. About a half million women left domestic service, while
almost 1.2 million moved into office work and manufacturing. These changes radiated out into
the African-American community, though with the usual caveats—few black women were
trained in skilled manufacturing occupations or government clerical work, and many left
domestic service only for the dirtiest of factory jobs.52
And while government propagandists devoted much rhetoric to celebrating the woman war
worker, many officials, industrialists, and guardians of tradition envisioned her labors as tempor-
ary and fraught with peril. The framers of the WRIA had mandated soldiers send a portion of
their pay home in an effort to keep women from working. Doctors wrote about the damage to a
woman’s reproductive organs heavy labor might do. Those women who did work excited fears of
female economic independence and sexual debasement. In the factories, some men sabotaged or

77
Figure 5.2 Poster showing a monumental Red Cross nurse cradling a wounded soldier on a stretcher.
Source: Illustration by A.E. Foringer. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, LC-USZC4-10241.
 Gender and the Great War

ostracized their female counterparts. Many women earned less than men for performing the same
tasks. Some people, finally, blamed wartime women’s employment for a rising divorce rate.53

The War’s Impact on Gender

In short, most historians agree the war ignited no immediate, broad revolution in gender roles.54 As
the French historian François Thébaud puts it, “[W]ar that exalts masculine values and radically
separates men and women does not seem to me to favor an evolution of the role of the sexes.”55 In
the 1920s, the military pursued what Susan Zeiger calls “a quiet policy of gender retrenchment.”
The campaign for nurses’ rank—with the accompanying amenities of commission and pay—
wouldn’t come until right after World War II. Advocates achieved a partial victory in 1920 with
the introduction of “relative rank” (a ceremonial status without official military rank or corre-
sponding pay scales). But that measure offered nurses no authority over or parity with men. From
1925 until World War II, the navy explicitly barred women from its ranks. Even in moral uplift, the
area in which women had found real influence during the war, the army backpedaled, failing to
invite a single woman to a 1923 conference on moral training.56 And women comprised a smaller
proportion of the domestic work force in 1920 than they had in 1910.57
Yet the war fired the ambitions of thousands of individuals who quietly continued their
professional engagements. Many of them found domestic life constraining and their war service
liberating. Jensen and Zeiger both argue that women affected, for a time, how the nation waged
war. They launched important campaigns to protect women and children from violence and
challenged the chivalric narrative surrounding military/civilian relations—a narrative that looked
strong in 1918 but which would later break down. The fight for rank galvanized nurses, attracted
powerful allies, and rehearsed battles against the military for recognition, inclusion, and remu-
neration. Finally, though the state viewed women as separate and subordinate contributors, it
could not deny their contributions. As Zeiger writes, for the remainder of the century, women
would base their claims to citizenship on activity in the labor force.58
Though fuller gains on that score would have to wait, the war helped deliver one of American
history’s seismic transformations in gender politics—the national woman suffrage amendment.
Some states had given women the vote in the nineteenth century, though as Kristin Hoganson
notes, the ascendancy of a more explicitly militarized and therefore male vision of citizenship helped
prevent any additional state gains between 1896 and 1910.59 But especially once the United States
entered the Great War, some feminists embraced this notion of martial citizenship, however
reluctantly, and imagined women finally winning the vote by its terms. As Christopher
Capozzola writes, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) set aside explicit
suffrage activism in favor of robust voluntarism. Other activists, however, continued to reject this
association between martial and civic virtue, and they lobbied for suffrage rooted in equality and
inclusion rather than readiness for military service. Alice Paul and her National Woman’s Party
(NWP) refused to trade war work for the ballot. Even before American entrance into the war, Paul
launched a daily protest in front of the White House. “Kaiser Wilson,” read a picketer’s sign in
August 1917, directly mocking the war’s democratic pretensions. Soon the protestors drew angry
crowds, arrests, and violence. To gender traditionalists, Paul and other radicals were doubly bad—
pushing inexorably for inclusion in politics while refusing to take their prescribed place in the ranks
of home front woman volunteers. Respected mental health experts and the New York Times called
them insane for their misunderstandings of gender and obligation.60
Yet Wilson, reluctantly and slowly, was coming around to woman suffrage, his support of
which he largely framed in the terms of martial citizenship even as he sought political benefits
for his party, as Robert Zieger argues. “This war could not have been fought,” said the

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President, “if it had not been for the services of the women.”61 By 1920, Congress had passed and
the requisite number of states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. Many suffragists saw
women’s wartime contributions as the decisive volley in a long battle. Kimberly Jensen cites
woman suffrage journals that rested their case on the service of the Red Cross, women doctors,
YMCA workers, and home front volunteers.62 In Capozzola’s words, suffragists won support
because women “showed through the fulfillment of obligations that they could be entrusted with
rights”—even if the state had insisted women discharge those obligations in traditional terms.63
The war’s impact on gender persisted beyond the 1918 armistice, as several recent studies show. In
War’s Waste, Beth Linker examines the culture of rehabilitation the War Risk Insurance Act helped
initiate. Disabled soldiers had long felt, or seemed to others, emasculated by their injuries, particularly
if they kept men from working. Surgeons, administrators, and other rehabilitation officials charged
with returning these men to their breadwinning roles were so concerned with the emasculation
narrative, Linker writes, that they sometimes endowed the disabled with greater masculinity for
overcoming adversity. The rehabilitation ethic also generated new fields dominated by women,
including occupational and physical therapy, with gender politics different from those governing
wartime nursing. To coddle or “mother” rehab patients, said male advocates, would hinder their
recovery. At Walter Reed Hospital, some female physiotherapists even defeated amputee veterans in
sports, inflicting a sort of positive gender shaming experience. The army’s rehabilitation journal,
Carry On, featured men with rebuilt limbs and confidence, leaving the less assuredly masculine shell
shock victims hidden from view. Men with certain kinds of injuries, then, if submitting to
(mandatory) rehabilitation, could resume their jobs and regain their masculine vigor.64
The rehabilitation program was quite successful but very expensive. And now, as Linker notes,
money was flowing to a vast medical infrastructure rather than into veterans’ pockets. Those pockets
had already been emptied, Stephen Ortiz writes, by the mandatory withdrawals from army paychecks
for wartime dependent care and insurance. Unsatisfied with military service as masculine fulfillment
or patriotic duty, particularly in the age of mass conscription, the veterans wanted compensation for
those lost wages. They won a 1924 measure promising them a “bonus” in the future. When in 1932
the Depression put men out of work and further challenged breadwinner masculinity, forty thousand
World War I veterans marched on Washington demanding early payment of the bonus. The army
drove them and the families they couldn’t support out of the capital.65
Meanwhile, the war cast tragic shadows across the lives of widows and mothers—the very figures,
as public culture had it, who had willingly sacrificed men even as they benefitted from their chivalric
protection. Erika Kuhlman’s Of Little Comfort (2012) tracks that story into the postwar years, as the
German and American states mobilized the image of the sacrificial mother in service of nationalistic
or militaristic goals. Some bereaved women abetted those goals by playing the role of “mothers in
need of male protection”; others challenged them by reminding people of the unmistakable costs of
war and articulating feelings of betrayal.66 In Bodies of War (2010), Lisa Budreau finds the same basic
duality present in official attempts to “transform grief into glory” through postwar commemorative
rituals. Most relevant is her coverage of the Gold Star Mothers pilgrimages. Between 1930 and 1933,
women traveled at the government’s expense to visit the graves of their sons in Europe. For the state,
Budreau argues, these pilgrimages served as spectacles of solidarity, nationalistic pride, collective
gratitude, and the American commitment to peace, but she also doubts they assuaged personal grief.
Mothers found themselves once again, like in 1917, mobilized as symbols.67
Despite the efforts and hopes of some Americans, then, World War I did not immediately
generate dramatic changes in gender roles. Women seeking careers still encountered exclusion or
ostracism, even as single women worked for wages as they had before. Visions of rugged martial
masculinity, though it’s not clear how much purchase they had among ordinary people in the first
place, survived more or less intact. Black efforts to earn masculine credibility by combat service

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failed to move most Americans or to translate into material improvements. But at the same time,
the desires that drove the war’s momentary loosening of convention never disappeared. Greater
transformations would come with later campaigns for political and social justice, later generations
of soldiers and families, later wartimes.

Conclusion
The scholarship on gender and World War I in the United States is growing richer all the time,
but it still offers opportunities for further research. We would benefit from a thorough study of
how gender politics informed the decisions to go to war in the United States government and
how they underwrote official and popular persuasive culture. Further work on the gendered
elements of wartime civil liberties abuses would be equally useful. It would be illuminating as well
to learn more about whether or how the war affected ideas about gender roles among ordinary
people from different classes, regions, races, and ethnicities, to augment some of the excellent
work already done on that subject.
Historians have produced detailed studies of stateside moral training for the doughboy, but we
could use more in-depth inquiries into his sexual attitudes and behavior in Europe. The
homoerotic undertones of military life, in particular, are ripe for further investigation in the
World War I context. More broadly, we have an underdeveloped comprehension of how the
American soldiers viewed their masculinity and the ways military experience affected it, despite
an abundance of available sources ready to help scholars address that issue. Finally, looking more
thoroughly at the legacies of the military sex education campaign, and of the doughboy’s sexual
experience in Europe, would be beneficial for the study of attitudes toward sexuality into the later
twentieth century.
Much of the history of war and gender in Great War America, and much of what scholars still
need to develop, is revealed by a single poster from that era. It reveals almost every important
element of the national experience with gender—provided we notice what’s present and absent,
intended and ironic, and read it with the benefit of hindsight. It is Howard Chandler Christy’s
painting for a 1917 recruiting drive (see Figure 5.3).
The image suggests unequivocally that military service is only for men. Those who enlist will
prove their masculinity; those who don’t will join women on the sidelines. Fighting men are
obligated to protect women but also entitled to possess them. The woman’s expression, posture,
and words contain hints of sexual invitation, though they also communicate warnings. What will
this woman think if you don’t enlist?
What’s missing is also instructive. In the poster’s telling, military service and the war’s
implications are wholly white affairs. It says nothing of the black enlistee’s or draftee’s desire to
“be a man and do it” and gain masculine martial citizenship by doing so—and nothing of how
those promises would be broken in a wave of postwar lynchings and race riots. The picture also
imagines sexual gratification as the doughboy’s prerogative—reflecting very real impulses in
the camps and in Europe—but is silent on the massive official efforts to subdue just such
activity. And though the militarization of masculinity may have animated recruitment cam-
paigns, it failed to move millions of men who likely never measured their manly virtue by such
standards. Many felt no particular need to enlist and many others didn’t have to because they
could “be a man” in other ways.
A final obscured element is most telling of all. The model for the poster, a woman named
Bernice Smith, did enlist in the navy, serving for three years and reaching the rank of chief
yeoman. The state mobilized both her image and her service, but in a microcosm of wartime
culture, it is only the image that’s visible here.

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Figure 5.3 Poster showing a young woman in a Navy uniform.
Source: Poster by Howard Chandler Christy. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-40824.
 Gender and the Great War

Notes
1 A small sampling of works that highlight the gendered elements of these patterns includes Nancy Cott,
Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Roger
Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2004); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics
Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at
Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in
America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 ed.); Michael McGerr, A Fierce
Discontent: The Rise and the Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003); Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
2 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25.
3 On German crimes see Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New
York: New York University Press, 2004); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A
History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Ruth Harris, “‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape,
Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War,” Past and Present 141 (Nov. 1993): 170–206.
4 These arguments are found in the Congressional Record, and I examine them in depth in the forth-
coming Love and Death in the Great War.
5 See Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2008), 33; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004 ed.), 20–30; Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in
Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 140; David
Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 239.
6 The political scientist Aaron Belkin connects masculinity and militarism in the twentieth century but
with very little coverage of World War I. See Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the
Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
7 See Celia Malone Kingsbury, For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (London:
Longman, 2002), 10–19; Pearl James, “Images of Femininity in American World War I Posters,” in
Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009), 273–311; Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to
Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46–86; Christina Gier, “Gender, Politics, and the
Fighting Soldier’s Song in America during World War I,” Music and Politics 2 (Winter 2008): 1–20.
8 See Kennedy, Over Here, 55; Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American
Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 136–51; Ronald Schaffer, America in the
Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6–12.
9 For war’s regenerative benefits—many intricately related to gender—see, among many others,
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering:
Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War:
The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a
Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Adams, Great
Adventure. On family and gender as key mobilizing symbols in wartime, see Robert B. Westbrook,
Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2010
ed.); Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
10 Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Susan Zeiger, “She Didn’t Raise Her Boy to Be a
Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the Culture of the First World War,” Feminist Studies 22

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(Spring 1996): 7–39. For the broader history of these ideas see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic:
Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980).
11 In addition to Kennedy’s book and Zeiger’s article in Feminist Studies, see Brewer, Why America
Fights, 67.
12 Stone, Perilous Times, 164–8.
13 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American
Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14 See Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 9.
15 See Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 31. Margot Canaday discusses scholarship on these issues in The
Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press), 60.
16 See John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York:
The Free Press, 1987), 185; Keene, Doughboys, 18.
17 Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the
First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
18 See Gerald E. Shenk, “Work or Fight!” Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kennedy, Over Here, 162; Chambers, To Raise an Army, 225–6. For the
overrepresentation of black draftees, see Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers:
Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 36.
19 Chambers writes that up to three million may have failed to register for conscription; Shenk says “most”
men avoided service in the communities he studied in New Jersey, California, Georgia, and Illinois;
Keith finds rampant antimilitarism among white and black people in the rural South. See Chambers, To
Raise an Army, 211; Shenk, “Work or Fight!,” 155; Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight.
20 See Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York:
Henry Holt, 2005), 47; Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers; Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of
Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2010); Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009); Mark Whalan, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 111–12.
21 For the intersection of gender and racial violence see, among others, Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark
End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from
Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore,
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
22 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 7.
23 See Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 52; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 32–9.
24 See Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998 ed.), 76–81; Kennedy, Over Here, 185–7; Keene,
Doughboys, 24–5, 40–1, 75; Zieger, America’s Great War, 89–91; Schaffer, America in the Great War, 100–3.
25 Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York
University Press, 1996); Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First
World War (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
26 See Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2001), 101–3.
27 Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–
1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 115–43.
28 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 29–34; Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped
the New Deal Era (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 14–15.
29 See Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after
the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 79–81.

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30 Quoted in Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935
(New York: The Free Press, 1994), 41. As discussed above, the other (albeit ultimately controversial)
expenditures on social welfare went to military veterans. See Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and
Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1992).
31 On this subject, besides works already mentioned, see Keene, Doughboys, 24–5, 75, 102, 129; Allan
M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 96–121; Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides
and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 11–27;
Peter S. Kindsvatter, American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 96; Gary Mead, The Doughboys: America and the First
World War (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), Chapter 10; Laurence Stallings, The Doughboys:
The Story of the AEF, 1917–1918 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 175, 179–82; Edward A.
Gutiérrez, Doughboys on the Great War: How American Soldiers Viewed their Military Experience
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 75.
32 See Coffman, War to End All Wars, 133. Nancy Bristow writes that disease rates among American
soldiers fell three hundred percent over the course of the war. See Bristow, Making Men Moral, 206.
33 See Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon, 108; Kennedy, Over Here, 187. For Keene’s differences with
Meigs, see her review of his book in Journal of Social History 32 (Spring 1999): 736–8.
34 See Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 19.
35 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013).
36 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 270–309.
37 Quoted in Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, 177.
38 For this paragraph see Keene, Doughboys, 102–3, 126–31; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 164–73;
Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 105–8.
39 See Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 11–70; Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon, 125–42.
40 See Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon, 110; Adams, Great Adventure, 113; Gutiérrez, Doughboys on the
Great War, 15, 19–21, 24, 38, 161–2, 166. Other works challenging the disillusionment narrative
include Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance,
1919–1941 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight:
Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); David
Kennedy, “The Myth of the Disillusioned American Soldier” in Myth America: An Historical
Anthology, eds. Patrick Gerster and Nicholas J. Cords (New York: Brandywine Press, 1997).
41 See Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 80–108. See also Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 107, 124–8;
Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, 116–17; Whalan, Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, 110.
42 Ebel, Faith in the Fight, 63, 83.
43 See Edward G. Lengel, To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, The Epic Battle That Ended the First
World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2008); John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the
Great War, 1917–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Stallings, Doughboys; Kindsvatter,
American Soldiers; Coffman, War to End All Wars; Mead, Doughboys; Keene, Doughboys, esp. 50–1.
44 For work of this sort outside of the American experience, see Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger,
and Birgitta Bader Zaar, eds., Gender and the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014);
Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006); Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Kathryn M. Hunter, “Australian and New Zealand
Fathers and Sons during the Great War: Expanding the Histories of Families at War,” First World War
Studies 4 (Oct. 2013): 185–200; Erika Quinn, “Love and Loss, Marriage and Mourning: World War
One in German Home Front Novels,” First World War Studies 5 (July 2014): 233–50; William G.
Rosenberg, “Reading Soldiers’ Moods: Russian Military Censorship and the Configuration of Feeling
in World War I,” American Historical Review 119 (June 2014): 714–40. Recent popular works include

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Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and their Forgotten World War (New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History
of the First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); David Laskin, The Long Way Home: An
American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010); James Carl
Nelson, The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
45 A partial list includes Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I
on Women Workers in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Zieger, America’s
Great War, 136–51; Lettie Gavin, American Women in World War I: They Also Served (Niwot:
University Press of Colorado, 1997); Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the
American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jensen, Mobilizing
Minerva; Grayzel, Women and the First World War.
46 See Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds.,
Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
47 See Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 83–103.
48 Ebel, Faith in the Fight, 129–37.
49 Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85–9, 95.
50 Quoted in Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 148.
51 See Greenwald, Women, War and Work; Kennedy, Over Here, 285. Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service,
182, also cites Greenwald, “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle
Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76 (June
1989): 118–49.
52 See Zieger, America’s Great War, 144.
53 See Kennedy, Over Here, 284–7; Zieger, America’s Great War, 143–51; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 153.
54 For example, see Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 163; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 174. For the same
pattern in Europe and analysis of the war’s impact on postwar gender roles see Susan R. Grayzel,
Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without
Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
55 Quoted in Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon, 120–1. The original source is François Thébaud, La femme
au temps de la guerre de 14 (Paris: Stock, 1986), 300.
56 Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 140–1; Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 168–70; Bristow, Making Men Moral,
179–214.
57 Kennedy, Over Here, 285.
58 See Jennifer D. Keene, World War I: The American Soldier Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2001), 120; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 174–5; Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 173–4.
59 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 130.
60 See Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 103–14; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 16–18; Zieger, America’s
Great War, 150. Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 171, credits the term “martial citizenship” to Patrick J.
Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veteran’s Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 2.
61 Wilson quote and Zieger comment in America’s Great War, 150.
62 See Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 166–7.
63 Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 104.
64 See Linker, War’s Waste, 6, 9, 76–7, 130. I take up the public image of disability and masculinity in
later decades in my book The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the
Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
65 Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill, 1–28.
66 Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort, 6.
67 Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933
(New York: New York University Press, 2010), 2.

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 6
“THE WOMEN BEHIND THE MEN
BEHIND THE GUN”
Gendered Identities and Militarization in the
Second World War
Sarah Parry Myers
st. francis university

Fluctuating gendered identity construction and the militarization of the body politic mark much
of the historiography of World War II. Increasing types of work available to women and
minorities meant more women entered the workforce than ever before and disrupted concep-
tions of traditional male work. A more intense disturbance resulted as women officially joined the
military for the first time in American history. While women served in the military in previous
U.S. wars, most had done so as civilians.1 Adjusting to this ever-changing climate, the military
and government regulated the sexuality of its citizens abroad, and the media flooded the public
with propaganda about women’s work being domestic, feminine, and temporary. Known as a
war with tremendous public support, American citizens’ involvement in the war effort came at a
tremendous social and political cost.
Definitions of citizenship remained gendered and racialized during the war, and the ideal
citizen soldier in the public’s mind was of a white man who served overseas, presumably in
combat. Historian Leisa D. Meyer argues that the U.S. government and military excluded African
Americans from combat and resisted women’s inclusion in the military due to “historical
constructions of the military as a bastion of white male power.”2 Women and African
American men faced stereotypes about their abilities to perform within the U.S. military, and
both failed to receive the benefits of full citizenship at the end of the war, despite their service.3
Ultimately, as the literature here suggests, women’s and minorities’ wartime efforts were
largely emphasized as temporary support for the important duty of combat overseas. The nation
justified gender and racial disruptions as necessary in a time of national crisis. As a result, an image
of the U.S. military as white and male continued. As a wartime propaganda film declared, “Our
enemies must be made to feel the mighty power of women; the women [and often minorities]
behind the men, behind the gun.”4

Laying the Foundation: Background of the Field of Gender and World War II
Studies of American women and gender in World War II largely emerged during the last few
decades of the twentieth century. The field of American women’s history is a relatively new field
that developed out of the 1960s and 1970s women’s rights movement. Gender studies followed,

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responding to Joan Scott’s seminal 1986 argument that gender should be a category of analysis,
alongside race and class.5 The incorporation of gender and women’s history into U.S. military
history began in the 1980s, part of the “new military history” that includes studies of war and
society. In 2007, historian Robert Citino argued for an end to the differentiation between “new”
and “old” military history since recent studies have incorporated masculinity, memory, and
culture.6 However, some continue to refer to the field as new military history, in contrast to
studies that privilege operational histories and analysis of leadership, strategy, and tactics.
Early debates in these fields focused on the long-term impact of the war on women and gender
roles. A seminal work in the field, historian William Chafe’s The American Woman: Her Changing
Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 argues that World War II was a “watershed”
moment for women, as they assumed new and expanding roles in the workforce.7 Since Chafe’s
argument in 1974, historians of World War II have reconsidered this watershed thesis. In
Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945, Leila Rupp disagrees
with his interpretation and argues that women’s lives reflected continuity more than change.
Propaganda emphasized the value of self-sacrifice and the temporary nature of wartime work,
which prevented any permanent changes in women’s lives.8 In her book on wartime changes in
three major U.S. cities, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during
World War II, Karen Anderson ultimately concludes that the war “did not signal any radical
revision of conventional ideas regarding women’s proper social and economic roles.”9 D’Ann
Campbell’s Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era also countered Chafe, citing
that women transitioned back, often willingly, to traditional roles after the war. Furthermore,
women were “at war” with their country, since the war disrupted their lives at home in the
domestic sphere.10
Later historians focus on how women’s work during the war led to an increased political
consciousness. Susan Hartmann’s The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s and
Sherna Berger Gluck’s Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, The War and Social Change built on
Chafe’s argument to explain how the women gained an increased sense of confidence through
their new wartime roles, which laid the “preconditions” for the women’s rights movement of the
1970s.11 Oral history interviews with female workers in factories, as well as the automobile and
electrical industries, support these arguments, as women explained that they wanted to keep their
jobs in the postwar period, although male employers forced them out of the fields. Many of the
jobs they held during the war paid more than traditionally female careers, especially for minority
women whose job options were even more restricted than those for white women.12
As Hartmann and Gluck furthered Chafe’s watershed argument, Joan Scott argued for a
historiographical shift away from his thesis, which she saw as “ultimately unresolvable.” Scott
hoped historians would transition from a discussion of the impact of the war on women to an
analysis of “the processes of politics, connections about economic policy and the meanings of
social experience, [and] cultural representation of gender,” while answering questions about
representations of sexual difference.13 Works published in the decades since have taken the
historiography in these and increasingly new directions.

Wartime Work
Women performed a myriad of new civilian and military roles during World War II, although the
now infamous image of Rosie the Riveter symbolizes American women’s work in popular
memory.14 It was through new forms of employment that Americans directly confronted shifting
gender roles and the militarization of men’s and women’s lives.

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 Gender Identities in the Second World War

Figure 6.1 The central message in this 1943 propaganda poster reflects the common theme of women
serving in domestic, sacrificial roles on the home front to support combat troops overseas.
Source: Valentino Sarra, 1943. Courtesy of World War II Poster Collection at Northwestern
University Library.

Women working in nontraditional fields in the civilian sector encountered resistance, as men
often established a sexual division of labor within workplaces in order to identify certain
previously male jobs as female.15 Ruth Milkman’s Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job
Segregation by Sex during World War II notes that women who worked in the automobile and
electrical industries faced gendered discrimination from fellow male workers and male employers.
Male workers often resented women workers because they threatened traditional male notions
about work that affirmed their masculinity. Male employers, who had never hired female
employees before, struggled with how to manage women and despised what they saw as a

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disruption to the industry and flow of the work day.16 Women were forced out of these positions
in the postwar period under the guise of hiring veterans returning from overseas. In the process,
employers restored the traditional gendered role of men as breadwinners, relegating the majority
of women to jobs in the lower-paying pink collar fields of education, communications, and
healthcare.
Although only for the duration of the war, new types of work offered increasing opportu-
nities, especially for minority women. And, more so than white women, Mexican American and
African American women found opportunities for political activism during the war. For Mexican
American women, the war provided a newfound independence as male supervision lessened with
men serving overseas. Elizabeth R. Escobedo’s From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican
American Women on the World War II Home Front illuminates how Mexican American women
negotiated family relationships as they worked outside the home, despite community or family
resistance. In addition, women became political actors as they donned female versions of the male
zoot suit in order to challenge their second class citizenship in American society, as well as
traditional ideals of Mexican femininity.17 Similarly, African American women “found an
empowered voice during the war,” according to Maureen Honey in Bitter Fruit: African
American Women in World War II. In this anthology of African American literature, Honey offers
examples of women who garnered a political voice through their writings and women who were
able to escape jobs as domestic servants to enter new fields, including factory work and the
military.18
In order to reassure the American public about the upheaval of gender roles, government
propaganda campaigns portrayed women’s work as temporary, domestic, and feminine. Maureen
Honey illuminates these themes in her discussion of two leading magazines, True Story and the
Saturday Evening Post. In Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War
II, she reveals that these magazines offered fictional stories with plot lines that aligned with the
U.S. government’s propaganda campaigns.19 They portrayed women who worked for patriotic
and self-sacrificial reasons, then returned home when they were no longer needed to work. Thus,
the government prompted women to remember that their sacrifices were for the good of the
nation state, rather than self. This discouraged women’s career aspirations, allowing men to take
their jobs. Propaganda posters portrayed women’s wartime work in these same ways, as evi-
denced in the work of Ruth Milkman and Susan Hartmann.20 Posters showed women workers
with makeup, lipstick, and neatly styled hair surrounded by patriotic images or color schemes of
red, white, and blue. Slogans on these posters prompted women to regard the work they
performed as temporary. In order to explain to the public why women were now able to perform
these nontraditional roles, propaganda images and descriptions compared factory work with
domestic chores. As Milkman describes, one advertisement explained that operating a small drill
press was the same as squeezing orange juice or running egg beaters.21 In order to reconcile
women’s social and economic mobility acquired through their wartime work, Americans found
“solace in managing gender and sex along traditional lines” as evidenced in Melissa McEuen’s
analysis of photography, propaganda posters, and advertisements in Making War, Making Women:
Femininity and Duty on the Home Front, 1941–1945. As her title suggests, the media sought to
“make women” on the home front to help with war effort abroad.22 Government and media
sources perpetuated messages that winning the war required women’s support, wartime work,
and “agreeable” attitudes, which would bolster morale.23
Women’s roles in the military similarly elicited gendered arguments and fears about the extent
of change brought by the war, even though the majority of women served in traditionally
feminine, albeit militarized, roles, including those of file clerks, switchboard operators, and
executive secretaries. Military authorities described the use of female units as an act of desperation

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to free men for combat. Congressional legislation militarized each women’s unit with the
exception of the women pilots in the Army Air Force (AAF). Militarization provided women
with military status and benefits, including medical care, insurance, and military funerals. Female
pilots in the AAF remained civilians and did not have veteran’s status in the postwar period
despite the fact that the AAF organized their unit with the intention of militarization.
Even in traditional roles, women’s wartime experiences often challenged contemporary notions
of proper wartime roles for women. Nurse and author Elizabeth Norman sheds light on a
previously understudied group of women that complicates the history of women and war in We
Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese.24 Although the
work of nursing was considered traditionally feminine and unthreatening in the media, Norman
illuminates how a largely overlooked group of women nurses performed in ways that deviated from
societal conventions. After Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines at President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s instruction and headed to Australia, the Japanese occupied the Philippines and held
women nurses as POWs. Norman argues that men often call women “angels” in wartime to create
an image of the women as sacrificial, caring, and feminine, like the images in Maureen Honey’s
propaganda.25 That portrayal emphasizes men’s role as protectors of women but was contrary to the
actual experience of these women who survived as POWs for three years.
A recent study that builds on this idea of women who circumvented male protection but also
struggled for survival is Theresa Kaminski’s Angels of the Underground: The American Women who
Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II. Kaminski uncovers the story of four
American women who participated in the resistance movement in the Philippines during
Japanese occupation. Utilizing FBI records, memoirs, and archival sources, Kaminski offers a
complicated picture of a largely unknown aspect of women’s wartime efforts. These women
smuggled food, supplies, and information to POWs, and the Japanese captured and possibly
tortured some of them. Men in both Norman and Kaminski’s studies referred to these women as
“angels,” a term that is fraught with gendered implications. Norman argues the word is “deni-
grating” to women, as it is utilized “to remind women to sacrifice, to work long hours for low pay
and not complain … to push them to be perfect.” Utilization of this term perpetuates and projects
male visions of the idealized nurse and women.26
Women’s introduction into new military roles disrupted American public opinion and
military men’s attitudes on a large scale. Analyzing oral histories, archival records, and media
coverage of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), historian Leisa D. Meyer’s Creating GI Jane:
Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II discusses the American public’s
perceived “proper” roles of men and women.27 The formation of the WAC generated con-
troversy about definitions of masculinity and femininity, as the public feared the sexuality of
female soldiers and the disruption of “normal” gender and family roles. As a result, the WAC
faced severe slander campaigns which spread throughout the military and American public, most
of which focused on the women’s sexuality. Contradictory, falsified reports suggested the WACs
were prostitutes for military men or that the women became lesbians after enlistment. According
to Ann Elizabeth Pfau in Miss Yourlovin’: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II, an
Army investigation discovered that this slander came from men within its own ranks. These male
soldiers feared their own family members or love interests would join the military if the Army
opened enlistment to women. In their minds, these women should be waiting for them on the
home front instead. Men also feared being drafted into combat once WACs filled noncombat
assignments. This fear complicates much of the historical narrative and popular memory of
military men. Contrary to the American public’s expectation of a willing fighting force deter-
mined to confront the enemy, there were men who preferred to serve on the home front and
away from combat roles.28

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To counter this slander, the Army and other military branches portrayed their female units as
feminine, chaste, white, and middle-class. Furthermore, the Coast Guard, Navy, Army Air
Force, and Marines were hesitant to admit African American women for fear of similar slander
campaigns due to stereotyped ideas about female sexual respectability.29 Just as they viewed
African American men, a segment of the American public considered black women to be more
promiscuous. The WAC was the only branch to initially include African American women—
though on a segregated basis—while Japanese-American women were admitted later in the war.
The Coast Guard (SPARS) and Navy (WAVES) also enlisted African American women while
the Army Air Force (WASP) and the Marines prohibited them for the duration. In Serving Our
Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II and To Serve My Country, to Serve
My Race: The Story of the Only African-American WACS Stationed Overseas During World War II,
Brenda Moore illuminates how these women sought to advance closer to full citizenship and to
prove their loyalty to the U.S. through their military service.30 They desired equality without
discrimination and freedom from fear of racial violence and antagonism.
A recent study, Michaela Hampf’s Release a Man for Combat: The Women’s Army Corps during
World War II, supports Meyer’s arguments about the Army’s construction of the WAC as chaste,
heterosexual, and feminine in the media. She furthers our understanding of the WAC as she
examines the construction of the woman/soldier, including changing understandings of gender
identity.31 As she explains: “Donning the uniform often proved to be a liberating experience for
many women. Hence we can also observe the formation of new identities, as women as social
actors assumed and embodied newly available subject positions of the female soldier.”32 Her
analysis of identity construction pushes the field of gender and World War II further as she argues
that women’s incorporation into the military as soldiers meant military masculinity had to be
redefined through the sexual division of labor within the Army. This redefinition intentionally
excluded the WACs, and even went so far as to assert that true military service was combat, which
minimized the roles of women and men who served on the home front, as well as those of men in
non-combat roles overseas.33
Although women did not receive complete citizenship through their military service, all
branches but the Army Air Force granted women militarization, which brought them ever closer.
Molly Merryman’s Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of
World War II examines the failure of the 1944 bill that would have militarized the women pilots
into the then-AAF. As the bill was being discussed in Congress, the Civil Aeronautics
Administration War Training Service (CAA-WTS) programs were being shut down and male
instructors became eligible for the draft. These instructors started a media campaign alleging that
the WASPs were taking jobs from male pilots. Congressmen chose to listen to these false
accusations and inaccurate statistics, rather than the Congressional testimony of Secretary of
War Henry Stimson and AAF General Henry Arnold who supported the bill. Arnold and
Stimson explained that the WASPs did not take jobs away from qualified male pilots and
emphasized the need for the WASPs to continue in their current assignments.34 Merryman
argues that the bill failed because of gendered fears surrounding women’s military participation,
particularly since the WASPs were performing highly skilled work in male-dominated spaces. As
she explains, the WASPs were “going beyond culturally constructed normative boundaries of
how women were expected to behave, and who were serving in what were constructed to be
male roles.”35 After failing to receive militarization, the AAF disbanded the WASP program.36
There were also gendered and political implications for conscientious objectors during the
war. The public perceived these women as eschewing their traditionally prescribed gender roles,
since the U.S. government asserted women’s duty as supporting the war effort. Rachel Waltner
Goossen examines the women who were pacifists due to their religious beliefs in Women Against

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Figure 6.2 This feminine, patriotically attired factory worker evokes the U.S. government’s message
that women’s work was temporary and only for the duration of the war.
Source; United States Office of War Information, 1943. Courtesy of World War II Poster
Collection at Northwestern University Library.
 Sarah Parry Myers

the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941–1947.37 When
they entered Civilian Public Service, these women countered societal expectations that they
support the war through their domestic or public work. These female objectors were empowered
as they developed “self-assurance and skills that would later carry them into the workplace” in the
postwar period, since many worked in Foreign Service or other international peacekeeping
efforts. Yet the majority of them did not view their activism as a step toward gender equality,
according to Goossen, due in part to the patriarchal nature of their family and church
communities.38

Man Up: Defining and Contesting Wartime Masculinities

Military service as the ideal form of masculinity was also visible in the American media and
pervasive enough that working-class men confronted it in American society. Men who served
overseas or in combat fulfilled a quintessential military masculinity that excluded servicemen on
the home front, civilian workers, and conscientious objectors. The media’s interpretation of this
idealized masculinity focused on strong, courageous, white bodies. The presence of African
American men, who served in increasingly expanding roles in order to draw closer to full
citizenship, threatened this image. Military service has long been linked to citizenship and has
gendered implications. As Steve Estes explains in I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights
Movement, “Citizen-soldiers must protect and defend the state in return for the right to have a say
in how the state is run.”39 However, gender and racial segregation in the military barred women
and African Americans from rights as full citizens during the 1940s. Furthermore, Estes argues,
“the relegation of women and minority men to noncombat roles excluded them from this band of
brothers, for this was where manhood and citizenship were defined.”40
Utilizing images from sources such as propaganda, comics, and advertisements, Christina Jarvis
in The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II concludes that images of the
American soldier represented an idealized version of American masculinity. The male body was
militarized during the war as the government literally invested in bodies through the Selective
Service and physicals performed prior to military service. Even illustrations of Uncle Sam
transitioned from a tall, thin figure to a stronger, more broad-shouldered one in order to reinforce
“muscular masculinity.”41 This “rhetoric of muscles” symbolized national strength and revealed
the male body as “a privileged site around which debates about the health of the nation
unfolded.”42 However, wounded bodies created alternative masculinities as they lay in “opposi-
tion to dominant cultural representations” of muscular masculinity. Popular culture tried to
reconcile these images through emphases on men overcoming their injuries or utilizing tech-
nologies in rehabilitation.43 Overall, historians of World War II need to explore definitions of
white masculinity on the home front and overseas, including how men defined their masculinity
and sense of self in the context of propaganda.
Working-class men recognized this emphasis on military masculinity and questioned its
position as the most ideal form of masculinity. Matthew Basso’s Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and
Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front sheds light on civilian male workers, an understudied
group in the historiography of gender and war. Basso surveys the ways that civilian copper
workers in Montana exhibited a white, “working-class masculine ideology.”44 These men sought
to prohibit women and minorities from working in the mines because of their own “racial and
gender prerogatives.”45 They defined masculinity through physical labor and strength, as well as
“a perceived superiority to and eminence over women and children.”46 Copper workers directly
countered military masculinity, which they sensed was elevated over and a “threat” to their own
working-class masculinity.47

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Despite the media’s image of ideal, white military forces, African Americans served in the
military during World War II, often as a means to achieve full citizenship. Initially, the military
relegated African American men to labor units and considered them “unfit” for combat.48 Yet,
the infamous story of Navy Messman Dorie Miller who fired an anti-aircraft gun at the Japanese
during the attack at Pearl Harbor illuminates the permeability of the line between combat and
non-combat roles.49 Under pressure from civil rights organizations, the AAF allowed African
American men to become military pilots for the first time, although they had to fight for the right
to prove their abilities in combat. Described as experimental, the Tuskegee Airmen fought against
racist stereotypes and asserted their place alongside white men as protectors of families and
ultimately the home front.50 Fighting in combat brought them closer to the equality that they
wanted within both the military and American society as it laid the foundations for the civil rights
movement in the postwar period.51
The Double V Campaign was a part of this larger movement towards full citizenship, as
African Americans pressed for victory abroad for the Allies and for full equality and citizenship at
home.52 In light of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech and the racism in
Nazi ideology, many African Americans wanted to hold Roosevelt accountable to his call for
complete freedom. Ronald Takaki’s Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War
II argues that they hoped for a “multicultural democracy” in the postwar United States.53 African
Americans found their political voice in the Double V Campaign, while the Office of War
Information censored news coverage of African American military men, particularly those in
combat. As Kimberley Phillips explains in War! What Is It Good For?, the purpose of the campaign
was “not only to expose the contradictions of the Jim Crow military but to make visible their
competency as soldiers.” These men fought for “equal access to the draft and the battlefield.”54
This effort enabled them to lay claim to their masculinity alongside white men.
Male conscientious objectors asserted their own masculinity since the public questioned
anything other than combat or military enlistment as heroic service to the nation. In Smoke
Jumping on the Western Fire Line: Conscientious Objectors during World War II, Mark Matthews tells
the story of religious, male conscientious objectors who volunteered to fight forest fires in
western states. The American public labeled these men with derogatory phrases such as cowards,
draft dodgers, or “yellowbellies.”55 With the use of these terms, the public ignored the fact that
this work was incredibly dangerous and necessary, carving out a definition of masculinity that
conflated heroism with military service. However, by volunteering for this hypermasculine form
of work, the smoke jumpers asserted their own strength and courage.56 While this study offers
excellent analysis, studies of antiwar activities during World War II offer a new avenue for
researchers.
American society and the media reinforced military service as a masculine rite of passage and
ideal form of masculinity, which for African American servicemen equated to fuller citizenship
and equality. Yet, this version of masculinity ignored and discounted the contributions of civilian
men on the home front. These men often felt the need to prove their physical strength, prowess,
and courage in order to counter societal stigmas.

Regulating Sexuality: Maintaining Troop Morale and Assuaging Public Fears

Alongside restrictions to combat and military service placed on African Americans and women,
U.S. government and military officials attempted to control and moderate Americans’ sexuality
during the war. Through this supervision they perpetuated a public image of wholesome
heterosexuality, yet military policy assumed that men would be sexually active while it required
women to refrain from sexual relations. In this regulation, military authorities hoped to minimize

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disruptions to the military’s structure, which included notions of men as warriors with certain
needs who protected virtuous women on the home front, all the while maintaining supportive
public opinion.
The U.S. military actively pursued and interrogated men and women suspected of homo-
sexuality, as shown in Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: Gay Men and Women in World
War II. These interrogations emerged out of the same fears military leaders held about African
Americans and women, that they would make “poor combat soldiers,” “threaten morale and
discipline,” and make the military a place of “radical social experimentation rather than a
strong fighting force.”57 Based on extensive oral history interviews, personal papers, and
declassified government sources, Bérubé argues that gay men and women fought not only for
their country but also for their “survival as homosexuals within the military.”58 There were
also fears in the government, military, and American public that women would be susceptible
to homosexuality based on their military experiences, as outlined in Meyer’s Creating GI Jane.
Women in military uniform also inadvertently sparked accusations that they were sexually
promiscuous or prostitutes for military men. Psychiatric screening of male and female enlistees
attempted to keep homosexuals out of the military, and officials conducted investigations of
soldiers accused of homosexuality and then discharged those found guilty.59 The motivation
behind these investigations lay in stereotyped assumptions that homosexual servicemen or
women would soften or weaken the U.S. military and reduce its effectiveness as a fighting
force.60
High-ranking U.S. military officers and government officials expressed concern about the
spread of venereal disease among troops, often blaming women rather than their male sexual
partners for carrying disease. While government and military officials, as well as medical profes-
sionals, viewed sex as a need for men to maintain their masculinity, the military viewed women’s
sexuality as both dangerous and necessary to the war effort. In her analysis of print culture in
Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II,
Marilyn Hegarty argues that the government’s desire to restrict prostitution became a “war
against women who transgressed [sexual] boundaries.”61 Propaganda posters posited women as
carriers of VD and sources of temptation, marking them as dangerous to military men.
Furthermore, military and local police often released servicemen from charges while arresting
their sexual partners, revealing that these authorities placed the blame solely on women. Overall,
the military sent dissonant messages to men, simultaneously advocating “sexual reserve” while
providing prophylaxis instruction and issuing condoms.62 The official policy toward WACs, on
the other hand, was to encourage sexual abstinence.63 Military officials also hoped that women
working in USO clubs would prevent men from seeking other forms of female companionship,
according to Meghan K. Winchell’s Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses
During World War II.64 This contradiction perpetuated “the stereotype of the virile, aggressive,
military male.”65 The women recruited were primarily white and middle class, since the USO
considered them to be “sexually respectable,” as opposed to African American women, whose
sexuality was labeled “dangerous and uncontrollable.”66 In The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in
World War II Hawaii, Beth Bailey and David Farber support this interpretation of sex as an
inherent need of military men, as their study of World War II Hawaii finds that military
authorities regarded the sex trade as “natural” for male morale.67 Mary Louise Roberts’s What
Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, 1944–1946 also examines how
sexual relations played out in France while under American military occupation. These acts and
relationships became a source of contention between the French government and the American
military, which failed to regulate American soldiers who raped, sexually assaulted, and engaged in
unregulated prostitution with French women. American military authorities were concerned that

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the media would report these acts on the home front, so they issued limited regulations, although
they often proved difficult to enforce. At times, U.S. military officials blamed African American
soldiers when French women launched rape accusations, due to stereotypes about the masculinity
of African American men.68 These racist beliefs that African American men were more virile or
sexually aggressive had existed since the origins of slavery in North America and continued
throughout American history, particularly in the history of lynching in the decades prior to
World War II.69 In addition, the U.S. military stereotyped African American men as more
promiscuous due to high rates of venereal disease among servicemen.70 Ultimately, the military
and American society posited African American men, not white males, as sexual aggressors.
While the military viewed sexual relations as boosting male morale overseas, there were also
societal expectations of women on the home front to improve men’s resolve via their physical
appearance. The American media sexualized women’s bodies and viewed them as sources of
political obligation, especially with the emergence of the pin-up. Robert Westbrook asserts that
pin-ups, like the famous photograph of Betty Grable requested by over five million men overseas,
were sources of political obligation for men, serving as motivations for fighting.71 Building on
Westbrook, McEuen’s Making War, Making Women argues that femininity was a sign of women’s
patriotism, as women were encouraged to “make themselves into something worth fighting
for.”72 Beauty standards emphasized femininity by focusing on everything from hygiene and nail
care to the fashion industry’s dresses. As Pfau outlines in Miss Yourlovin’, women served as sites of
“obligation and desire” and “played key roles in the emotional lives of American servicemen.”
Male soldiers wanted to fulfill their political obligation of fighting for the state while women
remained on the home front to await their return.73
While some women might have felt victimized by this emphasis on physical appearance, art
historian Maria Elena Buszek’s Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture analyzes the
ways that women utilized pin-ups for their own empowerment. She argues that the pin-up
represented a “fleeting moment in which … women’s freedom to exercise their ability, sexuality,
and potential was encouraged by society at large.”74 Overall, this focus on women’s bodies is
evidence of the militarization of their sexuality.
Pin-ups and images were compelling and influential, as Donna B. Knaff relates in Beyond Rosie
the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art. Knaff examines the power of
American print culture to illuminate the contradictions and complexities in messages about
women’s sexuality and work during World War II. The media simultaneously empowered and
repressed women, as their wartime work was described as equivalent to men’s, yet did not offer
women “equal empowerment.”75 Utilizing Judith Halberstam’s theory of female masculinity,
which explains masculinity as its own entity in the absence of men, Knaff argues that female
masculinity offers new ways of thinking about women’s roles and definitions of the ideal
woman.76 These wartime images of female masculinity both illuminated and reassured
American anxieties. Building on Leisa Meyer’s discussion of fears about military women as
sexually deviant, Knaff discusses how female masculinity was integral to women’s wartime lives
and led to fears about the gender order. By the end of the war, women gave up or were forced to
give up their masculinity in order to appease male workers and returning veterans.
As the military and government regulated Americans’ sexuality, they sought to project a
wholesome, heterosexual image of the military that would appease the public. At the same time,
media sources encouraged women to construct an appearance and demeanor that would boost
troop morale and serve as a motivation for soldiers. With the goal of improving the effectiveness
of its fighting forces, military authorities prohibited homosexuals and warned servicemen of
promiscuous women, deemed carriers of venereal disease. Overall, these actions reveal contem-
porary constructions of sexuality and the body.

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Future of the Field

There are many directions of future study for the field of gender and World War II, particularly
in the areas of masculinity, trauma, and identity. There is a noticeable gap in the historiography
with regards to men who were not stationed overseas, whether civilian workers as in Matthew
Basso’s and Mark Matthews’s studies or military men stationed on the home front for the
duration of the war. More work is also needed on male nurses from World War II, which
Charissa J. Threat explores in Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps.77
Another avenue of further research could focus on the “sexual habits” of military men that
Mary Louise Roberts argues influenced diplomatic relations.78 The negative consequences of
the war on individual lives also warrants further study, including hidden histories of veterans
suffering from psychological trauma, which was not well understood in the postwar period, or
men who returned home with visible physical disabilities.79 Furthermore, an examination of
trauma within families who experienced loss, whether from military service or atrocities, is
needed. Together, these histories would provide a better understanding of the emotional cost
of the war. The negative effects of wartime military service, especially on the body and the
psyche, challenged traditional norms and influenced discourses on gender, especially
masculinity.
Historians also need to further analyze civilian gender identities, including the ways
Americans formed or embraced specific identities as they transitioned from civilian to military
life. This is evident in the experiences of the WASPs who assumed an identity as military pilots.
Furthermore, as my research shows, the war gendered flying as a male activity, and ultimately
led to women’s exclusion from flying at certain altitudes until the late 1960s.80 Studies of white
masculinity during the war, especially in men’s antiwar activities, home front work, and
military roles, are also available for exploration. In addition, there needs to be increased
conversation between historians of gender in World War II in other countries with those in
the United States, especially since many histories of the war are written in English. For
example, Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird argue that civilian home defense in
Britain challenged the ideal of men as protectors, and as a result, women’s role in the home
defense is forgotten in the popular memory, much as war has largely been remembered as male
in the United States.81 This gendered memory of war posits military women and civilians on
the home front as supportive to the male soldier whose service ultimately led to victory.82 Ideas
about gender often transcend state and national boundaries or borders, as evidenced by a study
of the modern girl in various countries.83 Also noticeably absent from the literature are book-
length, comprehensive studies of women in the Coast Guard (SPARS), women in the Navy
(Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service or WAVES), and female Marines.84
Together, these histories will capture the diversity of people’s experiences during World
War II, disrupting the myth of World War II as the “good war,” and will further analyses of
gender, citizenship, and sexuality.85

Notes
1 Most women who served in the military during World War I worked in nursing and clerical positions.
Although the navy enlisted women in clerical positions, navy and army nurses served as civilians and
only attained “relative rank” after the war. Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in
the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 14, 120–124; Susan Zeiger, In Uncle
Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999), 21–22.

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2 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 12.
3 For more on obligations of citizenship, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies:
Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
4 Danger! Women at Work. Directed by J.A. Yovin. Prelinger Archives. San Francisco, CA.
5 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no.
5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
6 Robert M. Citino, “Review Essay: Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” The
American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1070–90.
7 William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970
(Oxford University Press, 1974).
8 Rupp analyzes popular images of women in wartime propaganda. Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for
War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
9 Anderson focuses on women’s work in the defense industry in the cities of Baltimore, Seattle, and
Detroit. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during
World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 60.
10 D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984).
11 In essence, Hartmann argues, women’s experiences instilled a sense of consciousness that they and their
daughters channeled decades later. Gluck explains that women’s newfound awareness influenced their
daughters, some of whom became activists in the movement. Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and
Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 216; Sherna Berger
Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, The War and Social Change (New York: Meridian, 1987).
12 Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by
Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
13 Joan Scott, “Rewriting History,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, eds. Margaret
Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jensen, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 25.
14 Journalist Emily Yellin provides an overview of the various forms of women’s participation in the war
effort, including that of raising Victory Gardens, playing in the All American Girls Professional
Baseball League, and as journalists. Emily Yellin, Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at
the Front during World War II (New York: Free Press, 2004).
15 Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and
Propaganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
16 Milkman, Gender at Work, 32.
17 Elizabeth R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World
War II Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015).
18 Maureen Honey, Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1999), 33.
19 Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 42–44.
20 Milkman, Gender at Work; Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond.
21 Milkman, Gender at Work, 61.
22 Like Honey, Milkman, and Hartmann, McEuen illuminates how women were supposed to be
models of “patience, cheerfulness, and fidelity.” Melissa McEuen, Making War, Making Women:
Femininity and Duty on the Home Front, 1941–1945 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011),
quote on 5, 3–5, 9, and 106.
23 McEuen, Making War, Making Women, 178–179.
24 Until Norman’s book, the story of these nurses was largely absent from histories of World War II.
Based on interviews as well as published and unpublished material from the nurses and their families,
Norman discusses what it was like for these women to work in an almost exclusively male domain.
Elizabeth Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the
Japanese (New York: Pocket Books, 1999), 272.

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25 As Norman argues, it was “to remind women to sacrifice, to work long hours for low pay and not
complain. It is meant to idealize women, to push them to be perfect, because that is the kind of
woman, the kind of nurse men want.” Norman, We Band of Angels, 272.
26 Norman, We Band of Angels, 272; Theresa Kaminski, Angels of the Underground: The American Women
who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),
428.
27 Opponents saw the WAC as “destructive to masculine culture” because they interfered with male
bonding. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 2, 4.
28 Ann Elizabeth Pfau, Miss Yourlovin’: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008). http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pfau/.
29 Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 36.
30 Brenda Moore, Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Brenda Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race:
The Story of the Only African-American WACS Stationed Overseas During World War II (New York: New
York University Press, 1997).
31 Michaela Hampf, Release a Man for Combat: The Women’s Army Corps during World War II (Köln:
Böhlau Verlag Köln, 2010), 62, 281.
32 Hampf, Release a Man for Combat, 176.
33 Ibid., 7.
34 Sarah Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used’: The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War
II” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 2014).
35 Molly Merryman, Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of World
War II (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 175.
36 My own work takes Merryman’s argument further by examining other reasons for failed militariza-
tion including the dominant personality of WASP Director Jacqueline Cochran and the relationship
between the War Training Service and the Army Air Force. Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be
Used.’”
37 The women often came from Mennonite, Amish, Brethren, or Quaker backgrounds. Rachel
Waltner Goossen, Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American
Home Front, 1941–1947 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
38 Goossen, Women Against the Good War, 14, 92, 126–27.
39 Steve Estes, I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005), 13.
40 Ibid., 13.
41 Christina Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2004), 44.
42 Ibid., 44, 58.
43 Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 88, 118.
44 Matthew Basso, Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front
(University of Chicago Press, 2013), 6.
45 Ibid., 4.
46 Ibid., 7.
47 Ibid., 5.
48 Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?: Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War
II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 16, 22.
49 Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (New York: Little,
Brown, and Company, 2000).
50 Estes, I Am a Man!, 13, 31.
51 Ibid., 12.
52 Other minorities had motivations of full citizenship, including Japanese Americans, Native
Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Jewish Americans. Takaki, Double Victory.
53 Takaki, Double Victory, 7.

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54 Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 16.

55 Mark Matthews, Smoke Jumping on the Western Fire Line: Conscientious Objectors during World War II
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 51.
56 Ibid., 265.
57 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press,
1990), 2.
58 Ibid., 7.
59 Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 157–78.
60 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 176, 183.
61 Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during
World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 112.
62 Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 108; Meyer, GI Jane, 33.
63 Meyer, GI Jane, 109.
64 Meghan K. Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses During World War II
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Kara Dixon Vuic, forthcoming manuscript,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 87–88.
65 Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 108.
66 Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun, 137, 9–10.
67 Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 95–132.
68 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, 1944–
1946 (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
69 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 172; Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing
Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
70 Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 5.
71 Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington:
Smithsonian Books, 2004).
72 McEuen, Making War, Making Women, 2.
73 Pfau, Miss Yourlovin.
74 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006), 231.
75 Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 74.
76 Judith Halberstam ultimately argues that female masculinity is its own entity, and not an imitation of
male masculinity. Furthermore, studying masculinity does not require an analysis of men. Halberstam
explores various female masculinities including tomboys, female boxers, and lesbians who pass as men.
See Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter, 21.
77 Charissa J. Threat, Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2015).
78 Roberts, What Soldiers Do, 11.
79 There are no book-length analyses of World War II veterans with physical disabilities or psychological
injuries. For studies of veterans returning to civilian life for other U.S. wars including the Civil War,
World War I, and Vietnam, see James Marten, America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014); John M. Kinder, “Iconography of Injury: Encountering
the Wounded Soldier’s Body in American Poster Art and Photography of World War I,” in Picture
This!: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2010), 340–368; Jonathan Shay, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
(New York: Scribner Press, 2002).
80 Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used.’”
81 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defense: Men, Women and the Home
Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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82 The memory of war has often been gendered male, as evidenced in works such as Ann M. Little,
Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007); Sarah Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Alfred Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times
of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York: Vintage, 2004); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary
Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007).
83 Eve Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
84 The SPARs is a shortened version of the Coast Guard motto “Semper Paratus” and its translation
“Always Ready.” The women Marines did not have an acronym or equivalent.
85 For more on the myth of the greatest generation and the glamorization of World War II, see Michael
Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
and G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1995).

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 7
HOMOPHOBIA, HOUSEWIVES,
AND HYPER-MASCULINITY
Gender and American Policymaking
in the Nuclear Age
Matthew W. Dunne
housatonic community college

Against the backdrop of a lemon-yellow model kitchen, the focus of the Cold War temporarily
shifted from rockets to washing machines. It was July 24, 1959, and the American National
Exhibition had just opened in Sokolniki Park, Moscow. Over the next two months, nearly 2.7
million Soviets would tour the exhibition. As attendees sipped on free samples of Pepsi-Cola and
strolled through exhibits preaching the virtues of everything from the state of American nuclear
research to brownies, they were treated to a highly sanitized vision of American ingenuity and
consumer opulence. The United States Information Agency had agonized over every detail in
every exhibit for months, and American government officials had gone to great lengths to
showcase the United States in the most positive light possible. As several historians have pointed
out, however, government officials may have revealed more about American society than they
bargained for. Like so many elements of the early Cold War, the exhibit was informed by
American gender ideology.
The notorious “Kitchen Debate” (see Figure 7.1) between Vice President Richard Nixon and
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the opening night of the exhibition illustrates just how
long a shadow Americans’ attitudes about gender roles, family life, sexuality, and child-rearing
cast over the early Cold War. After escorting Khrushchev through several exhibits, Nixon
stopped at a model Betty Crocker kitchen, pointed to a dishwasher, and asserted, “This is the
kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like
to make life easier for women.” Through the aide of an interpreter, Khrushchev interrupted
Nixon and declared, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under
Communism.” Without missing a beat, Nixon shot back, “I think that this attitude towards
women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.”1
The debate laid bare the gendered assumptions of both American and Soviet society. Nixon’s
vision of the ideal American family was predicated on the assumption that behind every house-
wife was a male breadwinner who could provide her with the washing machines and vacuum
cleaners that would free her from the drudgery of housework and allow her to live an easier, more
fulfilling life as a housewife and consumer. But even in Nixon’s high-tech society, American
women were still firmly anchored to the private sphere of the home. After all, someone had to
run the dishwasher. In Communist society, housewives were at least theoretically obsolete, and

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Figure 7.1 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, center left, talks with U.S. Vice President Richard
Nixon during their famous “Kitchen Debate” at the United States exhibit at Moscow’s
Sokolniki Park, July 24, 1959. While touring the exhibit, both men kept a running debate on
the merits of their respective countries.
Source: Courtesy of AP Images, 590724023.

women were expected to work outside the home and had opportunities to pursue education and
career advancement, which Khrushchev alluded to when he disdainfully commented on the
“capitalistic attitude toward women.”2
The combative exchange underscored Nixon and Khrushchev’s distinct perspectives on the
gender dynamics of an ideal society, but they shared at least one thing in common – a casually
misogynistic attitude towards women, which they bonded over during the course of the day.
After Khrushchev noticed Nixon eyeing several young women modeling American bathing suits
and sportswear, he approvingly quipped, “You are for the girls, too.” Nixon attempted to change
the subject, alluding to a self-propelled vacuum cleaner and joking, “You don’t need a wife,”
which made Khrushchev chuckle. And at the end of the day, after awkwardly fumbling over a
toast, the two world leaders finally agreed to “drink to the ladies.”3 Despite their markedly
different opinions about the ideal home and the duties of male and female citizens, the two men
clearly shared a worldview where women were sex objects and subservient to men, a worldview
that millions of women in the Communist Bloc and the United States were already rebelling
against.
Back in the United States, the debate cemented Nixon’s reputation as a tough leader who was
not afraid of confrontation, an image he would work hard to cultivate throughout the 1960s and
early 1970s. Perhaps more significantly, the debate is emblematic of how gender could creep to
the forefront of the early Cold War at any given moment. Gender ideology was not always on
such public display during the era, but it was almost always present, informing the attitudes and
beliefs that helped shape domestic American society, political debate, and military policy, and

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influencing ordinary Americans’ perceptions and anxieties about national security and interna-
tional relations. This chapter emphasizes the ways in which gendered analysis has enriched and
broadened our understanding of the early Cold War, and focuses on how attitudes about
sexuality, gender roles, child-rearing, physical fitness, and family life informed, and were
informed by, U.S. military policy and political culture between 1947 and 1963.

The Cold War Home Front and the American Family

The early Cold War era is frequently remembered as a golden age in American family life. After
World War II, the baby boom had given rise to a new emphasis on the American family, which
was promoted in public policy and celebrated in popular culture. Traditionally, historians
examining this period treated the postwar American family and the Cold War as distinct
historical phenomena, but in the 1980s scholars began paying new attention to the relationship
between domestic American society and the broader social and cultural landscape of the Cold
War. Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era represents one
of the foundational works in this scholarship. Published in 1988, May began her study with a
simple question: “Why did postwar Americans turn to marriage and parenthood with such
enthusiasm and commitment?”4 Ultimately, May concluded that the climate of the Cold War
created anxieties and pressures that influenced Americans to embrace domesticity in an attempt
to seek safety and security in the nuclear age. As she argued, in Cold War America “the family
seemed to be the one place where people could control their destinies and perhaps even shape
the future.”5
Central to May’s argument was the notion of “domestic containment,” which paralleled the
nation’s containment of communism abroad. According to May, the Cold War consensus
contained sexuality in the home and the family, providing Americans with a safe outlet for
their potentially subversive impulses. Since the publication of Homeward Bound, several historians
have complicated and expanded on May’s research. May herself acknowledged the limits of her
dependence on the Kelly Longitudinal Study, a data set consisting of surveys of approximately six
hundred white middle-class men and women who raised their families during the early Cold War
era, which raises questions about the applicability of her research to minorities and working-class
Americans.6 Some historians raise the possibility that the links between domestic ideology and the
Cold War have been exaggerated, such as Jane Sherron De Hart, who inquires, “[W]ould
‘domestic containment’ have existed without the Cold War, perhaps by another name?”7
Several other scholars focus on components of American society that contradict May’s thesis.
For example, Joanne Meyerowitz notes, “While in many cases Cold War thought did indeed
reinforce traditional gender roles and the heterosexual marital norm, in other notable cases it also
seemed to subvert them.” Exploring the language of reform in particular, Meyerowitz concluded
that “Cold War foreign policy had no fixed association with gender and sexual norms but instead
had multiple and contradictory meanings.”8 And historians such as Jacqueline Castledine, Helen
Laville, Michelle Nickerson, and Bill Osgerby demonstrate that a significant number of women
and men in the early Cold War were not willing to be limited by domesticity or constrained by
societal pressures and life in the stereotypical American family.9
Domestic containment was a powerful ideal, not a reality. Historian Stephanie Coontz
summed this up succinctly when she wrote, “Contrary to popular opinion, ‘Leave It to
Beaver’ was not a documentary.”10 Nevertheless, May’s research remains influential because of
how it framed Cold War domestic politics. Her research emphasized that the traditional treat-
ment of diplomatic, military, and domestic American history as distinct historical phenomena was
not indicative of how real people actually lived. Americans didn’t compartmentalize their lives

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into distinct categories in the 1950s, so why should historians? As May asserted, her research
located “the family within the larger political culture, not outside it.”11
Since 1988, numerous historians have validated May’s approach by demonstrating the central
role of domesticity in military policy and international relations. For example, Donna Alvah
documents how service wives and children were utilized as “unofficial ambassadors” and became
important contributors to American soft power after the Department of Defense allowed the
families of servicemen stationed overseas to join them abroad in 1946.12 Several historians also
highlight how the private lives of American military personnel came under intense military and
foreign scrutiny during the early Cold War. Maria Höhn examines this phenomenon in postwar
West Germany, where the German Bundestag declared large regions of the southwest corner of
the state “moral disaster area[s]” because of the rise of “striptease parlors, prostitution, common-
law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy,” which they attributed to the buildup of
American troops.13 Back in the United States, Americans’ initial celebration of the marriages
between military personnel and foreign women also soured, as Susan Zeiger reveals in her
research on the history of war brides in the 20th century. When the nation was scrambling for
allies after World War II, there was widespread approval of the “white Allied war brides”
American GIs brought home from Europe. But by the early Cold War, this attitude was replaced
with anxiety and official attempts to police interracial relationships, especially “as the faces of
brides came more fully to reflect the global reach of U.S. foreign policy.”14 These facets of the
early Cold War highlight how the military attempted to project a specific image of the American
family abroad, and how the military family and the interpersonal relationships of military
personnel became important sites of allegiance and contestation between the United States and
its allies during the postwar era.
Perhaps no issue characterizes the complex exchange between military policy and domestic
gender ideology during the early Cold War as dramatically as the military and public’s reaction to
American soldiers during the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. Although American soldiers
served admirably well in Korea by any objective standard, in the United States, anxieties about
the Cold War found expression in public doubts about the manhood of American servicemen.
The public and official reaction to American POWs charged with showing cowardice in the face
of the enemy marked the height of American panic over the Korean War. The extent of the
POWs’ suffering has been well documented.15 American POWs faced indoctrination, physical
and psychological torture, and extremely harsh conditions in prison camps, especially in the first
two years of the war. Nevertheless, the media and military officials promoted a critical inter-
pretation of American soldiers during and immediately after the war, which influenced the
popular perception of Korea and the men who fought there.
By the middle of the 1950s, attempts to pinpoint the reason a small number of American
POWs capitulated under physical and psychological duress increasingly focused on the nation’s
mothers, who had supposedly produced a new generation of “soft” men.16 In his research on the
tense homecoming of American POWs after the Korean War, Charles S. Young highlights how
mothers became the central targets of critics whose “central theme was effeminacy.”17 These
attitudes were reflected in popular media for the better part of a decade, culminating in the pièce
de résistance of Cold War mother-hate, the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962).18 Despite the
fact that they never set foot in Communist prison camps, American mothers were routinely
blamed for what occurred in them, evidence that anxieties about excessive femininity and gender
norms were central to the nation’s interpretation of the Korean War.
As Charles S. Young and I argue in our respective books, Name, Rank, and Serial Number:
Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad and A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and
Postwar American Society, concerns about the toughness of American men had concrete

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ramifications on military and government policy in the aftermath of the Korean War.19 In the
1950s, the army instituted a range of new policies to counteract the reforms of the Doolittle
Board, which had revised the army’s disciplinary code after World War II and, according to
critics, paved the way for a “softer” and undisciplined army. The new measures emphasized more
rigorous physical conditioning during basic training, reinstated military discipline off-post, and
granted noncommissioned officers more authority. The army also instituted a new code of
conduct, which outlined stricter expectations for American soldiers who were held in captivity.
During the same period, the government waged a national campaign on youth fitness that
directly addressed concerns about the next generation’s ability to handle the physical and
psychological rigors of modern warfare. After several studies released in the middle of the decade
reported that over half of the nation’s youth failed to meet minimum health requirements and
American children’s physical fitness compared unfavorably to other nations, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s administration held the first Conference on the Fitness of American Youth at the
U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in June 1956. Critics and medical experts blamed
the lackluster physical fitness of American children, and especially American boys, on the relative
comfort of postwar American society and deficiencies in American parenting. These were not
simply perceived as domestic problems, however, and were routinely coupled with broader issues
of national security and the army’s rejection rates of draftees, which had reached nearly thirty-
three percent between 1950 and 1956. As the historian Robert L. Griswold notes, the youth
fitness campaigns during this era were informed by the Cold War and never extended much
thought on young girls’ health “because flabby boys – and ultimately a blabby, defenseless,
‘woman-like’ manhood – was the target of cultural concern.”20
The climate of the Korean War ultimately informed parenting strategies and policies on youth
fitness throughout the era. As Laura McEnaney’s research on the Federal Civil Defense
Administration’s campaign to enroll the public in civil defense preparation demonstrates, for
many Americans the Cold War was never far from home.21 While children were subjected to
“duck and cover” drills in school, their parents were encouraged to build bomb shelters in their
backyards and consistently reminded of the gender norms governing the behavior of the model
American Cold Warrior.22 At the same time, gender ideology influenced the military’s expecta-
tions and perception of soldiers and the Korean War. For the last three decades, historians have
produced a rich and varied scholarship on the gendered subtext of Cold War America that
conclusively proves that the interplay between Cold War gender ideology, domestic society, and
the U.S. military significantly impacted the trajectories of both domestic and military history. As
Elaine Tyler May originally argued back in 1988, the history of postwar domesticity and the
history of American military policy and international relations during the early Cold War are
considerably enriched by appreciating how they interacted.

Sex and National Security

On February 28, 1950, Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy admitted that over the preceding
three years ninety-one employees had been dismissed from the State Department because they were
homosexuals. The admission led to a full-blown Senate investigation in June, which concluded that
homosexuals were working in the upper echelons of American government and represented a
significant security risk, purportedly because they could be seduced or blackmailed by the
Communist enemy. Homophobia, and anxiety over male and female sexuality in general, would
have enormous consequences for thousands of American men and women during the early Cold
War era, but it went largely overlooked until scholars informed by gender and LGBT studies began
to appreciate its significance. Since the publication of John D’Emilio’s pioneering study, Sexual

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Figure 7.2 A young man defends his firing from the State Department as coming down to incompe-
tence, rather than alleged homosexuality.
Source: Alan Dunn. The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.

Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, in
1983, historians have been examining this history in order to shed light on a crucial facet of the early
Cold War: male and female sexuality, and the sex lives of American soldiers and government and
military officials, had become a focal point of American national security.
The armed forces had been discharging homosexuals for decades, but during the homophobic
panic of the early Cold War they pursued homosexuals and “sexual perverts” with a renewed
vigor.23 In 1949, a subcommittee of the Department of Defense Personnel Policy Board
expressed concern about the lack of a uniform policy on homosexuality in the different branches
of the military. This spurred the Department of Defense to adopt a new policy that dictated,
“Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the
Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed
Forces is mandatory.”24 John D’Emilio’s research highlights the “cost in human suffering” of
these policies, such as the “housecleaning” of eleven lesbians at the Keesler Air Force base in
Biloxi, Mississippi, and the dismissal of at least two dozen more at Lackland Air Force base in San
Antonio, Texas and Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.25 Unfortunately, these
cases were just the tip of the iceberg in the decades-long homosexual purge in the government
and military. For the remainder of the 1950s, the military dismissed approximately two thousand
personnel a year on the grounds of their sexuality, in many cases without granting the accused a
court-martial proceeding or even allowing them the opportunity to question their accusers.
According to the historian David K. Johnson, “For much of 1950, the issue of homosexuals in
government threatened to overtake that of Communists in government within public political
discourse.”26 Given the fiercely anti-Communist landscape of the late 1940s and early 1950s, this

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puts the focus on homosexuality into perspective. In 1953, President Eisenhower revised
President Harry Truman’s federal loyalty program to include sexual perversion, which included
homosexuality, as grounds for dismissal. By the middle of the decade, the nation’s internal
security apparatus had expanded its focus to communists and homosexuals, and the military
and federal government’s homosexual purge had spilled over into civilian society, impacting
thousands of Americans and producing a Lavender Scare that would last for the next twenty-five
years.27 Although there was practically no evidence that homosexuals actually represented a
serious security threat, the military demonized homosexuality and radically overstated the threat
homosexuals posed to national security. As the historian Margot Canaday demonstrates, national
security may not have been the only factor behind the military’s policy on homosexuality. At least
in the case of female soldiers, the specter of lesbianism was frequently used as a political tool, and
“antilesbian investigations aimed not only to remove a few women from the service, but to
employ the threat of lesbianism to secure the subordination of women soldiers as a class.”28 The
Lavender Scare thus helped the federal government root out insubordination, isolate women
from the material benefits of military service, and justify an enormous expansion of the national
security state and federal oversight of government and military officials’ private lives.29
The government’s insistence on a heteronormative armed forces ensured that servicemen’s
sexuality would become a hot topic during the early Cold War. On December 1, 1952, the New
York Daily News turned the private sexuality of soldiers into a matter of public spectacle when it
reported that Christine Jorgensen, a GI during World War II, had undergone a sex change operation
in Denmark. Jorgensen became one of the most well-known American GIs in 1953, and her story
led to increased suspicion that the armed forces had been infiltrated by sexual “deviants.”30
Ultimately, the behavior of American servicemen in Korea was filtered through traditional gender
norms, and the media and Cold Warriors frequently reinterpreted any sign of weakness through
the lens of sex. For example, Dr. Joost Meerloo’s work on Communist psychological torture in
the early 1950s argued that it was equivalent to rape, a crime understood at the time to happen solely
to women.31 For critics, the supposed shortcomings of American soldiers in POW camps, and
Korea in general, highlighted the military’s lack of heteronormative masculine toughness. Beyond
slandering the sacrifices so many members of the Armed Services made during this era, the hyper-
anxiety over traditional masculine sexuality throughout the nation and widespread homophobia
in the government and military resulted in many good military personnel having their careers
cut unjustly short. Over the last three decades, historians have increasingly brought the stories of the
servicemen and servicewomen persecuted by these policies to light, and have revealed how
sexuality and national security became intertwined in Cold War America.

Political Rhetoric and Policymaking

Gender ideology clearly had a profound influence on the interactions between the military and
domestic American society, but perhaps the most intriguing question of early Cold War gender
studies remains: Did gender actually influence U.S. military policy during this era? Several historians
who have examined this question argue that the answer lies in the political culture and rhetoric of
the era. Their research indicates that gender ideology influenced the worldview of policymakers
and was responsible for a hyper-masculine political culture that influenced politicians and military
officials to consistently adopt aggressive military tactics over other courses of action.
Historian K.A. Cuordileone’s analysis of the gendered politics of the early Cold War era
reveals the role coded language and a “heightened preoccupation with – and anxiety about –
manhood” played in American political culture between the end of World War II and the early
1960s.32 Throughout the era, political discourse was flooded with euphuisms, sexual innuendo,

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and “hard” and “soft” imagery, which belied what Cuordileone describes as “a new premium on
hard masculine toughness [… that] rendered anything less than that soft, timid, feminine, and as
such a real or potential threat to the security of the nation.”33 The “boys club” character of
postwar politics was never on clearer display than during the California Senate race of 1950
between Richard Nixon and Helen Douglas, when Nixon simultaneously questioned Douglas’s
loyalty to the United States and reminded voters of her femininity by characterizing her as “pink
right down to her underwear.” Other writers and politicians might use more coded language in
public, but the notion that politics was a man’s game, and a straight man’s game at that, was
pervasive. Republicans repeatedly called the manhood of the Truman administration into
question, and politicians such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, the
Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, were publicly maligned for their supposedly
effeminate policies and character.34 By contrast, the Eisenhower administration emphasized the
president’s storied military career and athleticism, particularly in election years. As Cuordileone
demonstrates, the Democrats eventually engaged in similar tactics in an attempt to rebrand their
party as “masculine” and “virile.” During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy took
a page out of the Republicans’ playbook when he criticized Nixon’s emphasis on domesticity
during his infamous debate with Nikita Khrushchev, asserting, “Mr. Nixon may be experienced
in kitchen debates, but so are a great many other married men I know.”35
Although macho rhetoric was hardly new in American politics, as historian Peter Filene argues,
“The Cold War endowed it for the elite with extra fervor and currency.”36 More than just a
domestic political weapon, the gendered imagery evoked by policymakers and the media created a
mental universe that frequently portrayed the Communist enemy as immoral. In American popular
culture, Soviet women were commonly depicted as sexless, brutish, and unfeminine, a sign of the
supposedly unnatural gender order of Communist society.37 And Soviet men, according to the
logic of this gendered discourse, did not pose a real threat to the United States because they were
dominated by women, and thus hardly men at all. Gendered imagery was also employed to
emphasize Cold War allies’ subservience to the United States. For example, Naoko Shibusawa
demonstrates how Japan was converted from America’s World War II nemesis to the nation’s
“geisha ally” during the Cold War. This transformation was evident in popular culture as well as
military officials’ and policymakers’ repeated references to Japan as a woman or small child. As
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur put it in 1951, Japan was “like a boy of 12.”38
Was all the talk of virility, subservience, and perversity merely a rhetorical device, or was it
reflective of something deeper? Clearly, gendered public discourse influenced the cultural and
political landscape of Cold War America, and ordinary citizens were consistently treated to
political debates and visions of the Cold War that existed within a gendered framework. It is
harder to pinpoint with any true certainty how many politicians and military officials whole-
heartedly bought into this gendered worldview, but it is clear that none of them could escape the
hyper-masculine atmosphere of the era.
Analyzing the Cold War establishment’s shared “ideology of masculinity,” historian Robert
D. Dean argues that policymakers during the 1960s “faced great pressures toward conformity to
dominant ideologies of masculinity.”39 Seth Jacobs highlights this phenomenon in one of the
United States’ most ill-fated policy decisions in South Vietnam, the country’s nearly decade-long
support of Ngo Dinh Diem. According to Jacobs, the United States threw the weight of
American economic and military support behind Diem, at least in part, because he represented
“a straight-shooting, God-fearing, two-fisted man in the inscrutable, un-Christian, effeminate
East.”40 Historians such as Heather Marie Stur go a step further, arguing that hyper-masculinity
informed the entire culture of American policymaking during the buildup of the Vietnam War.
Stur’s research illustrates how a series of gendered assumptions about Vietnam operated in a

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feedback loop between domestic American culture, U.S. policymakers, and the nation’s wartime
propaganda. These assumptions even reached the highest levels of American government, where
“John Wayne-like concerns about masculinity” and paternalistic narratives about America’s role
in the world influenced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and their policies in Vietnam.41
Kennedy and Johnson were not isolated examples, and for policymakers and military officials
during the early Cold War, being labeled “soft” on Communism could easily slide into a public
repudiation of their manhood or sexuality and potentially end their career.42 In a climate where
advocating anything other than all-out military aggression could spell career or political suicide,
even policymakers who had doubts about the wisdom of aggressive military policies had reason
for pause. The scholarship on early Cold War political culture and rhetoric highlights how an
emphasis on hyper-masculinity influenced the general atmosphere of postwar policymaking, and
has illustrated how a veil of testosterone cast a shadow over policy debates from the Bay of Pigs
Invasion to the early years of the Vietnam War.

Gender Analysis and the Future of Cold War Studies

On June 28, 1954, President Eisenhower sketched a bare-chested, muscular figure and several naval
vessels and scrawled the word “Guatemala” in cursive twice in his notes while conferring with
members of his cabinet and legislative leaders about a coup against the Guatemalan President Jacob
Árbenz that had occurred the night before. In his analysis of the doodle, historian Christian G. Appy
writes, “The sketch warrants interpretation because it suggests some of the images and assumptions
that shaped U.S. Cold War foreign policy.”43 Indeed, the sketch offers a rare glimpse into the mind
of the leader of the free world at the height of the early Cold War, indicating that an aggressive, bare-
chested masculinity was coupled with American covert operations in Eisenhower’s imagination.
For the last thirty years, historians have worked diligently to bring the underlying gender
framework that is hinted at in sources like Eisenhower’s sketch out into the open. Although the
scholarship on the relationship between gender ideology, the military, and the early Cold War has
come a long way, work remains to be done. The domestic gender consensus has been predomi-
nantly studied from the perspective of white, middle-class Americans, and more research is
necessary on the way race and class complicate this picture. New research on the global implications
of the military’s promotion of American gender ideology has just started to scratch the surface on
the complex interactions between the military, gender ideology, and civilian populations around
the world.44 The history of policymakers who failed to comply with aggressive military policies also
remains underdeveloped, and gender studies could bring new insight to several key moments in the
early Cold War. Most significantly, scholars have not fully elucidated the role women played in the
military and their impact on U.S. military policy after the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act
was passed in 1948, and they have largely failed to heed Cynthia Enloe’s call for a more expansionist
approach to the roles women play in international politics.45 The existing literature on the
interactions between gender ideology, the military, and the Cold War has laid a strong foundation
for our understanding of the U.S. military and its policies during a pivotal moment in the
“American century.” Continued research promises to bring the gendered framework of the early
Cold War, and sources like Eisenhower’s sketch, into even sharper focus.

Notes
1 “The Kitchen Debate – Transcript,” http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_con-
versions/16/1959-07-24.pdf.

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2 For an analysis of the gendered implications of the Kitchen Debate, see Nicole William Barnes,
“Making Easier the Lives of Our Housewives: Visions of Domestic Technology in the Kitchen
Debate,” in Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships, ed. Elizabeth Patton
and Mimi Choi (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 89–104; Ruth Oldenziel and Karin
Zachmann, “Kitchens as Technology and Politics: An Introduction,” in Cold War Kitchen:
Americanization, Technology and European Users (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009); Emily S. Rosenberg,
“Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,’” in The Ambiguous
Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the American Century¸ ed. Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 447–454; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the
Cold War Era, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 19–24.
3 “Khrushchev-Nixon Debate, From CNN Cold War,” http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/
Khrushchev_Nixon_debate.htm.
4 May, Homeward Bound, 4.
5 May, Homeward Bound, 26.
6 For May’s defense of the KLS sample, see May, Homeward Bound, 14–16.
7 Jane Sherron De Hart, “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality and National Identity in Cold War
America,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. James Gilbert and Peter Kuznick (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 127.
8 Joanne Meyerowitz, “Sex, Gender and the Cold War Language of Reform,” in Rethinking Cold
War Culture, ed. James Gilbert and Peter Kuznick (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2001), 107.
9 Jacqueline Castledine’s Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), Helen Laville’s Cold War Women: The International
Activities of American Women’s Organisations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), and
Michelle Nickerson’s Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2012) represent important contributions on the political activities of American
women in the early Cold War era, and stress that women played active roles in Cold War politics and
public life. Bill Osgerby’s study, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern
America (London, New York City: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001), builds on earlier scholarship, such
as Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New
York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), and highlights how some American men reacted to, and
often times rebelled against, domesticity.
10 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York:
BasicBooks, 1992), 29.
11 May, Homeward Bound, 11–12.
12 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965
(New York: New York University Press, 2007).
13 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in West Germany (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3.
14 Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century
(New York: New York University Press, 2010), 128–129.
15 For a detailed examination of the American POW experience during the Korean War, as well as their
popular portrayal and reception, see Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and
Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 174–216; Matthew W. Dunne, A Cold
War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2013), 81–115; Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the
Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 97–
131; and Charles S. Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and
Abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24–31, 109–126, and 162–174.
16 For an analysis of the cultural and social anxieties surrounding postwar motherhood, see Dunne, A
Cold War State of Mind, 116–145; Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in
American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 40–85; Rebecca Jo Plant,

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Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010), 19–54; Molly Ladd-Taylor and Laurie Umansky, eds., “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Jessica Weiss, To Have and
to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and
Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number, 151–161.
17 Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number, 152.
18 Commenting on the mother in the film, the historians Jacobson and Conzález asserted that gender
historians could not come up with a better character to “illustrate the argument about gender,
sexuality, the family, and the politics of citizenship during the Cold War” if they tried. Matthew
Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González, What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and
Cold War America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 143. For a more detailed
analysis of The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War gender norms, see Susan L. Carruthers, “‘The
Manchurian Candidate’ (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare,” Historical Journal of Film,
Radio, and Television 18 (March 1998): 75–94; Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind, 138–41; Margot A.
Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), 265–268; Tony Jackson, “The Manchurian Candidate and the Gender of the
Cold War,” Literature-Film Quarterly 28.1 (2000): 34–40; Jacobson and González, What Have They
Built You to Do?; and Michael Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War
Movies,” Representations 6 (Spring 1984): 1–36.
19 Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind, 141–142 and Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number, 152–161.
20 Robert L. Griswold, “The ‘Flabby American,’ the Body, and the Cold War,” in A Shared Experience:
Men, Women, and the History of Gender, ed. Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone (New York: New
York University Press, 1998), 325. For an analysis of the anxieties over children’s fitness and the
Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ fitness campaigns, see Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind,
129–137.
21 For her full analysis, see Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday
Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
22 Several historians have analyzed American children’s experience of the Cold War. See, for example,
Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times
Books, 1994); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a
Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); and William M. Tuttle, Jr., “America’s
Children in an Era of War, Hot and Cold: The Holocaust, the Bomb, and Child Rearing in the
1940s,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 14–34.
23 This panic was triggered by a number of factors, including the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s landmark
study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which reported that thirty-seven percent of males
engaged in at least one homosexual activity in their adult lives, an increasingly visible homosexual
subculture in many American cities, and, according to the historian George Chauncey, the conflation
of homosexuals and pedophiles in popular culture after World War II. For his full analysis, see George
Chauncey, Jr., “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William
Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 170–172.
24 Quoted in Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 261.
25 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 45–46.
26 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal
Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30–31.
27 Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 82–84.
28 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 177.
29 Whittaker Chambers, who gained notoriety for his role in the Alger Hiss case in 1948, remains one of
the only documented examples of a homosexual operating as a Communist spy, and he defected from

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the Communist Party before World War II. In his analysis of the sexual politics of the era, the historian
Robert D. Dean has highlighted the case of Joseph W. Alsop, Jr., a well-known journalist, who was
blackmailed in 1957 by the KGB and presented with photos depicting him engaging in a homosexual
act with an undercover Soviet agent in Moscow. Alsop refused to collaborate and reported the
incident to U.S. intelligence officials. As Dean argues, “Alsop’s response refuted the then-current
gender ideologies and cultural assumptions about the moral ‘weakness’ of homosexuals and the
‘security risks’ they posed.” Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold
War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 157.
30 For a more detailed analysis of Jorgensen, see Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of
Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Joanne
Meyerowitz, “Transforming Sex: Christine Jorgensen in the Postwar U.S.,” OAH Magazine of
History 20.2 (March 2006): 16–20.
31 Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind, 125–129.
32 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge,
2005), ix.
33 Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, viii. For an excellent example of
how this type of rhetoric informed how government officials wrote and thought about the Cold War,
see Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in
George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83.4 (March 1997): 1309–
1339.
34 Cuordileone has described the smear campaign against Adlai Stevenson as “a high-water mark in the
history of dirty politics in America.” Senators Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, William Jenner, and
the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, publicly and privately questioned Stevenson’s manhood and his
sexuality. For an analysis of the campaign tactics employed against Stevenson, see Cuordileone,
Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 88–96.
35 Quoted in Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 182.
36 Peter Filene, “‘Cold War Culture’ Doesn’t Say It All,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J.
Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 160–161.
37 Commenting on this facet of Cold War culture, Cuordileone notes, “the idea that Communism reversed
somehow the natural order of gender relations and even empowered women at the expense of men . . .
[was] a more complex reflex of deep anxieties rooted in American life, not Soviet reality.” Cuordileone,
Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 79. See also May, Homeward Bound, 18–19.
38 Quoted in Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2006), 55. Also see Christina Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation:
The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War Commitment to Asia,” in Cold War Constructions: The
Political Culture of the United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) and Andrew J. Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign
Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964,” Journal of American History 81.2
(September 1994): 518–542.
39 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 6.
40 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in
Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 16.
41 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147–153.
42 For example, see Dean on how the careers of Charles Thayer and Samuel Reber “showed the
establishment the dangers of becoming vulnerable to accusations of ‘softness.’” Dean, Imperial
Brotherhood, 65–66.
43 Christian G. Appy, “Eisenhower’s Guatemalan Doodle, or: How to Draw, Deny, and Take Credit
for a Third World Coup,” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism,
1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 185.
44 For examples of the benefits of this approach, see Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S.
Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 136–158; Karen

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Hagemann and Sonya Michel, ed., Gender and the Long Postwar: The United States and the Two
Germanys, 1945–1989 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011); Dennis Merrill,
Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 127–133; and Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British
Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
45 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 196–197. Three notable exceptions are Charissa J. Threat,
Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2015) and Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which examine the history of the Army
Nurse Corps and debates about gender roles in the military between World War II and Vietnam, and
Linda Witt, Judith Bellafaire, Britta Granrud, and Mary Jo Binker, “A Defense Weapon Known to Be of
Value”: Servicewomen of the Korean War Era (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005), which
explores the contributions of American servicewomen to the Korean War effort and the impact of the
Women’s Armed Services Integration Act between 1948 and 1953.

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 8
GENTLE WARRIORS,
GUNSLINGERS, AND GIRLS NEXT
DOOR
Gender and the Vietnam War
Heather Marie Stur
university of southern mississippi

The cover story of the August 1975 issue of Soldiers, a U.S. Army magazine, focused on a
controversial issue: hair. A new generation of enlisted men wanted to keep their hair longer than
the close crop many officers believed was a crucial part of Army discipline and image. Outlining
the history of Army hair regulations going back to the late eighteenth century, the article sought
to address the conflict between officers and enlisted personnel over what was an acceptable Army
haircut for men. Since the late eighteenth century, the article argued, Army hair regulations had
changed according to civilian styles. In more recent years, the image of an Army soldier, short
haircut and all, had symbolized the “All-American boy,” but even that could no longer be
considered a standard because “what the general public’s All-American boy image is in 1975
hasn’t been determined.” The growing number of women in the Army further complicated the
hair issue. Army regulations did not stipulate that women’s hair be a certain length but indicated
that hair should neither fall below the bottom edge of the collar “nor be cut so short as to present
an unfeminine appearance.”1 At first glance, the debate over Army hairstyles might appear to be a
case of youth rebelling against conservative authorities, but it encapsulates the challenges to the
connections between gender and military service in the wake of the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War was the starting point for significant transformation in U.S. military culture
and the image of the armed services. Until Vietnam, masculine citizenship and military service
were intertwined in American culture, but as the war grew unpopular, so did the notion that boys
became men on the battlefield. When the draft ended in 1973, the armed services embarked on
recruitment campaigns aimed at drawing both men and women into the ranks in order to fill
personnel needs. Because the Vietnam War in many ways discredited the military, no longer
could the forces rely on a pro-military culture to drive men into the service branches. At the same
time, women demanded wider access to military specialties and career paths. While military
authorities tended to view the integration of women as a pragmatic move to fill personnel needs,
not all enlisted men took happily to serving alongside women.
Challenges to the links between gender and military service occurred amidst broad question-
ing, and in some ways rejection, of traditional gender roles in the civilian world. In the years after
World War II, the women’s movement, gay liberation, and black freedom struggles all called for
alternatives to the definitions of masculinity and femininity that had characterized the white,

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middle-class social hierarchy and the suburban family image that had symbolized the American
dream for the first half of the Cold War. Because military service was deeply ingrained in
American identity, the transformations in military access and culture happened alongside and
were influenced by home front social movements. Antiwar GIs called upon their fellow service-
men to support women’s liberation, which, by extension, would liberate them from the
constraints of militarized masculinity. Black troops pointed out the ways in which the racism
and sexism that oppressed African Americans at home shaped U.S. foreign relations. Women
demanded increased access to military service as part of the drive for gender equality. In this
complex mix of disillusionment, activism, and redefinition, military authorities attempted to
respond to changes in the civilian culture that military service had, at one time, defined. If many
Americans now refused to see military service as the ultimate proof of manhood, and at the same
time, a movement demanded that women have equal access to professions and institutions,
leaders within the armed forces realized they had to reshape the military’s image in order to
preserve the institution.
The scholarship on gender and the Vietnam War constitutes a vibrant and expanding subfield
of military and U.S. history that intersects with the histories of women, gender, sexuality,
diplomacy, and American culture. Pioneering works challenged historians to acknowledge and
examine both the roles that women have played in military and diplomatic engagements and the
significance of ideas about women and men, masculinity and femininity, in shaping Americans’
understandings of global relations, from high politics to popular culture. As scholars of foreign
relations have demonstrated, gender, often along with race, shaped U.S. policymakers’ views of
the Cold War world and the U.S. role in it.2 Scholars have also examined the ways in which
gender ideas influenced Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who were convinced
that the United States had to prove its strength and dominance on the global stage, and in popular
culture, the “John Wayne” image of the stoic, aggressive, American fighting man reflected that
mindset.3 Studies of American soldiers’ experiences, especially those of “grunts” in Vietnam,
have shown that the realities of war, especially the combat experience, led some American GIs
and veterans to reject the notion that war was what men do. In their experiences, killing had not
made them into men; it had dehumanized them. These studies have illustrated how the Vietnam
era GI antiwar movement demanded a rethinking of the link between masculinity and war.4 As
Beth Bailey’s work on the all-volunteer military has shown, after the Vietnam War, the transition
to the all-volunteer force required the branches of the U.S. military to rebrand themselves and
transform their image from an institution that “made boys into men” to one in which men and
women could develop job skills, earn money for college, and build a career.5 In more recent
years, the increasing number of women in the U.S. armed forces, the opening of combat
specialties to women, and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” undoubtedly will encourage
continued historical analysis of gender and the U.S. military.

Gender, the United States, and the Vietnam War

As the United States embraced its position as one of two superpowers after World War II,
Americans used gender to make sense of international relations and their nation’s global mission.
In the U.S. Cold War worldview, American masculine strength and power would be put to use in
the defense of weaker nations that were threatened by communist insurgencies, the concern that
dominated U.S. foreign relations after 1945. The conventional wisdom of the era went that if
communism was allowed to take hold throughout the world, it would threaten all that Americans
held dear, including the nuclear family and comfortably appointed suburban homes. Embodying
the American dream was the “girl next door,” innocent, white, middle-class, and in need of

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protection by a courageous gunslinger.6 Elaine Tyler May’s work on domestic “containment”

during the Cold War illustrates how national security concerns intersected with anxieties about
the state of the American middle-class family in a domestic culture that emphasized how specific
gender roles with the family unit could help citizens feel secure in an insecure world. Yet as Susan
Douglas and Wini Breines have shown in their work on women who came of age in 1950s and
1960s suburbia, domestic containment sometimes was stifling rather than reassuring.7
Many scholars have identified John Wayne as the most visible symbol of the benevolent
gunslinger or gentle warrior in Cold War American popular culture, as his films offered
Americans a metaphor for U.S. engagement with the world. For example, Loren Baritz argues
that Wayne represented “the traditional American male” who “performs, delivers the goods, is a
loner, has the equipment, usually a six-shooter or a superior rifle, to beat the bad guys, and he
knows what he is doing.”8 Examining Westerns of the post-World War II era, Richard Slotkin
has argued that the films are metaphors illustrating how Americans viewed the U.S. relationship
to the world.9 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, novels, television shows, and films
glorified the frontier as the “meeting point between civilization and savagery,” where toughness
and a commitment to absolute truths defined real men, Michael Kimmel has written.10 Tom
Engelhardt has also explored the importance of the gunslinger character in post-World War II
American popular culture as an embodiment of Americans’ beliefs about the Cold War world.11
Ronald L. Davis has written that when Wayne became the ultimate cowboy-hero in American
popular culture, he made it his mission in his own life to promote “good, old-fashioned American
virtues,” which in the Cold War world meant fighting communist insurrections. In 1966, Wayne
toured Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops, and he returned home an outspoken supporter of the
war. His experience in Vietnam inspired him to direct and star in The Green Berets, a film that
critics panned but that grossed $7 million in its first three months.12 For many of the men who
served in Vietnam, cowboys, Indians, and the Wild West shaped the playtime of their youth, and
“Indians” stood in for faceless communism in their childhood war games.13 Noting the interna-
tional reach of the John Wayne image, Cynthia Enloe characterizes Wayne as “globalized
shorthand for militarized masculinity.”14
The ideas Wayne embodied played out not only on the big and small screens, but also in the
development of U.S. foreign policy. Cowboy movies enforced the notion that the United States
had a noble mission to press ahead into the “new frontier” and tame the “savage” world.15
Immersed in a culture in which the figure of John Wayne symbolized the masculine ideal, U.S.
policymakers were influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by these cultural narratives as they
plotted the course of America’s international relations. John F. Kennedy won the presidency in
1960 with a vision that U.S.-style democracy would touch all corners of the globe. But the new
president feared that suburban comforts had made American young men “soft” and thus unfit to
compete in Cold War competitions. Robert Dean argues that, in order to justify projects like the
expansion of the Army’s Green Berets, Kennedy exploited the fear that a “crisis of masculinity”
could weaken U.S. global power.16 The president wrote articles for Sports Illustrated and hired
Bud Wilkinson, a former University of Oklahoma football coach, to be his physical fitness
adviser. Kennedy believed that American men must be “tough” and physically fit to endure
“military demands in Europe and the jungles of Asia.”17
Lyndon Johnson inherited the Vietnam War from Kennedy, and John Wayne-like concerns
about masculinity also informed his policymaking. Johnson feared that he would appear “less of a
man” than Kennedy if he brought U.S. troops home before winning the war.18 Reflecting the
paternalism of American Cold War foreign policy, Johnson believed the United States had an
obligation to help alleviate poverty in the decolonizing world. Lloyd Gardner argues that Johnson
and advisors such as Walt Rostow viewed economic development as the means to halt the spread

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of communism. Initiatives such as the Mekong Project, which was modeled after the New Deal
Tennessee Valley Authority, aimed to bring electricity to and improve irrigation in the Mekong
River region. In order to provide a moral justification for U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Johnson
sought to extend the “Great Society” overseas by committing money and manpower to mod-
ernization and development projects. It reflected his paternalistic conviction that the United
States had a duty to aid the development of “backward regions.”19 Jonathan Nashel, Michael
Latham, Nils Gilman, and Seth Jacobs have also explored the ways in which paternalistic ideas
about America’s relationship to the decolonizing world were embedded in modernization
theory.20
One of the first introductions servicemen had to the military’s oppressive and destructive uses
of gender and sexuality was in basic training.21 Derogatory references to women in the language
of basic training were used to denigrate recruits and define the enemy. In his study of U.S. combat
troops sent to Vietnam, Christian Appy writes that throughout basic training, drill instructors
repeatedly used pejorative terms about women in order to accuse recruits of showing weakness.
To be called a woman—or, usually more crudely, a “cunt” or “pussy”—was to be pegged as
lacking manhood. Appy quotes novelist Tim O’Brien, who wrote that during basic training,
“women are dinks. Women are villains. They are creatures akin to Communists and yellow-
skinned people and hippies.” Additionally, references to women and femininity were synonyms
for homosexuality, an even more damaging accusation because military law prohibited homo-
sexual relations. Recruits who were called “faggots” or “queers” by drill instructors faced more
vicious treatment.22 My analysis of an M-161A rifle operation and maintenance manual shows
how heterosexuality was normalized in military publications. The manual featured sections such
as “How to Strip Your Baby” and a leggy cartoon drawing of a rifle magazine called “Maggie.”23
In this climate, proving masculinity through aggressive displays of heterosexuality became part of
the rite of passage.
Historians can only estimate the numbers of women who served in the military in Vietnam.
While the Defense Department did not keep accurate records on women, it has estimated that
approximately 7,500 women served in Vietnam. The Veterans’ Administration has set the
number at 11,000. More than 80 percent were nurses, most from the Army Nurse Corps.
Among those who were not nurses, about 700 women were members of the Women’s Army
Corps (WAC), while much smaller numbers served in the Navy, Air Force, and Marines.24
Pinning down the numbers of civilian women who worked in Vietnam is even more difficult;
estimates have gone as high as 55,000.25 Kathryn Marshall, a journalist who compiled an oral
history anthology based on interviews with American military and civilian women who served in
Vietnam, notes that the lack of official records “both serves as a reminder of government
mishandling of information during the Vietnam War and points to a more general belief that
war is men’s business.”26 While the number of American women who served was miniscule
compared to the number of men, ideas about women and gender were, in fact, very present in
foreign policy documents, policymakers’ conversations, soldier folklore, and the rhetoric of basic
training.
Although a few women went to Vietnam before the U.S. committed combat troops, the
majority of American women who served in Vietnam in either military or civilian capacities
arrived between 1965, the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the last
U.S. combat troops departed. Military women were exempt from the draft, and not all women
who joined the armed services during the era wanted an assignment to Vietnam. When it came
down to personnel needs, some who went did so only because they had received orders. In
contrast, civilian women by and large chose to go to Vietnam, often because they desired to help
the troops. Whether military or civilian, those who picked Vietnam went for a variety of reasons

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that depended on factors such as race, class, and religion. As Kara Dixon Vuic has demonstrated,
the Army Nurse Corps offered money for college and career opportunities that some female
recruits viewed as a move toward independence.27 Some women thought service in Vietnam
sounded like an adventure with the chance to travel to an exotic locale while avoiding or delaying
marriage and family life. Others felt guilty that conscription forced men to serve, and they wanted
to do their part to help. As my work demonstrates, another group was answering President
Kennedy’s call to young Americans to go out into the world as missionaries of democracy.28
Cold War insecurities regarding the perceived Soviet threat and other potential challenges to
U.S. power infused gender roles with a particular strictness in the 1950s and 1960s, even when
real women’s and men’s lives told more complicated stories. As May has written, Americans used
gender and sexuality to make sense of the Cold War world, linking private matters such as
marriage and family life to U.S. foreign relations. Engaged in an ideological struggle with the
Soviet Union for power and influence in the world, U.S. leaders portrayed capitalist democracy
as the humane alternative to communism; in his “kitchen debates” with Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev, then-Vice President Richard Nixon held up suburbia and its affluence as the
epitome of American values. The heterosexual gender roles implicit in the image were strictly
enforced, with the white, middle-class, suburban nuclear family as the ultimate symbol of
appropriate roles for men and women. Bringing the notion of “separate spheres” into the mid-
twentieth century, politicians, sociologists, and medical doctors prescribed policies that once
again placed women in charge of the home and childrearing and gave men financial and political
responsibilities.29 Despite the cultural image, the experiences of women in the Cold War era
reflected the disconnects between the image of the suburban housewife and the realities for most
American women, as Wini Breines, Susan Douglas, Alice Echols, Ruth Feldstein, Susan
Hartmann, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Ruth Rosen have shown.30 Married and middle-class
women increasingly sought wage work outside the home, and groups including the National
Manpower Council and the President’s Council on the Status of Women called for the incor-
poration of women into service for the nation’s defense. As Sara Evans and other women activists
have written, traditional gender roles persisted even within the era’s movements for social
change. Their experiences of marginalization within civil rights and antiwar organizations
motivated them to fight for women’s equality.31 Women’s rights activists expressed the discon-
tent and isolation that May, Douglas, and Breines described in the women of 1950s and early
1960s suburbia. As Vuic and I illustrate, Red Cross donut dollies, WACs, and women Army
nurses also experienced the tension between their personal and professional advancement
through military service in Vietnam and the traditionally feminine image they were meant to
uphold – angels, girls next door, a touch of home. As women were integrated into the military
after 1975, Bailey and myself have shown, servicewomen also faced the disconnect between the
expansion of military opportunities for them and the resistance they faced from some of their male
counterparts and conservative Americans.

Gender and the GI Antiwar Movement

After experiencing basic training and service in Vietnam, some GIs became disillusioned by the
military’s version of masculinity, a “mentality that turns human beings into … murdering
soldiers.”32 Some antiwar GIs expressed the notion that for some combat veterans, the warrior
myth as played out in their reality of war left them feeling not like men at all, if being a man meant
killing a man – or a woman or a child. They were the troops psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls
“antiwar warriors,” who attempted to redefine the myths that U.S. policymakers employed to
enforce existing power structures and justify America’s Cold War scramble for global

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domination.33 Antiwar GIs opposed not only the Vietnam War but also the gendered ideology
that defined it. Some servicemen demanded an end to sexism in the military, and some even
reached out to women’s groups, adopting the rhetoric of women’s liberation and applying it to
their situations. On stateside military posts and overseas bases, as well as among civilians, antiwar
GIs found ways to express their opposition to the war by writing in antiwar newspapers and
frequenting GI coffeehouses. Among the main issues antiwar GIs and veterans addressed was their
belief that both women and men had to be liberated from their socially constructed roles in order
to stop war. It is important to note that scholars such as Meredith Lair have convincingly
demonstrated that most American servicemen in Vietnam did not serve in combat units or
experience danger routinely during their tours of duty.34 The antiwar GIs and veterans who
wrote about issues of gender and sexism focused on one type of experience, the combat
experience, to express their antiwar sentiment. My examination of the GI antiwar movement
focuses on the ways in which this aspect of the movement reflected the pervasiveness of gender
ideas throughout the Vietnam War.
Gender liberation – the liberation of both men and women – was a recurring theme in the GI
antiwar press. Soldiers wrote articles arguing that gender roles oppressed them by equating
masculinity with fighting and sexual aggression. The rejection of the type of masculinity the
military promoted was part of a broader opposition to military authority, to the Vietnam War,
and to the ideology that some GIs believed underwrote it. Articles discussed the need for men and
women to unite rather than view each other as adversaries, and they called on soldiers to resist
military imagery and language that degraded women. The GI antiwar rhetoric denouncing
sexism reflects the influence of the American women’s and civil rights movements, and of
international movements against imperialism. In his book on the GI antiwar movement, historian
Richard Moser estimates that about 25 percent of GIs participated regularly in antiwar activism.35
Certainly, not all antiwar soldiers criticized the military’s version of masculinity, but antiwar
newspapers and coffeehouse activities indicate that a significant number of antiwar GIs specifi-
cally opposed the masculinity of the warrior myth. My work examines the gendered language in
GI and veteran antiwar newspapers, and Moser, David Cortright, Gerald Nicosia, Andrew Hunt,
and Richard Stacewicz have written about the experiences of antiwar GIs and veterans from a
social history perspective.36
I, along with historians Amanda Boczar and Amber Batura, have investigated the ways in
which prostitution was a consequence of and reflected the gender and sexual ideas that informed
U.S. Vietnam War culture.37 The GI antiwar newspaper The Bond condemned the U.S. military’s
decision in January of 1972 to allow prostitutes onto bases in Vietnam. Prior to the ruling, military
personnel had to leave the base to find prostitutes or brothels, but the directive allowed “local
national guests,” including prostitutes, on base as long as they had a Vietnamese government-
issued identification card. U.S. officers told a reporter for the New York Times that “they
supported the practice to keep peace within the increasingly disgruntled ranks” of American
troops in Vietnam. Contending that the military brass “have always used the oppression of
women” to ensure the submission of troops, Private John Lewis, a reporter for antiwar newspaper
The Bond, argued that “the brass’s crimes show that they have used every low and disgusting tactic
to try to keep every GI in a state of a dehumanized beast who is willing at any time to do the
bidding of these sexist, racist, fascist monsters.” Lewis reported that the U.S. war in Vietnam
forced more than 400,000 Vietnamese women into prostitution because the war destroyed
farmland and thus pushed rural people into cities in search of work and as refugees. Calling
South Vietnam a “colony” of the U.S. with an economy run by the U.S. military, Lewis
maintained that many peasant women had no choice but to become prostitutes, the only job
available to them in the military economy.38 The article’s headline read, “Legalized Prostitution –

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Brass’s New Weapon Against GIs and Vietnamese Women,” suggesting that assumptions about
servicemen’s sexual desires were part of the larger U.S. project in Vietnam, and that military
authorities used those assumptions to control the behavior of troops. This approach to the
Vietnam War is part of a broader scholarly investigation of sexuality and soldier behavior in
wartime, which includes the work of Mary Louise Roberts on U.S. troops in World War II
France, Petra Goedde’s writing on American soldiers and German women in the postwar
occupation of Germany, Maria Höhn’s work on U.S. servicemen and German women in Cold
War West Germany, and Katharine H.S. Moon’s study of prostitution during the Korean War.39
Some black GIs connected the degradation of women with the oppression of African
Americans as a whole, and in antiwar newspapers they called for solidarity between black
servicemen and servicewomen against military sexism and racism. John Wayne, whose personal
politics aligned clearly with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, was not the model of
masculinity for all American men who served in Vietnam, even though patriarchal attitudes were
pervasive in alternative definitions of manhood. Scholars such as Herman Graham and James
Westheider have examined African American male troops in the Vietnam War and have looked
at the social and cultural issues that shaped their wartime experiences.40 Steve Estes has analyzed
the role of masculinity in African American freedom struggles.41 Leaders of the Black Panther
Party articulated a version of manhood based on African Americans’ achieving independence and
control over their lives and communities. To them, manhood meant rejecting white social,
political, economic, and cultural structures that for so long had been used to oppress blacks. Other
African Americans saw manhood embodied in the boxer Muhammad Ali, who refused to report
for Army duty in 1965 after his petition for conscientious objector status was denied. In 1966, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leading organization in the black
freedom struggles of the era, issued a statement in support of men who chose to avoid a war
that SNCC considered a racist endeavor of white imperialism against the Vietnamese.
Yet another form of masculinity was present in Hispanic communities. Through World War
II, Mexican Americans had emphasized military service as an avenue for proving manhood and
worthiness of citizenship. The desire to demonstrate loyalty and manhood fostered a “readiness to
die” among young Chicanos that, according to George Mariscal, carried over to the Vietnam
generation. But some young Chicanos built an antiwar movement around rejecting the imper-
ialistic attitudes that John Wayne represented, identifying with Vietnamese resistance. Their
defiance did not necessarily mean that they embraced the redefinition of gender roles, however,
and paternalism and chauvinism affected definitions of manhood in every racial group. Regarding
those men who became soldiers, either voluntarily or through conscription, Robert Jay Lifton
wrote that, whatever an individual soldier’s view of manhood, for those who became soldiers,
either voluntarily or through the draft, “a crucial factor was the super-masculinity promoted
within the military.”42
GI coffeehouses linked antiwar GIs to various civilian movements, including the growing
women’s movement. The Oleo Strut, near Ford Hood, Texas, opened a small health clinic, and
its staff helped form the Killeen Women’s Group, where members occasionally wrote articles
about the women’s liberation movement for the GI newspaper Fatigue Press. GI wives from Fort
Hood worked with the Strut to plan rallies against the war for military families.43 The cafes helped
GIs view their struggle against the Vietnam War as part of a larger struggle against the oppression
of mainstream American power symbolized by sexist expressions of masculinity. GI antiwar
newspapers provided space for civilian women – usually GI wives – to vent about the war’s
impact on their lives and to criticize the military’s gender ideology. Wives of GIs complained of
poor housing on bases, lack of job opportunities in military towns, and the military’s general
disregard for families. They spoke about the impact the war had on military families, especially

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those of enlisted men, and showed how ideas from the women’s movement intersected with
antiwar sentiment in a critique of both war and sexism. The presence of women’s articles in the
antiwar papers demonstrates an openness to women’s perspectives on the part of the papers’
editors, who usually were soldiers or veterans. While some GIs no doubt skipped past those
articles, others read them carefully and took to heart their opinions and grievances, in ways that
modified their thinking about gender and sexism.
Antiwar GIs and veterans – particularly those involved in the coffeehouse movement –
considered women and the women’s movement vital allies in the fight against the system that
created both the Vietnam War and domestic social ills. Pete Zastrow, a veteran who served a one-
year tour in Vietnam beginning in December 1968, said that women helped antiwar servicemen
focus on “vital issues that, while they weren’t direct veterans’ issues, were issues that veterans
damn well ought to be interested in – child care, the rights of women.”44 Mike McCain, a
Vietnam veteran and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), said of women in
VVAW: “The women taught us boys a whole lot. They were mostly our girlfriends who ended
up being some of the most valuable, the most dedicated, the most active, the most disciplined
people in the organization.”45 Jeanne Friedman, a former civil rights activist and organizer of
antiwar veterans, remembered that in VVAW, “women were doing a lot of the work. Women
were paying attention to taking care of business.”46
I, along with Nick Turse and Gina Weaver, have discussed veterans’ testimonies to the violence
and sexual assault against Vietnamese women, which they considered to be one of the grisly
consequences of the military’s gendered ideology.47 From January 31 through February 2, 1972,
VVAW sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation, a meeting in Detroit of approximately 100
Vietnam veterans who testified about atrocities committed by U.S. troops during the war. Several
times during the event, the testimony turned to the rape and murder of Vietnamese women, and one
panelist described how the Marine Infantry Training Regiment (ITR) taught troops to scrutinize
Vietnamese women more closely than men during interrogations. “They stress over and over that a
woman has more places to hide things like maps or anything than a male,” the veteran said.48 His
statement implies that Vietnamese women could be more dangerous than their male counterparts.
In addition to identifying enemies, treating Vietnamese women harshly also aimed to keep
Vietnamese men from working against the Americans, “because it makes a lasting impression on
some guy – some ‘zip’ – that’s watching his daughter worked over. So we have a better opportunity
of keeping him in line by working her over,” the veteran continued.49 Another panelist, a Marine
corporal named Christopher Simpson, stated that sexual atrocities committed against Vietnamese
women were “pretty usual over there.” It was not that being sexually attracted to Vietnamese
woman was a bad thing, but instead of approaching her in the way of normal courtship, “they might
stick a rifle in a woman’s head and say, ‘Take off your clothes,’” Simpson said. “That’s the way it’s
done over there. ’Cause they’re not treated as human beings over there, they’re treated as dirt.”50
Linking violence against Vietnamese women to both sexism and a career in the military, Marine
Sergeant Joe Bangert testified about the disembowelment of a Vietnamese woman that he observed:
“I think the person involved was a freaked out sexist, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. I think
maybe he had problems. He had to be – he was in the Army for 20 years.”51 As Turse and I have
shown, in the Winter Soldier testimonies, Vietnam veterans exposed the dark side of the gender
ideology at the root of the American presence in Vietnam.

Post-Vietnam Shifts in the Military’s Image

Beth Bailey’s pioneering work on the all-volunteer force has established the groundwork on
which scholars can continue to examine the impact of gender ideas on the U.S. military after the

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Vietnam War. After the draft ended in 1973, the U.S. armed services set out to remarket
themselves in response to the movement for women’s equality and the unpopularity of the
Vietnam War. Once held up as an exclusively masculine domain and a bastion of manhood, in the
mid-1970s, the armed forces recreated themselves as institutions where women as well as men
could get an education and learn job skills.52 In an all-volunteer force that was reaching out to
recruit women, John Wayne could no longer serve as the central ideal of military life. This was
due partly to concerns about filling the ranks, but it also represented an implicit acknowledgment
that the Vietnam War had discredited the military’s John Wayne image.
In my analysis of gender and women’s experiences in the post-Vietnam military, I demonstrate
how Army publications showcased opportunities for women and the advancement of women
within the ranks and issued statements of support for political measures aimed at gender equality.
The August 1975 issue of the Army magazine Soldiers published an article backing the Equal
Rights Amendment, arguing that “in the civilian world, more and more women feel that being a
housewife is not enough. They are looking for fulfillment in other areas. The purpose of the ERA
isn’t to push women into non-traditional occupations, but to eliminate discrimination based on
sex. The Army, on its own, has made a great head start toward that same goal.”53 As evidence, the
article noted that the number of women on active duty in the Army had tripled over the past three
years. Simultaneously, the Army eased restrictions on what professions women could enter,
allowing them to serve in almost every field except combat. Legislation aimed at bringing gender
equality to the armed services included granting women entry into military academies in 1976
and dissolving the Women’s Army Corps and fully integrating women into the Army in 1978.
The number of women in the U.S. armed forces increased significantly during the 1970s, from
1.3 percent of the enlisted ranks in 1971 to 7.6 percent in 1979. The Army saw an even larger
increase, where women personnel jumped from 1.2 percent to 8.4 percent.54
Cynthia Enloe has noted that the changes in women’s roles in the military were intricately
intertwined with changes in America’s racial landscape. Within the increase in women joining
the military, by 1987, African American women comprised more than 44 percent of all enlisted
women in the Army. The number was four times black women’s proportion of the civilian
female population in the United States. In the total armed forces, black women made up more
than 25 percent of all enlisted women. For some young African American women in the Reagan
years, the military looked like a rare institution that would provide them with education, job
training, health benefits, and pay.55 Since the warrior myth had declined in popularity due to the
Vietnam War, the military sought to emphasize those benefits to service that had nothing to do
with proving one’s manhood in battle.
Beth Bailey demonstrates that despite official measures to recruit women, military culture
indicated that new policies did not necessarily stimulate changes in mindset. Although the
services recognized the need to open their ranks to women in order to fill an all-volunteer
force, military culture remained defined by gender difference, sexuality, and narrow ideas about
appropriate roles for women in the armed forces. Combat remained the chief point of contention
in debates about women’s roles in the military. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Parker, chairman of
the University of Michigan’s Army ROTC program, acknowledged that women recruits could
compete on the same level physically as men, but because of Americans’ perceptions of soldiering
as a man’s field, neither women nor men could truly envision women in combat roles. Regarding
military culture, John Teahan, a psychology professor at Wayne State University, observed that
“naturally the male inclination toward protectiveness is at work here; it’s ingrained in our
culture.” Teahan went on to state that “male soldiers resent having to feel protective. It makes
them feel more vulnerable because deep down they do not believe the women to be as
competent. They fear women cannot back them up well on the battlefield, cannot qualify as a

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trustworthy member of the team.”56 Lieutenant Colonel Sherman Ragland, Walter Reed Army
Medical Center’s Human Resources Officer, tried to explain the cultural imagery that was part of
the dilemma: “A woman in most people’s minds is symbolic of motherhood, so when you give a
woman a gun, it’s the same thing as giving your mother a gun and sending her off to fight.” Peggy
Paige, an instructor for the 8830th Military Police Brigade in Gaithersburg, Maryland, also drew
on gendered imagery to explain her opposition to serving in combat: “Women are equal brain-
wise, but not physically. I’m a delicate creature and I want to be treated that way.”57 As I have
shown, cultural changes in the way Americans viewed war and soldiering would have to come
before legislation could successfully open combat to women.58
In 1976, a Washington Post reporter interviewed cadets and officers at the U.S. military
academies, and they provided a variety of perspectives on the subject. Beth Lundquist, a
midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, wanted the opportunity to serve in
combat because she believed it was a waste of time to go through the academy’s rigorous
training to take a desk job when it was over. Cheryl Spohnholtz, a fellow midshipman, also
favored opening combat roles to women and said that her male counterparts resented women’s
exemption from them. Reginald Bassa and Todd Worthington, Air Force Academy cadets,
complained that women got “all the bennies [benefits] but they’re not doing the same as the
guys. They spend all this money on training the girls and then send them to the adjutant corps.”
Lieutenant General Sidney Berry, the superintendent of West Point at the time, hoped women
would not be assigned to combat units because he believed that “would tend to reduce the
effectiveness of those combat units.” Brigadier General Stanley Beck, the Air Force Academy’s
commandant of cadets, provided the most specific reason for wanting to keep combat roles
closed to women. “The fact is the American people don’t want women in combat, and I doubt
that they will change … No country in the world wants women in combat. When you get
right down to the heart of why not … one of the main factors is the effect of women being
captured and becoming POWs. They would be subject to greater abuse than their male
counterparts.”59
Captain Douglas Murray, chairman of Navy Reserve Officers Training Program (ROTC) at
the University of Michigan, saw the debate over women in combat as part of a larger conversation
about changing gender relations. “I’m of the generation that still holds chairs and opens doors,”
he said. “So my apprehensions are that men might do very foolish things in the name of gallantry.
Like run into open fire to save her the risk.” Murray went on to wonder what the demand for
women in combat might mean about a transformation of gender relations in broader society.
“Are these people a reflection of American womanhood? When will men stop opening doors?
Where is this all headed?”60
Besides the combat issue, concerns arose that women in an integrated force would “lose their
identity,” or in other words, become masculine. As the services worked to increase the numbers
of female personnel, they also enacted practices to maintain mainstream femininity. Reflecting on
the Air Force Academy going coed, Colonel James P. McCarthy worried that women, who
would be outnumbered about 28 to one by men, would adopt “lower voices, athletic walks, and
profane language” in order to blend in. “We want to graduate the most feminine women officers
we can,” McCarthy said.61 Basic training for women Marines at Parris Island, South Carolina
followed that of men’s basic in style and substance, with drill instructors hurling orders and insults
at women recruits and pushing them beyond their physical limits. Yet the one area in which
women Marines spent the most time after physical training was a course called “image develop-
ment.” In the classroom where the course was held, desks turned into vanity tables, and recruits
learned techniques for applying makeup, including appropriate shades of lipstick that did not clash
with the red braid on the Marine cap.62 The reality of having a coed force was acceptable as long

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as the image of difference between men and women, representing mainstream gender roles,
remained intact.
This was due largely to concerns about sexuality, which were not new to the post-Vietnam era
but which took on increased significance as women were integrated into the regular forces. Some
men viewed their female counterparts as either “hopeless nymphomaniacs” or “a hopeless loser or
a lesbian.” Detailing some of these attitudes, Family: The Magazine of Army/Navy/Air Force Times
published an article entitled “You’ve Come a Long Way … Maybe,” a play on the slogan of
Virginia Slims cigarettes. The article acknowledged the advances women in the military had
made, including an expected increase in the number of women in the armed services due to
heightened recruitment efforts, the removal of the cap on the percentage of women allowed to
make up the forces, the ending of salary caps for women, and equalization of retirement
regulations. By the time of the article’s publication in 1972, the armed forces had seen five
women generals. Hester Turner, one-time chair of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women
in the Services, observed, “The women now in military service are beginning to fade that image
of a benchwarmer and are becoming full and active members of the Armed Forces team.”63 But
individual attitudes suggested a less than friendly opinion of servicewomen. Air Force Captain
John Prince complained that too many members of the Women’s Air Force “fit into the truck
driver mold.” An Army captain argued that “the proximity of women to men in combat would
cause problems. People don’t react normally under combat. Sex is one of the outlets in a stress
situation, and people have personality changes sometimes in combat.”64 Even after Vietnam,
sexuality was central to some servicemen’s views both of women’s roles and of the military itself.
The Vietnam War and its aftermath coincided with several events that together stimulated
changes in gender roles and relations in the United States. The idea of extending equal rights to
women echoed the beliefs of antiwar GIs who, along with feminist activists, argued for a gender
liberation that would free both women and men from social constrictions. GI and veteran
resistance to the warrior persona at times allied with struggles against racism and sexism on the
home front. While the late 1960s and 1970s are remembered as a period of transformation in
women’s roles and rights, it was also a time, because of the Vietnam War, that masculinity and
men’s social roles were held up for scrutiny and change. This transformation had an impact on the
U.S. armed services, which could no longer rely on old connections between manhood, citizen-
ship, and military service to fill their ranks after the Vietnam War. Yet, even in this time of
change, the ideas which undergirded military masculinity were not easy to transform. Scholars
have an a opportunity to continue exploring the role of gender in military culture and Americans’
perceptions of the U.S. military, especially by analyzing the integration of the service academies
in 1976 and the role of American servicewomen in the first Gulf War.

Future Scholarship
Scholars of women, race, and gender in the Vietnam War and after have built a strong foundation
on which additional authors can build. While I have offered a cultural analysis of how gender
shaped Americans’ understandings of the war, and Vuic has written a comprehensive study of
Army nurses in Vietnam, there is room for additional work on the Women’s Army Corps, as well
as a social history of American civilian women who went to Vietnam. More quantitative analysis
on the GI antiwar movement would help illuminate the degree to which gender informed
antiwar GIs and veterans’ attitudes. A study focused on African American women in the Vietnam
War could answer questions about the intersections of race and gender in the U.S. military
experience during the war. An exploration of gays and lesbians in the military during the Vietnam
era could shed light on what, if any, impact the gay liberation movement had on the military, just

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as scholars have shown how the civil rights and women’s movements were intertwined with
Americans’ Vietnam War experiences.
There remains work to be done on gender and the Vietnam War, particularly in terms of how
the gender ideology that informed U.S. intervention in Vietnam shaped the experiences of the
Vietnamese. Although some historians have begun recasting the conflict as a Vietnamese war,
Vietnamese voices remain on the margins of the broader narrative. Images of Vietnamese women
were central to how Americans understood the U.S. relationship with Vietnam. Policymakers
feminized South Vietnam to explain why the United States had to save it from the communist
threat. On the flip side, the image of the “dragon lady” represented the insecurities U.S.
servicemen felt in a war where both allies and enemies were Vietnamese. National Liberation
Front fighters were women; GI folklore told of prostitutes who emasculated their customers.
How these types of cultural attitudes shaped interactions between U.S. servicemen and
Vietnamese women will help explain not only broader issues of U.S.-Vietnam relations but
also military-civilian engagements more generally. American servicemen’s attitudes about mas-
culinity likely colored their views of their counterparts in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
(ARVN) as well. The widespread belief among Americans that ARVN troops were lazy, cow-
ardly, and quick to desert reflects the notion that South Vietnamese soldiers were not as manly as
Americans.65 Regardless of the more complex realities, the notion of their inferior masculinity
could justify the U.S. military coming in to do a job that the ARVN allegedly could not do itself.
Incorporating the voices of Vietnamese men and women into the story regarding U.S. troops’
interactions with the Vietnamese can reveal more clearly the ways in which American ideas about
masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and power affected Vietnamese lives during the war.

Notes
1 CPT Larry J. Myers, “Hairy Problem,” Soldiers (August 1975): 28–33.
2 Works on gender and U.S. foreign relations include Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases:
Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Susan
Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1999); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); Tom Engelhardt, The End
of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books,
1995); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination,
1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Andrew Rotter, “Gender Relations,
Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964,” Journal of American History 81, no.
2 (Sept. 1994): 518–42; Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh
Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the
Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
3 Heather Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 4. For more on the image of the U.S. soldier in American popular culture, see
Andrew Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the
Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
4 See Stur, Beyond Combat; Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the
Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Richard Stacewicz, Winter

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Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997);
David Cortwright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 1975); Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement (New York:
Carroll & Graf, 2004); Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New
York: New York University Press, 1999); Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam
Veterans (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
5 Stur, Beyond Combat, 217.
6 For a detailed examination of Cold War gender imagery and U.S. foreign relations, see Stur, Beyond
Combat.
7 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 20th anniversary edition
(New York: Basic Books, 2008); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass
Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995); Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up
Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
8 Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way
We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 37.
9 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
10 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 252.
11 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
(New York: Basic Books, 1995).
12 Ronald L. Davis, Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1998); Kimmel, Manhood in America; Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy
of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
13 Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 71–72.
14 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pluto Press,
1983), xxix.
15 Slotkin provides a detailed analysis of the frontier idea in U.S. history, including the policies related to
the Vietnam War. See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century
America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
16 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 169.
17 Donald Mrozek, “The Cult and Ritual of Toughness in Cold War America,” in Rituals and
Ceremonies in Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
University Popular Press, 1980), 183.
18 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 269.
19 Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
1995). See also Thi Dieu Nguyen, The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina: Water, War, and Peace
(Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999), 87.
20 Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005);
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy
Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future:
Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Seth
Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in
Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
21 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 35.
22 Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993), 101–102.
23 Stur, Beyond Combat, 161.
24 Another 500 women served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, but most of them were
stationed in the Pacific and other parts of Southeast Asia, not in Vietnam. Fewer than 30 women
Marines served in Vietnam. Only nine women Navy officers served tours of duty in Vietnam in a
capacity other than nurse. See Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American
Women in Vietnam, 1966–1975 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987), 4; Ron Steinman,

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Women in Vietnam (New York: TV Books, 2000), 18–20; Susan H. Godson, Serving Proudly: A History
of Women in the U.S. Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 213; Col. Mary V. Stremlow, A
History of the Women Marines, 1946–1977 (Washington: History and Museums Division
Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1986), 87.
25 Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 4; Milton J. Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and
Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 163.
26 Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 4.
27 For a thorough examination of the role of the Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam, see Kara Dixon Vuic,
Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011).
28 Stur, Beyond Combat, 64–141.
29 May, Homeward Bound, xxiv–xxv.
30 Breines, Young, White, and Miserable; Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the
Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its
Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to
Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Susan M.
Hartmann, “Women’s Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not
June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994), 84–100; Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A
Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” in Not June Cleaver, 229–62; Ruth Feldstein,
Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement
Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2006).
31 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left (New York: Vintage, 1980).
32 “GIs and Asian Women: The Army’s Deadly Game,” Fatigue Press, May 1971, 7, Wisconsin
Historical Society.
33 Lifton, Home from the War, 30–31.
34 Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
35 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 132.
36 Stur, Beyond Combat; Moser, The New Winter Soldiers; David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance
during the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of
the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004); Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A
History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Richard
Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1997).
37 Amanda Boczar, “Uneasy Allies: The Americanization of Sexual Policies in South Vietnam,” The
Journal of American-East Asian Relations 22, no.3 (2015): 187–220; Amber Batura, “The Playboy Way:
Playboy Magazine, Soldiers, and the Military in Vietnam,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations
22, no.3 (2015): 221–42.
38 John Lewis, “Legalized Prostitution: Brass’s New Weapon Against GIs and Vietnamese Women,”
The Bond, January 27, 1972, 4, Wisconsin Historical Society.
39 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign
Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The
German-American Encounter 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002); Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
40 James Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: New
York University Press, 1999); Herman Graham, The Brothers’ Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and
the Military Experience (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).

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41 Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005).
42 Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 78–79; Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts, 18, 27,
143; Lorena Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Vietnam War Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 111–26; George Mariscal, Aztlan and Viet Nam:
Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 203–12;
Lifton, Home from the War, 239.
43 “Strike Back Campaign,” Fatigue Press, Issue 25 (Date missing), 7, Wisconsin Historical Society.
44 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 364.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Stur, Beyond Combat; Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
(New York: Picador, 2013); Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War
(New York: SUNY Press, 2010).
48 “Veterans’ Testimony on Vietnam – Need for Investigation,” Congressional Record, April 6, 1971,
p. E2831.
49 “Veterans’ Testimony on Vietnam – Need for Investigation.”
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982);
Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 2009).
53 “Women: Moving Up,” Soldiers (August 1975): 11, National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park, Maryland, Record Group 319 – Records of the Army Staff, Women’s Army Corps,
1945-1978 [hereafter NARA RG 319], Box 94, Folder 791.
54 Holm, Women in the Military, 260–88; Bailey, America’s Army, 133, 135.
55 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 136–37.
56 Emily Fisher, “Women Mastering Combat, but Men Lag in Acceptance,” Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 25, 1976.
57 “Women: Moving Up,” 12–14.
58 Bailey, America’s Army.
59 Phil McCombs, “Women Cadets See Combat Roles as Key to Equality,” Washington Post, December
23, 1976.
60 Fisher, “Women Mastering Combat, but Men Lag in Acceptance.”
61 “Air Force Academy, Going Coed, Ponders Pockets and Calories,” Wall Street Journal, February 18,
1976, 1–2.
62 “Leathernecks with Lipstick,” Washington Post, March 7, 1976.
63 Margaret Eastman, “The Woman in Uniform: How Liberated Can She Be?,” Family: The Magazine of
Army/Navy/Air Force Times, March 15, 1972, 7.
64 Ibid., 8.
65 Important studies of ARVN include Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South
Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006) and Andrew Wiest, Vietnam’s
Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

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 9
TRANSITIONING TO AN
ALL-VOLUNTEER FORCE
Melissa T. Brown
city university of new york—borough of manhattan community college

In 1973, the United States abolished the draft. Four years earlier, President Richard M. Nixon
had appointed a committee to develop a plan for instituting an all-volunteer force. The Gates
Commission envisioned a military based on labor-market principles, whose composition
would not differ greatly from the conscripted forces. The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) suc-
ceeded, but the Gates Commission was wrong about the make-up of the forces. The demo-
graphics of the AVF changed, and most notably for military culture, the proportion of women
and the roles they filled markedly increased. This chapter will examine the literature that
addresses how the transition to a volunteer force impacted the gendering of U.S. forces.
Scholars have explored the demographics of the new volunteer force and the gendering of
recruitment. Various works have chronicled the transformation of women’s participation that
began in the 1970s, with women serving in greater numbers and in new roles, changes in family
policy allowing women with children to serve, and the dissolution of separate women’s
organizations. They have also revealed military men’s reactions to those changes. Scholars
have investigated the attempts in the 1980s to roll back women’s participation, the resurgence
of militarized masculinity in the larger culture, and an accompanying lack of tolerance for gays
and lesbians in the military. Other topics covered in this chapter include the literature on the
1991 Gulf War and media coverage of women, Gulf War-era ideals of militarized masculinity,
and debates over women and combat.

The Demographics of Service

As chronicled in Beth Bailey’s America’s Army, David R. Segal’s Recruiting for Uncle Sam, and my
own Enlisting Masculinity, the end of the draft led to debates over whether conscription was a civic
obligation or a violation of individual liberty.1 Commentators asked who would serve and
predicted an Army of the underclass, mainly reliant on the poor and minorities who would be
driven by economic need. They were really asking which men would serve. As I point out, the
discussions of equality, diversity, and citizenship ignored questions of gender. The unspoken
assumption was that civic obligation only matters for men. As long as women and men can both
volunteer, however, the end of conscription “breaks the automatic link between masculinity and
soldiering.”2 This means that “in terms of gender, the all-volunteer force, with its greatly
increased participation of women, becomes more representative of society, not less, but this

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isn’t seen to have value, the way that the mingling of various classes of men does.”3 Debates about
the draft reflected a masculinized conception of citizenship.
The make-up of the forces did change. In the 1970s, enlistees, as predicted, became poorer,
and less-educated whites were more likely to volunteer. However, Bailey shows that as the
military raised standards for high school diplomas and test results, the poorest Americans
became less likely to qualify, and the military became more middle class.4 Women’s participa-
tion increased significantly, as did African-Americans’. In “The All-Volunteer Force in the
1970s,” David R. Segal et al. focus on the intersections between race and social class among the
young men who volunteered, and Mady Wechsler Segal, Meredith Hill Thanner, and David
R. Segal examine the participation of both African-American and Hispanic men and women in
“Hispanic and African American Men and Women in the U.S. Military: Trends in
Representation.”5 Segal, Thanner, and Segal’s consideration of both race/ethnicity and gender
is uncommon. African-American women serve at disproportionately high rates—Brenda
Moore explores how racial and gender inequality propel them into service in “From
Underrepresentation to Overrepresentation: African American Women”—but they receive
little attention in the literature on the military, which tends to look at “African Americans” or
“women.”6 The AVF has generally been successful at dealing with racial relations, as Charles C.
Moskos and John Sibley Butler demonstrate in All That We Can Be, and the divisions between
men and women, who have been excluded from combat, have been considered more salient.7
In The Rise of the Military Welfare State, a study of Army social welfare policies, Jennifer
Mittelstadt examines the anxieties caused by the demographic shifts of the early AVF.
Discussions of recruit “quality” often conflated concerns about the poor performance of
under-educated soldiers with concerns over the growing number of soldiers who were low-
income, African-American, and/or women (even though African-Americans in the Army at
that period tended to have more education than their white peers and women had to meet
higher enlistment standards than men), a distressing development for those whose archetype of
a soldier was a middle-class white man and who associated blackness and femininity with
welfare and dependence.8
With the end of the draft, the armed forces also became more married. Historically, lower-
ranking enlisted men were discouraged or even prohibited from marrying, while officers were
expected to marry, and their wives were supposed to serve as a volunteer auxiliary. According to
Mady Wechsler Segal in “Military Culture and Military Families,” with the end of the draft, the
need to retain trained personnel led the military to do more to accommodate families, though
wives who wanted to build careers or get an education were hampered by frequent relocation.9
One of the gendered effects of the transition to the AVF, then, has been the increase in military
wives, women who are expected to shape their lives around their husbands’ careers and act in
ways that support force readiness. In Maneuvers, Cynthia Enloe describes how military wives, who
are socialized to further military goals, are objects of concern and institutional control.10 They
have to take on all family responsibilities when their husbands deploy but are supposed to yield
authority when he returns. Mittelstadt shows that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Army wives
successfully pushed for better family support programs—ones that weren’t entirely dependent on
the volunteer labor of wives themselves—and “Army wives gained greater voice and power as the
army began to extend its social welfare apparatus directly to wives and families.”11 Over time,
however, “the army would resist and attempt to contain wives’ influence.”12 Over the course of
the 1980s, ties between Army family programs and conservative Christian organizations “inten-
sified the army’s already existing emphasis on traditional gender roles—the male soldier-bread-
winner (at the expense of the female soldier) and the supportive wife—to create powerful
messages about men and women and the relationship between them in the army.”13 While

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military wives have banded together, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider’s Sound Off! reveals that
servicewomen and civilian wives have not made common cause as women in a male-dominated
institution; military women may face hostility from the wives of the men they work with,
especially Navy wives concerned about their husbands at sea on ships with mixed-gender
crews.14

Recruitment
In order to get men into the military with no draft to compel them, the military must actively
recruit. In the early 1970s, marketing the military branches was a difficult task. In the public
imagination, the military has been connected to masculinity and the making of men, but at the
time conscription ended, military service was largely discredited by the Vietnam War, and
masculinity was being assailed by the women’s movement and by changes to the economy that
threatened men’s breadwinner status. In America’s Army, Bailey provides a history of how the
Army’s recruiting practices evolved over the course of the AVF, while in Enlisting Masculinity, I
examine how the recruiting materials themselves have constructed gender.15 I argue that the
branches responded to challenges to masculinity not by trying to de-gender service in their
recruiting advertisements, but by drawing on a variety of different constructions of masculinity
over the course of the AVF, including versions based on economic independence and upward
mobility, dominance and mastery through technology, proving oneself by meeting challenges,
hybrid forms combining toughness with compassion and egalitarianism, as well as a more
traditional warrior masculinity. A small proportion of recruiting materials has been aimed at
women, with some seeking to reassure potential recruits that they won’t lose their femininity and
others offering women equal opportunity or the chance to have experiences and acquire traits
typically associated with masculinity, like adventure and independence. Women have become a
regular, if token, part of recruiting imagery. Men, I demonstrate, are still its central target, and
only men have been represented as warriors.
With the transition to the AVF, one component of the military’s recruiting strategy was the
creation of social welfare policies to make service more attractive and increase retention. In The
Rise of the Military Welfare State, Mittelstadt argues that Army leaders, dismayed by the free-market
model of the AVF envisioned by the Gates Commission, posited a “model of masculine
familialism” with the Army serving as “benevolent patriarch” of an “Army Family.”16 The
Army’s promises to “[take] care of its own,” presented in some of its publicity materials,
mimicked “the patriarchal gender relations of the traditional male breadwinner family”; the
Army, as “symbolic head of household” cared for its “dependents,” while the soldier in turn cared
for his own family with the aid of Army support programs. The Army Family ideal was meant to
engender the feelings of connection and loyalty which would make a soldier decide to stay in the
military, while working “externally to represent the military as an institution epitomized by …
virtues partly associated with traditional male-headed households.”17 Many supporters of the
military, however, opposed the Army playing a social welfare role, fearing it would attract
“misfits” and turn the Army into “a last resort for those who could not make it in the civilian
world and depended on the army as low-income civilians used public assistance programs.” They
predicted “the degradation of the army into a feminized social welfare provider, anathema to the
masculine, martial purpose of the institution.”18 One specific type of benefit had the potential to
address their anxieties. In the late 1970s, military officials and sociologists began to push for
educational benefits as a way to increase the recruitment of middle-class white men into the
Army, to counter demographic trends they found troubling.19 The GI Bill of the early 1980s,
championed by President Ronald Reagan, was meant to increase the Army’s prestige and “held

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the promise to transform the army’s image from a social welfare institution of last resort to a
foothold for potential, if not actual, middle-class America.”20 Thus, gender has been a concern
for military recruiting not only in terms of who is recruited and the message of recruitment
materials, but even in relation to the image of the military generated by benefit programs meant to
facilitate recruiting.

The 1970s: Women’s Participation Transformed

The AVF could not have succeeded without women, but the Gates Commission didn’t consider
the possibility of increasing the use of women, assuming they would continue to make up less
than 2 percent of the forces. In fact, according to Martin Binkin and Mark J. Eitelberg in
“Women and Minorities in the All-Volunteer Force,” the commission discussed replacing
many positions servicewomen tended to fill, like clerical jobs, with civilian workers to reduce
costs.21 Robert K. Griffith, Jr.’s history, The US Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–
1974, shows that the Army was taking a different path.22 The Army had been quietly conducting
its own studies of how it might achieve a volunteer force, and those studies recommended
expanding the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). The Army opened more Military Occupational
Specialties (MOSs) to women. The Army planned a publicity campaign that would tell women
that “their true value to the service is not that they are capable of replacing men, an unfeminine
connotation, but that they are women and the feminine touch is required to do the job better,”
but would also emphasize that women receive equal treatment when it comes to pay, benefits,
and responsibilities.23
The Navy’s plans for women are detailed by Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall in Crossed
Currents, a history of women in the Navy.24 In August 1972, anticipating the passage of the Equal
Rights Amendment and the inception of the AVF, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval
Operations, issued a directive that expanded roles for women. In previous decades, the Navy had
accepted a small number of women, who were held to higher educational and mental capacity
standards than male recruits, for a limited set of jobs in traditionally feminine fields,25 and it wasn’t
concerned when it failed to retain many over-qualified servicewomen. With the impending loss
of draft-motivated volunteers, Zumwalt wanted to improve the retention and utilization of
women.
By the end of the 1970s, women’s participation exceeded the military planners’ expectations,
rising from 1.3 percent of the enlisted ranks in 1971 to 7.6 percent in 1979. As Jeanne Holm
details in Women in the Military, over the course of the decade, several policy changes fundamen-
tally altered the terms of women’s participation in the military.26 In 1972, along with opening
more jobs, the Army and Navy opened the Reserve Officer Training Corps to women, following
the Air Force, which had done so in 1969.27 In 1973, Navy women became eligible for aviation
duty in noncombat aircraft. Army women became eligible in 1974 and Air Force women in 1977;
Holm argues that flying is the Air Force’s central mission, and Air Force men fought the hardest to
keep women off planes.28 In 1975, the Department of Defense (DOD) stopped automatically
discharging women who became pregnant. Congress opened the service academies—the under-
graduate colleges run by the services that commission officers—to women in 1976. In 1978, a
court ruling and subsequent change in the law allowed women to be permanently assigned to
noncombatant ships.
The new pregnancy policy of 1975 was a crucial change for servicewomen. The services
opposed the new policy, which made discharge for pregnancy voluntary, but they faced a
mounting series of lawsuits over the issue. Before 1975, women were kicked out of the military
for becoming pregnant, or even for becoming a stepmother, and women with minor children

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couldn’t enlist. According to Kara Dixon Vuic in “‘I’m Afraid We’re Going to Have to Just
Change Our Ways’: Marriage, Motherhood, and Pregnancy in the Army Nurse Corps during the
Vietnam War,” the policies barring mothers from serving first began to loosen as the Army made
exceptions for badly needed nurses during the Vietnam War.29 According to Judith Hicks Stiehm
in “The Generations of U.S. Enlisted Women,” the military assumed that young women would
serve for a few years then leave to marry and have children, as was common in civilian jobs.30 A
select few would find a vocation in the military and stay childless and probably single as well to
pursue it. Many WAC leaders weren’t supportive of the policy change. Stiehm notes that the
WAC functioned as “a sisterhood of women in uniform” who, though they worked at jobs
alongside men, trained together, lived together, were subject to the Corp’s all-female adminis-
tration, and supported each other in formal and informal networks.31 The WAC community of
single, childless women would fracture with the addition of mothers. In addition, the pregnancy
policy applied to both married and single servicewomen. A single woman with children, WAC
officers believed, might find it difficult to meet both her service and parental responsibilities, and
she would be “vulnerable to the sexual slurs military women have always endured.”32
Nevertheless, Stiehm finds that women who enlisted in the mid-1970s or later expected that
they would be able to combine family life and a military career.
The anxiety over sexual slurs against pregnant servicewomen was part of a larger concern
about the image of military women on the part of the women’s services directors. These women
officers were highly concerned with maintaining a respectable, feminine image, and they strictly
policed the dress and behavior of enlisted women. Bettie J. Morden details these restrictions and
the attitudes of the commanders who enforced them in The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978.33
Holm connects the service directors’ anxieties about respectability to the vicious slander cam-
paigns faced by military women in the 1940s and 1950s, which painted them as immoral.34 Bailey
also traces out how the concerns about respectability and reputation surfaced in WAC pamphlets,
training films, and recruiting materials, as well as the WAC directors’ opinions and policies.35 So,
even as they worked to expand opportunities for women, the heads of the women’s programs
were focused on the acceptability of military women, which, in their experience, meant not just a
feminine image, but also not being seen as a threat to men in the institution and not challenging
men’s exclusive responsibility for combat. As Linda Grant De Pauw shows in Battle Cries and
Lullabies, a history of the roles played by women in war, the military has had the image of being so
self-evidently a man’s place that any woman who wanted to be a part of it must either be
unnaturally mannish (a lesbian) or a whore.36 This dichotomy is also explored in Camouflage Isn’t
Only for Combat, Melissa S. Herbert’s study of how military women attempt to negotiate
gendered expectations about behavior.37
Even beyond the changes in personnel policies, the 1970s was a decade that transformed the
conditions of military women’s service and challenged long-held beliefs about appropriate roles
for military women. Women still had to meet higher enlistment standards than men,38 but, as
Stiehm explains, they entered nontraditional fields previously closed to them, with varying levels
of success.39 Military women began to wear fatigues and uniforms with pants. In Mixed Company,
Helen Rogan discusses the problems associated with Army women’s fatigues and boots,40 and in
“Dressed to Kill?” Elizabeth L. Hillman examines the gendered anxieties over the design of
women’s uniforms at the newly integrated service academies.41 Holm chronicles a variety of
major changes in women’s training, command authority, promotions, and support structures.42
Military women began to train alongside men, no longer receiving lessons in deportment or
make-up application.43 Early in the decade, women could volunteer to receive limited rifle
training; by the end, it was mandatory that they qualify on the M-16, and, if going into combat
support, learn how to use grenade launchers, claymore mines, and M-60 machine guns.44 A few

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women began commanding men, and by 1980, women officers in all of the branches were
integrated into men’s promotion lists. The move offered women a theoretical improvement in
status and promotability, but it meant they competed against men for promotion, even though
their opportunities had been limited and they had no access to combat experience.45 Over the
course of the 1970s, the separate organizations for women, which protected women’s interests
but also isolated them from the rest of military, were disestablished, leaving women’s issues to be
incorporated into the jurisdiction of other personnel staff offices. With the dissolution of the
WAC, in particular, women became more fully integrated into the military, no longer assigned to
separate units, which was part of women generally becoming a more normal part of the forces.
There were also large costs, as women lost support structures and an all-woman chain of
command that promoted women and protected their welfare in a male-dominated
environment.46 As Stiehm put it, women’s integration was actually “submergence.”47
Many servicemen believed that the expansion of women’s roles compromised their mascu-
linity. According to David H. Marlowe in “The Manning of Force and the Structure of Battle,”
Army men who trained in gender-integrated units believed that all-male units produced
“tougher, more competent, militarily better trained, and ‘harder’ soldiers” even when the
training programs were essentially identical.48 The men who trained alongside women assumed
their training must be less difficult. “The presence of women lowered the perceived value of the
training to many of the men, who asked themselves, ‘If women can do it, how much of a
challenge can it be?’” even though they generally respected and cooperated with the women
soldiers.49
Military men also reacted strongly to women’s presence at the service academies. The
military’s top brass strove mightily, but without success, to prevent Congress from mandating
women’s admission to the academies, and many young men who attended resented the presence
of women. In “Pernicious Cohesion,” Carol Burke reveals the resistance to women at the naval
academy expressed in misogynistic folk traditions such as jokes, cadence calls, pranks, graffiti, and
academy rituals and by the groups of “Webbites” formed by male midshipmen (students), named
for James Webb, future Secretary of the Navy, U.S. Senator, and presidential hopeful who was a
vocal critic of women’s admission to the academy.50 Stiehm examines the first year of women’s
integration at the Air Force Academy, in Bring Me Men and Women, by interviewing the
predominantly male officials who planned and implemented women’s admission. Studying the
different administrative units of the academy, she found that the Physical Education department
was concerned about “fatness and femininity,” the Commandant of Cadets was concerned about
“inappropriately chivalrous behavior by men, reverse discrimination, and women’s capacity to
command,” as well as how male cadets would accept female peers, and the academic faculty
assumed “that their programs were ‘sex-neutral’ and required no adjustment whatever.”51 Stiehm
concludes that “equal opportunity, experience, and treatment cannot be achieved when the
participation of one group (in this case women) is numerically restricted (in this case to
approximately 10 percent), and when that same group is denied routine access to the organiza-
tion’s most valued role (in the Air Force, that of pilot).”52 According to Lance Janda in Stronger
than Custom, a history of the admission of women to West Point, the first women cadets “endured
the full spectrum of sexism, from verbal harassment to physical attacks, from persecution in the
classroom to sexual assault in the barracks.”53 Male cadets who expressed support for their female
classmates were subject to harassment, and “in this cauldron of peer pressure many men in the
Class of 1980 quickly learned to despise women at the Academy.”54 Differing physical standards
for men and women has been the most contentious issue and one of the main subjects of men’s
complaints. More fundamentally, women “threatened the image male cadets nurtured in their
minds about what it meant to be a cadet, a soldier, and even a man.”55 Ultimately, however,

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Janda, writing two decades after Stiehm’s assessment of the Air Force Academy, believes that
“lingering ills should not obscure the very real accomplishments of West Point in integrating
women” and that women “are now part and parcel of the fabric of Academy life, a part of the
habit and tradition of the institution.”56

The 1980s: Womanpause, Resurgent Masculinity, Restrictions on Gays and

Lesbians
While the 1970s saw rapid expansion of women’s participation in the military, the 1980s began
with efforts to roll it back, as well as a reinstitution of draft registration for young men only. The
late 1970s was a difficult period for the military and, in particular, for the Army, as Beth Bailey
chronicles.57 The AVF was proving to be more expensive than predicted, and Congress balked at
paying for adequate recruiting resources. Pay and benefits fell behind those of entry-level civilian
jobs, and the forces couldn’t meet recruiting targets. International tensions were mounting, with
the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1980, President Carter
reinstated draft registration, which Gerald Ford had ended in 1975. Congress would not support
Carter’s request that women be included (for noncombat service), and in 1981 the Supreme
Court upheld the constitutionality of excluding women from Selective Service registration and
any potential draft in Rostker v. Goldberg.
Shortly after the 1980 presidential elections, Army and Air Force officials attempted to scale back
the recruitment of women, claiming they wanted to study women’s impact on readiness, which had
already been studied several times in the 1970s. In Gender Differences at Work, Christine L. Williams
argues that “the numerous studies of women in the military during this period can be seen as
attempts to resist their incursion: each sought to discover ways that women compare unfavorably
with men in order to justify excluding them from military service.”58 Holm attributes the attempt
to limit the recruitment of women (dubbed “womanpause”) both to resistance to women’s
incursions into previously male areas and to a desire by the Army to undermine the AVF and
convince the incoming Reagan administration to return to a draft. Holm, who had served as
Women in the Air Force director, believes that the Air Force joined the Army’s efforts out of fears
that if the Army held down female enlistments, the DOD might look to the Air Force to recruit
additional women to leave more men for the Army.59 In the early 1980s, however, the AVF was
surmounting its problems. Bailey credits a variety of factors: The Reagan administration increased
defense spending and military pay, the Army reformed recruiting, the early-1980s recession made
service more attractive, Vietnam was moving further into the past, and a more conservative,
patriotic culture accompanied Reagan’s win.60 With the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment,
which had only been ratified by thirty-five of the necessary thirty-eight states by the 1982 deadline,
the military was feeling less pressure to provide opportunities for women, especially perhaps since
Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA movement played on fears that under the ERA, women could be
drafted and forced into combat. In 1982, the Army barred women from twenty-three MOSs
previously open to them because of potential proximity to combat operations in wartime; in Arms
and the Enlisted Woman, Stiehm examines how the branches made changes to combat codes to
justify restrictions on women.61 That same year, the Army re-segregated men and women in basic
training, which had been desegregated in the 1970s.62
The 1980s saw a reassertion of masculine martial values within the culture at large. In
“Redeeming Vietnam,” J. William Gibson argues that the defeat in Vietnam and the feminist
and civil rights movements “constituted a serious challenge to traditional male military values”
such that “the 1970s were a time of deep crisis for the cultural reproduction of war and the
warrior”; in the 1980s, two different types of cultural productions redeemed militarized

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masculinity.63 Paramilitary culture, celebrated in novels, television shows, magazines, games,

training camps, and movies, especially those featuring Sylvester Stallone as “Rambo,” puts the
hero outside of the constraints of military structures that limit his ability to achieve victory,
making all men potential warriors. On the other hand, military institutions themselves are
legitimated in “techno-thrillers,” including the novels of Tom Clancy, which restore military
prestige, create positive post-Vietnam war narratives, and reassert “the primacy of heroic male
warriors, magic weapons, and horrific enemies as fundamental cultural categories for Americans
to conceptualize and experience the world.”64 In The Remasculinization of America, Susan Jeffords
also argues that movies, books, television shows, and other depictions of the Vietnam War
reaffirmed a traditional masculinity that was challenged by the loss of that war.65
Along with a resurgent conservatism and an attempt to constrict women’s military roles, the
1980s also began with new efforts to enforce the ban on gay and lesbian servicemembers, further
contributing to a reinvigoration of military masculinity. According to Randy Shilts in Conduct
Unbecoming, the military’s tolerance of gay servicemembers fluctuated depending on its personnel
needs.66 In the 1970s, individual commanders had discretion over whether or not to discharge
gay and lesbian enlistees. A few gay and lesbian servicemembers began to challenge the discharge
policy through litigation, and the Air Force and Navy advised that discharge was discretionary,
not mandatory. In 1981, to close any loopholes that could make a legal challenge successful, the
DOD mandated the discharge of any “person, regardless of sex, who engages in, desires to engage
in, or intends to engage in homosexual acts.”67
As Carol Cohn points out in her analysis of the Clinton administration’s proposal to lift the
ban,68 “Gays in the Military: Texts and Subtexts,” public concerns and debate about gays in the
military focus almost entirely on gay men, not lesbians.69 She argues that the gay ban helped to
preserve the masculinizing function of the military. The absence of (openly) gay men allowed
men to enjoy homoerotic experiences and intense bonds with other men while having their
heterosexual masculinity established and reinforced by the military—an institution synonymous
with manhood. A great deal of the discussion focused on privacy—not generally an attribute of
military life—and showers. The subtext, for Cohn, is that if gays openly served, men might have
to imagine themselves the objects of the male gaze, putting them in a feminine subject position. In
“The Pursuit of Manhood and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces,” Kenneth L. Karst makes
a similar argument: “When a gay soldier comes to the Army’s official attention, the real threat is
not the hindrance of day-to-day operations, but rather the tarnishing of the Army’s traditionally
masculine image.”70 Karst explicitly links womanpause and the 1981 policy on gay servicemem-
bers; both the exclusion of gays and limits on women were “part of a vigorous effort to keep the
gender line clearly marked.”71
While the political discussion focused on gay men, scholars have shown that the discrimina-
tory policy had a bigger impact on women. As noted earlier, servicewomen have always been
suspected of being lesbians, and, indeed, military service required that women violate gender
norms, which is why the women’s services put such effort into reinforcing the femininity of
women recruits. According to Rogan, there was a strong lesbian culture within the WAC. While
there were intermittent witch hunts, leading to courts-martial and dishonorable discharges,
lesbians were relatively comfortable and sheltered. Writing about life at WAC Headquarters at
Fort McClellan before men began arriving in the early 1970s, Rogan even claims that straight
women were kept out of the inner circles of WAC power.72 In Citizenship Rites, Ilene Rose
Feinman reports on the disputes over the history of lesbians in the WAC and just how large a
presence they were over the course of the WAC’s existence as a separate organization.73 Writing
about the inception of the WAC during World War II, Leisa D. Meyer argues in Creating G.I.
Jane that while World War II allowed for the development of lesbian subcultures, WAC leaders

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found ways to deal with “the lesbian problem” without publicly acknowledging lesbianism,
which would have reflected adversely on the WAC.74 However entrenched lesbians were,
women’s integration and the dissolution of the WAC left them exposed.
In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement was pressing for new opportunities for
women, and the social acceptability of military service for women increased. However, as
Michelle M. Benecke and Kirstin S. Dodge show in “Military Women in Nontraditional Job
Fields: Casualties of the Armed Forces’ War on Homosexuals,” the ban on lesbians was a tool that
could be used against women making incursions into nontraditional fields and to sexually harass
women and coerce them into sexual relationships.75 The ban was a threat to all servicewomen,
not just lesbians. In the 1980s, women were disproportionate targets of homosexual purges.
While men were usually investigated individually, women were subject to mass investigations—
witch hunts—in which suspected women were interrogated and pressured to name other
lesbians. As more men filled recruiting quotas, commanders who disliked having women in
nontraditional fields challenged their presence by accusing them of lesbianism. Frequently
targeted were “competent, assertive, and athletic women—i.e., women whose service records
[were] above reproach, leaving no other vulnerability.”76 The fairness of hearings was compro-
mised by “widespread acceptance by military men of stereotypes about women in the military
and about lesbians.” For instance, one accused servicewoman was asked why she wasn’t suspi-
cious of certain women because they “looked like homosexuals,” and “board members indicated
that she should have known that women who play softball are lesbians.”77 Benecke and Dodge
argue that as servicewomen penetrated previously all-male fields, accusing women of lesbianism
was a way servicemen could maintain their sense of masculinity (in effect, alleging that what they
do is a man’s job, and the women who do it aren’t “real” women).78 While women in
nontraditional fields bore the brunt of the accusations, any woman who didn’t make herself
sexually accessible and who spent time socializing with women opened herself to charges of
lesbianism (meaning that women couldn’t seek each other out for support or join women’s teams
or groups without risk of being called a lesbian).79 Men blackmailed women into accepting sexual
advances by implying that rejection confirmed their homosexuality, an extortion scheme known
as “lesbian-baiting.” Women failed to report harassment and subjected themselves to unwanted
sexual relationships to avoid being kicked out of the military. The end of the gay ban in 2011 was
a major advance for all military women, as well as gay men.
While the service branches began the 1980s attempting to undermine the AVF and roll back
women’s participation, the Pentagon didn’t want to reinstate conscription and didn’t support
new restrictions on women’s roles, even as the homosexuality policy helped to regulate those
roles in practice. In fact, later in the decade, the Pentagon attempted to achieve consistency
among the services in its application of combat restrictions. The result was the 1988 “Risk Rule,”
which established uniform criteria for closing noncombat positions to women, based on the risk
that they would be exposed to direct combat, hostile fire, or capture, and which allowed for the
opening of thousands of new positions to women. The clarification was necessary. As Holm
recounts, in 1983, around 170 women soldiers and a small number of Air Force women
participated in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada, with confusion over how
combat exclusion policies applied. Some women weren’t allowed to deploy or were sent
home, though some were subsequently returned to Grenada because their units were short-
handed without them.80 In Ground Zero, Linda Bird Francke reports on similar problems that
arose in the 1986 airstrikes against Libya. Some of the tanker aircrews were mixed-gender, so
crewmembers received expeditionary medals instead of combat medals—which contribute to
promotions—that the crews would have received had they all been all-male.81 According to
Cynthia Enloe in The Morning After, the Pentagon’s public relations officials tried to limit media

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coverage of servicewomen in Grenada, because their roles “were wider—and closer to the
masculinized inner sanctum of combat—than many members of the American public had
realized.”82 Women were a necessary part of the AVF, but the military’s masculine image and
culture required a sharp line between men’s and women’s roles, even if those lines became fuzzy
in practice.

The 1990s: The Gulf War

The 1991 Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, altered public ideas about soldiering and
gender and led to a major expansion of women’s roles. Almost 41,000 women, a little more than 7
percent of total U.S. forces, were deployed to the Gulf. D’Ann Campbell argues in “Combatting
the Gender Gulf” that the war was a test of women’s abilities, and they passed. The military found
that “women performed well in hundreds of combat support and combat service support roles
such as patrolling the perimeters, flying helicopters, commanding Patriot missile launcher sites,
controlling air traffic, driving trucks, and providing the senior commanders with daily intelli-
gence briefings,” and “the Pentagon’s final report to Congress on the Persian Gulf concluded that
‘women performed admirably and without substantial friction or special considerations.’”83
Servicewomen stationed in Saudi Arabia faced discrimination and harassment from Saudi men,
and the DOD placed restrictions on them related to clothing and driving to avoid offending Saudi
sensibilities. Women also faced harassment from fellow servicemen. However, harassment,
Campbell shows, mainly came from men outside a woman’s unit, as the men and women who
worked together under the wartime conditions successfully bonded and saw each other as
teammates.84
The media gave heavy coverage to women’s participation. The Gulf War raised Americans’
awareness of military women—how many there were and the range of jobs they performed.
Enloe argues that images of American military women were used to bolster the legitimacy of the
war and the military: “By contrasting the allegedly liberated American woman tank mechanic
with the Saudi woman deprived of a driver’s license, American reporters [implied] that the
United States is the advanced, civilized country whose duty it is to take the initiative in resolving
the Persian Gulf crisis and in leading the international community into a new world order.”85
Military women were portrayed as “doing a job and in so doing enhancing the country’s military
competence”; in other words, “they were professionals.” According to Enloe, professionalism
equaled respectability: “A professional woman soldier, it appeared, was neither morally loose nor
suspiciously manly. The media stories dealt with the latter anxiety, so common in World War II,
by emphasizing husbands, children, and boyfriends left behind.”86 Media coverage of the war also
made feminists more aware of military women. As an antimilitarist activist in the 1980s, Ilene
Feinman and many of her fellow activists had assumed that servicewomen had a false conscious-
ness or had been subject to the “poor draft,” driven by economic need. The Gulf War made her
contend with the idea that there were women who loved the military and wanted it to be their
career.87
While media coverage raised awareness of military women and contributed to a professiona-
lized public image, as Linda Bird Francke shows, one group of servicewomen was greeted with
much more ambivalence: mothers. The Gulf War was dubbed a “Mom’s War,” with stories of
women having to leave behind small children. Francke reveals that much of this coverage was due
to reservists who hadn’t expected to be called to active duty contacting reporters to try to use
media attention to shame the military into granting deferments or exemptions.88 Of single parents
deployed to the Gulf, fathers outnumbered mothers three-to-one, but there were no stories on
fathers torn about leaving their children or the hardships their children faced. The media coverage

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of the problems of mothers at war was also entirely overblown: “Despite the public perception
that vast numbers [of mothers] were either unable or unwilling to deploy, less than one-half of one
percent of the 23,000 single parents and 5,700 service couples with children detailed to the Gulf
were unable to go because of family reasons.”89 The media attention had an impact, however, as
Francke demonstrates. In January 1991, various bills were introduced in Congress to bring home
single parents or one parent in a dual-career couple and to exempt them from future combat
deployments, potentially leading to a “mommy track” that would limit servicewomen’s career
opportunities. Military women’s groups and civilian groups like the National Organization for
Women and the National Women’s Law Center successfully fought the legislation.
The Gulf War led to a major expansion of women’s military roles. Opponents of women in
combat often claim that Americans would not accept women dying in war or being taken prisoner.
Thirteen women were killed in the Gulf and two became prisoners of war. According to Francke,
Americans expressed no particular shock or anger at the women’s deaths.90 They also weren’t
specifically upset at women being taken prisoner, though there was general outrage at Iraqi
mistreatment of American POWs.91 Servicewomen had performed ably, and the ones who died
demonstrated that combat restrictions did not protect women. All personnel were at risk; Iraqi scud
missiles were aimed at the rear areas as well as the front lines. By the end of 1993, legislation allowed
women to serve on combat ships and to compete for assignment to combat aircraft. In 1994, the
DOD repealed the Risk Rule, which had failed to protect women serving in the Gulf. The new
policy stated that women could be assigned to any positions for which they were qualified, except
units below the brigade level whose primary mission is direct ground combat.
The Gulf War not only ushered in new roles for military women, according to both Linda E.
Boose in “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’” and Steve Niva in “Tough and Tender,”
it reaffirmed American masculinity and put to rest the ghosts of Vietnam.92 Boose traces a
transformation of Vietnam War narratives over the course of the 1970s and 1980s that retro-
actively feminized the antiwar movement and positioned veterans as the victims of the war. She
posits Vietnam as a break in militarized ties between fathers and sons and argues that with the
reconfiguring of narratives, “the patriarchal military state has been returned to its pre-Vietnam
status of wise father.”93 The Gulf War allowed “a revivified militarism that could once again
become self-reproducing.”94 Boose reads the cultural ideal of masculinity in the wake of the Gulf
War as boyish—father-obsessed, irresponsible, and envisioning life in terms of games or sports.
The experiences of the Vietnam generation offered the nation “a chance to grow up” through
“painful self-knowledge.” The Gulf War was instead an enacting of “regressive desires” televising
to the world a “depiction of the culture of American masculinity that the latter half of the
twentieth century had shaped: an image of wanton boys, killing for their sport.”95
For Steve Niva, however, the Gulf War heralded a new vision of martial masculinity. The
emerging paradigm of masculinity did not restore “the pre-Vietnam ideal of patriarchal American
manhood” but was a transformed, hybrid version that combined “toughness and aggressiveness
with tenderness and compassion.”96 While enemies have historically been feminized, Saddam
Hussein was portrayed as “the anachronistic hypermacho opponent who in the end could not
match the liberal and compassionate U.S. man.” This “new world order” masculinity also
accentuated “the technological and civilizational superiority of the U.S. military and society,”
positing a benevolent United States as the justifiable leader of the post-Cold War international
order.97 While this new masculine ideal presents itself as superior to more traditionally patriarchal
forms, it does not “radically question the persistent fact that men, particularly elite Western men,
still dominate the major institutions, decision-making bodies of international authority and
power that, however enlightened their agendas and concerns, still shape the agenda of world
politics.”98

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In Epic Encounters, Melani McAlister also addresses masculinity, focusing on the interplay
between race and gender in the Gulf War military.99 She notes that the news media did not just
highlight women’s participation or the advanced technology of the bombing campaign, but the
racial diversity of the armed forces. The ability of the United States “to intervene whenever and
wherever its leaders felt necessary” could be justified by the representations of the multicultural
military: “[T]he diversity of its armed forces made the United States a world citizen, with all the
races and nations of the globe represented in its population.”100 McAlister argues, however, that
“the figuration of the United States through the sign of the multicultural military was fraught
with tensions, as the military traditions of masculinity and (hetero)sexualized discipline ran up
against the multicultural narrative of inclusion.” Racial tensions could be eased by “gender and
sexual exclusions,” as “heterosexual masculinity provided the narrative by which racial inclusion
was effected.” She notes a news article on members of a multiracial platoon—all presumably
heterosexual men—sharing their racially inflected music, magazines, and pornography. The
shared pornography is the latest iteration of the narrative of “the military as the cookstove of
the melting pot … updated in a masculine dream of the multiracial brotherhood of sex and war.”
Despite the media attention to women, “women were still expected to be external to the
fighting, represented but not present.”101 While Boose and Niva present different visions of
Gulf War masculinity, they both, along with McAlister, perceive the assertion of masculine
power in that war.

Women and Combat in a Volunteer Force

The Gulf War renewed debates over women in combat that had arisen with each expansion of
women’s roles. Women’s appropriate relationship to combat has been one of the most fraught
issues of the AVF. Objections to women’s participation in combat, however that may be defined,
range from the supposedly practical, such as concerns about hygiene and menstruation or
women’s lack of upper-body strength, to claims about the fundamental natures of women and
men. The literature on women and combat is vast. A few examples will serve to show the range of
the arguments. Keeping women out of combat, both supporters and opponents agree, is, at base,
about preserving the masculinity of war.
In “The Manning of Force and the Structure of Battle,” David H. Marlowe, who would
exclude women from ground combat but not from naval or air combat or from combat support
units, argues that “physiological traits conducive to success on the battlefield and those socio-
cultural aspects of the combat group critical to cohesion and endurance in battle” mandate
women’s exclusion.102 He points to biological differences in strength, testosterone’s relationship
to brain structure and aggression, and the importance of cohesive combat groups that depend on a
male bonding in which “masculinity is an essential measure of capability.”103 While Marlowe was
Chief of the Department of Military Psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Research Institute
when he wrote “The Manning of Force,” many of the most prominent voices against women in
combat are not scholars. Elaine Donnelly, for instance, is a conservative political activist who
founded the Center for Military Readiness to counter threats to traditional military culture.
Donnelly would bar women from any kind of combat and from noncombat units which co-
locate with combat units, and she advocates for the re-segregation of men and women in basic
training. “Constructing the Co-Ed Military” brings together arguments she has been making
against women’s participation over the past few decades.104 Her objections include: differences in
strength (“women do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help fellow soldiers
survive”); “disciplinary and deployability problems that … detract from unit cohesion, readiness,
and morale”;105 the “moral and cultural contradiction” that “violence against women is all right,

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as long as it happens at the hands of the enemy”;106 watered-down training that is designed to help
women succeed and avoid injury, but that compromises military effectiveness; inappropriate
relationships, romantic or hostile, between women and men; pregnancy; the opposition, by a
majority of military women, to the desegregation of combat; the violation of the gendered ideal
that “good men protect and defend women” instead of placing them in danger;107 and the
debilitating effect on men’s morale should women soldiers be harmed.
Another notable opponent of women in combat, Brian Mitchell, a former Army officer and
associate editor for The Navy Times, would exclude women from the military entirely, except,
perhaps, for badly needed doctors and nurses. Mitchell agrees with many who advocate for
women in the military that it’s not possible to draw a firm line between combat and noncombat
roles. However, he sees that as grounds not to expand women’s military roles but to eliminate
them. In Weak Link, Mitchell argues that aside from problems related to physical strength,
pregnancy, and unit cohesion, men’s motivations for going to war are rooted in protecting
women and demonstrating their manhood, both of which are undercut by women’s presence.108
A robust literature from both inside and outside of the academy counters these arguments
against women in combat. In “Women in Combat,” Martha McSally, an Air Force Colonel who
was the first American woman to fly a combat mission, challenges arguments against women in
combat based on strength, cohesion, pregnancy, double standards, and attitudes that women “just
don’t belong” in combat.109 She argues that lifting restrictions on women will increase military
effectiveness, the standard often cited by opponents of women in combat. According to McSally,
many women are qualified and capable, so excluding them as a class—which doesn’t protect them
from harm—rather than evaluating them as individuals, hampers the military’s flexibility in
utilizing personnel. Stiehm examines how myths that underpin warfighting and military institu-
tions are compromised by military women. She believes that women can and should contribute
to the nation’s defense as men do. “If women are not prepared to make a commitment to
nonviolence as a way of life, and to advocate it for others (especially their ‘protectors’) as well,”
she asks, “shouldn’t they assume their share of responsibility for exercising legitimate
violence?”110
Women’s exclusion from combat may be a cause of sexual harassment and assault—the
subjects of several major scandals in the 1990s—because that exclusion allows male soldiers to
view women as not truly a part of the military. Popular historian Jean Zimmerman takes this
position in Tailspin, an analysis of “Tailhook”—shorthand for the public revelations of debauch-
ery and accusations of the mistreatment of women, including naval officers, at the 1991 annual
convention of the Tailhook Association of naval aviators. She contends there is a “crucial
relationship between respect and responsibility.”111 Military women were “still considered in
some quarters [as] a modern-day version of the camp follower. Because women were seen as
marginal, because they were excluded from crucial prestige positions, this kind of sexual dynamic
[harassment] prevailed.”112 For Zimmerman, “[g]iving women the right to prove themselves as
warfighters establishes them on a new footing as fully participatory, first-class citizens.”113 The
opening of ground combat to women, which was announced by the Secretary of Defense in
December 2015, should resolve many empirical questions raised by the arguments of proponents
and opponents, including whether Zimmerman is correct about a link between exclusion and
harassment, but will likely lead to new debates about masculinity, femininity, and the military.

A Completed Transition
By the 1990s, the transition to the AVF could be considered complete, for the simple fact that a
return to the draft became implausible, both politically unlikely and no longer wanted by the

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military itself. When the Army, Navy, and Air Force faced recruiting problems in the late 1990s, a
few critics predicted the demise of the AVF, but not on the scale prompted by the late-1970s
recruiting problems.114 The attacks of September 11, 2001 inspired calls for national service or a
draft, but there was no significant public debate over it. The U.S. military fought sustained
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing significant recruiting problems, without resorting to
conscription. According to Bailey, in the 1970s and 1980s, political and military leaders assumed
that the AVF was a peacetime force, and a major war would mean conscription. Over time, the
distinction between a peacetime force and a wartime force faded, along with the assumption that
the AVF was only suited for peacetime. Americans “eventually stopped using the phrase ‘all-
volunteer’ to talk about the nation’s military.”115 Government officials seem more inclined to
deal with personnel issues by turning to private military contractors, and the share of military tasks
performed by private companies (mainly staffed by former members of the military) has risen
precipitously since 2001.
The all-volunteer force is less of a presence in the lives of most Americans than the conscripted
military ever was, but it is still predominantly male, and recruiters have deployed ideas about
masculinity to draw in men, coding combat, in particular, as masculine. The end of the draft
ended men’s exclusive obligation to defend the country, and the AVF has succeeded, in large part,
because women have been willing to serve. Military women have been viewed as a problem or a
group in need of accommodation; men and their needs and abilities are always the standard.
However, while they haven’t always been fully accepted, women (who at publication make up
14.5 percent of active duty forces) have become an integral part of the institution.
While we know a great deal about how the transformation of the armed forces initiated by
the end of the draft altered women’s military roles and challenged military masculinities, and
the attendant adaptations and conflict that ensued, our understanding of the gendered aspects of
the transition to the AVF could be further developed in several areas. Other potential topics for
additional research include gender and the Reserve Officer Training Corps, the differences
among the service branches in how dominant ideals of masculinity have been impacted by
women’s changing roles, and how conceptions of American national identity have been
influenced by the gendered changes to the military. As the DOD has begun turning to private
military contractors in place of conscripts, scholars have started to investigate military out-
sourcing, but a great deal of work remains to be done, particularly in relation to the gendered
impact of this shift. Perhaps most necessary of all is more work on the intersections of race/
ethnicity and gender in relation to the various aspects of the transition. As women engage more
directly in ground combat, and military institutions and individuals facilitate, accommodate, or
resist their participation, there will be a need for scholarship that approaches the subject with a
nuanced understanding of masculinities, femininities, and the relevant social and political
contexts.

Notes
1 Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009); Melissa T. Brown, Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting
Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); David R. Segal,
Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1989).
2 Brown, Enlisting Masculinity, 31.
3 Ibid., 32.
4 Bailey, America’s Army, 121–122, 258.

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5 David R. Segal, Thomas J. Burns, William W. Falk, Michael P. Silver, and Bam Dev Sharda, “The
All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s,” Social Science Quarterly 79 (June 1998): 390–411; Mady Wechsler
Segal, Meridith Hill Thanner, and David R. Segal, “Hispanic and African American Men and
Women in the U.S. Military: Trends in Representation,” Race, Gender, and Class 14 (2007): 48–64.
6 Brenda Moore, “From Underrepresentation to Overrepresentation: African American Women,” in
It’s Our Military, Too! Women and the US Military, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1996), 123–133.
7 Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration
the Army Way (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
8 Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2015), 79–88.
9 Mady Wechsler Segal, “Military Culture and Military Families,” in Beyond Zero Tolerance:
Discrimination in Military Culture, ed. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Judith Reppy (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 251–261.
10 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), chapter 5. Enloe also briefly describes the military’s differing
expectations for the small number of military husbands, many of whom are themselves in the
military.
11 Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, 144.
12 Ibid., 146.
13 Ibid., 161–162.
14 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Sound Off! American Military Women Speak Out (New York: Paragon
House, 1992), 49–52.
15 Bailey, America’s Army; Brown, Enlisting Masculinity.
16 Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, 36.
17 Ibid., 42.
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 98.
20 Ibid., 95.
21 Martin Binkin and Mark J. Eitelberg, “Women and Minorities in the All-Volunteer Force,” in The
All-Volunteer Force after a Decade: Retrospect and Prospect, eds. William Bowman, Roger Little, and
Thomas G. Sicilia (McLean, VA: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1986), 82.
22 Robert K. Griffith, Jr., The US Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–1974 (Washington:
Center of Military History United States Army, 1996), 18, 22.
23 Ibid., 191–192.
24 Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, Crossed Currents: Navy Women from WWI to Tailhook (Washington:
Brassey’s, 1993).
25 This would include clerk/typist, administration, supply, personnel, and medical positions.
26 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, revised edition (Novato, CA:
Presidio, 1992).
27 The Reserve Officer Training Corps is a college-based program for training and commissioning
military officers.
28 Holm, Women in the Military, 314, 320–323.
29 Kara Dixon Vuic, “‘I’m Afraid We’re Going to Have to Just Change Our Ways’: Marriage,
Motherhood, and Pregnancy in the Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War,” Signs 32
(Summer 2007): 997–1022.
30 Judith Hicks Stiehm, “The Generations of U.S. Enlisted Women,” Signs 11 (Autumn 1985): 171.
31 Ibid., 172.
32 Ibid., 173.
33 Bettie J. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978 (Washington: Center of Military History
United States Army, 2000).
34 Holm, Women in the Military, 179–185.

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35 Bailey, America’s Army, 143–154.

36 Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
37 Melissa S. Herbert, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military
(New York: New York University Press, 1998).
38 Except in the Air Force. The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps could choose between recruiting
higher-quality women or lower-quality men, but the more prestigious Air Force attracted enough
men to hold them to higher standards as well.
39 “In their zeal to enlist women and to fill the jobs most needed by the military, recruiters assigned
women to a variety of nontraditional fields, such as communications, electronics, and mechanical
repair. Some recruits found the new jobs too physically demanding, others discovered they disliked a
field after trying it out, and many found they were poorly received in jobs where the shortage of men
was not so severe as to make any worker welcome.” Stiehm, “Generations,” 167–168.
40 According to a WAC Colonel, “There was emotional controversy over the idea of a unisex fatigue.”
Women wore boots designed for nurses standing on concrete floors, which weren’t suitable for
training and injured women when they ran in them. Helen Rogan, Mixed Company: Women in the
Modern Army (New York: Putnam, 1981), 60, 61–62.
41 Elizabeth L. Hillman, “Dressed to Kill? The Paradox of Women in Military Uniforms,” in Beyond
Zero Tolerance: Discrimination in Military Culture, ed. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Judith Reppy
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 65–80.
42 Holm, Women in the Military, chapter 19.
43 Except in the Marine Corps, which continued to train men and women separately and to instruct
women in etiquette and the use of cosmetics.
44 The Marines did not give women weapons training until 1984.
45 Ibid., 276–278.
46 Ibid., 279–288.
47 Stiehm, “Generations,” 172.
48 David H. Marlowe, “The Manning of Force and the Structure of Battle: Part 2—Men and
Women,” in Conscripts and Volunteers: Military Requirements, Social Justice, and the All-Volunteer
Force, ed. Robert K. Fullinwider (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 194.
49 Ibid.
50 Carol Burke, “Pernicious Cohesion,” in It’s Our Military, Too! Women and the US Military, ed. Judith
Hicks Stiehm (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 205–219.
51 Judith Hicks Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated Change at the U.S. Air Force Academy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 7, 8.
52 Ibid., 288.
53 Lance Janda, Stronger than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002), xxvii.
54 Ibid., 105.
55 Ibid., 121.
56 Ibid., 184.
57 Bailey, America’s Army.
58 Christine L. Williams, Gender Differences at Work: Women and Men in Nontraditional Occupations
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 59. The MAXWAC and REFORGER studies
assessed what proportion of women in a unit would lead to a deterioration in performance, on the
assumption that women would harm performance when they made up somewhere between 0 and 35
percent of a unit. The tests showed that they did not.
59 Holm, Women in the Military, 387–391.
60 Bailey, America’s Army, 174.
61 Judith Hicks Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
62 The Army reinstated gender-integrated training in 1994.

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63 J. William Gibson, “Redeeming Vietnam: Techo-Thriller Novels of the 1980s,” Cultural Critique
(Fall 1991): 183.
64 Ibid., 200.
65 Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989).
66 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993).
67 Ibid., 380.
68 As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton promised supporters he would lift the ban on gays in the
military. Upon taking office, he faced intense resistance from the military and Congress. The
resulting compromise, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” made the ban a part of law, instead of just DOD
policy, but the restriction was on openly gay servicemembers, and commanders were not supposed to
initiate investigations (many did), though they could act on credible evidence. Legislation passed in
2010 rescinded “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the ban on openly gay servicemembers ended in 2011.
69 Carol Cohn, “Gays in the Military: Texts and Subtexts,” in The “Man” Question in International
Relations, ed. Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpat (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 129–149.
70 Kenneth L. Karst, “The Pursuit of Manhood and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces,” UCLA
Law Review 38 (February 1991): 546.
71 Ibid., 578; quote on 546.
72 Rogan, Mixed Company, 157.
73 Ilene Rose Feinman, Citizenship Rites: Feminist Soldiers and Feminist Antimilitarists (New York: New
York University Press, 2000).
74 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9–10.
75 Michelle M. Benecke and Kirstin S. Dodge, “Military Women in Nontraditional Job Fields:
Casualties of the Armed Forces’ War on Homosexuals,” in Gay Rights, Military Wrongs: Political
Perspectives on Lesbians and Gays in the US Military, ed. Craig Rimmerman (New York: Garland,
1996), 71–108.
76 Ibid., 76.
77 Ibid., 79.
78 Ibid., 82.
79 Ibid., 85.
80 Holm, Women in the Military, 404–405.
81 Linda Bird Francke, Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997), 228–229.
82 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 217.
83 D’Ann Campbell, “Combatting the Gender Gulf,” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 63
(October 1992): 69.
84 Ibid., 82.
85 Enloe, Morning After, 170–171.
86 Ibid., 220.
87 Feinman, Citizenship Rites, 13–19.
88 Francke, Ground Zero, 132–134.
89 Ibid., 146.
90 Ibid., 78.
91 Ibid., 101.
92 Linda E. Boose, “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf,” in
Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 67–106; Steve Niva, “Tough and Tender: New World Order Masculinity and the Gulf
War,” in The “Man” Question in International Relations, ed. Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpat
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 109–128.

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93 Boose, “Techno-Muscularity,” 88.

94 Ibid., 69.
95 Ibid., 100.
96 Niva, “Tough and Tender,” 110–111.
97 Ibid., 119.
98 Ibid., 122.
99 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
100 Ibid., 250.
101 Ibid., 255.
102 Marlowe, “The Manning of Force and the Structure of Battle,” 195.
103 Ibid., 194.
104 Elaine Donnelly, “Constructing the Co-Ed Military,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14.2
(2007): 815ff.
105 Ibid., 836.
106 Ibid., 849–850.
107 Ibid., 930.
108 Brian Mitchell, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military (New York: Regnery Gateway,
1989).
109 Martha McSally, “Women in Combat: Is the Current Policy Obsolete?,” Duke Journal of Gender Law
and Policy 14.2 (2007): 1011ff.
110 Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 233.
111 Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 280.
112 Ibid., 195.
113 Ibid., 280.
114 Opponents of women’s integration blamed the recruiting shortfalls on a demasculinization of the
forces and their public image. See Brown, Enlisting Masculinity, 10, 38–40, 71–72, 96–99.
115 Bailey, America’s Army, 228.

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 10
9/11, GENDER, AND WARS
WITHOUT END
Anna Froula
east carolina university

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 prompted a
retaliatory response from the United States that has ushered in sweeping changes in the military and
society at large. The open-ended invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq continue to
necessitate changes to pre-existing gender norms in military culture. More recently, progressive
calls for social change along with the United States’ ongoing conflicts have led to repealing laws that
historically prevented the full inclusion of women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
(LGBT) personnel in all branches of service, though not without appeals to militarist masculinity
and social resistance. Military women and LGBT personnel continue to challenge conceptions of
both military masculinity as the exclusive province of male soldiers and femininity as the realm of
peace. The existence of women and LGBT soldiers in combat has historically been both defined
and denied by discourses of sexuality, aggression, violence, and power within an institutional
hierarchy that is based on and communicated through the abhorrence of the feminine. Their
increasing presence in the armed forces invokes cultural anxieties about what it means for the U.S.
military to rely on the expanding service of women, debates over women’s fitness for combat
conditions, and social angst over the military’s dwindling role as a male rite of passage.
Scholars have been researching such attitudes and their impacts on gender integration in the
military. In her work on military folklore, Carol Burke has extensively documented how this
attitude pervades basic training.1 Kelly Oliver and W. Alton Jones highlights the term “soften” in
the military’s need for women to interact with local men and children in the warzones because
they are “more readily admitted into homes and domestic spaces.” The notion of women
softening warfare also extends to the U.S. military torture scandals: “[W]omen are also used to
‘soft-up’ public perceptions of abuse and torture.”2 While we have yet to see the outcomes of
gender-integrated combat units, leadership scholar Karin Klenke reminds us, “Only by giving
servicewomen opportunities to prove themselves in combat situations will military commands be
able to determine if their missions have been compromised by including women in combat
units.”3 Women have made significant strides in the “War on Terror.” Still, journalist Tara
McKelvey noted six years before the combat ban was lifted that they can be read positively, “as
powerful and commanding within the ranks … and often on equal footing with men in the war,”
and negatively, “as a destabilizing force—either because they’re not capable of controlling their
passions … or because they’re outspoken about their views and cause problems for other, less
conscientious soldiers.”4

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been reframing ideas about national and military
masculinity. What follows here is an attempt to synthesize this still rapidly changing field from
9/11 to the entrance of women into Special Forces training.5 Scholars from both scientific and
humanities disciplines continue to produce an enormous body of work on gender, the military,
men, and women. In this essay, I trace major themes and milestones (women approved for
combat, LGBT personnel serving openly) from 9/11 to the present. I first discuss the gendered
reactions to 9/11 before turning to women’s expanding roles in the military, an expansion
plagued by sexual violence and a poorly equipped infrastructure that has often protected assailants
and punished victims and that is still being reshaped as of this writing.6 Next I discuss issues related
to women in combat. Finally, I sketch the ongoing progress toward acceptance of LGBT
soldiers.7

Assertions of National Masculinity

In The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Susan Faludi has outlined how a
collective sense of national emasculation followed the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001—
one that she argues accompanied an attempted return to more traditional gender roles.8 Both
scholarly and journalistic discourse analyzes the ways that Commander in Chief George W. Bush
initially stood in for the strong national body before the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and lack of
exit strategies from the Middle Eastern theaters of war came to light.9 As the nation began to
attempt to make sense of the tragedy of 9/11, sorrow and shock gave way to rage and revenge
fantasies that pervaded much public and political rhetoric.10 What emerged in the post-attack
culture of fear were gendered tropes of interpreting the attacks and reacting to them.11 Initially,
Deborah Cohler notes, Americans had affirmed a “blue-collar” masculinity to celebrate the
heroism of the first responders to the World Trade Center.12 As President Bush remarked on
October 6, 2001, “Our nation is still somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s a certain level of
blood lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed, and patient, but pretty
soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.”13 Bush put all people and all nations on notice: “Either
you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”14 American studies scholar Pierre Guerlain terms
this kind of nationalism displayed by Bush and other male heads of state as representative of
“neomachos” who sold “an image of America that corresponds all too well to some anti-
American stereotypes: the idea of a sexist, violence-prone American that does not hesitate to
resort to brute force to achieve its aims and does not want to be constrained by international rules
and regulations.”15 As political philosopher Iris Marion Young argues, a “logic of masculinist
protection” informed the political ideology and rhetoric of the President and his supporters, who
“use[d] a language of fear and threat to gain support for constricting liberty and dissent inside the
United States.”16 Young contends that this logic subordinates those needing protection—
women and children—who in turn are constructed as adoring their protector.17 The
Commander in Chief and his staff, as well as their supporting pundits on twenty-four-hour
news stations and in other media venues, framed the case for war in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, as
necessary to protect America and its citizens.
The fall 2002 special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society provides a succinct
snapshot of the initial ways that scholars were reading the terrorist attacks and the gendered
cultural and political response to them. Hélenè Cixous poetically reads the twin towers as
embodying both “phallic power” and “feminine grace,” and their substitution of an erection,
by nature fragile, an object of the terrorists’ “castrating rage.”18 American women heard con-
tinual messages that they needed protection (“against whom,” asked Susan J. Brison, “other
strong men?”).19 Marita Sturken characterizes the national valorizing of the men who rushed into

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the burning twin towers and the brave traders who called loved ones at home in the face of
eminent death as an erasure of the women who also worked there.20 Women often became
invisible; “real” men led the charge against the enemy. As Naomi Klein details in Shock Doctrine,
societies in states of shock—whether from natural or man-made disasters and crises, or in this case,
the terrorist destruction of both human lives and powerful symbols of international financial
dominance—are prone to seek a paternal figurehead to restore order and relieve panic.21
Faludi’s The Terror Dream documents the cultural discourse that appeared in the press and
sought to restore more traditional gender roles in the wake of 9/11. She contends that while most
of the victims of the attacks were males—first responders and office workers in the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon—pundits nevertheless projected victimhood onto representations of
weeping female children and “homemakers in the suburbs held hostage by fear.”22 National
sentiment, as Diana Taylor notes, could be symbolized by the smoking hole of the World Trade
Center wreckage and in “feminine adjectives … weakness, vulnerability, suffering, mourning,
and fear.”23 Faludi furthermore highlights the contradiction in this response: “[T]he last remain-
ing superpower, a nation attacked precisely because of its imperial preeminence, responded by
fixating on its weakness and ineffectuality.”24 Conservative punditry built on this emasculation
trope with accusations that feminism had weakened the country, leaving it vulnerable to attack.25
As Faludi notes, a former military officer wrote on Mensaction.net, a web community that
champions tribal cultures with rigid gender roles: “The phallic symbol of America had been cut
off, and at its base was a large smoldering vagina, the true symbol of American culture, for it is the
western culture that represents the feminine materialistic principle, and it is at its extreme in
America.”26 J. Anne Tickner reminds us that even Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the
attacks, taunted American men for becoming too feminized.27 While American men within and
outside the White House assumed the posture of World War II-era “hardboiled masculinity” and
stockpiled guns, writes Faludi, “Security Moms” stocked cupboards with nonperishable food and
anthrax antidotes.28 Decrying feminism as a root cause of the attacks, some conservative opinion
shapers, such as Peggy Noonan, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, searched for men embodying a
John Wayne masculinity, “men prepared to mete out ‘torture’ and ‘focused brutality,’ take ‘nasty
and brutish means,’ and chuck the ‘niceties’ of avoiding civilian casualties.”29 For example,
conservative newspaper columnist David Brooks wrote approvingly, “We will destroy innocent
villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.”30 As Guerlain points out, the
September 2003 “cover of the monthly magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute
announced: ‘Real Men Are Back,’” a sentiment that hit home for many Americans.31 American
studies scholar Dana D. Nelson highlights Richard Goldstein’s analysis of President Bush “harness
[ing] theatrical manliness”: a “neomachismo, a conservative, antifeminist backlash embrace of
hypermasculinity.”32 This trend was crystallized, writes Nelson, in Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld’s appearance in People Magazine’s 2003 list of “the sexiest men alive” and in, as I discuss
below, George W. Bush’s Top Gun-inspired declaration that major combat operations in Iraq
were over.33 The hypermasculine posturing and presentation of noncombatant men revealed,
perhaps unintentionally, a fragile national masculinity, one that must be defended with whatever
means necessary.

Gendering the Cause for Invasion

Much of the scholarship about the invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 and Iraq in 2003
highlights the gendered shaping of the rationale: strong American men saving Muslim women
from the repressive and cruel Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. Accompanying the
chivalrous and raced framing and fiction of the United States “saving” Afghan women from

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the Taliban was a concerted effort to prop up and lionize the wartime masculinity of men in the
White House.34 As many scholars agree, the crafting of the wars that followed 9/11 as a “clash of
civilizations” underscored this gendered and imperial national discourse where, in Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak’s terms, “white men sav[e] the brown women from the brown men.”35
For example, Lila Abu-Lughod examines how First Lady Laura Bush’s 2001 radio address
successfully deployed the figure of the oppressed Afghan woman to justify U.S. bombing and
intervention in Afghanistan.36 Abu-Lughod explains that experts were asked to give religious and
cultural explanations of Afghan life “instead of political and historical explanations”; they
received questions that reified such cultural binaries as East/West, Christian/Muslim, us/them:
“cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently
in burquas.”37 The notion of saving these women from Taliban oppression also helped structure
the invasion as chivalrous.
In the lead-up to the invasion of Afghanistan, the White House adopted a public stance based
on frontier masculinity and its long racial and gendered history—from pioneer narratives through
“the colonial domination of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines”—as a familiar scenario
wherein, Diana Taylor states, “the fetishized male in uniform saves the [implicitly white] lady
from the dark, menacing other.”38 As Cynthia Enloe argues, national policy decisions about the
military can stem from male politicians’ need to feel “manly” in the face of fears about appearing
“soft.”39 She writes, “when the US touts any military institution as the best hope for stability,
security, and development, the result is deeply gendered: the politics of masculinity are made to
seem ‘natural.’”40 In particular, President Bush’s march to invade Afghanistan was steeped in
frontier mythology’s John Wayne cowboy figure and terms such as “dead or alive” and “we’ll
smoke him [bin Laden] outta his hole.”41 Faludi further documents that political candidates
flashed guns during their campaign stump speeches, and “the war cabinet was served a ‘Wild West
menu’ of buffalo meat’” at the first post-9/11 meal at Camp David.42
As scholars have demonstrated, amid global anti-war protests, public officials also justified the
invasion and occupation of Iraq in gendered terms, most often by framing President Bush as a
cowboy who needed to topple the tyrant Saddam Hussein.43 Restoring national masculinity was
also thematized by other events in Iraq, such as the sensationalized rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in
2003, which first depicted her as a Rambo-style warrior and then a damsel in distress. The U.S.-
staged removal of Saddam Hussein’s statue from Firdos Square in Baghdad on April 9, 2003, and
images of Hussein crawling from his womb-like hole, hair in disarray, to his capture in December
2003 provided visual proof that the United States had emasculated Iraq in retaliation for its own
emasculation.44 Philosopher Bonnie Mann argues that war is an opportunity to stage national
masculinity as “self-making rather than self-defending. Indeed, the superpower identity can only
be maintained and expressed through repetition, through a staging and restaging of its own
omnipotence.”45 For the United States, then, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were initially
staged as a reassertion of national virility. Sociologist and gay rights activist Aaron Belkin argues
presidents have, after all, long waged war to prove their masculinity, but it is the troops who risk
their lives.46
Scholars traced the public fascination with two women soldiers from West Virginia: Lynch,
who seemed to epitomize “why we fight,” and Lynndie England, who personified the cruelty of
U.S. torture of prisoners of “enemy combatants” at Abu Ghraib. Via her patriotically stylized
rescue, Lynch’s salvation became the preferred fantasy of the casus belli, and, according to Deepa
Kumar, was used “strategically … to win support for war.”47 She was, according to American
media studies scholar Stacy Takacs, the embodiment of “the homeland and its values,” meaning
that “her personal vulnerability evokes the nation’s vulnerability and makes remilitarization
appear the only viable means to achieve security.”48 As Oliver notes, their stories galvanized

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debates over equal rights and feminism and evoked “the problematic notion of women as both
offensive and defensive weapons of war,” a notion rooted in archaic fears of “the ‘mysterious’
powers of women, maternity, and female sexuality.”49 After hundreds of thousands of protestors
around the globe pointed out the folly of U.S. Coalition forces invading Iraq, the retroactive
justification for entering the quagmire appeared in small, blond, female form: Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
Long before she could correct the official but falsified record for herself in Congress in 2007, her
story—framed in the narrative structure of the colonial American captivity narrative, the oldest
form of U.S. literature—depicted the dark fantasy of dark men ambushing a convoy to kidnap and
rape.50 To style Lynch as the face of a besieged America at war, official spokesmen revised her lost
convoy battling armed resistance in Nasiriya into an ambush and downplayed the eleven KIA, the
nine wounded, and the seven other captives—including Shoshanna Johnson, a black soldier,
whose story of captivity was wholly subsumed into Lynch’s.51 The Iraqi personnel who donated
blood for her necessary transfusions, performed other life-saving procedures, and attempted to
return her to U.S. forces were recast into Fedayeen, who beat and raped her at night instead of
singing her lullabies, as she reported her nurse did. As Kumar notes, “when military officials
provide information to journalists that they later correct, it is not the product of an innocent
mistake but rather a part of a conscious strategy of misinformation.”52 As Kumar and other
scholars have documented, the mediated fashioning of Lynch into an inspiring damsel in distress,
who served in the military yet was a captive, safely fit within normative patriarchal gender roles
that sustain the male as warrior-hero, and became consumable for American citizens who could
virtually participate in Lynch’s extraction through video coverage that converged with other
manufactured images of U.S. military prowess.53
Scholars likewise argue that the U.S.-staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in April 2003
and President George W. Bush’s 2004 hypermasculine posturing in front of a now iconic—and
tragically ironic—“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner likewise seemed to restore the
national masculinity that some quarters perceived lost in the terrorist attacks.54 President Bush’s
construction of hegemonic masculinity aided public perception that he was the one to rehabilitate
the nation. As international studies scholars Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling suggest,
Bush’s “casting himself as the vengeful patriarchal Warrior” effectually “reconstruct[ed] the
American public—that is, the civilian population—as the state’s helpful mate/subordinate.”55
Substituting Afghanistan and Iraq as the vulnerable body in need of rescue, Bush deployed
common Hollywood tropes of the chivalrous and heroic rescuer, complete with an action
figure available for sale online.56 Kevin Coe, et al. analyze Bush’s Commander in Chief persona
as a deliberately constructed powerful leader who deployed masculine themes in his public
speeches.57 One month after Lynch’s highly publicized retrieval from the Nasiriya hospital,
Bush landed on the USS Lincoln in a flight suit in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy S-3B Viking and
delivered a premature speech celebrating that “[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
The transformation of the Commander in Chief from a presidential candidate who decried
nation-building into a victorious maverick was complete. The well-executed performance of
Hollywood masculinity appeared, for many pundits, to support the entirety of the Iraq War with
well-endowed masculinity.58 Commenters from Gwen Ifill to Chris Matthews to G. Gordon
Liddy, respectively, raved about his “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan” style, his women-
pleasing “swagger,” and the way that the flight suit made “the best of his manly characteristic.”59
Yet, the center of these narrative binaries of the victimized and redeemed white woman and
the swaggering, fighter-pilot redeemer could not hold as the “war on terror” dragged on,
destabilizing the region.
One year after the staged productions of American innocence and paternal rescue, the
patriotically serviceable vision of the war was damningly inverted by the depictions of torture

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in Abu Ghraib—proof first of Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then American. Many scholars com-
mented on the ways that Lynndie England became the story as, Laura Prividera and John Howard
explain, “the Victorian fallen woman archetype.”60 The media focus on England’s morality, they
continue, “obfuscates military culpability for the events at Abu Ghraib, preserves patriarchal
militarism, and subordinates white women in the US military.”61 A grinning Army Private
England, a West Virginia “country girl” like Lynch, featured prominently in photographs of
naked, brown male bodies masturbating, cowering under aggressive German Shepherds, and
attached to electrodes. Photographs cemented her as a scapegoat, as one of the “few bad apples”
punished for committing torture. As both agent of torture and object of masturbatory nightmare,
England-as-spectacle occupies a paradoxical space coded both hypermasculine by her sexual
emasculation of the male prisoners and feminine by her objectification as military prison
centerfold.62 As communications scholar Shannon L. Holland notes, scapegoating England so
thoroughly in the press “deflected attention away from the other soldiers involved in the scandal
(particularly the men who were involved)” but also drowned out “more comprehensive discus-
sions regarding the US military’s use of abuse and torture, the unlawful detainment of suspected
terrorists, and the erosion of civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.”63 Further, Kelly Oliver points to
the torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay—which included the use of fake menstrual
blood—as evidence that the sexuality of military women “has not only been figured as a weapon
in the media but also explicitly used as a weapon by the military.”64 The revelation of torture at
the hands of U.S. women shocked many scholars who grappled with disproved gender essentialist
notions that women might feminize the institution of the military.65

The Increasing Roles of Women

As many scholars have noted, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lacked front lines; thus military
women were often in combat situations even as they were legally prohibited to do so. The
Department of Defense lifted the longstanding ban on women in combat in January 2013, a
change that acknowledges that women have proven their capability in combat in the front-less
theaters of the “war on terror.” Removing the ban, which retroactively acknowledges that
women have long been serving in combat, also signifies a possibility that U.S. military branches
have challenged the perceived binary of the peaceful, domestic woman and the violent soldier
male, at least officially. Yet troubling gender distinctions remain pervasive in military culture.66
As Amy Garey puts it, they are still regarded in many quarters as “tumors on the body of
patriarchy.”67 Scientific and humanities research demonstrate the ways in which women per-
sonnel continue to deal with military sexual assault, social marginalization, and reproductive
issues from war zones.
One important intervention into the issue of military sexual assault has been Kirby Dick’s 2012
Oscar-nominated documentary Invisible War, which demonstrates that military women are
overwhelmingly more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted by their fellow soldiers than killed
by the enemy.68 Asking why the military is so underequipped to “combat sex crimes and rape
within its confines,” gender studies scholar Alicia Arrizón sees “rape as an act of terror exercised
‘collaterally’—a symptomatic tool of the ‘gendered war’ or ‘gendered terrorism ingrained in the
military culture.”69 As military and political leaders work to build a better infrastructure to
prevent assault and punish attackers, scholars are only beginning to deal with these issues.
Historian Elizabeth Mesok’s scholarship reveals that Military Sexual Assault (MST) is related to
attempts to police gendered behavior “in the midst of the destabilization of gender roles.”70
Fictional portrayals of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have largely avoided including these
stories in their narratives, with a few exceptions that warrant future research.71 Comedian Amy

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Schumer’s skit “A Very Realistic Video Game” criticizes this phenomenon—and hypermascu-
line war video games—by portraying a satiric game in which female soldiers must navigate a
military bureaucracy in which they are dissuaded from reporting sexual assault.72 YouTube’s
WIGS web channel delivered a fifteen-episode series, Lauren (2012–2013), which explores two
women soldiers and their attempts to deal with their own rapes from their brothers-in-arms. MST
can compound PTSD symptoms, as many scholars have argued.
Even if much of military service has been stripped of prohibitive gender biases, what often
happens during and after the tour of duty reflects gender differences. For example, scholars
maintain that the U.S. military continues to use depleted uranium (DU) in its warzones, despite
studies finding in the early years of the “war on terror” that female veterans of the first Gulf War
were three times as likely and male veterans two times more likely than the general population to
have infants with birth defects.73 Scientists have yet to fully study the effects of DU and anthrax
contaminants on the children of veterans of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to journalist Helen Benedict, “despite the equal risks women are taking, they are
still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues.”74 Regarding
the postwar treatment within an already overburdened VA system, Benedict writes in her exposé
of rape culture in the military:

Women make up the fastest growing group of veterans today, have different needs
than men, and do not necessarily feel safe in a male therapy group or with a male
doctor or counselor; it is too reminiscent of being outnumbered by men in war. They
also have different PTSD symptoms and need different treatment—they are more
likely to turn their anger and blame in on themselves rather than becoming violent
toward others, especially if they have been sexually assaulted, are more prone to
anxiety and depression, and take considerably longer to recover.75

Acknowledging these differences, however, should not eclipse the scope of military labor that
women have been involved with in the United States’ longest wars.
Over 280,000 women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Female Engagement Teams
(FET) of women Marines have been desperately needed to search Muslim women and comfort
women and children in hearts-and-minds missions, and scholars continue to study the ways that
the military uses military women specifically to engage local women.76 Some of the Army
“Lionesses” in Iraq are featured in Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’s 2008 documentary
Lioness, which traces the experiences of the first women soldiers to be sent into combat in Iraq
and their struggles with learning to live with PTSD, balancing childcare and deployed spouses,
and having been under-trained for combat that came to them. In one scene, the combat veterans
watch a History Channel show on the battles in which they participated—a show that has edited
them out altogether. Such erasures of women’s military history and experience have greatly
contributed to both the construction of America’s national identity as masculine and misconcep-
tions about women’s abilities.
Nonetheless, the Lionesses and other FETs were crucial in ending the ban on women in
combat. Elizabeth Mesok argues that “[t]he training and deployment of military women as
counterinsurgents did not emerge out of the military’s growing awareness of women’s equal
capabilities as combat laborers; it emerged from an understanding that women—not just their
substantive laboring bodies but ‘women’ as a discursive sign—were an untapped resource for US
military strategy.”77 Military leaders, she writes, “decided that the deployment of women with
combat units would make missions more effective, as the presence of a female body would
presumably soothe and calm” the women and children living under U.S. occupation.78 She

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further notes that the success of this work was determined by “an essentialist belief in female
soldiers’ inherent passivity” even as it ensured that women “participat[ed] in some of the blood-
iest battles of the Iraq War.”79 Mesok describes “the militarized performance of affective labor,”
which “occurs both through the bodily demonstration of emotion and through the presence of
the female body, whereby military women merely reveal their gender as a means of gaining
civilians’ trust and cooperation.”80 In a similar vein, artist and scholar Coco Fusco writes,
“Women’s presence [in Iraq] also creates the impression that American institutions engaging in
domination are actually democratic, since they appear to practice gender equity.”81 The work of
the FETs, Mesok argues, served to “legitimate[e] … US military women as valuable warring
subjects—leading to the repeal of the combat exclusion policy and women’s full integration and
thus full military equality.”82 Although women have been fighting for full inclusion into the
military for decades, the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that women
could, and have been, successful combat soldiers and helped pave the way for the repeal of the
combat exclusion ban.
Full integration and military equality remains an unwritten story in these early years after the
repeal of the combat exclusion ban, and this will remain a rich field of study for years to come.
Nevertheless, 2015 was in many ways a banner year for military women. After two women
successfully completed the Army Ranger School in August 2015, the Army announced that it
would open the school to all women soldiers; shortly thereafter the Navy announced it would
open its elite SEAL training to women, nearly twenty years after Demi Moore played a character
who successfully passed in G.I. Jane.83 Yet in December 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter
announced that all combat positions, “with no exceptions,” will be open to women, a move that
was not celebrated in all corners.84 Explains Carter, “they’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars
and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They’ll be able to serve as Army rangers and green berets,
Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was
previously open only to men.”85 Writes sociologist Anthony C. King, “quantitatively, the
accession of women to the armed forces is likely to be very small—probably about 1 percent or
less of the ground combat arms—but, historically, it represents a profound transformation.”86 In
political scientist Paige Whaley Eager’s assessment, women have made significant impacts on “the
planning, execution, and evaluation of foreign-policy making related to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan—from the female Army Private to the Secretary of State.” However, she notes,
including more women “in the armed services and elite foreign-policy making apparatus does not
appear to have translated into a kinder, gentler, more empathetic foreign policy posture for the
United States.”87 I would argue the same about the recent official acceptance and inclusion of
LGBT service personnel.

Out of the Camouflage Closet

Just as women have made progress in the “war on terror,” there have been historic moves to end
the exclusion—and discharge—of lesbian, gay, and bisexual soldiers. In an overview of literature
about homosexuality and the military, G. Dean Sinclair argues that many homosexual men and
women choose the military “in order to justify their existence and demonstrate that they are
worthy of the same rights of others.”88 He explains that exclusion was “not based on any evidence
… but rather formulated purely through speculation.”89 Likewise, argues the documentary The
Strange History of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, concerns about “unit cohesion”—the idea that integrating
LGB personnel would affect combat readiness—were made up because there was no evidence for
it, only fear.90 Belkin highlights this “phony debate,” arguing that “opposition was a modern
incarnation of the politics of paranoia, a dangerous tradition in American history.”91 According to

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Army Judge Advocate Eugene R. Milhizer, both opposition to and support for homosexual
individuals serving openly in the military are based in essentialist beliefs of whether same-sex
relations are either intrinsically immoral or moral.92 Practically speaking, however, Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell (DADT) increased the military’s recruitment and training costs as seasoned personnel
were discharged and replaced with green recruits. According to The Strange History, fifty-four
Arabic linguists were discharged between 1994 and 2003, and the estimated cost of discharges
from 1994 to 2009 is $383 million, a number that does not begin to speak to the personal trauma
and suffering wrought on LGBT personnel. Calls to recognize their service and sacrifice grew,
and President Obama eventually signed the repeal of DADT on December 22, 2010. While this is
an important policy shift, leadership and strategy scholar L. Michael Allsep, Jr. argues that
“military culture continues to preserve images and meanings hostile to open homosexuality.
Unless military culture changes in conformity with the realities of the modern warrior, this
superficial image of a military open to gay warriors will merely mask the reality of a culture hostile
to the very idea.”93
At the time of this writing, the U.S. military is also working toward the inclusion of
transgender personnel. George R. Brown writes that many male-to-female individuals choose
military service because of its perception of masculinity and allows them to “make commitments
to the social role of ‘man.’”94 Whereas the military has tracked the number of discharges under
DADT, the number of discharges for trans soldiers is unknown, although a report by a commis-
sion charged with “assessing whether US military policies that ban transgender service members
are based on medically sound rationales” estimates 15,450.95 The commission recommended the
following: “1) Lift the ban on transgender military service”; “2) Do not write new medical
regulations”; and “3) Base new administrative guidance on foreign military and US government
precedents.”96 In response, the Army ordered in February 2015 that any discharges of trans
individuals would have “to be made by a top, senior civilian officer,” which would limit such
discharges.97
The Army also allowed hormone treatment for Chelsea Manning, who rose to national
prominence in 2010 for releasing confidential U.S. military documents—what would be
known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs,” which included a video of a U.S. Apache
helicopter crew jubilantly firing on Iraqi children and journalists whom they mistook for
insurgents.98 Manning, currently serving thirty-five years in prison for the leak, had hoped that
exposing the truths of war and aggression would “inspire resistance and uprising” in the anti-war
movement.99 Instead, Dean Spade and Craig Willse argue that her “story ultimately was too anti-
military for the homonationalist organizations to take up, even while her advocates sought to
portray her as the sympathetic gay soldier produced by anti-DADT organizations.”100 That is,
because Manning’s story conflicts with “tropes developed by the pro-military, anti-DADT
advocacy of brave, proud gay soldiers,” her potential to be the poster child for the movement
is in jeopardy.101

Conclusion
As prominent war and feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe writes, “wars don’t simply end. And wars
don’t end simply.”102 Sweeping changes related to gender and the U.S. military at war are still
ongoing at the time of this writing, and there is much research on the intersection of gender and
the “war on terror” yet to do. But this is only part of an unfinished story, and many avenues of
research remain unexplored. Elaine Scarry has written that the meanings of war wounds are
predicated on the outcomes of the wars, yet these have not come to conclusive ends.103 As the
United States’ longest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down, a minority of its

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population has served in combat while the vast majority have remained unaffected by the effects
of war. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned in 2010 “for most Americans the wars
remain an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that do not affect them
personally.”104 This gap and a nation weary of war have cost service personnel in ways that both
are continuing to and have yet to be studied and brought into public discourse in terms of wars’
impacts on military families and relationships, job prospects, and re-acclimation into a society that
has not sacrificed as they have. Not to mention, what will be the impacts on young American
citizens—and their intersections of race, class, gender, and so on—who are growing up in a time
of constant war? Professor of Law Mary L. Dudziak suggests that, unlike the ways in which
“persistence of war and the simultaneous separation of killing, dying, and the dead from the
center of American life illustrate the way war and peace are spatial,” that “widespread domestic
militarization might seem to bring intimacy with war into American communities.”105 How is
domestic militarization gendered? And drone warfare? As Mesok suggests, “rather than consider
only what women and men do in the military, we must think about the ways that gender operates
as a space in which liberalism, humanitarian imperialism, and militarism are stitched together and,
as a result, what new potentially subversive, warring subjects may emerge.”106 Whereas we have
seen great strides in making the military more inclusive and egalitarian, we have not seen similar
strides in a national effort to understand the experiences of war of the men and women fighting in
our name.

Notes
1 Carol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing
Military Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
2 Kelly Oliver and W. Alton Jones, “Women as Weapons of War?: Women, Violence, and Agency in
Terrorism,” Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 4, no. 1 (2013): 95.
3 Karin Klenke, “Women in Combat: Contexts, Terror Management, and Mortality Salience—
Implications for Women’s Leadership,” International Leadership Journal 8, no. 2 (Summer 2016):
38–67, quote on 58.
4 Tara McKelvey, “Introduction,” in One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara
McKelvey (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 12–13.
5 Dan Lamothe, “Women Will Attempt Army Special Forces Training Soon—But They’re Not the
First,” Washington Post, July 25, 2016.
6 Creating a better system is a current work in progress. On July 28, 2016, the Department of Defense
Inspector General initiated a “sex assault reprisal unit,” which investigates incidences of retaliation
for reporting sexual assault. See Tisha Thompson, Rick Yarborough, Steve Jones, and Jeff Piper,
“Serving in Silence: Sex Assault Retaliation Complaints Investigated,” NBC Washington, July 28,
2016.
7 For analysis of gendered visual art interrogating the logics of the “war on terror,” see Siona Wilson,
“‘Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No’: Four Artists Refigure the Sex War on Terror,” Oxford Art
Journal 32, no. 1 (2009): 121–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25650845.
8 Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2007).
9 See Faludi, The Terror Dream. My use of the President as the national body derives from Susan
Jeffords’s work in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989) and Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
10 See, for example, Lynne V. Cheney, Jerry L. Martin, and Anne D. Neal, “Defending Civilization:
How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It,” American Council of

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Trustees and Alumni, Revised and Expanded, February 2002, www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv.pdf;

Emily Eakin, “On the Lookout for Political Incorrectness,” New York Times, November 24, 2001.
11 J. Anne Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives of 9/11,” International Studies Perspectives 3 (2002): 333–50.
12 Deborah Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning: Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in US Mass
Media after September 11,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 3 (2005): 246. See also Faludi, The Terror Dream.
13 Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 71–93,
quote on 71.
14 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” George W. Bush
White House Archives, September 20, 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/
releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
15 Pierre Guerlain, “New Warriors among American Foreign Policy Theorists,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 116.
16 Iris Marion Young, “The Logics of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security
State,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2003): 3.
17 Ibid., 5.
18 Hélenè Cixous, “The Towers: Les tours,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1
(2002): 431.
19 Susan J. Brison, “Gender, Terrorism, and War,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no.
1 (2002): 437.
20 Marita Sturken, “Masculinity, Courage, and Sacrifice,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28, no. 1 (2002): 444–45.
21 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2007). There are, of course, exceptions to the idea of women being erased to see 9/11’s meanings
through men. Deborah Cohler notes the emergence of “nationalist feminism” in the wake of the
attacks: “[N]ationalist feminism polices norms of race, gender, and sexuality as it claims to promote
neoliberal gender equality … national feminism … perpetuates gendered divisions, heteronorma-
tivity, neocolonialism, homophobia, and racism.” “Keeping the Home Front Burning,” 246, 258.
22 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 5.
23 Diana Taylor, “Ground Zero,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 453.
24 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 9.
25 Ibid., 8–9. Faludi also notes the gendered differences in post-9/11 dreams: Men’s reflected shame of
being unable to prevent tragedy, women’s on the other “side of failed male protection: the menace
of masculine violence invading their lives” (11). See also John F. Harris, “God Gave U.S. ‘What We
Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” Washington Post, September 13, 2001.
26 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 9; “The Land of the Smoldering Vagina,” Men’s Action to Rebuild
Society, http://www.mensaction.net. Moreover, Faludi writes, “taken individually, the various
impulses that surfaced after 9/11—the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly
men, the heightened call for domesticity [and shopping], the search for and sanctification of helpless
girls—might seem random expressions of some profound cultural derangement. But taken together,
they form a coherent and inexorable whole, the cumulative elements of a national fantasy in which
we are deeply invested, our elaborately constructed myth of invincibility” (14).
27 Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives of 9/11,” 333.
28 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 4. On “Security Moms,” see Inderpal Grewal, “‘Security Moms’ in the
Early Twentieth-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism,” Women’s
Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (2006): 25–39. The article is actually about the twenty-first century.
29 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 4.
30 David Brooks, “The Age of Conflict: Politics and Culture after September 11,” Weekly Standard,
November 5, 2001.
31 Guerlain, “New Warriors,” 109.
32 Dana D. Nelson, “The President and Presidentialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 5.
See Richard Goldstein, “Neo-Macho Man: Pop Culture and Post-911 Politics,” The Nation, March
24, 2003.

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33 Nelson, “The President and Presidentialism,” 5–6.

34 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 19–45.
35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, ed. Patrick William and Laura Crisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
66–112, quote on 92. See, for example, Margaret Denike, “The Human Rights of Others:
Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and ‘Just Causes’ for the ‘War on Terror,’” Hypatia 23, no. 2 (2008):
95–121; Helen M. Kinsella, “Understanding a War that Is Not a War: A Review Essay,” Signs 40,
no. 1 (2014): 217; Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the Clash of
Civilizations in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3
(2004): 285–306; Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism,
Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” Feminist Formations 17, no. 3 (2005): 112–33;
Myra MacDonald, “Muslim Women and the Veil,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 7–23. On
the “clash of civilizations,” see Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72,
no. 3 (1993): 22–49.
36 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on
Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90. Abu-
Lughod wrestles with the problematic nature of liberal feminists supporting this point of view in
this essay.
37 Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” 784. This contradicts Leila Ahmed’s
argument of the Muslim veil becoming in the early twentieth century a “symbol of Muslim
resistance and tradition in the face of a European concern with unveiling Muslim women.” See
also Melani McAllister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945,
updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 280–82.
38 Taylor, “Ground Zero,” 454.
39 Cynthia Enloe, “Masculinity as a Foreign Policy Issue,” in September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives,
ed. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002): 256–57.
40 Ibid., 257.
41 “President Urges Readiness and Patience,” George W. Bush Archives, September 15, 2001, http://
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915-4.html. On the construc-
tion of Bush as a cowboy, see Ryan Malphurs, “The Media’s Frontier Construction of President
George W. Bush,” The Journal of American Culture 31, no. 2 (2008): 185–201. See also Stacy Takacs,
“The Contemporary Politics of the Western Form: Bush, Saving Jessica Lynch, and Deadwood” in
Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror,” ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and
Karen Randell (New York: Continuum, 2010): 153–63; and Anna Froula, “Lynch ’n England:
Figuring Females as the US at War,” Global Media Journal 5, no. 9 (2006). http://www.globalmedia-
journal.com/open-access/lynch-n-england-figuring-females-as-the-us-at-war.pdf.
42 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 4–5, 8.
43 Wendy M. Christensen and Myra Marx Ferree, “Cowboy of the World? Gender Discourse and the
Iraq War Debate,” Qualitative Sociology, 31, no. 3 (2008): 287–306.
44 Denise M. Horn, “Boots and Bedsheets: Constructing the Military Support System in a Time of
War” in Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, eds. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (Santa
Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 61.
45 Bonnie Mann, “How America Justifies Its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity
and Sovereignty,” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (2006): 147–63, quote on 155.
46 Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–6.
47 Deepa Kumar, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica
Lynch Story,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 297. The commodification of Lynch benefited not
only a media hungry for a winning story but also U.S. stockholders and the economy at large. See Bill
Deneer, “Good News from Iraq Gives Investors a Reason to Buy,” Dallas Morning News, April 2, 2003.
48 Stacy Takacs, “Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11,”
Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–310, quote on 302.

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49 Kelly Oliver, “Women: The Secret Weapon of War,” Hypatia 23, no. 2 (2008): 1–17, quote on 1.
50 For more detailed analysis of the utility of the captivity narrative for Lynch’s story and how Lynndie
England’s experience reversed its conventions, see, for example, Froula, “Lynch ’n England”;
Takacs, “The Contemporary Politics”; Carol Mason, “The Hillbilly Defense: Culturally
Mediating US Terror at Home and Abroad,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 39–63; Faludi, The
Terror Dream, 165–240. Because she cannot remember any sexual assault happening, Lynch disputes
others’ claims of rape; her biographer, Rick Bragg, insisted on stating she was raped in I Am a Soldier,
Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (New York: Knopf, 2003) because he believed that “people need to
know that this is what can happen to women soldiers” (quoted in Faludi, The Terror Dream, 191).
51 Because the American captivity narrative relies on white femininity taken captive by savage, dark
others, it does not include the experience of enslaved black Americans. For more on Johnson’s story,
see Veronica Byrd, “To Hell and Back,” Essence 34, no. 11 (2004): 164–210. Lori Piestewa, the first
Native American women in uniform to be killed in combat, received ancillary press attention,
largely due to the fact that she was Lynch’s best friend.
52 Kumar, “War Propaganda,” 297–313, quote on 305.
53 Kumar, “War Propaganda,” 300.
54 For besieged national masculinity, see Faludi, The Terror Dream. For the April 2003 staging of the
toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in April 2003, see McAlister, Epic Encounters, 292–93.
55 Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence
and Desire from September 11,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2004): 526.
56 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinities and Camouflaged Politics: Unmasking the Bush
Dynasty and Its War against Iraq (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), 115–16. See also Norman K.
Denzin, “The War on Culture, the War on Truth,” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2
(2004): 137–42; Michael Griffin, “Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq:
Photographic Motifs as News Frames,” Journalism 5, no. 4 (2004): 381–402; Gearóid Ó Tuathail,
“‘Just Out Looking for a Fight’: American Affect and the Invasion of Iraq,” Antipode 35, no. 5
(2003): 856–70; W. Lance Bennett, “News as Reality TV: Election Coverage and the
Democratization of Truth,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 171–77.
57 Kevin Coe, David Domke, Meredith M. Bagley, Sheryl Cunningham, and Nancy Van Leuven,
“Masculinity as Political Strategy: George W. Bush, the ‘War on Terrorism,’ and an Echoing Press,”
Journal of Women, Politics and Policy 29, no. 1 (2007): 48.
58 George W. Bush, “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,”
George W. Bush White House Archives, May 1, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html.
59 These televised quotes, as well as many other examples of gendered praise, have been cataloged in such
write-ups as “‘Mission Accomplished’—Media Reaction,” W. The Official Film Guide, n.d., http://wth
efilm.com/guide/pages/73-Mission-Accomplished-Media-Reaction.html; Peter Hart, “Transmission
Accomplished: Propagandizing the Short-Lived Iraq War ‘Victory,’” FAIR.org, May 1, 2007, http://
fair.org/extra-online-articles/Transmission-Accomplished/; and Greg Mitchell, “Five Years Ago:
How the Media Gushed Over ‘Mission Accomplished,’” Huffington Post, May 1, 2008, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/5-years-ago-how-the-media_b_99633.html.
60 John W. Howard III and Laura C. Prividera, “The Fallen Woman Archetype: Media
Representations of Lynndie England, Gender, and the (Ab)uses of US Female Soldiers,” Women’s
Studies in Communication 31, no. 3 (2008): 287–311, quote on 296.
61 Ibid., 287.
62 In their 2005 album A Bigger Bang, the Rolling Stones commemorated the public perception of
England in their song “Dangerous Beauty.” See also, for example, Froula, “Lynch ’n England”;
Cristina Masters, “Femina Sacra: The ‘War on/of Terror,’ Women and the Feminine,” Security
Dialogue 40, no. 1 (2009): 29–49; V. Spike Peterson, “Thinking Through Intersectionality and
War,” Race, Gender, and Class 14, no. 3–4 (2007): 10–27.
63 Shannon L. Holland, “The Enigmatic Lynndie England: Gendered Explanations for the Crisis at
Abu Ghraib,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (2009): 246–64, quote on 246.

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64 Oliver, Women as Weapons of War?, 21–22.

65 For excellent insights into the torture policies, see, in particular, Mark Danner, Torture and Truth:
American, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004) and Tara
McKelvey, Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (New
York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).
66 On women serving in combat in Iraq pre-2013, see Lionesses (Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers,
2008).
67 Amy Garey, “Why Is the Cook on the Radio?: Warrior Women and Welfare Mothers in the
American Armed Forces,” Michigan Feminist Studies 23, no. 1 (2010), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/
spo.ark5583.0023.105.
68 While military sexual assault has received much scholarly attention for women, male victims remain
understudied. See, for example, Jessica A. Turchik and Susan M. Wilson, “Sexual Assault in the US
Military: A Review of the Literature and Recommendations for the Future,” Aggression and Violent
Behavior 15 (2010): 267–77; Tim Hoyt, et al., “Military Sexual Trauma in Men: A Review of
Reported Rates,” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 13, no. 3 (2011): 244–60. Many rape victims are
discharged under false diagnoses of personality or adjustment disorder. Michael Wishnie, “Yale Law
School Veterans Clinic Advocates for Marginalized Veteran Populations,” American Bar Association,
January 27, 2015. See also GQ’s undated exposé in Nathaniel Penn, “Son, Men Don’t Get Raped,”
GQ, n.d., http://www.gq.com/long-form/male-military-rape.
69 Alicia Arrizón, “‘Invisible Wars’: Gendered Terrorism in the U.S. Military and the Juárez
Feminicido,” in Gender, Globalization, and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi
(New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 82–110.
70 Elizabeth Mesok, “Affective Technologies of War: US Female Counterinsurgents and the
Performance of Gendered Labor,” Radical History Review 123 (2015): 86 n.54.
71 In Fort Bliss (Claudia Myers, 2014), Army medic Maggie Swann (Michelle Monaghan) fends off an
attempted rape by her Staff Sergeant. Return (Liza Johnson, 2011) acknowledges the prevalence of
rape in a single line of dialogue when Kelli (Linda Cardellini) says that she “wasn’t raped in a porta-
potty.”
72 Diana De Pasquale, “Inside Amy Schumer: Military Video Game and Victim Blaming,” Critical
Commons, n.d., http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/dianadepasquale/clips/sexual-assault-
in-military-video-game/view.
73 See Helen Benedict, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2009), 110, 246 n.14. On other wartime contaminants leading to birth defects, Benedict also
tells the story of Miriam Barton (alias), who received the mandatory but controversial Anthrax
vaccine and is “locked in a bureaucratic struggle with Veterans Affairs trying to find out why her son
cannot hear or talk” (110).
74 Ibid., 1.
75 Ibid., 203–04. Also see Benedict, The Lonely Soldier on the “disastrous” 2005 cuts to the VA.
76 Paige Whaley Eager, Waging Gendered Wars: U.S. Military Women in Afghanistan and Iraq (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014), 39.
77 Mesok, “Affective Technologies,” 80. See also Stephanie K. Erwin, “The Veil of Kevlar: An
Analysis of the Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan” (Master’s Thesis, Naval Postgraduate
School, 2012).
78 Mesok, “Affective Technologies,” 60.
79 Ibid., 64–65.
80 Ibid., 61–62.
81 Coco Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), 41.
82 Mesok, “Affective Technologies,” 68.
83 G.I. Jane, directed by Ridley Scott (1997).
84 Felicia Schwartz and Gordon Lubold, “Defense Secretary Says US Opening All Military Combat
Roles to Women,” The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2015.
85 Ibid.

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86 Anthony C. King, “Women Warriors: Female Accession to Ground Combat,” Armed Forces &
Society 41, no. 2 (2015): 379–87, quote on 385.
87 Eager, Waging Gendered Wars, 173.
88 G. Dean Sinclair, “Homosexuality and the Military: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of
Homosexuality 56, no. 6 (2009): 701–18, quote on 701.
89 Ibid., 714.
90 The Strange History of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, directed by Fentin Bailey and Randy Barbato (New
York: HBO, 2011).
91 Aaron Belkin, “The Politics of Paranoia,” Journal of Homosexuality 60 (2013): 214. His conception of
paranoia derives from Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1965).
92 Eugene R. Milhizer, “‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: A Qualified Defense,” Hofstra Labor and Employment
Law Journal 21, no. 2 (2010), Article 2. See also Belkin, “The Politics of Paranoia.”
93 L. Michael Allsep, Jr., “The Myth of the Warrior: Martial Masculinity and the End of Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell,” Journal of Homosexuality 60, no. 2–3 (2013): 382. He warns, “Before all members of the
armed forces can serve without fear of discrimination based on their sexual orientation, those cultural
beliefs and values will have to change to embrace the image and idea of the gay warrior” (383).
94 George R. Brown, “Transsexuals in the Military: Flight into Hypermasculinity,” in The Transgender
Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 537–44, quote
on 537. See also Adam F. Yerke and Valory Mitchell, “Transgender People in the Military: Don’t
Ask? Don’t Tell? Don’t Enlist!,” Journal of Homosexuality 60, no. 2-3 (2013): 436–57.
95 Jocelyn Elders and Alan M. Steinman, “Report of the Transgender Military Service Commission,”
Palm Center: Blueprints for Sound Public Policy (March 2014): 4. http://www.palmcenter.org/files/
Transgender%20Military%20Service%20Report.pdf.
96 Ibid., 21.
97 Tom Vanden Brook, “Army Eases Policy on Transgender Soldiers,” Military Times, February 16,
2015, http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/02/16/army-eases-policy-
on-transgender-soldiers/23509491/.
98 Ibid. See also, Julie Tate, “Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years in WikiLeaks Case,” The
Washington Post, August, 21, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/
judge-to-sentence-bradley-manning-today/2013/08/20/85bee184-09d0-11e3-b87c-
476db8ac34cd_story.html.
99 Dean Spade and Craig Willse, “Sex, Gender, and War in an Age of Multicultural Imperialism,”
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 1 (2014): 119.
100 Ibid., 17.
101 Ibid., 6.
102 Cynthia Enloe, Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkley: University of
California Press, 2004), 193.
103 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985).
104 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Gates Fears Wider Gap Between Country and Military,” The New York Times,
September 29, 2010.
105 Mary L. Dudziak, “War and Peace in Time and Space,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 13, no. 2
(2014): 381, 382.
106 Mesok “Affective Technologies,” 80.

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 PART II

Mobilizing Gender in the

Service of War

As the essays in the first section make clear, wars and military service have wrought gender change
throughout U.S. history. Section II takes up another aspect of the relationship between wars and
gender by examining gender as a component of discourses, policies, and conceptions of national
identity that have shaped military interventions throughout the nation’s history. The authors of
these four chapters highlight the ways that scholars have shown gender to be an important
component of all facets of wartime foreign relations. In particular, historians engaged in the study
of diplomatic and foreign relations, the U.S. military, wars, and militarism have utilized the
theory and methods of cultural history to demonstrate that gender is essential to understanding
the reasons the nation engages in war, the ways Americans understand enemies and allies, and the
ways that gender is a central component in the militarization of American culture.
These chapters outline the development of scholarship that has transformed the study of war-
making. Through a focus on policy makers, historians have shown gender to be an influential
component in understanding the motivations and decision-making process. Although the
decision-makers who have led the nation to war have most often been men, scholars have also
shown diplomacy to include organizations comprised mostly of women who have had a tangible
effect on international relations. At both the individual and organizational level, gender has
framed the nation’s responses to domestic and foreign concerns. As historians have shown,
Americans have sometimes believed that war would solve the problems of gender change at
home. In turn, gender norms also helped to frame Americans’ beliefs about which fights were
worth having. It was much easier for leaders to justify intervention in foreign lands, for example,
when those nations were characterized as feminine and in need of rescue.
While the invocation to “be a man” has accompanied many calls to arms, scholars have
interrogated the particular ways gender has underscored declarations of war and foreign relations
at particular moments in U.S. history. The need for war was, in many cases, framed as a necessary
effort to defend institutions at the heart of patriarchal society, such as slavery, empire, or
capitalism. And, in turn, the military enlisted patriarchal society in the form of the “nuclear”
family to subdue former enemies, domesticate occupations, and normalize postwar relations.
Likewise, defending the nation often meant protecting it from nations and peoples that seemed
poised to threaten the nation’s gender order, whether from without or within the borders.
Enemy nations and peoples were often construed as barbarically masculine threats to women at
home, even as women came under close scrutiny to ensure they adhered to proper wartime roles.

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In all of these ways, the following chapters demonstrate, scholars have illuminated the ways
gender has been at the heart of the nation’s extension of power and violence, both in wartime and
in peacetime. Gendered militarism, in fact, has become a central part of the nation’s history. At
the same time, historians remind us that notions of gender generally and gendered militarism
specifically are not uniform but are intimately connected to race, class, ethnicity, region, and a
myriad of other factors.
As the U.S. military continues to integrate women, gays and lesbians, and transgendered
people into the forces, these chapters challenge us to think about what a greater attention to
gender might mean. Will a broader understanding of gender in the military change the way it
wages violence and makes war? These chapters provide a historical framework for understanding
the ways gender has shaped military and wartime rhetoric and policies, and thus should serve as a
useful guide for thinking about the present and future.

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 11
GENDER AS A CAUSE OF WAR
Robert Dean
eastern washington university department of history

In the last couple of decades, a number of historians have written histories that explore the ways
that discourses of gender have shaped American engagement in conflict. A common thread that
runs through much of this literature connects ideologies of “manhood” to debates, policies, and
social practices that led to war and expansion. But does “gender” cause war? This essay is an
attempt to formulate some useful responses to that question, drawing upon some of the scholar-
ship that has opened new questions about masculinity, politics, and war.1
Let us begin with a few propositions that might help to put the issue in a meaningful context.
First, gender will not often provide a satisfying explanation as the sole or proximate cause of war
in the context of any episode in U.S. history. Gender is, however, thoroughly entwined with
many aspects of both individual identity and the construction of social order. Tropes of gender
have been, and continue to be, virtually ubiquitous in political discourse.2 Consequently, almost
any complete explanation of the genesis of war will need to grapple with gender as a part of a
complex mix of motivations that could include analysis of economic and strategic imperatives,
racial hierarchies and racial ideology, constructions of social class, as well as domestic struggles for
power.
“Manhood” and “manliness” are key terms in the history of discourses about individual and
national identity, social order, and the legitimacy of political leadership. And of course, it is
important to remember that for the purposes of historical analysis, gender is discursively con-
structed. Masculinity, the more current term for the social attributes of manhood, is a pattern of
behavior and social expectations, an accretion of “truths” about the essential nature of men. So for
our purposes, it is culture, not biology, that is determinative, even though the discourses
themselves may refer to presumed essential differences between men and women that are rooted
in sexual biology.
Thus, masculinity is an ideological construction, with important implications for the political
legitimacy of leaders and policymakers in a republic. The “strength” of leaders, their conformity
to dominant cultural ideals of masculinity, has been and continues to be a constant theme of
political struggle and electoral rivalry. International relations and the perception of foreign threat
typically put these questions of strength or weakness at the center of domestic political debate, as
well as shaping the foreign policy of leaders themselves. It is important to remember that decisions
about war occur not in an abstract realm of pure calculations of national interest, strategic
considerations, economic costs and benefits, or humanitarian concerns. They have been made

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by particular embodied men, who are products of culture and class, and who were themselves
typically confronted with a variety of problems simultaneously—how to cope with perceived
threats from abroad while struggling with political rivals at home, for instance. The performance
of “masculinity” is itself a feature of political discourse that can have profound implications for
war or peace.3
The essay that follows discusses several episodes in American history where scholars have used
gender analytically to advance our understanding of the discursive origins of war. No attempt is
made to construct a totalizing synthesis that encompasses every American war in chronological
sequence, or to identify every occurrence where the construction of “manhood” might be
recruited to serve in explaining the outbreak of war. Accounts of the First and Second World
Wars and their aftermath, for instance, will be conspicuous by their absence. While much good
work on gender and the world wars has been done, this essay is more narrowly focused on
elucidating patterns of cause and effect in a few cases of U.S.-initiated war.4 This argument is, in
part, rooted selectively in a recent historiography in which historians have deployed arguments
that elucidate the effects of gendered discourses and political practices that shaped decisions to go
to war. It is also heavily reliant on my own research into ways that gender and culture shaped
American intervention in Vietnam, stretching back to the late nineteenth century. The essay is
also intended to tease out the implications that in some cases are present, but not explicitly
developed as gender analysis, in a diverse literature.

Manhood, Honor, Slavery, and the Civil War

We might begin an examination of some examples that shed light on ways that gender ideologies
can be part of the mix of factors that lead to war by looking at the antebellum U.S. slave South.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, for instance, examines the implications of the culture of “honor” that
held sway, especially in the South. His work ultimately links masculine ideologies of “honor” and
the quotidian practice of violence to the cultural and political logic that sparked the Civil War.
“The principles of honor,” he argues, “were the means to create and bind together a privileged
group and to classify the ranks of its members for the purposes of establishing order and group
cohesion.”5
Honor and violence often intersected in the duel. The ritual of the duel, Wyatt-Brown argues,
was “significant in the organizing of leadership in political circles, especially southern ones.”6
Dueling “was a means to demonstrate status and manliness among those calling themselves
gentlemen, whether born of noble blood or not.”7 Another closely related social institution,
the citizen’s militia, provided another avenue for ambitious men in a society where the line
between warrior culture and civilian life was indistinct, and where claims to “honor” were not
determined by birth. In this contest for place and status, “the title of ‘Major,’ ‘Colonel’ or best of
all, ‘General’ did wonders for reputation in that very hierarchical society.”8
Honor, according to Wyatt-Brown, revolved around the bonds of patron-client relationships,
harnessing the threat or the reality of personal violence and the risk of death to maintain political
credibility and status among peer-group competitors. Maintaining the public appearance of
honor became a central element of both personal and public identity among male slaveholding
elites especially. Honor defined a particular performance of masculinity, “a form of dramatiza-
tion.” But besides underwriting the social power of the planter class, the imperatives of honor
directed behavior and perhaps also incurred psychological costs: “a heartless, overbearing male
passion to rule untrammeled, especially over women and menials; second, a repression of self-
exposing, seemingly effeminate feelings that could prompt ill-recognized anger and melancholy:
and third, a lust for fame and immortality in men’s memory.”9

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This gendered ideology of honor was a central constituent of southern slaveholders’ identity,
and, Wyatt-Brown argues, the compulsion to defend “honor” was central to the genesis of the
secession crisis and Civil War. “Just as personal insults could lead to duels so could northern
assaults on southern reputation for honesty and Christian bearing result in civil conflict . …
Lower South secessionists were convinced that the North had had the effrontery to give the
South the ‘lie direct,’ to use the dueling term.”10 For many southerners, “the Civil War was
reduced to a simple test of manhood,” asserts Wyatt-Brown.11
Southern elites of course believed that the threat they perceived to the system of chattel slavery
during the 1850s up to the election of Lincoln represented a threat to every aspect of their
identities as privileged, economically independent, “free” white men, who ruled “untrammeled”
with patriarchal power over women and their enslaved human chattel, up to and including the
power of sexual domination. The system of slavery was, as Walter Johnson has put it, “the empire
of the white man’s will.” Johnson and Edward Baptist have recently published books on the
culture and economics of slavery that demonstrate with admirable clarity how patterns of elite
male behavior arose from social, cultural, and economic imperatives to dominate others. An
identity as an “honorable” and successful southern slave owner included powerful incentives to
brutalize enslaved people with the lash to maximize the profitability of cotton production.
Planters recorded each slave’s daily output as a means “to calibrate torture in order to force
cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity.” This “pushing” system
generated a 2.6 percent annual average increase in the productivity of the enslaved on the cotton
frontier between 1811 and 1860. Wealth, political power, and “honor” all flowed from a
pervasive, systemic violence practiced to compel compliance and ever-increasing productivity
from a terrorized and sexually vulnerable enslaved population. To maintain control over enslaved
bodies and to prevent resistance or rebellion, the South became a kind of quasi-militarized
society. Southern states used measures that amounted to a kind of civic conscription of white
men (including those that did not possess enslaved “property”) to staff the armed and mounted
slave patrols that were supposed to ensure the discovery and repression of any potential
rebellion.12
Torture, rape, and other forms of compulsion, sexual and otherwise, were constituent
elements of both the enslaver’s culture, and in many cases, his personal identity. Such violence
also was central to economic practice, grounded firmly in the expansionist commodity-produ-
cing speculative capitalism of the Cotton Kingdom. As Johnson argues in an earlier study, by
“making a world out of slaves” the ownership and domination of other human beings was central
to the psychological and social identity of Southern slave owners and aspirants to that class. The
paradox was that such domination created among the power-holders of Southern society a
profound economic and psycho-social dependence on slavery itself. Another way to put this is
to say that ideas about manhood did not merely “inform” the system of chattel slavery, but that
implicit or explicit in the work of scholars like Wyatt-Brown, Baptist, and Johnson is the
argument that slave-owning masculinity and the system of chattel slavery were mutually con-
stitutive. As a consequence, Southern cultural and political life evolved an extraordinary and
violent sensitivity concerning perceived threats to the “peculiar institution,” one that led to a war
of rebellion in defense of slavery.13
Gendered ideologies of male power and honor were at the same time inextricable from
racialized ideologies of white supremacy and a “Christian civilization” based on enslaved African-
American labor. That civilization was one of the most violent in the Western world, even leaving
aside the quotidian violence intrinsic to the maintenance of chattel slavery. The “code of
masculinity,” as Baptist argues, was used by white men “as both weapon and motivator in battles
for political equality and access to the economic benefits of slavery.”14 Up and down the class

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hierarchy white men were enmeshed in economic and status competition that carried the
potential to explode into physical conflict. White on white violence was ubiquitous:

At the most basic level, white people fought each other in the old slaveholding states
to prove that they were not slaves. Enslaved men were not allowed to defend their
pride, their manhood, or anything else. They had to endure the penetration of their
skin, their lives, their families. Therefore the best way to insult a white man was to
treat him like a black man, as if he could not strike back, and the best way to disprove
that was to strike back.15

With a homicide rate in some parts of the Deep South fifty times higher than that of the
northeastern United States, it is evident that violence was an interpersonal problem-solving
strategy of first resort in the region, grounded in basic conceptions of “free” white manhood.
That gendered culture of aggression played out in sectional conflict over slavery as well. As
southern slave owners imagined that the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency posed a
direct threat to the institution of chattel slavery, they also interpreted abolitionist and free-soil
ideology as an insult to their honor, their privilege, and to their identity as men. Secession,
military mobilization, and war were a reflexive response deeply rooted in racialized ideologies of
“manhood.”

Manhood and Imperial Expansion—The Filibusters

Even before the outbreak of civil war in 1861, an aggressive paramilitary masculine ideology of
expansionism intrinsic to the hoped-for Manifest Destiny of the “slaveocracy” had been central to
both the internecine violence that erupted in the Kansas territory, and to a number of filibustering
expeditions attempting to annex parts of Latin America. Amy Greenberg’s work on the gendered
culture of Manifest Destiny after 1848 illuminates the centrality of a vision of aggressive, martial
American manhood to the mercenary armies recruited and deployed in efforts to conquer and
dominate Caribbean and Latin American states. Filibusters attempted to peel off more Mexican
land, to acquire Cuba as a “natural” appendage of the slave South, and the southerner William
Walker briefly undertook to rule Nicaragua as a kind of slave colony. These doomed expeditions
foreshadowed, unsuccessfully, the explosion of overseas colonial conquest and intervention that
followed in the wake of the American war with Spain in 1898, itself a legacy of the power of a
discourse of imperial manhood.16
Greenberg argues that at least two different ideologies of imperial expansionist manhood existed
in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. One, “martial masculinity,” exalted the values of
aggression, domination, physical force, and male sexual prowess. The other, “restrained masculi-
nity,” valued reasoned male self-control, success in business, and the sexual and behavioral strictures
of evangelical Protestantism. Men of all social classes adopted each style, but workingmen facing
contracting economic opportunity were especially disposed toward martial masculinity. Martial
men often saw the private armies of the filibustering expeditions as avenues for economic and even
sexual success no longer available to them at home. The imperial frontier-to-be would serve as a
“safety valve” for men thwarted in efforts to succeed materially, or who sought adventure and a
chance to dominate “lesser” peoples. The men that enlisted in such adventures were, as one
observer at the time described them, “mostly of the class found about the wharves of Southern
cities, with here and there a Northern bank cashier who had suddenly changed his vocation.”17
The martial imperialism of the era of Manifest Destiny was discursively constructed as a
sexualized and racialized vision of manly domination, advertised widely in efforts to recruit

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and equip the expeditions. Latin American men were depicted as lazy, weak, and ineffectual—
contemptible comic figures to be supplanted by their North American conquerors. But
Latin women were envisioned as attractive, compliant, ready and willing to be “annexed”
by virile filibusters.18 As Walter Johnson asserts, “in the fantasy life of nineteenth-century
white supremacy and imperialism, every story that contrasted American vigor and deter-
mination to Latin enervation and loss of self-control was also a story about smoldering sexual
possibility.”19
This privatized freelance imperialism was “ultimately a colossal failure” according to
Greenberg. Filibustering was a dangerous fantasy for its participants, leading to hunger, humilia-
tion, and death for many. Nonetheless, filibusters mobilized support both in the North and the
South—by staging mass rallies linked covertly or overtly to the Democratic Party, and by finding
financial support among slave-owning and other capitalist investors hoping to get in on the
ground floor of the next American forced labor frontier. But by provoking controversy over the
expansion of slavery, filibustering undermined existing support for Cuban annexation, something
desired and pursued by Democratic administrations in the 1850s. It exacerbated the sectional
crisis that generated full-blown civil war in 1861.20
The “gendered culture of Manifest Destiny” did encourage “Northerners and Southerners to
turn to violence as a solution to personal and national problems,” Greenberg argues. Here we can
see gender appear as a central interpretive theme among these historians of the antebellum era.
Whether the studies are focused on systems of male “honor,” the workings of expansionist
speculative enslavement-capitalism, or the freelance imperial ambitions of the filibusters, racia-
lized masculine ideologies of domination, violence, and sexual power are inextricably entwined
with the causes of war. These range from the Indian wars that dispossessed the indigenous
inhabitants of the cotton frontier, to the filibustering expeditions against Mexico, Cuba, and
Nicaragua, and finally the secession crisis and the outbreak of civil war.21

Manhood and Imperial Expansion—The War of 1898

The slaughter of 1861–1865 reduced enthusiasm for war and shifted the diplomatic and political
balance toward “restrained manhood,” according to Greenberg. For a few decades in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, the gendered vision of American overseas imperial expansion was
largely focused on commerce. As Secretary of State James G. Blaine put it, the goal was “‘the
annexation of trade,’ not ‘the annexation of territory.’”22 The United States sometimes deployed
military force, not for purposes of outright conquest, but to defend business interests.
Nonetheless, the last decade of the century saw the resurgence of martial ideology and, after
1898, American wars of overseas imperialism.23
Central to the renewal of militarism and war was a vision of American manhood under threat,
as Kristin Hoganson, Sarah Watts, Gail Bederman, and other scholars argue. This conception of a
crisis in masculinity has multiple dimensions. The social and economic changes of an industrializ-
ing society disturbed traditional sex roles. The visibility of the “new woman” and campaigns for
suffrage and prohibition portended threatening changes in women’s participation in political life.
The fecundity of the new immigrant working class inspired anxieties simultaneously racial,
political, and sexual among old stock WASPs. As Bederman so ably argued twenty years ago,
the growth of Social Darwinist thought had the paradoxical effect of explaining the presumed
superiority of “Anglo-Saxon” civilization while at the same time provoking fear of degeneracy
and softness among “overcivilized” middle and upper class white men compared to their prolific
racial, class, and ethnic “inferiors,” at home and abroad. If the right sort of American men could
not reclaim the full potency of manhood, “race suicide” loomed.24

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As scholars note, the economic depression of the 1890s undermined many men’s traditional
role as family breadwinner. That dispossession raised, among elites, the specter of class warfare or
revolution. For, of course, a kind of class warfare had repeatedly erupted across the country since
1877: railroad labor violence, the Haymarket protests, strikes, injunctions, private and state armies
deployed to put down union militancy at places like Homestead and Pullman. Sexual anarchy
loomed too, in the minds of many “old stock” Americans. Socialism, anarchism, and other left
and labor ideologies were tainted by association with gender and sexual nonconformity, from fear
of imagined homegrown petroleuses to “free love” feminists of the International.25
The “closing” of the American frontier, announced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in
1893, generated an anxious desire for an alternative “safety valve” to relieve the pressure from the
dangerous classes. A new overseas frontier would give scope for manly adventures and might
provide new economic opportunity through the acquisition of an empire and the expansion of
export markets. American policy elites also possessed a sort of imperial envy. During recent
decades European powers, led by Britain, had been engaged in a global scramble for formal
empire, while America had focused on the growth of capitalism and consolidation of its
continental empire. For a new industrial power like the United States, the British especially
seemed to provide an example worthy of emulation. England publicly celebrated a cult of
manhood surrounding empire and its colonial service. Envious and admiring members of the
American ruling class advocated a similar shouldering of the white man’s burden. This was to be
both a means to make manifest America’s commercial destiny, and a vital element of the
(Darwinist) struggle that would ensure a place of primacy for America’s Anglo-Saxon civilization.
For example, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in a flush of enthusiasm following the 1898 U.S.
victory in Cuba, urged the creation of “a class of men precisely like those employed by England in
India.”26
A kind of “greatest generation” hero worship of aging Civil War veterans fed a desire among
many men for the experience of war as a therapeutic corrective to inadequate or neurasthenic
masculinity, perceived as both an individual and collective problem in fin-de-siècle America. As
Kristin Hoganson notes, many patrician political leaders and military theorists like Lodge,
Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, Brooks Adams, and others shared this
idealization of war. Battle, Roosevelt argued, built masculine character and physical strength in
ways that served both the individual and the state. “No qualities called out by a purely peaceful life
stand on a level with those stern and virile virtues which move the men of stout heart and strong
hand who uphold the honor of their flag in battle.” But in this vision, “degeneracy” threatened.
Those who lacked manly virtue would obstruct the imperial destiny of the state: “The timid man,
the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great
fighting masterful virtues, the man of dull mind whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift
that ‘thrills stern men with empires in their brains’—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the
nation undertake its new duties.”27
As Sarah Watts shows in her cultural and psychological study, “inner demons” drove
Theodore Roosevelt and other vocal propagandists for military solutions to the problems of
race, nation, and class. This anxious ideology of manhood exhibited powerfully punitive features.
Punishment was necessary to correct and redeem both individual and nation. It needed to be
directed within and without:

Important personalities like [Theodore] Roosevelt, [Edward] Ross, [Alfred Thayer]

Mahan, [Owen] Wister, and [William] James exhorted middle-class men to project
their own self-purifications onto the nation’s body and to undertake a national self-
hardening as a radical antidote to modern ills. These men imagined a tough collective

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exterior that took the form of a modern steel navy, the domination of militarily
weaker or less civilized nations, or repeated disciplinary actions at home against race
and class enemies.

They sought an “evolutionary savagery” under proper discipline. Killing, in the right circum-
stances, was a necessity, conceived “as civilization cleansing, race hardening, and nation
strengthening.”28
A discourse of manliness, “honor,” and “chivalry” permeated the debate that arose in the press
and in Congress after the onset of the Cuban War of Independence against Spain (1895–1898),
according to Kristin Hoganson. One contemporary political commentator suggested that the
public was inflamed by an irresponsible and flamboyant jingoism already eager to seize the
“possibility of war with anybody anywhere.”29 As the popular press began covering the Cuban
struggle by depicting the conflict according to the conventions of chivalric novels, American
jingoes adopted a political language of honor and duty, calling for intervention to protect the
weak. Righteous anger was focused on the treatment of Cuban womanhood, portrayed as sexual
victims of their Spanish colonial oppressors. As supporters of intervention, the yellow press often
depicted the victims of Spanish tyranny as light-skinned maidens, in effect whitewashing the
actual racial makeup of Cuba. In the lead-up to war, interventionist discourse erased the Afro-
Cuban component of the insurgency. American citizens too, on a few occasions, were detained
or maltreated by the colonial authorities, further inflaming the jingoes’ aggrieved sense of honor
and chivalry.30 American men were obligated to defend the honor of the United States, the
argument went, because an honorable man or an honorable nation could not simply stand aside in
the face of injustice and insult. As the Spanish counter-insurgency war grew more brutal and
atrocities received play in the press, American advocates for war increasingly saw Cuba as the
crusade that could, by reinvigorating a traditional manly virtue among Americans, restore an
“honorable” (that is to say conservative and militarized) political and gender order at home, as
well as placing Cuba in the protective embrace of the United States.31
The jingoes, advocates of a chauvinist “manly” imperialism, were, as Hoganson argues,
products of an American political system structured around male privilege and power—enfran-
chised men were the only actors within the electoral system, and “to win political authority, men
had to appear manly.” Politics was a rough game, and gendered accusations of weakness were a
pervasive part of the language of competition. Reformers or those seen as possessing upper-class
pretensions of one sort or another were given labels like “she-men,” “eunuchs,” “man-milli-
ners,” or “political hermaphrodites.” Theodore Roosevelt himself was on the receiving end of
this sort of ridicule when he entered the New York state assembly as a young man, where he had
been insulted with appellations such as “Jane-Dandy,” “Punkin-Lilly,” and “our own Oscar
Wilde” by partisan newspapers and rival legislators. It took several years of strenuous, self-
publicized masculine adventure on his Dakota ranch dressed in proper cowboy costume for
Roosevelt to shake that taint.32
In the contest over Cuban policy, opponents of intervention, or those merely hesitant, were
subject to “the coercive power of gender in political debate,” according to Hoganson.33
Interventionists deemed President William McKinley, himself a veteran of the Civil War,
insufficiently eager for war. They accused him of being a captive of business interests. But of
course, the jingoes did not effortlessly win the debate by asserting their vision of the glory-to-be
of resurgent American warrior manhood fighting Spaniards. Opponents of intervention raised
several objections. The expense of a war and its potential to derail the troubled U.S. economy
bothered some. Many felt uncertainty concerning the true military capacity of Spain and doubted
that the war would result in the rapid victory advertised by interventionists. Opponents in the

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press pointed to the problematic racial composition of the Cuban people, who were “more than
half negroes, many of whom were born in Africa, and the remainder turbulent Spaniards and
descendants of Spaniards.” To intervene would be racial folly: “Cuba libre means another Black
Republic … Hayti is already too close.”34 Anti-interventionists in Congress “asserted that the
central issues at stake in Cuba were economic, political, and legal, rather than chivalric,” argues
Hoganson.35 In this “restrained” vision, a manliness of sober, pragmatic calculation, not martial
fury, should decide policy. Despite the urgent threats to the honor of the nation bemoaned by
jingoes, McKinley pursued avenues other than war to resolve the Cuban crisis. But on February
15, 1898, an explosion in Havana harbor shifted the terms of the public debate decisively away
from sober calculation and toward rash intervention.
The explosion that sank the USS Maine, killing 261 of the crew, was immediately blamed on
Spanish perfidy, despite the absence of any real evidence. (The historical consensus now attributes
the sinking to an accidental coalbunker fire that ignited ammunition stores.) Amid a campaign in
the yellow press demanding war, interventionists in Congress sought to avenge American
“honor.” This had a decisive effect on the positions of anti-interventionist Congressmen,
according to Hoganson. “The certitude that honor was at stake made it politically foolish to
argue that a naval accident of uncertain provenance was insufficient grounds for war because
honor made the issue seem essential to the preservation of American manhood and the American
political system.”36
The president, however, did not rush to war, and thus McKinley’s “backbone” became an
object of political derision, and the discourse surrounding his seeming “weakness” undermined
his attempt to settle the issue short of armed conflict. The publication of the “de Lome letter” a
week before the sinking of the Maine initiated the controversy. A private letter of the Spanish
Ambassador was intercepted and published by a pro-war newspaper. The letter insulted
McKinley as a “low politician,” “weak and catering to the rabble.” With the destruction of the
instrument of American naval power in Havana harbor, McKinley’s failure to respond strongly
either to the insults of the representative of the Spanish state or to the purported shedding of
American blood marked him in the popular press and among posturing Congressional jingoes as
“lame, halting, and impotent.”37 The interventionists in the press asked if his passivity was due to
“his characteristic invertebrateness or [to] the restraints of the peace-at-any price moneyed
interests or business interests of the country.”38 Even Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary
of the Navy at the time and a self-identified “Jingo,” reputedly asserted to associates that his boss
the president “had no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” While it now seems that this much
repeated quotation cannot be traced to a reliable source, it is nonetheless clear that Roosevelt in
March 1898 ardently hoped for war. Roosevelt argued that the “‘defective imaginations of many
good people here, the limited mental horizon of others, and the craven fear and brutal selfishness
of the mere money-getters, have combined to prevent us from doing our duty.’”39
During the interval between the sinking of the Maine on February 15 and the April 25 U.S.
declaration of war against Spain, McKinley faced a growing political problem, despite his own
apparent doubts about the necessity or wisdom of war. As Hoganson argues, the growing public
outcry threatened the legitimacy and effectiveness of his administration. Faced with personal attacks
denigrating his courage, his physique, his Civil War record, and ultimately his manhood, McKinley
continued for weeks searching for a diplomatic solution to the Cuban crisis. When the refusal of the
Spanish Crown to comply with U.S. demands short of war made apparent the domestic political
danger of continuing the search for a negotiated resolution, on April 11 McKinley decided to put
the matter to Congress. Even then, he faced criticism for insufficient enthusiasm for war. When
Congress authorized intervention, the president acted, imposing a blockade of Cuba, followed by a
request to Congress for a declaration of war. Hoganson argues that “the debate over his backbone

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shows that gendered ideas about leadership limited the range of politically viable options available to
him. McKinley’s backbone became a central issue in the debate over war because political activists
… believed that manly character mattered in politics.”40
Thus began an imperial war. The defeat of the Spanish forces in Cuba followed quickly after
the newly recruited American army of volunteers landed. Secretary of State John Hay congra-
tulated Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to
help General Leonard Wood form the First Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” and whose
highly publicized exploits launched a meteoric ascent for his political career. “It has been a
splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and
spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave,” Hay gushed.41 The Cuban insurgents
though, found it less than splendid. While the Spanish were driven out, the American forces
sidelined Cuban nationalist leaders, many of whom had complexions too dark to inspire
confidence among the new occupation authorities. McKinley’s administration constructed the
new Cuba Libre as a U.S. dependency. The United States annexed Puerto Rico. The American
decision to exercise a “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines as a colonial possession led to a
prolonged and bloody counter-insurgency war against Filipino nationalists and “tribal” resistance
that killed perhaps two hundred thousand inhabitants of the archipelago between 1899 and 1914.
As Paul Kramer has shown, deeply held ideologies of gender and race justified the decisions to
deny self-government to the inhabitants of the new imperial possessions and dependencies.
American officials held as axiomatic the incapacity and “immaturity” of dark-skinned peoples.42
White men alone were capable of properly governing, at least until a lengthy (and indeterminate)
period of tutelage adequately prepared the “savage, childlike, feminine” new subject to take the
reins of state.43
So once again, the historiography suggests profound links, if not one-dimensional proximate
causes, between ideologies and political discourses of martial manhood and the decision to begin
war. A late-nineteenth-century generational change in the vision of “hegemonic” masculinity
began to celebrate qualities at odds with the restrained masculinity identified by Amy Greenberg.
Bederman, Hoganson, Watts, and other historians have demonstrated that many men of the
political classes felt anxieties about economic issues, social and political order at home, Darwinian
competition with “lesser races” and imperial rivals, aggressive “new” women, and the dangers to
individual and nation posed by “overcivilization.” A discourse of masculine honor and martial
virtue promised action that might set the nation back on a manly, honorable course. As jingoes in
the popular press deployed stories of Spanish cruelty and oppression in the genre of chivalric
romances, the political language of masculine honor and duty obscured the pragmatic objections
to war held by many Americans. McKinley, who apparently did not idealize war, was buffeted by
the demands for a martial solution to a crisis he attempted to resolve otherwise. Ultimately the
discourse of honor and manhood created political conditions that compelled a resort to inter-
vention and war. That set in motion decades of repeated military actions to police the new
imperial possessions and Latin American dependencies.

Cold War, Lavender Scare, and the Gendered Politics of the Vietnam War
Here it might be useful to highlight existing gaps in the literature of gender and war in U.S.
history. There is a rich literature on gender relating to both the First and Second World Wars, but
many of those studies examine issues such as the changing role of women, the effects of war on the
construction and experience of masculinity, prostitution and the military, gender ideology and
“shell shock,” or the transformative effect of war mobilization and experience on the homosexual
communities in the United States. There is an absence of studies of the causative effects of

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gendered discourse and the origins of American involvement in the world wars, a place where
perhaps further work is warranted. Frank Costigliola’s pioneering work on emotion and the high
politics of the American, British, and Soviet alliance stands as something of an exception. His
analysis does not explore the origins of the Second World War itself, but he sheds a great deal of
light on the ways that the gendered, embodied, and emotional experiences of Roosevelt,
Churchill, Stalin, and many of their high-level subordinates contributed to the breakdown of
the wartime alliance and the descent into “cold war.”44
There is, nonetheless, much conceptual continuity between the era of the turn-of-the-
century imperial wars and the notion of a “crisis” of masculinity as one element in the genesis
of Cold War imperial intervention. The Vietnam War, of course, makes a useful case study,
illustrating how the domestic politics of manhood, mixed with a toxic and homophobic anti-
communism, could create the conditions where presidents and their advisors would find a
counter-revolutionary war in Southeast Asia to be a self-protective political necessity. In the
1970s some scholars and journalists such as Richard Barnet and David Halberstam alluded to the
political imperatives of “toughness” as part of the genesis of American intervention, but none
engaged in a systematic analysis of gender as a precipitant of war. The explanatory tropes that
dominated explanation of the Vietnam War, such as “quagmire,” the imperatives of “contain-
ment,” the legacy of the “open door,” and the like, did not adequately address the full range of
cultural determinants that drove policy. My own work on this question followed some of the
clues present in this earlier work, in an analysis that puts gender and class at the center of
explanation.45
Another valuable contribution to the literature on gender, politics, and the origins of inter-
vention during the Cold War is K.A. Cuordileone’s Manhood and American Political Culture in the
Cold War. While Cuordileone’s book is not primarily focused on the question of gender as a cause
of war, it provides a brilliant unpacking of the gendered cultural and political anxieties that
discursively structured anti-communism in the decade and a half before large-scale American
military intervention in Southeast Asia. As Cuordileone argues, the self-conception and the
language of political “virility” deployed by the Kennedy administration “encouraged the flexing
of liberal muscle from Cuba to Vietnam.”46
And as my work demonstrates, many of the figures that composed the “establishment” of the
1960s had been socialized to manhood in institutions bequeathed to them by the turn-of-the-
century imperialists. John F. Kennedy and many of his foreign policy advisors had grown up with
very explicit “prescriptive” lessons about proper elite masculinity. Sex-segregated boarding schools,
Ivy-League universities, and elite military service composed a kind of curriculum followed by these
elites before launching a career in government; they learned to construct an identity-narrative of
imperial manhood similar in its essential assumptions to that espoused by Theodore Roosevelt a few
decades earlier. Most had, as young men, also experienced the proscriptive dimension of the politics
of masculinity, in the shape of a politicized Lavender Scare and purge whose punitive effects left
profound scars on liberal internationalist foreign policy elites.47
By the 1880s, patrician elites had created an American system of sex-segregated boarding
schools to train their sons, explicitly modeled on English public schools like Eton, Harrow, or
Rugby. Their purpose was to build manly character by removing boys from the effeminizing
influence of mothers, the luxury and indulgences of an affluent home, and the corrupting
influences of city life. At places like Groton School (where Theodore Roosevelt sent his sons),
St. Paul’s, or Choate (where John F. Kennedy attended), boys were faced with the imperative to
conform to a regime that celebrated and rewarded conformity to an aristocratic model of neo-
stoic warrior masculinity, and punished them physically and psychologically for deviance from
that ideal. Hazing and ostracism, administered as often by the other boys as by the masters (but

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tacitly sanctioned by them), made painfully apparent the penalty for any failure to conform to the
expectations concerning the ideals of “manly youth” that suffused school culture. The schools
cultivated conformity to group norms, male bonding, and strenuous engagement in struggle (i.e.,
“character”) rather than emphasizing the development of questioning minds. Ivy-League uni-
versities with elite secret societies continued this process of creating elite male solidarity,
organized around class privilege and ambition. I argue that for the generation that came of age
in the run-up to the Second World War, elite volunteer military service completed the creden-
tials of manhood, just as it had for the young university men who helped fill the ranks of the
Rough Riders in 1898, or the much-publicized Lafayette Escadrille during the First World War,
composed of volunteer American fighter pilots fighting Germans on the Western Front.
It often took considerable effort to enlist. Many future Vietnam-era foreign policy function-
aries had to use family connections to pull strings that would allow them to overcome physical
impediments like bad eyesight or chronic health problems and get them into the properly
glamorous service. John F. Kennedy, future U.S. president, was a physical wreck, with a variety
of congenital chronic illnesses, any of which would have sufficed to exempt him from service. But
Kennedy aspired to power and wanted the experience of war for personal and political reasons.
Through the influence of his powerful father and family physicians who helped to deceive the
Navy medical screeners, Kennedy became a commander of a Motor Torpedo Boat in the South
Pacific. It was an elite, glamorous, and much-publicized branch of the Navy, analogous in many
ways to Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. My research shows that most of the men who later
served Kennedy’s administration had themselves followed one variant or another of this pattern,
serving as junior officers in the Office of Strategic Services, or in commando and paratroop units,
or as aviators or submariners. Kennedy emerged from the war a much-publicized hero. His
exploits on behalf of his surviving crew after a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT Boat were
treated in a New Yorker story, which subsequently appeared as a Reader’s Digest condensation for a
mass audience. The hero-narrative served as an invaluable political asset, attaching a warrior’s
gravitas to the slender, frail young veteran in his first congressional campaign. PT-109 became a
central element of Kennedy’s iconography, and one that during the rest of his political career
allowed him to explain away his recurrent (occasionally life-threatening) bouts with congenital
illnesses as legacies of old war injuries. The experience of victory in global imperial war made
many of Kennedy’s elite peers “not so scared of big decisions,” as Vietnam-era National Security
Advisor Walt Whitman Rostow later phrased it.48
They returned to the United States and to “politics in an age of anxiety,” as Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. put it in his Cold War polemic. As Cuordilone argues, Cold War fears of the
weakness of “mass man” (Schlesinger’s term) reflected a sense of crisis concerning the male self, a
crisis that demanded a “virile,” “vital center” liberalism in response. Cuordileone shows that
Cold War anxiety was multifaceted, encompassing worries about political, social, gender, and
sexual order.49
The rapid breakdown of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States
was accompanied by apocalyptic fears of an implacable and expansionist imperial rival that
threatened U.S. interests abroad. America was again at war, this time a “cold war.” Subversion
of one kind or another seemed to menace the home front. Right wing resentment against the
New Deal combined a newly invigorated domestic anti-communism with old cultural and
political resentments to form a toxic brew. Before too long, Congress, with the help of the FBI
and other security agencies, initiated a witch-hunting Red Scare in an attempt to purge com-
munists, destroy the Communist Party USA, and roll back the New Deal.50
Perhaps the lingering trauma of the war itself heightened concerns about the state of American
manhood, labeled as another “crisis of masculinity” by those worried about male regression in the

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face of peacetime abundance and comfort. In this vision the very wealth and success of American
corporate capitalism posed a danger to gender order—it bred the feminized, conformist “orga-
nization man” that David Riesman, William H. Whyte, and other commentators and pundits
deplored. Pushing paper rather than hewing an empire from the wilderness, modern, “other-
directed” middle-class men lacked the drive and vigor of their ancestors.51
Homosexuality also became an issue that alarmed those who would protect the integrity of the
state. As scholars such as John D’Emilio and David K. Johnson have shown, the years following
the war saw the growing visibility of gay communities in American cities, including Washington
D.C.52 The pioneering sex research of Alfred Kinsey, published in a massive but best-selling
scientific tome in 1948, further focused the attention of the public on homosexual men. While
Kinsey’s intention was to scientifically normalize homosexuality as one end of a spectrum of
natural sexual behaviors, the widely publicized study had the unintended effect of focusing
attention and anxiety on the hidden presence of closeted gay men in American life. A backlash
emerged, with police vice squads conducting “pervert elimination campaigns” targeting public
spaces in Washington and elsewhere. While historians such as D’Emilio and Johnson have
understandably focused on the Lavender Scare in its role in the further development of a self-
conscious gay community, and on the oppressions experienced by that community, other
historians, including myself and Cuordileone, argue that the post-war homosexual purges
ultimately had profound effects on the high politics and the foreign policy of the United States.53
Homophobia and anti-communism became two weapons in a bitter political offensive waged
by Republican conservatives against President Harry Truman’s administration, and against the
eastern establishment elites that staffed the foreign policy apparatus. As the Red Scare inquisitions
gained momentum and inflicted damage on Truman and the State Department, growing anxieties
about “perverts” in government offices provided an opportunity for opponents to open a new
salient. Gender and sexuality became another terrain of struggle in the bitter contest for power
between conservative provincial members of Congress and the eastern foreign policy establishment.
A discourse of hidden sexual “perversion” drove the formation of a sexual inquisition that
paralleled that of the Red Scare. Soviet Communism was depicted as an implacable, expansionist
enemy. Domestic communism was portrayed as an infection, a conspiratorial invasion of state and
society that undermined the nation from within. Homosexuals were depicted as “moral weaklings,”
vulnerable to Communist blackmail. “Perverts” were weak, soft, and unable to deny themselves
pleasures of their “deviant” sexuality. The universal assumption was that the stigma of homosexuality
was so powerful that gay men would protect themselves from public exposure by cooperating with
Soviet espionage. In the growing panic over security and subversion, anti-communist “pervert”
hunters launched an inquisition to root out and purge homosexuals from government offices, quietly
at first, within the State Department Security Division and the FBI. But by the spring of 1950,
Congressional ultra-conservatives used reports of dismissals of gay men in the State Department to set
in motion a full-blown Lavender Scare, fueled by scandalous publicity. Before it was over, hundreds
of State Department employees had been dismissed, many gay, others not.
My work demonstrates that the purge targeted and removed from office a significant number
of prominent diplomats and Foreign Service officers, closely associated with the Democratic
administrations of the preceding twenty years and the “internationalist” variety of anti-com-
munism despised by the far Right. For several years, spanning both the Truman and the
Eisenhower administration, Congressional sexual inquisitors and their FBI allies pursued high
officials with much expertise in Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. Labeled by the Right as
weak, as appeasers, and as “perverts” without the necessary “virility” to “meet Russian diplo-
macy,” the destruction of the diplomats’ careers sent a chilling message to their younger
colleagues: A public self-presentation in conformity with anti-communist masculine orthodoxy

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was a vital protective measure for a career in foreign policy.54 To be associated with negotiation
or diplomatic compromise could prove fatal.
Historians have long argued that the Red Scare purges had devastating effects on American
Cold War diplomacy, and perhaps contributed to the errors that led the United States to
intervene in Vietnam. My study was the first to recognize the significance of the Lavender
Scare to the bitter domestic partisan struggles that put “manhood” at the center of the politics of
Asian anti-communism, and to offer a detailed analysis of the operations of the purges.55
When Senator John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, with the memory of the Red and
Lavender Scares still fresh, he made sure to project an image of resolute, Cold War manhood. He
employed the language of decline, positioning himself as the candidate destined to resurrect
American power and American manhood. The United States had “gone soft—physically,
mentally and spiritually soft,” during eight years of Republican rule. He red baited his opponent
for the “loss” of Cuba to Castro’s communism. He promised to rebuild American defenses, to
close the (mythical) “missile gap” with the Soviets that he claimed the Eisenhower administration
had allowed to develop. And perhaps most ominously in retrospect, he promised to develop
America’s capacity to wage counter-insurgency operations in post-colonial revolutionary
“brush-fire” wars to contain the “Communist bloc.”56
Kennedy’s first months in office were bruising. Although optimistically labeled “Operation
Castration” by JFK’s aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the CIA’s expedition of anti-Castro Cuban
filibusters at the Bay of Pigs failed miserably. The defeat and humiliation of the American proxies,
reported in the news around the world, stung the new president.57 The Vienna summit meeting
with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev a couple of months later went badly too. When rollback
in Cuba failed and as Khrushchev bullied him in Vienna, Kennedy resolved that he would have to
limit the political damage, both internationally and domestically, by visibly holding the line in
another trouble spot in the American imperium, the weak client state of South Vietnam. The
Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was a kind of imperial fiction, one largely created by the United
States in the wake of French defeat in the first Vietnamese war of independence, 1946–1954.
With the division of the former French colony of Vietnam into two states, communist North and
“free” South, the United States constructed an anti-communist containment proxy in South
Vietnam, led by the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem.58
By any material or strategic imperial calculus, the RVN had little real importance to U.S.
interests. But it held growing significance in the minds of U.S. leaders as a test of American
“credibility.” As the communist insurgency grew in the south, demonstrating Diem’s lack of
political support among the Vietnamese and the weakness of his government, Kennedy and his
advisors began to escalate U.S. military efforts. Journalists and historians, including David
Halberstam and Garry Wills, among others, noted as early as the 1970s that the Kennedy
White House developed a cult of counter-insurgency as an arm of policy.59 I argue that
counter-insurgency was (perhaps unconsciously) designed to avoid the necessity to confront
the true strength of Vietnamese nationalism. Army Special Forces, elite volunteers trained to fight
guerrillas on their own terms, would enable “nation-building.” Masculine virtues of American
will, military power, and know-how would prevent the “loss” of another Asian client state, with
all the potential for political disaster at home that had been demonstrated during Truman’s
presidency—the “loss” of China, the Red and Lavender Scare, and the debacle of stalemate in
Korea. I argue that Kennedy’s reliance on counter-insurgency was pushed from two directions:
by his own internalized identity narrative as aristocratic warrior-statesman, and from without, in
anticipation of the damage to his chances for a second term if the Diem government collapsed.
Historians have long noted that the legacy of the Red Scare had left the State Department
bereft of Asian experts who knew much of anything about the region, with pernicious effects on

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U.S.-Asian policy.60 But the new history of the Lavender Scare demonstrates that the purges also left
a profound trauma in the minds of any remaining Asianists, and other diplomats. If they had doubts
about the wisdom of using force to prop up a feeble client, they largely kept silent. The generalists
too, who should have been positioned to do the large-scale cost-benefit calculations, were paralyzed
by the memory of the fates of those whose careers had been destroyed less than a decade earlier.
When the politics of gender are analyzed, it becomes apparent that no one was willing to
recommend a negotiated solution to civil war in Vietnam because negotiation translated as “weak-
ness” or “appeasement” in the toxic domestic political discourse, a failure of manhood itself.61
Kennedy and his advisors drew the United States even further toward full-blown war by
sanctioning a coup against their own proxy, Diem. They hoped that Diem’s failing client state
could be redeemed by replacing the increasingly uncooperative dictator with a more compliant
leadership, drawn from a junta of ambitious anti-communist generals. But the assassination of
Diem was followed shortly by the assassination of Kennedy himself. Lyndon Johnson inherited
the presidency and the unfolding disaster of Vietnam in late 1963. The coup had succeeded only
in further destabilizing South Vietnam. Johnson, however, inherited most of Kennedy’s Vietnam
advisors, and he was, if anything, more committed to the necessity of applying force to avoid the
“loss” of Vietnam. The new, accidental president faced election in 1964. Despite growing doubts
held by a few high-level advisors, and even Johnson himself, the plan that evolved was to conduct
an escalation just large enough to prevent the imminent collapse of the RVN, while planning for
a much larger war to follow the election. The politics of masculinity permeated all of election year
policy for Vietnam. Johnson was determined to run as peace candidate, while absolutely
committed to maintaining containment and his own “credibility” against communist “aggres-
sion.” His Republican opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, presented a militant hyper-
masculine and confrontational image, posing for campaign advertising in his Air Force reserve
general’s uniform in front of the Berlin Wall, or in full western cowboy regalia. Goldwater hinted
that if elected he might solve the Vietnam problem with a nuclear attack on Hanoi. Johnson,
while ratcheting up American troop levels and staging CIA-sponsored covert attacks on North
Vietnamese targets, posed as the firm but moderate choice. When in August one of those attacks
went awry and provoked a North Vietnamese military response against a nearby American
warship, Johnson launched a “retaliatory” bombing attack against the North, while persuading
the U.S. Congress to pass an authorization for military action that amounted to a blank check for
the executive branch, the Tokin Gulf Resolution.62
Although little discussed by most historians of Johnson’s presidency, LBJ’s 1964 campaign was
targeted by an “October surprise” orchestrated by the Goldwater campaign when they revealed
that the president’s close aide Walter Jenkins had recently been arrested for homosexual behavior.
Johnson acted quickly to dismiss his long-serving aide, hoping that he could minimize the scandal
by repudiating his old friend and associate. Surprisingly for most observers, the political gay-
baiting failed to do much damage, in contrast to the Truman-era Lavender Scare. Johnson won
the election in a landslide.63
Soon in Vietnam guerilla attacks against U.S. military bases provided the justification for a
virtually complete American takeover of the counter-insurgency war. First the United States
began a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment against North Vietnam, and then 75,000
additional American troops arrived to defend the airbases. Very shortly the troops began con-
ducting “search and destroy” patrols against the communist forces. When a military request to
more than double U.S. troop strength reached Johnson, he did briefly pause for collective
reflection and advice. He gathered his staff and former high officials who had been responsible
for the creation of the policy of containment and the imperial Cold War, subsequently referred to
by journalists as the “wise men.” Other historians have examined the policy debates of the “wise

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men,” but none have systematically analyzed the outcome as a product of gender ideology and
elite male socialization.64 In the debate that followed, there were a couple of voices that argued
against a commitment to a failing proxy with no indigenous political legitimacy, while at the same
time preemptively swearing fealty to whatever policy the president adopted. But the over-
whelming advice was to intervene, even though the chances of success were small. Honor and
credibility were to be defended at all costs, lest American weakness provoke further “aggression.”
“If the Communist world finds out we will not pursue our commitment to the end, I don’t know
where they will stay their hand,” argued Secretary of State Dean Rusk. In the summer of 1965,
Johnson confirmed the fatal commitment to full-blown war. Over the course of the next ten
years, 58,000 Americans and 2.5 or 3 million Vietnamese died in a war that devastated much of
Southeast Asia. In the end, the United States could not defeat the power of Vietnamese
nationalism and was forced to abandon its efforts to “contain” communism in the region.65
I argue that Kennedy, Johnson, and their advisers did not rely on a primarily strategic or
material calculus about the consequences of intervention as they took the nation to war. They
used a different logic, the political logic of neo-stoic warrior manhood. Their own upbringing
and life experience taught that the relentless defense of boundaries, the rejection of “appease-
ment,” and conduct to maintain “honor and credibility” was the path to political success and a
heroic legacy. A lifetime of immersion in masculine competition and a culture celebrating
militarized manhood gave many highly educated, privileged, and powerful men the conviction
that duty, the protection of their own power, and that of the nation demanded a war. All of the
intelligence, war game modeling, and other strategic predictions suggested that massive military
intervention would not produce a stable, “free,” anti-communist South Vietnam. But the
political imperative demanding “honor” engagement, struggle, those virtues of elite manhood
internalized by the foreign policy establishment, worked in conjunction with the painful legacy
of the Red and Lavender Scares to compel first Kennedy, then Johnson, to cling desperately to
failure. Each failure in Vietnam led to further escalation of force to forestall short-term defeat.
For American policymakers to abandon an otherwise insignificant imperial client was to
imperil their own sense of self, and to imperil their political careers. A culture and ideology
of imperial manhood that had taken form at the turn of the century proved remarkably durable
and adaptable.

Future Directions
Gender analysis offers scholars meaningful ways of enriching our understanding of the reciprocal
relations between ideologies of masculinity and femininity and the conduct of war, including its
effects on individual and social experience. As the preceding discussion shows, gender analysis can
also shed light on the origins of war, a narrower question than a generalized “gender and war”
problematic. I encourage scholars interested in such issues to creatively engage questions con-
cerning the discursive politics of manhood and its role in the genesis of war. In the most obvious
sense there are chronological gaps in the literature, where detailed gender and cultural analysis
might yet offer insights into the origins of American involvement in wars of expansion and
imperial conflict. Perhaps the most fruitful avenue leading to real innovation might be cross-
cultural comparison. While many of the studies that I have cited above have placed U.S. agency
and gendered discourse at the center of analysis, one might ask what the story would look like if
ideologies of masculinity and patriotism deployed by Native American, Mexican, Cuban,
Filipino, German, Italian, Japanese, Soviet, Korean, Vietnamese, Afghan, Iraqi, and other
political and military leaders were carefully considered in relation to the outbreak of conflict
with the United States.

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Notes
1 A small sampling of some of the scholarship that engages these questions includes: Joanne B. Freeman,
Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986) and “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Spring 1997), 1–36; Amy S.
Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Sarah
Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003); Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start
the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood:
Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2001); K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
2 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no.
5 (December 1986), 1053–75.
3 See Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 4-6.
4 Examples include: Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances; Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex
and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Maria Höhn,
GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations,
1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally:
Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). In looking for the
gendered “cause” of war in the case of the Second World War, it strikes me that the place to begin that
discussion is with the politics of European authoritarianism and the rise of fascism in its various forms,
something outside of the scope of this argument.
5 Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” 1.
6 Ibid., 1–2.
7 Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, 146–48.
8 Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” 20.
9 Ibid., 2–3, 18–21.
10 Ibid., 7, 35.
11 Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, 28.
12 See, for instance, Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 162–208, 222–43; and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has
Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 125–
44, 233–44.
13 Johnson, River, 170–75, see also Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78–116.
14 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 217.
15 Ibid., 219.
16 See Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire; on 1898 see Hoganson, Fighting
for American Manhood and Watts, Rough Rider in the White House.
17 Quoted in Johnson, River, 389.
18 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 88, 108, 129, 133, 153, 209, 216.
19 Johnson, River, 386.
20 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 272–73; on the financing of
filibustering expeditions in the 1850s, see Johnson, River, 331–36.
21 On Native American dispossession in this context, see Johnson, River, 4–5, 25, 30–31 and Baptist, The
Half Has Never Been Told, 68–69.
22 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 275–79.

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23 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 275–79.

24 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 29–37; Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 1–20, 65–73;
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1–45.
25 Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 159–64; Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre:
Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 138–39; M. J. Heale,
American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 24–33. For a widely cited example of the contemporary expression of
many of these ideas, see Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New
York: Baker and Taylor, 1885).
26 Thomas G. Patterson, “U.S. intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpreting the Spanish-American-Cuban-
Filipino War,” OAH Magazine of History 12, no. 3 (Spring 1998), 5–6, 8; Hoganson, Fighting for
American Manhood, 10, 147; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 21–22.
27 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 37, 144; Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and
Addresses (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1906), 9.
28 Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 73, 75.
29 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 40.
30 On racial imagery and ideology toward Cuba, see Michael Hunt, Ideology and American Foreign Policy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 61–62, 66–67.
31 John Wesley Hanson, Jr., ed., The Parties and the Men; Or, Political Issues of 1899 (Chicago: W. B.
Conkey, 1899), 258; Piero Gleijeses, “1898: The Opposition to the Spanish-American War,” Journal
of Latin American Studies 35, no. 4 (November 2003), 704; Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood,
56–67.
32 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 22 23; Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 126–27;
Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 176–80.
33 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 89.
34 Gleijeses, “1898,” 687–704.
35 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 66–67.
36 Ibid., 84, 89.
37 Ibid., 89, 91.
38 Gleijeses, “1898,” 707.
39 Richard F. Hamilton, “McKinley’s Backbone,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3 (September
2006), 490.
40 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 106.
41 John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898 in William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John
Hay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 337.
42 Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1–34.
43 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 107–14, 131–44, 155.
44 See note 4 above. A few pioneering examples of this diverse and large literature would include Alan
Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free
Press, 1990); Margaret R. Higonnet, ed., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacot, eds., Gendering War Talk
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power
in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
45 See Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy (New York:
Random House, 1972); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House,
1972). For perhaps the earliest attempt to use the social construction of gender to explain the Vietnam
intervention, see Marc Feigan Fasteau, “Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in Foreign Policy,” in
The Male Machine (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974). For a very small sample of literature on Vietnam
from this era see David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy
Era, revised edition (New York: Rowman Littlefield, 2008); George McTurnan Kahin, Intervention:

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How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986); and Larry Berman, Planning a
Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).
46 Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, xxiii; on the politics of manhood
in the Kennedy White House, see chapter 4, “Reinventing the Liberal as Superman,” 167–236.
47 Much of the following argument is derived from Dean, Imperial Brotherhood.
48 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 62, 77.
49 Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 1–36; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The
Vital Center (New York: Riverside Press, 1949), 1.
50 The literature on the Red Scare is very large; a tiny sample might include: David Caute, The Great
Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978);
Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998).
51 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 171–73; Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 105–10. See
also David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); and William H.
Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
52 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal
Government, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On the Lavender Scare as a contest over
control of American foreign policy, see Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 61–167. For a somewhat different
argument concerning the significance of the Lavender Scare to American foreign policy, see Naoko
Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic
History 36, no. 4 (September 2012), 723–52.
53 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, especially 164–67; Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in
the Cold War, 40–66.
54 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 83, 87, 118.
55 A pioneering article that began to unpack the discursive links between gender ideologies and
“national security” is Geoffrey Smith, “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and
Disease in the Cold War United States,” International History Review 14, no. 2 (May 1992), 307–37.
56 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 179–86.
57 Ibid., 184.
58 On race and religion as factors in the creation of the Diem dictatorship, see Seth Jacobs, America’s
Miracle Man in Vietnam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
59 Halberstam, The Best and Brightest, Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
(Boston: Little Brown, 1982).
60 The literature on the Red Scare is very large, but an early account of the anti-communist purge of
diplomats that made such an argument is E.J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service
Officers and What Befell Them (New York: Viking Press, 1972). Also useful is Newman, Owen Lattimore
and the “Loss” of China; David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New
York: Free Press, 1982). See also Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 32–33, 116–17.
61 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 164–67, 201–40.
62 Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996).
63 Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 221–26.
64 For relatively early arguments that attribute responsibility for the decisions differently, but do not
engage gender as category of analysis, see Kahin, Intervention, especially 347–402; and Berman,
Planning a Tragedy, 31–80.
65 Rusk quoted in Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 237.

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 12
GENDERING THE “ENEMY” AND
GENDERING THE “ALLY”
United States Militarized Fictions of War and
Peace
Tessa Ong Winkelmann
university of nevada, las vegas

During the American Revolution, white European settlers in what would soon become the
United States attempted to distance themselves from what they characterized as the delicacy and
effeminateness of British soldiers. This was in many ways a response to being themselves
characterized as a vulgar and degenerate lot of colonial subjects by many in the “metropole,” as
settlers in overseas American colonies were often seen as lacking the manly influences of
civilization found in the motherland. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the “closing of
the frontier,” as it was described, put American manliness and vigor in jeopardy since white
settlement had reached the farthest Pacific coastline, and there were apparently no more “wilds”
left to tame. Manly regeneration had been possible through the “strenuous life,” an idea that
embraced hard living and strife and was popularized by national leaders such as Theodore
Roosevelt. Imperial wars of conquest and occupation were an extension of strenuous living,
and the people of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other former Spanish colonies were imagined
as effeminate and childlike “wards” in need of the manly protection and tutelage of the United
States. During World War II, American propaganda often depicted German and Japanese soldiers
as savage and barbaric. The defeat of both, many believed, was vital to preserve proper hetero-
normative families at home, as opposed to whatever queer relations the enemy might bring to
American shores. More contemporarily, many U.S. bombs dropped during the Gulf War were
emblazoned with the message, “Bend over, Saddam,” the queering of the enemy in this case
emboldening U.S. troops.1
Gendering the “enemy” has long been a recruitment tool and policy of the American war
system, a war system that has, in turn, defined the limits, potentials, boundaries, and values of
the United States.2 Belief in an effeminate or barbarically masculine “other,” for example, has
led to the establishment of a U.S. settler colonial nation state, and justified foreign and domestic
imperial occupation as well as the enactment of countless atrocities at home and abroad. While
the examples above highlight the gendered nature of calls to arms and how those who are non-
allied in times of war have been effeminized or otherwise queerly engendered, the nature of
gendering the enemy is often far more complex than simply imagining a foe to be unmanly or
monstrously hyper-masculine. While some of the examples above are indicative of the more
obvious gendered logics of American warfare – creating an image of an “unmanly” foe to

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inspire patriotic fervor – they are by no means the only way in which such gendered logics have
played a part in these histories.
The denigration of an “enemy other” during times of war is often complex and unstable, as
gendered conceptions often depended on multiple factors. For example, competing societal ideas
of masculinity and femininity may inform how individuals envisioned the contours of warfare.
The motivations for producing certain types of imagery may vary between pro and anti-war
voices, pro and anti-imperialists, and soldier and civilian. What’s more, non-allied nations and the
peoples of occupied and militarized countries form their own gendered ideas about their
colonizers, occupiers, or opposition. In the case of colonized and militarized nations, anti-
colonial sentiments are often couched within complaints about the vulgar and licentious behavior
of occupiers towards virtuous local women, and gendering the other can become a critique of
empire with revolutionary possibilities.
Scholarly work that examines the gendered ideas, language, and processes that have informed
U.S. war making tends to fall within many different subfields of U.S. history, specifically those
that center gender as a signifier of power relations.3 As Joanne Meyerowitz has outlined, the
1990s was a period of departure and invigoration for gender studies scholarship. The call of Joan
Scott and others to highlight how gender as a category of analysis could reframe historical
narratives and illuminate hierarchies of power in society was taken up, and many emergent
works in the field of gender and women’s studies turned their attention to topics supposedly
above the gendered fray, such as politics, foreign relations, wars, and imperialism.4 These works
shared the imperative of demonstrating how social constructions of gender do not only affect or
have to do with women or women’s lives, but also have much broader implications, as gendered
logics have helped to structure the very fabric of society. In the field of military history from early
American history that looks at Native American and European settler wars, to wars of U.S.
expansion and empire, to more modern twentieth-century warfare, scholars have demonstrated
how gendering the “other” or the “enemy” relies on and also strengthens hierarchies based on
ideas of gender and sexed differences. These studies have shown how gendered language and
systems of power have been deployed to justify some of the bloodiest moments of U.S. warfare.
In the essay that follows, we will consider some of the main ways that scholars have explored
and theorized the gendered work of creating an “us” versus a “them” during various moments of
American warfare. Perhaps the most obvious utility of gendering the “enemy” throughout U.S.
military history, gendered logics have helped to demarcate an “us” versus a “them,” inciting
militaristic fervor propelled through ideas of perceived difference. Often, perceived racial
difference compounds the way gendered understandings are applied to a group of people, as
was the case with the infantilizing and emasculating of colonial populations during the Spanish
and Philippine-American wars and in the Pacific theater during WWII. Often neglected in
scholarly inquiry is the possibility of gendering the other from the perspective of the colonized,
the occupied, the non-allied, or the supposed enemy. A U.S.-centric approach forgets the agency
of those who are the targets of U.S. aggression and denies the possibility of liberatory or anti-
colonial possibilities through using gendered logics in times of war. This essay will also question
the utility of a strict periodization of wartime moments as the lens through which to view the
gendered and raced logics of warfare, as these logics are always informed by pre-war values and
sustain lasting post-war consequences.
Finally, this essay will consider two interconnected ideas about U.S. militarism and gender.
First, we will explore how it is not only enemies who are constructed through gendered
knowledge and ideas, but also who is counted as an ally or a friend in wartime matters.
Problematic and often violent outcomes of gender construction and deployment are produced
not only in moments of war, but also in moments of militarized peace. Connected to this idea of

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militarized peace is the changing nature of the U.S. military in a world under the pressures of
globalizing imperatives, and how these changes have impacted how gendered ideas are deployed
in the name of security and freedom. In particular, how is a supposed gender-sensitive approach
to war making changing how enemies are depicted and constructed? In an era of shifting and
rearticulating militarism in which women can serve in combat, DADT has been repealed, diverse
ranks are applauded, and ever-changing military technologies have changed how wars are
“fought” and “won,” has the work of gendering also changed or transformed? As much recent
scholarship that addresses this “new militarism” has sought to demonstrate, these indicators of a
supposedly more progressive United States military—indicators that often involve increased
sensitivity to issues of gender, sexuality, and violence against women—are often concepts
deployed to obscure the continuing violence of the war system.

United States Warfare and the Gendered Work of Creating the “Enemy”
Throughout U.S. history, moments of heightened nation-building and national identity
solidification have been accompanied by warfare.5 The impetus and rationale to engage in
war has always been dependent on contemporary and often shifting ideas of gender, ideas that
privilege and exalt certain ideas of masculinity and disdain and abhor certain types of femininity.
Indeed, the very origins of the United States as a settler colonial nation was not simply the result
of a break with Europe via revolution, but was spurred by gendered and racial notions of who
was an “American” and who was not, as well as who was virtuous and who was corrupt. As
historians of gender and race in the United States have shown, the creation of a republic of
“freedom” was largely rooted in sexist and racist ideas of who could participate in such a
republic.6
Some of the first works to theorize how concepts of gender came to play a role in the
revolutionary period were written around the time when feminist scholarship was first establish-
ing itself as a legitimate field of study. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the work of Mary Beth
Norton, Jan Lewis, Elaine Crane, and Linda K. Kerber largely spoke to ideas of “Republican
Motherhood,” or the idea that white women during the revolutionary period were seen as the
bearers and teachers of virtuous republicanism. While Norton and Kerber argued that the idea of
“Republican Motherhood” may have opened some doors for women, primarily in accessing
education, Crane is more dubious of the idea of women’s advancement at this time period.7 As
Crane describes, one of the main ideologies that American republicanism tried to challenge was
the idea that Great Britain was the patriarchal head of the family while the American colony
represented the dependent child. Revolutionary fervor was, therefore, partly envisioned as an
affirmation of American manly adulthood and a rejection of a weak, dependent ward status.
Ironically, however, the dismantling of this paternalistic relationship through propaganda and
warfare was sought whilst trying not to dismantle the same type of paternalistic control that
existed in the “dependent relationship between husband and wife” in America.8
Both Norton and Kerber describe other gendered logics at play in how colonists often came to
associate disloyalty with the feminine sex. Kerber, for example, describes how the popular press
castigated American women for their “disloyal” consumption of British goods, thereby under-
mining the revolutionary goals of American men. “Female qualities were commonly made the
measure of what a good republican ought to avoid … Effeminacy was associated with timidity,
dependence, and foppishness—even homosexuality. It was associated with luxury and self-
indulgence.” She concludes, “If Americans lived in a world of the political imagination in
which virtue was ever threatened by corruption, it must be added that the overtones of virtue
were male, and those of corruption, female.”9

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As these gendered ideas of who was a loyal or disloyal American imbued the Revolutionary
War efforts, similar tropes came to be associated with the British enemy overseas, as the perceived
culture, refinement, luxury, and excesses of British men also came to be criticized as corrupt and
unmanly. The recent works of Kariann Yokota, Stefan Dudink, and Karen Hagemann point out
how Americans and British alike came to see each other in gendered terms during the American
Revolution. Likewise, these authors highlight the multiple and changing ideas of masculinity that
existed for both American and British camps.10 For example, Yokota describes how concepts of
masculinity and effeminacy were largely tied to ideas of civility, culture, and racial purity. For the
British, the commonly held idea of Americans’ degeneracy was based in ideas that colonists were
too close to the “savage” Native and African peoples whose supposed barbaric hyper-masculinity
was at odds with the refined cultural masculinity of European gentleman. American colonists
attempted to flip this gendered script as they, in turn, “feminized the desire for old world objects
and manners, an admiration figured as both unmanly and unpatriotic.”11
Gender ideologies even varied between Americans, as revolutionary elites in turn deflected
European ideas of degeneracy, racial impurity, and hyper-masculinity off of themselves and onto
their non-landed and poorer countrymen who lacked the vote but were still expected to be loyal
militiamen.12 While some white settler founders touted the rugged masculinity and virtuousness
of American militiamen, others like George Washington believed that their poor non-landed
counterparts lacked discipline and civility, much like the indigenous peoples with whom they had
perhaps come too closely into contact with. Dudink and Hagemann explore how these incon-
sistencies in gendered ideologies during the revolutionary and post-war period eventually came
to crystallize in the form of a united masculine and white American national identity. As they
describe, the war to separate from the British crown helped to solidify ideas of republican
masculinity, as white men—landed and unlanded alike—came to represent the ideals of the
nation as well as who could be fully included into the body politic. Voting rights, for example,
were quickly changed to include all white men, and white masculine unity was created at the
expense of solidifying ideas of difference, not just between men and women, but also between
whites and non-whites.13 Wars with Native American nations and violence against African
Americans further espoused the fiercely defended notion that the United States was a white
man’s nation.14
Almost one hundred years later, another war was waged to determine the identity of the
United States, and again ideas about manhood, femininity, and racial inclusion informed how
Americans characterized their enemies and made enemies out of each other. While much
scholarship on the American Civil War focuses on issues of race and slavery, the scholarship
that focuses on gender during this period is also abundant. An intersectional approach to the Civil
War demonstrates that race, class, and gender were inextricably bound together in the complex and
varied ways that union and confederate enemies understood one another. Catherine Clinton and
Nina Silber point out, for example, that ideas of family, manhood, womanhood, and femininity
were central to discourses about abolition and secession between the northern and southern states.15
Silber describes how northerners often depicted their southern enemies as lazy, idle, weak, and
ultimately effeminate in their reliance on plantation slavery to maintain their wealth and lifestyles.
Conversely, southerners often proclaimed their own manliness as superior to that of northerners, in
that they were the masters of not only their women and children, but also of their slaves, whom they
understood as childlike dependents.16 Many plantation owners’ understandings of their own
manhood, after all, depended not only on denying freedom to enslaved African Americans, but
also denying them manhood, womanhood, and stable family lives.17
Leeann Whites adds that northern feminists as well as abolitionists threatened southern
manhood and its authority over enslaved populations. Many suffragists, she explains, demanded

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rights for women, even black women, including the motherly right to maintain and have
authority over their families. According to southerners, these feminists were indicative of the
loss of northern manhood, as men in the north had apparently lost control over their women.18
Indeed, women who tried to engage the public sphere during the civil war were often made out
to be an “enemy” of both the Union and the Confederacy alike. As Clinton describes, women
who entered into pubic spheres and debates, whether it was agitating for votes, protesting the
rising costs of household items, or simply being insolent to soldiers, could find themselves
despised and slandered as “public women” by both their enemies and allies alike.19 The
American Civil War erupted over the place of slavery in the Union, and gendered notions of
manhood and proper womanhood were not only at the center of debates about the “peculiar
institution,” but also helped to turn brothers and sisters into enemies.
Shortly after the Civil War, around the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans
invested in ideas of virile masculinity became troubled that the Pacific Coast of the United
States had been reached and that white settlers had no more “wilds” to tame. Frederick Jackson
Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” lamented the “closing” of what he called the American frontier.20 In
1898, America declared war against Spain, seizing an opportunity to reinvigorate the manly vigor
of the nation through a demonstration of militarized strength and colonial expansion beyond the
so-called frontier. Thus the colonized nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and
others, many of which were already engaged in and winning revolutions against Spain, were beset
by the militaries of the United States, supposedly in the name of liberating these “childlike”
nations and ultimately advancing U.S. imperialism.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber were some of
the first scholars of American history to critique turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. imperialism
abroad. Many scholars in the field had previously failed to recognize the actions of the United
States in the late 1890s as a form of imperial conquest, and Williams and LaFeber understood these
wars of imperialism largely in terms of capitalist colonial expansion.21 By the 1990s, cultural
theorists and scholars of imperialism began pursuing broader understandings of empire. The
works of Edward Said and Anne McClintock, for example, sought more socio-cultural under-
standings of British and European imperialism, and scholars of U.S. imperialism were quick to see
similarities and connections.22
Some of the first and most influential works to comprehensively explore the gendered
dimensions of U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the twentieth century include Gail Bederman’s
Manliness and Civilization, Amy Kaplan’s “Left Alone with America,” and Kristin Hoganson’s
Fighting for American Manhood. Bederman looked at how ideals of American manliness were
shifting away from older Victorian ideas of refinement and morality to idealize instead an
aggressive, sexualized, and rugged masculinity. These changing notions of manliness, which
were closely tied to notions of racial inferiority and superiority, helped facilitate the expansionist
fervor of American imperialists.23 Kaplan points to the absence of cultural approaches to the study
of U.S. imperialism and states that “imperialism as a political or economic process abroad is
inseparable from the social relations and cultural discourses of race, gender, ethnicity and class at
home.” Thus, more broad and comprehensive understandings of American culture that center on
gender, for example, need to trouble notions of national boundaries and boundedness.24
Hoganson focuses squarely on the Spanish-American and Philippine American wars, and argues
that “the political pressure to assume a manly posture and appear to espouse manly policies gave
gender beliefs the power to affect political decision-making,” ultimately leading the nation into
war.25 A diverse group of American men and political leaders, she states, were brought together
by a “shared enthusiasm for war predicated on common gender assumptions.” Men like
Theodore Roosevelt, who espoused the “strenuous life,” believed that overseas expansion and

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indeed war would not only be good for growing the U.S. economy, but would also help bolster
American manliness and provide an “outlet for men’s robust energies.”26 While American
expansionist policies largely relied on these ideas of vigorous national masculinity, they also
relied on the production of an emasculated and weak counterpoint.27
From westward expansion to transpacific conquest, non-white indigenous peoples and
colonial “others” have historically been the contrapuntal to emergent American forms of
nationalism. In addition to the scholars mentioned above, Julianna Barr, Amy Greenberg,
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Louis Perez, and others have pointed to the gendered machinations
that helped propel ideas of American civilizational superiority. Indigenous North American tribes
were imagined as effeminate and barbarously masculine, at once noble and reviled. When the
United States declared war against Spain, the Spanish Crown and leadership were often depicted
in political cartoons and other media outlets as a feeble old lady, superstitious and indulgent.
“She” was a failing matriarch that could no longer manage the “unruly” and childlike colonies.28
Likewise, the peoples of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines were variously imagined as
childlike, weak, and effeminate populations in need of manly protection and paternalistic
guidance. As Hoganson, Perez, Kramer, Rafael, Rydell, and others have noted, American
imperialists believed that it would be only under the manly guidance and tutelage of Uncle
Sam and the proper maternal nurturing of Lady Liberty that these infant nations would be able to
flourish. Abe Ignacio and Al McCoy highlight how political cartoons and other popular media
representations depicted Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other colonized populations as
babies and colonial “wards,” thereby making the occupation of overseas “possessions” seem
justifiable.29 The idea that colonial subjects were helpless and incapable was compounded further
by the visual representation of these non-white “others” as racially inferior, with Filipinos, for
example, most often represented in the style typical of American blackface minstrelsy.30 Filipinos
were derisively nicknamed “little brown brothers” by the first Governor General of the
Philippines, William Howard Taft, a nickname that further emphasized the racial emasculation
of the new family members.31
While “little brown brothers” complemented the idea of a childlike Philippine nation and
people, “little brown sisters” became associated more with colonial fantasies and prurient
imagery. The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and other territories that came under
U.S. jurisdiction after the Spanish American War, were often engendered and imagined in the
image of a beautiful young woman who was in constant peril of debasement by a villainous
Spanish empire, but was also potentially dangerous herself. Scholars such as Haunani-Kay Trask,
Laura Briggs, Eileen Suarez, Cynthia Enloe, Adria Imada, and others have also shown that, while
“paradise” may have been depicted as a woman, colonial women were also “enemy others,”
whose dangerous bodies could undermine everything from colonial sanitation planning to effective
military performance.32 Although American discourses often remarked on the exotic nature
and sexual availability of colonial women – an enticement or perk for all the U.S. troops and
“adventurers” abroad – the social mores of the time also feared racial contamination through
interracial sexual contact. Army medical practitioners and religious missionary leaders alike warned
of the dangers of supposedly diseased non-white women in these tropical locales. Such women,
they warned, were immoral and lusty and could potentially make a degenerate out of an otherwise
moral and upstanding white man.33 The gendering of Caribbean and Pacific island nations as
beautiful but potentially dangerous tropical women thus not only propelled U.S. imperial wars of
conquest but remains an enduring legacy of the militarized occupation of the islands.
Filipinos did not miss the disparaging gendered logics applied to them and their nation, and
many took up the work of gendering the other as well. For example, U.S. soldiers quickly gained
a reputation amongst Filipinos for being constantly drunk and debauched, creating disorder in the

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streets as their bar fights over Filipina women tumbled out of saloons and bars. Filipino nationalist
presses, as the work of McCoy demonstrates, were quick to pick up on these incidents of
debauchery and abuses of Filipinas, critiquing the occupation of their nation with depictions of
lusty and greedy colonists defiling virtuous Filipina women.34 Likewise, in 1917, several
American-owned and -patronized dance halls were unceremoniously shut down by the
Filipino Mayor of Manila, Justo Lukban, backed by a broad coalition of American and Filipino
moralist supporters that included the Manila Women’s Club. These dance halls – where
American and European men could pay to dance with Filipina women – were accused of
being fronts for prostitution, and therefore dangerous for the moral welfare of young white
men. While American moralists were concerned about the well-being of their white countrymen
falling into the clutches of depraved and “diseased” Filipinas, I suggest that Lukban and his
Filipina supporters in the dance hall issue were not as interested in the welfare of white men.
Rather, as I argue in “Dangerous Intercourse,” their concerns were more focused on reframing
these negative narratives about Filipina women, especially since these narratives reflected on
Filipinos as a whole and their capacity for self-rule.35 As Haunani-Kay Trask and Carina Ray have
demonstrated, gendering the other with anti-colonial purpose was a common strategy for many
colonial peoples attempting to navigate the shifting power dynamics of imperialism, from the
Philippines to Hawai’i to the British-occupied Gold Coast.36
In the years following overseas expansion, gendered ideologies were again in a state of flux and
motion. While imperialism provided an outlet for men’s supposed “vigorous energies,”
Hoganson points out that many white women also found gratification in helping to shape
imperial policies and other reform efforts. Indeed, immediately preceding the First World War,
feminist activity and women’s visibility in political matters were significantly heightened.
Similarly, before World War II, American women were a part of the workforce like never
before. These pre-war moments must be considered to fully understand the gendered processes at
work during wartime. Pre-war feminist activism and gendered norms largely impacted how
gender was deployed during both WWI and WWII. While both wars presented the possibility for
women to gain even more autonomy in society, most scholars point to the crystallization of strict
gendered ideologies in the name of wartime “unity,” and the dissipation of many gained wartime
liberties in the post-war period. Likewise, military propaganda in both periods sought to depict
enemy combatants as non-heteronormative and savagely masculine as opposed to the morally
masculine American G.I., who fought to protect virtuous women and children back home. Like
previous armed conflicts, gendered ideologies were again central to not only why we fought, but
also whom we fought. As much of the scholarship on WWI and WWII that follows here
highlights, whom we fought was not always a foreign enemy, but also often an internal one.
During moments of militarized crisis, American women who did not conform to wartime ideals
of womanhood were often made into domestic enemies to be feared.
As in previous wars, creating enemies during World War I was a gendered process that not
only sought to differentiate the United States from opponent nations abroad, but also created
internal divisions between and amongst American citizens. While some scholarship on this
period, such as that of Celia Kingsbury, Gail Braybon, and Jennifer Haytock, discusses wartime
gendered propaganda in the United States and abroad, many U.S. socio-cultural studies during
WWI focus on the internal gendered ideologies used to facilitate conscription and to differentiate
between good patriotic mothers and troublesome unpatriotic feminists.37 Indeed, while gender
and sexuality informed national wartime priorities – such as protecting virtuous American
women from brutish German and Japanese rapists – enemies were also created within the
domestic home front. As Susan Zeiger describes in her work, wartime propaganda idealized
the “patriotic mother” and urged mothers to dutifully send their sons off to war, thereby easing

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the tensions around conscription.38 Patriotic womanhood had an antithesis, however, as

Kathleen Kennedy has demonstrated in her scholarship on the “disorderly woman.” This more
marginal figure of bad and disruptive womanhood was advanced by politicians and war suppor-
ters alike who sought to garner unified support for the war abroad without the “disorderly”
feminist agitation for other causes that might undermine or undercut military cohesion. Those
that propelled the disorderly woman idea claimed that involvement in such activities when the
nation was at the brink of war was frivolous at best and, worse, could potentially be an indication
of female espionage and sabotage, thus creating an internal enemy within the nation itself.39
Kimberly Jensen points to the very real consequences of this “disorderly woman” trope, as
women who sought full citizenship through suffrage – as opposed to women who tried to prove
their capacities through military service – often faced incarceration or violence.40
Many enemies were also fabricated – both abroad and on the home front – during the Second
World War. Most early studies of American participation in WWII that center on gender focus
on the role of women at home as workers or activists and abroad in the military. Maureen
Honey’s Creating Rosie the Riveter examines how propaganda was mobilized to attract women to
non-traditional labor industries while simultaneously reinforcing entrenched ideas about
women’s roles in society. As Honey argues, the duality of this propagandized American
woman – the capable industrial laborer and dutiful mother and wife – made a return to pre-
war gendered norms easier.41 Creating G.I. Jane, by Leisa D. Meyer, similarly examines discourses
applied to American women during this period, focusing instead on those who joined the
Women’s Army Corps. Laura McEnaney describes how women peace activists who believed
in isolationism used ideas of traditional families and motherhood to promote their ideas. All of
these studies trace how women who did not fit within certain idealized tropes of womanhood
were often vilified as unpatriotic or as creating unnecessary problems during times of crisis.
Where Honey highlights public concern about women entering into the workforce, Meyer
describes how “women’s service in the armed forces was especially threatening because of the
military’s function as the ultimate test of ‘masculinity.’”42 Those who opposed women’s parti-
cipation in the military sought to depict the Women’s Army Corps as a hotbed for sexually
promiscuous women who behaved like men or “manish” women suspected of being lesbians, a
threat to the proper male-centric and heteronormative functioning of the military. As Christina
Jarvis describes in The Male Body at War, the male solider became an idealized form of masculinity,
and female encroachment into this world was tantamount to treason against those attempting to
demonstrate American masculine superiority to enemies abroad.43 Mothers who promoted
isolationism were similarly marked by politicians and even the president as treacherous and
potentially fascist, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.44
Gendered ideologies helped to make enemies out of non-conforming or anti-war women, but
this was just a part of the logics that shaped ideas of why and who we fought. As many Asian
American studies scholars have shown, race and racism also profoundly shaped ideas about enemy
“others” during WWII. While much earlier scholarship that examined WWII as a race war
tended to focus on Germany and the Holocaust, scholars such as Jarvis, John Dower, and others
have pointed out that for Americans, a greater sense of difference – and therefore animosity and
enmity – was felt towards the Japanese.45 While Japanese soldiers came to be depicted in the U.S.
media as brutes and savages in ways similar to how Germans and other non-allied actors were,
such notions about “enemy others” were not conjured in the same ways, nor did they have
equally consequential outcomes for those whom they described. For example, as Jarvis points out,
even though the war effort was focused in Europe, most Americans felt that the Japanese were
more alien than other non-allied enemies.46 George Roeder describes in his book, The Censored
War, how negative media portrayals of Japanese civilians and soldiers influenced anti-Japanese

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sentiment to the point that more soldiers expressed a desire to fight and kill Japanese soldiers than
German soldiers.47 To understand this wartime sentiment towards the Japanese requires a deeper
inquiry that looks at the longer history of Asian immigration to the United States.
Scholars Yen Li Espiritu, Mae Ngai, Ronald Takaki, Eiichiro Azuma, and others have all
demonstrated that, while the bombing of Pearl Harbor may have signaled the impetus for U.S.
declarations of war, American anti-Asian sentiment had been present for decades prior.48
Colonial depictions of Pacific Islanders and restrictive immigration laws for Asians had early on
solidified ideas of Asian inferiority and difference. While Germans and other white ethnic
immigrants were always white or could “become” so, thereby gaining fuller access to U.S.
citizenship, Asians had continued to be “impossible subjects” to integrate due to what many
Americans believed to be insurmountable racial differences.49 What’s more, Asian American
scholars point to the ways that wartime understandings of the Japanese “enemy” were informed
not only by race, but also by gender. People of Japanese descent, as Espiritu has described, have
largely been racially emasculated and seen as enemy outsiders since they first came to U.S. shores,
long before WWII. Early immigration restrictions, she describes, led to the formation of
predominantly male Asian American communities. These “bachelor societies” were simulta-
neously depicted as queer homosocial environments, as well as dangerous dens of “alien” men
eager to seduce white women. Further, many Asian immigrants, barred from most types of work,
took up labor that was typically seen as “women’s work,” such as launderers, domestic servants,
and cooks.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor sparked a crisis in these ideas of Asian effeminacy and white
American masculinity that, as Jarvis describes, necessitated a depiction of the Japanese as more
barbarically masculine. Japanese soldiers in the Pacific theater came to be called the “yellow peril”
by the media and were racialized as savage brutes and rapists, although this characterization was
also interspersed with ideas of effeminacy. For example, as Espiritu describes, the systematic
internment of Japanese Americans emasculated the entire community, helping to restabilize the
gendered ideas that most Americans had about these “enemies.”50 Unlike most German
Americans, who were not placed in concentration camps, Japanese incarceration was the latest
institutionalized means of rendering this community impotent. Race and gender shaped pre-war,
wartime, and post-war ideas about both Japanese American and German American citizens, but it
was largely only for the former that such ideas meant internment and the suspension of civil,
social, and economic liberties.
On the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese too had their own racial and gendered ideas
about Americans, and like Filipino Nationalists mentioned earlier, much of the propaganda
created around American “foreign devils” had anti-racist or anti-imperial underpinnings. As
Dower describes of Japanese attitudes towards enemy Americans, the association of white
foreigners with masculinity shifted to femininity as Japans military and political prowess grew.
The defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and the failure of Americans, British, and the
United Nations to enact any substantial influence in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria have
been pointed to as moments where Japanese perceptions of white foreigners came to include
effeminacy. Japanese depictions of racist and weak Americans was often used to promote ideas of
a new post-war era of equality, sovereignty, and prosperity, even while Japanese leaders envi-
sioned a superior Japan as the architect and master of this new world order. Japanese ideas of their
own racial morality and superiority, as opposed to the imperialist greed, savagery, and effeteness
of Americans, Dower suggests, were partly realized due to a long history of unequal relations with
western nations (even European allies to Japanese forces largely believed in Japanese inferiority),
and partly generated as a culturally specific way to make sense of the war as well as Japanese hopes
for expansion after its conclusion.51

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The long history of racialized emasculation of Asians and Asian Americans also lent itself to
perceptions of the Vietnamese nation and people during the Vietnam War. According to
Jacqueline Lawson, sexism, racism, and anti-communism were all necessary and essential ele-
ments for the United States to wage war in Vietnam.52 As she describes, Vietnamese combatants
were regarded as weak and effeminate, as enemy combatants have typically been imagined during
times of war. “Reducing the Vietnamese to mere ‘gooks’ – something between a woman and an
animal,” helped bolster troop morale and also legitimated the U.S. involvement in the region.
Lawson describes how even the allied South Vietnamese ARVN army did not escape the ridicule
and denigration of American troops, who described them in their journals and memoirs as
cowards, passive, and feeble. As one Veteran described,

there is a large gap of feeling and understanding between the American soldier and the
Vietnamese. … They don’t respect the South Vietnamese soldier because they don’t
trust him … they don’t respect the Vietnamese people because they do our laundry,
clean out buildings, fill our sandbags, polish our boots, wash our dishes, and women
sacrifice their bodies. … The people whose freedom we’re fighting for have become
our servants.53

As with Asian Americans during WWII, Vietnamese allies and enemies alike were racialized and
gendered as inferior.
The dehumanization and engendering of Vietnam and its people, however, was only one
outcome of the racism, sexism, and intolerance described above. Through a study of military
propaganda and veterans’ diaries, Lawson shows that women (especially women of color) and
femininity in general were loathed as the enemy of masculinity and hence deemed dangerous for
the survival and perpetuation of American national manhood. Thus violence against women in
Vietnam became normalized and even encouraged, as many soldiers came to work out their
manhoods on the brutalized bodies of Vietnamese women and girls. Heather Marie Stur further
argues that certain types of racialized femininity were idealized and came to help justify American
involvement in the war, namely the idea of white, innocent, American “girls next door.” This
trope, she argues, also served as a foil for the vilified Vietnamese “dragon lady.”54 As with many of
the previous examples, the racial and gendered logics applied to make “enemies” in Vietnam did
not simply dissolve after the withdrawal of American forces. Violence against Vietnamese and
Vietnamese American men and women – who remained the targets of durable racist and sexist
logics – continued well after the cessation of the armed conflict. In the United States these
enduring logics contributed to the domestic abuse and murder of Asians and Asian Americans. In
Vietnam the sexual economy persisted and grew, and Vietnamese women with Amerasian
children were especially vulnerable to violence.55

An Increasingly “Globalized Militarism” and the Gendered

Work of Creating the Ally
This same brutalization of perceived enemy “others,” both in and out of moments of militarized
warfare, continues more contemporarily. The protracted “War on Terror” reflects what many
scholars of war and international relations describe as “post-modern” or “globalized” war, or
moments of modern militarized conflict that reflect shifts in or rearticulations of militarism. As
Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho describe in Militarized Currents, these shifts may include but
are not limited to: more diverse American troops in which women and post-colonial subjects and
others enlist for combat, the more frequent use of private, subcontracted security or police firms

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to fight battles; newer technologies that render violence even more impersonal; the repeal of
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; and a professed sensitivity to issues of gender and sexuality.56 This shift
or rearticulation may be pointed to by proponents of U.S. militaries as symptomatic of a more
responsible, sensitive, and beneficial military system, one that doesn’t create totalizing
“knowledge” about enemy others based on offensive stereotypes, racism, or sexism. As
many scholars have shown, however, the idea of a more progressive military that doesn’t
use ideas of gender or race to create fictitious enemies largely reflects more lip service than
actual substantive change.
The scholarship of Jasbir Puar, for example, exposes the cracks in the veneer of a supposedly
more progressive militarism. An increased sensitivity to issues of gender and a flimsy normalizing
of (some) gay and queer individuals in the United States and its military, Puar describes, is not
without the conversely militarized oppression of those considered unassimilable or too queer to
incorporate into the nation or vision of the nation.57 As Puar argues, the incorporation of some
white liberal LGBTIQ individuals – those that reproduce heteronormative values such as
marriage, the creation of nuclear families, and the neo-liberal defense of American freedoms –
into the body politic and indeed, into the military, codes acceptable queerness as white. In the
protracted war on terror, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian bodies are Orientalized and marked as
racially and sexually deviant, and too perverse for national inclusion, thereby growing the idea of
a queer white norm. Her analysis posits not only that these ideas of “good” versus “bad” queer
populations rely on each other for life, but also that queering the “other” is an integral factor in
the global growth of Islamophobia. In other words, the tenuous incorporation of acceptable
white LGBT persons (those who reproduce and support ideas of nuclear families, the sanctity of
marriage, American freedoms, etc.) into the military and the body politic has also simultaneously
helped create a queer, unassimilable enemy other. Queering the other, Puar states, has been a way
to sustain ideas of insurmountable differences between Americans and South Asians, Arabs, and
Muslims in the face of the War on Terror.
The work of Shigematsu, Camacho, and Puar highlighted above broaden how we can think
of the process of making gender during war, especially in a “globalized” war system that
purports to be more diverse, inclusive, and sensitive. Their scholarship demonstrates how
such “liberalizing” rearticulations of gender and sexuality do not mean that the manufacture of
totalizing knowledge about enemy others based on race, gender, and sexuality has ceased to be a
part of war making. Rather, as they point out, ideas of a more progressive militarism actually
work to obscure the gendered work of creating enemies and other types of military violence
rather than alleviate these issues. A post-modern or globalized militarism, then, may be an even
more dangerous war system, as the manufacture of enemies based on racist, sexist, and heter-
eosexist notions continues, but an image of more progressive values prevails. In such a system,
gendered logics continue to support military actions by fabricating enemies; however, gender
has also become a tool for the U.S. military to showcase its legitimacy and conscientiousness.
These “post-modern” logics of gender and sexuality can be used in ways that shift the direction
of conversations about the military. At the same time, increasing and depersonalized military
violence wreaks disproportionate havoc on the lives of women, girls, and racial “others”
around the world, as it has always done.58
Similarly important for understanding how a more “globalized” U.S. militarism operates is the
notion of allyship, or security. While most of the examples discussed thus far have been during
moments of militarized war, a more comprehensive understanding of how gender shapes war
systems must also examine militarized moments of peace and discourses of allyship. The idea of
allyship, after all, arises from the prospect or the threat of having enemies. The need for allyship or
“securing peace,” therefore, is fueled by the threat of war and is always and already a part of the

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U.S. war system.59 Scholars of American history, gender and women’s studies, international
relations, and ethnic studies have already begun the work of looking at the gendered work of
creating allies and how these forces impact militarism. For example, Vera Mackie describes the
rhetoric of alliances, especially as they use metaphors of intimate and gendered relationships.
Allies are often described as family members, siblings, or intimate friends, although the metaphors
used to describe the relationship may look different in “allyships’ involving unequal power
dynamics.60 As in the previous example of the United States and its supposedly benevolent
colonial relationship with the Philippines, a gendered allyship or friendship was expressed
through invoking ideas of parent-child relationships or a marriage/elicit relationship. Thus by
examining instances of gendering the “ally,” we can parse out a multitude of inequalities in
relationships that are otherwise assumed to have a degree of equality or commensurate gain from
becoming allied.
Vernadette Gonzalez destabilizes the idea of allyship by examining the gendered dimensions of
tourism and hospitality in her recent book, Securing Paradise. As Gonzalez describes, the occupied
nation of Hawai’i has long been “host” to an overwhelming number of U.S. military and naval
forces that supposedly secure peace. This presence has in turn led to the memorialization of
various military sites and created the infrastructure to host certain types of patriotic tourism.
Citing the popularity of the Pearl Harbor memorial, battleship attractions, and various sub, tank,
and helicopter amusements, she points not only to the connections between military occupation
and the growth of modern day tourism, but also the gendered logics of hospitality and accom-
modation that imbue this relationship.61
The embodiment of the Hawai’ian nation as feminine, exotic, alluring, and friendly has not
only served as justification for its occupation and eventual fraudulent incorporation into the U.S.
body politic, but also for its desirability as both a military outpost and tourism destination.
Gonzalez, along with Haunani-Kay Trask and Adria Imada, have observed that “[p]aradise is a
woman,” and that tourism as well as ideas of militarized “protection” of consumer paradises relies
on this personification.62 What is more, the idea that such a paradise must be secured by
masculine “guardianship” normalizes the military presence on the islands and justifies the
continued disenfranchisement of native communities, violence against women, and degradation
of the environment.
Hawai’i, like other locales that play host to U.S. bases at a high cost to their own sovereignties –
such as Japan, Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, South Korea, and American Samoa – are all
considered allies or friends in terms of U.S. foreign relations. Exploring the gendered rhetoric and
logic behind ideas of “security” and allies exposes the fiction of equitable and mutually beneficial
relations, and the idea that increased militarization creates increased peace. More importantly, by
taking into account how “allies,” like “enemies,” are gendered, modern manifestations of
colonization and imperialism become more apparent, and the lines between militarized war
and militarized peace are obscured. Indeed, as gendering the enemy does the work of justifying
armed conflict and war, gendering the ally does the work of sustaining long-term occupations
under the guise of peace.

Conclusion
As this essay has articulated, the gendered processes of war making are multivalent and
complex. An examination of various moments throughout modern U.S. military history
has shown that gendering the “other” in times of militarized war goes well beyond the
depiction of enemy non-allied forces as feminine, unmanly, or as sexually deviant.
Gendering as a process of militarism works not only to revile an “enemy” in order to

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justify war and boost wartime fervor, but also aids in the construction of national identities
while simultaneously creating institutionalized difference that excludes those who don’t
fit such priorities or a certain desired image of the nation. Gendering the other can also be
a form of anti-colonial resistance and possibility when examined from non-U.S.
perspectives.
The examples from the World Wars and the Vietnam War demonstrate the limitations of
understanding gendered processes solely within actual moments of warfare. To understand how
Japanese and Vietnamese “enemies” and even allies came to be feminized and vilified, our
methods and scope must go beyond periodized moments of war to also examine how preexisting
domestic conditions such as immigration and racial animosity are also gendered and contribute to
wartime violence. Racialized constructions of gender are deployed not only on wartime “ene-
mies” but on American citizens and wartime allies. These ideas of dangerous racialized femininity
do not dissipate at the cessation of hostilities, but persist in militarized aftermaths, often with
profound and deadly effects on people of color in the United States and abroad. As many of the
examples discussed throughout have shown, the gendering processes expressed during militarized
conflicts are more readily applied, accepted, and made durable if there is already a perceived layer
of difference that sets one apart from dominant society.
Finally, in an era of a more “globalized” and post-modern military war system, if we study
moments of intense militarized conflict to understand gendered depictions of the “enemy,”
we must also study militarized peace to understand gendered depictions of the ally. Ideas of
allyship are inextricably attached to and dependent on militarized conflict for their meaning.
Allyship and militarized peace are a crucial part of the war system, especially as lengthy
occupations have always characterized war and peace times, and base “hosting” has and
continues to play an ever-increasing role. Examining the gendered understandings of allyship
exposes the fiction of positive changes for the better in a “globalized” U.S. military and, more
importantly, highlights how continuing imperial occupations are obscured under the rhetoric
and guise of allyships for peace. If the war system needs a militarized masculinity for its
survival, it also needs a feminized, queer, non-normative target upon which to unleash its
aggressions and desires. Understanding the cultural work and processes that normalize an “us”
versus a “them,” or an “us” plus “our allies” can hopefully aid scholars, activists, and others in
deconstructing these logics and exposing them as dangerous fictions. Pushing for a
decolonized, demilitarized future means transforming our cultural values and supporting the
potentials and lives of all, especially those who have found themselves to be the perpetual
targets of American violence.

Notes
1 Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 359.
2 “War system” as defined and described in Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1996).
3 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91,
no. 5. (December 1986): 1053–75.
4 Joanne Meyerowitz, “A History of Gender,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December
2008): 1346–56. Meyerowitz highlights the work of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Stephanie McCurry,
Laura Edwards, and Nina Silber in southern U.S. history; Mary Beth Norton, Kathleen Brown,
Jennifer Morgan, and Toby Ditz in early American history; Gail Bederman, Arnaldo Testi, Robert
Dean, and K.A. Cuordileone in the field of twentieth-century U.S. history; Emily Rosenberg,

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Andrew Rotter, Frank Costigliola, and Petra Goedde in foreign policy/relations; and finally Kristin
Hoganson, Mary Renda, and Robert Dean in the areas of war/military history.
5 Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg, eds. Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and
Peacekeeping Practices (New York, London: Routledge, 2012), 7.
6 Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-
Century America (London: Verso, 2003); Susan Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and
Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009);
Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006).
7 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology
in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
8 Elaine Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Lebanon,
NH: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 209.
9 Kerber, Women of the Republic, 31– 36. For more on consumer culture and gender in revolutionary
America, see also Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption and Commodity Culture,” American
Historical Review 103 (June 1998): 817–44.
10 Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 217; Stefan Dudink and Karen Hagemann, “Masculinity in
Politics and War in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, 1750–1850,” in Masculinities in Politics and
War: Gendering Modern History, eds. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and Josh Tosh (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 3–21.
11 Yokota, Unbecoming British, 217.
12 Yokota, Unbecoming British. See also Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and
Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Ned
Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
13 Dudink and Hagemann, Masculinities in Politics and War, 8–9.
14 Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land.
15 Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
16 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997).
17 Jim Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses, 76–91.
18 Leeann Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses, 3–21.
19 Catherine Clinton, “‘Public Women’ and Sexual Politics during the American Civil War,” in Battle
Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 61–77.
20 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading
Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’ and Other Essays, ed. John
Mack Faragher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 31–60.
21 William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical
Review 24, no. 4 (1955): 379–95; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American
Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).
22 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Edward W. Said, Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
23 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest
Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24 Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,”
in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 1994), 3–21.

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25 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
26 Ibid., 7–10.
27 The “contrapuntal” or counterpoint, as described by Edward Said, is the marginalized “other” or
forgotten point of view to a dominant narrative or idea. A contrapuntal reading, as he describes,
would take into account, for example, not only ideas of turn-of-the-century American “manhood”
but also ideas of effeminacy that “manhood” is created against. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
28 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; see also Abe Ignacio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-
American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T-Boli Publishing, 2004); JoAnna Poblete, Islanders
in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai’i (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
Poblete describes the various peoples that came under U.S. imperial control as “colonial nationals,” a
term that describes their non-citizen status, but also their partial inclusion into a U.S. body politic that
allowed them, among other things, to travel throughout the empire.
29 Ignacio, The Forbidden Book; Alfred W. McCoy, Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricature of the American
Era, 1900–1941 (Quezon City, Philippines: Vera-Reyes, 1985).
30 Ignacio, The Forbidden Book, 81–115. See also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
31 William Howard Taft referred to Filipinos as “Little Brown Brothers” in correspondences to
U.S. President McKinley. Taft was reporting back to the U.S. on the state of the islands as the
leader of the 2nd Commission to the Philippines. See Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent
Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982).
32 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist
Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Adria L. Imada, Aloha
America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012); Eileen J.
Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham:
Duke University Press Books, 2000); Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and
Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
33 See Ken De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical
Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Tessa Ong
Winkelmann, “Dangerous Intercourse: Race, Gender and Interracial Relations in the American
Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2015).
34 McCoy, Philippine Cartoons.
35 Winkelmann, “Dangerous Intercourse.”
36 Trask, From a Native Daughter; Carina E. Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of
Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (February 1,
2014): 78–110.
37 Celia M. Kingsbury, For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Jennifer Anne Haytock, At Home, at War: Domesticity and World
War I in American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003); Gail Braybon, Women
Workers in the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2012).
38 Susan Zeiger, “She Didn’t Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the
Culture of the First World War,” Feminist Studies 22, no.1 (1996): 7–39.
39 Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
40 Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2008).
41 Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).

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 Tessa Ong Winkelmann

42 Leisa D. Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the
Women’s Army Corps during WWII,” in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, ed. Martha
Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 67; Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane:
Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998).
43 Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity During World War II (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
44 Laura McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered
Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism,” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 47–58.
45 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books,
1986). See also soldier recollections and memories in Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of
WWII (New York: The New Press, 1997); Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of
Soldiers in Battle (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media BV, 1982).
46 Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 120–23.
47 George Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), 87.
48 Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and
Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and
Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible
Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 2000); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998).
49 For more on how white ethnic immigrant populations became white, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish
Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); David R. Roediger, Working Toward
Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Ngai, Impossible
Subjects.
50 Yen Li Espiritu, “All Men are Not Created Equal: Asian Men in U.S. History,” in Men’s Lives, 7th
ed., ed. Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2007), 21–29.
51 Dower, War Without Mercy.
52 Jacqueline Lawson, “‘She’s a Pretty Woman … for a Gook’: The Misogyny of the Vietnam War,” The
Journal of American Culture 12, no. 3 (1989): 59.
53 Lawson, “‘She’s a Pretty Woman … For a Gook,’” 58.
54 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender
and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
55 Lawson, “‘She’s a Pretty Woman … For a Gook’”; see also Saundra Pollack Sturdevant and Brenda
Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press,
1993); C. Gastardo-Conaco, Filipino-Amerasians: Living in the Margins, (Quezon City: University
Center for Women’s Studies Foundation in collaboration with the Pearl S. Buck International and
Agencies Collaborating Together with Amerasians, c1999); Robin S. Levi, “Legacies of War: The
United States’ Obligation Toward Amerasians,” Stanford Journal of International Law 29 (1993): 459;
Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases.
56 Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds. Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia
and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xviii.
57 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).
58 Jennifer Turpin, “Many Faces: Women Confronting War,” in The Women and War Reader,
eds. Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer E. Turpin (New York: New York University Press,
1998), 3–18.

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59 Vera Mackie, “Gender and the Rhetoric of Occupation,” in Occupying the Other: Australia and Military
Occupations from Japan to Iraq, eds. Christine de Matos and Robin Gerster (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009), 80–106.
60 Mackie, “Gender and the Rhetoric of Occupation.”
61 Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
62 Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 161; Trask, From a Native Daughter; Imada, Aloha America.

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 13
GENDER AND AMERICAN
FOREIGN RELATIONS
Molly M. Wood
wittenberg university

On March 31, 2014, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times entitled, “The Things She Carried.”
It begins this way: “The injury wasn’t new, and neither was the insult. Rebecca, a combat veteran
of two tours of duty, had been waiting at the VA hospital for close to an hour when the office
manager asked if she was there to pick up her husband. No, she said, fighting back her exasperation.
She was there because of a spinal injury she sustained while fighting in Afghanistan.” The author of
the piece, Cara Hoffman, observes that “stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our
culture … their stories are simply not told in our literature, film and popular culture.”1 Finding,
telling, and analyzing the stories of women at war, and as veterans of war, is but one way in which
historians who are interested in the intersections of gender, conflict, culture, war, diplomacy,
American foreign relations, and international relations can engage in scholarly conversation. As
Cornelia Dayton and Lisa Levenstein write in their 2012 state-of-the-field essay, “The Big Tent of
Women’s and Gender History” in the Journal of American History, many scholars “who do not self-
identify as women’s or gender historians deploy the field’s tool kit in their research.”2 The gender
tool-kit has been particularly well deployed by those who identify broadly as historians of American
foreign relations or American international history.
In 1990, in the flagship journal of American foreign relations history, Diplomatic History,
contributor Rosemary Foot asked “Where Are the Women?” That same year, historian Emily
Rosenberg published an important initial overview of the scholarship then emerging on women,
gender, and American foreign relations history in an article entitled “Gender. A Roundtable:
Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations” in the Journal of American History. In 1991,
the first edition of the classic “state of the field” book-length collection Explaining the History of
American Foreign Relations appeared, but with little attention to gender as a way to “explain”
American foreign relations. Only Rosenberg, the sole female contributor to the sixteen-chapter
anthology, acknowledges gender as one, among many, of the methods of analysis useful for
“walking the borders of power.”3 Three years later, Diplomatic History published an issue featuring
a special forum on “Culture, Gender and Foreign Policy,” likely bringing these themes to the
attention of most regular Diplomatic History readers for the first time. And in 2004 a second edition
of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations appeared, vastly expanded, reflecting the
cataclysmic changes in the field in terms of coverage, methodology, and theory. This new edition
includes substantially revised essays from the first edition, but it also presents entirely new material
on post-colonialism, borderlands, modernization theory, race, memory, cultural transfer, and

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critical theory. And gender. In the gender chapter, historian Kristin Hoganson provides a wide-
ranging overview of the voluminous scholarship on gender and American foreign relations
history up to that point and calls on foreign relations historians to “follow the history of
consumption, transnational history, world history, immigration history, borderlands histories,
and histories of empire and displaced peoples,” as well as gender and sexuality.4 No small feat, and
yet, this is exactly what historians of gender and American foreign relations and international
history have been doing consistently and creatively. Since the story of the emergence and
evolution of gender as a significant mode of analysis for foreign relations history has been well
told already by Hoganson and others, this essay makes no effort to provide an exhaustive
overview of the scholarship but instead emphasizes selected trends and examples mostly from
the past decade.

Women Internationalists Doing “Women’s Work”

The first generation of works on women, gender, and foreign relations history started in a
predictable manner, by identifying the women, largely overlooked, who were involved in
international or transnational work, broadly defined, over time. Scholars defined these women,
and the work in which they engaged, using mostly traditional gender norms, thereby focusing on
categories such as peace activists, nurses, philanthropists or volunteer workers, aid workers,
missionaries, and others. In Rosenberg’s 1990 Journal of American History article, she outlines
several categories of the then-emerging scholarship on gender and American foreign relations
history which remains relevant today. Scholars today continue to produce excellent histories of
women or groups of women engaged in activities, either at home or abroad, traditionally defined
as “women’s work.” The recent scholarship on these groups of women has largely paralleled the
growth of international, transnational, and global approaches to writing history. Leila Rupp
published the path-breaking Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement in
1997, focusing on three major transnational women’s organizations, the International Council of
Women, the International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF). More recently, Allison Sneider, in Suffragists in an Imperial Age, examines
the U.S. imperialist movement within the specific context of the extended battle for woman
suffrage, and the ways in which suffragists used the “language of empire” to further their cause.5
Manako Ogawa in “The ‘White Ribbon League of Nations’ Meets Japan: The Trans-Pacific
Activism of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1906–1930” also contributes to the
ever-growing body of literature on public diplomacy and demonstrates the influence of transna-
tional scholarship on gender and American foreign relations. In this case, the Japanese women of
the Japanese World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a national branch of the World’s
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, worked to change the perceptions many westerners
held about the Japanese and Asia writ large in the early twentieth century.6
David Patterson’s book The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy
in World War I combines both peace movement history and traditional diplomatic history to
explore the international work of peace activists, especially the women who served in leadership
positions. Patterson does not ignore the work of men in this capacity, but rather highlights the
leadership of women as “citizen activists” and the primacy of women’s voices in the work of
peace activism, mediation, and attempts to reach a negotiated settlement and put into place
international mechanisms to prevent further war.7 In 2003, Scott Bennett published Radical
Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963, an event
which caused reviewer and seminal scholarly figure in the history of women’s peace activism
Harriet Hyman Alonso to title her 2006 review of the book “Finally—The War Resisters

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League.” As Alonso notes, the War Resisters League “is one of the longest lived peace organiza-
tions in U.S. history,” and yet little scholarly work had emerged on it until Bennett’s book. While
his work does not focus explicitly on women or gender, it credits one woman, Jesse Wallace
Hughan, a feminist socialist pacifist, as the founder of the organization, and rightly highlights the
many ways in which women and men, as pacifists and activists, worked together for the single
cause of peace.8
Often connected to the cause of peace, especially in the early twentieth century, were women
and women’s groups who identified themselves as “internationalists.” Some of the newer works
on this theme focus specifically on Pan-American relations. In 2014, Megan Threlkeld published
Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico. In this book she explores the
inherent “tensions between U.S. women’s internationalist ideas and Mexican women’s nation-
alist aspirations” in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.9 Internationalist and American-based
women’s groups, such as the WILPF and Young Women’s Christian Association, wanted to
organize Mexican women and to have a voice with American officials who were formulating
U.S. policy towards Mexico, but they failed to take into account the agenda and goals of Mexican
women in their particular national context. In this case, the ideals of women who considered
themselves “internationalists” were thwarted by the narrower objectives of nationalist women.
Dina Berger’s article, “Raising Pan Americans: Early Women Activists of Hemispheric
Cooperation, 1916–1944,” examines the Pan-American Round Table (PART), formed in
Texas in 1916, the first women’s group committed to the creation of a “Pan-American con-
sciousness” and “promoting the larger cause of hemispheric cooperation.” Berger sees the “soft
power” employed by this organization as a “window into the interplay of civic activism, gender
and foreign relations in the twentieth century.” The women of PART emphasized the creation
of “friendship and understanding” as part of inter-American solidarity. Their desire to change
American attitudes and perceptions of Latin Americans was reflected through their motto, “liking
from knowing.”10

The Missionary Impulse

One of the most influential sub-genres within the larger category of scholarship focusing on
traditionally defined “women’s work” continues to expand our understanding of missionary
women through history, and contributes to our understanding of “soft diplomacy” and cultural
imperialism, including the ways in which Americans perceive others. Lisa Joy Pruitt examines the
“construction, elaboration, and reinforcement of a discourse about the female ‘Oriental’ Other”
in A Looking-Glass for the Ladies: American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century,
a process she defines as “evangelical orientalism.” By the second half of the nineteenth century,
the work of these women resulted in the creation of denominational women’s mission boards and
what Pruitt refers to as the “dramatic feminization of the foreign missions movement.” Her work
also emphasizes the increasingly established identification of the “status of women as an indicator
of the degree of civilization that a society had attained,” an argument about gendered “domes-
ticity” that is increasingly common in studies of many different groups of western women who
lived and worked abroad.11 For instance, Barbara Reeves-Ellington’s Domestic Frontiers: Gender,
Reform and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East is part of a new
generation of scholarship on female American missionary efforts abroad. She explicitly defines
those missionary efforts as a transnational exchange. In this case, Reeves-Ellington explores the
efforts of American missionaries to convert Eastern Orthodox Bulgarians in the Ottoman
Empire. She also emphasizes the “discourses of domesticity” that became “one of the most
durable exports that American missionaries introduced to the Ottoman Balkans.”12

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Hyaeweol Choi combines gender analysis and colonial studies in Gender and Mission Encounters
in Korea, which focuses on Korea as a unique site where American women missionaries interacted
with Korean women under Japanese colonial rule. Regina Sullivan turns to a biographical
approach in her book Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and
Legend.13 More broad and ambitious in approach, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation
and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 aims explicitly to “internationalize American
foreign relations and gender history” through the themes of mission and nation. Editors
Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie Shemo argue convincingly that archival
collections of Protestant missionaries are some of the most important and abundant “sources of
information about American women abroad,” and by using them and attempting to find
evidence from various local environments, scholars can more effectively examine both “female
agency and locate non-American actors.” In doing so, they argue, historians and others help
reveal the “global spread of American culture.” Indeed the essays in this collection include
American missionary movements in the United States, India, Rhodesia, Shanghai, Japan,
Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Congo, and the Philippines, as well as essays by Jane Hunter and
Ian Tyrell, two of the founders of the sub-field of gender and missionary movements.14

Marriage and Family

While scholarship on missionary women begins to address themes of domesticity and U.S.
foreign relations, other studies have explored domestic life within the framework of marriage
and family. Elaine Tyler May’s path-breaking book, Homeward Bound, which showed how Cold
War containment policy was linked explicitly to traditional family and domestic roles in the 1950s
and 1960s, was followed by Laura McEnaney in Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets
Everyday Life in the Fifties. In 2002, Helen Laville analyzed women’s organizations during the
Cold War in Cold War Women. Using the rationale of protecting “the home” in the 1950s, she
argues, American women embraced an “American internationalism” by working in and through
organizations founded on the ideal of victory in the moral war against communism.15 In 2007,
Natasha Zaretsky published No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National
Decline, 1968–1980. Zaretsky extends her examination of “family” and the concept of “nation”
to the decade of the “long 1970s.” As Zaretsky argues, “Fears about the fate of the family shaped
debates about American national decline.” Marcia Chatelain explores the theme of internation-
alism within another traditionally female organization, the Girl Scouts. Her 2014 article on
“International Sisterhood” argues that the American Girl Scouts organization of the Cold War
era made a concerted effort to emphasize the role of the teenage girls in their organization as
“cultural ambassadors” during their travels abroad.16
In 2007, historian Donna Alvah published a much-needed historical study of another group of
American “cultural ambassadors,” military families, titled Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military
Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965.17 My own work on the wives of American
diplomats in the first half of the twentieth century parallels some of Alvah’s work as well as the
work of historians who have studied marital and professional identity and the nature of work.
American Foreign Service officers as well as State Department officials understood that marriage
could greatly enhance their careers. Wives accompanied their diplomat husbands to posts all over
the world, serving in unpaid representational roles, mainly as hostess and social facilitator. Wives
referred to themselves as professionals in their own right, and officials recognized this quasi-
official status, not by formally rewarding their work with monetary compensation, but by
promoting an efficient and well-liked wife’s husband to a more prominent or prestigious rank
or post. The role of gender in the U.S. Foreign Service was also evident in the role women played

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as domestic role model for the rest of the world. The language and assumptions of gender helped
the State Department to define America for the rest of the world during the crucial decades of the
early twentieth century.18
In a similar vein, Dana Cooper’s Informal Ambassadors examines the proliferation of transat-
lantic marriages, from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, between
prominent American heiresses and members of the British aristocracy. Cooper employs a
biographical approach to argue that these marriages helped to foster and strengthen the Anglo-
American “special relationship” during these years. In another example of the role of marriage in
understanding U.S. foreign relations, in 2010, Susan Zeiger published Entangling Alliances: Foreign
War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century. Zeiger analyzes the thousands of
marriages between local women and American soldiers stationed abroad starting in World War
I and extending through the war in Vietnam. The work of Cooper, Zeiger, and others who focus
explicitly on marriage adds to the growing field of works in U.S. foreign relations history that
shows the relevance of private lives in foreign relations.19
The significance of these private lives was recognized by Diplomatic History in another special
forum, “Gender and Sexuality in American Foreign Relations,” published in 2012. In this issue
Laura McEnaney writes, “We are past the question of ‘whether’ and on to the business of ‘how’
when it comes to understanding gender and sexuality’s relationship to international relations.”
New scholarship blends the kind of archival research valued by diplomatic historians with the
close textual reading of cultural studies, but the combination reminds us also “about the limits of
our explanatory powers as historians, no matter what is in our toolbox.”20 Two of the articles in
this forum reflected a recent resurgence in biographical analysis, enhanced by new and innovative
approaches to the writing of scholarly biography, reflecting in part the larger “cultural turn” in
history. A 2009 Roundtable on “Historians and Biography” in The American Historical Review
defended the genre by highlighting the inventive work being done by historians in various sub-
fields and drawing a clear distinction between “biographers” whose primary purpose is to tell the
story of a life and historians who write biography as a way of understanding a particular historical
context. As David Nasaw writes, historians “deploy the individual in the study of the world
outside that individual and to explore how the private informs the public and vice versa.”21

Gender and Sexuality

It is not a surprising leap from marriage and family ties to a more explicit focus on private lives
and sexuality. In the context of diplomacy, the contributors to the Diplomatic History issue on
“Gender and Sexuality” argue that intimate personal relationships and sexual histories can both
reflect and influence foreign policies. In the article “Pamela Churchill, Wartime London, and
the Making of the Special Relationship,” Frank Costligliola examines the multiple intimate
sexual relationships Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law had with influential Americans
associated with President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and with others, including
journalist Edward R. Murrow, in wartime England. Costigliola argues that these relationships
helped to create greater trust and bonds between American and British officials. As he observes,
Pamela Churchill “cultivated intimacy” and therefore “embodied what would become known
as the special relationship.” As part of the forum, Robert D. Dean assesses Costigliola’s “will-
ingness to analytically engage the historical actors of the period as embodied, emotional, fully
human characters.” Dean observes that “by putting private behaviors at the center of his inquiry
about the workings of state power, he demonstrates how reason and emotion are inseparably
bound together in the actual contingencies of lived experience where policy decisions are
made.”22

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Costigliola has been at the forefront of the intersections of biography, gender, sexuality, and
emotions in his many contributions to foreign relations history. His article “Broken Circle: The
Isolation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II” previews the 2011 publication of his book,
Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. The article examines
President Franklin Roosevelt’s close circle of friends and advisors, including the little-known
Missy LeHand, whom Costigliola describes as Roosevelt’s “closest companion for two decades”
and his “personal and political partner.” In her response and analysis of Costigliola’s article in
Diplomatic History, Petra Goedde draws attention to “the broader ideological and cultural con-
text” of decision-making rather than the political and diplomatic decisions themselves.23 While
not an explicit gender analysis, it is becoming more and more apparent to many historians
working in these areas that the broader social and cultural context of an individual’s life cannot
be separated from gender.
All of the scholarship on gender and American foreign relations history for the past thirty years
owes an intellectual debt to Joan Scott, whose seminal article, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” first appeared in 1986.24 Scott revolutionized modes of thinking about
gender and power relations, which foreign relations historians have found to be particularly
useful, including such themes as the recognition of the role of gendered discourse and imagery as
ways of legitimizing international hierarchies. Recent scholarship in this vein includes studies of
various forms of foreign “occupation” and the “new imperialist literature” and masculinity.25 In
1998 Kristin Hoganson published a groundbreaking work entitled Fighting for American Manhood:
How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish American and Philippine American Wars. Robert D. Dean
followed with Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy, and in 2004
David K. Johnson published The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in
the Federal Government. Johnson’s important book brought attention to the Cold War persecution
of homosexuals and explicitly linked that persecution to national security fears. While Dean
focused his analysis on the 1960s and the foreign policies of Presidents John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson, Johnson’s analysis begins during the McCarthy era and was the first historian
to work with the archival records of the Hoey Committee, the U.S. Senate committee charged
with investigating “sexual perversion” on the federal workforce in 1950. Though Johnson is not a
diplomatic historian, his broad analysis of persecution of gays and lesbians in the U.S. government
during the Cold War cannot help but provide appropriate context for understanding how those
fears fit into the larger Cold War context.26

Gender and Militarism

Attention to gender as one component of American national and international expansion and/or
intervention has provided scholars with a more nuanced understanding of American reasoning in
a variety of cross-cultural contexts. Amy Greenberg, for instance, explores American continental
expansion in Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. She examines contrasting
ideals of manliness, what she calls “restrained manhood and martial manhood” and argues that the
“martial manhood,” emphasizing physicality, aggression, and even violence, played a crucial role
in the drive for territorial expansion.27 Many now employ a transnational approach, challenging
traditional national borders, to the histories of the Colonial and Early National periods, where
topics such as trade, cross-cultural encounters (including indigenous encounters with European
colonizers), and traditional military and diplomatic relationships are explained through gender
analysis, especially the contexts and modes of masculinity.28 Indeed a common theme emerges
whereby gendered discourses help to explain U.S. decisions for war and justifications for
continued warfare and military occupation, whether in traditionally defined and declared wars,

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such as World War II, or less well-defined or amorphous war, such as the Vietnam War or the
Cold War.29
New scholarship on the war in Vietnam has moved beyond the battlefield in exciting ways,
many of which rely on gender analysis. All of them owe a debt to Susan Jeffords who published
The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War in 1989. Jeffords sees various
representations of the Vietnam War in popular culture, including film, novels, media, and
other outlets, as part of an effort to “remasculinize” the United States in response to long-term
feminist challenges. More recent works serve as signature examples of the ways in which gender is
incorporated into the voluminous literature on the Vietnam War. Meredith H. Lair’s book,
Armed with Abundance, while it does not foreground an explicit gender analysis of the war,
nonetheless tells an important story about the rear-echelon, non-combat experience in
Vietnam, including the inevitable interactions between American soldiers and Vietnamese
civilians, who, in desperation, reorganized their economy around satisfying the desires of
young American men for souvenirs, entertainment, and female companionship.30
Heather Marie Stur published Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War in 2011.
She focuses her analysis on the gendered and racialized encounters between the Americans and
the Vietnamese “on the ground” and through their “lived experiences.” She explores competing
images of women and gender, including the symbolic Vietnamese “dragon lady” who needed “to
be tamed or slain,” and the American “girl next door,” embodied in the Red Cross workers or
“donut dollies.” She also analyzes the concepts of masculinity and femininity, arguing that the
lengthy war at times strengthened and at times challenged these ideals. Stur’s analysis of gendered
imagery is particularly compelling. As she explains, “A cartoon drawing of a Vietnamese woman
with a dagger strapped to a shapely leg; an American woman applying lipstick before heading out
to the Red Cross recreational center … underscore the importance of both women and gender to
Americans’ attempts to make sense of and justify U.S. intervention.”31

After the War Is Over: Gender and Occupation

Recent works on the broad theme of postwar military occupation reflect further connections
between the study of U.S. foreign relations history and gender analysis. These works reflect the
gendered and sexualized aspects of U.S. military occupations and maintenance of military bases
and military-civilian interactions. In 2001, Mary Renda published Taking Haiti: Military
Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940, arguing that the American Marine
occupying force was strongly influenced by a paternalistic attitude towards the Haitians, perceiv-
ing them as “feminized,” in need of guidance and protection.32 Laura Wexler similarly looks at
the American vision of “others” as seen through the lenses of some of the first female photo-
journalists in the early twentieth century. In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S.
Imperialism, she analyzes photographs and texts to reveal the ways in which women’s roles served
as indicators of various levels of “civilization.”33
A number of new works on the American postwar experience in Japan have proliferated in the
past decade. Among the books published that foreground gender and U.S. foreign relations in
occupied Japan is Naoko Shibusawa’s 2006 America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy.
Shibusawa argues that American policymakers, among others, used gendered discourse effec-
tively to justify the American postwar occupation of Japan and to shift the American popular
image of the Japanese from a hated enemy in World War II into a staunch Cold War ally, in fact,
the “‘bulwark’ against communism in the Far East.” Among other strategies, “portraying Japan as
a woman” in a variety of contexts, including popular culture, “made its political subjugation
appear as natural as a geisha’s subservience to a male client.” Not explicitly a study of occupation

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policy formulation, Shibusawa employs gender analysis, as well as race and definitions of
“maturity,” to “understand how ideologies in the United States supported American foreign
policy” in the post-World War II era.34
Mire Koikari, in Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of
Japan, challenges the image of the American occupation of postwar Japan as a “benevolent
liberator” and suggests instead that that American democratic reform in Japan was an example
of a wider “Cold War imperial feminism.” While there is literature on imperial feminism in the
British, French, and Dutch colonies, studies of this gendered facet of imperialism in American
possessions is still a growing area that combines studies of occupation, the Cold War, and post-
colonial feminist studies. The author emphasizes the central role of women, both Japanese and
American, in the process of postwar negotiations, and especially in the role of Japanese women as
participants in the occupation, not simply the recipients of American democratic and gender
reform.35 Sarah Kovner, in Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan, explores
the American postwar occupation through the sex business and the experiences of sex workers.
Specifically, she examines the ways in which the arrival of large numbers of American servicemen
changed the “long-established landscape of the sex industry in fundamental ways.” Initially the
Japanese government attempted to control the postwar sex business through the creation of a
Recreational Amusement Association (RAA), which would bring the brothels, and other aspects
of the industry, under government oversight. This was an attempt to limit contact of the
American men with Japanese civilian women, by giving them government-sanctioned access
to sex workers. Allied authorities, however, immediately disbanded the RAA, pushing the sex
business underground. Kovner has therefore brought sex work, as a topic of historical research,
into conversation with the conduct of formal occupation as well as larger considerations of geo-
political power, economic change, and imperialism, broadly defined.36
The same basic question drives the work on the post-World War II occupation of both Japan
and Germany. How did Americans and Germans or Japanese make the transition, quickly and in
the context of the emerging Cold War crisis and global reshuffling, from enemy to ally? Two
books appeared at about the same time, with some of the same methodological focus on
“ordinary Germans,” mostly civilian women, and American servicemen. In GIs and Fräuleins:
The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany, Maria Höhn explores the reactions of
ordinary Germans, in their daily lives, to the extended presence of U.S. troops in postwar West
Germany. German women, in general, had the most contact with American troops, including
African American troops, and they felt most radically the changes in social structure and gender
roles. Höhn focuses her study on a particular remote part of postwar West Germany, the rural,
poor Rhineland-Palatinate in southwest Germany, which had been referenced as a “moral
disaster area” after American troop deployments resulted in “striptease parlors, prostitution,
common-law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy.”37 Höhn explores the tension
that resulted between German conservatives who wanted to restore women to their traditional
roles as wives and mothers, and the American servicemen who disrupted that ideal. However, she
also looks at the more positive interactions between the American GIs and German women,
including those who worked on the American military base or in the local (legitimate) businesses
frequented by servicemen. Gender roles, she argues, evolved, as did the position of many women
in German society. These changing roles lend insight into larger postwar changes in West
Germany, including consumerism and modernization.
Petra Goedde’s book, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–49,
appeared at about the same time, in 2003. She also looks at the lives of “ordinary Americans
and Germans,” though of course the “ordinary Americans” under scrutiny were American
servicemen, and the “ordinary Germans” were overwhelmingly civilian women, who far

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outnumbered German men. Goedde argues that the day-to-day interactions between the
American men and German civilians (mostly women) helped to speed up the necessary reconci-
liation between former enemies. She also identifies what she calls the “cultural feminization” of
postwar Germany. The “perceived vulnerability” of German women after the war “became
synonymous with Germany’s political and economic vulnerability.” In part of her conclusion,
Goedde offers with great clarity one of the ways in which gender, as a category of analysis, has
been now widely accepted by historians of American foreign relations. “Gender,” she writes,
“helps uncover important behavioral and attitudinal structures in the relationships among
individuals, groups and nations.”38 More recently, in 2010, Höhn and Seungsook Moon edited
a volume entitled Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War II to the Present,
in order to provide an overview of American military interactions with civilian populations in the
three locations, South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and West Germany, where the majority of
American bases have been located.39 The interdisciplinary scholarship represented in this volume
explores the various ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race interacted and intersected in
what the editors call the “hybrid space” of military occupation.

What’s Happening Now: Gender and Policy

Gender is now more recognizable in the foreign policy mainstream, where the scholarship is less
of a historical nature (for now) but takes its cue from political scientists, sociologists, and other
feminist scholars. In 2009 the influential journal Foreign Affairs published a piece entitled, “What
to Read on Gender and Foreign Policy.” The editors explain that “feminists have long argued
that it is wrong to ignore half the population when crafting policies meant to secure a stable world
order” and suggest their selected readings “are essential reading for anyone interested in the
connections between gender relations—norms and assumptions about men and women, mascu-
linity and femininity—and the practice of foreign policy.” They suggest such works as War and
Gender, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, and Gender, Conflict and
Peacekeeping.40 Cynthia Enloe’s vast contributions over the past three decades have been parti-
cularly useful for historians of gender and American foreign relations history. Not only has her
classic book, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, first
published in 1989, been revised and updated (2014), but in 2010 she turned her keen analytical
eye to the war in Iraq with Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. In this
work she adopts a semi-biographical strategy in producing eight personal profiles, four of Iraqi
women and four of American women, to explore the many gendered, though often hidden,
features of this war.41
More work will be needed on women, gender, and the twenty-first century “global war on
terror.” What is the relationship between gender and terrorism in the U.S. and around the world?
How will U.S. foreign relations be affected by an increasing refugee crisis in Europe, especially
when so many of the refugees are women and children? Women in the U.S. armed forces are
moving increasingly into “combat,” but the traditional definition of “combat” is evolving at a
rapid pace, as is the nature of war itself. Women hold high-level cabinet positions in the U.S., and
a woman, Hillary Clinton, was the 2016 Democratic nominee for president. Gender constituted a
significant part of the 2016 presidential campaign on both sides, between Donald Trump’s
cartoonish misogyny and scrutiny of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. At the same time,
historians of U.S. foreign relations should also continue to “drill down” into lives of long-
forgotten individual women and men and networks of women and men who lived, worked, or
traveled abroad or who engaged in foreign affairs activism, broadly defined, either overtly or
behind-the-scenes.

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Bananas, Beaches and Bases, as well as Emily Rosenberg’s 1990 Journal of American History essay,
mentioned at the beginning of this essay, were among my earliest influences as I muddled through
the first years of graduate school, convinced, and not sure why, that I was interested in “women and
gender and American foreign relations and diplomacy.” My early journey coincided, in the 1990s,
with the expansive growth and growing acceptance of the sub-field that at first seemed hopelessly
marginal. “What was I going to be? A diplomatic historian or a woman’s/gender historian?” And
yes, the question was usually posed as an “either/or,” not a “both.” Twenty years later, these clear-
cut but limiting categories of formal scholarship continue to break down, which only benefits
historians of gender and U.S. foreign relations who are willing to think creatively, embrace new
technologies and engage in research using the digital humanities, travel to foreign and obscure
domestic archives, and ask questions that are informed by wide reading in many fields.

Notes
1 “The Things She Carried” references Tim O’Brien’s classic collection of short stories about the
Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. Cara Hoffman, “The Things She Carried,” New York Times,
March 31, 2014, A23. I would like to thank Jeffrey Engel for calling my attention to the New York
Times piece.
2 Cornelia Dayton and Lisa Levenstein, “The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History: A State
of the Field,” Journal of American History 99, no. 3 (December 2012): 794.
3 Rosemary Foot, “Where Are the Women? The Gender Dimension in the Study of International
Relations,” Diplomatic History 14, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 615–622; Emily Rosenberg, “Gender. A
Roundtable: Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History
77, no. 1 (June 1990): 116–124 and “Walking the Borders,” in Explaining the History of American
Foreign Relations, Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, eds. (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 27. Among the first works explicitly linking gender and U.S. foreign relations cited by
Rosenberg in this essay: Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign
Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1986); Barbara Steinson, American Women’s Activism in World War I (New York: Garland, 1982);
Harriet Alonso, The Women’s Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921–41 (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1989); Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds., Women, War and History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987).
4 Laura McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers,” Emily Rosenberg, “‘Foreign Affairs’ and
World War II,” and Elaile Tyler May, Geoffrey Smith, Susan Jeffords, Amy Kaplan, Anders
Stephanson, and Bruce Kuklick, “Commentaries,” in Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (Winter 1994):
47–124; Kristin Hoganson, “What’s Gender Got to Do with It? Gender Relations as Foreign
Relations History” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., Michael Hogan
and Thomas Paterson, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 322.
5 Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997); Allison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansionism and the
Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
6 Manako Ogawa, “The ‘White Ribbon League of Nations’ Meets Japan: The Trans-Pacific Activism
of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1906–1930,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (January
2007): 21–50.
7 David Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I
(New York: Routledge, 2007).
8 Harriet Hyman Alonso, review of Scott Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and
Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), in
Diplomatic History 30, no. 1 (January 2006): 143–145.

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9 Megan Threlkeld, Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1.
10 Dina Berger, “Raising Pan Americans: Early Women Activists of Hemispheric Cooperation, 1916–
1944,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 39–40.
11 Lisa Joy Pruitt, A Looking-Glass for Ladies: American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth
Century (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 2–3.
12 Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform and American Interventions in the Ottoman
Balkans and the Near East (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). For additional works on
the theme of domesticity, see, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995); Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Destiny,”
American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 581–606; Carol Chin, “Beneficent Imperialist:
American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Century,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 3
(June 2003): 327–352; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and
U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Kristin Hoganson,
“Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865–1920,” American Historical Review
107, no. 1 (February 2002): 55–83; and Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of
American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
13 Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009); Regina Sullivan, Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend
(Berkeley: University of California, 2009).
14 Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms:
Women, Mission, Nation and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 1.
15 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books,
1988); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
16 Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 17; Marcia Chatelain, “International
Sisterhood: Cold War Girl Scouts Encounter the World,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (2014): 261–70.
17 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965
(New York: New York University Press, 2007).
18 Molly Wood, “Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the ‘Social Game’ in the U.S.
Foreign Service, 1905–1941,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 142–65;
“‘Commanding Beauty’ and ‘Gentle Charm’: American Women and Gender in the Early
Twentieth Century Foreign Service,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 3 (June 2007): 505–30. See also
Catherine Allgor, “‘A Republican in a Monarchy’: Louisa Catherine Adams in Russia,” Diplomatic
History 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 15–43.
19 Dana Cooper, Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American
Relations, 1865–1945 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014); Susan Zeiger, Entangling
Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York
University Press, 2010). See also Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides
in America (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
20 Laura McEnaney, “Personal, Political, and International: A Reflection on Diplomacy and
Methodology,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (September 2012): 770. In this same issue see also
Katherine Sibley, “Introduction: Gender and Sexuality in American Foreign Relations”; Veronica
Wilson, “‘Now You Are Alone’: Anticommunism, Gender and the Cold War Myths of Hede
Massing and Whitaker Chambers”; Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire:
Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics”; Frank Costigliola, “Pamela Churchill, Wartime London,
and the Making of the Special Relationship”; and Robert D. Dean, “The Personal and the Political:
Gender and Sexuality in Diplomatic History.”

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21 David Nasaw, “Introduction to AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” The American
Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 574.
22 Costigliola, “Pamela Churchill, Wartime London, and the Making of the Special Relationship,” 754;
Dean, “The Personal and the Political,” 763.
23 Costigliola, “Broken Circle: The Isolation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II,” and Petra
Goedde, “‘Thick Description’: An Assessment of FDR, LBJ, and Henry Kissinger,” Diplomatic History
32, no. 5 (November 2008): 677–718 and 767–71. Quotes from page 677. See also Costigliola, Roosevelt’s
Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
24 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5
(December 1986): 1053–1075.
25 There is now considerable literature on British imperialism that foregrounds gender analysis. For
historiography on the “imperial turn,” see Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking
with and Through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For gender analysis, see, for
example, Angela Woolacott, Gender and Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
26 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish American and
Philippine American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Robert D. Dean, Imperial
Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2003); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
27 Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 11. See also K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood in American Political Culture in the
Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005).
28 See R. Todd Romero, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion and Colonialism in Early
New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
29 For a classic, see Margaret Higonnet, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987). See also the recently reissued Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War:
German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
30 Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989); Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the
Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
31 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2, 3, and 16.
32 Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
33 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000).
34 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 3, 4, 11.
35 Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
36 Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2012), 1. See also Meghan Warner Mettler, “‘Modern Butterfly’: American
Perceptions of Japanese Women and their Role in International Relations, 1945–1960” and Malia
McAndrew, “Beauty, Soft Power and the Politics of Motherhood During the U.S. Occupation of
Japan, 1945–1952,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 4 (2014): 60–82 and 83–107.
37 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3. See also Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of
Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs and Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
38 Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–49 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 80–81 and 205.
39 Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World
War II to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). On Korea, see also Katherine H.S.

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Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
40 Charlie Carpenter, “What to Read on Gender and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 22 (December
2009); Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of
Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Dyan Mazurana, Angela
Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart, eds., Gender, Politics and Peacekeeping (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005).
41 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989, 2014); Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq
War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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 14
GENDER AND MILITARISM IN
U.S. CULTURE DURING THE
LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY
David Kieran
Washington and Jeerson College

On August 7, 2015, ten candidates for the Republican presidential nomination gathered on a stage
in Cleveland. Towards the end of the evening, one of the moderators, FOX News host Megyn
Kelly, asked Mike Huckabee whether he would favor allowing transgender men and women to
serve openly in the armed forces. The former Arkansas governor was unequivocal. “The military is
not a social experiment,” he answered, before explaining that “[t]he purpose of the military is to kill
people and break things.”1 A few days later, the New York Times published a lengthy investigation
into the sexual violence perpetrated by the Islamic State. According to Rukmini Callimachi, “The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed
in the organization.”2 Within hours, the National Review’s David French leveraged outrage over this
violence into a critique of the Obama administration’s Iraq policy, telling readers to “remember that
none of this was inevitable” and that “stories like the stories you read above represent the human
cost of weakness and withdrawal.”3 And a few weeks after that, Captain Kristen Griest and
Lieutenant Shaye Haver became the first women to successfully complete the Army’s rigorous
Ranger school. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) echoed the sentiments of many who felt that
Griest and Haver’s achievement finally put to rest questions of whether women were capable of
serving in the combat arms. The two “‘have shown that women can compete on a level-playing
field with men to serve in the defense of our nation,’” Mikulski argued, going on to say that
“‘continued gender integration will improve readiness and help our Armed Forces to recruit the
best talent we can throughout all of our services.’”4
These three moments occurred within a month of one another, but they reveal radically
divergent perspectives on the relationship between gender and militarism in U.S. culture.
Huckabee assumes that a powerful, destructive military is a necessity in American culture, and
that such an institution can only endure when normative gender identities are enforced. For
French, an activist foreign policy that betrays no effeminacy – “weakness and withdrawal” – and
is instead defined by military strength is a means of ensuring the safety of women and girls in the
developing world. And for Mikulski, the military is an avenue for the achievement of gender
equity. Yet however much Huckabee and Mikulski might disagree about who should serve and
how they should do so, it is nonetheless true that neither they nor French question the privileged
place of militarism in U.S. culture. Huckabee’s claim that the military must be able to “kill people
and break things,” after all, is simply a coarser articulation of French’s disdain of “weakness” and
the ultimate goal of the “readiness” that Mikulski celebrates.

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In U.S. culture, questions about what kind of military the United States should have, how it
should be used, who should serve, and why they should do so have long been informed by
discourses of gender. Following the injunction of Cynthia Enloe, who more than any scholar has
defined this subfield, to develop a “feminist curiosity” that “can help reveal why U.S. foreign policy
has become so militarized – and at what costs,” historians and scholars of gender have over the past
three decades increasingly interrogated and problematized these questions, both theorizing the
relationship between gender and militarism and illuminating the histories of their intersection.5
In what follows, I provide an overview of how scholars have set about answering questions
that emerge from Enloe’s injunctions. What is militarism, and how is it gendered? To what extent
is militarism dependent upon men and women inhabiting particular roles and performing certain
types of labor? In what ways does militarism rely upon and reproduce patriarchy? How have
various groups embraced militarism in order to perform or claim various gender roles, and how
has that been related to the broader pursuit of rights? How does militarism shape the material
conditions of the lives of those influenced by it? How does militarism intersect with structural and
institutionalized forms of oppression, whether rooted in sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, or
elsewhere? What are the global repercussions of the gender dynamics of American militarism?
And, finally, how does an interrogation of the gender politics of American militarism open
possibilities for resistance and reform?

Defining Militarism
What is militarism? How is it distinct from war? How is it distinct from, for example, a belief that
a strong military is an essential aspect of national security, or that a nation must sometimes be
willing to use military force? Scholars of American militarism have posited that militarism
describes a culture that goes beyond valorizing the military and instead understands it as central
to national identity, its engagement with the wider world, and its approach to social problems
large and small. Though he prefers the term “militarization,” the historian Michael Sherry
explains that it is “the process by which war and national security became consuming anxieties
and provided the memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life.”6
Sherry further explains that a militarized society cannot be reduced to or equated with a
military dictatorship or a country that is permanently engaged in warfare, even though, as Mary
Dudziak points out, twentieth-century U.S. culture has come to be defined by nearly perpetual
war.7 It is, rather, a set of attitudes and beliefs which, Sherry explains, “though obviously
expressed in the ‘production of violence’ … may have sources and outlets far removed from
violence and military power.”8
Most important to Sherry, though, is that militarization is a defining feature of twentieth-
century American life.9 Andrew Bacevich would agree, writing that militarism has become
particularly ascendant in post-Vietnam War U.S. culture, and

manifest[s] itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as

the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the
efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have
come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness,
military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.10

Scholars interested in the gendered contours of American militarism offer expanded definitions.
For Laura Sjober and Sandra Via, “militarism … compris[es] an underlying system of institutions,
practices, values, and cultures. Militarism is the extension of war-related, war-preparatory, and

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war-based meanings outside of ‘war proper’ and into social and political life more generally.” It is
marked, they argue, by “the blurring or erasure of distinctions between war and peace, military
and civilian.”11 Enloe, however, offers a definition of militarism that places discourses of gender
in sharper relief, arguing that

by embracing the ideology of militarism, a person, institution, or community is also

accepting a distinctive package of beliefs …
Among those distinctively militaristic core beliefs are (a) that armed force is the
ultimate resolver of tensions; (b) that human nature is prone to conflict; (c) that having
enemies is a natural condition; (d) that hierarchical relations produce effective
action; (e) that a state without a military is naïve, scarcely modern, and barely
legitimate; (f) that in times of crisis those who are feminine need protection; and
(g) that in times of crisis any man who refuses to engage in armed violent action is
jeopardizing his own status as a manly man.12

To live in a militarized society, scholars argue, is to inescapably, as Sherry puts it, “live in the
shadow of war” and, more generally, of the military, in a culture where resources are directed to
strengthening and sustaining the military, and military approaches are embraced as a means of
addressing problems that might have other, non-violent solutions.13 This is hardly limited,
though, to matters of foreign policy. Indeed, one of the defining features of militarism that
feminist scholars have illuminated is the degree to which it insidiously creeps into the culture as a
whole, informing everything from politics to the legal system to health care. As Angela Davis puts
it, despite the absence of open warfare in the United States, “multiple wars are still being waged
on many of our communities.”14 This includes everything from the “war on drugs” to the
increasingly aggressive tactics of urban police forces or the border patrol.15 This understanding of
militarism has led several scholars to argue for an intersectionalist approach that links feminist
critiques to those of, among other issues, race and class.
These definitions share some assumptions: that the military is, first, a central organizing feature
around which other aspects of American life orbit and whose ends they serve, and, second, the
primary means or model for resolving domestic and international problems. The definitions
articulated by these scholar-activists, however, sometimes fail to recognize the more nuanced
ways in which men and women have engaged with militarism in order to gain rights and equal
access to the law.

Masculine Ideals and the Maintenance of Militarized Society

As Enloe’s definition highlights, feminist critics have understood that American militarism both
relies upon and perpetuates assumptions about gender. Many scholars note, for example, the
extent to which “militaries … are quintessential sites of hypermasculinity” and link militarism to
patriarchy.16 Patricia McFadden identifies “the inextricably intimate ties between militarism (as
an ideology and a practice of plunder and oppression) and the hegemonic assertion of patriarchal
power over the lives of women and their communities/societies globally.”17 Other critics point
to the enduring homophobia and sexism that marks the U.S. military, arguing that the military’s
dominance inhibits challenges to patriarchal power in other areas of U.S. culture.18
Defining features of militarism as a patriarchal institution are its insistence on men and women
performing particular gender roles and its privileging of normative gender identities over alter-
natives. This has historically meant that men have been encouraged to perform a masculinity that
is bellicose and aggressive.19 Indeed, Sjoberg and Via go as far as arguing that militarism relies

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upon this conception of masculinity, in that “the functioning of the military-industrial or

military-civilian complex needs men to be willing to kill and die on behalf of their state to
prove their manhood and ‘women to behave as the gender women.’”20 Thus, while militarism
requires the endurance of normative discourses of masculinity, it also contributes to sustaining
them. It is, as Zillah Eisenstein explains, “a process by which masculinity is both produced and
reproduced.”21
This concept has consistently found expression in the arguments that Americans have used to
justify interventions and their participation in them. In particular, militarism has often seemed a
salve to concerns that American masculinity was under siege or in decline. The Spanish-
American War, Kristin Hoganson writes, was pursued in large part due to anxieties about a
waning American masculinity that many of the war’s proponents thought could only be corrected
through martial efforts abroad.22 The war’s supporters, she explains, “regarded war as an
opportunity to shore up the manly character of American politics. War, they believed, would
return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women
proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”23 For leaders like William McKinley and
participants like Theodore Roosevelt, participating in the conflict was a means of demonstrating
a white manliness that the modern age had called into question.24 Writers like Roosevelt, Amy
Kaplan shows, in particular defended domestic white supremacy by asserting unmanly behavior
on the part of African-American troops.25 In 1898, then, American militarism provided a
bulwark against the social changes – particularly the increased political and social activism of
women and non-whites – that threatened white masculine power.26
The Spanish-American War was hardly the only conflict that turned upon the notion that
maintaining or achieving manliness was dependent on embracing militarism. Lyndon Johnson
certainly understood the Vietnam War as a test of his masculine resolve, and as Frederik Logevall
explains, the President’s embrace of and interest in maintaining his masculinity rendered anything
other than an increasingly significant military commitment to Vietnam impossible.27 Johnson’s
sense that losing Vietnam would not only harm the nation but in fact emasculate him is evident in
Peter Beinart’s relation of a moment “when reporters repeatedly badgered him about why
America was in Vietnam, [and] Johnson finally unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and
screamed, ‘This is why!’”28 The sense that Vietnam was, in fact, a moment of emasculation led to
a spate of popular culture in the 1980s that fetishized the masculine body as it augured a return to a
militarized society.29 More recently, George W. Bush and others mobilized arguments about
masculinity – citing, for example, the actions of men aboard the hijacked Flight 93 on 9/11 – to
build support for the United States’ twenty-first century wars.30
Claims that an embrace of militarism could restore a threatened masculinity have also been
made by members of marginalized groups seeking full inclusion in the nation. Even before the
twentieth century, military service emerged as a key avenue through which African Americans
sought to assert their cultural citizenship.31 During the Spanish-American War, African-
American newspapers contrasted black soldiers’ manly heroism with the enduring racism of
segregated America, a trend that continued throughout the “Double-V” campaign of the Second
World War and into the first years of the war in Vietnam.32 And, as it had in earlier moments,
military service – even after the war ended – allowed African-American men to inhabit gender
roles unavailable to them elsewhere in U.S. culture.33 For example, Maria Höhn and Martin
Klimke have shown African-American soldiers stationed in post-war Germany found that their
ability to have relationships with white women without incurring the opprobrium that they
would have faced in the United States “fortified a sense of manhood, equality, and even
democracy in them that they were denied in their home country.”34 As late as the first years of
the Vietnam War, positive associations between American militarism and African-American

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manhood still prompted both support for the war and enlistment in the armed services.35 “In the
late 1950s and early 1960s,” historian Kimberly Phillips writes, “many African-Americans
considered the military not just personal opportunity of economic stability but an expression of
widely held values of self-reliance, personal dignity, and racial activism.”36 These views remained
stable even as the war worsened, as “many African Americans viewed their visible presence in
combat as hard-won symbols of manhood, honor, and dignity.”37
However sincere those feelings might have been, the notion that military service enabled non-
white men to achieve and perform normative masculine identities was always fraught and
became increasingly so as liberation movements in the United States grew more radical and
more global. By the Vietnam War’s final years, many African Americans and Latinos viewed
people of color living in the United States and those living in the developing world – and
particularly the areas in which the United States was intervening – as equally oppressed by a
militarism that focused more on defending U.S. empire than on delivering democracy and
freedom. Phillips, for example, points to “grass roots efforts [that] coordinated community
awareness of the global impact of U.S. militarism and how the military trained black men to kill
populations of color in other countries.”38 Similarly, Chicano opposition to the war was,
Lorena Oropeza explains, “the determination to craft a new vision of manhood that would
stand apart from military service.”39 As well, resistance to the Vietnam War was marked by
feminist collaboration in which, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu writes, “women literally and symbolically
crossed borders in order to build an international antiwar movement.”40 In the post-Vietnam
War period, Ariana E. Vigil points out, Latina/o anti-militarism has recognized the “connec-
tion between U.S. policies in Central (and Latin) America and the Middle East.”41 She analyzes
a range of Latina/o texts that illuminate her contention that “just as violent practices associated
with war occur with increasing frequency in supposedly nonmilitarized spaces, so too do
apparently domestic and/or cultural constructions of gender find expression in ideas about
and deployments of military violence.”42

Highlighting the Non-Masculine in Defense of American Militarism

If the embrace of militarism and the need to defend or claim normative masculinity have often
been mutually constituting, the endurance of a militarized culture has also required the continued
juxtaposition of the masculine, militarized figure and the non-masculine figure who cannot
perform the militaristic task at hand. Most common has been the insistent feminization of
women, whether American women who must be saved from external threats, or women abroad
who must be liberated from despotism. These women, imagined as victims rather than actors
with agency of their own, are insistently portrayed as docile, subservient, and vulnerable. Jennifer
L. Fluri articulates this construct as a “wartime femininity” that “requires the ‘protective’ force of
violent masculinity to secure its fragility and feminine representation of the homeland/
motherland.”43 She further explains that “the ‘saving women’ trope extends a legitimate reason
for waging violent conflict, while marginalizing women as political actors. This solidifies men’s
roles as both perpetrator and protector in the shaping or implementing of military violence.”44
And again, this is a phenomenon that has appeared in U.S. culture from at least the Spanish-
American War to the present. At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans in favor of
intervening in Cuba highlighted the purported savagery and sexual violence that women endured
at the hands of the Spanish military.45 In the twenty-first century, one of the Bush administra-
tion’s most visible arguments for military action in first Afghanistan and then Iraq was that the
interventions would improve the lives of women and girls in those countries.46 “After 9/11 the
Bush administration and the American Media suddenly turned their attention to the Taliban’s

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treatment of women,” Gwen Bergner writes, adding that then-First Lady Laura Bush said
American women “should sympathize with Afghan women on the basis of their shared role as
mothers.”47
The argument that war is justified because women need to be rescued has been the target of
sustained critique by feminist critics of militarism. In response to what she terms “Imperial
Feminism,” Huibin Amelia Chew has offered a biting critique, pointing out that wars waged
because of claims of women’s freedom have in fact disproportionately harmed or killed women
and worsened women’s living conditions. The war in Iraq, she argues, is focused on “maintaining
the political and military power necessary to guarantee the economic interests of the US elite. To
that end, occupying authorities have, time and again, proved perfectly willing to barter away
women’s rights.”48 Moreover, it is not only neoconservatives like Laura Bush and Condoleezza
Rice who come in for feminist critique. Chew equally condemns liberals, who are uncritical of
their own patriarchy.49
Feminist scholars have also shown a range of ways in which the privileging of “militarized
masculinity” depends upon the marginalization, if not the disparagement, of any gender category
that deviates from it.50 As Enloe explains, “militarized masculinity” endures by differentiating
itself from, and denigrating, alternative masculinities.51 Most vividly, this process of differentia-
tion and denigration has manifested itself in anxieties about perceived threats to military mascu-
linity. These have been particularly evident early in the era of the All-Volunteer Force, when,
according to critics, the military was becoming insufficiently masculine.52
One of the most significant debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has
surrounded the inclusion of gay men, lesbians, and transgender people in military service. As Beth
Bailey explains, in the early 1990s “policy discussions about gays in the military centered on
questions of military efficacy rather than on the morally charged issue of sexual behavior.” Efforts
to exclude gay and lesbian service members turned upon “appeal[s] to Americans who worried
more about security and military strength than about religious sexual prohibitions.”53 Critics, that
is, framed the issue as one in which particular soldiers should be excluded from service not because
of sexual identity in and of itself, but because the presence of those individuals threatened the
masculine culture of the military and, presumably, its ability to successfully fight the nation’s wars.54
But it is not only concerns about gay soldiers that have helped shore up American militarism.
Jasbir Puar, for example, insistently interrogates the ways in which the growing acceptance of gay
men and lesbians’ claims for sexual rights in U.S. culture has helped facilitate Arabs and Muslims as
the most dangerous sort of queer threat that the United States now faces. When Arabs and
Muslims become the most threatening outsiders to normative American culture, Puar argues,
they become culturally acceptable targets of American military aggression.55 Her radical critique
positions what is often understood as an essential component of the larger work of feminist theory
and practice as in fact helping to facilitate the endurance of American militarism. Work like Chew
and Puar’s thus calls to account liberals who might otherwise imagine themselves as committed to
feminist and anti-militarist projects and encourages not only a more rigorous self-critique but also
a feminism that is more vigorously anti-racist and anti-militarist.
Isabel V. Barker has similarly illuminated the extent to which the legitimacy of the U.S.
intervention in Iraq relies upon constructing the masculine figure of the American soldier against
the feminized low-wage workers who serve them. As she points out, much of the work once
done by enlisted men but also historically imagined as “women’s work” – preparing food, doing
laundry, cleaning barracks – is now performed by men who migrate to U.S. warzones from
elsewhere in the Global South in order to take low-paying jobs with U.S. contractors.56 The
presence of these men, she explains, “serves as a site of symbolic politics underwriting the
gendered dimensions of the national identity of the American soldier” in that it “[positions]

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members of the U.S. military first as bearers of a superior masculinity vis-à-vis feminized migrant
workers who are, significantly, non-Americans performing devalued feminine reproductive
labor.”57 These arguments may overlook, or insufficiently engage, a larger history of the
military’s use of indigenous laborers and its efforts to free enlisted service members from menial
tasks.58 Nonetheless, for these scholars, the traditional masculinity on which militarism relies is
shored up by its juxtaposition against these emasculated, foreign men.

Women’s Labor and the Maintenance of Militarism

If non-masculine men who do “women’s work” in Iraq help maintain the idealized image of the
masculine soldier and the militarized culture of which he is a part, then how does women’s work,
both domestically and abroad, facilitate militarism? One of the most vigorous areas of debate has
surrounded the question of women’s military service. Certainly, during the Second World War,
the roles that women could play in the military were hotly debated.59 These concerns continued
into the era of the All-Volunteer Force. As Beth Bailey has shown, the 1970s were rife with
debates about whether women were in fact qualified to serve or could effectively perform a
soldier’s role.60 As Bailey explains, “Women’s participation in the U.S. Armed Forces, from the
beginning, was built around understandings of appropriate gender roles.”61
On the other side of that coin was the question of whether women would benefit from serving
in the military, that is, whether military service offered increased opportunity and more rights.
Since at least the Vietnam era, the military has consistently appealed to women by offering itself as
an institution that provides opportunity not available in more sexist segments of society. For
African-American nurses in the Vietnam era, Kara Dixon Vuic explains, service “offered another
kind of opportunity – the hope of escape and the promise of opportunity,” and many women felt
that the Army did indeed deliver.62 And if Army recruiting efforts at times played on conven-
tional notions that working women were on the prowl for a husband, the Army also increasingly
allowed women access to a widening array of occupations.63
Nonetheless, the questions of what kinds of military labor women are capable of performing
have continued. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, anxieties abounded about performance of
female soldiers, which Jennifer Mittelstadt asserts “revived arguments from the 1970s about
female soldiers making unique and even dangerous demands on the military.”64 During the
United States’ twenty-first century wars, debates about whether women can serve in combat
specialties have emerged alongside an awareness that female service members are often in combat,
whatever their specialties. Elizabeth Mesok’s work on Lioness Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan has
illustrated this dynamic, showing that, increasingly, the military’s ability to carry out its mission
depends upon women performing diverse kinds of labor that are themselves shaped by complex
understandings of appropriate gender roles.65 That is, while women in these roles are ostensibly
present to facilitate relationships with Afghan and Iraqi woman and to demonstrate respect for
Afghan and Iraqi prohibitions against contact between these women and men outside of their
families, a duty that emerges from “an essentialist belief in female soldiers’ inherent passivity,”
they are also tasked with performing “caring labor” for their fellow soldiers that “sustains the
military’s labor force, offering emotional, even maternal support intended to bolster soldiers’ will
to continue the fight.”66 In arguments like these, scholars have called into question whether
military service is indeed an avenue of opportunity or liberation for women.
Feminist critics, however, have been quick to point out that continued structural inequality
that leaves many women lacking economic and social opportunity elsewhere renders them
available for military service. As a result, they have interpreted the increased visibility of
women in the armed forces and in combat roles not as a marker of increased equity but rather

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as evidence of enduring structural oppression. As Zillah Eisenstein explains, “Women in the

military may make the military look more democratic as though women now have the same
choices as men, but the choices are not truly the same.” In fact,

[a]t present, this stage of patriarchy often requires women to join the army in order to
find a paying job or get an education. The military – given this militarist stage of
global capital – is a main area where working- and middle- class women can find paid
work… These women are looking for ways to get medical and housing benefits,
educational resources, career training.67

As well, some scholars argue that the hierarchical, heteronormative, and patriarchal structure of
the military inherently confines women to subservient roles and actually limits the political
agency of women who might otherwise pose a threat to the patriarchal system.68
Other scholars have examined the politics of military recruitment from a similar perspective.
Gina Perez’s study of Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in Chicago
illustrates that Latina participation is motivated not only by economic benefit but also by
the potential for adolescent girls to obtain “freedom and autonomy” for a population “expected
to abide by culturally prescribed norms of behavior.”69 Yet she also finds that JROTC
programs are popular with many parents and administrators because, like other structured
extracurricular activities, they have the potential to discourage undesirable social outcomes like
teen pregnancy.70 Likewise, Eli PaintedCrow, a former Army sergeant turned activist, explains
that the question of why many women enlist is often shaped by class issues, and she argues that
anti-militarist activism inherently requires addressing the suffering that is ordinarily experienced
by many women, and particularly women of color.71 Here, the intersectional dimensions of this
scholarship are evident: Gender-based critiques of militarism necessarily engage with broader
critiques of a society that does not ensure economic and social security for its members.
Active-duty service, of course, is not the only type of labor that women perform to sustain
militarism. Indeed, one of the earliest texts in the subfield – Enloe’s Does Khaki Become You? – begins
with the assertion that “[m]ilitary men have long sought to control women in order to achieve
military goals.”72 This claim resonates throughout the two generations of feminist critique that has
followed. Certainly, this has been an issue to which Enloe herself has returned, arguing that
mothers, wives, and girlfriends have all been recruited to assist in maintaining a militarized culture.
They are “women as mothers of potential recruits, women as girlfriends and wives of soldiers,
women as patriots, women as voters, women as entertainers and prostitutes, women as workers in
defense industries … and at least a few women to work inside the military.”73
The expectation on the part of the military branches, if not American culture as a whole, that
women would labor in support of American militarism has been consistent throughout the
twentieth century. During the Second World War, Emily Yellin has written, “American
women were … under immense pressure from their country to protect and defend steadfastly
the very idea of traditional home and family, and their central place in it.”74 Even more overtly
militarized were the wives of U.S. servicemen stationed in Europe, who, Donna Alvah argues,
“were considered instrumental in demonstrating American good will and sensitivity toward non-
Americans” and thus “would help persuade [Germans and Okinawans] to accept a long-term
foreign military presence.”75 In this manner, the militarization on which American empire
depended relied upon women’s unpaid labor.
In later years, as the All-Volunteer Force became a largely married force, the ability of the
nation to sustain the military and go to war came to depend upon women’s willingness to be
appropriately supportive wives and mothers on the home front.76 “The ‘homefront’ represents

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feminized characteristics, yet it is implicated in the warfront,” Denise Horn explains. “[W]ithout
the support of the ‘homefront,’ the ‘warfront’ could not exist. This necessitates socialization
towards acceptance of certain warfront-values within the ‘homefront.’”77 Recognizing this need,
the Army in particular developed a range of programs that would cultivate the support of military
wives and families.78 This was not always, however, an altruistic endeavor on the part of the
military; throughout the 1980s, many military spouses understood that their own ambitions had
to be subordinated to their husbands’ pursuit of higher rank.79
The cultural imperative that women play these culturally prescribed roles and acquiesce to
American militarism has consequences both for individual women and for society as a whole. As
Horn explains, expectations about standards of behavior for military spouses can leave them open
to physical and sexual violence in a culture in which reporting such crimes can damage a service
member’s career.80 Less violent, but still potentially exploitative, is what Jennifer Mittelstadt calls
“the expectations that [Army wives] perform unpaid labor for the army” in the form of caregiving
and support.81 In the early 1980s, some women in military families inverted the “Army family”
ethos to claim more benefits and programming for its civilian members, “demand[ing] that the
army work for the good of army wives and families.”82
And even as these programs came into existence, the military continued to extract unpaid
labor from women in various ways. Enloe’s recognition that many wives and mothers become the
primary caregivers to veterans who have returned with physical or psychological injuries points to
the economic losses and fatigue that these women face but also the cultural silence about the costs
of war that is facilitated by caregiving done in homes and by families, a silence that in turn
facilitates the perpetuation of American militarism by hiding its costs.83 U.S. militarism thus has
not only social but also material impacts on the lives of American women.
American women, of course, perform other roles in support of the military. In nearly every
conflict, and even in times of ostensible peace, the American military has depended upon
women’s labor and sexuality to maintain the morale of the fighting force.84 The success of the
American military and imperial enterprise abroad has also depended on the labor of women living
outside of the United States. Countless women around the world are impacted by American
militarism, from women who work as prostitutes, are sexually victimized, or perform low-wage
labor on or near U.S. military bases, to women who must struggle to survive in the countries
where the United States uses military power, to women who are displaced by, and often trafficked
as the result of, that violence.85 This exploitation likewise has a long history. In post-World War
II France, the sexual availability and exploitation of French women facilitated the recuperation of
American soldiers’ masculinity and solidified claims of the United States’ emerging global
dominance.86 The sexual exploitation of women was also central to the Vietnam War,
Meredith H. Lair writes, because “people displaced by the war quickly found that catering to
the baser needs of American servicemen was their best hope of survival.”87 As well, the
persistence of American militarism, and the degree to which it has been exported into the
political culture of countries with whom the United States is allied, has played a critical role in
impoverishing even women who do not perform sex work. As Enloe points out in her now-
classic essay “Tracking the Militarized Global Sneaker,” the ability of U.S.-based firms to
manufacture goods in foreign factories at low cost has historically relied upon their collusion
with the U.S.-backed militarist regimes that govern those countries and which ensure the
availability of low-wage workers, usually women.88
The impact that U.S. militarism has had on women around the world has led many feminist
critics to call for a transnational politics of solidarity and resistance. These calls have taken the form
of highlighting women’s movements in other countries, from anti-nuclear protests in England to
opposition to the sexual exploitation of women and girls by U.S. marines on Okinawa.89 Yet this

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scholarly awareness has not repeated the broader society’s error in seeing women only as
victims. Instead, scholars have illuminated the extent to which Iraqi and Afghan women,
far from the powerless victims that the Bush administration imagined them to be, have been
active in pursuing women’s rights, equitable political representation, and anti-militarism.90 This
scholarship recognizes that because the impacts of U.S. militarism are global, resistance to it must
be as well, and they call not only for awareness of but solidarity with women around the world
whose lives are impacted by the presence of the U.S. military and the militarist ideology that
buttresses it.
Calls for a global, feminist anti-militarism have hardly been the only outcomes of scholarship
that examines the links between gender discourses and U.S. militarism. Indeed, this scholarship is
almost uniformly anti-militarist, with scholars positing it as harmful not only to women but also to
American culture more broadly. Perez, for instance, argues that through the presence of JROTC
programs, “militarizing schooling … significantly undermines public democratic power by
advancing a militarized notion of citizenship contingent upon loyalty and obedience.”91
Armato and his colleagues, arguing against ROTC programs on college campuses, make nearly
the same point, complaining that “Army Values … are a shorthand for the process of transforming
individuals into a cohesive group of people who have internalized the discourses of the military
hierarchy. Loyalty entails uncritical allegiance to the state, particularly the military.”92 In argu-
ments like these, arguments based on the analysis of militarism’s gendered dimensions facilitate
critiques of militarism more generally.
Indeed, many anti-militarist scholars envision feminist inquiry and activism as a critical means
of destabilizing American militarism. In particular, feminist critics have not been satisfied by
studies that look at gender in isolation and have called for intersectional approaches that inter-
rogate gender alongside discourses of race, class, and citizenship. If many of the historians whose
work I have cited throughout this essay are most concerned with interrogating how discourses of
gender contribute to American militarism, the deleterious impacts of militarism on women, and
the ways in which the cultural roles that women perform enable and sustain militarism, many
activist scholars are nearly equally invested in positing feminist inquiry as a methodology for
critiquing the contours of militarism beyond its impact on women.93 Here, one can trace the
evolving impact of Enloe’s frequent calls for a “feminist curiosity” in matters of foreign policy.94
Angela Davis makes an equally strident critique, calling for “a more thoughtful, a more radical
feminism”:

[a] feminism that does not capitulate to possessive individualism, a feminism that does
not assume that democracy requires capitalism … a feminism that fights for women’s
rights while simultaneously recognizing the pitfalls of the formal “rights” structure of
capitalist democracy … this feminism does not say that we want to fight for the equal
right of women to participate in the military, for the equal right of women to torture,
or for the equal right to be killed in combat.95

Comments like these make evident how deeply feminist scholarship on militarism and gender is
committed to intersectional feminist critiques that view women’s marginalization and disen-
franchisement in relation to issues of class and race. Alongside this work, however, is the range of
historical approaches that offer a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between
militarism and gender, one that highlights the ways that their intersection has created both
possibilities and pitfalls as Americans, and those who live in the shadow of American militarism,
have struggled for equity, rights, and sometimes survival. Thus, studying the gendered contours
of American militarism in all of their nuance remains an important project.

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 Gender and Militarism in the 20th Century

The Future of Gendered Militarism

As this brief survey of recent scholarship reveals, vibrant work is being done at the intersection of
gender studies and the study of U.S. militarism. These studies proceed from the foundational
assumption that militarism is inherently gendered and both relies upon and reproduces traditional
discourses of heteronormativity, masculinity, and patriarchy. They reveal how diverse perfor-
mances of gender and sexuality enable and are reproduced by the discourses of militarism that are
so central to U.S. culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This work has examined
these intersections from diverse perspectives, ranging from an interrogation of how women’s
domestic labor facilitates U.S. imperial adventures abroad to uncovering the ways in which
militarized masculinity requires the destabilization of alternative masculinities.
Yet four intersecting attributes of this scholarship seem important above others. First, the
intersection of gender and militarism has insistently collided with questions about national
identity and cultural citizenship. As they have debated what kind of a nation the United States
is, what its obligations are, and who is a member of it, Americans have insistently returned to
discourses that link militarism and normative constructions of masculinity and femininity.
Second, American militarism determinedly relies upon the (often unpaid) labor of women,
whether they are inside or outside the military, Americans or women living abroad. Third,
feminist scholarship on U.S. militarism is determinedly transnational in scope. Understanding
that U.S. militarism impacts the lives of women living and working around the world, this
work calls on an awareness of their struggles and their own advocacy and activism. This
awareness both counters claims that non-western women are merely victims who require
saving by the United States through the application of military force and facilitates solidarity
among marginalized and disempowered people across national boundaries. Fourth, this scho-
larship is adamantly intersectional. Although they emerge from feminist scholarship, the
arguments made by the scholars I discuss above are equally concerned with issues of race,
class, and citizenship, and they view them as inseparable from concerns about gender and
sexuality. Indeed, for many of these scholars, the theories and approaches of feminist scholar-
ship and gender studies provide avenues of inquiry to issues that transcend the cultural politics
of gender. Their approach is thus adamantly activist, critiquing political invocations of gender
that seek to further truncate women’s agency and imagining a feminism that actively addresses
structural inequality. The study of gender and militarism is thus a richly interdisciplinary field
that looks outward from the academy to critique current practices of inequality and imperialism
and to call for a more equitable society.
This robust field, however, is far from settled, and continued work to interrogate and address
the gendered dimensions of U.S. militarism remains necessary. Students of the U.S. military
would do well to embrace Enloe’s call to develop a “Feminist curiosity,” and to heed her
warnings about the risks of not doing so.96 Indeed, understanding how discourses of gender
intersect with concerns about U.S. militarism seem ever more pertinent, and future work will
hopefully build on the observations, analyses, and theories outlined in this chapter. Certainly,
there are contemporary questions to be answered through such inquiry: Does the anticipated
opening of all U.S. military specialties to women promise greater equity for female service
members, or does it further interpolate women into the perpetuation of U.S. militarism and
imperialism? How will the Obama administration’s projection of military power into the Pacific
and trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership impact the lives of women working
abroad? How should Americans understand the place of women living under the combined
threats of the Islamic State and the military actions aimed at defeating it? How does the recent
increase in women serving in the military require new ways of thinking about military spouses,

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 David Kieran

many of whom are now men? By the same token, how has the recent directive to allow gay,
lesbian, and transgender Americans to serve in the military reshaped military domesticity?
But there are also significant historical questions that feminist inquiry can help answer too,
ones that scholarship on the gendered dimensions American militarism have so far not taken up in
great detail. Scholars of earlier moments would do well to consider how policymakers took
women’s issues into account as they built a militarized society, and how women within the
United States and around the world responded. Asking these questions promises not only a more
robust understanding of the impact of American militarism’s emergence in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, but will also further the broader goal of critiquing and countering its
endurance.

Notes
1 Janell Ross, “Mike Huckabee Says the Military’s Job Is to ‘Kill People and Break Things.’ Well, Not
Quite,” The Fix (blog), Washington Post, August 7, 2015.
2 Rukmini Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape,” New York Times, August 13, 2015.
3 David French, “Exposing the ISIS Sex-Slave State,” The Corner (blog), National Review, August 13,
2015.
4 Matthew Cox, “Female Lawmakers Praise First Women to Graduate Army Ranger School,”
Military.com, September 10, 2015. http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/09/10/female-
lawmakers-praise-first-women-graduate-army-ranger-school.html.
5 Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2007), 1; Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching For Women in a New Age of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 122.
6 Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), xi.
7 Ibid.; Mary Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, and Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 4.
8 Sherry, In the Shadow of War, xi.
9 Ibid., ix.
10 Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
11 Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, “Introduction,” in Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives
(Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 7.
12 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 219.
13 Sherry, In the Shadow of War, ix–x.
14 Angela Y. Davis, “A Vocabulary for Feminist Praxis: On War and Radical Critique,” in Feminism and
War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, ed. Robin L. Riley, et al. (London: Zed Books, 2008), 19.
15 On this, see Cindy Sousa and Ron Smith, “Army of None: Militarism, Positionality, and Film,” in
Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, ed. Barbara Sutton, et al. (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 254; Zillah Eisenstein, “Resexing Militarism for the
Globe,” in Feminism and War, 29; Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 127; and Enloe, Globalization and
Militarism, 4.
16 V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and
Militarism,” in Gender, War, and Militarism, 23. For a similar claim, see Michael Armato, et al.,
“Pedagogical Engagements: Feminist Resistance to the Militarization of Education,” Review of
Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 35, no. 2 (2013): 113.
17 Patricia McFadden, “Interrogating Americana: A Feminist Global Critique,” in Feminism and War, 58.
18 Huibin Amelia Chew, “What’s Left? After ‘Imperial Feminist’ Hijackings,” in Feminism and War, 79;
Armato, et al., “Pedagogical Engagements,” 115.

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19 Sjoberg and Via, “Introduction,” 8.

20 Ibid.
21 Eisenstein, “Resexing Militarism for the Globe,” 35.
22 Anxieties about American manhood were consistent throughout the years leading up to the war. See
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 16 and Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15.
23 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 11.
24 Ibid., 105–106, 143; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 191.
25 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2005), 125, 133, 136–38.
26 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 45, 154; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 14, 191.
27 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 393. On masculinity as a motivation for U.S. policymakers in the
Vietnam era, see also Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and
the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
28 Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: Harper Collins, 2010),
180.
29 See Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989) and Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993).
30 See, for example, Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 152–54; Peterson, “Gendered Identities, Ideologies,
and Practices,” 22; David Kieran, Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 165–71; Marita Sturken, “Masculinity, Courage,
Sacrifice,” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 444–45.
31 Jennifer James, A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World
War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 188–89; Drew Gilpin Faust, This
Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 48–49.
32 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 135; Kimberly L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom
Struggles and the U.S. Military From World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2012), 20–63. This was also true for Latinos; see Lorena Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No!: Chicano
Protest and Patriotism during the Vietnam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20.
33 On African-American military citizenship during the First World War, see Adriane Lentz-Smith,
Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) and
Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
34 Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs,
and Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 49.
35 Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 190; Kieran, Forever Vietnam, 17–18.
36 Phillips, War! What is it Good For?, 190.
37 Ibid.
38 Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 246.
39 Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No!, 109.
40 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam
Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 193.
41 Ariana E. Vigil, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in Latina/o Cultural Production (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2014), 15.
42 Ibid., 9.
43 Jennifer L. Fluri, “‘Rallying Public Opinion’ and Other Misuses of Feminism,” in Feminism and
War, 144.

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44 Ibid., 143. See also Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 154.

45 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 50–51, 56, 134, 137–38; Peterson, “Gendered Identities,
Ideologies, and Practices,” 28.
46 Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011), 5. See also Tasha N. Dubrewny, “First Ladies and Feminism: Laura Bush as
Advocate for Women’s and Children’s Rights,” Women’s Studies in Communication 28, no. 1 (2005):
84–114; Miriam Cooke, “Saving Brown Women,” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 468–70; Kevin J. Ayotte
and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the
Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 112–33; Carol A. Stabile and Deepa
Kumar, “Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender, and the War in Afghanistan,” Media, Culture, and
Society 27, no. 5 (2005): 765–82; Laura J. Shepherd, “Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in
the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post-9/11,” International Feminist
Journal of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006): 19–41.
47 Gwen Bergner, “Veiled Motives: Women’s Liberation and the War in Afghanistan” in Globalizing
Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building, ed. Zubeda Jalalzai and David Jefferess
(Durham: Duke University Press 2011), 101.
48 Chew, “What’s Left?” 80–81.
49 Ibid., 83.
50 Peterson, “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices,” 18; Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 218.
51 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 218.
52 Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015),
7–8.
53 Beth Bailey, “The Politics of Dancing: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and the Role of Moral Claims,” Policy
History 25, no. 1 (2013): 89–90.
54 Ibid., 100–01.
55 Jasbir K. Puar, “Mapping US Heteronormativities,” Gender, Place and Culture 13, no. 1 (2006): 67–88;
Puar, “Feminists and Queers in the Service of Empire,” in Feminism and War, 47–55; Puar, Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
56 Isabel V. Barker, “(Re)Producing American Soldiers in an Age of Empire,” Politics and Gender 5, no. 2
(2009): 214.
57 Ibid., 215, 217.
58 For one example, see Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the
Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 83.
59 See, for example, Molly Merryman, Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots
(WASPs) of World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
60 Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 2009), 134, 169.
61 Bailey, America’s Army, 136.
62 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009), 60.
63 Bailey, America’s Army, 151–52, 160.
64 Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, 179.
65 Elizabeth Mesok, “Affective Technologies of War: US Female Counterinsurgents and the
Performance of Gendered Labor,” Radical History Review 123 (2015): 64.
66 Ibid., 64, 72, 74.
67 Eisenstein, “Resexing Militarism for the Globe,” 30.
68 Peterson, “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices,” 24.
69 Gina M. Perez, “How a Scholarship Girl Becomes a Soldier: The Militarization of Latina/o Youth in
Chicago Public Schools,” Identities 13, no. 1 (2006): 63.
70 Ibid.
71 Setu Shigematsu with Kristina Bhagwati and Eli PaintedCrow, “Women-of-Color Veterans on War,
Militarism, and Feminism,” in Feminism and War, 100.

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72 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (London: South End Press, 1983), 1.
73 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 149. See also Stur, Beyond Combat, 64–104.
74 Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 36.
75 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War (New York:
New York University Press, 2007), 73.
76 Denise M. Horn, “Boots and Bedsheets: Constructing the Military Support System in Time of War,”
in Gender, War, and Militarism, 60, 63–64.
77 Ibid., 62.
78 Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, 71.
79 Doreen M. Lehr, “Do Real Women Wear Uniforms? Invisibility and the Consequences for the U.S.
Military Wife,” Minerva 14, no. 3 (1996): 29-44.
80 Horn, “Boots and Bedsheets,” 64.
81 Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, 121.
82 Ibid., 126–29, 145.
83 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 146; Chew, “What’s Left?,” 76.
84 See, for example, James J. Cooke, American Girls, Beer, and Glenn Miller: GI Morale in World War II
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012), 23.
85 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989), xiii, 2, 67–71; Chew, “What’s Left?,” 75–76, 77; Armato, et al.,
“Pedagogical Engagements,” 115.
86 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9, 7.
87 Lair, Armed with Abundance, 206.
88 Enloe, Globalization and Militarism, 19–38.
89 On these movements, see Cynthia Cockburn, Anti-Militarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace
Movements (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
90 See, for example, Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 276–301 and Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making
Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
91 Perez, “How a Scholarship Girl Becomes a Soldier,” 58–59.
92 Armato, et al., “Pedagogical Engagements,” 106.
93 Davis, “A Vocabulary For Feminist Praxis,” 22.
94 See, for example, Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 129.
95 Davis, “A Vocabulary for Feminist Praxis,” 21.
96 Enloe, Globalization and Militarism, 8, 17.

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 PART III

Gender, Sexuality, and Military

Engagements

The four chapters in this part reveal the complicated and nuanced ways that gender, sexuality, and
military engagements are intimately connected. The chapters draw upon scholarship that explores
personal understandings and experiences of martial gender and sexual ideas, as well as scholarship
that examines military regulations of work and sexuality. As the chapters note, military and
civilian authorities deemed particular gender and sexual roles essential to martial success, but those
roles varied with time and context and affected policies related to martial labor and service,
military families, sexual encounters, and sexual violence.
Importantly, these chapters highlight the ways that gender and sexuality are intertwined. What
military authorities believed about a person’s gender was often linked with what they believed
about their sexuality. Being “a man,” for example, frequently meant to have physical prowess,
strength, and power in both social and sexual relations, whereas proper women were expected to
embody restraint and passivity in social and sexual relations. In many instances, women’s wartime
value depended on their sexuality, and as the chapters note, the right kind of sexuality depended
on the woman. Wives, sweethearts, mothers, prostitutes, even rape victims filled important, if
unevenly valued, purposes, all of which were further delineated by race and class. These notions
changed over time, and women’s expanding martial roles provoked reconsiderations of women’s
and men’s gendered and sexual roles both within and outside of the military.
In all wars, military leaders have paid careful attention to regulating soldiers’ sexual behaviors,
and as these chapters reveal, their attention sheds light not only on military expediency, but also
on broader medical, biological, psychological, and moral concerns, as well as the intersections of
gender, race, and class. As the chapters make clear, sexual violence has formed an integral part of
military culture, from seemingly innocuous marching cadences to motivational promises of
sexual conquest, rape by American military personnel against local inhabitants within war
zones, and sexual assault of men and women within the U.S. ranks. Consensual sexual relations
have also proven fundamental to military policies. Homosexuality frequently proved a concern of
military authorities, who policed homosexual sex and peoples in uneven and fluctuating ways that
mirrored both military personnel needs and contemporary understandings of sexuality. Likewise,
authorities defined some familial relationships as significant for military stability and enacted
policies that encouraged their development. These policies enlisted military families as symbols of

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the American way of life, while regulations on sexual encounters and prostitution were intended
to broker good relations between the United States and the nations in which its military served.
The essays in this volume make clear that military service has been a vehicle for attaining many
things—full citizenship, economic benefits, and social status, to name but a few. With that
understanding, this part suggests that military service is also a kind of gendered and sexual service,
a way for individuals to embrace, claim, or reject particular gendered and sexual ideologies for
themselves. Martial gender and sexual roles are, then, essential to understanding gender and
sexual roles in broader American culture. These roles are always in flux, and with the ending of
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the opening of all military positions to women, and the extension of
protection to transgendered personnel, the scholarship analyzed in these chapters provides useful
models for new lines of inquiry and analysis that will shape both our history and our future.

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 15
“PATRIOTISM IS NEITHER
MASCULINE NOR FEMININE”
Gender and the Work of War

Charissa Threat
spelman college

A 1940 editorial on war work posits that “patriotism is neither masculine nor feminine. It is human
emotion”; however, the work of war in the United States, as with many places throughout the world,
has historically been gendered.1 Gender, the socially constructed masculine and feminine traits that
are associated with the biological sex of males and females, has determined the roles and responsi-
bilities of men and women in relation to war. Historically, Americans concluded that patriotism
meant that soldiering was the obligation of male citizens, while support roles were the concern of
female citizens. Nevertheless, since colonial times, war in America, as in other places, often worked to
undermine these gendered divisions of labor. By the late twentieth century, ideas about gender and
war challenged historical assumptions about patriotism, and scholars increasingly examined how the
nature of warfare and the work of war—or martial responsibilities in the broadest sense—consistently
blurred the lines between feminine and masculine duties in defending and supporting the nation.
What exactly, is war work? Superficially, war work is most often defined through the tasks and
responsibilities of soldiers in defense of the nation. For much of U.S. history, to join the military
was to be a soldier and thus, not only to defend the nation in the most patriotic way but also to
fulfill the most widely recognized obligation of citizenship. War, then, provided the means by
which male citizens could work to fulfill their obligations to the nation. And yet, the paradox of
this view is that military service was narrowly focused on those that carried and deployed weapons
when in reality not all soldiers served in combat roles. As technology, warfare tactics, and the
terrain of war changed, the kinds of work needed in war and those who could complete it also
changed. Consequently, the conflation of war work with combat participation does not often
reveal the complicated nature of work in wartime. Therefore, war work, I argue, embodies all
work done on behalf of, or in defense of, a nation at war. Moreover, as gender shapes war work,
the nature of warfare in different environments and at different historical moments in U.S. history
has shaped perceptions of gendered martial responsibilities. By considering more nuanced under-
standings of war work, scholars reveal how contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity
have supported, redefined, or limited martial roles for men and women.

Historiographic Treads in the Late Twentieth Century and the Work of War
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the use of gender as a category of analysis in scholarship on war
often referred to a study whose primary focus was women. This was for a very good reason; the

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 Charissa Threat

field of women’s history was in its infancy as part of, and as a result of, the second-wave feminist
movement that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As scholars grappled with how to understand
and document the nation’s participation in war, and women’s place in it, the scholarship
produced in this period often focused on celebrating American women as part of the larger
history of the United States during wartime and even suggested that war work provided a major
point of departure for American men and women. William Chafe’s groundbreaking 1972 study
The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Political, and Economic Roles, 1920–1970 deserves
attention as one of the first studies that argues that war acted as a catalyst for change among
American women, particularly white, middle-class, married women. Chafe argues that the
conditions of wartime precipitated the movement of millions of women into the public envir-
onment as part of the labor force and the military. This fundamental change to the status quo had
consequences; as Chafe concludes, the Second World War helped facilitate the push for equality
of the sexes that would see the reemergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s. Although not
without a number of problems, particularly Chafe’s focus on white, middle-class, married
women, often in jobs that remained sex segregated, The American Woman remains an essential
foundational study to understanding contemporary work on gender and war work.
By the 1980s, Chafe’s arguments about the role of wartime in transforming the status of
American women resulted in a number of studies that examine the tensions between normative
sex roles, patriotism, and women’s labor-force participation during wartime in other eras. Linda
Kerber’s Women of the Republic (1980) and Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters (1980), for
example, examine how women’s traditional domestic roles and wartime activities took on
political significance during and following the American Revolution. While Kerber and
Norton ultimately disagree about how much the American Revolution changed the lives of
American women, they do agree that women’s work and contested position during the American
Revolution led to the creation of a new gendered identity for women, the Republican Mother.
Republican Motherhood merged women’s domestic roles with a public persona that did not
fundamentally reshape gender roles but acknowledged the importance of women’s work during
the American Revolution and women’s roles as important in the formation and future of the new
nation.2
The conversation about tensions between traditional roles of women and the long-term
effects of participation in wartime work remained an important part of understanding contem-
porary ideas about gender and war throughout the 1980s. Karen Anderson’s Wartime Women: Sex
Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women in World War II (1981), D’Ann Campbell’s Women
at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (1984), and Ruth Milkman’s 1987 study Gender
At Work: Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II provide thematic focus to Chafe’s
arguments about why World War II was a pivotal moment in understanding how war work
affected gender relations in the United States.3 War necessitated the mobilizing of the entire
American populace but required the reconstruction of gender roles, particularly those that
pertained to women’s work and responsibilities. In other words, war required the expansion of
gender roles to include work that supported the war as part of the gendered responsibilities of
women. What was seen as strictly a male job before the war was recast as a job that women could
and should do to support men who were defending their nation. Nevertheless, women, as all
three authors point out, faced dramatic challenges to participating in wartime mobilization
efforts. While the federal government promoted war work as a patriotic cause and expanded
women’s martial roles outside of combat, defense industry employers, union organizations, the
U.S. military, and American citizens were uncomfortable with the idea of women entering the
workforce in such large numbers and participating in volunteer efforts that blurred the lines of
acceptable female behavior.4 All three authors diverge from Chafe in their conclusions about the

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relationship of women to the war, pointing out instead that the reality of women’s wartime
participation was much more complicated and less a complete departure of feminine and mascu-
line ideals than Chafe asserts.
Meeting the growing need for womanpower required the federal government to shape its
employment campaign as a short-lived change to the status quo, while also supporting the idea of
expanded opportunity through, for example, the concept of equal pay for women under the
National War Labor Board’s General Order #16. Still, the reality proved much more complex. In
industry, union organizations and company employers put their own policies in place to keep
women employees segregated both on the job and in union membership. According to
Anderson, even the effect of women’s earnings on family finances was cause for concern, as
many, from union officials to everyday citizens, feared that women wage earners would upset
traditional gender identities that placed men as primary family earners. While certainly a positive
change for the classes of women who had always worked, how would the earnings of middle class
women affect the delicate balance of gender roles once the war was over? For this reason, a
significant portion of citizens, while supportive of women’s voluntary efforts during the war,
were suspicious and even hostile to wage earners in any capacity.
The changing martial roles of American women also became a part of the historiography of
gender and war in the 1970s and 1980s. While largely focused on World War II as a transitional
moment for American women, especially through the large-scale recruitment of women in
various branches of the military, scholars in the early 1980s responded to two significant changes
in the military structure in the 1970s. First was the emergence of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973,
and second was the dissolution of the Woman’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1978.5 These events
certainly pointed to a significant evolution of gender roles in the military, though they did not
significantly change the masculine nature of the armed forces. The disbandment of the WAC
integrated women into all-male units, but what did that actually mean for the daily realities of
men and women in the military? Did this represent a significant move towards equality between
the sexes with respect to military service?6 And did it fundamentally change the work military
women did in the service? These are some of the questions that sociologist Michael Rustad
addresses in Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Women (1982).7 Rustad bases his study on
interviews of enlisted men and women stationed in Germany in the late 1970s. While optimistic
in tone, he ultimately finds that enlisted women’s efforts to participate in the military often
resulted in exploitation as they struggled with, and against, stereotypes in their roles as military
women. The integration of women into the regular army, therefore, was the integration of
women into a thoroughly masculine institution, and while many hoped for equality as a result,
enlisted women found challenges to their participation from both enlisted men and members of
the officer corps.
In the same year, Jeanne Holm published one of the first comprehensive investigations of the
events, decisions, and policies that affected women in the U.S. armed forces, Women in the
Military: An Unfinished Revolution (1982).8 Ten years later, the revised and updated edition took
readers on a journey of American women’s military participation from the American Revolution
—albeit briefly—through military campaigns in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf. The
work is activist scholarship at its best. Holm, a retired U.S. Air Force general, aimed to
demonstrate that women had a long and storied history in the service of their country that had
become permanent by the mid-twentieth century. Holm writes that “women by the 1990s were
serving in nearly all noncombat jobs in each of the services,” so much so that they were “so
integrated in the armed forces that the U.S. could not have gone to war without them.”9 In other
words, women were so critical to the defense of the nation that contemporary notions of
femininity included the possibility of martial service. Holm, however, reveals that “repeated

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frustrations and built-in institutional resistance of the traditional bound military subculture,”
including policies and job availability, made it difficult for women to successfully serve their
country as part of a long-term career. Although, for example, the non-combat jobs women
performed were deemed necessary for the daily management of the military, these jobs were
valued less than those that were available only to men. Therefore, military polices concerning
rank and promotion, those defining or pertaining to family life, and continuous debates over
combat exclusion laws exposed the tenuous nature of military service for American women. At
the heart of these debates were two inter-related questions. Should women share, “as a matter of
citizenship, the same rights and obligations as men in the nation’s defense; and if not, what
[should] the legitimate parameters of their participation be?”10
What is significant about the scholarship from the 1970s through the 1990s was its agreement
that war and war work—especially in the early and mid-twentieth century—fundamentally
reshaped the lives and responsibilities of American women and men by providing new and
expansive ways for women to participate in the martial defense of the nation. Nevertheless,
military and national policy revealed how women battled with, and often lost to, prevailing
perceptions of gender roles and duties during wartime, viewpoints that underlined women’s
martial work not only as “non-combatants” but as “temporary,” and if not temporary, certainly
secondary to that of men, a group whose war work scholars often erroneously understood only
through a single duty, combat. By the late twentieth century and the early decades of the new
millennium, earlier scholarship on women provided scholars with the framework to expand
conversations about military service and civic responsibilities in and out of wartime. Scholars did
so by thinking more broadly about citizenship and war work and exploring thematic discussions
about military service and sexuality, American manhood and military masculinity, the creation of
the female soldier, and civil-military relations, in order to showcase the work of war in
contemporary American history.

The State and the Citizen: War Work and Martial Roles
Constructing martial responsibilities is one way the state broadens the terms of citizenship. In
Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II
(2008), Marilyn E. Hegarty reveals the extent to which female sexuality was harnessed by the
nation to protect the gender status quo and, at the same time, to support heterosexual manhood.
While women’s military service during the Second World War steadily moved Americans to
consider the idea that women should have large-scale involvement in military work and the
defense of the nation, as Hegarty points out, it was not just the military but the total mobilization
of the nation that transformed the gender system during and after the war. “Women’s bodies were
nationalized and their sexuality militarized: women’s laboring and sexual bodies were, in a sense,
drafted for the duration,” just as men were drafted to defend the nation.11 Unlike traditional jobs
in which women replaced men who were going off to fight, this work relied on female sexuality
and required no skills other than for women to use and highlight what many believed were
feminine attributes. The result of total mobilization, as Hegarty reveals, was a conflicting
relationship between the state and American women, in which sexualized femininity was both
valorized and reviled. The “patriotute,” a combination that linked women’s patriotism and
patriotic work with their sexuality, was used to reinforce a notion of military masculinity.12
Christopher Capozzola’s Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern
Citizen (2010) also focuses on the state’s role in wartime mobilization. Whereas Hegarty sees the
state using coercive means to harness womanpower for war, Capozzola argues that the state used
female citizens’ culture of volunteerism for its own end. By focusing on accepted gendered roles

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to frame men’s and women’s work obligations during war, the state made volunteerism coercive.
For example, pre-war volunteer associations that were the domain of women and used as a way
for some women to provide social services and organize public life continued and expanded once
the war began. The expectation, once the war began, was that all women would take an active
role in providing social services for the nation as part of their citizenship obligations. War
responsibilities, martial service for men, and support roles for women, relied on state-supported
coercive techniques which included community policing and surveillance to ensure that citizens
met their obligations of citizenship.13
While coercion served as a means of state control over its citizens during wartime, scholars also
examine how citizens themselves used wartime gendered ideologies to frame and expand their
obligations and service to the nation. According to Linda Kerber’s No Constitutional Right to Be
Ladies (1998), the distinction between men’s and women’s obligations to the state, as a char-
acteristic of citizenship, is an important one because obligations often embody opportunities to
participate in the exercise of the power of the state.14 Women’s reduced civic obligations,
including exemption from martial service, translated to, according to Kerber, diminished rights
that excluded women from institutions and jobs that defined public life and full recognition as a
member of the state. Therefore, participation in war work at various moments in U.S. history
provided the means for women to press for access to full citizenship rights. In Women at the Front:
Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2007) and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First
World War (2008), Jane E. Schultz and Kimberly Jensen examine the ways that groups of women
challenged their second-class citizenship through their wartime work.15 Whether in caregiving
capacities, fighting for equal pay and status, in support activities, pushing for civic or social
recognition, in military service, or demanding participatory acknowledgement, women argued
that the work they did was not only comparable to, but deserving of, the full citizenship rights and
benefits available to men who serve in martial positions. These activities created a “front where
gender, class, and racial identities became … sites of conflict” and spaces that revealed the
complex way war complicated citizenship.16
Military service as a means to access citizenship rights was additionally complicated by racial
ideologies. Most scholarship on African American participation in wartime activities and in
military service focuses on the relationship of the two to civil rights activism, as well as the
ways that war helped confirm black manhood. Torchbearers of Democracy (2010) by Chad Williams
and Let Us Fight as Free Men (2014) by Christine Knauer are two examples. Black soldiers were
atypical in wartime American society, according to Williams, as they threatened “prevailing social
hierarchies and white supremacist visions of American society.”17 Black soldiers, then, challenged
understandings of martial masculinity when they attempted to demonstrate their valor and claim
the right to citizenship and equal rights by participating in the very project that the state used to
define male citizenship since the founding of the nation. This, in turn, prompted white men to
delineate war work that privileged combat roles, which were often closed to non-white men, as
the true marker of citizenship. In examining World War I, World War II, and the Korean War,
Williams and Knauer show how black soldiers complicated the work of the state in connecting
military masculinity to civic obligations and the benefits of democracy.
By the Vietnam War, however, many African Americans doubted that participation in martial
service would change the continuing inequality faced by minorities in the nation. As Kimberley
Phillips argues, war work as a strategy for social justice and citizenship claims was not always
successful and, in fact, often furthered race inequality. Although the state continued to discuss
military service as a citizenship obligation, it was only one way the state constructed gendered
citizenship obligations in the postwar period. As the nature of warfare significantly changed
between World War II and the Vietnam War, the drafting of poor, working-class men and

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minorities, who had neither the income nor connections necessarily to avoid the draft, over-
whelmingly bore the burden of combat duty as a result. While war work and martial service
continued to shape African American understandings on race and citizenship, it did so more to
highlight race and class inequalities than to provide a way to challenge the state to ensure the
benefits historically attached to martial service were open to all citizens.18

Sexuality and Martial Service

In July 1993, the Clinton administration announced the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue”
(DADT) policy, or what was formally known as Department of Defense Directive 1304.26. Since
World War II, military policy attempted to regulate homosexual behaviors of service members
with an outright ban of homosexuals in the military, as many believed that war work was unsuited
to homosexuals, who were often gendered as feminine and in need of protection. But even before
the Second World War, military officials were concerned with how homosexual behavior
affected soldiering work, work that was defined through a highly masculine, thoroughly hetero-
sexual perspective that required men to serve and protect those weaker. According to Margot
Canaday’s The Straight State (2009), during World War I, the military was aware of homosexual
behavior and sexual “perversion” among its ranks but lacked a clear definition of either and
therefore any clear policy solutions. It was not until 1940, upon the advice of psychiatrists and
within an increasingly anti-gay atmosphere in civilian life, that homosexuals were added to the
list, along with women and African Americans, of those who would make poor soldiers.19
President Clinton proposed DADT to reconcile both a presidential campaign promise and
what had become a loud public debate to reevaluate military service and homosexuality. For
many supporters of the continued ban on homosexuals serving in the military, open homosexu-
ality would not only lead to decreased morale and effectiveness but also further disrupt the strong
masculine image of the U.S. military and, by extension, weaken American manhood. This was
similar to the charge by those who were increasingly critical of the very change in the martial
defense of the nation that Holm’s celebrated, the visibility of American women in the military, or
what some critics deemed the feminization of the modern military.20 In essence, those who
opposed both the acceptance of homosexuals serving in the military and the expansion of women
in all branches of the military understood war work in limited ways, one that considered no one
other than heterosexual men able to defend the nation. In this way, sexuality and gender identities
shaped the definition of war work and defined who could or could not adequately protect the
nation and its citizens. Those who argued for homosexuals to openly serve in the ranks of the
military, in contrast, pointed out that regardless of military policy, not only had homosexuals
always served in the military, but outdated policies against them deprived the military of valuable
resources in the defense of the nation.
Like William Chafe, Allan Bérubé cites World War II as the transformative moment for
understanding the policies and social and political debates concerning homosexuals serving their
nation as soldiers. In Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II
(1990), Bérubé argues that rather than a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, “the
social and political changes that grew out of their confrontations must be examined [to show]
how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government and
how it transformed them both.”21 Prior to the war, social constraints defined gender identities
through heteronormative behaviors and expectations—that is, by traditional understanding of
male and female roles and through an assumption that heterosexuality was the norm for everyone.
Citizenship obligations with respect to martial service were classified in masculine heterosexual
terms, which made it possible to keep women out of the military except in the most traditional

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roles, as nurses, for example, and to keep gay men and, later, lesbians invisible in the service. It was
the growth of anti-homosexual policies coupled with the massive mobilization of World War II
that moved gays and lesbians into mainstream life. The Second World War, in other words,
worked to create a homosexual community. War, and the work it required, functioned to expand
the roles and responsibilities of men and women but cannot be fully comprehended without
understanding the way that particular moments in American history are shaped by ideas on
gender, sex, and race. It is these ideas that ultimately determine who would labor in what roles as
part of wartime work.
The development of a stringent, special bureaucratic apparatus in the military to manage and
investigate homosexual personnel gave homosexuals an opportunity to build a community inside
the military, even as it provided some homosexuals the opportunity to “avoid compulsory
military service by coming out.”22 Regardless of how strict military policies towards gays during
World War II were, officials could not completely eliminate homosexuals from the ranks. As a
result, homosexual veterans, like others, begin to define themselves in the postwar period as
another marginal group and argued that they had fought a war on two fronts, one on behalf
of their country and one to defend themselves against their government’s attempts to ostracize
them.23
In the years after Coming Out under Fire was published in 1990, a growing number of scholars
began to draw parallels between the integration of African Americans and women in the military
and the proposal to integrate homosexuals in the military. Late-twentieth-century notions of race
and gender provided the space for Bérubé to show readers how far the American public had come
in thinking about whether homosexuality should be a deterrent to military service. Bérubé
pointed out that because 1950s social attitudes of masculinity and femininity remained firmly
tied to heteronormative ideas about gender roles and military service, it was almost impossible to
challenge public discussions that decried homosexuality as a threat to national security during the
Cold War. As a matter of fact, Bérubé writes, the Crittenden Report, a secret report completed in
1957, acknowledged that homosexuals discharged from the service had not only successfully
functioned in military units but often had fewer problems and were better qualified than
heterosexuals in the military.24 Yet, the report concluded, no changes to policies towards
homosexuals should be made, because to do so would be to move too far ahead of civil society
on the matter; the Cold War and attitudes on homosexuality in that historic moment worked to
stymie any changes to the current situation. Thirty years after the Crittenden Report, Bérubé
suggests, public debates on homosexuality and contemporary and evolving understandings on
gender made it possible for scholars to connect the integration of homosexuals to the history of
race and gender integration in the military through an examination of war and military service.25
At the same time, war work revealed that ideas about femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in the
military were, in some cases, less about the military itself than about what the military represented
in American society—access to state and economic power, a reflection of the gender status quo,
and claims to citizenship.26 In this way, war work operated to preserve the right of certain groups
of men to benefit from martial service.

American Manhood, Military Masculinity, and War Work

In Manhood in America (1998) Michael Kimmel argues that “at the turn of the last century,
manhood was replaced gradually by the term masculinity, which referred to a set of behavioral traits
and attitudes that were contrasted with a new opposite, femininity.”27 As fears about the
feminization of the nation took hold in the late Victorian period, martial service or martial
masculinity took on the important function of strengthening the nation’s manhood. Kimmel and

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other scholars in masculinity studies offer a framework to understand the process of how and why
martial service complicated the relationship among men, women, and war, and how it was often
fashioned in relation to race and class ideologies.28 In For Cause and Comrades (1997), for example,
James McPherson argues that manhood, patriotism, and duty sustained and motivated a genera-
tion of men to fight in the American Civil War. So strong was their masculine conviction of
honor, so reinforced by their communities, families, and fellow soldiers, that to abandon the war
was to violate the most cherished obligations of manhood in the late nineteenth century. The
nature of warfare at that moment meant that war work was combat, and the great majority of men
took up arms. This would change in the twentieth century as the landscape of warfare and
technology used to fight wars, among a host of other changes, meant that the military would rely
more on soldiers in support roles to successfully engage the enemy. For McPherson, however,
martial service, combat, was the way to prove one’s manhood, and war became the crusade by
which this was accomplished.29
One part of the crusade to which McPherson alludes in his work on men and the Civil War,
the strengthening and protection of American manhood and masculinity, was also a defining
characteristic of the imperial project undertaken by the United States at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race
in the United States, 1880–1917 (1996), Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood: How
Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (2000), and Aaron
Belkin’s 2012 Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–
2001 see in this moment the roots of contemporary notions of modern masculinity.30 Belkin
argues that the American imperial project shaped how military service was masculinized and by
extension heterosexualized. War, in the context of imperialism, worked to reinforce a parti-
cular understanding of American manhood that rarefied “manly character … generally in
reference to contrasting ideas about womanly attributes.”31 This was largely because, as
Hoganson argues, gender convictions continued to shape social and political culture in the
United States even as traditional understandings of gender roles were unstable in the midst of
the rise of the assertive “new women.”32 U.S. participation in the imperial project through the
use of the military and the work of its soldiers to stake claims over land and resources globally
ultimately served to strengthen manhood domestically and to assert American masculinity to
the rest of the world.
Contemporary public debates continued on the evolution of military masculinity in the first
half of the twentieth century. These debates consider the ways that military masculinity was
contested by men and how it affected domestic notions of masculine military service during the
First and Second World Wars. War work, particularly the type of work that men did to support
war, was contested in the twentieth century as the type of jobs necessary to fight wars, expanded,
and yet, combat remained the most prestigious and accepted form of war work for men. Men not
serving in combat roles or not allowed to serve in combat roles were left to challenge what
constituted military masculinity. Jennifer Kenne’s Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of
America (2003) and Adriane Lentz-Smith’s Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I
(2010), for example, examine how the politics of race during the First World War shaped African
American men’s participation.33 African American men, because of racial politics that deemed
black men unsuitable for combat service, were almost entirely assigned to labor or support
battalions. They protested because they understood that the work opened to them was less
respected than combat roles and thus, they had less access to the advantages attached to serving the
nation through combat.
Conscientious objectors (CO) also challenged what war work was accepted as part of men’s
service to their nation. During World War I, conscientious objectors had been vilified as

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“slackers,” men who refused to meet their citizenship obligations through combat work.
Timothy Stewart-Winter’s 2007 article, “Not a Soldier, Not a Slacker: Conscientious
Objectors and Male Citizenship in the United States during the Second World War,” examines
how conscientious objectors complicated obligatory military service as a prerequisite for citizen-
ship. Stewart-Winter argues that the Selective Service Act of 1940 “introduced new tensions
between pacifism and male citizenship” as the federal government reinforced the connection
between male citizenship and military service.34 Pacifists argued that men could fulfill their
citizenship obligations in a variety of ways beyond combat; men who were disinclined to serve in
combat roles, for a variety of reasons, including religious, could still support their nation at war
through their labor. The Selective Service Act, the first peace-time draft in United States history,
provided the means by which these men could still meet the responsibilities of citizenship
without engaging in traditional war work because it defined the acceptable means through
which men could obtain an exemption from martial service. However, all work done by
conscientious objectors was not necessary viewed in the same way. As Stewart-Winters points
out, the I-A-O designation, which included men willing to serve in uniform in non-combat
roles, provided men with an alternative masculinity, one that masculinized the peace movement,
so that even though conscientious objectors were not universally accepted, the war provided the
means by which their masculinity could remain intact in some form.
In contrast, Mark Matthew’s Smoke Jumping on the Western Fire Line (2006) reveals that
conscientious objectors that were designated as 4-E, meaning those unwilling to serve in uni-
form, did not fare as well. The 4-E conscientious objector often served with the Civilian Public
Service, “performing work of national importance under civilian direction,” and although
recognized as necessary to the nation, their work continued to be viewed as the work of
“slackers” or “cowards” who refused to fulfill their martial responsibilities.35 It was, therefore,
the mere act of being in uniform that provided men the small opportunity to redeem themselves
with respect to their gendered citizenship obligations.
The evolution of warfare in the latter part of the twentieth century continued to expand the
types of work available to men seeking to fulfill their obligations to the nation through military
service. In Armed with Abundance (2011) Meredith Lair explores how soldiering was compli-
cated during the Vietnam War by the fact that the number of support units and the men that
staffed them, known as REMFs, far surpassed combat units directly engaging the enemy. War
work during the Vietnam War required, according to Lair, five support soldiers for every
combat soldier. This work included those that performed mechanic, medical, ordnance, and
quartermaster duties, among others, and who lived and worked in vastly different circum-
stances than the “grunts,” or combat soldiers. While resentment did occur among the front and
rear-echelon troops, the overwhelming majority of soldiers serving their nation in non-combat
positions made it difficult to continue to link combat soldiering with manhood and citizenship
obligations.36

Constructing the Female Soldier

World-wide wars in the first half of the twentieth century not only provided men with
alternative means to meet their citizenship obligations but also helped renegotiate gender
relations to allow women to join in the defense of the nation. Creating the female soldier,
however, required the crisis generated by total war to open martial war work to women in ways
that had not previous been available. In Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s
Army Corps During World War II (1996), historian Leisa D. Meyer examines “the women’s army
as a means through which to evaluate the discussion and debates over men’s and women’s

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proper roles during wartime.” Meyer offers an analysis of the ways in which war necessitated
the creation of the female solider during World War II and how the military and civil society
tried to guarantee little disruption to culturally accepted gender roles as a result. As access to
state and economic power was historically linked to masculinity and, thus, military service, the
creation of the female solider threatened the gendered power structure. The examination of the
WAC, then, helps readers understand the “impact of World War Two on gender and sexual
ideology and the struggles around gender and sexual identity” taking place in the contemporary
moment.37
Two of the greatest obstacles facing civil and military officials in constructing the female
soldier were the historical dichotomy between “female” and “soldier” and the negative public
perception about the combination of the two identities. Attempts to reconcile the two
identities led the military and civil society to a relentless focus on controlling the nature of
female soldiers’ military labor, sexuality, and behavior that ultimately privileged traditional
feminine roles in civilian life. In terms of military service, the privileging of feminine roles was a
way to avoid any perception of the female solider as a threat to “male power in the military or
the notion that masculinity was integrally tied to the definition of ‘soldier.’” Female soldiers’
participation in the military was understood as temporary or for the duration of the war, their
work defined as support, with responsibilities that kept them as far away as possible from any
suggestion of combat duty. The stringent regulation of women kept female soldiers in a
precarious position, or what Meyer calls a “double bind.”38 Female soldiers who fiercely
maintained feminine traits were seen as incompetent, reinforcing the stereotype that women
should have no permanent place in the military; however, those who rejected conventional
femininity were often labeled as mannish.
Five years after World War II, as Linda Witt and other authors reveal in A Defense Weapon
Known to Be of Value (2005), paternalistic ideals and low retention rates continued to suggest the
inferiority of female soldiers, making many believe that female soldiers were an unsuccessful
addition to the military and unreliable resource in the defense of the nation.39 This was in large
part because the conditions under which women were allowed to work as soldiers remained
unchanged. Female soldiers were expected to continue in support roles. In their personal lives,
they were expected to be without dependents, and although marriage was allowed in some cases,
it was generally discouraged if a woman wanted to remain in the military. Most Americans could
agree that women were a valuable resource during emergencies, but making female soldiers
normative remained difficult even ten years after Congress made women a permanent part of the
military with the passage of the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act of 1948. Meyer and
Witt reveal how World War II and the Korean War periods become important moments in
understanding the relationship between military service, war work, and the evolution of gender
identities in contemporary American society.
Gender ideologies continued to shape women’s wartime participation into the Vietnam War
era, as Heather Marie Stur reveals in Beyond Combat (2010). By the 1960s, however, women’s
participation in martial roles was no longer in question as work opportunities expanded beyond
direct participation in specific military branches. Stur focuses on women who went to Vietnam in
a variety of capacities, including as members of the WAC, as nurses, and as members of the Red
Cross Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas program, to show that women’s war work
obligations continued to be complicated by persistent gender ideologies. Stur problematizes the
meaning of female soldiers by pointing out that whatever their job, women were valued as much
for their femininity as the work they performed. For example, WACs’ daily work as soldiers often
resembled that of male support staff in Vietnam, but women were also expected to represent or
embody domestic feminine ideas that reminded male service members of the women they were

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supposed to be protecting. For women, this tension often led to competing narratives of their
work and roles as “soldiers.”40

Civil-Military Relations and Gender Identities

Recently, social and cultural historians have looked to military service and investigations into
U.S. military institutions as the means of understanding major cultural and social changes in
twentieth-century America. These studies continue to investigate challenges to citizenship rights,
civil rights, social justice, and gender equality to suggest that the broad field of civil-military
relations offers historians the opportunity to understand how and in what ways civil society and
the U.S. military worked not as two separate entities but as inter-related and necessary halves. In
America’s Army (2009), Beth Bailey, for example, argues that the military has been the institution
where the United States’ struggles over race, gender, and other social issues played out in the last
century. There is a symbiotic relationship between civilian and military life, in other words,
wherein military service and war work highlight the tensions and conflicts in American society.
Bailey and other authors, then, convey the important connections between war, society, and
culture, brokering no question as to the importance of the historical connection between all three
in shaping past and present beliefs on the work of war and gender ideologies.41
In Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (2010), historian Kara Dixon
Vuic presents an engaging study that at once considers “the history of the army in the Vietnam War
and a history of the process of gender change in the 1960s and early 1970s.”42 Vuic argues that the
exigencies of the Vietnam War helped both to further the position of women and nurses in the
army and to preserve their subordinate status. Here, gender roles and understandings of masculinity
and femininity are complicated by a war in which a lack of clearly defined combat lines and combat
duty brought both military men and women to the frontlines as the breakdown between frontline
combat and rear support disappeared.43 The war and staffing demands further complicated the
gender divide between combat and support as the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) formally accepted
men, first into the reserves in 1955 and then as part of the regular Army in 1966, thus changing the
gendered military identity of the job. Vuic also points out that nurses and women were agents of
change, making demands on both the army and civil society to create different criteria for what
constituted both gender roles and the jobs or activities traditionally attached to them.44
In my 2015 study Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps, I examine the
intimate connection between military service, wartime, and social change by investigating the
parallel campaigns to end occupational segregation by white men and African American women.
I find that the ANC provides an ideal lens to illustrate the connection between the work of war
and the evolution of gender and race ideologies as ideas about social justice expanded. War in the
twentieth-century United States transformed the occupation of nursing as demands inside and
outside the military for economic and social equality and on-going questions about gendered
divisions of labor were affected by military nursing needs and irregular war environments. The
nursing profession, historically gendered a female obligation and raced white, faced challenges
from both non-white women and men. The all-female nurse corps at its founding in 1901 was set
apart from the male soldier, as gender determined a strict delineation for martial service. This
delineation allowed for an uneven and gendered access to the benefits attached to martial service.
Integration of men into the all-female organization allowed male nurses to expand martial service
to include non-combat roles such as nursing; at the same time, it allowed female nurses to claim
broader access to the benefits of martial service that were once reserved for men through their
successful campaigns to access equal pay, benefits, and opening of military ranks previously closed
to women.45

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Gender and the Work of War in the Twenty-First Century

War and the work of war continues to challenge contemporary notions of masculinity and
femininity in America society. In the last five years, American society has witnessed both the repeal
of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (2011) and the lifting of the ban on women serving in combat roles
(2013). These changes have occurred not only because the nature of warfare has changed, but also
because society’s expectations for men and women have changed. But, does this mean that martial
service is no longer connected to masculinity or male citizenship responsibilities? The easy answer
to this question is no; the eighteen-year-old male citizen is still required by law to sign up for
selective service. Although, both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees recently voted
in H.R. 1509 to add an addendum to the current Selective Service law that would authorize the
president to provide for the registration of women for selective services, this was strictly a possibility
should the reinstatement of the draft occur, not a legal requirement of women.46
What has changed is the way in which wars are fought, and the skills and technology required
to support the defense of the nation. Warfare in the twenty-first century has forced a renegotia-
tion of the gender division of labor, one that has provided an expanded definition of martial roles
and has provided a space for women, just like men, in the military. This, like the open addition of
homosexuals and the inclusion of women into combat roles, provides contemporary scholars
with rich opportunities to continue to use military engagements and military institutions as a
place from which to explore and investigate the ways in which masculine and feminine identities
define, constrain, and expand martial roles for men and women. Scholarship that expands our
understanding of the evolution of masculinity and war work and the value placed on different
jobs would also be a welcome addition. Already a new generation of historians are producing
work and expanding discussions on the parallels between the end of DADT and the end of a
segregated military during the mid-twentieth century. The repeal of DADT has also opened up
new fields of inquiry about transgender and queer soldiers, and work continues to expand on
women in combat, male and female rape, and the twenty-first century soldier in non-traditional
war environments. Finally, the field of civil-military relations provides scholars with the oppor-
tunity to examine martial service as gender, race, and even the nation’s identity continues to
change. Certainly, for example, the Supreme Court decision to support gay marriage and the
military’s acceptance of transgender soldiers will have consequences not only for martial service
but also for the benefits that individuals and families expect to receive for war work.

Notes
1 “To the Colors—Or?” Editorial, American Journal of Nursing 40, no. 10 (October 1940): 1134.
2 Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary American (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980) and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The
Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
3 Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women in World War II
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with American: Private Lives
in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work:
Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
4 See Susan Hartmann, Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1983).
5 During the 1968 presidential election, Nixon promised to eliminate the draft lottery and move the
country to the All-Volunteer Force; however, this did not occur until 1973. Selective Service
registration was reestablished in 1980 by President Carter. Congress continues to debate abolishing
the draft. In 2016, both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees voted to add an addendum

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to the current Selective Service law that would authorize the president to order women to register for
selective services.
6 These are also some of the very questions that Beth Bailey attempts to answer in America’s Army. Beth
Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Voluntary Force (Boston: Belknap Press, 2009).
7 Michael Rustad, Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Women (New York: Praeger, 1982). For a
similar study that focuses on women’s military experiences serving in various countries, see Nancy
Loring Goldman, ed., Female Soldiers—Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary
Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
8 Mattie E. Treadwell, U.S. Army in World War II: The Women’s Army Corps (Washington: Center of
Military History, 1985).
9 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, CA: Presido Press, 1982,
revised and updated, 1992), xv.
10 Ibid.
11 Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during
World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 7. For similar conversations on World
War I, see Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2008).
12 Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 3.
13 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern Citizen (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
14 Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
15 Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, xvi.
16 Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Berkeley: University of
Carolina Press, 2007), 3. See also, Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, ix–xii and 11.
17 Chad Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3.
18 Kimberley Phillips. War! What is it Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World
War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 11.
19 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 57; Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay
Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, revised
edition 2000), 2.
20 See Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster (Washington: Regnery Publishing,
1997).
21 Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 7.
22 Ibid., 256.
23 See also Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years,”
Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 759–75.
24 Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 265–79.
25 In the last ten years, scholars working on gays in the military focus on the integration campaigns by
African Americans and women as a framework to historicize the integration of homosexuals in the
military. See, Douglas W. Bristol, Jr. and Heather Marie Stur, eds., Integrating the U.S. Military: African
Americans, Women and Gays since World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, forth-
coming, April 2017).
26 Donald H. Horner, Jr. and Michael T. Anderson, “Integration of Homosexuals into the Armed
Forces: Racial and Gender Integration as a Point of Departure,” in Gay and Lesbians in the Military:
Issues, Concerns and Contrasts, eds. Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley (New York: Aldine De
Gruyter, 1994), 247–60.
27 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998, 2006, 2012), 89. Also, R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1995).

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28 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 196.

29 James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
30 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military
Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-
American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
31 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 3.
32 Ibid., 1.
33 Jennifer Kenne, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2003); Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
34 Timothy Stewart-Winter, “Not a Solider, Not a Slacker: Conscientious Objectors and Male
Citizenship in the United States during the Second World War,” Gender and History 19, no. 3
(November 2007): 519.
35 Mark Matthews, Smoke Jumping on the Western Line: Conscientious Objectors during World War II
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 25.
36 Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The U.S. military has had this kind of high support to
combat arms ratio in all twentieth-century wars, but historians have yet to parse its relationship to
martial masculinity.
37 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) encourages scholars to examine the construction of
gender identities and to use gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis, thus providing a
framework for historians to continue the work that Meyer and others had begun in the 1990s.
38 Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane, 180.
39 Linda Witt, et al., A Defense Weapon Known to Be of Value: Servicewomen of the Korean War Era
(Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005).
40 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). For additional scholarship on women’s military work see,
Francine D’Amico and Laurie Weinstein, eds., Gender Camouflage: Women and the U.S. Military
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); Lory Manning and Vanessa R. Wight, Women in the
Military: Where They Stand (Washington: Women’s Research and Education Institute, 2000).
Comparisons between various branches of the military are useful in studying the numerous ways
the military and civil society dealt with women in the military. One example of a specific history on
women’s roles in a specific branch of the military is Mary T. Saranecky, A History of the U.S. Army
Nurse Corps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
41 Bailey, America’s Army.
42 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010), 9. Also, Stur, Beyond Combat, Chapters 2, 3, and 5.
43 Lair, Armed with Abundance, 6.
44 Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman, 11.
45 Charissa Threat, Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2015).
46 See https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1509, accessed on October 2, 2016.

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 16
U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL AND
FAMILIES ABROAD
Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Power in the U.S.
Military’s Relations with Foreign Nations and
Local Inhabitants during Wartime

Donna Alvah
st. lawrence university

This chapter surveys historical scholarship that explores gender, sexuality, and military families
with regard to the U.S. military and its relations with foreign countries, including their
inhabitants. Such scholarship took root in the 1980s, in feminist political scientist Cynthia
Enloe’s pioneering analysis of interconnections among gender and sexuality, the military, and
international relations. She questioned assumptions about soldiers and their sexual relationships
with women—for example, that militaries and prostitutes “naturally” go together—and argued
that such relationships are shaped by politics and have political implications.1 In 1990, Emily
Rosenberg, a diplomatic historian, built on Joan Wallach Scott’s now well-known insights
about gender as a category of historical analysis (published only a year earlier) to contemplate
how ideas about gender might have influenced foreign policies and wars.2 Despite the
disinclination of some historians of U.S. foreign relations and the U.S. military—sub-fields
dominated by men—to consider ideas about gender and sexuality as influential in diplomacy
and fundamental for understanding U.S. military power abroad, Enloe and Rosenberg’s
ground-breaking insights inspired historians to follow their leads, and they continue to do so.
There are now many fascinating analyses that attend to gender and sexuality in the dynamics of
the U.S. military abroad. They persuasively illustrate that intimate and other types of
interpersonal encounters between people in occupied and host countries and U.S. military
personnel and their families should be considered a form of foreign relations that sometimes
advanced and sustained, and other times created difficulties for, the U.S. military and U.S.
power abroad.
Scholars of these topics implicitly or explicitly criticize the U.S. government and its military
for countenancing sexual assaults and exploitation and committing other harms abroad, and for
not living up to proclaimed American ideals of equality, democracy, and fairness in their
relationships with occupied and host nations and their inhabitants. Scholars also have noted
that while the U.S. military has been reliant on women’s work, gender and racial stereotypes have
pervaded its policies on and treatment of women, whether they were American wives of
servicemen, local women who worked on U.S. bases, friends or romantic partners, or served

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U.S. military men in bars and nightclubs, or as prostitutes. While acknowledging some
exceptions in individual relations between U.S. military personnel and people abroad, critics
have interpreted the U.S. military as an institution as establishing and perpetuating U.S. dom-
inance via attitudes toward and policies on relationships between Americans and local peoples.
Individual interactions could reinforce this dominance even in friendly encounters.
Much of the scholarship discussed in this chapter views the United States as economically,
politically, geographically, and culturally expansionist or imperialistic in its past relations with
other nations. In 1959, historian William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy challenged the idea of the United States as exempt from the category of imperialism.
Williams refuted earlier histories that had depicted U.S. foreign policies on trade and other
matters as for the most part benevolent, and U.S. military actions abroad as undertaken not only
to defend U.S. national interests, but also to advance in the wider world democratic and
economic principles that would profit those not yet enjoying their fruits.3 In the 1990s, an
innovative scholarship emerged identifying American culture as a vehicle for U.S. imperialism,
and U.S. imperialism as naturalized and mitigated by American culture, while insights about the
role of sexuality and gender in foreign relations (including military engagements) gained
traction.4 In explaining the objectives of the edited collection Haunted by Empire: Geographies of
Intimacy in North American History (2006), anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler eloquently conveys the
scholarly endeavor of

explor[ing] the familiar, strange, and unarticulated ways in which empire has
appeared and disappeared from the intimate and public spaces of United States
history; how relations of empire crash through and then recede from easy purview,
sunder families, storm sequestered spaces, and indelibly permeate—or sometimes
graze with only a scarred trace—institutions and landscapes of people’s lives.5

In many of the books and articles examined in this chapter, the U.S. military’s interactions with
people of other nations, including in “intimate” interpersonal relations, sexual and otherwise, are
what Stoler refers to as “transfer points of power” that are not necessarily unidirectional but
ultimately strengthen U.S. empire.6
Studies of U.S. military personnel’s sexual interactions and other social relationships with
people abroad illuminate how the military has framed its relations with foreign nations, and how
it exercised its power in carrying out U.S. foreign policies. Such relationships have included
sexual encounters, consensual and non-consensual, and non-sexual encounters that could be
casual or formal, friendly or unfriendly, violent or caring, profound, intimate, passing or long-
term, or some combination of these. At times military leaders considered American families,
including family members who accompanied U.S. military personnel abroad, as essential to
sustaining the U.S. military wherever it was, and even influential in how residents of occupied
and host nations perceived the U.S. military and foreign policies.
In scrutinizing social relationships between U.S. military personnel and the people they
encountered abroad, scholars have illustrated their complexity. Frequently they uncover sexual
and other forms of exploitation of and harm to people in nations occupied by the United States or
hosting its bases. Historical studies also reveal racism toward these people, as well as toward
American people of color. Yet while demonstrating that even mundane interpersonal interac-
tions that at first glance may appear insignificant were shaped by and expressed U.S. power,
scholars also have noted ways that people in occupied and host nations asserted power as well.
They point out that it is simplistic to see Americans as always the historical agents and the people
abroad with whom they interacted as powerless and merely acted upon. Social relationships could

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mitigate U.S. dominion, alter hierarchical U.S. military policies to accommodate Americans’ and
local peoples’ inclinations for friendly or romantic connections, and challenge American racism,
even if to some extent such encounters also reinforced U.S. dominance abroad as well as
entrenched social inequality among Americans.
Scholars’ attention to the myriad ways that foreign relations were instantiated on the ground
by ordinary people has helped provide a fuller picture of life in the places where the U.S. military
was based. The scholarship also demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexual and other social
interactions to foreign relations and negotiations and struggles of power between nations. In so
doing, many of these works shed light on and give voice to the experiences of women, and
sometimes children. It is noteworthy that many scholars who study relations between U.S.
military personnel (and their families) and local peoples are Americans who had been in military
families as spouses or children, or are from nations with a history of a large U.S. military presence,
or are the children or grandchildren of people from those nations. It is likely that their personal
backgrounds have made them especially perceptive to the potential for scholarly study of
interpersonal interactions and implications for relations between nations.
This chapter considers selected scholarly books and articles that illustrate key themes and
recurring questions in the literature. It is mainly concerned with those dedicated to examining the
topics of gender, sexuality, and families in connection with the U.S. military abroad and its
personnel’s interactions with local inhabitants. It also at times considers other studies that do not
exclusively or extensively examine these topics but point to possibilities for further research.

The American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War

Since the creation of the United States, women have taken part in the nation’s military activities,
and families have accompanied soldiers. Histories on social aspects of the U.S. military between
the Revolutionary and Civil Wars usually discuss women and families as camp followers. Some
works broadly discuss masculinity and the military. However, there is scarce attention in the
historical scholarship on this period to interactions with people of other nations in relation to
gender, sexuality, families, and the U.S. military.
Although some officers arranged for their wives to join them at camps and outposts, U.S.
military officials viewed most women (not all of whom were soldiers’ wives) and children as
“camp followers” who tagged along in a relationship of dependency—and in fact, the U.S.
military term for spouses and children of soldiers to this day is “dependents.”7 Cynthia Enloe
argues that military officials devalued women’s varied work because even though they heavily
relied on it, they were ambivalent about or even hostile to feminine presences in the midst of
what they insisted was a thoroughly masculine institution.8 The undervaluing of women’s work
resulted in the minimization of their presence in the records of war. For example, in an essay on
women in the American Revolution, Holly A. Mayer explains that following the Revolutionary
War, those who wrote about it tended to focus on “‘masculine’ ideals rather than ‘feminine
materiality,’” with the result that women “were then ignored as authors focused on ideas, leaders,
and strategies.”9 She also states that in the nineteenth century, “with few exceptions, women’s
actions in the Revolution were remembered more in popular rather than academic venues” and
were thus marginalized as history became a professional field.10
Although official and unofficial policies sought to discourage wives and children—particularly
families of enlisted personnel—from traveling and living with soldiers, some did so nevertheless,
even in frontier and foreign posts. For example, Betty L. Alt mentions “spouses … following their
warrior husbands into Mexico” and giving birth on ships during the U.S.-Mexican War.”11
According to Robert Johannsen, “laundresses, often the wives of enlisted men,” worked for the

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U.S. Army in its war with Mexico, “in more or less official capacities.” Johannsen also notes that
“Mexican army units customarily traveled with large entourages of female camp-followers,
wives, daughters, or lovers of the soldiers, often with babes in arms, who marched with the
men and carried their packs and household goods.”12 It would be fascinating to know much more
about how gender and sexuality shaped American soldiers’ and sailors’ and their families’
interactions with allies, rivals, and neutrals during the Revolutionary War, the Quasi-War with
France, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, the U.S.-Mexico War, and other military engage-
ments involving foreign nations, but these topics currently lack sustained scholarly attention.
In her essay on women in the American Revolution, Mayer draws attention to the complica-
tion of even understanding such relations in terms of “foreign relations.” She describes various
encounters involving combatants and non-combatants that illustrate the problem of trying to
identify people’s national affiliations at a time when the very existence of the United States as a
sovereign nation was in dispute, on a continent colonized by multiple European powers and
comprising diverse ethnic groups. Mayer does not delve into analysis of gender, sexuality, or
families with regard to the military and relations with other nations and their peoples. Yet one
glimpses in Mayer’s essay encounters that may represent instances of these. She mentions French-
Canadian soldiers and their families who left Canada as “refugees” and allies with the Continental
Army as the latter retreated in 1776; an Irish woman who worked as a nurse for the American
Army; a sutler spying on the American Army for the British; and women sexually assaulted in
their homes by British soldiers.13 These brief references invite the reader to wonder whether
evidence exists that could tell historians more about the gendered and international dimensions of
these types of encounters.
There are thought-provoking works that do consider gender and sexuality in wars where U.S.
soldiers encountered foreign peoples prior to the war against Spain in 1898, although there is little
to no discussion of the political dimensions of such interpersonal interactions. Victor Meladze
offers a psychoanalytical history of Americans’ impetus for wars from the nineteenth century to
the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of wars against “out-groups” in the nineteenth century,
he makes a sweeping assertion that “[t]he genocide that the U.S. group perpetrated against Native
Americans, for example, and the wars it waged against Mexico (Mexican-American War, 1846–
1848) and Spain (Spanish-American War, 1898) were symptomatic of the nation’s need to restore
its sense of masculine potency through sacrificial rebirth rituals/mass murder of out-groups.”
However, besides the general references to mass violence, Meladze does not specifically discuss
U.S. soldiers’ social interactions with members of these “out-groups.”14 In contrast to Meladze’s
broad claim about U.S. soldiers’ masculinity in wars against foreigners, Lawrence R. Murphy’s
tightly focused article on venereal disease among Union soldiers on the western frontier allows a
glimpse of the soldiers’ interactions with women possibly from foreign countries, and of how the
soldiers’ sexual activity might have diminished their martial effectiveness. Murphy proposes that a
venereal disease rate five times that of the Union Army in general may have weakened the
soldiering abilities of Union men in the far western United States, where they fought
Confederates as well as Native Americans.15 Murphy mentions prostitutes and refers to women
possibly perceived by U.S. soldiers to be of Native American or Hispanic descent and thus
“foreign,” namely “Adobe Mary” and “Castillian [sic] beauties.”16 Without delving into these
relationships, both of these studies hint at lines of potential research.
While there is scholarship on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that gives attention to and
sometimes even concentrates on women and children who accompanied U.S. armed forces in
wartime, there is no extensive historical analysis of gender, sexuality, or families as pertinent to
understanding the U.S. military’s relations with foreign nations and peoples. Perhaps this is
because few historical sources provide information on these topics. It is possible that scholars

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today scrutinizing primary sources from the wars in this period—even sources already studied by
historians interested in different topics—would find evidence allowing for more extensive
analysis of gender, sexuality, and families in connection with the U.S. armed forces and contacts
with people of other nations.

The U.S. Army-Native American Wars ca. 1848–1890

The U.S. Army’s wars with Native Americans in western North America in the latter half of the
nineteenth century are the earliest military engagements to receive sustained scholarly considera-
tion of gender and sexuality in U.S. soldiers’ and their families’ interpersonal interactions with
people not considered to be U.S. citizens. One reason that this historiography considers inter-
actions between Native Americans and U.S. Army personnel and their families to be in its
purview is because until the Snyder Act of 1924, the U.S. government did not recognize many
Native Americans as citizens. Another reason is that many U.S. citizens perceived and treated
Native Americans as outsiders to white American society, even though some Native Americans
had assimilated into it. Additionally, many Native American groups considered themselves
sovereign nations. In a recent article, Brian DeLay persuasively argues that diplomatic historians
should recognize that “U.S. relations with Indians were foreign relations” and discusses views of
scholars who agree and disagree with this perspective.17
Patricia Stallard’s Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian-Fighting Army (1978), Sherry L.
Smith’s The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (1990), and Anne Bruner
Eales’s Army Wives on the American Frontier: Living by the Bugles (1996) relate the experiences and
perspectives of American women who accompanied U.S. Army officers and enlisted men in the
West, including their encounters with and impressions of Native Americans.18 In all three books,
women’s perspectives are mostly those of white officers’ wives, because there is much more
historical evidence from and about them than for enlisted men’s wives and other women who
were there—including Native American, black, and Mexican women. Stallard’s book also
contains a chapter on white children in Army families, and Eales’s book has a chapter on enlisted
men’s wives and other women employed at Army posts.
Although none of these books focuses entirely on gender, sexuality, or wives and families of
U.S. soldiers in interactions with people considered “foreign” by white Americans, they devote
more attention to these topics than the scholarship on other wars prior to 1898. All three books
describe white Army wives and Native Americans interacting with and expressing curiosity about
one another in peaceful meetings, examining each other’s homes and dress. In depictions of their
meetings, when white women showed Native American women their undergarments and hair,
one gets the impression that they did so to humor the inquisitive women rather than to teach
white feminine ideals and domesticity to them.19 Smith observes a range of Army wives’ (and
their officer husbands’) feelings toward Native Americans—hostility, wariness, disdain, friendli-
ness, warmth, compassion—and notes that the white Americans sometimes perceived Native
Americans as feeling the same towards them.20 All three authors demonstrate that Army wives
contributed to racialized representations of Native Americans that could be used to defend
indigenous peoples’ rights or legitimize violence against them and the seizure of their lands.
One may see the Army wives’ letters and other writings about interactions with Native
Americans as what Laura Wexler calls “domestic images” that “constructed the idea of the
domestic in a way that differentiated hierarchically the lives of ‘civilized’ Americans from the
lives of a variety of people not considered adequately domestic.”21 Wexler analyzes photographs
of U.S. sailors aboard the Olympia, the flagship of Admiral George Dewey’s fleet that had swiftly
defeated Spain at the Battle of Manila Bay in the 1898 Spanish-American War.22 Wexler

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characterizes the domestic images of the sailors as “visual tableaux that seek to capture American
military might on its time off.” Like the photographs of the sailors, the frontier Army wives’
accounts of hosting Native Americans in their homes and other domestic images depicting
military personnel and their families abroad could serve as “imperial instrument[s]” that obscured
the violence of conquest and reinforced ideas of U.S. superiority and goodness.23
The three books also demonstrate that sexual relations between U.S. Army personnel and
Native American women served to demarcate Native Americans from white society.24 Smith and
Stallard remark that because of venereal disease among soldiers, military leaders wanted to
physically segregate Native American women.25 Smith points out that “the committee assumed
that the problem was between enlisted men and Indian women, and nothing was said about
officers,” although many officers did in fact have sexual relationships with Native American
women.26 She notes that despite accounts of what might have been frequent, or in any case in the
officers’ views unsurprising, sexual relations between Native American women and Army
officers, there were few marriages between them.27 The three authors’ accounts of sexual
relationships between Native American women and white Army men illustrate that the very
intimacy of such interactions generally reinforced racial and social boundaries between whites and
Native Americans. Smith states that “most [officers] maintained in public statements that a sexual
relationship or marriage between savagery and civilization threatened civilization. While the
Indian would be elevated by the match, the white man would be lowered.”28
Army Wives on the American Frontier is exceptional in all the scholarship on U.S. military wives’
interactions with men considered racial “others” and outside of white American society, in that it
describes “sexual tension” between officers’ wives and Native American men. Accounts from
officers’ wives reveal that sometimes the white women admired the physiques of Native
American men, and whites also wrote of Native American men’s alleged attraction to Army
officers’ wives. But whereas Army communities to some extent tolerated or expected that white
men would engage in sexual relations with Native American women, this was not the case for
white officers’ wives and Native American men.29
Additional themes relating to gender and military families illuminate U.S. military attitudes
toward Native Americans. Smith explores officers’ and their wives’ views on the moral question
of whether the U.S. Army was justified in killing Native American women and children. Though
some white officers deplored categorizing women and children with combatants, others
attempted to justify killing Native American women in attacks and battles on the grounds that
they could be vicious fighters. Both perspectives illustrate white Americans’ attitudes about
gender. One view feminized Native American women and children as more passive, weak,
and innocent than Native American men, and thus not legitimate targets of violence. The other
view masculinized Native American women, marking them as targets in part because they
violated whites’ assumptions about appropriate gender roles.30 Another relevant theme in
Glittering Misery regards Army officers’ and their wives’ decisions on whether or not to adopt
Native American children, some orphaned in battles and Army attacks. Here we see the
possibility of Army families extending or restricting definitions of “family.” Smith tells of an
Army captain who considered adopting “a little girl, as I had slain her mother,” but who changed
his mind when asked “how Mrs. Mills [his wife] would react.” Smith speculates that the captain’s
impulse to adopt the girl stemmed from “a sense of personal responsibility for the tragedy.”31
Smith maintains that “in the nineteenth-century West, there was no monolithic military
mind” regarding “matters of Indians, Indian policy, and the morality of the Indian Wars,” and
that “officers and their wives offered a spectrum of opinions, attitudes, temperaments, and levels
of sophistication.” Yet the various themes relating to gender, sexuality, and military families in
the books by Stallard, Smith, and Eales indicate that even non-violent interactions between white

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Army people and Native Americans delineated racial boundaries. Smith acknowledges that
regardless of Army officers’ and their wives’ range of viewpoints on Native Americans, “[i]t
was only on certain fundamental assumptions about savagery and civilization, the army’s suppo-
sedly irreproachable conduct on the frontier, and the military’s presumed special qualifications to
manage Indian affairs that they found unanimity.”32

The Wars of 1898 and the U.S.-Philippines War (1899–1902)

There is more scholarship relating gender, sexuality, or the experiences of wives and families to
the U.S. military abroad in wars at the turn of the twentieth century than for the pre-Civil War
eras, though not as much as for wars in the twentieth century. Whereas there is little analysis of
race, racism, and imperialism in the scholarship on the wars against Native Americans, it is much
more prominent in the works about the Spanish-American and Philippines wars and enriches our
understanding of the military’s place in foreign relations at the turn of the twentieth century,
including careful analysis of how these are intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality.
While some histories briefly discuss U.S. military personnel and their families’ social relation-
ships with local peoples in the U.S. wars to end Spain’s rule of colonies in 1898 and then to
establish control of the Philippines, very little scholarship focuses on this subject, and primary
sources are difficult to find.33 That there is no specialized body of scholarship in English focusing
on gender and sexuality in U.S. soldiers’ interactions with Cubans and Puerto Ricans during the
1898 war in the Caribbean maybe because the Spanish-American War was so short. Some
scholarship on gender, sexuality, and U.S. imperialism takes as its starting point sexual relations
between U.S. military personnel and Cubans and Puerto Ricans, but this is not scholars’ central
focus. Although the issue of U.S. military men’s relations with prostitutes has attracted some
scholarly attention, non-monetary sexual relations and the whole realm of non-sexual relations
involving U.S. soldiers and the women and families who likely joined them in the Caribbean
during or after the war has not.
In Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002), Laura
Briggs points out that throughout areas of U.S. imperial occupation, the military grappled with
how to address soldiers’ relationships with local prostitutes. Military officials pursued various
forms of regulation of prostitutes in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, the Panama Canal
Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippines, and even along the U.S.-Mexico border in 1916. These
policies, according to Briggs, “were not entirely consistent, nor were they uncontested.” While
varied, they generally involved the segregation of prostitutes in specific neighborhoods and their
regular medical inspections. The system of inspection and issuing health certificates to prostitutes
aroused the indignation of U.S. social reformers, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union (WCTU), which asserted that such policies gave official U.S. blessing to immorality and
also implicated the nation in actions associated with “imperialism,” in contrast to the United
States’ self-conception as anti-imperialist.34
While Spain and the United States reached a peace agreement in 1898, in February 1899 the
United States went to war again in the Philippines, this time to take control of the islands from
Filipinos who demanded independence. In “The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Gender
Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War” (2006), Paul A. Kramer describes
the U.S. Army’s efforts to counter the spread of venereal disease among its soldiers in
the Philippines and the ensuing controversy in the United States. The essay’s goals include
“explor[ing] the politics of gender in the making of U.S. empire,” inspired by the “new
literature” on gender and empire, such as Briggs’s study.35 Kramer shows that U.S.
military officials saw the problem of prostitution in both gendered and racialized terms, following

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long-standing assumptions (described in similar terms in Stallard’s Glittering Misery) that “the
prostitute was the perpetual and exclusive source of contagion” and that “colonized peoples were
reservoirs of dangerous tropical disease.”36 This notion led the military to adopt the aforemen-
tioned practice of registering and monitoring prostitutes to reduce the infection of U.S. troops. In
reality, Kramer points out, a high percentage of U.S. troops came to the Philippines already
infected with venereal diseases, and U.S. war and occupation policies in fact helped spread disease
to rural Filipino communities.37 Kramer’s essay shows that the revelation of the U.S. military’s
tacit sanctioning of prostitution ignited a widespread campaign of U.S. domestic reformers
demanding “abolition” of regulated prostitution, which included not only the WCTU, but
also women’s suffragists and an array of “anti-imperialists” (a category that included white
supremacists and organized labor, among others). While diverse in their outlooks, all feared
that both “Oriental” and “European” practices threatened to undermine American exception-
alism and bring not only venereal diseases but moral corruption back to the United States. In the
end, the Department of War ordered the military to halt its inspection regime, with the effect that
it simply became invisible, regulated through local Filipino authorities but ignored officially.
Kramer observes in his conclusion, “The intertwined histories of military occupation, sexual
labor, disease control, and moral politics were central to the advent of U.S. overseas empire,”
though the “military-prostitution complex would continue to be marginalized in an effort to
protect moral justifications of U.S. power overseas.”38 Both of these points are central to the
literature of the U.S. military in and especially after the Second World War.
In his book The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006),
Kramer argues that American women who arrived after the war’s end, military officials’ wives
among them, “signified … a transformation of colonial politics from war to suasion.” With
American women, securing U.S. military and civilian control of the Philippines could occur in
ways more subtle than physical violence.39 For instance, social gatherings such as dances with elite
Filipinos inscribed U.S. power and Filipinos’ acquiescence to it. Kramer also cites evidence that
U.S. military officers and their wives established racial boundaries with Filipinos simply by
declining to interact with them and encouraging other Americans to do the same.40
Based on my own research on wives of U.S. military personnel in the Philippines, I, like
Kramer, find that white American women perpetuated racial and national hierarchies in inter-
actions with Filipinos. Writings from U.S. military personnel, their wives, and civilian observers,
and U.S. military documents offer clues about how Americans connected with the U.S. military
attempted to reinforce U.S. power in the Philippines during what Americans called the “insur-
rection” there between 1899 and 1902 and in the subsequent U.S. occupation of the islands in the
following decades. In interactions with servants from the Philippines and other nations, and with
other Filipinos they encountered, or conversely by declining to socialize with Filipinos,
American military wives could demonstrate their notions of appropriate feminine behavior as
well as aid the United States in establishing the alleged national and racial superiority of white
Americans that they believed justified U.S. governance of the islands.
Though historical and scholarly sources on the topic remain sparse, it is clear that despite U.S.
military strictures against enlisted men marrying, Army men, white as well as African American,
did marry, live out of wedlock, and have children with Filipinas. It seems that Americans in the
Philippines usually disapproved of such relationships and considered them embarrassing, pre-
sumably because they breached racial and national boundaries that sustained the U.S.-Philippines
hierarchy.41 Richard Meixsel shows that later, in the period between the end of the First World
War and the United States’ entry into the Second World War, U.S. servicemen’s, as well as their
wives’ and children’s, relationships with locals were an aspect of the U.S. military presence in the
Philippines.42

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The scholarship on gender and sexuality during and after the U.S. military ventures in the
Spanish Caribbean and the Philippines is not fully developed, but the works that have explored
aspects of the topic suggest the need to investigate how U.S. military actions and policies both
shaped and were shaped by the interactions of military personnel and their families with people in
areas under U.S. occupation. In addition to the importance of gendered rhetoric (the outstanding
example here is Kristin L. Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood), scholars must attend to the
interactions of U.S. military personnel and their family members with the peoples of these areas to
understand the complexities of these wars and their aftereffects.43 Further scholarship exploring
the perspectives of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Chamorros/Chamorus and other people of Guam,
and Filipinos are also needed to deepen our comprehension of the dynamics at work. In moving
forward, scholars of this period could employ some of the insights of scholars mentioned in the
following sections of this chapter, which cover eras in which the literature is more substantial.

World War I and the Postwar Occupation of Germany

Although there is a substantial body of scholarship on social and cultural aspects of the U.S.
military in World War I, only a few sources offer sustained discussions on ways that the U.S.
military used gender, sexuality, and marriage to frame its relations with other nations.44 Sources
on the war and the postwar occupation of Germany discussed in this section examine some
themes seen in the works on earlier wars, sometimes more extensively: concerns about venereal
disease, ideas about soldiers’ masculinity, relationships between U.S. soldiers and local women.
Newer topics arise as well, including white Americans’ fears about the effects of African American
soldiers’ interactions with white civilian women in Europe, and children fathered by U.S.
soldiers, both issues that appear in the scholarship on later eras as well.
In Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (2009), Adriane Lentz-Smith describes
African American soldiers in the Allied Expeditionary Force in France, as well as U.S. military and
French responses to them. While Americans worried about U.S. soldiers in general forming
liaisons with French women, the prospect and reality of African American soldiers associating
with white French women enflamed them. Although the U.S. Army already segregated African
American soldiers from whites, white military officials as well as white soldiers acting indepen-
dently sought to enforce segregation beyond U.S. military boundaries, fearing that greater social
freedom in France would embolden African Americans to challenge military authority as well as
white supremacy once back in the United States.45 They also blamed French women for
undermining white supremacy. “To protect Jim Crow from French women,” writes Lentz-
Smith, “the U.S. Army tried to teach white supremacy to them”—but failed. Despite their white
compatriots’ attempts to enforce segregation, even by execution and lynching, African Americans
did engage in “interracial liaisons, both romantic and civic.”46 Those serving in a combat division
attached to French infantry felt that French soldiers and civilians respected and appreciated
them.47 Many African Americans imagined France as free of racism, yet Lentz-Smith explains
that France was not “a land ‘that knew no color line,’ as its fans claimed, but rather … the French
were too busy drawing their own color lines—between colony and metropole—to commit
themselves to the American Negro problem.”48
Concern about venereal diseases is a theme in most of the literature on social and cultural
aspects of the U.S. military in World War I, and also appears in scholarship on the postwar U.S.
occupation of Germany. Efforts to prevent soldiers from contracting or spreading “social
diseases” were about more than physical health and brought the military, civilian government,
and non-governmental organizations together to combat them. Elizabeth Gagen shows how in
entering World War I in 1917, strongly influenced by Progressive values, organizations such as

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the War Camp Community Service (WCCS) sought to cultivate “a more gentle and domes-
ticated soldier.”49 Gagen explains that her argument extends other historians’ findings that
“Progressive notions of moral manhood … firmly conflated masculinity with sexual purity.”50
However, the WCCS concerned itself with white soldiers only, though Gagen does not say why.
Lentz-Smith briefly discusses interconnections among notions of white supremacy,
“Americanism,” and “racial purity,” linking them to fears that white French women endangered
these since they could “pollute the American citizenry by mixing indiscriminately with soldiers of
all races.”51 Put another way: White men and white women needed to exercise sexual restraint
not only to prevent venereal diseases from polluting their bodies, but also to safeguard their race
and nation. The logic here recalls those described by both Briggs and Kramer during the era of the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars.
Articles on the U.S. occupation of Germany after the war illuminate multiple dimensions of
the U.S. Army’s and Germans’ worries about venereal disease resulting from American soldiers’
“fraternization” with German women. In “Chastity, Masculinity, and Military Efficiency: The
United States Army in Germany, 1918–1923” (2006), Douglas F. Habib, like Gagen, argues that
concerns about venereal disease prompted efforts to construct a “new gender identity for …
soldiers.”52 The U.S. officer corps that undertook this endeavor, “prescrib[ing] chastity, sobriety,
industry, and physical fitness against the moral peril” to ensure that soldiers would do their jobs
effectively and that the occupation mission “to enforce the Armistice agreements” would
succeed.53 In November 1918, General John Pershing’s anti-fraternization order forbade “inti-
mate personal association with [Germany’s] inhabitants,” and instructed soldiers to don a
“dignified and reserved attitude at all times.”54 According to Habib, “[c]hastity became the
manifestation of bravery and strength,” and a “test to the real American,” whereas “sexual
intercourse marked the cowardly, weak, and unmasculine.”55 Nevertheless, U.S. soldiers visited
prostitutes, and venereal disease persisted. In September 1919 the new commander of occupation
forces in the American zone ended the ban on fraternization. Habib concludes that “[t]he attempt
to reconstruct masculinity proved a failure, as soldiers were unwilling to internalize the sanc-
tioned masculine values of sexual restraint and detachment from the civilian population.”56
In “American Doughboys and German Fräuleins: Sexuality, Patriarchy, and Privilege in the
American Occupied Rhineland, 1918–23” (2007), Erika Kuhlman analyzes German and
American responses to German women’s sexual relationships with U.S. soldiers, and the asso-
ciated problems of venereal disease and children born out of wedlock. Germans threatened
women who became involved with U.S. soldiers and berated them as irresponsible, immoral, and
shameless, though Kuhlman says that there was some recognition that economic hardship pushed
women into prostitution and other relationships with American men.57 Kuhlman argues that the
U.S. military and the German government established control of German women by providing,
respectively, protection in the form of marriages to American soldiers (who preferred dependent
German wives to liberated American women), and German government assistance. Together
these measures constituted a collaboration to “reconstruct patriarchy” in the U.S. occupation as
well as in German society. Moreover, she contends that perceptions of the reestablishment of
German social and moral order through a return to pre-war traditional gender roles contributed
to Germans’ and Americans’ assessments of the occupation as successful, which benefited the
United States in international political and economic relations.58
In contrast to the wars for westward expansion in North America and the Philippines War, the
United States in World War I fought against enemies who were almost exclusively white.
Anxieties about gender relations and sexuality took on new configurations, such as the concerns
about sexual relations between African Americans and white Europeans and the consideration of
a solution to prostitution that involved marriage between U.S. soldiers and citizens of an

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occupied nation. Even the enduring military concern with venereal disease, whose contours in
the World War I era resembled those of earlier times in the focus on fear of racial contagion and
moral corruption, seems to have taken on somewhat of a new cast in its attention to the virtues of
sexual purity and military efficiency. In other ways, the experience of gender and sexuality in U.S.
military involvement in the First World War, especially the questions about relations between
U.S. troops and women in occupied nations that bedeviled postwar officials, set the stage for what
the Second World War would bring.

World War II
The scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the U.S. military abroad in World War I focuses on
Western Europe, primarily France, because this is where the vast majority of Americans fought
and went on leave; the scholarship on World War II, on the other hand, examines these topics in a
wide variety of locales. The scholarship on both eras demonstrates that assumptions about racial
and national differences permeated Americans’ and local peoples’ attitudes about U.S. service-
men’s contacts with women and influenced U.S. military policies. However, much of the World
War II scholarship emphasizes disruptions and harm to local populations, especially women, by
U.S. military personnel and policies. This focus on the disruptive aspects of the U.S. military’s
activities can be explained by the much greater scale of U.S. involvement in the Second World
War in terms of the number of personnel engaged, the duration of the U.S. involvement in
combat, and the geographical scope of the U.S. presence. With millions of men around the world
between 1941 and 1945, U.S. military personnel interacted not only with many more, but
also with more racially diverse, non-combatants among both allied and enemy peoples than in
the First World War. American racism, especially directed at Asians, affected American encoun-
ters in Japan and elsewhere in a more persistent way than in Europe. Yet scholars also identify
points of resistance to U.S. domination, as well as evidence of affection, compassion, alteration of
U.S. military policies to accommodate social relationships, and efforts to counter sexual violation
and racism.59
Scholars have documented a variety of social relationships between U.S. servicemen and local
women, including sexual exploitation and assault, in Axis nations during the war and occupa-
tions. Yuki Tanaka’s Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and
the U.S. Occupation (2002) supplies abundant evidence from U.S. government, Australian, and
Japanese archival documents as well as personal accounts to demonstrate that Japanese as well as
Allied forces participated in systems devised to sexually exploit women and that that U.S. and
other occupation soldiers committed numerous sexual assaults in Japanese communities and
sometimes murdered their victims. Still, scholars often have found it challenging to obtain
historical records about U.S. soldiers’ sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls.
According to Tanaka, historical sources do not reflect the actual number of sexual assaults because
the stigma of rape led many Japanese to decline to report them. The Allies failed to prosecute the
Japanese abuse of women from nations victimized by Japanese imperial aggression because they
themselves committed similar abuses and were complicit with the Japanese in the continued
postwar exploitation of Asian women. Racism certainly influenced attitudes about who were to
be considered legitimate victims of sexual maltreatment.60
U.S. servicemen’s encounters with local people in Germany during and after the war also were
shaped by assumptions about gender and race, and influenced military policy and the enemies’
views of one another. In GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations (2003), Petra
Goedde shows that U.S. servicemen sexually exploited and assaulted local women, though there
also were friendships and romantic relationships, some of which resulted in marriage. She

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demonstrates that gendered interactions between U.S. military personnel and German civilians
(mainly women and children) softened the U.S. occupation in Germany and were important in
establishing good postwar U.S.-German relations.61 Using military court records, Jennifer Evans
in “Protection from the Protector: Court-Martial Cases and the Lawlessness of Occupation in
American-Controlled Berlin, 1945–1948” (2013) finds that alleged sexual assaults of German
women by U.S. soldiers worried military officials that the Americans’ behavior would influence
Germans’ attitudes about U.S. occupation goals of re-education and democratization. German
women’s recourse to U.S. military courts gave the women a voice and an opportunity to tell their
side of the story, and may have made a positive impression about democracy and justice.62
Though it may be unsurprising to some that U.S. soldiers sexually exploited and assaulted
women in Axis countries, scholars show that such transgressions also occurred in Allied nations.
In Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (2007), sociologist of
criminology J. Robert Lilly uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze military court
records on rapes committed by U.S. soldiers in England, France, and Germany, and speculates
that over 17,000 rapes occurred in the three countries in this period.63 In What Soldiers Do: Sex
and the American GI in World War II France (2013), Mary Louise Roberts examines U.S. military-
French relations in Normandy and Brittany following the Allied invasion in June 1944, in
relation to “three kinds of sex between GIs and French women …: romance, prostitution, and
rape.” She demonstrates that American stereotypes of France as a sexually promiscuous society,
U.S. military personnel’s disrespectful treatment (including abuse) of French citizens, and U.S.
military authorities’ countenancing of or inadequate responses to such behavior harmed U.S.-
French relations. And as often occurred in previous and later wars, Americans and French
directed rape accusations at African American soldiers (twenty-five of whom were executed).64
Even apart from sexual violence, the presence of U.S. military personnel could still prove
disruptive. Annette Palmer’s 1983 article on American soldiers in Trinidad shows that black
Trinidadian men resented that Trinidadian women were attracted to African American soldiers,
possibly because of their uniforms, “novelty” as U.S. citizens, and money.65 She argues that “[a]ll
the American soldiers [white and African American] contributed to the destruction of part of the
social fabric of the island,” including the establishment of prostitution “because of the infusion of
money from the American servicemen.”66 Moreover, the colonial governor of Trinidad worried
that envy of the Americans’ apparent prosperity would incite black Trinidadians to challenge
British rule.67 Palmer speculates that British concerns about the disruption of black Trinidadian
society influenced U.S. military policy, leading eventually to the removal of African American
soldiers.68
As is clear from some of the previously cited examples, scholars have shown that U.S. military
personnel’s sexual relations with women of host and occupied nations and military policy
regarding such relations were intimately bound up with U.S. foreign relations. U.S. officials as
well as people in occupied nations sought to utilize the existence of prostitution, sexual assault,
and consensual sexual and romantic relations to support their own goals. Historian and professor
of women’s studies Mire Koikari was among the first scholars to scrutinize the U.S. occupation of
Japan in terms of gender and power, while also considering intersections with ideas about
sexuality, class, race, and nationality. In “Rethinking Gender and Power in the U.S.
Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952” (1999), she demonstrates that Japanese responses to the
occupation, expressed via criticism of Japanese women’s (including prostitutes’) sexual relation-
ships with foreigners and public discussions about the children of U.S. soldiers and Japanese
women, illuminate not only U.S.-Japanese relations but also power relationships in Japanese
society. She also argues that there were opportunities for challenging the occupation as well as the
Japanese governments. For example, the Japanese protested as undemocratic and contrary to

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occupation goals the indiscriminate detention of Japanese women suspected of prostitution as a

means to curb venereal disease among U.S. soldiers.69
Like Koikari’s study, historian Michiko Takeuchi’s article “‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and
Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan,
1945–1952” (2010) reveals that the sexual exploitation of Japanese women was integral to
relations between the United States and Japan, and to the interests of both nations. Americans’
sexual use of Japanese women prostituted by their government acknowledged and reinforced
U.S. dominance of Japan, and also served the goals of “former Japanese colonial officials” to
establish cooperative relations with the occupation government and maintain their own leader-
ship positions. Takeuchi further argues that the U.S. occupation officials’ outlawing of “special
comfort facilities” served other foreign relations purposes: It demonstrated the alleged “moral
superiority of the United States as a conqueror” over “uncivilized Japanese,” and it represented
the alleged “liberation of Japanese women,” enhancing the global image of the U.S. as a
champion of democracy—a key aspect of the United States’ rivalry with the Soviet Union.70
While Takeuchi, Tanaka, and other scholars rightly call attention to the exploitation and
criminal abuse and suffering of Asian women in World War II and beyond, some scholars caution
that the emphasis on women as victims of U.S. military personnel abroad can obscure women’s
agency and consensual relationships with U.S. soldiers. Takeuchi points out that heavy reliance
on “documents” (presumably government sources) may cause scholars to miss women’s voices.71
These scholars’ depictions of the interconnections among gender, sexuality, race, and national
power in World War II and the postwar occupations highlight the complex nature of human
social relationships, many of which defy the easy categorizations that terms such as “victimiza-
tion” convey. Sexual assault and other forms of violence and exploitation were prevalent and
warrant far more attention than they have received, but encounters between American men and
local women did sometimes result in mutual affinity or utility. Takeuchi points out that some
U.S. military personnel were compassionate in their relationships with Japanese women.72
Women did not necessarily see themselves as victims, or solely as victims; they attempted to
exercise agency in a world of multivalent and shifting power relations. Although all social
encounters between Americans and local people took place in the framework of U.S. national
relations with occupied and host governments, residents of these nations negotiated those
structures of power, just as U.S. military personnel, military leaders, and government officials did.

U.S. Servicemen and Families Abroad in the Post-World War II

Occupations and Early Cold War
While concerns about sexual violence and prostitution certainly occupied U.S. military leaders in
the postwar era, so too did the potential effects of other kinds of social interactions. Works
devoted to U.S. servicemen and their families abroad emphasize that the role of gender in U.S.
military in foreign relations extends beyond the encounters of male soldiers and female civilians,
and beyond relations of sex, violence, money, and romance. U.S. military family members,
including male soldiers in their roles as fathers and husbands, both displayed American gender
relations and engaged with occupied and host country citizens in ways defined by gender
hierarchies, and their interactions could support or undermine U.S. power, or even do both at
the same time.
Reports and histories prepared for the U.S. military since the end of the Second World War
recognized American families as influential in positive or harmful ways in relations between the
U.S. armed forces and occupied and host communities. Although created for military use, they
are works of scholarship that cite numerous sources useful for research on U.S. military families

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abroad and their interactions with local peoples.73 A few contemporary works by sociologists
studied U.S. military families, though rarely outside of the United States. An exception to this is
Charlotte Wolf’s study of American military personnel and their families in Ankara, Turkey
between 1965 and 1967. Although Wolf does not foreground analysis of gendered and sexual
relations between Americans (including family members) and local people, she provides insight
into attitudes and social interactions, emphasizing mutual enmity between Americans and Turks
in these years.74
Martha Gravois’s groundbreaking article “Military Families in Germany, 1946–1986: Why
They Came and Why They Stayed” (1986) may be the earliest published historical study to
highlight the diplomatic roles and symbolic significance of U.S. military families in postwar
Germany. Gravois determines that military officials considered families as instrumental in helping
to establish democracy and friendly relations with West Germans during and well after the
occupation.75 My book, Unofficial Ambassadors: U.S. Military Families Overseas and the Cold
War, 1946–1965 (2007), broadens the study of U.S. military families overseas to span multiple
countries and the first two decades of the Cold War. I trace the development of military policy
shortly after World War II to bring servicemen’s wives and children overseas, initially to join
occupation forces in Japan and Germany, and eventually to multiple countries, mostly but not
only in Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. In light of social expectations for family togetherness,
along with the policy of maintaining a large and extensive armed forces abroad for the postwar
occupations and to deter communist nations from dominating U.S.-allied countries, U.S.
military officials considered American families integral to the morale of military men, and they
regarded wives as valuable for their volunteer (or in any case, unpaid) work in support of military
communities. I use government, personal, and popular sources to confirm that many Americans
also considered wives, children, and in some cases servicemen as husbands and fathers to be useful
for establishing friendly relationships with local peoples in occupied and host nations, and thus
useful for gaining acceptance for the foreign military presence and for promoting the U.S. Cold
War anticommunist foreign policy.
As do other scholars of the U.S. military abroad during and after World War II, I find that
assumptions about race and gender permeated relationships among Americans as well as with
residents of occupied and host nations. Thus, the U.S. military and family members often acted in
ways that preserved racial hierarchies in and outside of U.S. military sites and promoted U.S.
domination in occupied and host countries. Yet I also demonstrate that Americans and local
peoples could mitigate U.S. dominance via friendship, goodwill, and resistance.76 In Cold War
Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East
Asia (2015), Koikari offers more perspectives of Okinawan women than do I, showing that
interactions between U.S. military wives and Okinawan women were “diverse and heteroge-
neous,” and that “Okinawan elite women’s encounters with American women … were far more
fluid and negotiable” than those between Okinawan maids and U.S. military wives described in
my book. Koikari also sees American women as striving to overcome “racist and imperialist
sentiments of the past.”77
While the emphasis in my book is on Americans, in GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American
Encounter in 1950s West Germany (2002), Maria Höhn shines light on how contacts between
Americans affiliated with the military and Germans evoked mixed public reactions. While some
Germans enjoyed the company of American servicemen and families and appreciated access to
American culture, conservatives’ reactions to Americans and Americanization revealed assump-
tions about gender, sexuality, race, and national identity. As other authors have found in their
studies of previous and later U.S. wars, Höhn shows that white Americans encouraged Germans’
racism toward African American servicemen. U.S. military policies and culture discouraged

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interracial relationships between African American servicemen and white German women, and
conservative Germans deplored what they considered the immorality and indecency of German
women who socialized with African American men.78
Collectively, these works demonstrate that gender dynamics informed U.S. military family
relations with citizens of occupied and host nations, but not in a single fixed way. Furthermore,
they continually intersected with racial, national, and other dynamics. As with the scholarship on
other eras of U.S. history, more voices from the non-American participants in these relationships
would enhance our understanding of what they meant and how interacting with members of
U.S. military families affected people’s perceptions of the United States and U.S. foreign policy
goals.

The Korean and Vietnam Wars and Their Aftermaths

The scholarship on the Korean and Vietnam wars and their aftermaths covers themes familiar
from earlier sections of this chapter, with attention primarily on sexual relations between U.S.
military personnel and local women through prostitution and intermarriage, and children
fathered by U.S. servicemen. Along with those writing on the U.S. military in Asia in earlier
periods, scholars have found that racial attitudes strongly informed perceptions of all of these
phenomena, for Americans, Koreans, and Vietnamese alike.
Prostitution of women in South Korea (as of 1948 the Republic of Korea [RoK]) began
before the Korean War (1950–1953), continued during it, and endured long after it ended, as the
U.S. military remained as an ally of the RoK to protect against another incursion by North Korea.
Political science professor Katherine H. S. Moon’s Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-
Korea Relations (1997) demonstrates that U.S. servicemen’s sense of entitlement to sexual services
was condoned by some U.S. military officials as well as RoK officials, despite the Korean public’s
resentment. At the same time, many Koreans believed that prostitution would protect privileged
classes of girls and women from sexual assault, and also smooth relations between the two
governments.79 In “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in
South Korea, 1945–1970” (2010), sociologist Seungsook Moon has also found that U.S. and
RoK officials viewed prostitution and cohabitation (considered as preferable to interracial
marriages) as beneficial for the U.S. military and for Korean society.80 In the scholarship on
South Korea and postwar Japan, there is a similar emphasis on how the U.S. and the occupied or
host nation both sought to manage prostitution to achieve their domestic and international goals.
As in earlier wars, Americans married local women and returned with them to the United
States. Yet historian Susan Zeiger argues in Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American
Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (2010) that Americans’ perceptions of the wars and women in
Korea and Vietnam undid “the war bride as a cultural construct.” Romanticized depictions of
World War II war brides as representing “happy endings” to U.S. wars gave way to disillusion-
ment with U.S. Cold War foreign policy and contempt for Korean and Vietnamese wives.
Poverty and prostitution in Korea and Vietnam shaped notions in the United States of the women
as prostitutes and “economic parasites,” though in the context of xenophobia in the 1920s,
Americans also had viewed French wives of World War I veterans as “parasites.”81 Fears that
Vietnamese women were “untrustworthy” since U.S. soldiers could not be certain of their
wartime allegiances could lead to brutality. Historian and journalist Nick Turse presents evidence
(much of it from U.S. military investigations into alleged war crimes) of U.S. servicemen sexually
assaulting and murdering Vietnamese girls and women, asserting that they were collaborating
with enemy men.82 Such perceptions attest to the simultaneous persistence and malleability of

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gender, racial, and national prejudices evoked to explain and justify U.S. foreign policy and
military actions abroad.
Births of children fathered by U.S. servicemen at foreign posts have long been a consequence
of maintaining the U.S. military presence abroad.83 This theme has perhaps been explored most
deeply in the case of children fathered by U.S. soldiers to South Korean and Vietnamese women.
Racial and national prejudices toward these children among populations in all three countries,
and judgments of the mothers as sexually promiscuous and dishonorable to their families and
societies, persisted well after the wars ended. International adoptions of these children could
reinforce racial and national hierarchies, but also could defy customs and laws that upheld racial
segregation.84

Conclusion: Directions and Sources for Future Scholarship

The burgeoning of scholarship that has in the last quarter century established interconnections
among assumptions about gender and sexuality, U.S. military policy, U.S. military personnel’s
and their families’ social interactions with people in occupied and host nations, and U.S.
relations with other nations, raises intriguing possibilities, and suggests many challenging,
exciting opportunities for future research. This chapter has focused on military conflicts that
the U.S. government and people regarded as wars, and that American society and culture
remember as wars.
However, since the late eighteenth century, the U.S. government has frequently deployed
military forces abroad “in situations of military conflict or potential conflict” but not called
wars.85 The vast majority of Americans likely had (and have) little to no awareness of any but the
largest of these military deployments. But what about people in the places of “conflict or potential
conflict”? Were there social interactions between local people and U.S. military personnel that
warrant consideration of gender or sexuality for understanding U.S. military policy, U.S. military
relations with foreign nations, and effects on foreign societies?
It may yet be too early for a well-informed, extensive historical analysis of gender and sexuality
in U.S. military policy and relations with Middle Eastern nations and local inhabitants. Ongoing
U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the survival of their governments
and to assist them in defeating extremist groups such as the Taliban and Islamic State probably
means that U.S. military documents will remain unavailable to researchers for a long time. What
might researchers discover about U.S. military policy in these places with regard to gender and
sexuality in contacts between U.S. military personnel and local people? How do social contacts
between American military personnel and local populations compare with those in previous wars
(including in the U.S. Army campaign in North Africa in World War II)? What contacts do
women U.S. military personnel have with local peoples in the Middle East, and how are these
shaped by ideas of gender, sexuality, and race? Sexual assaults and murders of Iraqi civilians
distressed Iraqis and alarmed many Americans, in contrast to the under-reported U.S. sexual
crimes against civilians in previous eras. The New York Times reported that U.S. military officials
informed American soldiers in Afghanistan that it was not their role to report or intervene to stop
the rapes of boys by Afghani military allies.86 What do these incidents tell us about U.S. foreign
and military policy on and relations with Afghanistan and Iraq?
The topic of U.S. military families abroad still warrants much more research. Millions of
family members have lived in numerous sites abroad, yet English-language scholarship on them
remains scarce. It is commonly assumed that U.S. military families abroad lived in compounds
segregated from occupation and host nation societies. However, when military base housing was
in short supply, Americans resided in neighborhoods among local inhabitants. Residents of

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occupied and host nations worked on military bases, and some Americans ventured into local
communities to socialize in international women's clubs, do volunteer work, shop, and visit
cultural and historical sites.87 Comparative studies of relations between soldiers and their families
in contacts with local people in military occupations could identify distinctions between and
commonalities among them.
Nearly all histories that examine sexuality and gender in U.S. military policies and soldiers’ and
sailors’ relations with people abroad concern heterosexual relationships between military men
and local women, sanctioned and illicit. This is not surprising, since the U.S. military as officially
defined comprised primarily male soldiers for much of the nation’s history. Although Americans
worried about servicemen’s morality and physical health, and about how contacts with local
women might harm the military’s relations with occupied and host nations, there was some
degree of assumption that male-female sexual relationships were inevitable and natural, even
when considered undesirable and dangerous. Yet there are historical accounts of gay and lesbian
military personnel in wars, despite measures to prevent enlistment of and weed out homosexual
men and women in the armed forces.88 Might evidence of same-sex relationships between U.S.
military personnel and residents of occupied and host nations be located in the United States and
abroad? What about evidence of U.S. servicewomen’s relationships with local men abroad?
Paula Fass, a leading historian of children and youth, declared that “there is … no adequate
history without the history of children.”89 Over the last two decades, scholarship on children and
youth has proliferated.90 There is more work to be done to bring children and youth into
accounts of the U.S. military abroad and its relations with occupied and host nation inhabitants.
Another consideration is that scholarship on sexual violence committed by U.S. military per-
sonnel abroad usually refers to “women” as victims. This can obscure the fact that many victims
were not adults, and the likelihood that male children also were victims.
Whatever topics historians write about depend on available sources. This chapter has exam-
ined only scholarship published in English, though there are studies of these topics in other
languages, including German and Japanese. Several of the works examined in this chapter draw
upon sources in languages other than English that document how inhabitants of countries in
which U.S. armed forces were posted experienced the foreign military presence, and how their
governments responded to its residents’ relationships with U.S. military personnel. Scholars of the
U.S. military abroad who seek to go beyond the perspectives and experiences of Americans
would do well to learn the languages of the places where U.S. personnel were stationed; there are
innumerable possibilities for scholarship here.
Still, many of the topics discussed or suggested in this chapter (or overlooked) involve people
who did not leave historical records that would reveal information about the types of social
interactions described here. Or there might be records, but they would be difficult to obtain. Oral
histories of people who experienced World War II and later wars could provide information
about relationships between Americans affiliated with the U.S. military, and their interactions
with local peoples.
There are millions of documents pertaining to the U.S. armed forces in the National Archives
and other government and non-government archives. However, finding aids do not necessarily
readily lead researchers to the sources they seek. Sources on the U.S. military in past eras are not
necessarily labeled as pertaining to “dependents,” “military families,” or other obvious subject
categories, making it especially difficult to locate pertinent records. Additionally, archivists
usually prioritize the declassification and cataloging of sources that are in demand by researchers.
Documents judged “low use” may remain unexamined indefinitely.
Still another possible hindrance to the researcher, though understandable, is the maintenance
of privacy for military personnel and their relatives. While in some places letters and other sources

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deemed personal or sensitive are available to researchers, in other cases they are not, or require
declassification or redaction in order to be used. Sources pertaining to alleged crimes committed
by U.S. military personnel against people in occupied and host nations may have mysteriously
disappeared.91
Tenacious digging as well as the assistance of knowledgeable and helpful archivists are essential
to locating information about military personnel, their families, and relationships with local
peoples abroad. Scholars uncovering previously unexamined sources in the archives, or reading
known sources with attention to gendered and sexual aspects, could discover new avenues for
investigation.

Notes
1 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (Boston: South End Press,
1983), 19; Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 81. Also see Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing
Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2 Emily S. Rosenberg, “Gender,” Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (June 1990): 116, 118–19; Joan
Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2, 11,
32, 48.
3 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1st ed. (Cleveland: World Pub. Co.,
1959).
4 See Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American
History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American
History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 26–27. Here Stoler discusses
the emergence and influence of scholarship on American culture and empire, citing Amy Kaplan’s
essay “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in
Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E Pease (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993).
5 Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by
Empire, 1.
6 Ibid., 7, 24. Stoler takes “transfer points of power” from Michel Foucault’s original wording, “a dense
transfer point for relations of power,” in The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction (New York:
Vintage, 1978), 103.
7 Betty L. Alt, Following the Flag: Marriage and the Modern Military (Westport, CT: Praeger Security
International, 2006), 2.
8 Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 3.
9 Holly A. Mayer, “Bearing Arms, Bearing Burdens: Women Warriors, Camp Followers, and Home-
Front Heroines of the American Revolution,” in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives,
1775–1830, eds. Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 172. Mayer quotes Nina Baym in the statement on “‘masculine’ ideals rather than
‘feminine materiality,’” from American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New
Brunswick, NJ: [n.p.], 1995), 11. The endnotes for Mayer’s essay contain citations for numerous
works on women in the American Revolution, ranging from the nineteenth century to the early
2000s.
10 Mayer, “Bearing Arms, Bearing Burdens,” 172.
11 Alt, Following the Flag, 3, 9. See also Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American
Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 3–4.
12 Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136–37.
13 Mayer, “Bearing Arms, Bearing Burdens,” 177–78, 179, 180, 182.

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14 Victor Meladze, “U.S. Masculinity Crisis: Militarism and War,” Journal of Psychohistory 42, no. 2 (Fall
2014): 95–96.
15 Lawrence R. Murphy, “The Enemy Among Us: Venereal Disease Among Union Soldiers in the Far
West, 1861–1865,” Civil War History 31, no. 3 (1985): 259, 264.
16 Ibid., 263.
17 Brian DeLay, “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic
History 39, no. 5 (Fall 2015): 928.
18 Patricia Y. Stallard, Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian-Fighting Army, with a Foreword by Darlis
A. Miller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991 [originally published in 1978 by the Old
Army Press, Fort Collins]); Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western
Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Anne Bruner Eales, Army Wives on the American
Frontier: Living by the Bugles (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1996). Although the War Department did
not officially prohibit enlisted men from marrying, military authorities did disapprove of and
discourage it and did not provide the same level of support to enlisted men’s families that officers’
families enjoyed. Nevertheless, relatives of enlisted men did accompany them to Western posts. See
Stallard, Glittering Misery, 53.
19 Smith, The View from Officers' Row, 76; Eales, Army Wives on the American Frontier, 155.
20 Ibid., xvii, 13.
21 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), 21, 23.
22 Ibid., 15–19.
23 Ibid., quotation on 35, 23–35.
24 Eales also mentions that brothels “hired mostly Irish, blacks, and Mexicans.” Army Wives on the
American Frontier, 144.
25 Stallard, Glittering Misery, 70; Smith, The View from Officers’ Row, 80. Smith subsequently states
that “[l]ike the Banning Committee testimony, surgeons’ venereal disease records remained silent
on officers” (80).
26 Quotation from Smith, The View from Officers’ Row, 80. On army officers’ and enlisted men’s
relationships with Native American women, see Smith, The View from Officers’ Row, 78–89; and
Eales, Army Wives on the American Frontier, 102, 152.
27 Smith, The View from Officers’ Row, 79. She mentions two exceptions: “Lieutenant D. H. Rucker of
the First Dragoons married a ‘civilized’ Cherokee, and army surgeon Washington Mathews married a
Hidatsa woman” (86).
28 Ibid., 86.
29 Eales, Army Wives on the American Frontier, 148–52.
30 Smith, Glittering Misery, 67–72.
31 Ibid., 72–74.
32 Smith, The View from Officers’ Row, 182.
33 Betty Sowers Alt refers to wives and children journeying to Cuba and the Philippines during and
shortly following the Spanish-American War, but does not examine them in depth. Alt, Following the
Flag, 9.
34 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 30–31.
35 Paul A. Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Gender Politics of Prostitution during the
Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire, 368.
36 Ibid., 373. See also Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 33–45.
37 Ibid., 378–79.
38 Ibid., 396.
39 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 178.
40 Ibid., 186, 188.

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41 Donna Alvah, “U.S. Military Wives in the Philippines, from the Philippine War to World War II,” in
A Companion to Women’s Military History, eds. Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining (Leiden,
Netherlands: Brill, 2012), 431–52.
42 Richard B. Meixsel, Clark Field and the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines 1919–1942 (Quezon
City, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 2002). Meixsel frequently brings into his account American
wives and children, as well as U.S. servicemen’s relationships with Filipinas.
43 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
44 Nancy K. Bristow’s Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York
University Press, 1996) is a key work that focuses on progressive reformers’ ideas and concerns about
masculinity and sexuality in their efforts to shape American soldiers’ character at army camps and in
other programs in the United States during World War I.
45 Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 109–10.
46 Ibid., 103, 107, 131, 133–135.
47 Ibid., 109–10.
48 Ibid., 108.
49 Elizabeth Gagen, “Homespun Manhood and the War against Masculinity: Community Leisure on
the US Home Front, 1917–1919,” Gender, Place, and Culture 16, no. 1 (February 2009): 33.
50 Ibid., 31.
51 Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 97–98.
52 Douglas F. Habib, “Chastity, Masculinity, and Military Efficiency: The United States Army in
Germany, 1918–1923,” International History Review XXVIII, no. 4 (December 2006): 737.
53 Ibid., 737.
54 Ibid., 740.
55 Ibid., 746.
56 Ibid., 744–45, 747–48.
57 Erika Kuhlman, “American Doughboys and German Fräuleins: Sexuality, Patriarchy, and Privilege in
the American Occupied Rhineland, 1918–23,” Journal of Military History 71, no. 4 (October 2007):
1089, 1099.
58 Ibid., 1077, 1080, 1090–91, 1094, 1104–06.
59 On the complexity of relationships in the U.S. territory of Hawaii, see Beth Bailey and David Farber,
The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992).
60 Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S.
Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002).
61 Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003). Also see Goedde, “From Villains to Victims: Fraternization and the
Feminization of Germany, 1945–1947,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 1–20.
62 Jennifer Evans, “Protection from the Protector: Court-Martial Cases and the Lawlessness of
Occupation in American-Controlled Berlin, 1945–1948,” in GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic,
Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence, eds. Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef
Junker, Publications of the German Historical Institute (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2013): 212–33. Also on U.S. servicemen in Germany and the complexities of relationships with
Germans, see John Willoughby, “The Sexual Behavior of American GIs during the Early Years of the
Occupation of Germany,” Journal of Military History 62, no. 1 (January 1998): 155–74; and Remaking
the Conquering Heroes: The Social and Geopolitical Impact of the Post-War American Occupation of Germany
(New York: Palgrave, 2001).
63 J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 11–12. This book originally appeared in French in 2003, and was also
published in Italian in 2004.

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64 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2, 7, 10.
65 Annette Palmer, “The Politics of Race and War: Black American Soldiers in the Caribbean Theater
during the Second World War,” Military Affairs 47, no. 2 (April 1983): 59.
66 Ibid., 61.
67 Ibid., 59.
68 Ibid., 60–61.
69 Mire Koikari, “Rethinking Gender and Power in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Gender
and History 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 316, 320–30.
70 Michiko Takeuchi, “‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific
Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” in Over There: Living with the
U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, eds. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 94–95.
71 Ibid., 102.
72 Ibid., 104.
73 Some examples from the U.S. Army: European Command, Office of the Chief Historian, Domestic
Economy (Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1947); Oliver J. Frederiksen, United States Army, Europe,
Headquarters, Historical Division, The American Military Occupation of Germany 1945–1953 (1953);
and D. J. Hickman, U.S. Army, Europe, Headquarters, Operations Division, Historical Section, The
United States Army in Europe 1953–1963 (1964), all available at the U.S. Army Military History
Institute; European Command, Negro Personnel in the European Command 1 January 1946–30 June 1950
(Karlsruhe, Germany, 1952), available at the U.S. Army Center for Military History.
74 Charlotte Wolf, Garrison Community: A Study of an Overseas American Military Colony (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing, 1969).
75 Martha Gravois, “Military Families in Germany, 1946–1986: Why They Came and Why They Stay,”
Parameters, Journal of the U.S. Army War College 16, no. 4 (1986): 57–67. Also see Martha Gravois,
“Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Wiener Schnitzel: Army Families in Germany, 1946–1986,” M.A. thesis
(Shippensburg University, 1986).
76 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965
(New York: New York University Press, 2007).
77 Mire Koikari, Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and
Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 28.
78 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
79 Katherine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), 36–38.
80 Seungsook Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South
Korea, 1945–1970,” in Over There, 39–77. Moon’s essay “Camptown Prostitution and the Imperial
SOFA: Abuse and Violence against Transnational Camptown Women in South Korea,” in Over There
(337–65) discusses sex work in South Korea after the end of the Cold War. She finds that more
recently, prostitutes are more likely to be Filipina and Russian women rather than Korean. On
prostitution in Asia more generally, see Saundra Pollack Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus’s pictorial
analysis in Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The Free Press,
1992); Michael Cullen Green’s Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire
after World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
81 Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 7, 205.
82 Ibid., 215; Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York:
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2013).
83 In addition to the previously mentioned works by Kuhlman and Zeiger, history and women’s studies
professor Mary Renda finds reference in the 1920s to “illegitimate children of soldiers and native
women” in U.S.-occupied Haiti. Heide Fehrenbach has studied German and U.S. responses to white
German women’s children fathered by African American soldiers. See Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti:

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Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001), 215; Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar
Germany and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
84 Just a few scholarly sources on these topics are: Robert S. McKelvey, The Dust of Life: America’s
Children Abandoned in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); James M. Freeman
and Nguyễn Đình Hữu, Voices from the Camps: Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2003); Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of
International Adoption (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015); Alison Varzally, Children of
Reunion: Vietnamese Children and the Politics of Family Migrations (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2017).
85 Richard F. Grimmett, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2009,”
Congressional Research Service, 27 January 2010, “Summary.” Obtained from Air University,
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl32170.pdf, accessed December 17, 2016. Grimmett
states that he does not include “Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of U.S. military
units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.”
86 Joseph Goldstein, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,” New York
Times, September 20, 2015.
87 Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors, 102–16, 153–55.
88 Allan Bérubé alludes to this but predominantly discusses relationships between U.S. servicemen (and
between servicewomen to a lesser extent) in Coming Out under Fire: A History of Gay Men and Women
in World War II (New York: Plume, 1990), 192.
89 Paula S. Fass, “Childhood and Memory,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 2 (2010):
162.
90 Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten, Foreword by Robert Coles (New York:
New York University Press, 2002) is a forerunner of historical scholarship focusing on children and
youth in war. Also see James Marten, “Children and War,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the
Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Routledge, 2013), 142–57.
91 Turse, Kill Anything that Moves, 21. Turse’s account of the process of obtaining information about U.S.
military crimes against civilians in Vietnam exemplifies dedication to historical investigation (14–22).

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 17
HOMOS, WHORES, RAPISTS,
AND THE CLAP
American Military Sexuality Since the
Revolutionary War
Donna B. Knaff*
former chief historian, women in military service for america memorial

If Hawaii was a sanctuary for some men returning from combat, then—in the profane
logic of wartime—Hotel Street was the sanctum sanctorum… It was where the men
came to get drunk, to have their pictures taken with an ersatz hula girl, to get tattooed.
Hotel Street was where the brothels were.
—Beth Bailey and David Farber, “Hotel Street Sex,” The First Strange Place: The
Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii1

Since its inception, the U.S. military has promised that it would “make men out of” the young
men who joined it. “GEE!! I wish I were A Man,” says a windblown young woman on a
recruiting poster from World War I; “I’d join THE NAVY.” Below the portrait of the young
woman in a sailor’s uniform reads the real message of the recruitment: “BE A MAN AND DO
IT.” One of the implications of the poster, that a male will become “A MAN” by joining the
service, provides the critical subtext of military enlistment: that the military is the quintessential
masculine enterprise, and that it will impart masculinity to those who join.2 Traditionally, many
men have signed up for this reason; yet, their very search for masculinity provided the greatest
difficulty for the military they joined. Young men who were in a quest to prove themselves “A
MAN”—and those who, as Beth Bailey and David Farber point out, sought solace either from
the memories or the prospect of combat—often looked to sex as a means to achieve both goals.
Prostitution nevertheless affected combat readines in staggering ways; “venereal disease,” spread
by those who performed and patronized sex work, rendered many troops hospitalized and
undeployable. The Medical Corps’ motto, “Conserve the Fighting Strength,” meant discharging
the fewest people possible for health or other reasons, however, so venereal disease remained its
greatest focus for many years.
Over the course of the twentieth century, though, a greater awareness of sexuality and sexual
practices began to change that focus. While the U.S. military had a long record of homosexual
service members and usually sought to discharge them, policies excluding lesbians and gays in the
military intensified during and after WWII, when roughly 16 million Americans were in uni-
form. The enlistment of women in large numbers during that war further problematized policies

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on sexuality. Early military prosecutions focused on sodomy, usually defined as anal and some-
times oral sex between men, and as of the early 1990s including anal and oral sex between a man
and a woman. Occurring as it did during the sexual revolution, the Vietnam era presented new
aspects of gender and sexuality, and military women acquired heightened significance as both
models of femininity and objects of men’s sexual gaze. Legal challenges to exclusion and
separation of lesbian and gay personnel arose by the early 1980s. In 1993, the military inaugurated
the controversial policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT); it went through a contentious
repeal process in 2011. After thousands of discharges under DADT and other policies, in June of
2015, the Department of Defense (DOD) codified legal protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual
service members. As of June 30, 2016, the DOD instituted protections for transgender service
members, who may no longer be involuntarily separated, discharged, or denied reenlistment
solely on the basis of gender identity. Service members currently on duty will be able to serve
openly.3 Modern concerns about the sexuality of U.S. military members have generally shifted to
the incidence, prevention, and perpetrator punishment of Military Sexual Violence (MSV),
which affects both men and women.
In many ways, the U.S. military has continued to fight very old battles concerning the
sexuality of its service members; in other ways, the battles are either new or have taken a
dramatic and sinister turn in terms of screening for and regulating “undesirable” sexual
behavior. The military’s struggles fall into three major categories: homosexuality, “venereal”
disease, and women’s sexuality; future study will no doubt include Military Sexual Violence,
and all of these subjects have at least some overlap. Scholars treat these matters through the lens
of social, gender, cultural, racial, military, or medical history and in academic or not-so-
academic ways; each source, however, brings a piece of the puzzle to the picture of military
sexuality as a whole.

Homosexuality
For the modern reader, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell so recently in the rear mirror, homosexuality
may be one of the first aspects of sexuality that comes to mind in an historical treatment of military
members’ identities and practices. Journalist Randy Shilts takes up the history of the military’s
battle against homosexuality in his book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S.
Military (1993). This work, which he describes as “a piece of investigative reporting,” rather than
a scholarly work, attempts to create a clear but long-range history and fill in many chronological
blanks concerning homosexuality in the forces. Starting his timeline in 1778, Shilts describes the
drumming-out of the first known homosexual soldier from the Continental Army, moving
quickly through the late 1700s, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II, before
going into detail about military policies on homosexual service during the Vietnam War.4 As
Shilts notes in this section, during the Vietnam era, in forty-nine of the fifty states, confessing to
a homosexual act was to confess to a felony, sometimes punishable by up to twenty years in
prison. Yet many men took the popular advice about avoiding the draft by either admitting
to homosexuality or by being a “hoaxosexual,” someone who merely claimed to be gay in order
to avoid military service.5 Shilts also recounts the DOD’s oxymoronic actions: “lip service to the
idea that homosexual persons are unfit for military service” versus “the growing need for
manpower in Vietnam.”6 He uses Vietnam-era DOD discharge data to show the explicit and
implicit policies on homosexual service—then shows data that demonstrate how the military
overlooked homosexuality as long as it needed recruits or draftees in all times of war. In this
sweeping, nearly eight-hundred-page work, Shilts traces that idea through the 1980s and up to
1990. While not internally cited (though sourced by chapter at the end), Shilts’s research ranges

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from DOD policy to a variety of secondary sources, and his interviews with what he claims were
more than one thousand people for the book provide a direct and personal insight into the effects
of the military’s policies that is useful for the scholar. Shilts’s work, however, though still highly
regarded for the astounding breadth of its primary sources and its reach back even to
Revolutionary times, may have limited utility to the academic precisely because of the loose
citation style and the lack of highly focused, in-depth analysis in what is ultimately a journalistic
work for a lay audience.
Documenting the military’s attempts to regulate homosexuality, and drawing heavily on
Shilts’s work, is Rand’s National Defense Research Institute study, Sexual Orientation and U.S.
Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of
Defense in 1993 in order to help formulate the Executive Order that became DADT. Using
much of Shilts’s and Allan Bérubé’s (referred to later this chapter) histories in order to historically
contextualize its work, the Rand study’s ostensible aim was to “end discrimination based on
sexual orientation,” and to define sodomy in its historical military context and in relation to the
Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).7 The study explores military policy regarding
homosexuals from the Articles of War of 1916, which represented the first complete revision
of military law in more than one hundred years, to the just-pre-DADT era and investigates both
the development of the definitions of sodomy and its prosecution.8 It also scrutinizes the
military’s historical tendency to apply sodomy laws and regulations unequally to homosexual
and heterosexual service members, and considers scientific, legal, and military data and active-
duty military opinion polls concerning homosexuality.9 The study draws parallels between
integration of “out” homosexuals and African American racial integration in the 1940s—a
popular comparison. It also notes that the military codified the pre-WWII practice of separating
gay men from service, in twenty-four separate revisions of regulations concerning homosexuality
between 1941 and 1945.10 The study is especially useful to the scholar for the polls that
queried early 1990s active-duty personnel about both sexual behavior and attitudes, even
concerning HIV, “private sexual behavior between consenting adults,” and “Homosexual
Behavior Among Self-Identified Heterosexuals.”11 The Rand study draws a more nuanced
picture of both sexuality and of military policies regarding sexuality than did previous military
studies. The study is remarkable, however, for the difference between its stated purpose—ending
discrimination—and the ways the military used the DADT policy to discharge thousands of
LGBT personnel during its duration.
Continuing the arc of examination of governmental policies, Margot Canaday’s The Straight
State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2009) links national identity and
sexuality and reveals a military with much fuller knowledge of the sexual practices of its members
than the Rand study might suggest. Set within her examination of government policies at large,
especially those related to civilian immigration, Canaday’s analysis points out that while historians
generally regard WWII as “the war when the military ‘uncovered’ sexual perversion as a large-
scale problem for the institution,” Army and Navy records produced during and after the First
World War reveal a military establishment well-acquainted with homosexuality within its ranks.
Canaday’s observation of the military’s growing distinction between “perversion” as “less as a
marker of degeneracy … and more as behavior associated with a psychopathic type” sets the
military in the cultural context of the U.S. government in general.12 In her chapter “Managing
Sexual Stigma in the World War I-Era Military, 1917–1933,” Canaday describes how sexual
behavior and even rape between men, often those who identified vehemently as heterosexual,
characterized an organization not yet fully equipped to identify or prosecute this kind of conduct,
or even to draw distinctions between the “disparate sexual cultures” present in the service.13
Filling in the blanks left by the Rand study, Canaday notes that between the two World Wars, the

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military tried to screen and exclude homosexual men from service by using contemporary
biological theories about the causes and manifestations of homosexuality; it began to re-characterize
sexual behavior with psychological or psychiatric traits. Although there was official policy during
the interwar period that homosexuals required courts-martial under the Articles of War, she
observes that the military more frequently discharged them administratively under a “Section
VIII” discharge for unsuitability.
As Canaday discusses in her chapter “Homo-Hetero Binarism, Federal Welfare Policy, and
the 1944 GI Bill,” these discharges could theoretically be honorable, but discharges in case of
psychopathic behavior usually fell under the category of “less than honorable,” or “blue,”
discharges.14 This discrepancy led to highly unequal treatment, both for male veterans discharged
under these conditions—discharges reached their highest percentage during WWII—and for
women, already suffering fewer material benefits due to the Veterans Administration’s (VA)
qualification of them as being, by definition, not heads of families. Canaday’s chapter “Women’s
Integration, Homosexual Tendencies, and the Cold War Military, 1947–1959” traces how the
early Cold War services focused on lesbianism, rather than ignoring, conflating, or subsuming it
under other categories, as it had in the past.15 Because “women in the service threatened the
special relationship between men, soldiering, and martial citizenship,” Canaday notes, “provision[s]
on homosexual tendencies generated enormous witch hunts that were used not just to police sex,
but female personnel more generally.”16 In order to preserve the gender hierarchy in citizenship,
the state “constitute[d] lesbianism” in such a way that “women in the service as a class” suffered
most grievously.17 Far beyond Shilts’s “investigative journalism” and the Rand study’s concise and
pragmatic work, The Straight State uses citizenship as a lens through which to perceive the military
against a greater governmental backdrop.
Narrower in focus than Canaday’s work, and much more personal in its examination of how
military policies affected service members, Allan Bérubé’s 1990 work, Coming Out Under Fire:
The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, broke new ground when it was published.
Bérubé focuses primarily on men’s military experiences, basing his analysis on papers and
photographs of gay GIs—significantly, salvaged almost literally from the dumpster of history in
San Francisco in the 1970s. While Canaday rigorously researches her sources, Bérubé discusses
WWII military demographics with sometimes-questionable figures: He quotes the number of
servicewomen in WWII at 270,000, though the figure usually cited is 350,00018; he cites
American Indian participation in WWII at 19,000, while the Department of Defense cites
44,000.19 He also uses Alfred Kinsey’s wartime surveys as a framework to estimate at least
650,000 to as many as 1.6 million (male) homosexual soldiers (perhaps a more supportable figure
than some of Bérubé’s other statistics).20 Bérubé’s wide-ranging and interesting synthesis of the
letters of gay GIs in WWII explores the spectrum of experience, from “Getting In” and “Fitting
In” to the “Gay Refuge” of GI drag shows for servicemen, and how “Gay Life” was subject to
“Vice Control.” He also explores the critical topic of how psychiatry “discover[ed]” the Gay GI
—much as Canaday discusses how the military “uncovered” homosexuality in its ranks, and
equally important as it pertained to later military policies.21 In such policies, military officials
usually disregarded new psychiatric interpretations that it characterized as being positively
disposed to homosexuality, such as the Department of the Navy’s acknowledgement that many
“physicians and penologists” categorized homosexuality as “a medical rather than a criminolo-
gical problem.”22 The military likewise disregarded psychiatric opinions negatively disposed
toward the Section VIII “blue discharge”—“for the discharge of men with ‘undesirable habits
or traits of character,’” which during the war, as Canaday notes, came to include homosexuals.23
While Bérubé’s history is both compelling and entertaining, its approach is not scholarly, and he
advances little if any argument.

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Historian Leisa D. Meyer takes up where Bérubé leaves off, fleshing out how conflicts over
military policies came to include lesbians and other women in her 1996 book, Creating G.I. Jane:
Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II. Written partly in response to
the debate over the then-current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” policy, Meyer’s work
posits 1990s military policy on sexuality as comparable to 1940s policy. She notes in her Prologue
that “because the military is a critical bastion of state power[,] and service within it a determinant
of the rights of citizens, allowing heterosexual women, lesbians, and gay men to participate within
it fully and without harassment or discrimination increases expectations that those same groups
will be treated with fairness and respect in the public sector.”24 Meyer’s careful, thoughtful, and
thorough analysis explores the “women’s army,” created in 1942, as a means to evaluate the
debates “over men’s and women’s ‘proper’ roles during wartime,” and as a way to understand
“the impact of World War II on gender and sexual ideology … and sexual identity.”25 Meyer
investigates how racist Women’s Army Corps (WAC) policies affected African American female
soldiers, explains how gendered attitudes toward women prompted a slander campaign against
the WAC, and in each chapter of the book dissects how women’s new gender and military roles
affected both their sexuality and the ways others perceived it. Meyer includes an excerpt from one
male soldier’s letter to a female soldier friend: “There is no absolute means of forcing [Waacs26] to
become playthings for the officers, but the power is there to make things unpleasant if they
don’t,” the soldier writes, ably forecasting the modern struggle with the abuse of power often
inherent in Military Sexual Violence.27
Seemingly in response to Bérubé’s primary focus on men, and as one of the first scholars to
investigate military women’s sexuality in general and that of military lesbians in particular, Meyer
includes a chapter, “Protecting Whom? Regulating Sexuality in the Army and the WAC.” In it,
she details how attempts to regulate female soldiers’ sexuality differed from those regulating male
soldiers’ sexuality. Meyer notes, as does Nancy Bristow in her study of “venereal disease” in
WWI, that African American women, especially prostitutes, were constructed as having greater
“sexual immorality” and being more sexually promiscuous than their white counterparts.28
Meyer delves further into Army treatment of Black Wacs who indulged in (or who were
suspected of indulging in) behavior that would give them venereal disease.29 Likewise, she
investigates Army reactions to “illegitimate” pregnancy, noting that the Army encouraged
abstinence and was, in theory, highly resistant to the distribution of contraceptives and education
on how to use them.30 Army struggles about how to regulate (i.e., discharge) pregnant Wacs were
complicated by the fact that the VA refused to consider pregnancy a medical ailment; “it was
merely a ‘normal condition,’” as Meyer explains.31 The Army contrasted regulation of service-
women’s heterosexual behavior against that of men in two ways: First, it considered men’s
heterosexual activities a sign of virility. Men had little or no responsibility either for the health and
well-being of their female sexual partners or for any children they might have fathered; those
women were “bad” and deserved no social protection. Second, unmarried Wacs’ sexual absti-
nence “protected” them from what Meyer terms “the dangers associated with heterosexual
behavior.”32 Ultimately, while entering the Army did not give Wacs rights equal to those of
male soldiers, it did give servicewomen “economic independence and freedom from familial
control,” encouraging many of them to become sexually active during the war. This sexual
activity, and its comparison to men’s, provided yet another clash in the military’s efforts to
regulate service members’ behavior. Meyer’s work is indispensable to understanding military
women’s gender and sexuality in WWII.
Broader in historical scope and different in its aim than both Meyer and Bérubé’s works is Steve
Estes’s 2007 book, Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out, a narrative history based on oral
histories with not only LGBT veterans from WWII, but also Korea, the Cold War, the Vietnam

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War, the Gulf War, and wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. While not going into nearly as
much depth as Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire, which Estes terms “most instructive and inspira-
tional” for his own research, Ask and Tell benefits from the racial, ethnic, and experiential diversity
of its interviewees, including Latino, African American, and Native American veterans.33 Ask and
Tell also presents interviews with both wartime draftees and career military personnel, including
“combat heroes” and “soldiers who faced dishonorable discharges simply because of their
sexuality.”34 Estes’s section on the DADT era situates that ban as “the most public stage” of a
“continually reconsidered and revised” policy on openly gay and lesbian military service.35 The
book shuns anonymity for its interview subjects because, according to Estes, it tends to “undercut
the credibility of the sources and … reinforce the hidden nature of gay service and sacrifice,”
although multiple other authors, including Bérubé and Mary Ann Humphrey, have also included
real names in their works.36 (In Humphrey’s 1988 book, for instance, which includes testimonies
from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the “Post-Vietnam Years and the Present,”
only twelve of the forty-two total veterans use aliases.) Further, while Estes includes female veterans
frequently among the other chapters, “The Women’s War for Inclusion” is a refreshing addition to
mostly male accounts of military service.37 Estes’s brief history of women’s roles in the armed forces
draws parallels between the implicit policies of the pre-DADT era and those of a military that did
not fully integrate women until the mid-1970s.38 Although sometimes presentist, overly general,
and lacking in-depth analysis, the book contains insights into the arguments for and against LGBT
military service, using the testimony of service members who personally felt the effects of those
arguments and the policies arising from them.
In contrast to Estes’s work, Judith Butler’s 1997 book, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, provides an unparalleled example of the theoretical, as opposed to anecdotal or
secondary-sourced, approach to sexuality. Undertaking the parsing of the cultural theory behind
the military’s resistance to homosexuality, Butler particularly dissects these ideas in her chapter
“Contagious Word: Paranoia and ‘Homosexuality’ in the Military.” Whereas Estes begins each
chapter with a bit of history, then lets each gay or lesbian author tell his or her story, Butler
forefronts the question “whether citizenship requires the repression of homosexuality” by
analyzing homosexual service in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In this social and cultural
scenario, identity in its most abstract form—a service member’s announcement of her/his
sexuality—threatens the rights (if not the responsibilities) of that person. As the then-DADT
military attempts to sanction “homosexual speech,” Butler characterizes the military as “a zone of
partial citizenship,” wherein some features of citizenship are preserved, while others, like sexual
identity—and voicing it verbally—are suspended.39 By proposing “the term as unspeakable,” the
military must repeatedly propose the term. It then constructs the homosexual as “one whose
definition is to be left to others.” Butler carefully deconstructs “homosexual” in this context,
emphasizing that the term was only “banished” in the context of self-identification, in a way that
“engage[d] in a circularity of fabrication and censorship” exemplary of paranoia.40 In a brilliant
and complex analysis, Butler charges that “the self-descriptive utterance of ‘homosexuality’ …
infects its [military] listener—immaculately—through the ear,” and, as its own form of sexually
transmitted infection, was thus the crux of the ban on LGBT service.41 Her theoretical break-
down of the origins of fears about homosexuality provides insight into the homosexual witch
hunts that have plagued the American military throughout its history, principally since WWI.

“Venereal” Disease
Butler’s figurative “sexually transmitted” infection drew upon a long history of literal sexual
transmission of disease that was another bane of the military’s existence—quite probably since the

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existence of armies. The study of the military’s connection to venereal disease also provides access
to the study of military social history, as military medical authorities’ racial prejudice severely
influenced research and treatment of sexually transmitted infection.
Allan Brandt’s 1985 book, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United
States Since 1880, was perhaps the first book to discuss the U.S. Government’s efforts, since the
late nineteenth century, to make “military camps in the United States safe … from the twin
threats of immorality and disease.”42 Venereal disease threatened military efficiency and health,
but also “symbolized both moral failure and social decay” in the early 1900s.43 Brandt relates the
War Department’s struggles to contain the prostitution, alcohol abuse, and venereal infections
endemic to military camps and their environs; the rate of venereal disease before WWI was close
to 30 percent (in contrast to the also-shocking figure of almost 20 percent during the Civil
War).44 Reformers and “social hygienists” began a campaign to secure “wholesome” environ-
ments for soldiers and emphasize morality and efficiency. Brandt recounts that the government
created the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) in 1917, a few days after the
American declaration of war, and analyzes the efforts of the CTCA to provide physical activities,
regulated and chaperoned interactions with “pure” women, and sexual instruction.45 In its
pursuits, the CTCA had to redefine “masculine” (virile) behavior, reinforce “feminine” (chaste)
conduct, and invoke a strict moral code, which underwent stringent testing in WWI.46 In
framing a policy about sexual behavior and regulation of prostitution, the services relied heavily
on military medical authorities, who emphasized prophylaxis stations. These stations fore-
grounded discussions of sexuality but were of questionable efficacy. Ultimately, Brandt says,
“The venereal disease campaign during the war forced a general consciousness of sexual behavior
unprecedented in American life.” A reliance on medicine also produced a higher status for
physicians, who defined and proscribed sexual behavior, and new chemical and pharmaceutical
treatments. These efforts, Brandt says, served to define “Progressivism,” but pitted science against
morality—an opposition that lasted well into the next world war.47
In his chapter, “Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet: Venereal Disease in the Age of Antibiotics,” Brandt
discusses the critical discovery of penicillin’s effectiveness in curing venereal disease, and its effect
on not only wartime and postwar sexual mores, but also military and public health regulations.48
His argument—that the magic bullet of antibiotics “cannot combat the social and cultural
determinants of these infections”—leads him to examine the evolution of the policies and
procedures instituted in WWI. In WWII, the military continued its dependence on the techni-
ques of keeping soldiers busy and afraid of venereal disease.49 Since penicillin was not in wide-
spread military use until 1944, those methods seemed apt, but as Brandt quotes one medical
officer, “The sex act cannot be made unpopular.” The WWII military thus also relied heavily on
prevention and prophylaxis, not just chemical but also through the use of condoms—an
“important reversal of WWI policy.”50 Brandt also discusses regulations like the May Act,
which was designed to control prostitution around military bases, and the medical and social
debates around “private practitioners,” or “Victory Girls,” young women who were not profes-
sional prostitutes but had sex with servicemen for free, as a sort of charitable contribution to the
war effort.51 Because venereal disease was ostensibly no longer a threat, sexuality itself had
become the problem, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, “the three ‘p’s’: permissiveness,
promiscuity, and the Pill,” led to increased sexual activity and rapidly climbing rates of venereal
infection.52 Brandt outlines the evolution of attitudes and public health regulations through the
1970s, moving from the diseases eradicated by penicillin to those unaffected by it, such as herpes.
He then sets up his last chapter, on the AIDS epidemic.53
Published ten years after Brandt’s updated work, in 1996, Nancy K. Bristow’s Making Men
Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War devotes itself to exploring the actions and effects of

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progressivism and the CTCA during WWI. Drawing on Brandt’s chapters on the same subject,
and covering much of the same material, Bristow nonetheless expands the subject to include a
more detailed examination of CTCA activities. Arguing that an exploration of the CTCA and its
connection to progressivism offers us the opportunity to view the Committee as a specific
example of progressivism and the power of its reformers in the first two decades of the twentieth
century, Bristow lays out progressive efforts to raise standards of decency among soldiers and in
their encampments, in order to combat social chaos.54 She expands Brandt’s history of the
CTCA, to show how progressives envisioned remaking the military training environment as
an initial step to transforming American culture as a whole through domestic reform agendas.55
Bristow divides her analysis into several chapters, beginning with the “masculine and feminine
ideals that shaped the commission’s programs”; these gender ideals had to integrate with “female
infiltration of the political sphere,” which threatened male middle-class notions of masculinity.56
Taking her analysis into gender history, Bristow investigates how women’s piety and purity,
especially sexual purity, were vital to being a “true woman,” and CTCA involvement was part of
being a protector of home and family.57 The Commission helped transform female domesticity
and favored women’s extensive participation in the war effort by redefining, for both middle- and
working-class men, their relationship with women, such that they could work with, rather than
have domination over, women.58 It also perpetuated what Bristow refers to as the CTCA’s own
“white, urban, middle-class vision.”59
Like Brandt, Bristow discusses CTCA programs and their demobilization as the war drew to a
close, during which time its connections to the military lessened, and as the CTCA attempted to
make greater connections to American morality and citizenship.60 She also takes on the contra-
dictions between the CTCA’s stated purpose and its methods, exploring gender and class and
African Americans’ resistance to those contradictions and the reformers’ cultural nationalism. In
her very effective chapter, “Repression and Resistance: African Americans and the Progressives’
National Community,” Bristow provides a detailed and useful history of the disparity in treat-
ment between African American and white soldiers. This inequity was especially apparent in
“social hygiene” education for African American soldiers. Bristow notes the CTCA’s under-
standing of the importance of educating the African American population about social hygiene,
which conflicted with its belief that African Americans might prove uneducable; CTCA sexual
education programs for black soldiers thus lagged far behind those for white soldiers.61 Bristow
also analyzes how stereotypes of African American women contributed to perceptions of them as
“unmoral” [sic] and as general carriers of venereal disease.62 She explores the military assumption
that all black soldiers returning from leave had engaged in sexual activities with infected “Negro”
women, and black soldiers were thus required to take prophylactic treatments upon their
return.63 The treatment of African American soldiers in terms of their sexuality was both
symptomatic and emblematic of their military treatment generally, and Bristow’s work, as well
as that of Adriane Lentz-Smith, delves into this topic.
Lentz-Smith’s book, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, identifies the Great
War as a “transformative moment” in African American assertions of self and citizenship.64
Investigating the experiences of 200,000 African American men who went overseas as part of
the U.S. military during WWI, she notes that the war gave many of them “their first taste of life
outside the confines of American racial systems.” Overseas military experience, however, also
forced black soldiers to re-examine “the war for democracy” as a war against democracy, in which
Jim Crow followed them to Europe through the racism of white officers and enlisted men. Their
experiences influenced the freedom struggle decades into the future.65 “For African American
soldiers, serving America also meant proving their manhood—asserting themselves as courageous
and capable, independent and deserving of honor.”66 The book traces “how African Americans

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… reformulated what they meant by manhood and nation,” and focuses on the war’s influence on
political consciousness, during the war and after.67 Building on Bristow’s work on gender and
Canaday’s work on citizenship, Chapter Three specifically focuses on “manhood and sexuality,”
using the biographies of new inductees to “illuminate how mobilization, service … and encoun-
ters with black women in the U.S. and white women in France refined black soldiers’ sense of
themselves as men and citizens.”68
“In the minds of many reformers,” Lentz-Smith recounts, “the danger of venereal disease was
primarily one of racial degeneration—a weakening of Northern European stock by ailments
thought common in African Americans.”69 During WWI, she notes, French women posed
particular danger; unschooled as they were in “the tenets of American white supremacy,” they
mixed indiscriminately with soldiers of all races. To those concerned with white racial purity, “both
gonorrhea and black aspirations were sexually transmitted diseases; responsible white men and
women needed to guard against the black virus in the body politic. … Because sex figured so
prominently in white Americans’ understanding of equality, attempts to circumscribe black soldiers’
sexual behavior also represented attempts to limit African American troops’ self-conceptions and
projected images.”70 Largely because of white supremacists’ alarms about sexual race-mixing, black
soldiers, too, came to see “interracial liaisons as a way of exhibiting manly prerogative.”71
Ultimately, Lentz-Smith says, “The two wars for democracy—against the Central Powers and
within the AEF—would do much to shape their sense of manhood. France served the African
American freedom movement by allowing black soldiers to envision and partake in an unsegregated
world, and “New Negroes” found strength to fight for the democracy that the United States
trumpeted, and black Americans could imagine, but that they did not have.72
That African American soldiers had greater sexual responsibility than white soldiers is a theme
Mary Louise Roberts continues in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II
France. Roberts surveys the sexual lives of soldiers in U.S.-occupied France, focusing in one
section on race and rape. “In the summer of 1944, Norman women launched a wave of rape
accusations against American soldiers,” Roberts relates. “Forced to confront the sexual excesses
incited by its own propaganda, the Army responded … by scapegoating African American
soldiers as the primary perpetrators of the rapes. … Within the year, twenty-five black soldiers
had been summarily tried and executed … hanged by rope.”73 The vilification of African
American soldiers (and the lynching-like method of their deaths) was due in great part to
cooperation between French civilians and the U.S. military, who shared potent racist attitudes,
despite positive experiences of black soldiers who fought in France in WWI. “Sex was funda-
mental to the way the US military framed, fought, and won the war in Europe,” Roberts notes,
and GI sexual conduct was “neither innocent of power nor unimportant in effect.”74
Roberts’s chapter “Black Terror on the Bocage” fully explores both the proliferation of rape
charges of American servicemen and the flimsy evidence on which African American soldiers
were frequently convicted. Departing from Lentz-Smith’s characterization of the French as
generally positively disposed toward African American soldiers, Roberts confronts what she
calls the French people’s “deeply-rooted racist sentiments” as being a product of French
imperialism in western Africa. Roberts speculates that the “black-GI-as-rapist came to serve as
a projection” for a range of postwar French emotions and must be framed by the growing
dominance of the United States over French life.75 With rumors as the only “news” available to
the French, they came to pair power and rape, assuming that black Americans “‘believed they
[were] authorized, by their “liberating” action, to violate numerous women.’” Thus, some
French believed, hanging “high and fast on trees in the court of honor” was fully justified.76
Thoughtfully deconstructing the political and racial dynamics of African Americans in the U.S.
military in this most critical aspect of the liberation/occupation of France, Roberts wryly

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concludes, “A nation rarely acquires power in a graceful manner.” If “one aim of [her] book is to
confront the giants with their trail of clumsy destruction,” Roberts observes, “Remembering the
‘good war’ has also meant forgetting, as well.”77 What Soldiers Do demonstrates the ways in which
rape as sexual behavior overlaps with issues of race, power, and political influence.
In the Pacific theater, Beth Bailey and David Farber’s The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of
Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (1992) fleshes out yet another aspect of sexuality and race. As
they discuss the fact that “Hawaii’s population was a mixture of racial and ethnic groups unlike
anywhere else in the United States,” Bailey and Farber unpack the sexual and racial impact of the
influx of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and Marines on the islands. There, they note, “the pressures
of war altered sexual mores and challenged established ethnic and racial boundaries,” in a way that
echoes Roberts’s discussion of soldiers in France.78 That impact was particularly strong on the sex
trade on Hotel Street, where “close to 250,000 men a month paid three dollars for three minutes
of the only intimacy most were going to find in Honolulu.”79 The war situation that brought
thousands of American servicemen into the Hawaiian islands fueled an enormous prostitution
trade, in which each prostitute “normally serviced about 100 men a day, at least twenty days out
of every month.”80 A result of a different kind of “liberating” force, this phenomenal trade
persisted in spite of the May Act, which President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law in July
1941. The act stated that “where local officials were either unwilling or unable to do the job
themselves, the federal government would stamp out any and all prostitution aimed at
servicemen.”81 Bailey and Farber write, however, that the act had been “assiduously avoided”
in Hawaii, in favor of regulating brothels and the prostitutes within them.82
That avoidance, of course, was based on the notion that prostitution served many purposes: It
“kept venereal rates relatively low,” it gave the “predominantly masculine community” a place to
vent its “unstoppable urges and acts,” and it allowed men to satisfy those urges in regulated brothels,
as opposed to with “our young girls and women … by rape, seduction, or the encouraging of
natural tendencies.”83 The chapter “Hotel Street Sex” deals with the ways Honolulu’s semi-
respectable outlets for sex theoretically helped to avoid rape; however, some military officials feared
that prostitution encouraged homosexuality. According to Navy Shore Patrol officers, who
attempted to separate “permissible from unpermissible vice” [sic], fellatio, as provided by the
prostitutes, “was not a far cry from such sex perversions” as one might find on an all-male ship.84
There were other drawbacks; similar to Brandt’s eye-opening percentages of sexually transmitted
infections in servicemen, Bailey and Farber observe “more American men left the armed forces
with a contagious venereal disease than were wounded by the enemy.”85 Ultimately, after con-
siderable contentious debate about the use, advantages, and disadvantages of prostitution, the
governor of Hawaii closed the brothels in 1944. As Bailey and Farber put it, “After all the worry
about the men’s needs and urges … [t]here was no epidemic of sex crimes, and the servicemen put
up no fight.”86 The anticipated catastrophe turned out to be no catastrophe at all.
Ultimately, as Brandt, Bristow, Lentz-Smith, and Bailey and Farber show, the historical study of
venereal disease is not only an examination of how the military dealt with a medical problem. In the
end, that study is a story of how the military used sexuality as a way to control all aspects of soldiers’
behavior, to influence the communities around military camps, and to perpetuate racism—even
during wars whose ostensible aim was to promote democracy and stamp out vicious prejudice. As
these authors demonstrate, one area where this prejudice especially focused was women’s sexuality.

Women’s Sexuality
Hotel Street’s struggle with prostitution was only one example of the regulation of women’s
sexuality, particularly in prostitutes patronized by military men. Women have clearly factored

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into the preceding sections, particularly in the discussion of venereal disease; however, the
military’s focus on women particularly concentrated on controlling women’s sexuality.
In her book, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality
During World War II, Marilyn Hegarty “makes visible part of a troubling chapter of American
women in wartime.”87 Hegarty explores the ways the “apparatus of the state manipulated female
sexuality across lines of race, class, and ethnicity” and illuminates “the process by which some
women became ‘patriotutes,’” a combination of patriot and prostitute used to describe women
who entertained troops sexually in order to maintain morale and whose behavior society morally
condemned.88 Since the state had, as Bailey and Farber extensively explore, and as Brandt and
Bristow document from WWI, initiated a campaign to “protect the nation from prostitutes
carrying venereal diseases,” Hegarty notes, “female sexuality seemed particularly dangerous.”89
As numerous women volunteered to provide companionship to the troops, the “already unclear
boundaries between acceptable and transgressive sexuality grew even more nebulous,” and
separating “acceptable morale-maintaining sexuality from dangerous promiscuous sexuality”
tainted women’s contributions to the war effort with “charges of sinful and transgressive sex.”90
Hegarty’s Chapter Four, “‘A Buffer of Whores’: Military and Social Ambivalence about
Sexuality and Gender,” deals specifically with “how the state could both use and control female
sexuality.”91 The state’s policies “created spaces of confusion,” as the war against venereal disease
on both ideological and material fronts resulted in efforts to repress and regulate prostitution.
Consistent with Bailey and Farber’s exploration of prostitution and the May Act, Hegarty’s efforts
balance the desire to protect service men from venereal disease while maintaining their morale. As
Hegarty puts it, “Female sexuality was dangerous, but sexual labor was essential to the war
effort.”92 Hegarty draws on Meyer’s characterization of military service as “a critical measure of
cultural masculinity” and cites the argument that “military cultures tend to foster attitudes that are
demeaning to women” through a number of means. Sex equaled masculinity in the wartime
military; men “needed” sex, and so women’s value lay in their sexuality. Hegarty’s assertion,
however, is that attempts to control both men’s sexuality and their safety in having sex (i.e.,
prophylaxis) actually incited men to seek sex. She further refers to Cynthia Enloe’s characteriza-
tion of military and civilian wartime officials as manipulating cultural definitions of femininity so
that all groups of women would serve military objectives.93 Interestingly, however, despite a
passing reference to the slander campaign against the WAC that Leisa Meyer documents so
carefully, Hegarty does not refer to servicewomen’s sexuality, concentrating instead on “prostitutes
and promiscuous [civilian] women and girls.”94
Building on Meyer’s examination of the WAC in WWII, but including both military and
civilian women, my book Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular
Graphic Art takes up the analysis. Through the lens of war posters, cartoons/comics, and adver-
tisements, and with a focus on the theoretical concept of “female masculinity,” I explore how
women’s changing roles in wartime affected expressions of both their gender and sexuality.
Beginning with the Introduction, “A Queer Mixture of Feelings: Conflicting Messages to
Women during the War,” I parse the wartime meanings of the word “queer” and explore how
women’s “new masculinity,” as they entered formerly all-male spheres, was implicitly part of
their wartime changes.95 Men (and women) based resistance to those changes in large part on the
sapping of male masculinity caused by the Great Depression; popular graphic art during the war
was the site of negotiation of the cultural anxieties prompted by those wartime gender-role shifts.
Drawing not only on Meyer, but also on Mattie Treadwell’s official Army history of the WAC
and Jeanne Holm’s history, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, I contextualize
popular images with official government and military documents and instructional manuals
concerning female soldiers’ sexual and social behavior.

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In the chapter “‘Does Your Sergeant Know You’re Out?’: Women’s Sexuality in
Wartime,” I take on what I term “perhaps the most uncomfortable” aspect of gender frontiers
and women’s masculinization.96 Sources from the time show that images encouraged women
both to express and restrict their “feminine” sexuality, in order for men to perceive women “as
accessible but neither promiscuous nor lesbian.”97 Many of the military’s attempts to regulate
women’s sexuality focused on uniform regulations, with breast pockets (and what lay beneath)
the targets of especial angst in both images and reality. Part of my context is WAC documents,
focusing particularly on “The WAC Officer,” an Army manual that tried to lead female officers
through the minefield of detecting “unwholesome” relationships between women—a great
anxiety about creating women’s branches of the military. “Unwholesomeness,” in this context,
included not only homosexuality but also sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted infec-
tions—again, an overlap with “Venereal Disease.”98 Another trepidation, this time about
deploying women overseas, was that the mere presence of white women, especially in remote
theaters of war, would drive (white) men to rape. Yet another worry echoes WWI’s character-
ization of women as embodying disease, a recurring theme in many of the sources this chapter
examines. And like Meyer, although primarily through the lens of images, I contrast the
military’s education of men and women concerning venereal disease: Men, for example,
watched graphic “V.D.” films; women attended compulsory “social hygiene” lectures. The
implication was that while men’s sexual exploits had to do only with their bodies, a woman’s
interactions also reflected her social intercourse.99
Moving forward roughly twenty years in focus, Kara Dixon Vuic’s 2010 book, Officer, Nurse,
Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War, provides in-depth analysis of the experiences
of the roughly 5,000 army nurses who made up the majority of military women in Vietnam. Vuic
examines how the nurses were part of “The Changing Army”100 and how those changes reflected
the schism between the career Army nurses and the young women “who ‘come to us almost
straight from nursing school,’” as Vuic quotes the female executive officer of a field hospital.101 In
her chapter “Helmets and Hair Curlers: Gender and Wartime Nursing,” Vuic investigates how
nurses negotiated gender during the war and how the Army deployed gender strategically,
particularly as the Army Nurse Corps “devoted considerable attention to ensuring that female
nurses looked feminine in their uniform.”102
All of this discussion frames Vuic’s sixth chapter, subtitled “Gender and Sexuality in the War
Zone.” Much as both Meyer and I delved into in our works, Vuic observes compellingly,
“Militaries have historically used women’s sexuality to affirm and support martial masculinity.
This gendered purpose for women has meant that they could provide support services for armies,
contribute to the war effort on the home front, and serve as feminine symbols” of men’s
protection. At the same time, though, younger female nurses’ association with women’s libera-
tion and sexual revolution meant that they “experienced a conflicting and changing domestic
debate about sexuality, to which they added the already complex nature of sex in the military.”103
In the struggle, Vuic says, women’s sexuality in the war zone became “almost like a commodity,”
which posited women as “morale-boosters to military men” and as “reminders of heterosexual
domestic relationships.”104 Women’s sexuality also suggested them as sexual objects or, worse,
objects of harassment or rape, much as it had during WWII.105 The attitude that “a woman’s
‘value’ depended on her sexual purity and … women were responsible for resisting the urges” of
naturally sexually aggressive men contrasted against high-ranking officers ordering women to
parties and other situations where they felt sexually objectified.106 She closes with a brief
exploration of nurses’ retrospective feelings about how the Army had used their gender and
sexuality, and about how the government treated women veterans after the war. Vuic’s work is an
important study of sexuality of women in “gender-appropriate” military specialties and points out

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critical obstacles to the smooth integration of women in the armed forces, twenty years after the
World War that marked their large-scale participation.
Other sources useful for those newly encountering the study of sexuality in the military
include Melissa S. Herbert’s 1998 book, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and
Women in the Military. Herbert offers evidence that military women continue to fight perceptions
(in the late 1990s and arguably still today) that they are either “Dykes or Whores,” as she titles her
chapter on sexuality.107 Noting that “women are compelled to strike a balance between the
‘feminine demands’ of their sex role and the ‘masculine demands’ of their work role,” Herbert
explores both “lesbian baiting” and “how homophobia interacts with gender ideology” in the
numerically and ideologically predominantly-male military.108 In her chapter “Doing Gender/
Doing Sexuality,” Herbert studies the ways military women “negotiate terrain” that implicitly
regulates expression of both their gender and sexuality. Calling upon the examples of then-Major
Rhonda Cornum in the Persian Gulf War, and on other notable women, Herbert attempts to
take apart “masculinity” and “femininity” in the context of sexuality in the military.109 The
thread that she spins in the late 1990s is a clear continuation of attitudes towards women from
WWI to the present day.
The authors in this section who deal with women’s sexuality consider variations on a theme
whose tune has not changed much over time. Much as Marilyn Hegarty and I consider women’s
roles in World War II, Vuic echoes the leitmotif of the control of women’s sexuality for both
military and social purposes. Women became symbolic of disease and its transmission; their roles,
both as professional prostitutes and as “Victory Girls,” reinforced female sexuality even as female
servicemembers served in Vietnam and into the 1990s. This foregrounding of military women’s
sexuality would continue to grow more sinister as the military moved into the present day.

The Future of the Field

The future of the study of military sexuality will find its base securely in the past. The timeline of
both women’s interactions with and participation in the military shows the consistency of
attitudes toward both prostitutes and female servicemembers—and the serious and sinister
implications of recent opinions. While the body of current scholarship in this area is still rather
small, scholars may start their work in the study of Military Sexual Violence and Military Sexual
Trauma (MST).
The military continues to grapple with not only the widespread presence of women within its
ranks, but also their new presence in all combat Military Occupational Specialties.110 In addition,
sexual assaults by men against men continue to grow. Currently, the DOD Sexual Assault
Prevention and Response (SAPR) Office maintains a wide-ranging website as the office tasked
with managing the military’s pervasive problems with MSV and MST. The DOD and the
military services produce “comprehensive” annual reports to help address the crime of sexual
assault and other issues within the military. These reports include DOD Military Service
Academy (MSA) Reports (with appendices on the Military, Naval, and Air Force Academies),
DOD SAPR Annual Reports, the DOD Special Victims Capability Report, and The Defense
Manpower Data Center’s 2015 Service Academy Gender Relations Focus Groups’ Overview
Report. The site further includes the DOD Report to the President of the United States on
Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, issued annually. Tabs within the site feature announce-
ments concerning the office and its actions, Law and DOD Policy, and Prevention Strategy and
Victim Assistance.111 A notable inclusion in the “Announcements” section is the “Survivor
Experience Survey,” which seeks input from those service members who have reported a sexual
assault since October 1, 2013.

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A much more counter-culture response to the military’s official efforts against MSV and MST
is the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). As an advocacy group, SWAN “strives to aid
service women through policy reform, media advocacy, litigation, and community organizing,”
focusing on four major issues concerning military women: service in combat, reproductive health
care, VA benefits and health care, and MSV.112 (While SWAN notes on its website that “military
sexual violence impacts both men and women,” and that “more than half of all incidents of sexual
violence happen to men,” a 2015 Military Times article observes, “About 4.9 percent of military
women say they experienced a sexual assault within the previous 12 months, compared to 1
percent of male service members, according to [a] 2014 survey.” Further, given the fact that
women make up only about 15 percent of the military as a whole, as the Military Times article
notes, “On a per capita basis, military women remain far more likely to experience a sexual
assault.”113) According to the DOD, MSV occurs in the form of “unwanted sexual contacts” tens
of thousands of times every year, while only a fraction of these get reported.114 It continues to
occur, SWAN observes, because “[a] culture of victim-blaming, lack of accountability, and toxic
command climates is pervasive throughout the U.S. Armed Forces, preventing survivors from
reporting incidents and perpetrators from being properly disciplined.”115 A military legal system
currently “giving commanders, not lawyers or civilian powers, the authority to prosecute and
manage the [military] criminal courts system” exacerbates the problem. Military regulations
prevent affected service members, who often suffer from PTSD, from suing members of the
military who either “perpetrated the crimes against them or may have mishandled their cases.”116
SWAN maintains a list of campaigns and topics in which it is involved, and keeps online archives
of previous newsletter issues dating back to 2010. The organization keeps readers up-to-date via
its website, and both the site and the organization’s newsworthy activities are valuable resources
for scholars.117
As SWAN notes, “While rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are strongly associated with
a wide range of mental health conditions for both men and women veterans, they are the leading
causes of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among women veterans, while combat trauma is
still the leading cause of PTSD among men.”118 Further, military policies against service member
adultery tend to prosecute female adulterers more than male, sometimes in cases where a woman’s
pregnancy results from MSV. This area of trauma will continue to grow as the object of enormous
scrutiny among scholars, as should the effectiveness of MSV punishments and preventions.
Lastly, one of the influential sources of current scholarship is the Palm Center, a think tank that
continues to deliver current information, and influence policy, on sexuality in the military.
Founded in 1998 at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Palm Center is “committed to
sponsoring state-of-the-art scholarship to enhance the quality of public dialogue about critical
and controversial public policy issues.”119 Recent publications include articles on “Accession
Standards for Transgender Personnel,” “Presidential Leadership and Military Discrimination,”
and “Services Out of Compliance,” referring to military regulations concerning transgender
service members.120 The Palm Center’s website also maintains articles and papers on a number of
topics related to military sexuality policy and law, including DADT and other themes.
While the military history of sexuality examines male servicemembers almost entirely prior to
studies of WWII, the field has grown to include a significant number of studies of women, and to
include women in studies of the military as a whole. Likewise, stories of sexual identity and
orientation have largely replaced studies of sexuality pertaining to sexually transmitted infection
and regulation of prostitution. Still other investigations explore the range of human experience of
sexuality, crossing rank, gender, sex, and military occupational specialty. In the end, as old stories
become new and then old again, no one source alone can replace a variety of sources, con-
textualized historically and culturally.

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Notes
* The views expressed in this chapter are the author’s own and do not reflect the position of the
Department of Defense
1 Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II
Hawaii (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 95.
2 The image is by Howard Chandler Christy. For a slightly more extended discussion of this image, see
Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 50.
3 U.S. Department of Defense, “Secretary of Defense Ash Carter Announces Policy for Transgender
Service Members,” Release No: NR-246-16, June 30, 2016, http://www.defense.gov/News/
News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/821675/secretary-of-defense-ash-carter-anno
unces-policy-for-transgender-service-members, accessed July 6, 2016.
4 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: Fawcett
Columbine, 1993), 67. Shilts provides detail in numerous personal interviews. Another source
concerning rape in the Civil War is Maureen Stutzman’s “Rape in the American Civil War: Race,
Class, and Gender in the Case of Harriet McKinley and Perry Pierson,” in the University of Albany’s
Transcending Silence, Spring 2009 (e-journal, http://www.albany.edu/womensstudies/journal/
2009/stutzman.html).
5 Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 67.
6 Ibid., 66.
7 National Defense Research Institute, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and
Assessment (Santa Monica: RAND, 1993), 32.
8 Ibid., 3–10.
9 Ibid., 34.
10 Ibid., 5.
11 Ibid., 3, 51.
12 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 57.
13 Ibid., 85.
14 Service members often referred to Section VIII (or Section 8) discharges as “blue,” for the paper on
which the form was printed. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire (New York: The Free Press,
1990), 139.
15 Canaday, The Straight State, 175.
16 Ibid., 180, 189.
17 Ibid., 213.
18 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, rev. ed. (Novato, CA: Presidio Press,
1993), 100.
19 Department of Defense, “Native American Indian Heritage Month,” http://www.defense.gov/
Portals/1/features/2015/1115_native-american/National_American_Indian_Heritage_Month_
2015_ODMEO_feedback.pdf.
20 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 3.
21 With the enormous growth of neuropsychiatry during WWII, homosexuality went through several
classifications and options for filtering out draftees/enlistees—and the discharge of those diagnosed
with or accused of homosexuality. U.S. Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History,
http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/NeuropsychiatryinWWIIVolI/chapter9.htm,
accessed July 11, 2016.
22 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 140.
23 Ibid., 139.
24 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G. I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War
II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1.
25 Ibid., 2.

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26 Brackets in the original. A WAAC is a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the
precursor to the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Meyer adheres to the practice of using lower-
case “Waac” or “Wac” to refer to individual Corps members.
27 Meyer, Creating G. I. Jane, 39.
28 Nancy Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York
University Press, 1996).
29 Ibid., 103.
30 Ibid., 109.
31 Ibid., 113.
32 Ibid., 120.
33 Steve Estes, Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2007), 2.
34 Ibid., 2–3.
35 Ibid., 185.
36 Ibid., 3; Mary Ann Humphrey, My Country, My Right to Serve: Experiences of Gay Men and Women in
the Military, World War II to the Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
37 Most of the sources in Bérubé’s work are male; only about six are female. While the lopsidedness of
the male/female proportion may be understandable, due to the lopsided numbers of men and
women in the military during WWII, it does tend to privilege men’s voices over women’s.
Humphrey’s work includes the testimonies of thirteen women of the forty-two total oral histories
and may fare only slightly better under this criticism.
38 For more on this critical era in military women’s history, see Beth Bailey’s chapter “If You Like Ms.,
You’ll Love Pvt.,” in America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard
University Press, 2009).
39 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 103.
40 Ibid., 104, 107.
41 Ibid., 116.
42 Alan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52, 161.
43 Ibid., 52.
44 Ibid., 97, 54.
45 Ibid., 59, 66.
46 Ibid., 95.
47 Ibid., 120.
48 Ibid., 161.
49 Ibid., 162.
50 Ibid., 164.
51 Ibid., 166. The May Act, which sought to prevent prostitution on restricted zones around military
bases, “was invoked chiefly during wartime and then only in selected areas, primarily in the
Carolinas and Tennessee during World War II.” National Archives and Records Administration,
www.archives.gov/.../fbi/classifications/018-may-act.html, accessed June 16, 2015.
52 Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 173–75.
53 Brandt published an updated edition of his 1985 work in 1986, specifically in order to address more
fully the then-new and raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS. The Rand study, referred to earlier in this
chapter, took up the topic of attitudes toward and occurrence of HIV/AIDS in its 1993 work, Sexual
Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment (Santa Monica: RAND, 1993). I
note here that the sources used in this chapter are works of history, not medicine or science, and are
useful for their historical analysis of rapidly changing medical etiology.
54 Bristow, Making Men Moral, 8.
55 Ibid., xvii–xviii.
56 Ibid., 28.
57 Ibid., 47.

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58 Ibid., 28.
59 Ibid., 53.
60 Ibid., 180–82.
61 Ibid., 157.
62 Ibid., 160.
63 Ibid., 163.
64 Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 4.
65 Ibid., 4.
66 Ibid., 5.
67 Ibid., 5.
68 Ibid., 10.
69 Ibid., 98.
70 Ibid., 98–99.
71 Ibid., 99.
72 Ibid., 108.
73 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10.
74 Ibid., 10.
75 Ibid., 240–41.
76 Ibid., 250.
77 Ibid., 261.
78 Bailey and Farber, The First Strange Place, 22, and caption for photo on page 12, which reads: “Men in
a Hotel Street shop look over photos of nude women.”
79 Ibid., 95.
80 Ibid., 100.
81 As stated in note 51, the May Act, which sought to prevent prostitution on restricted zones around
military bases, “was invoked chiefly during wartime and then only in selected areas, primarily in the
Carolinas and Tennessee during World War II.” National Archives and Records Administration,
www.archives.gov/.../fbi/classifications/018-may-act.html, accessed June 16, 2015.
82 Ibid., 98–99.
83 Ibid., 99.
84 Ibid., 104–05.
85 Ibid., 106.
86 Ibid., 132.
87 Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality
during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 1.
88 Ibid., 1.
89 Ibid., 2.
90 Ibid., 8. An excellent reference for those wishing to explore the history of “girls” practicing the
“right” kind of sexuality is Meghan K. Winchell’s Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Study of
USO Hostesses During World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). For a
discussion of sexuality in pinups during the war, see Maria Elena Buszek’s Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism,
Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Chapter Five: “Sex, Women, and
World War II.”
91 Ibid., 85.
92 Ibid., 85–86.
93 Ibid., 86; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London:
Pandora Press, 1983).
94 Hegarty, Victory Girls, 104.
95 Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter, 9.
96 Ibid., 20.

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97 Ibid., 20, 82.

98 Ibid., 97. In other contexts not including relationships between women, unmarried pregnancy
joined the list.
99 Ibid., 103, 105. For another reference on the sexualization and objectification of women in images
during WWII, see Melissa A. McEuen, Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the
American Home Front, 1941–1945 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
100 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010), Chapter 2.
101 Ibid., 72.
102 Ibid., 90.
103 Ibid., 137.
104 Ibid., 139.
105 Ibid., 140, 144–45.
106 Ibid., 149.
107 Melissa S. Herbert, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military
(New York: New York University Press, 1998), 55.
108 Ibid., 78, 79.
109 Then-Major Cornum retired from the U.S. Army as Brigadier General Cornum, in 2012.
110 As the DOD notes, “On 24 January 2013, the SecDef rescinded the 1994 Direct Ground Combat
Definition and Assignment Rule (DGCDAR) and directed the Services to open all occupations and
units to women as expeditiously as possible, but no later than 1 January 2016. The Army’s campaign to
integrate women into combat arms branches and improve readiness across the force is titled Soldier
2020” (http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/WISR_Implementation_Plan_Army.
pdf, accessed July 15, 2016).
111 Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) Office, www.sapr.mil/
index.php, accessed January 31, 2016.
112 Service Women’s Action Network, http://servicewomen.org/ and http://servicewomen.org/
#homeabout, accessed June 29, 2015.
113 Andrew Tilghman, “Report: Hazing Fuels Male-on-Male Sex Assaults,” DACOWITS “Articles of
Interest,” (originally appearing in Military Times online), http://dacowits.defense.gov/Portals/48/
Documents/News%20Articles/2015%20Weekly%20Articles/(18)%20News%20Articles
_6MAY2015.pdf, accessed August 25, 2016. For clarity’s sake, I want to stress that the military’s
definition of sexual violence is broad and includes acts of hazing or workplace harassment.
114 SWAN, http://servicewomen.org/#homeabout, accessed June 25, 2015. It is important to note
that SWAN updates its site fairly frequently. The design of the site and the current links have
changed since I first cited the source, and the website now contains different information than when
I first accessed it.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Another source, edited by noted military historian G. Kurt Piehler, The Encyclopedia of Military
Science, provides concise overviews of several topics related to sexuality in the military, including
HIV/AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, several entries under “Gays and Lesbians,” and Military
Sexual Trauma. Though clearly meant as a library reference, the encyclopedia provides a wealth of
information on the military in general and sexuality in specific.
118 SWAN, http://servicewomen.org/military-sexual-violence/, accessed June 25, 2015.
119 Palm Center, http://www.palmcenter.org/about, accessed June 29, 2015.
120 Palm Center, http://www.palmcenter.org/publications/recent, accessed June 29, 2015.

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RAPE, REFORM, AND REACTION
Gender and Sexual Violence in the U.S. Military

Elizabeth L. Hillman and Kate Walsham

mills college and university of california, hastings college of the law

Like the impact of gender norms in U.S. military history as compared to their impact on U.S.
history overall, rape and sexual violence have had a distinctive, perhaps outsized, role in shaping
U.S. military culture, society, and law. During and in between wars, U.S. military personnel have
committed sexual violence against civilians as well as service members, against persons of all
genders, in war zones, and during training and periods of leave. The tendency of these crimes to
go unreported by victims, who were often wary of the consequences of accusing service
members, makes empirical claims about prevalence and incidence rates difficult to track across
time and place. Nonetheless, the historical record of investigations, prosecutions, and narratives
reveals that rape and sexual violence have accompanied the U.S. military in its operations foreign
and domestic, across eras of military technology, strategy, and demographics.
This review essay analyzes the contested history and the contemporary struggles surrounding
rape and sexual violence in the U.S. armed forces. Historians, theorists, feminist critics, legal
scholars, military leadership, and journalists have investigated these topics, but significant gaps
remain in our understanding. We analyze the existing scholarship in three sections and conclude
with some recommendations for future research.
The first section examines sexual violence committed by service members against other
service members within the U.S. military, focusing on the factors that distinguish sexual assault
within the military from in civilian communities. This analysis begins with a look at Susan
Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape as a launching point for the
examination of intra-military sexual assault. It then moves on to analyze how the issues
Brownmiller raised have shifted since the transition to an all-volunteer force and closes with a
discussion of the 2016 recommendations to better address intra-military sexual assault through
updating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which specifies military crimes and
governs their prosecution.
The second section of this chapter considers sexual violence committed by service members
but propagated against local inhabitants and/or civilian personnel rather than other service
members. This section begins by contextualizing the history of sexual assault against local
populations or civilian personnel in wars generally. It then moves to a discussion of how sexual
assault played a role in the Indian Wars, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the second war in
Iraq. This section closes by discussing some of the problems that have plagued the military’s
prosecution of individuals who perpetrate sexual violence within the context of war.

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The third section closes the historical analysis with a look at the broader impact of rape and
sexual violence on military culture, training, and operations. It examines the impact of both
formal and informal training on creating military cultures. In this analysis, we discuss the
consequences of integrating women, gays and lesbians, and transgender people into the armed
forces, acknowledging formal progress as well as cultural resistance. Positive steps such as the
formal denunciation of sexual violence by presidents, generals, and other authorities have under-
mined, but not eliminated, the history and cultural norms that continue to provide cover to some
military perpetrators of sexual violence.

Intra-military Sexual Assault

While there has always been some level of intra-military sexual assault, evolving policies related to
gender and sexual orientation integration and opportunity brought the prevalence of military
sexual assault to the forefront in the late 20th century. As the U.S. military moved to an all-
volunteer force, the recruiting of women became more important to military effectiveness, and
feminist critics like Susan Brownmiller began to reveal the extent and harms of sexual violence.1
The issue of intra-military, or service member-against-service member, sexual assault received
increasing attention in the 1970s. Since the early 1990s, academic studies, legal reform, and more
comprehensive prevention and response strategies have increased awareness and started to reveal
the shape of the river of military sexual violence.2 Definitive and comparative data remain hard to
come by because of uneven and inadequate record keeping and continued low reporting rates for
incidents of sexual violence.3 Despite those empirical limitations, a deeper understanding of both
current and past patterns of sexual violence in the military began to emerge in the first decade of
the 21st century.
Scholars such as Jean Zimmerman and William H. McMichael have shown that beginning
with the shift to all-volunteer forces, public scrutiny of military personnel policies and culture
generated more awareness and understanding of sexual violence within the U.S. military even
as low reporting rates for intra-military sexual assault continued. The Tailhook scandal of 1991,
examined in depth by numerous scholars, military leaders, critics, and others since it occurred,
exposed not only egregious sexual misconduct by naval aviators at a conference but also an
extensive and official cover-up, setting off a national discussion of sexual violence within the
ranks of military service.4 In the years that followed, the military services altered their formal
training and education practices to raise awareness of military sexual violence, and more
survivors of sexual assault and harassment came forward. It remained difficult for many victims
to report incidents, however, because of the military cultural norm of deference to authority. In
addition, concerns about retaliation by superiors and peers, not being able to pursue a military
career, and not being believed when reporting misconduct of superiors deterred some victims
assaulted by those superior in rank, which constituted a substantial fraction of military sexual
violence.5 Army lawyer and historian Frederic L. Borch wrote about one especially serious
example, the rape of army recruits by drill sergeants at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1996, that
led to army-wide investigations, criminal prosecutions, and the creation of a reporting hotline
that received hundreds of calls.6 Eleven drill sergeants were accused of raping female trainees;
the worst offender faced fifty-eight charges involving twenty-one victims, including nineteen
counts of rape, and was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years for his crimes. Male
victims of male-on-male sexual assault were also deterred from reporting by the U.S. military’s
anti-gay policies, including the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” era of 1994 to 2011, when the
suggestion that a service member was homosexual could lead to ostracism, punishment, and
discharge, as Aaron Belkin discusses in his book Bring Me Men.7 Low reporting rates limit our

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ability to characterize trends in intra-military sexual assault over time and place as compared to
other types of crimes.
Another challenge in comparing intra-military sexual assault over different historical peri-
ods, or estimating the prevalence of military versus civilian sexual assault, are the unstable
definitions of rape and sexual violence in both civilian and military contexts. Scholars have
documented how criminal codes have been repeatedly reformed, in and outside of military
justice, to reflect more accurate assessments of the types and harms of sexual violence that occur.
Laws changed in several waves in response to these newer understandings, establishing protec-
tions for victims who report assaults, creating hierarchies that specify crimes (“rape” to “wrongful
sexual contact”) based on factors like severity and the intent of the perpetrator, and refining the
definition of consent to sexual activity. For example, on the critical issue of consent, the federal
Judicial Policy Panel (JPP), a blue-ribbon group set up in 2014 to monitor progress toward
eliminating military sexual assault, recommended in 2016 that the UCMJ be amended to more
accurately and clearly reflect the consensus in contemporary criminal justice that a sexual act
completed without consent constitutes rape. The definition of consent in the relevant statute
(Article 120) was deemed confusing even after decades of attention to reform in military law
related to sexual assault, in part because it retained vestiges of outdated rape laws that could be
interpreted as requiring a victim to physically resist an attacker before a factfinder might conclude
that there was a lack of consent.8 If enacted, this legal reform would both clarify what constitutes
rape and prevent ongoing and damaging expectations that victims of rape must physically resist in
order to demonstrate their lack of consent. In the military context, however, this definition is
complicated further by the fact that some consensual sex has also been criminalized, including
adultery and some same-sex sexual activity. This creates a situation in which a “consensual sex”
defense to rape could negatively impact both the victim and the perpetrator by triggering
potentially career-ending retaliatory action against each party to the contested sexual encounter.9
Protecting those who report sex crimes against official retaliation was an important focus of
reform efforts during the surge of regulatory and legal changes implemented during and after
2013, when concerns about the high prevalence of rape within the military and yet more high-
profile scandals convinced lawmakers that the military needed to address the fears that prevented
victims from reporting assaults to authorities.10 Informal retaliation against service members who
reported sexual assaults by others in the military, however, has proved harder to eliminate than
official actions.11
Perhaps as challenging as ending the cultural practice of retaliating against a service member
who turns in another service member for a crime (even if that crime is a serious sexual assault) is
drawing the distinction between criminal sexual misconduct and non-criminal sexual behavior in
a military environment that offers sexual opportunity and makes some consensual sex illegal.
Elizabeth Hillman, Mark Meigs, Mary Louise Roberts, Alice Kaplan, and other scholars have
argued that service members have sometimes experienced military life as opening a door to sexual
opportunity because of the combination of travel and deployments far from home, the dom-
inance of youth culture within the ranks, the intimate working conditions of military life, and the
bonding that occurs among those who endure the stress and vulnerability of performing danger-
ous, arduous jobs.12
This reality means that sex is a part of military life for many service members, just as it is for
civilians. Yet the criminalization of certain acts of consensual sex by the UCMJ has led to a
staggering lack of data regarding the rates of sex of all kinds within the ranks. This lack of data also
means that it is nearly impossible to track the rates of retaliation due to reported incidents of sexual
violence, as the JPP found in 2016 when collecting and analyzing available information. The JPP
reported that the only data that currently exists about retaliation against service members after

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reporting sexual misconduct comes from workplace surveys.13 Based on this investigation and the
lack of data, the JPP has “stressed the critical importance of such data to understand and resolve
how incidents of retaliation affect individual Servicemembers, unit cohesion, and military
readiness.”14 The JPP issued thirty-eight recommendations, which they presented to Congress
in five separate reports.15 These thirty-eight recommendations span military justice reform, and
include recommendations for how to: collect data regarding sexual assault reporting, prosecution
rates, and outcomes; establish uniform receipt of restitution for survivors of sexual assault;
eliminate retaliation against people who report sexual violence; and clarify the “consent” term
in the military rape statute, UCMJ Article 120, as referenced in the discussion above. The
necessity of such extensive recommendations underscores both the extent of necessary reforms
and the enormity of the bureaucratic and cultural shifts necessary to improve the military’s
response to, and efforts to eliminate, sexual violence.
While the JPP was investigating and issuing reports, the Military Justice Review Group, a
Department of Defense (DOD) working group, issued its own report on military justice as a
whole.16 The far-reaching report, overseen and signed by Andrew S. Effron, former Chief Judge
of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, examined Article 120 and other
related statutes, which resulted in recommendations mostly focused on increasing presumptions
in favor of victims, including expanding punitive statutes to include a presumption of coercion
for all sexual contact between service members of different ranks, and creating a military
equivalent to the civilian “Crime Victim Rights’ Act.”17 These recommendations seek to address
the tension between the military’s history of sexualized violence and retaliation against those who
report it, with the imperative to encourage reporting and increase awareness of the potentially
criminal nature of a very wide range of sexual behavior.18

Sexual Violence Against Civilians

As the preceding section of this essay demonstrates, there are significant gaps in research and
reporting regarding intra-military sexual violence. Unfortunately, sexual violence committed
outside the ranks of the military, by service members against local inhabitants, is even harder to
compare over time and location. While there is little hard data, Hillman argues that “[n]o
historian with even a modest command of facts can dispute that the armed forces of state militaries
have been responsible for the worst sexual violence of our shared past.”19 The United States is not
among the worst perpetrators of state-sponsored sexual violence documented by historians, but
its military is not exempt from criticism for failing to prevent sexual violence against civilians.
In-depth analysis and accounts of the U.S. military’s sexual assault of civilians during wartime
is sparse, like data on sexual assault in other national armed forces, in part because reporting sexual
violence—or even getting an understanding of the definitions of sexual violence—has been
accompanied by stigma in most every context. While the practice of utilizing rape as a military
tactic has been seen as an improper use of force and targeting for centuries, historians, political
scientists, and activists like Cynthia Enloe, Elisabeth J. Wood, Dara Kay Cohen, Amelia Hoover
Green, Hillman, and Brownmiller have shown that rape of civilian populations in war zones has
sometimes been considered a legitimate and expected byproduct of any military action.20 As
scholars on the history of sexual violence explained in 2013, “[w]e do not have enough data to
determine whether the incidence of wartime rape is increasing, decreasing, or holding steady. In
fact, we lack reliable basic data on the incidence and prevalence of rape in most conflict settings, a
problem that frequently leads to mistaken overgeneralization.”21 Efforts to expose and outlaw
rape as a tool in military action internationally have increased our understanding, but as Wood
notes in her analysis of the existing data available regarding rape of civilians in war zones, these

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data are limited in that they mostly center on rape in the context of civil wars rather than foreign
militaries’ sexual violence against civilian populations.22
Susan Barber and Charles Ritter’s important 2009 work challenged the notion that rape was
rare during the U.S. Civil War, pointing out that black and white women both faced sexual
assault and rape and that prosecution was selective. They noted that the Enrollment Act of 1863
broke new ground by providing an opportunity for occupied women to accuse Union service
men of sexual crimes, creating some expectation that perpetrators would face justice.23 Kim
Murphy’s I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War further documents rape during the Civil War,
tracing disparities in the ability of black women to seek justice as compared to white women.24
While some white women suffered from rape and sexual assault, black women in the occupied
South “served as the unfortunate sexual spoils when Union soldiers asserted their traditional right
of military conquest.”25
This concept of a “traditional right of military conquest” was the norm prior to the Geneva
Conventions, which changed the notion that governing soldiers’ sexual behavior during war was
not an important obligation of state militaries. Stella Cernak demonstrates that in the 1920s, rape
and sexual assault shifted from being deemed “acceptable consequences” of armed conflict to
being prohibited, and the 1929 Geneva Convention sought to protect civilians from the con-
sequences of military action and to prevent the exploitation of women who served the military as
nurses and domestics.26 In 1949, the fourth Geneva Convention was adopted and initiated the
modern international humanitarian law regime. It recognized a “rape victim’s individual right to
be free of rape” rather than relying on a generic rationale about safeguarding civil society.27
Under international criminal law, sexual violence in wartime became a specified crime, and in the
U.S. military, it was, and remains, punishable by death or imprisonment under the UCMJ.28
Such severe punishments for service members convicted of sexual assault, in and outside of the
U.S. military, did not alter a powerful, but historically misleading, trope that cast rape and sexual
violence as inevitable byproducts of war. Some scholars have characterized military rape as part of
military power itself, arguing that “[i]n a culture that continually demands members to perform
dominance, soldiers often resort to domination through sexual assault.”29 This argument for
sexual violence and rape as inevitable in wartime or in armed conflict considers “the distinction
between taking a human life and other forms of impermissible violence” too narrow to be
preserved, converting women into what Brownmiller describes as “simply regrettable victims—
incidental, unavoidable casualties—like civilian victims of bombing, lumped together with
children, homes, personal belongings, a church, a dike, a water buffalo or next year’s crop.”30
Such compelling characterizations of rape in warfare brought much-needed attention to the
trauma of military sexual assault, but they also obscured the variation in wartime sexual violence
within, and outside of, the United States.
Historians have revealed a long history of U.S. military personnel waging sexual violence
against civilians, in particular during the Indian Wars, World War II, and the Vietnam War. As
Brownmiller describes, U.S. military history reveals especially brutal assaults against civilians
during the Indian Wars. One account of an April 1871 vigilante group assault on Aripava Apaches
near Camp Grant, Arizona, for example, shows the particularly brutal nature of the sexualized
violence that some white Americans perpetrated against Native Americans, as well as the ways in
which official and unofficial acts seemed to condone excessive violence. Having been dispatched
to the scene, Dr. C. B. Briesly, Camp Grant’s surgeon, noted:

The dead bodies of some twenty-one women and children were lying scattered over
the ground; those who had been wounded in the first instance had their brains beaten
out with stones. Two of the best-looking squaws were lying in such a position, and

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from the appearance of the genital organs and of their wounds, there can be no doubt
that they were first ravished and then shot. Nearly all of the dead were mutilated. …
While going over the ground we came upon a squaw who was unhurt, but were unable
to get her to come in and talk, she not feeling very sure of our good intentions.31

The survivors of this vigilante violence pleaded with the commander of Camp Grant to get back
their children who had been taken captive saying, “Get them back for us. Our little boys will
grow up slaves and our girls, as soon as they are large enough, will be diseased prostitutes to get
money for whoever owns them.”32 This kind of atrocity was not an isolated event during the
Indian Wars, as Sharon Block’s work on early American history and conflict makes plain, and
speaks to a larger pattern of racial and sexual violence in U.S. wars.33
In Mobilizing Minerva, Kimberly Jensen investigates the realities of sexual violence that civilians
experienced in World War I.34 Jensen discusses the American women who served in Europe
during the war, including their role establishing women’s hospitals, to help survivors of sexual
assault.35 By highlighting the work to support women in war zones, Jensen makes it clear that
women at least were aware of and working to counteract the reality of rape in wartime as it
happened.
During World War II, no less than General George S. Patton, a military leader famous for his
rigor and toughness, noted in a conversation about sexual assault and punishment with an allied
commander in Europe: “I told him that although I would do my best to keep such incidents to a
minimum there would unquestionably be some raping. I told him that he should forward the
details of all such incidents to me so that I could have the offenders properly hanged.”36 As
numerous scholars have discussed, whether offenders were “properly hanged” depended on
numerous factors embedded in military and American culture more broadly during Patton’s war
in Europe, including that African American service members were more likely to be tried and
convicted, and face harsh punishments for rape than white service members.37 Robert Lilly
investigates this disparity in Taken by Force, discussing the sexual racism of WWII and noting that
in a corps in Europe that had only 10 percent black troops, 42.3 percent of sex offenses charged
were against black soldiers.38
Mary Louise Roberts, Craig Cameron, and others have also investigated the intersections of
World War II-era expectations of sexuality and masculinity and how race influenced perceptions
of sexual conduct.39 In American Samurai, Cameron discusses the creation of a marine as a man
who has been “liberated” from civilian cultural values in part through powerful imposition of
misogyny and racism as part of the troop mentality.40 This mentality allowed the marines to
objectify femininity as a fragile victim and as an available weak spot to exploit in an enemy.41
Roberts also discusses this “liberation” from civilian mores, in the context of GIs in France in
WWII, noting that U.S. military officials saw U.S. men’s need for a sexual outlet as more
important than French societal health.42 She further describes the rumor mill stoking French
fear particularly of black American soldiers’ involvement in sexual assault.43
Underlying Patton’s statement was an assumption that men at war require the sexual use of
women’s bodies, a premise that links sexual violence to the commercial sex industry that has long
surrounded U.S. military forces. Violence occurred during World War II and other U.S. conflicts
when soldiers assaulted sex workers, when service members assumed all women were available
for paid sex, and when relationships between sex workers and service members turned ugly and
led to extreme violence.44 Such incidents underscored the need for powerful protections for
civilians (and other service members) against sexual assault as well as the consequences of a
military environment that tried to channel service members’ sexual behavior in ways that could
lead to violent encounters.

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Fear of violent outbursts exploding in unwanted directions may have been part of the reason
military leaders have been wary of eliminating the sex industry around major installations.45
Brownmiller argues that “[t]he American military got into the prostitution business by degrees, an
escalation process linked to the escalation of the war. Underlying the escalation was the assump-
tion that men at war required the sexual use of women’s bodies.”46 In World War II, brothel
districts in Honolulu were one early example of regulated prostitution. As Beth Bailey and David
Farber describe in The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii, these spaces
provided “protection” for “good” women while simultaneously providing a sanctioned outlet
for the sexual use of women’s bodies.47 Reporter Peter Arnett saw the gradual acceptance of U.S.
military-controlled and -regulated brothels in Vietnam as a natural outgrowth of what he called
“the McNamara theory”: “In 1965 the main idea was to keep the troops contented and satisfied.
Ice cream, movies, swimming pools, pizza, hot dogs, laundry service and hootch maids.”48
Seungsook Moon describes in “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military
Prostitution in South Korea, 1945–1970” how the U.S. military regulated prostitution in part
because of the military’s construction of a heterosexual masculine ideal soldier as requiring access
to sex and therefore prostitution.49 She also notes that much of the regulation focused on
minimizing the spread of venereal diseases and ensuring “clean sex.”50 Michiko Takeuchi
notes in her discussion of prostitution in occupied Japan that much of the regulation centered
on maintaining racial and classed hierarchy between the U.S. military men in part by having
classes of women who were permitted to service different subsets of soldiers.51 As Amanda Boczar
discusses in “Uneasy Allies: The Americanization of Sexual Policies in South Vietnam,” South
Vietnam and the U.S. engaged in a “Brothel Debate” which led to both governments attempting
to repress the prostitution industry through “the closure of bars, round-ups of prostitutes, and
restrictions on how American soldiers interacted with civilians.”52 Ultimately, however, the
U.S.’s interest in favor of treating the problems of venereal disease and corruption that flowed
from legal prostitution was more palatable than “pursuing a plan so potentially detrimental to
troop morale.” While having culturally sanctioned access to sex workers may have reduced the
incidence of some types of rape, Belkin points out that such practices served to reinforce aspects of
military culture and wartime operations that shaped service members’ sexual behavior and
encouraged the subjugation of women and persons of color.53 Heather Stur’s analysis of gender
and race during and after the Vietnam War reveals that race, nationality, and occupations of
women could serve to protect them from sexual assault, as in the case of mostly white Red Cross
“donut dollies,” or encourage soldiers to see them as dangerous and sexualized, as in the case of
Asian “dragon ladies.”54
Racial and ethnic difference continued to shape U.S. service members’ sexualized interactions
with non-U.S. populations long after the Vietnam War. Perhaps the most publicized and reviled
images of U.S. troops in the war in Iraq were photos of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing detainees at
the notorious prison at Abu Ghraib.55 Those stark images of naked detainees being taunted and
arranged in humiliating and sexualized positions by U.S. service members, women and men alike,
first appeared in public in the United States in the spring of 2004 and galvanized a reckoning
about not only the U.S. presence in Iraq, but also the nature and consequences of the incomplete
turn toward gender equity in the U.S. armed forces.56
In spite of the perceived frequency and banality of sexual violence in wartime, and the number
of terrible incidents that can be recounted, there have been significant variations in the frequency
of rape and other forms of sexual violence in different armed conflicts, including U.S. wars. As
Elisabeth J. Wood argues: “Wartime rape is neither ubiquitous nor inevitable. The level of sexual
violence differs significantly across countries, conflicts, and particularly armed groups. Some
armed groups can and do prohibit sexual violence.”57 This variation in frequency and intensity of

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sexual violence “suggests that policy interventions should … be focused on armed groups, and
that commanders in effective control of their troops are legally liable for patterns of sexual
violence they fail or refuse to prevent.”58
There has been a military and civilian cultural shift from a notion of inevitability toward a
recognition of the need to monitor, discipline, and prevent such violence. “Despite a past of
overlooking wartime sexual violence as either impossible to prevent or unworthy of attention,”
Hillman shows, “state militaries now often operate within social, political, and legal frameworks
that make investigation and prosecution of these crimes possible.”59 A nation acting as the
aggressor in wartime sexual violence rarely admits to such conduct, as Brownmiller pointed
out in 1975, just after the Vietnam War had changed so many Americans’ understanding of the
U.S. role in armed conflict around the world.60 Individuals in U.S. military history have been
more likely to face consequences for rape through courts-martial when the larger national and
global frameworks of racial and gender privilege also influenced investigation, prosecution, and
punishment. One early Cold War example suggests how those influences work together. In
1952, a military court reviewed Corporal John H. Henderson’s conviction at court-martial for
the rape of a French woman after a sexual encounter that he claimed was consensual.61
Henderson, accused during a time in which a woman’s consent to sexual activity was often
inferred by the circumstances and the use of force by an alleged perpetrator was an element of the
crime, appealed on the basis that there was insufficient proof of “force.” The court upheld
Henderson’s conviction and adopted a type of analysis, novel at the time, that effectively ignored
the legal requirement for force.62 While this judicial approach might strike contemporary observers
as an enlightened understanding of the realities of sexual coercion, Henderson’s conviction said
more about the army’s assumptions about the inappropriateness of cross-racial sex and African
American men’s hypersexuality than about its willingness to overlook the sexual history or degree
of resistance of a woman who reports a sexual assault. Essentially the court viewed Henderson’s
blackness in the face of his victim’s whiteness sufficient as a showing of force—the court presumed
that any expression of black sexuality would have been by force by its nature. The standard adopted
by the court in the Henderson case did not lead to reform in the prosecution or punishment of
military sexual assault, a process that would not begin in earnest until a half-century later.
Like the Henderson court-martial, which took place outside of a zone of armed conflict, many
U.S. service members’ sexual assaults of civilians have taken place outside of wartime and had a
significant impact on global affairs. One of the most publicized incidents of U.S. military sexual
violence during peacetime was an infamous rape in 1995 in Okinawa involving three servicemen
who gang-raped a twelve-year-old Japanese girl.63 Along with reinvigorating an ongoing
discussion about sexual violence perpetrated by service members, as Chalmers Johnson pointed
out, this incident brought questions about the reasonableness of ongoing U.S. military presence
in Japan.64
Part of the cultural bedrock of the military’s sexual violence issue stems from the individual
ideologies of those entering the service at different periods of time. Studies conducted by the
Naval Health Research Center in San Diego of incoming male Navy recruits from 2008 to 2010
indicated that between 13 and 15 percent self-reported perpetrating pre-military rape or
attempted rape.65 These numbers indicate that the level of misogyny and propensity for violence
among service members can be attributed not only to acculturation within the military, but also
to the society from which service members are drawn.
Closely related to, and often overlapping with sexual violence, domestic violence has also
been an under-prosecuted and under-studied crime in both military and civilian contexts. The
military context of long separation from civilian spouses and children, combined with service
members’ easy access to weapons, has meant that considerable violence, some of it undoubtedly

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sexual violence, has been perpetrated against military spouses. Aaron O’Connell discusses some
forms of spousal violence in his book about the Marines; however, he notes “no statistics exist for
how many marines became violent in the home.”66 Historical statistics on the incidence of
domestic violence can only suggest the extent of a problem that was largely ignored until the
1970s.67 Again, the lack of data regarding incidence of sexual violence within intimate partner
relationships hinders our ability to fully explore the issue of U.S. military service members’ sexual
violence against civilians.

Sexual Violence in Military Culture

Sexual violence has been part and parcel of military culture since its inception. Increasing
awareness of the harms of sexual violence in the first decades of the 21st century was not
only led to legal and policy reform but has also changed military culture, shifting the social
and behavioral norms of military service away from an acceptance and even cultivation of
sexual aggression, homophobia, and misogyny. Rape and sexual assault ceased to have any
official place in the U.S. armed forces as general after general, admiral after admiral, and
elected official after elected official denounced military sexual assault as at odds with U.S.
values and military service, culminating with President Barack Obama’s characterization of
military sexual assault as “shameful and disgraceful acts” that could not be permitted
because it “has made the military less effective” and, moreover, is “dangerous to national
security.”68
While President Obama’s recent powerful condemnation of sexual assault seems like an
obvious statement now, the road to this assertion has been long. Looking back to World
War II’s Women’s Army Corps members (WACs) who became impregnated during their
service, Leisa D. Meyer notes that the Army’s unwillingness to provide any support for the
pregnant WACs or support for their children reflected a larger “paradigm of military sexual
regulation … predicated on upholding racial hierarchies and encouraging male heterosexual
activity while discouraging male responsibility for [that] activity or its consequences.”69
Since that time, shifts in the military’s personnel makeup along with military investigation
task forces and outside scholarship interrogating military sexual violence and the negative
impacts of hetero-masculine sexual ideals have created a context that has convinced both
military and civilian government leaders of the need for systemic change.70 This recognition
first begat task forces, which led to new agencies, including the Department of Defense
Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO) (created in 2005) and panels to
collect information and make recommendations about military cultural practices as well as
the procedures that govern the investigation and prosecution of military sexual assault.71
Cultural practices that have been formally banned include those described by folklorist Carol
Burke such as the singing of misogynist marching chants, castigating recruits and trainees
with derogatory comments and names referring to women and LGBTQ persons, and
encouraging male sexual aggression.72 Military reformers sought to understand and address
scholarly criticism. One particularly critical analysis is that of law professor Madeline
Morris’s 1996 study of the “rape differential” in military and civilian prosecutions of sexual
violence in war and peace.73 The “rape differential” is a statistical analysis that shows that
while the rates of all violent non-rape crimes are reduced in the military context as
compared to the civilian context, the rate at which rape is reduced is significantly smaller
during peacetime but actually increases during wartime.74 This scholarship and analysis led
military reformers, including SAPRO, to seek to integrate best practices in violence
prevention into military training.75

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Despite growing numbers of female, gay and lesbian, and transgender personnel in the ranks,
informal military culture has sometimes preserved what military and civilian officials have sought
to ban. The number and importance of women serving in the military grew from a mandated cap
of 2 percent in 1967 to a relatively stable 15 percent by the 1980s, including a period of time in the
1970s during which the test scores and education levels of women recruits shored up the
military’s overall recruiting numbers.76 The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regime that had prevented
gay and lesbian service members from serving openly ended in 2011 following congressional
repeal of a 1993 statute.77 In 2016, nearly all restrictions on women’s service by occupational
specialty and potential for exposure to combat had been lifted with the rescission of a 1994 rule
that banned women from “direct” ground combat roles, and the ban on service by openly
transgender personnel was lifted.78 Yet women remained scarce at the highest ranks of service,
were concentrated in health care and administrative positions rather than in the prestige-building
career fields related to tactical operations, and were under-represented in the most selective
commissioning source, the national service academies.79
These demographic shifts should help to catalyze cultural shifts away from sexual violence as a
norm, as women and gay men earned more authority and autonomy that made them arguably
more dangerous targets of potential assault. The shifts toward gender and sexual equity also should
reduce the ease with which femininity, queerness, or a fluid gender identity can be exploited as a
vulnerability of a service member. Yet as Burke has noted, gender bias and sexual violence has
proved hard to eliminate in the rituals, speech, clothing, and music that preserve a “masculine
warrior code” that can be degrading toward women and homosexuality even as official policies
about military participation change.80 Military songs and chants that explicitly invoked tropes of
rape and sexual violence sometimes continued to shape military training and culture even after
official bans formally eliminated some of the most offensive practices.81

Directions for Future Scholarship

Images and stories of sexual conquest are deeply embedded in military history. Narratives of rape
and sexual violence have shaped U.S. military culture for a long time, far longer than the time that
current leaders of the armed forces have invested in trying to reduce rape and sexual assault. Rape
has likewise been a powerful presence in shaping military law throughout the post-World War II
era of modern military justice, even as reforms have sought to align military criminal law with
evolving civilian norms that recognize and punish the harms of sexual assault. As Hillman argues,
this predominance of sexual violence in military legal precedent has “strengthened through
repetition the image of some men as sexually violent predators and women as sexual victims,”
creating “an impression of female vulnerability and male dominance” while reducing account-
ability and allowing racialized presumptions about sexual aggression to persist.82 Ongoing efforts
to eliminate sexual assault within the ranks of the U.S. military can succeed only when informal
practices and cultural norms reject such notions of gender and sexual behavior and align official
pronouncements and regulations with everyday life in and around the U.S. military.
Research that makes visible the disconnect between the military’s informal practices and
official policies can help by using data collection and analysis to create a shared understanding of
the scope of the problem. Gathering data about either domestic or sexual violence is difficult in
any context, but the military has an advantage because of the intimacy of military life and the lack
of privacy that gives military officials more opportunities to measure—and influence—the
behavior and relationships of those within a military community as compared to those in civilian
workplaces or jurisdictions. In the past, the intensity and isolation of military communities from
civilians has sometimes fostered sexual violence; instead, it can be a means of recognizing and

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reckoning with social and cultural issues that encourage sexual coercion and violence. A greater
understanding of what impact a service member’s behavior is having on spouses and children
would be useful to policymakers, both civilian and military, in issuing and implementing
reform to limit unnecessary violence. Scholarship that improves our empirical knowledge of
incidence and prevalence, that enables comparative analysis across communities, jurisdictions,
and time periods, and that assesses the effectiveness of various prevention and response systems
can help to keep military policy, law, and cultural norms aligned in reducing military sexual
violence.

Notes
1 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
2 William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race
in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3 Elisabeth Jean Wood and Nathaniel Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within the US
Military,” Department of Political Science, Yale University draft paper, July 2016, 2–4, in possession
of the authors.
4 The Tailhook Report: The Official Inquiry into the Events of Tailhook ‘91, Office of the Inspector General
(Department of Defense) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at
War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: Doubleday, 1995); William H. McMichael, The Mother of All
Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1997). This scandal took up considerable space in newspapers and magazines during the 1990s, e.g.,
Jack Kammer, “Recovering from a Tailspin” Reason 25, no. 8 (1994): 48, Academic Search Complete,
EBSCOhost, accessed September 21, 2016.
5 Wood and Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within the US Military,” 5.
6 See Elizabeth Lutes Hillman, Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 129.
7 Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898–2000
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 118–22.
8 Judicial Proceedings Panel, Report on Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, February 2016, http://
jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/03_JPP_Art120_Report_Final_20160204.pdf at 5–6.
9 Ibid., 68–70 (discussing whether violations of UCMJ codes penalizing consensual sex should be
incorporated into Article 120, which requires registration as a sex offender upon conviction).
10 National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014, Pub. L. No. 113–66, § 1744(a), 127 Stat.
672, 980–82 (2013).
11 Department of Defense, Retaliation Prevention and Response Strategy: Regarding Sexual Assault and
Harassment Reports, April 2016, http://sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/Retaliation/DoD_Retaliation
_Strategy.pdf, 5–6, 3 fn2, 21–23; Wood and Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within
the US Military,” 1.
12 Hillman, Defending America, 33; Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in
the First World War (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Roberts, What
Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2013); Alice Kaplan, The Interpreter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
13 The Judicial Proceedings Panel, Issues Report on Retaliation: Notes Systematic Problems and Calls for
Reforms, February 11, 2016, http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/09-News_Media/Press_Release/
JPP_PR_20160211_Final.pdf.
14 Ibid.
15 All of the JPP Recommendations and reports are available at http://jpp.whs.mil/. JPP
Recommendations 1–11 are included in the Judicial Proceedings Panel Initial Report 11
(February 2015), available at http://jpp.whs.mil/public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/JPP_Initial

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Report_Final_20150204.pdf. JPP Recommendations 12–17 are included in the Judicial

Proceedings Panel Report on Restitution and Compensation for Military Adult Sexual Assault
Crimes 5 (February 2016), available at http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/
JPP_Rest_Comp_Report_Final_20160201_Web.pdf. JPP Recommendations 180–23 are
included in the Judicial Proceedings Panel Report on Article 120 of the Uniform Code of
Military Justice 5–7 (February 2016), available at http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-
Panel_Reports/JPP_Art120_Report_Final_20160204_Web.pdf. JPP Recommendations 24–36
are included in the Judicial Proceedings Panel Report on Retaliation Related to Sexual Assault
Offenses 5–10 (February 2016), available at http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/
04_JPP_Retaliation_Report_Final_20160211.pdf JPP Recommendations 37–38 are included
in the Judicial Proceedings Panel Report on Statistical Data Regarding Military Adjudication of
Sexual Assault Offenses 5–6 (February 2016) available at http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-
Panel_Reports/05_JPP_StatData_MilAdjud_SexAsslt_Report_Final _20160419.
16 Andrew S. Effron, Military Justice Review Group, Report of the Military Justice Review Group Part I:
UCMJ Recommendations, http://www.dod.gov/dodgc/images/report_part1.pdf.
17 Ibid., 37–38, 173–80.
18 The Judicial Proceedings Panel, Report on Statistical Data Regarding Military Adjudication of Sexual
Assault Offenses, February 2016, http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/
05_JPP_StatData_MilAdjud_SexAsslt_Report_Final_20160419.pdf; Judicial Proceedings Panel,
Report on Restitution and Compensation for Military Adult Sexual Assault Crimes, February 2016,
http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/08-Panel_Reports/02_JPP_Rest_Comp_Report_Final
_20160201.pdf.
19 Elizabeth L. Hillman, “Sexual Violence in State Militaries,” in Understanding and Proving International
Sex Crimes, eds. Morten Bergsmo, et al. (Torkel Opshal Academic EPublisher, 2012), 434.
20 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000); Brownmiller, Against Our Will; Elisabeth J. Wood, “Rape During War Is
Not Inevitable: Variation in Wartime Sexual Violence,” in Understanding and Proving International Sex
Crimes, eds. Morten Bergsmo, et al. (Torkel Opshal Academic EPublisher, 2012), 390; Dara Kay
Cohen, Amelia Hoover Green, and Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Wartime Sexual Violence:
Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward,” United States Institute of Peace Special Report
323 (2013): 8; Hillman, “Sexual Violence in State Militaries,” 434.
21 Cohen, Green, and Wood, “Wartime Sexual Violence,” 8.
22 Wood, “Rape During War Is Not Inevitable,” 390–91.
23 E. Susan Barber and Charles F. Ritter, “‘Physical Abuse … and Rough Handling’: Race, Gender, and
Sexual Justice in the Occupied South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the
American Civil War, eds. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009), 49.
24 Kim Murphy, I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War (Batesville, VA: Coachlight Press, 2014).
25 Barber and Ritter, “‘Physical Abuse … and Rough Handling,’” 50.
26 Stella Cernak, “Sexual Assault and Rape in the Military: The Invisible Victims of International
Gender Crimes at the Front Lines,” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 22, no.1 (2015): 221.
27 Ibid., 207–41.
28 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 32.
29 Valorie Vojdik, “Women and War: A Critical Discourse,” Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice 20
(2005): 346 (“Violence against women and the denigration of women is necessary to prove the
manhood of the warrior.”), cited in Meghan O’Malley, “All Is Not Fair In Love And War: An
Exploration of the Military Masculinity Myth,” DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law 5, no.1
(2015): 12.
30 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 32.
31 Ibid., 151–52.
32 Ibid., 151–52.

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33 Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006); Wood and Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within the US Military,” 3.
34 Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2008).
35 Ibid., 103–09.
36 Carol Strohmetz, “Rape, Women and War,” www.usm.edu/gulfcoast/sites/usm.edu.gulfcoast/
files/groups/learning-commons/pdf/rape_women_and_war.pdf, accessed October 2, 2016, 4 (quot-
ing George Patton, War As I Knew It (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1947), 288).
37 Hillman, Defending America, 100, noting that of the first ten volumes of published military justice
opinions, each of the nine cases where the defendant was reported to be African American resulted in
a sentence ranging from twenty years to life.
38 Robert J. Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6–7, 35.
39 Roberts, What Soldiers Do, 239–41; Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the
Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
40 Ibid., 49–69, discussing the masculine ideal of the marines.
41 Ibid., 69, 236, 243–46.
42 Roberts, What Soldiers Do, 4–11.
43 Ibid., 239, 242–43.
44 Hillman, Defending America, 107.
45 Ibid., discussing an incident in Munich where a soldier who could not find a prostitute instead
murdered and mutilated a German boy.
46 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 94.
47 Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 95–121.
48 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 94.
49 Seungsook Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South
Korea, 1945–1970,” in Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the
Present, eds. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 68.
50 Ibid., 46.
51 Michiko Takeuchi, “‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific
Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” in Over There: Living with the
U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, eds. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon
(Durham: Duke University Press), 94–97.
52 Amanda Boczar, “Uneasy Allies: The Americanization of Sexual Policies in South Vietnam,” Journal
of American-East Asian Relations 22, no. 3 (2015): 190.
53 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 96, 23.
54 Boczar, “Uneasy Allies,” 190.
55 Hillman, “Guarding Women,” in One of the Guys, ed. Tara McKelvey (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2007),
111–12.
56 See Elizabeth L. Hillman, “The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force,” in Iraq and the Lessons of
Vietnam, eds. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn Young (New Press, 2007), 156, 159–61, describing
shifting demographics due to increased integration of women in the ranks while noting that women
soldiers shoulder the burdens of war equally with their male counterparts without attaining the
rewards of status within the military.
57 Cohen, Green, and Wood, “Wartime Sexual Violence,” 1. Other works interrogating this subject
include: Wood, “Rape During War Is Not Inevitable,” 389–91.
58 Cohen, Green, and Wood, “Wartime Sexual Violence,” 1.
59 Hillman, “Sexual Violence,” 421.
60 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 37.

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61 Hillman, Defending America, 100 (internal quotation marks omitted).

62 Ibid., 101.
63 Hillman, Guarding Women, 113, citing Julie Yuki Ralston, “Geishas, Gays and Grunts: What the
Exploitation of Asian Pacific Women Reveals About Military Culture and the Legal Ban on Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual Service Members,” Law and Inequality 16 (1998): 661–62; Chalmers Johnson, “The
Okinawa Rape Incident and the End of the Cold War in East Asia,” California Western International
Law Journal 27 (1997): 389.
64 Johnson, “The Okinawa Rape Incident,” 394–95.
65 Lex L. Merrill, Carol E. Newell, Joel S. Milner, et al., “Prevalence of Premilitary Adult Sexual
Victimization and Aggression in a Navy Recruit Sample,” Military Medicine 163, no. 4 (1998): 209–
12; Terri J. Rau, Lex L. Merrill, Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., “Evaluation of a Sexual Assault
Education/Prevention Program for Male U.S. Navy Personnel,” Military Medicine 175, no. 6 (2010):
429–34.
66 Aaron O’Connell, Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 221–25.
67 Hillman, Defending America, 87 (ch. 4) n. 157.
68 President Barack Obama, Press Conference, Washington: May 16, 2013, video accessed October 2,
2016, https://www.c-span.org/video/?312788-3/president-obama-military-sexual-assault.
69 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 117.
70 See Nathaniel Frank, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America
(New York: St. Martin Press, 2009), 40–41 discussing toxic masculinity in military culture.
71 SAPRO, “Mission and History of the Department of Defense,” www.sapr.mil/index.php/about/
mission-and-history, accessed October 2, 2016; Response Systems Panel, created in 2013, http://
responsesystemspanel.whs.mil/, accessed October 2, 2016; and Judicial Policy Panel, created in 2014,
http://jpp.whs.mil/, accessed October 2, 2016.
72 Wood and Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within the US Military,” 19–20; Carol
Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military
Culture (Boston: Beacon, 2004).
73 Madeline Morris, “By Force of Arms: Rape War and Military Culture,” Duke Law Journal 45 (1996):
674–727.
74 Morris, “By Force of Arms,” 664. Criticized by John B. Corr, “Rape, Sex, and the U.S. Military:
Questioning the Conclusions and Methodology of Madeline Morris’ By Force of Arms,”
Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 10 (2000): 191–218.
75 SAPRO, Department of Defense, 2014–2016 Sexual Assault Prevention Strategy, April 30, 2014,
http://www.sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/SecDef_Memo_and_DoD_ SAPR_Prevention
_Strategy_2014-2016.pdf.
76 Hillman, “The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force.”
77 10 U.S.C.A. § 654 [Repealed. Pub.L. 111-321, § 2(f)(1)(A), Dec. 22, 2010, 124 Stat. 3516].
78 Remarks on the Women-in-Service Review as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter,
Pentagon Press Briefing Room, December 3, 2015, available at http://www.defense.gov/News/
Speeches/Speech-View/Article/632495/remarks-on-the-women-in-service-review.
79 Department of Defense Manpower statistics, https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/dwp_reports.
jsp, accessed October 2, 2016.
80 Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight, xviii.
81 Ibid., xi–x; Wood and Toppelberg, “The Persistence of Sexual Assault within the US Military,” 19–20.
82 Elizabeth L. Hillman, “Front and Center: Sexual Violence and Military Law,” Politics and Society 37,
no. 1 (2009): 103.

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 PART IV

Gendered Aftermaths

While the first three parts draw our attention to the ways gender has infused war-making in the
United States, this final part implores us to look beyond the battlefield and wartime home front to
postwar periods. As these chapters reveal, gender has proven central to the demobilization,
reintegration, and rehabilitation of veterans, and to the remembrance and commemoration of
war. Governmental policies for veterans and public commemorations of wars have drawn on and
determined gendered notions of military service and citizenship that have had wide-reaching
political, social, and cultural effects on American society.
While gender roles have often been disrupted for wars’ duration, the American public has
grappled with the meaning of those changes in postwar periods. Often, whatever changes had
been deemed necessary during wartime were rolled back at war’s end to reaffirm a prewar social
hierarchy based in conventional notions of men’s and women’s roles. In part, these retractions
were brought about by male veterans who created organizations to lobby for elevated social status
and entitlements as a benefit of service. Veterans’ organizations also narrowed postwar public
conceptions of military service by excluding women veterans. Until the 1970s, most veterans’
organizations permitted women, both veterans and non-veterans, only in female auxiliaries.
Public policies similarly contributed to a realignment of prewar gender norms. Veterans’ entitle-
ments provided by the government have seldom been awarded equally, but have facilitated white
male veterans’ access to land, political power, class mobility, job security, and education, while
excluding women and racial minorities in both explicit and implicit ways. Similarly, historians
have shown that efforts to rehabilitate disabled veterans have been rooted in efforts to reestablish a
gender hierarchy that valued conventional forms of male authority and breadwinner status.
Postwar periods similarly have witnessed a cultural inscription of conventional gendered
notions that link men with masculinity, muscularity, and national defense, and women with
femininity, submissiveness, and the home front. As many historians point out, wars fundamen-
tally challenge notions of masculinity as men are wounded, disabled, and killed, and as women
take on militarized roles previously deemed the domain of men. Postwar depictions, however,
often erase these challenges—and indeed erase much of the diversity of wartime service in general
—through a proliferation of images that align wartime service and conventional gender norms.
War memorials and commemorations, for example, privilege an image of heroic manly combat
while relegating women, to the extent that they are memorialized at all, to traditionally feminine
roles of support. Many war films similarly gloss over the physical and psychological costs of war as

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they quickly reintegrate veterans (particularly, male veterans) into regular patterns of work and
family life.
All of these postwar policies and images signal more than just a reckoning with wartime gender
change. They strike at the heart of what kinds of labor count as wartime service and what that
service means. As the chapters note, the ways that Americans value, celebrate, remember, and
mourn the costs of war tell us a lot about whose participation matters most and what they believe
is owed in return. Postwar discussions about veterans, disability, and memory are also discussions
about gender that, all too often, shaped the beginnings of the next war.

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 19
TO RECOGNIZE THOSE WHO
SERVED
Gendered Analyses of Veterans’ Policies,
Representations, and Experiences
Jessica L. Adler
florida international university

According to Title 38, which codifies laws relating to veterans’ benefits in the United States, the
matter is relatively simple. “The term ‘veteran’ refers to a person who served in the active
military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions
other than dishonorable.”1 But former service members are a highly diverse group. Their
perceptions of military life and access to government-sponsored benefits and distinct social
networks thereafter – characteristics that define the veteran experience in the United States –
depend on a variety of dynamics, including the time, place, and conditions of service, and social
factors such as race, class, and gender.
This chapter synthesizes literature regarding how gender shapes veterans’ experiences and
identities from a policy, health, and social perspective.2 Scholars have shown that state-funded
pensions and domicile institutional care offered in the nineteenth century were imagined and
granted as a means of recompense for dutiful, masculine service, and that rehabilitation programs
during and after the World Wars were intended to alleviate dependency and ensure that veterans
could be workers and family breadwinners. Similarly, they have argued that social policies like the
1944 G.I. Bill, veterans’ activism surrounding commemorations of military service, and popular
culture representations of former service members following wars helped instantiate, rather than
unsettle, prescribed gender roles. But scholars have also revealed that minority veterans –
including women and those who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) –
demanded with increasing visibility in the twentieth century to be granted entitlements and
recognized for their military contributions regardless of their sex or sexual identity. When they
challenged the idea that recognition of veterans should be based on traditional conceptions of
masculinity, historians tell us, they faced resistance from fellow former service members,
policymakers, and the general public, but also helped to expand who could qualify as a veteran
and a military hero.
This essay is organized according to the realms in which veterans often appear in scholarly
literature. The first section focuses on their role as recipients of state assistance, entitlements, and
rehabilitation services, while the second examines veterans’ organizations, activism, and ideals
regarding public commemorations of service. In spite of a relatively recent growth in scholarly

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work on both veterans’ policies and gender and war, there is much yet to be done. I conclude by
highlighting some areas for further research.

From Service Member to Veteran: Social Policy and Rehabilitation

Former service members have long received special benefits from their governments. Indeed,
Isser Woloch refers to French veterans of the late eighteenth century as “the state’s most favored
ward.”3 Policies concerning veterans in various nations follow some basic patterns – for example,
they centered in the nineteenth century on pensions and institutions – but the extent and
conditions of veteran-specific programs vary based on the military’s place in society, the
organization of government and the economy, perceptions of those who serve, opinions
regarding particular wars, and ideas about the injuries and illnesses incurred by service members.
In the United States, as in other nations, a distinct system of veterans’ benefits has served a variety
of ideological and practical purposes.4 It demonstrates the fulfillment of an ideal expressed by
Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle.”5 More pragmatically,
policymakers and veterans’ advocates have long recognized that access to publicly sponsored
institutions like hospitals, and entitlements, such as university tuition and employment assistance,
help alleviate poverty. Since the 1970s, when the United States instituted the all-volunteer force,
veterans’ benefits have served another practical purpose: attracting Americans to the armed
forces.6
Scholars note that veterans’ benefits are unique because they have historically been granted as
entitlements, rather than as welfare, but also that they were never wholly egalitarian.7 The extent
of entitlements veterans received was determined by their economic or disability status, as well as
the state’s need for service members. Theda Skocpol demonstrates that the Revolutionary War
Pension Act of 1818, for example, required that veterans demonstrate both martial service and
financial need in order to receive annual payments. Four decades later, prompted by the desire to
recruit soldiers for the Union Army, the federal government adopted the General Law of 1862.
Like the Revolutionary War Pension Act, prospective beneficiaries had to prove their eligibility,
but by demonstrating disability – defined according to the extent to which an injury or illness
hindered one’s ability to work – rather than poverty.8
While the U.S. government offered land and monetary payments to veterans throughout the
nineteenth century, institutional assistance “emerged much more slowly” than it did in Europe,
according to Patrick J. Kelly, not least of all because it represented an acceptance of a “mon-
archical” centralization of aid, and the possibility of long-term dependency. Throughout the late
nineteenth century, however, as the middle and upper class reform groups that had proactively
taken charge of Civil War veterans’ care became increasingly financially strapped, the federal
government established a national system of soldiers’ homes. By 1900, eight homes had housed
more than 100,000 union veterans in states across the country, including Ohio, Wisconsin,
Maine, and Virginia.9
While many men in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had access to the homes and
pensions by virtue of their professional and military backgrounds, scholars have shown, women
had to prove that they were fulfilling obligations as supporters and dependents.10 Women who
had served during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars mainly did so as civilians and were therefore
not legally considered veterans, but some still benefitted from veterans’ entitlements.11 By 1910,
more than 300,000 wives, mothers, sisters, and other “dependents” received pension payments.12
And according to Judith Gladys Cetina, some Soldiers’ Homes admitted the wives, widows, and
mothers of military veterans, as well as former army nurses. Justifying their decision to welcome
women, the trustees of a Wisconsin home used language that revealed contemporary values about

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both gender and class: “‘Here is a home where the dependent, poor and needy comrade with his
wife can be made comfortable and happy; that does not part the old man from his loving, faithful
companion.’”13
Scholars have shown that veterans’ benefits have “disproportionately benefitted those disabled
whom society, politicians, and courts deemed ‘worthy.’” In analyses of U.S. Civil War pension
records, Peter Blanck and Larry M. Logue have shown that white men with severe war-related
disabilities – especially those who served during battles like Gettysburg, which were popularly
viewed as important or perilous – gained access to state-sponsored veterans’ entitlements most
readily. Veterans who were African American or foreign born, these scholars show, faced
additional hurdles when attempting to access benefits.14 Throughout the twentieth century,
veterans with invisible injuries, or illnesses that were difficult to trace to battle – such as exposure
to mustard gas following World War I, malaria after World War II, the lingering effects of
frostbite suffered in the Korean War, Agent Orange-related illnesses after the Vietnam War, and
psychological ills following many wars – faced charges ranging from laziness to malingering when
they attempted to access compensation and medical care.15
Of course, one timeless characteristic of war is that it “brings about,” as Mary Tremblay
eloquently puts it, “an epidemic of disease and disability.”16 The nature of veterans’ benefits and
care have changed over time, scholars have shown, based on societal conceptions and expecta-
tions regarding gender and disability. In the era of the World Wars, in particular, various western
nations aimed to rely more heavily on rehabilitation, rather than pensions or long-term domicile
care facilities, as a means of ensuring postwar reintegration. As Marina Larsson notes, in the first
decades of the twentieth century, “disability became understood as a problem the individual
could rise above through psychological adjustment, rather than a condition that entailed inevi-
table physical limitations, suffering and dependence.”17 That cultural shift, according to historians
of war, gender, and disability, had major implications for the treatment of the war-wounded.
Historians propose that military officials and policymakers in the United States and beyond
attempted to use rehabilitation measures to bolster a sense of masculinity among wounded and ill
service members. In France after World War I, Roxanne Panchasi argues, rehabilitation efforts
were emblematic of a striving for “rational management of the destructive and disordering effects
of the war experience.”18 In Britain, Joanna Bourke maintains, they were intended to teach
disabled service members to “become ‘men,’ shrugging off what was regarded as the feminizing
tendencies of disability.”19 Likewise, in the United States, a military rehabilitation program was
motivated in part by a desire to stave off the feminine state of dependency – especially, Beth
Linker argues, on state pensions and long-term disability payments. At Walter Reed Hospital in
Washington, D.C., following World War I, she shows, the provision of state-of-the-art limbs,
rather than old-fashioned “peg legs,” was intended to render disability less visible, and “delegi-
timize the disabled veterans’ claim to federal assistance once rehabilitation was complete.”20 Ana
Carden-Coyne notes that the disabled male was seen as both feminized and infantilized.
Rehabilitation through occupational therapy, she argues, could be thought of as “an active
process of returning men from an inert state … through to ‘some more masculine and practical
occupation,’ which involved operating industrial machines, or other mechanic activities.”21
Scholars have also shown that many service members transitioning to veteran status proved
outwardly resistant to military and governmental ideals regarding masculinity and independence.
Here again, the U.S. experience was hardly unique. Focusing on World War I-era Britain and the
bodily experience of injury and pain, Wendy Jane Gagen argues that as disabled service members
became veterans, they took part in “a continual renegotiation and mediation of the gendered
ideal.”22 Fiona Reid maintains that British service members diagnosed with shell-shock during
World War I adopted an attitude of “wordless endurance” as a “contemporary coping

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mechanism.”23 In the same period, British soldier-patients resisted the “repressive nature of the
hospital regime,” according to Jeffrey Reznick. They were, Carden-Coyne writes, “suffering in
silence but resisting in secret,” aware that they were on public and medical display, and that they
faced long-term health challenges.24 Similarly, Beth Linker emphasizes the agency of disabled
American soldiers and veterans in the World War I period, noting that they outwardly challenged
policies aimed at ensuring that military rehabilitation would alleviate the need for state depen-
dence; service members with disabilities fought for access to publicly sponsored benefits while
they remained in the military and following discharge.25 Scott Gelber, too, argues that U.S.
veterans held and shared distinct ideas regarding a publicly sponsored post-World War I voca-
tional education program. While government officials aimed at what Gelber calls “vocational
conservation,” or returning injured and ill veterans to their prewar wage-earning capabilities and
circumstances, veterans themselves had higher hopes (albeit still tied to the male breadwinner
ideal) to access academic training and better their professional prospects.26
Scholars frame vocational education programs like the one discussed by Gelber and veterans’
social policies passed in the years surrounding wars as symbols and shapers of ideals regarding
gender and labor. The War Risk Insurance Act of 1917, for example, stipulated that service
members would allot a portion of their pay to so-called dependents, which would be matched or
exceeded by a family “allowance” from the federal government. It also provided compensation
for the family of a service member who was killed or disabled while in the service, and life and
disability insurance.27 The legislation, K. Walter Hickel argues, was “intended above all else to
uphold established occupational racial and gender divisions among the work force amidst
uncertainties of postwar reconstruction and labor unrest.”28 Beth Linker concurs. The goals of
the Act, she says, were “to encourage disabled soldiers coming back from the Great War to marry,
have children, and become breadwinners again, working outside the home.”29
World War II-era legislation was predicated on similar ideals. The 1944 G.I. Bill, widely
credited with re-shaping the American middle class, offered former service members access to
publicly funded university education, guarantees of home loans, employment assistance, and
unemployment compensation.30 Various scholars have shown that the G.I. Bill disproportio-
nately privileged what Nancy Beck Young calls “a narrow class,” which was largely composed of
white men.31 According to Suzanne Mettler, its education and training programs “were not
inherently sexist so much as the social norms and other policies of the era which encouraged male
veterans’ usage while discouraging females.” More than 95 percent of women married in the
post-World War II years and even the many who aimed to work had access to fewer, and lower-
paying, jobs. By disproportionately opening university spots and occupational paths to men,
Mettler argues, the G.I. Bill actually widened an educational gender gap that had been narrowing
for the previous half-century.32
Recent scholarly work has focused on another group that faced barriers to accessing veterans’
benefits throughout the twentieth century: former service members who were, or were accused
of being, gay. “One of the most vindictive punishments meted out to these veterans,” writes
Allan Bérubé, “was the denial of … benefits.”33 Would-be veterans were impacted by military
policies reflecting the norms of larger society, according to Margot Canaday. During World War
I, she maintains, the very definition of terms like “pervert” were in flux and the state “puzzled
rather than powered when it came to blocking homosexuals from service” and, subsequently,
veterans’ benefits. Stricter policies approved during and after World War II, according to
Canaday, were the product of a developing “binaristic conception of homosexuality and
heterosexuality” and worked to create a state-sponsored closet.34 In the 1940s, Bérubé notes,
service members suspected of being so-called homosexuals were released from the military with
“blue discharges.” That, according to one Women’s Army Corps veteran, equated to being

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“‘branded for life.’” Some of these former service members, Bérubé and Canaday show, wrote to
members of Congress, brought cases to court, and wrote about their experiences in popular
magazines. “The G.I. Bill,” Bérubé argues, “introduced the concepts of ‘rights,’ ‘injustice,’ and
‘discrimination’ to public discussions of homosexuality.”35
Other veterans who did not fit the masculine ideal used government-sponsored entitlements
as a wedge to open the door to state-sponsored benefits and lay the groundwork for future rights
movements. “Unlike their able-bodied counterparts who drew on the G.I. Bill,” Sarah Rose
maintains, veterans who were paraplegic or had severe disabilities, including amputations and
cardiac problems, “encountered a wide array of obstacles.” That was, in part, because govern-
ment programs and university resources reflected “gendered notions of disability as being
synonymous with dependency and disabled veterans as feminized.” Assuming that disabled
veterans could only handle a comparatively light university course load, the Veterans
Administration encouraged them to pursue vocational, rather than academic, programs. But,
Rose argues, in the late 1940s, disabled veterans at the University of Illinois-Galesburg undercut
“the automatic linkage of disability with dependency” by embracing an advocate’s stance that
they “‘participate in sports and … take a full [course] load.’” By rejecting the prevalent idea that
“disabled individuals, not society, needed to make accommodations,” Rose argues, they under-
took “groundbreaking disability-rights activism.”36
Female former service members, too, challenged gendered conceptions of veteran status in
social policies. Analyses of the advocacy efforts of Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)
demonstrate that, while some female former service members “quietly packed away their veteran
identity along with their wartime uniforms” after World War II, others aimed to convince
legislators that women’s contributions were on par with – and occasionally surpassed – those of
men.37 During reunions in the 1960s and early 1970s, many former WASPs agreed that it was
unjust that they had not been militarized during the war – the idea had been proposed as early as
1944 – and therefore were never granted veteran status. Some, Sarah Myers shows, were eager to
obtain the prestige associated with the label of veteran, while others pointed to the economic
security that came with access to free veterans’ medical care and services. A newly formed WASP
Military Committee rallied for support in 1972 and 1975 for legislation to grant the women fliers
military status, but both bills failed to pass.38 Facing opposition from groups eager to shield
veteran status from becoming too widely available – officials from mainstream veterans’ organi-
zations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, as well as the Veterans
Administration – the WASP built a savvy media and public relations campaign and capitalized
on a new social milieu. “In the 1940s, the media was incredulous that the WASPs would demand
or expect veterans’ benefits,” Molly Merryman argues. “By 1977, the media was incredulous that
they had not received those benefits.”39 WASP advocates focused on duties performed by
women who served and convinced members of Congress that the pilots were, in every sense
but officially, militarized. They were subject to orders and courts martial and had flown in
emergency war missions alongside military personnel.
The campaign led to the passage in 1977 of the G.I. Bill Improvement Act, a major policy
victory indicating that the nature of an individual’s service would – at least officially – trump
gender as a means of defining access to military status and veterans’ benefits. The Act stipulated
that those who “rendered service to the Armed Forces of the United States in a capacity
considered civilian employment or contractual service at the time such service was rendered,
shall be considered active duty for the purposes of all laws administered by the Veterans’
Administration,” as long as they received military training, were subject to military justice,
were permitted to resign, were susceptible to assignment for duty in a combat zone, and “had
reasonable expectations that their service would be considered active military service.”40

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In spite of such policy changes, major challenges remained in the post-Vietnam era. Scholars
have shown that many Vietnam veterans – regardless of their gender or sexuality – felt overlooked
and neglected and helped expand the veterans’ welfare state to include a variety of new readjust-
ment services. Largely as a result of their activism, Congress funded studies on the latent impact of
exposure to Agent Orange, and the American Psychological Association included “Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder” in its diagnostic manual. Also, the Veterans Administration restruc-
tured its services to include programs to combat drug addiction and homelessness, and established
more than 150 Vet Centers, where former service members could seek counseling.41
If male Vietnam veterans were being neglected, their female counterparts were virtually
invisible. Recounting her advocacy work of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lynda Van
Devanter, who served as a nurse in Vietnam, wrote, “The VA had not, in more than half a
century of existence, ever published anything that gave the least idea that women were entitled to
veterans benefits, although the Armed Forces had been spending millions annually to bring
women into the services.”42 The relatively conservative political climate of the 1980s was hostile
to the general idea of offering federal entitlements to all veterans but also to ideals of gender
egalitarianism. Women who served were left out of initial Veterans Administration studies
regarding perceptions of benefits and the health impacts of Agent Orange. And many who staffed
and attended meetings at newly created Vet Centers had to learn that there were women veterans
who needed help, too.43

Veterans in Society: Social Identities and Representations

Policy debates offer rich terrain for tracing how gendered notions of veteran status are built and
challenged, but some scholars urge against reducing the veteran experience to an endless quest for
government entitlements. David A. Gerber argues that an over-emphasis on political motives and
advocacy “misconstrues” the goals of individual veterans. By joining forces with their fellow
former service members, Gerber argues, veterans have strived to fulfill “ideological, social,
recreational, commemorative, and solidaristic” needs, not just made calls for government services
and benefits.44 They are, he suggests, social – not just political – actors.
The practices and principles of veterans’ mutual aid and fraternal organizations, historians have
shown, are in many cases reflections of the gendered ideals of larger society. As such, veterans’
groups are hardly unique. In an early study on fraternalism and masculinity, Mark Carnes notes
that voluntary organizations facilitated “a transition to, and acceptance of, a remote and proble-
matic conception of manhood in Victorian America.”45 Likewise, in the decades following the
Civil War, Stuart McConnell argues, in the local posts of the national veterans’ group the Grand
Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), “the most respected members were those who renounced self-
interest and displayed what was variously described as ‘character,’ ‘honor,’ or – the most frequent
term – ‘manliness.’”46 Similarly, the Disabled American Veterans, founded shortly after World
War I, trumpeted a credo of manly self-reliance.47 And William Pencak reports that the officers
who established the American Legion in 1919 appealed to “middle-class Americans’ classless
vision of Americanism.”48 The cover of the organization’s July 1919 magazine was typical. The
Legion was represented as a strapping white man, tossing off his army coat in front of a pillar
labeled “American Institutions.” He eagerly pursued a wild-eyed man toting a bomb, presumably
to wrestle the implement from him. The message was clear: The organization was a vital,
masculine protector of the country’s sacred freedoms against threatening menaces.49
Although the anti-egalitarian leanings of some of the most powerful veterans’ organizations
have received disproportionate attention, scholars have also shown that veterans’ activism after
wars is hardly homogeneous.50 According to one account, more than 175 veterans’ organizations

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arose immediately following World War I.51 While conservative groups like the American
Legion advocated an anti-immigrant, anti-communist, pro-military ideology, others embraced
socialistic, pro-labor ideals, and were anti-military; they claimed that veterans should fight for
material rewards from their government based on the conviction that they had been unjustly
exploited and thanklessly discarded. Even within conservative organizations, scholars have
shown, overarching ideals may not have been universally embraced. Some state and local offices
of the American Legion, for example, supported racial integration of organization chapters in the
1920s and WASP militarization in the 1970s.52 By the post-Vietnam era, anti-war and anti-
authoritarian ideals that had been present but muted in veterans’ movements of previous
generations became part of the mainstream.
As the WASP case demonstrates, women who served recognized the potential social and
political benefits of affiliating with fellow veterans. But scholars have shown that they occasionally
had uneasy relationships with progressive, non-veterans’ groups and the principles they
expounded. “Although they did not necessarily want to be associated with women’s liberation,”
Myers writes of WASP veterans, “their struggle for militarization parallels the demands of the
feminist movement.”53 Women nurses who returned from Vietnam and represented their service
as departing from traditional ideals of feminine caregiving, Kara Dixon Vuic demonstrates, faced
hostility from the general public and fellow women veterans. For example, the memoir of Lynda
Van Devanter, which depicted the army nurse’s life-saving work, but also her affair with a
married man and alcohol and drug use, was roundly condemned.54
In the post-Vietnam era, there was distance, too, between gay veterans and a blossoming gay
rights movement. Urvashi Vaid notes that when Air Force veteran Leonard Matlovich challenged
the military’s ban on homosexuals in the 1970s, he was at first embraced by gay activist groups,
but eventually accepted a cash settlement in the suit “because he was ‘exhausted and embittered’
by being used as a symbol in a movement that abandoned him when the limelight faded.”55
Meanwhile, some radical activists rejected veterans’ causes – including that of lifting the ban on
gays in the military – on the ideological grounds that “campaigning for military access ‘fosters the
notion that soldiering is an exceptionally valued activity.’”56
In spite of such tensions, gay veterans were mobilized to join forces by their marginalization as
service members and veterans. The Veterans Benevolent Association (VBA), founded in 1945 by
four gay men who had served during World War II, was, according to Allan Bérubé and others,
“the first major gay membership organization in the United States.” Attempting “to meet the
needs of veterans who felt out of place in established organizations,” the VBA’s membership of
about 100 hosted regular social meetings and parties, and “through informal networks … assisted
gay veterans in matters concerning the military, the law, and employment.”57 In the 1970s and
1980s, according to Vaid, legal rights organizations like the National Lawyers’ Guild and Lambda
Legal supported individual service members and veterans who protested not only the military ban
on homosexuals, but also the oppressive terms of their discharges, which precluded them from
accessing veterans’ benefits.58 In the post-Vietnam era, some former service members who
identified as LGBT formed their own focused advocacy groups like American Veterans for
Equal Rights. Their efforts deserve historical attention.59
As minority veterans struggled for social recognition and organization, scholars have shown,
the gendered representations of war wounds have remained contested and volatile. While
politicians and groups like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars often mobilized
the image of the war-wounded as a means of glorifying and celebrating American war efforts – a
“weapon in the battle for the hearts and pocketbooks of the American people” – groups with
different ideological missions did the opposite. As John Kinder shows, anti-war groups of the
1920s and 1930s reminded “the American public about the high costs of veterans’ pensions …

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and the ‘long-drawn-out misery’ of countless former doughboys.” In so doing, they “drew upon
familiar cultural stereotypes likening disability to helplessness, emasculation, and bodily
corruption.”60 Disability activists, David A. Gerber points out, “are not likely to feel enthusiastic
with the uses of disability in representations of either the anti-war hero or the survivor hero. In
both, disability is to one extent or another a thoroughly negative state.”61
That interpretation also applies to gendered representations of disabled veterans in popular
culture. In post-World War II films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), according to David
Gerber, disgruntled former service members regain their self-worth by overcoming their dis-
abilities, often with the aid of women who “deliberately [assist] men to reclaim the dominant role
of breadwinners and heads of their families.”62 Likewise, Annessa Stagner argues that in the
interwar years, in popular magazines like Life, “some stories suggested that shell-shocked veterans
remained uncured because their mothers or wives failed to provide the proper support necessary
for their healing.”63 An “abiding tension” is evident in such popular depictions, Gerber main-
tains. “On the one hand, veterans’ heroism and sacrifices are celebrated and memorialized.” On
the other, a wounded veteran “inspires anxiety and fear and is seen as a threat to the social order
and political stability.”64 Martin F. Norden, who examines film representations of disabled
veterans of World War II through Vietnam, also argues that “basic narrative patterns” emerge.
Men are often disempowered, then “remasculinized.” But the details of stories change, Norden
suggests, depending on historical circumstance. In the World War II era, characters were
remasculinized by adapting to a largely unified American society, with the aid of devoted
women. But in films like Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Forrest Gump (1994), which depict
Vietnam veterans, lead characters may “reclaim their masculinity” by taking a stand against war
and political power, often in spite of obstructionist, pension-hungry, or anti-war activist women
characters.65
Alongside analyses of these pop-culture representations, scholars have shown that some
former service members have attempted to undercut gendered ideals of veteran status by
participating in debates regarding how to memorialize wars’ heroes, victims, and meanings. In
the post-Vietnam War era, women and gay veterans paid heed to an argument put forward by
Daniel Sherman regarding post-World War I France: Monuments “did not simply reflect gender
roles”; they “helped to construct them.” As Sherman put it, “Commemoration privileges certain
kinds of experience and excludes others: it deploys and organizes not only memory but
forgetting.”66
Women veterans in the post-Vietnam War era recognized as much, though historians have
shown that they had diverse ideas regarding inclusive war memorials. When the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982, its famed wall of names featured eight women who
had died in Vietnam, but its Three Servicemen statue depicted only males. “I was moved by what I
did not see,” recalled Diane Carlson Evans, who had served as a nurse in Vietnam. “The time had
come,” she believed. “The norm of leaving women out of the historical account of war had to
change.”67 Kara Dixon Vuic offers an analysis of a decade’s worth of efforts to accomplish that
goal, showing that advocates like Evans “might have envisioned nuanced depictions of their
service, but what proved effective, understandable, and laudable in the public arena were
traditional images of women.” Evans reached out to veterans’ organizations and friends across
the country in order to build support for the installation of a statue of women at the memorial.
But she faced opposition on a variety of fronts. When she told attendees of a Veterans of Foreign
Wars meeting that the memorial would generally commemorate women’s contributions to war
efforts, she received little support. That changed, Vuic notes, when she re-framed her argument.
“Evans’ gendered characterization of the statue as a monument to women who held the nation’s
dying sons won over the VFW.” Others, however, opposed the memorial because it represented

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women in service as mere supporters of male fighters. As such, they felt it “mocked ideas of
women’s equality.”68
The varying perspectives – and the rise of a movement for a general monument to all women
who had served in the military – demonstrated that female veterans were a diverse and socially
complex lot with a variety of political and social backgrounds, motivations, and goals. As Evans
struggled to see through the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project, retired Air Force Brigadier
General Wilma Vaught led a movement to build a monument that would be “a living memorial
to recognize those who served.”69 She was motivated by her belief that the multiple generations
of women service members who had been forgotten “should be defined by their service, not their
gender,” as she put it in a 2011 oral history interview with Amy Rebecca Jacobs.70 As work began
in 1995 on Vaught’s Women in Military Service to America (WIMSA) Memorial at Arlington
National Cemetery, Vaught explained why the design featured no human likenesses, but instead a
reflecting pool; a computerized archive of photographs, service records, and stories; and an
educational center. “‘We did seriously contemplate a statue at one stage,” Vaught said. “And
our feeling was that … when you consider the diversity of what they’ve done – from typing to
flying airplanes to being nurses – we wouldn’t be able to get a single statue that women would be
able to look at and see themselves in it.”71
Scholars argue that proponents of both memorial projects achieved a major feat, but also point
out the substantive compromises they made and where their efforts may have gone further. The
Vietnam Women’s Memorial organized by Evans, featuring a bronze statue of three women
tending to a wounded soldier, was dedicated in 1993. An art critic from the LA Times offered a
telling critique, summarized by Vuic: “The memorial’s focus is on the suffering and death of
soldiers, with women present to support, comfort, and heal … the most lasting image of women
in the Vietnam War is of women as feminine nurturers.”72 The WIMSA memorial, which
contains no statuettes, faced no such criticism. But Kristin Ann Hass argues, like Vuic, that the tale
of how it came to be – debates about its design, funding, and location – highlights tensions about
how women’s service may be perceived and commemorated. Vaught, Hass shows, faced constant
funding challenges, demonstrating that although Congress was willing to approve the project, it
was hardly prepared to provide major financial support. Hass also points out that the WIMSA site
is, in many ways, “invisible.” Although there is a sign on the parkway alerting drivers that it exists,
it is located in Arlington National Cemetery, rather than in a central spot on the National Mall,
and it contains no clearly marked entrance to attract prospective visitors.73
LGBT veterans’ advocates from organizations like American Veterans for Equal Rights had in
mind ideals similar to Diane Carlson Evans and Wilma Vaught as they fought at the turn of the
twenty-first century for the establishment of memorials in Phoenix, Arizona; Cathedral City,
California; and Chicago, Illinois – recent efforts that have yet to receive scholarly attention. An
account by Thomas Swann, a veteran who advocated for the California site, notes that he and
other advocates faced staunch resistance from mainstream veterans’ groups and government
officials. “Fifty or one hundred years from now,” Swann writes, “people will visit America’s
first gay veteran’s (sic) memorial and be amazed and bewildered it was ever so controversial and
difficult to accomplish.”74
But, perhaps they will not be so bewildered. Perhaps they will recognize that such memorials –
and the veterans who fought for them – expand centuries-old ideals regarding military service.
Indeed, the inclusiveness of the commemorations might help explain why, in 2012, it was
possible for historian David A. Gerber to argue that “the traditional formulation of hero has
undergone a good deal of erosion in recent decades.” Rather than being connected solely to
“battlefield performance,” he writes, “‘hero’ is used today to characterize war survivors, war
victims of cruel circumstances, and those soldiers who seek psychologically and politically to

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overcome disabilities sustained in combat by denouncing both the war that led to their injuries
and war in general.”75

Conclusion: Navigating a Changed Landscape

Scholars have examined military veterans as wounded soldier-patients, disabled civilians, and
political and social actors, but much work remains to be done. “While the study of masculinity is
one of the major fields of research into war, conflict, and militarism,” Ana Carden-Coyne writes,
“the body wounded in war has only begun to be considered in the history of disability.” How do
understandings of “masculinity and femininity” shape diagnoses?76 How have disease classifica-
tions and general attitudes towards veterans changed in postwar periods, in connection with
conceptions of state responsibility and dependency? Are there similarities and differences across
different eras? Scholars may further explore, too, the relationships and interactions of disabled
veterans with their non-veteran counterparts. How have disabled male, female, and LGBT
veterans viewed their situations in relation to non-veterans, and how have the experiences of
the two groups overlapped and differed?
More studies are needed as well on the social experiences of LGBT veterans. Scholars of the
history of gay activism include discussions of ideological, ethnic, and racial divides surrounding
attempts to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the military and the quagmire of the early
1990s that led to the implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don‘t Tell.” But the late-twentieth-century
history of veterans’ struggles to repeal the terms of their discharges and gain access to benefits is
largely unwritten. Such stories could be investigated by examining the dynamics of veterans’
activism. For example, the “predominantly gay” Alexander Hamilton Post 448 of the American
Legion is pictured in Allan Bérubé’s book, participating in a Veterans’ Day Parade in San
Francisco in 1986, but we know little about the policies and practices that led to the post’s
creation within an organization generally represented as socially conservative.77
June Willenz’s interviews with women veterans of the World Wars, the Korean War, and the
Vietnam War, demonstrate that activism – and the idea of identifying as a veteran – did not
universally appeal to women who had served, though not necessarily because they wished to
adhere to a “dominant construction of femininity.”78 A woman who was born in Puerto Rico
and served with the Women’s Auxiliary Corps said most people were unaware she had served,
and she had no desire to seek out fellow veterans; by way of explanation, she noted that “she saw
her military service as a way to get out of the box and advance herself.” An African American
woman who served in the Navy in the early 1960s declared that she did not consider herself a
veteran, not least of all because she felt she was relegated to menial jobs and discriminated against
while enlisted because of her skin color. “She never identified with the military as an institution
and even less with the veteran population,” wrote Willenz. Irene Murphy, who served with the
Navy, noted that she considered herself a veteran, but held anti-war beliefs that were at odds with
major national veterans’ service organizations.79 As the population of former service members in
the United States becomes ever more diverse, historians would do well to analyze how experi-
ences and perceptions of veteran identity have varied based on race, ethnicity, and social back-
ground, as well as the nature of military service.
More work is needed, too, on how the memory and medicalization of homecoming – often
constructed in gendered contexts – shape societal conceptions of war and veterans’ postwar
experiences. In his controversial work on experiences of veterans returning from Vietnam, Jerry
Lembcke notes that, “there is no gainsaying the fact that wars exact an enormous price from those
who fight them.” But, he warns, “the ‘remembered’ Vietnam War was not the war itself but the
homecoming experience of the Vietnam veterans.”80 As such, Lembcke argues, it became “a

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modern-day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and generations of more
veterans.”81 Lembcke’s insights serve as a reminder that veterans do not hold a monopoly on the
suffering caused by military conflicts, and their diverse stories do not wholly explain a host of
historical conundrums, including why wars are won or lost. Future work should acknowledge
those ideas, and the fact that the representation and nature of homecomings do not just shape
societal understandings of military service, but also individual perspectives. “It is while attempting
reintegration, where past confronts present and combatants face the civilians they purport to
serve, that soldiers are most likely to confront their simultaneous ties to both victim-hood and
perpetrator-hood,” according to a 2015 article in the International Journal of Human Rights. In
reference to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors argue, the diagnosis of PTSD “contributed
to making the nation shy of judging or assessing the moral actions of soldiers and the nation, of
censuring and silencing public and private conversations that reckon the costs of war.” The
authors’ notion that the “categories” of hero and perpetrator are not “homogeneous or mutually
exclusive” deserves to be considered and historicized.82
While the study of veteran-related policies has increased alongside the examination of
disability and culture, there is room here, too, for further exploration. Historical accounts of
veterans’ policies focus predominantly on those who were wounded, participated in combat, or
both – hardly a representative sample, since most former service members never saw battle.83
Indeed, veterans in the twenty-first-century United States may be viewed not as a homogeneous
group with a common history, but instead as diverse working- and middle-class people, who have
effectively advocated for health and political rights based on a shared experience that meant
different things to different individuals. Future work might tease out how veterans of different
generations related to one another, and how service records determined veterans’ social net-
works, relationships, and policies. It also might focus on a subject of import to scholars of
disability – how the “medicalization of mental and social disruption of veterans by their
experiences,” as Jonathan Shay artfully put it, impacts policies and adaptation to civilian life.84
Thanks to the appearance of an increasing number of studies of veterans of various regions, the
seeds of transnational analyses have been planted. Indeed, scholars of the history of various nations
have argued that veterans’ issues are central to welfare states, imperialism, and the workings of
governments.85 Tracing similarities and differences between countries could reveal dynamic
social and policy ideals and paradoxes. Transnational studies could also determine whether
Gerber’s conclusions about transitions in ideals regarding heroism are applicable globally.
While there are plenty of research areas left to explore, we know from recent scholarship that,
throughout the twentieth century, veterans who did not fit the masculine warrior ideal gradually
faced fewer barriers to professional advancement both in and outside of the military, and their
service became more visible, if not celebrated. But previous challenges foreshadow those that
remain in the post-Cold War era. In May 2015, there were more than 2 million women veterans
in the United States, and as of 2011, there were more than 1 million gay veterans.86 Like their
predecessors, they experience their veteran status in a myriad of ways: pride in service, feelings of
isolation from non-veteran civilians, ambiguity about the wars in which they served. And like
their predecessors, they face health and economic challenges. Women veterans are four times
more likely to be homeless than their non-veteran counterparts.87 In 2003, a staggering 21
percent of women patients of the Veterans Health Administration were considered victims of
Military Sexual Trauma.88 Meanwhile, in spite of numerous studies indicating that service
members who concealed their sexual orientation while serving “experience negative mental
health effects … few resources are available for traumatized LGBT veterans.” Transgender service
members also “may experience discrimination after service through institutions like the VA and
many struggle with unemployment, homelessness and mental health disorders.”89 Gay veterans

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who have served since World War II continue to advocate for legal changes to discharges issued
on the basis of their sexuality.90 During the twentieth century, it is clear, gendered understandings
of veteran status underwent massive changes, but many challenges and questions remain.

Notes
1 Title 38, United States Code, Veterans’ Benefits, 85th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington:
Government Printing Office, September 15, 1958).
2 John R. Gillis defines identity as “a sense of sameness over time and space.” John R. Gillis, “Memory
and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed.
John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
3 Isser Woloch, “‘A Sacred Debt’: Veterans and the State in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” in
Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
4 For overviews of the history of veterans’ care and benefits in the United States (in addition to sources
cited elsewhere in this chapter), see Rosemary A. Stevens, “The Invention, Stumbling, and Re-
Invention of the Modern U.S. Veterans Health Care System, 1918–1924,” in Veterans’ Policies,
Veterans’ Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United States, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Bernard Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War:
The American Experience through World War II (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2013); James D.
Ridgway, “Recovering an Institutional Memory: The Origins of the Modern Veterans’ Benefits
System from 1914 to 1958,” Veterans Law Review 5 (2013): 1–55; Adam Oliver, “The Veterans Health
Administration: An American Success Story?,” The Milbank Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2007); Karen Cleary
Adlerman and Sar A. Levitan, Old Wars Remain Unfinished: The Veteran Benefits System (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
5 Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/
Lincoln2nd.html.
6 Minorities in the United States – including women, men of color, and people born in other countries
– have long viewed military service as a means of enhancing their citizenship rights, but the repeal of
the draft, and the institution of the all-volunteer force, led minorities to the military in greater
proportions. Beth L. Bailey, America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2009); Bernard Rostker, I Want You!: The Evolution of the All-Volunteer
Force (Santa Monica: RAND, 2006); Jennifer Mittlestadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
7 On the distinction between entitlements – granted without preconditions like financial need – and
welfare, see: Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890–1935
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s
Enduring Confrontation with Poverty: Fully Updated and Revised (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
8 Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 1. On the development of a distinct,
state-based, and comparatively meager benefits system for Confederate veterans, see R.B. Rosenburg,
“‘Empty Sleeves and Wooden Pegs’: Disabled Confederate Veterans in Image and Reality,” in
Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012),
204–28.
9 Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1997), 2–3. Also, on Soldiers’ Homes: Trevor K. Plante, “The National Home
for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers,” Prologue Magazine (Spring 2004): 56–61.
10 On the gendered nature of social policies, Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and
the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Dorothy E. McBride and Janine A. Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA: Policy Debates and Gender
Roles (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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11 For example, Alfred Young writes about Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson, who did
receive a veteran’s pension and identified fully as a veteran. Alfred Young, Masquerade: The Life and
Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York: Vintage, 2004).
12 Theda Skocpol, “America’s First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War
Veterans,” Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 63.
13 Judith Gladys Cetina, “A History of Veterans’ Homes in the United States, 1811–1930” (Ph.D. diss.,
Case Western Reserve University, 1977), 230, 71 n. 76, 44.
14 Peter Blanck and Chen Song, “‘Never Forget What They Did Here’: Civil War Pensions for
Gettysburg Union Army Veterans and Disability in Nineteenth-Century America,” William and
Mary Law Review 44, no. 3 (2003): 1163. For a more extensive follow-up study, see Larry M. Logue
and Peter David Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On African American veterans’ fights for rights and
entitlements, see Charissa J. Threat, Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps
(Chicago: University of Illinois, 2015), especially Chapter 4; Louis Woods, “Virtually ‘No Negro
Veteran … Could Get a Loan’: African-American Veterans, the GI Bill, and the NAACP’s Relentless
Campaign against Residential Segregation, 1914–1960,” Journal of African American History 98, no. 3
(Summer 2013): 392–417; Jennifer D. Keene, “The Long Journey Home: Federal Veterans’ Policy
and African-American Veterans of World War I,” in Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics, 146–70;
Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in
the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Ira Katznelson and Suzanne Mettler,
“On Race and Policy History: A Dialogue About the G.I. Bill,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 3
(September 2008): 519–37; Jennifer D. Keene, “Protest and Disability: A New Look at African
American Soldiers During the First World War,” in Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World
War Studies, ed. Pierre Purseigle (London: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005); Jennifer E. Brooks,
Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of
Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); David H. Onkst, “‘First a
Negro . . . Incidentally a Veteran’: Black World War Two Veterans and the G.I. Bill in the Deep
South, 1944–1948,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 517–44; Pete Daniel, “Black
Power in the 1920s: The Case of Tuskegee Veterans Hospital,” Journal of Southern History 36, no. 2
(August 1970): 368–88.
15 On distinctions between injuries and the basis of determining “service connection,” see Jessica L.
Adler, Burdens of War: Creating the United States Veterans Health System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2017). Wendy Jane Gagen discusses “two main groups” of service members with
disabilities, “those who were injured in active service and those who were not.” Wendy Jane Gagen,
“Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity During the First
World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook,” European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’Histoire
14, no. 4 (December 2007): 525–41. Melinda Pash, In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The
Americans Who Fought the Korean War (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Peter Sills,
Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014); Edwin A.
Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2012); Thomas I. Faith, Behind the Gas Mask: The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service
in War and Peace (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). There is an extensive literature on
cultural perceptions, personal experiences, and treatment of the psychological wounds of war in
various countries. As Jerry Lembcke wrote in a recent issue of Peace and Change devoted to the topic of
World War I and “the Gendered Subtexts of War Trauma,” “shell shock itself, coined during World
War I and remaining the ostensible starting point for modern approaches to the treatment of war
trauma, was leaden with sex-gender dynamics and implications.” Jerry Lembcke, “Editor’s
Introduction: World War I and the Gendered Subtexts of War Trauma,” Peace and Change 41,
no. 1 (2016): 5–6. Useful sources that consider gender and focus on the United States include Annessa
Stagner, “Healing a Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the
United States During and after the First World War,” The Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 2

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(April 2014): 255–74; Eric T. Dean, Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marisa M. Smith, “Medicalizing Military Masculinity:
Reconstructing the War Veteran in PTSD Therapy,” in Medicalized Masculinities, eds. Dana Rosenfeld
and Christopher A. Faircloth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 183–202; Jerry Lembcke.
PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).
16 Mary Tremblay, “Lieutenant John Counsell and the Development of Medical Rehabilitation and
Disability Policy in Canada,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 2012), 322.
17 Marina Larsson, “Restoring the Spirit: The Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers in Australia after the
Great War,” Health and History 6, no. 2 (2004): 49. In his formative book on disability, Paul Longmore
notes that in the Progressive Era, disability was seen as “a defect residing in the individual and
therefore requiring individual medical rehabilitation, special education, and vocational training to
improve employment prospects.” Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on
Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 49.
18 Roxanne Panchasi, “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World
War I France,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (1991): 110–12.
19 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 62. Referring to World War II rehabilitation efforts in Britain, Julie Anderson
argues, “a disabling injury or condition was … an emasculating experience, robbing a man of this
identity and stripping him of his masculine self.” Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in
Britain: “Soul of a Nation” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 9.
20 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 101.
21 Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance and Disabled American
Veterans of the First World War,” European Review of History 14, no. 4 (2007): 548.
22 Gagen, “Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender,” 527, 538.
23 Reid argues that public perceptions of veterans diagnosed with mental illness were hardly unanimous,
and changed over time. In the early 1920s, social welfare groups often presented them as “deserving
more respect than pity,” though within a decade, as many proved unable to support themselves, they
were alternately viewed as “criminal, sometimes a malingerer, sometimes simply a poor boy.” Fiona
Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930 (London: Continuum,
2010), 64, 129, 65, 4.
24 Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During
the Great War (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 71; Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds:
Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 334.
25 Linker, War’s Waste, 101.
26 Ideals regarding disability and manhood were not the only social considerations shaping rehabilitation
efforts, according to Gelber: “Racial and ethnic prejudices of doctors and vocational advisors likely
biased judgments of which wounded veterans had sufficient character to ‘carry on’ in various forms of
reeducation.” Scott Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order’: The Reeducation of Disabled World War I
Veterans in New York City,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005): 169. On the influence of the
U.S. War Department on veterans’ “reemployment” policies, see Audra Jennings, “‘Put Fighting
Blood in Your Business’: The U.S. War Department and the Reemployment of World War I
Soldiers,” in Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United
States, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 119–45.
27 Samuel McCune Lindsay, “Purpose and Scope of War Risk Insurance,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 79 (September 1918): 52–68. For further explanation of the
Act, see Stevens, “The Invention, Stumbling, and Re-Invention of the Modern U.S. Veterans Health
Care System, 1918–1924.”
28 K. Walter Hickel, “Entitling Citizens: World War I, Progressivism, and the American Welfare State,
1917–1928” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), 173. On the Act’s impact on women

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“dependents,” see K. Walter Hickel, “War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen’s
Dependents in the South, 1917–1921,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 4 (2001): 1362–91; K.
Walter Hickel, “‘Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination’: Citizenship,
Dependency, and Conscription in the South, 1917–1919,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 4
(November 2000): 749–80. Although debates about the Act, and the ideals it contained, focused
mainly on male service members and their dependents, the law’s conditions applied to a limited
number of women who were officially militarized – mostly nurses. For details, see Adler, Burdens of
War, Chapter One.
29 Linker, War’s Waste, 31.
30 There are many sources on the G.I. Bill. Recent noteworthy books include Glenn C. Altschuler and
Stuart M. Blumin, The G.I. Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Kathleen J. Frydl, The G.I. Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
31 “Ironically,” Young writes, “while the G.I. Bill has been termed an unprecedented advance in the
federal provision of social welfare, it symbolized the triumph of a more restrained construction of the
welfare state because its benefits were targeted to a narrow class.” Nancy Beck Young, “‘Do
Something for the Soldier Boys’: Congress, the G.I. Bill of Rights, and the Contours of
Liberalism,” in Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville: The
University Press of Florida, 2012), 201. Also, on the exclusivity of G.I. Bill benefits, see Ira
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).
32 Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 144–60.
33 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York:
The Free Press, 2000), 229.
34 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 176.
35 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 253. For first-hand accounts of LGBT service members, including
perspectives on the fear that a discharge on the basis of homosexuality could lead to a loss of benefits,
see Steve Estes, Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009); Mary Ann Humphrey, My Country, My Right to Serve: Experiences of Gay Men
and Women in the Military, World War II to the Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1990); Randy Shilts,
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
36 Sarah F. Rose, “The Right to a College Education?: The G.I. Bill, Public Law 16, and Disabled
Veterans,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (2012): 44, 38, 27.
37 Jean Dunlavy argues that the majority of women who served during the World Wars “quietly packed
away their veteran identity along with their wartime uniforms,” not least of all because, after the war,
they “faced the same sexual ridicule or suspicion that they had experienced while in the military.” Jean
Dunlavy, “A Band of Sisters: Vietnam Women Veterans’ Organization for Rights and Recognition,
1965–1995” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2009), 104.
38 Sarah Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used’: The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War
II” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University 2014), Chapter 5.
39 Molly Merryman, Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World
War II (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 138–39; for Arnold quote, 54.
40 The Act granted veteran status to occupational therapists, physical therapists, and dieticians who
served during World War I, and World War II’s Signal Corps operators, Women’s Airforce Service
Pilots, and Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. This Act deserves more scholarly attention and analysis.
G.I. Bill Improvement Act of 1977, Public Law 95–202, p. 1450.
41 On the rise of the Vietnam veterans’ movement and issues of focus: Mark Boulton, Failing Our
Veterans: The GI Bill and the Vietnam Generation (New York: New York University Press, 2014);
Wilbur J. Scott, Vietnam Veterans since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National
Memorial (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of
the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001); Andrew E. Hunt, The

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Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: G.I. And Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era,
Perspectives on the Sixties (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Wilbur J. Scott, The
Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War, Social Problems and Social Issues (New York:
Aldine De Gruyter, 1993); Paul Starr, The Discarded Army: Veterans after Vietnam (New York:
Charterhouse, 1974). The 1980 version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders differed from previous versions because it suggested that trauma
could arise not just from combat but also from natural disasters; “accidental manmade disasters (car
accidents with serious physical injury, airplane crashes…)”; or “deliberate man-made disasters
(bombing, torture, death camps).” The definition gave credence to an argument that women veterans
had been making for generations and that would become more prescient as military engagements
were less likely to feature a clear front line: Limited access to the military hierarchy should not
universally limit access to veterans’ entitlements. Quotes from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), 236–38. For an
analysis of PTSD in DSM-III, Hannah S. Decker, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s
Conquest of American Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 274–75. Amy Rebecca
Jacobs argues that women veterans “used PTSD to create a new definition of veteran that included
their service.” Amy Rebecca Jacobs, “Redefining ‘Veteran’: The Vietnam War and the Making of
Women Veterans, 1979–1997” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2013), 20. According to 1987
revisions to the manual, PTSD could result from “seeing another person who has been, or is being,
seriously injured or killed as the result of physical violence.” American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition – Revised) (Washington: American
Psychiatric Association, 1987), 247–51. By 1992, more than 15 percent of males and 8.5 percent of
women who had served in Vietnam had been diagnosed with PTSD. William E. Schlenger,
Richard A. Kulka, John A. Fairbank, Richard L. Hough, Kathleen B. Jordan, Charles R.
Marmar, Daniel S. Weiss, “The Prevalence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the Vietnam
Generation: A Multimethod, Multisource Assessment of Psychiatric Disorder,” Journal of Traumatic
Stress 5, no. 3 (1992): 354. On controversies within the psychiatric profession about the validity and
usefulness of the term “PTSD,” see, for example, Paul R. McHugh and Glenn Treisman, “PTSD: A
Problematic Diagnostic Category,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 21, no. 2 (2007): 211–22; Susan L.
Ray, “Evolution of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Future Directions,” Archives of Psychiatric
Nursing 22, no. 4 (August 2008): 217–25; Rachel Yehuda and Alexander C. McFarlane, “PTSD Is a
Valid Diagnosis: Who Benefits from Challenging Its Existence?” Psychiatric Times 26, no. 7 (July 9,
2009): 31.
42 Lynda Van Devanter, Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (New York: Warner
Books, 1984), 301.
43 Veterans’ Health Care and Programs Improvement Act of 1983, Hearings before the Committee on
Veterans’ Affairs, United States Senate, Ninety-Eighth Congress, First Session, on S. 11, S. 567, S.
578, S. 629, S. 664 and Related Bills (Washington: Government Printing Office, March 9, 10, 1983),
331–34. For a thoughtful analysis of how the Vietnam War simultaneously called into question and
bolstered normative gender roles, see Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the
Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
44 David A. Gerber, “Disabled Veterans, the State, and the Experience of Disability in Western
Societies, 1914–1950,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (2003): 899–916.
45 Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ix.
46 Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 104, 106. For a different view of the G.A.R., see Barbara
A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
47 For background on the establishment of the DAV, see Adler, Burdens of War, Chapter Four; John M.
Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 154–58.

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48 William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1989), 171–75; Thomas A. Rumer, The American Legion: An Official History
1919–1989 (New York: M. Evans & Company, 1990), 8–11. On the development of the Veterans
of Foreign Wars, a smaller but still politically powerful veterans’ advocacy organization, see Stephen
R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and G.I. Bill (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
49 Cover Art, The American Legion Weekly, July 11, 1919. Cited in Jessica Adler, “Paying the Price of
War: Soldiers, Veterans, and Health Policy, 1917–1924” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, May
2013), 107.
50 Donald J. Lisio, for example, argues that the Legion and VFW were not only conservative, but also
promoted a “narrow, intolerant superpatriotism.” Donald J. Lisio, “United States: Bread and Butter
Politics,” in The War Generation: Veterans of the First World War, ed. Stephen R. Ward (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975). John Kinder suggests that academic historians “tend to
view the Legion as a dangerous manifestation of post-World War I chauvinism,” while Legion
historians and insiders argue that the group’s identity centers on ideals of loyalty and sacrifice. Kinder
concludes that the “Legion’s early identity and work – particularly on behalf of disabled veterans –
belies neat categorization.” John Kinder, “Encountering Injury: Modern War and the Problem of the
Wounded Soldier” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2007), 256–62.
51 Kinder, “Encountering Injury: Modern War and the Problem of the Wounded Soldier,” 256–62.
Wilbur Scott argues that veterans of any conflict hardly constitute a homogeneous group. In addition to
factors like military rank and role, “one’s feelings about the rightness or wrongness of the war effort
provide further divides.” Therefore, he says, drawing together veterans with diverse interests and
backgrounds is “a task that would seem simpler for the veterans of a good war than the veterans of a
bad one.” Scott, Vietnam Veterans Since the War, xvii. Veterans’ groups after World War I were far from
politically monolithic; the agendas of the American Legion and DAV were influenced by larger social
circumstances, as well as comparatively smaller organizations. Some ex-service members joined “single-
population” groups, which brought together veterans based on disability, such as blindness or deafness;
those organizations often attempted to eschew any political stances. Gerber argues that disabled veterans
joined “mixed organizations,” whose members were both “able-bodied” and disabled (such as the
Legion and the DAV); “composite organizations,” which had members who had a variety of disabilities;
and “single population organizations,” where they banded together with others who had the same
injuries or illnesses. Gerber, “Disabled Veterans, the State, and the Experience of Disability in Western
Societies, 1914–1950.” Historian Jennifer Keene argues that the multitude of political stances articulated
immediately following the war via veterans’ organizations with a variety of ideological backgrounds had
been consolidated to a unified political voice by 1922, in part thanks to the government’s active attempts
to silence so-called radicals. Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 167–73.
52 On the Legion’s diverse opinions regarding race-based policies in the 1920s, see Adler, Burdens of War,
Chapter Four. On veterans’ groups’ divides regarding support of the WASP, see Merryman, Clipped
Wings; Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used.’”
53 Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used,’” 27.
54 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010), 166–67. Chapter 7 deals with postwar depictions of women service
members.
55 In the 1980s, just as gay veterans were increasingly calling on advocacy organizations for backing to
challenge military and veterans’ policies, Vaid notes, the movement’s agenda was “consumed by the
problems presented by AIDS.” Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian
Liberation (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 153.
56 Liz Montegary, “Militarizing US Homonormativities: The Making of ‘Ready, Willing, and Able’
Gay Citizens,” Signs 40, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 893; Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International
Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
57 Quote from Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 258. Also Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United
States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 176. Also see Anthony J. Nownes, “The Population Ecology of

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Interest Group Formation: Mobilizing for Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States, 1950–98,”
British Journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (2004): 49.
58 “Apart from veterans and their lawyers,” Urvashi Vaid writes, “the political movement did not take up the
issue of military reform until the late eighties.” Vaid, Virtual Equality, 153. For background on legal issues,
see Katherine Bourdonnay, Joseph Schuman, Kathleen Gilberd, Fighting Back: Lesbian and Gay Draft,
Military, and Veterans Issues (Chicago: National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force, distributed by
Midwest Committee for Military Counseling, 1985); Colin J. Williams and Martin S. Weinberg,
Homosexuals and the Military: A Study of Less Than Honorable Discharge (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
59 American Veterans for Equal Rights, according to the organization’s web site, is “the oldest and
largest chapter-based, all-volunteer national Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT)
Veterans Service Organization in the United States, and the nation’s only LGBT VSO recognized
by the Veterans Administration.” http://aver.us/about. It was created in 1990 as an umbrella group
for more than a dozen smaller organizations. Denny Meyer, Public Affairs Officer, American Veterans
for Equal Rights, Telephone Interview with Author, December 15, 2015. I am grateful to Denny
Meyer for taking the time to discuss with me the work and history of AVER.
60 John M. Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 221, 259. David A. Gerber also argues that “disabled
warrior heroes could easily be transformed into ‘poster boys’ for various political agendas.” David A.
Gerber, “Introduction: Finding Disabled Veterans in History,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed.
David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, 2012), 8.
61 David A. Gerber, “Post-Modern American Heroism: Anti-War Heroes, Survivor Heroes, and the
Eclipse of Traditional Warrior Values,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 369.
62 David A. Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in the
Best Years of Our Lives,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012), 71–74. On representations and prescribed obligations of women to returning
veterans in the World War II era: Susan M. Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on
Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” Women’s Studies 5, no. 3 (1978): 223–
39; Sonya Michel, “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in
American Postwar Films,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (July 1992): 109–28.
63 Annessa Stagner, “Healing a Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the
United States During and after the First World War,” The Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 2
(April 2014): 270.
64 Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits,” 71–74.
65 Martin F. Norden, “Bitterness, Rage, and Redemption: Hollywood Constructs the Disabled
Vietnam Veteran,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012), 106
66 Daniel J. Sherman, “Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France after World War I,” Gender
and History 8, no. 1 (1996): 84.
67 Diane Carlson Evans, “Moving a Vision: The Vietnam Women’s Memorial,” http://www.vietnam
womensmemorial.org/pdf/dcevans.pdf.
68 Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman, 185, 177, 182. On the creation of the monument and references to other
helpful sources, see Dunlavy, “A Band of Sisters,” 195 n. 33.
69 Suzanne Loudermilk, “Monument to Service Military: Almost 2 Million Women Have Served,”
Baltimore Sun, October 18, 1997.
70 Jacobs, “Redefining ‘Veteran,’” 239.
71 “Work to Begin This Week on Overdue Memorial,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, June 19, 1995.
72 Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman, 183–84.
73 Kristin Ann Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013), 116, 121.
74 LGBT Veterans Memorial, http://www.gayveteransmemorial.com/home/index.php/history. These
recent commemoration efforts have received little scholarly attention. On a gay veterans’ memorial

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dedicated in 2015 in Chicago, see Alan Yuhas, “LGBT Veterans to Get Their First Federally Approved
Monument,” The Guardian, May 13, 2015. Also in 2015, the National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Veterans Memorial Project purchased a site for a national memorial at Congressional
Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Josh Hicks, “New Memorial Planned for Gay Veterans at Washington
Cemetery,” The Washington Post, August 8, 2014.
75 Gerber, “Post-Modern American Heroism,” 347, 357.
76 Ana Carden-Coyne, “Introduction,” in Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, ed. Ana Carden-Coyne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5.
77 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 249.
78 The exclusion of women from “civic and martial practices,” Claire Snyder argues, “contributes to the
dominant construction of ‘femininity’” that juxtaposed an ideal of “‘republican mothers’” with
“masculine citizen-soldiers.” Claire R. Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service
and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 3.
Other scholars argue that female warriors could be viewed as “inherently unsettling to the social
order.” Shirley Ardener, Pat Holden, Sharon MacDonald, Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-
Cultural and Historical Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 6.
79 June A. Willenz, Women Veterans: America’s Forgotten Heroines (New York: Continuum, 1983), 69,
139, 143–44.
80 Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York
University Press, 1998). The first quote is from page 183, the second quote is from page 10.
81 Jerry Lembcke, “From Oral History to Movie Script: The Vietnam Veteran Interviews for Coming
Home,” Oral History Review 26, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1999): 85.
82 Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger, “‘Victim/Volunteer’: Heroes Versus Perpetrators and the
Weight of U.S. Service-Members’ Pasts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” The International Journal of Human
Rights 19, no. 5 (2015): 565, 557. For critical analyses of veterans’ troubled reintegration experiences
in other countries, see various essays in Nathalie Duclos, ed., War Veterans in Postwar Situations:
Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru, and Côte D'ivoire, The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and
Political Economy (Paris: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For a comprehensive bibliographic essay
regarding sources on the Vietnam War and memory, commemoration, gender, and “the wounded
warrior as a mnemonic figure,” see Jerry Lembcke, “The War in Vietnam: Studies in Remembrance
and Legacy, 2000–2014,” Choice 53, no. 10 (June 2016): 1427–37.
83 Meredith H. Lair’s work on the Vietnam War shows that experiences and exposure to dangers – even
during a war – depend on the time period, location, and branch of service. “Marines in Vietnam,” she
reports, “endured the most austere tours of duty and suffered the highest casualty rates [while] most
Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard personnel served in supporting roles … mostly out of harm’s way.”
Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011), 16. Other conflicts featured a similar diversity of experiences. For
example, in October 1918, when the army was at its peak World War I strength, there were
approximately 1.9 million service members serving in Europe, 1.6 million in the United States, and
300,000 in other countries. As this chapter’s discussion of “worthiness” notes, the varying service
records of wartime military personnel shaped policymakers’ discussions about veterans’ benefits, and
sense of generosity. The data is cited and discussed in Adler, Burdens of War, and Adler, “Paying the
Price of War: Soldiers, Veterans, and Health Policy, 1917–1924,” 100-01.
84 Jonathan Shay, “Afterword: A Challenge to Historians,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A.
Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 379. The literature on medicalization and
disability is extensive. Beth Linker, who argues that “veteran welfare became medicalized during the
First World War,” takes issue with “early theorists [who] understood medicalization to be beneficial
only for power-seeking, money-hungry doctors but deleterious for patients and society.” More
recent scholarship, she notes, points out that “some forms of medicalization are more humanistic
than other forms of social intervention, such as incarceration.” Linker, War’s Waste, 192–93, n. 36.
85 Julia Eichenburg and John Paul Newman, eds., The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the treatment of veterans following World War II in

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China, Neil J. Diamant, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in
China, 1949–2007 (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). On West African veterans
and imperial France, Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth
Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). On Chechen veterans in post-Soviet Russia, see
Maya Eichler, Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-Soviet Russia (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), Chapter 5. On French veterans, and France’s treatment of the war-wounded,
see Chris Millington, From Victory to Vichy: Veterans in Inter-War France (New York: Manchester
University Press, 2012). On British and German veterans, see Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home:
Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
On Canadian veterans: Peter Neary and J. L. Granatstein, eds., The Veterans Charter and Post-World
War II Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).
86 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Advisory Committee on Women Veterans (ACWV), Meeting
Minutes May 19–21, 2015, http://www.va.gov/womenvet/docs/acwvMinutes201505.pdf, 183–
84. According to a 2011 study, 20 percent of women veterans were black; about 8 percent were
Hispanic; about 2 percent were Asian; and 67 percent were white. “Minority Veterans: 2011,”
National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics (Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Policy
and Planning, May 2013), 7, http://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/specialreports/minority_veter
ans_2011.pdf. For a brief “fact sheet” on gay service members and veterans, and the challenges they
continue to face: Brittany L. Stalsburg, After Repeal: LGBT Service Members and Veterans, the Facts
(New York: Service Women’s Action Network, 2011), https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/files/
5214/4120/4269/LGBT-Fact-Sheet-091411.pdf.
87 Paige Whaley Eager, Waging Gendered Wars: U.S. Military Women in Afghanistan and Iraq (Farnham:
Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 72.
88 MST results from “sexual assault and … repeated, threatening sexual harassment occurring during
military service.” Jenny K. Hyun, Joanne Pavao, Rachel Kimerling, “Military Sexual Trauma,”
PTSD Research Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 1. There is an array of literature on MST and
emerging issues regarding the mental health of women veterans. For an overview, Jennifer J. Runnals,
Natara Garovoy, Susan J. McCutcheon, Allison T. Robbins, Monica C. Mann-Wrobel, Alyssa
Elliott, Jennifer L. Strauss, “Systematic Review of Women Veterans’ Mental Health,” Women’s
Health Issues 24, no. 5 (2014): 485–502.
89 A 2010 study revealed that “same-sex survivors of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment were
especially reluctant to report sexual violence because of the fear that their experience might be
confused with homosexual activity.” Stalsburg, “After Repeal,” 2.
90 The Restore Honor to Service Members Act proposes “to automatically upgrade adverse discharges
for veterans for no other reason than homosexual conduct.” On the Act, and legislation in New York
that would grant state benefits to veterans “adversely discharged for homosexuality,” see “Testimony
on Discharge Upgrades for Gay and Lesbian Veterans” (New York City Veterans Alliance, December
14, 2015).

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 20
BEST MEN, BROKEN MEN
Gender, Disability, and American Veterans

Sarah Handley-Cousins
independent writer

Returning American veterans face – and have faced since the American Revolution – a myriad of
complex negotiations as they attempt to find work, re-enter family units, seek financial support,
and claim citizenship. Though often overlooked, gendered conceptions of disability have been
central to these experiences. With each war, Americans discover anew the perceived incompat-
ibilities between disability and masculinity. Ideas about how men can and should bear pain,
control their bodies, and interact with the state all influence veterans’ experiences in postwar
landscapes. In a larger sense, anxieties over large numbers of depleted, dismembered men have
historically triggered public debates about rehabilitation, financial support, and national memory.
The important work of unearthing and studying the interconnections between gender and
disability has been a central focus of disability studies scholarship for decades. In 2004, Bonnie G.
Smith and Beth Hutchison’s edited volume, Gendering Disability, demonstrated that gender and
disability mirrored one another as modes of analysis: Each can offer insight into the history of the
body and the ways that subaltern groups relate to power structures and navigate antagonistic
physical and social environments.1 Further, combining the two allows us to gain a more nuanced
understanding of the complex experience of disabled persons – it is not just mind/body difference
that dictates their experience, but the gendered expectations that accompany disability.
Investigating the connections between masculinity or femininity and disability is particularly
important to understanding the history of disabled military veterans, because military culture and
masculinity are so closely intertwined. Soldiers are expected to adhere to a construction of
manhood that relies upon physical and mental ability in everything from their parade posture
to their composure in battle. Disability, even when incurred in action, challenges the very core of
martial masculinity.
Histories of the veteran experience have boomed in the past decade, thanks in part to an
increased interest in veterans’ issues in the wake of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but
historians have been slow to analyze disability. More specifically, disability is present, but often
treated as an uncomplicated fact, a medical reality without social or cultural implications. In
recent years, as disability history has gained traction as a subfield, more historians have applied the
principles of disability studies to examinations of disabled veterans. Rather than treating disability
as an isolated medical event – using the medical model of disability, which assumes that the
experiences of disability stem exclusively from medical causes – these histories examine disability
as a social construct, an identity and experience that is reflective of the wider culture and time.

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Two volumes are representative of this shift in focus: David Gerber’s foundational and sweeping
Disabled Veterans in History, which encompasses topics ranging from classical Greece to twentieth-
century Europe and America, and John W. Kinder’s more recent Paying with Their Bodies:
American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, which explores the recurring but shifting
“problem” of disabled American veterans from the Civil War to the present.2
Gender, however, has typically not been a key component of analyses of American veteran
disability. As John Kinder writes, “disability cannot be abstracted from other categories of identity
and power, and very often what it means to be disabled is determined as much by these aspects of
social existence as by the nature of physical impairment. Put another way, no one is ever just
disabled, not even disabled vets.”3 Still, most studies, including Kinder’s, address gender but do
not use it as a primary lens of analysis, most likely because in most war stories, men are the primary
actors, and the role of masculinity is often taken for granted. Most of the histories that explicitly
explore the interconnections between gender, disability, and war focus not on the United States,
but rather on Great Britain, France, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand, especially in the wake of
World Wars I and II.4 However, new scholarship is beginning to probe the links between military
service, veteranhood, disability, and masculinity in the history of the U.S. military experience.
This chapter will outline the state of the current field of gender and disability in the history of
the U.S. armed services. I focus largely on the experiences and problems faced by veterans, rather
than active-duty soldiers, but it should be noted that disability and gender are often of concern for
soldiers long before discharge – an issue that I will address at the end. I have organized the chapter
around the major problems in the field. First, I discuss the ways that historians have conceived of
wartime disability as a crisis for masculinity. Second, I look at how veterans sought to reintegrate
into civilian society, a multifaceted issue that includes finding work, securing government
support, and reestablishing a family life. Finally, I will offer some thoughts about opportunities
for new research and deeper analysis in future scholarship.

Disability and Manhood

One of the principal problems explored by historians has been the complex situation that disabled
veterans faced when they returned home from the front lines. As veterans reentered civilian life,
often bearing the marks of warfare on their bodies, they kindled public anxieties about a large
population of broken men. Could they rejoin the workforce? What kinds of work could disabled
men perform, and how much? Would disabled men be able to return to family life? Would
women want to marry such men, when they may have to spend their lives acting as caretaker,
rather than cared-for?
A recurring theme within the literature is that wars have triggered a crisis in masculinity arising
from the very existence of disabled veterans. Combat and struggle have long been seen as a key
component to masculinity, and military service has offered men the ultimate opportunity to
prove their manhood in battle. As such, many historians have argued that military service has, for
much of American history, represented a pinnacle of masculinity, even a necessary point of
transition between boyhood and manhood. Though some nineteenth-century American men
valued self-restraint, violence and conflict became increasingly powerful components of man-
hood. Amy S. Greenberg, for example, suggests that a national desire for a more aggressive,
muscular American masculinity motivated some men to seek opportunities for military experi-
ence by filibustering in Latin America.5 During the American Civil War, men of all categories of
masculinity – Northern and Southern, urban and rural, upper class, middle class, and working
class – served in Union and Confederate forces, and while they sometimes clashed over proper
martial conduct, they also generally agreed that war service was of critical import to manhood.6

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Gail Bederman and Kristin Hoganson argue that contemporary anxieties over the “over-civiliza-
tion” of white masculinity near the turn of the twentieth century held that America was
becoming weak and effeminate. In this context, military domination of less civilized, non-
white nations offered the influx of primal aggression American men needed.7 John Kinder
suggests that during World War I, Americans, worried that a period of prosperity and peace
was producing a generation of weak and spoiled young men, were eager to send boys to the front
lines, where they would presumably experience a masculine transformation. Likewise, Christina
Jarvis notes the centrality of muscular masculinity to American culture during World War II.8
Military service required physical strength and endurance, valor and fortitude, discipline and
aggression. In sum, scholars generally agree that when American soldiers donned uniforms, they
believed they were taking part in an event that affirmed and even enhanced their manhood.
For some, war wounds cemented a manhood amplified by war as “red badges of courage” that
served to prove their service and sacrifice.9 Civil War scholars have often pointed to the “empty
sleeve” as a powerful postwar symbol of manhood, patriotism, and sacrifice.10 Indeed, Frances
Clarke notes that even during the war itself, amputees were not seen as incapable of fighting –
several generals returned to the front after their amputations, and only 5,800 of some 22,000
amputees received an immediate disability discharge. Newspapers regaled readers with stories of
gravely wounded officers refusing to leave the battlefield, or forcing themselves to stand on a peg-
leg for hours while drilling troops.11 Brian Matthew Jordan argues that after the war, Union
veterans were invested in shaping a narrative of the Civil War that emphasized the Union cause as
moral, just, and necessary, because this storyline ensured that their pain and sacrifice had served
the critical purpose of emancipation.12
The popular media helped to disseminate the connections between war wounds and manhood
by featuring well-adjusted, patriotic disabled veterans. John Kinder recounts the story of Harold
R. Peat, who although Canadian, became a famous symbol of disabled veterans in the United
States during World War I. “Private Peat” was shot through the shoulder at the Second Battle of
Ypres, and was left with a disabled right arm and damaged lungs. With a best-selling autobio-
graphy, a film, and much fawning media coverage, Peat became perhaps the most famous disabled
veteran in North America during the First World War. According to Kinder, Peat believed that
his wound and the pain associated with it only served to make him “more of a man.”13 David
Gerber also describes the media’s role in making disabled veterans into heroes, including Private
Al Schmid, a machine gunner who was awarded the Navy Cross for heroism when he was
blinded in battle on Guadalcanal during World War II. Schmid’s story was turned into a feature
story for Life magazine, a biography, and a movie entitled The Pride of the Marines.14
While some believed a war wound proved a soldier’s masculinity, a great many others were
anxious about the ways that disability would affect American manhood. Outside of ideological
plaudits, real disabilities undermined martial masculinity. Civil War scholars including Megan
Kate Nelson, Frances Clarke, and Drew Gilpin Faust note that masculinity was under threat from
the very moment a wound was inflicted: Soldiers were expected to suffer with “pluck,” says
Clarke, a kind of cheerful resolve and refusal to acknowledge pain.15 The pain of war wounds
threatened to unman a soldier from its first moments – weeping, crying out, and complaining
were all incompatible with acceptable soldierly behavior. Brian Craig Miller, in his work on
Confederate amputees, recounts stories of veterans who vehemently resisted amputation, lest
they be seen as less than whole men.16 John Kinder notes a kind of hierarchy of war wounds
among World War I veterans. Ideally a doughboy would receive a small, but significant, wound
that would result in a scar, but not cause chronic health problems or impede motion. Far less
desirable was a nonvisible wound, such as chronic bronchitis from a gas attack. My own work has
shown that nonvisible wounds could prove a significant challenge to veterans: Since they could

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not be seen, they often could not be proven, which frequently led to allegations of malingering
and fraud. The disgrace of a nonvisible wound could be compounded if it affected the genitals,
impacting the ways that veterans urinated, sometimes causing painful chronic health problems
and leading to impotence.17
On the hierarchy of disabilities, psychological wounds were certainly the worst in terms of
manhood.18 Kinder asserts that there was no substantive difference to most soldiers and officers
between a mental breakdown and cowardice, stating that “throughout the Great War, neuroses
continued to be associated with weakness, malingering, and pathological insanity.”19 Christina
Jarvis recounts that in an attempt to avoid the staggering number of so-called “shell-shock” cases
during World War I, military officials during the Second World War believed they could prevent
all cases of trauma by actively screening out “misfits and obviously potential psychiatric casual-
ties.” Instead, they would build an army that represented “the cream of American manhood.”20 It
was not the horrors of war, they reasoned, but rather inferior manhood that caused mental
breakdowns in the face of battle.
Civil War historians have also pointed to the potentially emasculating effects of war trauma.
My own research on mental trauma demonstrates that some surgeons serving the Union Army
argued that the men who suffered from the vague but debilitating nervous disorder known as
nostalgia were pathologically cowardly and emasculated, and stricter recruitment procedures
could help weed out such poor soldiers.21 Soldiers themselves felt the stigma of mental illness
acutely when they struggled with nostalgia and war trauma in the ranks. According to David
Anderson, “if a soldier’s duty, a key standard of manhood, was to safeguard home and hearth, then
yielding to nostalgia would have had the dual effect of not only violating expectations of
manliness but also ‘feminizing’ them to a degree, a worry that came more and more into
prominence as the nineteenth century drew to a close.”22 Diane Miller Sommerville’s work on
war trauma and suicide among Confederate soldiers similarly shows that soldiers believed that
“courage in the face of battle was the critical test of manhood during the Civil War.”23 For some,
suicide was a better choice than a facing life as an emasculated coward.
It is a cultural truism that Vietnam veterans stand out among veterans of other wars in terms of
psychological fallout. Eric Dean argues that this assumption is unfounded, and that Vietnam
veterans suffered from war trauma to roughly the same extent that veterans of other wars did.
Dean’s landmark study compares Vietnam veterans to Civil War veterans, and finds that Civil War
veterans expressed much the same distress after their experience in battle as later veterans. Much of
the interpretation of the trauma of Vietnam revolves around other issues (such as the protracted
conflict, lack of unit cohesion, an unsympathetic civilian public, among others). Tracy Karner
shows that feelings of “unfulfilled manhood” pained many Vietnam veterans. They felt as though
they were fated to serve in uniform by a desire to emulate their fathers, who had been veterans of
World War II. But while veterans of World War II were hailed for their patriotic service, Vietnam
veterans found themselves socially alienated when they returned to the home front. According to
Karner, Vietnam veterans returned from the front lines “to social and cultural silence [that] denied
any recognition of the manhood that the veterans sought in combat.” For these veterans, the war
failed to serve as the transition from boyhood to manhood, keeping them trapped in a gendered
gray zone.24 Though the specific issues have changed with the circumstances of each subsequent
war, disability has consistently triggered societal anxieties over manhood.

Reintegration
A significant part of the work on disabled veterans deals with reintegration. All veterans, disabled
and able-bodied, faced the issue of transitioning from life in combat zones to life in civilian

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society; for those with physical or mental disabilities, however, reentering the civilian world
could be more complicated.
First, some disabled veterans could not simply resume their previous lives. Jalynn Olsen Padilla
shows that veteran amputees from the Civil War often had to abandon their previous forms of
labor, particularly physically demanding jobs such as farm work or skilled trades, in favor of
white-collar jobs as clerks or postmen. According to Padilla’s study of 200 Union veterans who
lost limbs in the Civil War, nearly all (90 percent) had been farm workers or skilled tradesmen in
1860.25 Only 10 percent were white-collar workers, and only 3 percent were clerical workers. A
decade later, 23 percent had become clerical workers, 19.7 percent unskilled laborers, and only 30
percent continued to work in skilled trades and farm work. Union veterans were drawn to white-
collar work because of federal veterans’ services like the Lincoln Institute, which trained disabled
veterans in bookkeeping, telegraphy, and typewriting to staff a growing American bureaucracy.
However, such positions were not without their own stigma. Padilla argues that even as the
economy shifted toward white-collar labor, “Americans still paid verbal homage to the ‘artisanal
culture of antebellum America’ with its emphasis on economic independence and the ability to
control one’s own labor.”26 An important additional finding in Padilla’s study was that by 1870,
11 percent of her sample was unemployed, and were labeled on census records as “crippled” or
“at home.”27 War wounds not only meant learning to live with an altered body, but also learning
new trades, and for some, leaving the workforce entirely.
David Serlin shows that employers following World War II were hesitant to hire disabled men
because of a fear they would hurt productivity. Bosses were happy to hire disabled World War I
veterans, but things changed after World War II. Serlin recounts U.S. Employment Service
employee Fred Hetzel’s explanation for employers’ reasoning: “[N]ow that the labor market has
tightened up, [employers] hire the physically fit applicant almost every time. They seem to want a
Superman or Tarzan – even though wartime experience showed that disabled men turned in
better work that those not handicapped.”28 But not all Americans felt this way, especially when
veterans could appear, move, and act able-bodied. A postwar comic strip called Gasoline Alley
illustrates Serlin’s point. A shop owner and foreman argue about whether they should hire
disabled soldiers and sailors, even though they feel badly for the veterans. “I feel sorry for
him,” the shop owner states, “but we can’t have him hobblin’ around here, he’d get in every-
body’s way.” The foreman hires Bix – a bilateral leg amputee who uses prosthetics hidden under
his pants – who impresses the shop owner with his hard work and productivity. When the shop
owner discovers the trick, he’s pleasantly surprised: “You sure put one over on me. I didn’t
suspect he wasn’t perfectly normal.”29 Such representations of disabled veterans couldn’t elim-
inate stigma, but they certainly helped convince some employers that disabled veterans were
worth hiring.
Labor was the critical defense against the emasculation of disabled veterans, but it was not
always enough. When they were unable to work enough to support themselves, disabled veterans
turned to their government. This decision, too, had gendered consequences.

Federal Support
To government authorities and bureaucrats, veterans who failed to adhere to precepts of
manhood were undeserving of federal support regardless of their service to the nation. This
was particularly true of Northern Civil War veterans, because they were required to go through a
lengthy application process in order to secure their pension. In my own work, I found that the
process of applying for pensions forced disabled Union veterans to balance a fine line of
masculinity. They needed to demonstrate in their pension applications that they were unable

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to support themselves or their dependents through physical labor, but this was an admission that
conflicted with central tenets of American masculinity. In their attempts to prove to the Pension
Bureau that they were not lazy moochers, old soldiers also had to prove that they wanted to work
and actively sought work – even if it was work that they couldn’t physically perform. Veterans
who could adhere to this precise definition of masculine disability were generally rewarded with
pension support, but those who refused to play the game were rejected. For example, former
Union Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain abandoned his attempts to get his
pension allotments raised when the Pension Bureau demanded that unless he could demonstrate
that he was utterly dependent on others for day-to-day bodily functions, such as sitting or eating,
he wasn’t disabled enough to warrant an increased payout.30 However, even as the Pension
Bureau made veterans occupy the awkward position of dependent men in order to earn their
pensions, the public grew increasingly resentful of “cripples” whom they perceived as lazy grifters
unjustly living off of the state.
The idea that the Civil War pension system had created a huge population of emasculated,
dependent men led to a radically new form of support for veterans of World War I. As Scott
Gelber explains, the federal government established job training in addition to pensions for those
soldiers wounded during World War I with the Vocational Rehabilitation Act.31 This would
allow for the Federal Board for Vocational Education (FBVE) to train veterans with new skills if
their wounds necessitated a career change, and help with job placement. The hope was that
focusing veterans’ benefits on job training and placement would help the federal government
avoid the immense pension expenditures that had followed the Civil War, while also helping
veterans circumvent the public disapproval of government handouts. According to John Kinder,
“rehabilitation promised to remasculinize America’s wounded warriors, saving them from lives of
shameful dependency.”32
However, this new system of benefits also kept disabled veterans under the strict control of
military and governmental authority. Congressman Thomas Blanton of Texas suggested that the
FBVE give veterans assigned courses, rather than allowing them to choose their vocational path,
because a veteran’s own choice would likely be “merely the inclination of the young man who
was crippled in body and soul and mind and probably did not know what was best for him.”33
Authorities with the New York branch of the Board of Vocational Education (NYBVE)
exercised subjective control over what veterans actually received in training and assistance,
often rejecting veterans of color and those deemed stupid, lazy, or unstable. According to
Gelber, “the racial, ethnic, and class prejudices of the doctors and vocational advisors likely
biased judgments of which wounded veterans had sufficient character to “carry on” in various
forms of reeducation.”34 The ability to “carry on” that post-World War I rehabilitationists sought
was tied not only to character, of course, but also to veterans’ manhood. According to Gelber,
veterans were fed up with the ineffectual help offered by the FBVE and often refused to utilize the
program. The conflict over the program, Gelber argues, helped to lead to the much more
successful G.I. Bill.35
According to Paul Lawrie, the FBVE was not simply interested in reeducating veterans, but
reconfiguring “the crippled soldier’s body into a source of national racial regeneration.”36 In a
society facing increasing mechanization and racial unrest, Lawrie argues that “FBVE policies
devalued, deskilled, and institutionalized disabled African American veterans and dismissed their
claims to rehabilitation as spurious attempts to unjustly profit from their ‘natural inferiority.’”37
Officials believed that the benefits for disabled veterans were a “declension from a productive or
‘normal’ body.”38 In other words, benefits for disabled veterans were predicated on the assump-
tion that the soldier’s body had previously been typical and used in ways deemed economically
and culturally “productive.” This “normal” body was, of course, white. People of color, like

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women and children, were understood as dependent and unproductive – inherently disabled and
emasculated.39 If FBVE benefits were offered to black veterans alongside white veterans, the
organization might “undermine white dominance rooted in income distribution, regional labor
markets, and citizenship rights,” and raise black veterans and their families out of positions of
racialized, menial labor.40 Instead, the FBVE overwhelmingly placed black men into menial,
unskilled work, combining labor, disability, and race into powerful scaffolding for white supre-
macy. Robert Jefferson has found that a similar situation faced black disabled veterans of World
War II: Because white medical and government officials filtered their definitions of disability
through their belief that black bodies were already inherently inferior, black veterans were often
ruled not disabled enough to qualify for support. While the activists worked for civil rights, black
veterans’ groups worked for increased benefits for disabled black veterans.41
The post-World War I preoccupation with rehabilitation also betrayed a kind of loathing of
disabled bodies and a desire to return men not only to work, but to a certain level of able-
bodiedness. Kinder argues that restoring soldiers to physical health was just as important to the
FBVE as job training. Men were offered extensive medical and surgical care as well as physical
therapy. Long convalescence, however, could also be dangerous. Soldiers were kept busy and
entertained with sports, dancing, and other pastimes meant to keep them cheerful in order to
prevent the disabled men from spending much time contemplating their new bodies.
“Rehabilitationists worried,” Kinder writes, “that more than any physical ailments, soldiers’
feelings of self-pity and inadequate masculinity could prove to be the biggest obstacles to their
successful reintegration into civil society.”42 Some even worried that long periods spent as a
patient, cared for by female nurses, was feminizing. For example, a soldier’s hospital worker
expressed concern that female nurses coddled wounded men, which could convince a soldier that
“convalescence is a sentimental matter in which he wears a radiant halo.”43 However, war
wounds were not always easily healed. Soldiers struggled with chronic pain, recurring infections
and secondary illnesses, and general weakened health that often kept them from completing their
vocational training or maintaining their new jobs.
No small part of the desire to rehabilitate soldiers, during World War I as well as other wars,
focused on the idea that disability could be cured through the miracle of modern medicine. For
most disabled veterans, the cure meant one thing: prosthetics. It was prosthetics that would take
dependent disabled soldiers and return them to a position of economic productivity. David
Serlin’s analysis of Gasoline Alley, described previously, shows that Bix, the World War II veteran
and bilateral amputee, was only employable because of his prosthetic legs.44 Thinkers, physicians,
and prosthetics manufacturers of the Civil War era all agreed upon the importance of prosthetic
limbs to rehabilitating wounded soldiers for both economic and political ends. Lisa Herschbach
argues that for Northern prosthetic limb manufacturers, like B. Frank Palmer, “the social
meaning of prosthesis derived from its interpolation into an ethic of free labor and industrial
organization.”45 Indeed, in the philosophy of physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Palmer was the
“Garrison of those oppressed members of the body corporeal,” creating an image that meant that
the reconstruction of the body reflected the Reconstruction of the nation.46 The idea that
disability could be cured through medical science remained tightly intertwined with ideas
about masculinity, veterans, and work into the twentieth century. Beth Linker shows that during
and after World War I, orthopedic surgeons saw themselves as intervening in the creation of a
class of emasculated, dependent cripples, and the Limb Lab at Walter Reed General Hospital
strove to create prosthetics that were easily hidden and created a façade of able-bodiedness.47
Not only were veterans expected to return to productivity, they were expected to return to
their position as heads of households, but their changed bodies often complicated their ability to
achieve and maintain the role of husband and father.

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Husbands and Fathers

The ability to marry and father children was a central problem for disabled veterans. Daniel
Blackie’s examination of Revolutionary War pensions shows a renegotiation of roles for disabled
veterans and their families in the early nineteenth century. Headship, the masculine duty of acting
as provider for wife and children, was critical to masculinity in the Early Republic. Disabled
veterans, Blackie finds, mirrored able-bodied men: They married, fathered an average of nine
children, and generally “conformed to the general demographic patterns of the time.”48 Yet,
their disability placed their position as family heads at risk. Though wives and grown children
might provide disabled veterans with care, the veterans themselves often still cast themselves as
the actual head of household. Blackie offers the example of Joel Porter, who in 1820 wrote in his
pension application that he had three adult daughters living at home, and although they were
able-bodied and most likely working and caring for their father, Porter emphasized that they were
still dependent on him. “In saying this,” Blackie writes, “Porter was acknowledging that as head
of his household, it was he who was ultimately responsible for supporting his family in times of
injury or illness.”49 Blackie’s study of care-work within the families of disabled veterans reveals a
complex relationship between gender and dependency. Disabled Revolutionary War veterans
were able to act as both caregiver and care recipient without giving up their position as head of
household.
Though Blackie has shown that for Revolutionary War veterans, disability and headship were
not mutually exclusive, Megan Kate Nelson finds far more anxiety over marriage and fatherhood
in her exploration of Civil War amputees. Contemporary representations of women and disabled
veterans offered no consensus. Some highlighted women’s desire to care for their wounded lovers
and husbands, using their love as a form of rehabilitation. In many Civil War-era stories,
wounded veterans offered to release sweethearts from their obligation to marry, but fictional
women almost invariably refused to go. Nelson relates the plot of an 1868 short story in which an
amputee, Conway, tells his fiancée, Nettie, that she should leave him. Instead, Nettie responds
that she loves him “better than before, Conway. You have lost your right arm. Let me be an arm
to you.”50 Nelson argues that photographs and illustrations positioning amputees with their
young children served to prove their continued virility. Other images, conversely, show disabled
veterans and their wives swapping gender roles in more disconcerting ways. Winslow Homer’s
engraved illustration in Harper’s Weekly, Nelson argues, shows a passive veteran, empty sleeve
pinned up, riding alongside his wife, who leans forward, holding a whip and driving their
carriage.51
In the wake of the Civil War, the previous balance experienced by families of disabled
Revolutionary War veterans was gone, and instead there was anxiety that men would be
emasculated as their wounds forced them into positions of dependency. While Nelson reveals
this anxiety through representations of veterans, Brian Craig Miller has recently shown that in the
Civil War South, not all women adhered to the prescriptive roles portrayed in the popular media.
Southern gender ideology still dictated that women help to strengthen and rehabilitate their
wounded men, but real women were less convinced that disabled men were desirable partners.
John Bell Hood, the Confederate general who lost his right leg and the use of his right arm during
the Civil War, had a tumultuous courtship with Sally Buchannan Preston. Hood and Preston
courted, but ultimately, Preston was not interested in a disabled man, much to Hood’s humilia-
tion. Later, their acquaintance Mary Chestnut remarked that Preston had never been interested in
Hood, but only had “some sympathy in the wounded soldier.”52
Historians who have examined the veterans of twentieth-century wars argue that the relation-
ships between disabled men and their families only became more complicated. John Kinder

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shows that rehabilitationists after World War I believed that mothers, wives, and sweethearts
played a critical role in helping their soldier return to useful manhood. One pamphlet even gave
women the task of transforming bloody wounds to marks of patriotism using their devotion:
“Shall you make them hate the light of day and invoke torments of humiliation surpassing any
agony war can devise? Or shall the magic of your eyes transfigure every scar into a badge of
honor?”53 Women played a critical role in the process of remasculinizing disabled veterans.
Much as Nelson finds in the post-Civil War era, both David Gerber and Martin F. Norden
also argue that representations of disabled veterans after World War II and Vietnam focused on
the role of women in relation to disabled veterans. Gerber describes the sexual anxieties and
tensions that played out on screen in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about American
servicemen readjusting to civilian life after World War II. Gerber describes a powerful scene in
which a disabled veteran, Homer, finally confesses his fears about his loss of manhood to his
fiancée Wilma. Wilma kisses Homer, reassuring both Homer and the viewer that disabled men
can still be sexually powerful. However, Gerber reminds the reader, while Wilma has invigorated
Homer’s sense of manhood, Homer’s other problems are not improved, and he largely fails to
reintegrate into civil society. Similarly, Norden argues that while post-World War II films such as
The Best Years of Our Lives offer fairly simple narratives of women helping to reaffirm the
masculinity of their disabled veterans, post-Vietnam films offer a more problematic relationship
between women and men. In Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Nordern argues, main character
Ron Kovic is not rehabilitated by his mother or girlfriend. Instead, his mother is blamed for
encouraging him to enlist in the first place, and his girlfriend offers no way to help to shore up
Kovic’s wounded manhood. “These films,” Norden states, “suggested that the vets had sought
their manhood in Vietnam and with high irony lost it there, and that, as participants in an
unpopular war, they did not deserve the traditional remasculinization process afforded the World
War II vets.”54 While disabled veterans of the earliest American wars were able to maintain their
positions as the heads of their families, those of later wars experienced greater struggle to recreate
families and relationships.

New Directions
One exciting thing about the growing field of disability history is that, because it is relatively
young, there is much yet to do. As evidenced by this chapter, the most significant gap in the
literature is on non-white veterans. Though in recent years a small number of books on black
veterans have emerged, only a few specifically focus on the manhood of disabled black veterans.
This seems like a particularly important question given that racial tensions peaked in the wake of
some American wars, particularly the Civil War and World War I, and the experiences of black
veterans from their time in Europe during World War II helped to shape the Civil Rights
Movement. What was life like for black veterans if, as Lawrie and Jefferson argue, their war
wounds were not interpreted as badges of courage, but proof of their weakness and inferiority? If
white Civil War veterans were held to impossibly high standards of manhood in order to earn
their pension payouts, how did black men, already believed to be unmanly and dependent, fare?
A particularly obvious omission in this essay is work on the experiences of disabled women
veterans. Of course, women have always been present in times of war, and have been impacted
both physically and mentally by its horrors, but have often been understood as peripheral actors,
by their contemporaries and some historians. Harriet Tubman, for example, who spent the Civil
War serving the Union Army in various capacities, including as a spy and scout, was repeatedly
denied a veteran’s pension despite her service on the front lines. She was eventually rewarded
with a small widow’s pension when her veteran husband died. That pension was raised after much

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negotiation in Congress, but by that time she was elderly and had spent much of her life in
poverty.55 Again, a century later in the wake of the Vietnam War, female army nurses had to
create their own advocacy organizations to ensure that nurses struggling with health problems
received proper care from the Veterans’ Administration.56 These kinds of experiences must be
centered in the discussion of the health ramifications of warfare, and allow us to understand the
wider repercussions for soldiers and noncombatants alike.
Of course, much of the absence of disabled women’s experiences with warfare is due to the
fact that women have only in more recent years officially served as soldiers on or near the front
lines, and historians have not yet begun to fully analyze the women who served in the Persian
Gulf or the War on Terror. If contemporary reports are any indication, there will be much fodder
for future historians. The more than 2 million women veterans today live with many of the same
disabilities as their male comrades, such as traumatic brain injuries and amputations, but also have
unique needs. Many V.A. branches do not offer prenatal care, obstetrics, or gynecological care.57
Women veterans also have an alarmingly high suicide rate, approaching six times the rate of
civilian women and nearly the same as the rate for male veterans.58 Further, disabled female
veterans deal with different gender implications of their changed bodies. Women amputees, for
example, face difficulties adhering to societal beauty standards by wearing feminine shoes or
applying makeup.59 I look forward to future studies that will explore the complex gender
situation faced by disabled women veterans, wounded in a military culture that expected them
to adhere to masculine codes of behavior, but returned to one that expected them to revert to
femininity, and living in bodies that made doing either difficult.
Recently, Jim Downs placed civilians at the center of a history of health during the Civil War
as he examined the suffering experienced by contraband slaves escaping to the Union army.60 I
believe this kind of re-orienting could lead to important new perspectives on war, disability, and
gender. A powerful example comes from Leslie Reagan’s exploration of the ripple effect caused
by Vietnam veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange. Not only did exposure to Agent Orange cause
birth defects in the children of affected veterans, Reagan argues, but it made wives and children
into casualties of a war they did not fight. The realization that wartime experiences caused serious
disabilities for their children caused male veterans to think differently about their reproductive
capacity – traditionally, women, as the primary carriers of the unborn, had been blamed for birth
defects.61 Studies like Downs’s and Reagan’s should inspire us to ask new questions about gender,
war, and disability. What do we make of nurses or female caregivers who became sick or injured
during their service? Can we learn more about the health of women who encountered encroach-
ing armies, such as the Union army rampaging with Sherman toward the sea or women who lived
near World War military bases? What of the health of sex workers who earned their living serving
armies? Can rape and its constituent psychological trauma, of civilians and soldiers alike, be
understood as a kind of wound of war? If so, we need to push our definition of the theater of war,
as well: There are, it must be noted, an alarming number of sexual assaults perpetrated within the
U.S. military.62 These kinds of questions would require historians to make serious shifts in terms
of whom they consider actors in warfare and a broadening of definitions of war-related health
problems, but I believe they could help us to see the wider-reaching consequences of warfare.
As disability history grows, scholars of veterans are beginning to examine the experiences of
their subjects through the lens of a social model of disability, but there is much work to be done.
We could learn, for example, from long-term studies of veterans over the course of lifetimes.
Many scholars have examined the ways that war wounds were understood in the immediate
aftermath of war, but did veterans and civilians see them the same way decades later? Did the
lingering ill effects of wounds affect the ways that veterans thought about the war service when
the ticker-tape parades were a distant memory? Similarly, there are ways the current scholarship

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on disabled veterans and their families could be expanded. For example, what was the dynamic
between husbands and wives who experienced a permanent shift in marital roles because of a war
wound? For future generations of historians, the intricate relationship between gender, disability,
and warfare will provide rich ground for new analysis.

Notes
1 Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison, eds. Gendering Disability (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2004).
2 David Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); John
W. Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015).
3 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 8.
4 For examples, see Frances Bernstein, “Prosthetic Promise and Potemkin Limbs in Late-Stalinist
Russia,” in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy, and Everyday Life,
eds. Michael Russell and Elena Iasakaia-Smirnova (New York: Routledge, 2014); Marina Larsson,
Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Julie
Anderson, “British Women, Disability, and the Second World War,” Journal of Contemporary British
History 1 (2006): 37–53; Anne Borsay, “Disability in British Poetry of the First World War,” Disability
and Society 4 (2015): 499–512; Anne Carden-Coyne, “Masculinity and the Wounds of the First World
War: A Centenary Reflection,” Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 1 (2015): xx–1; Joanna
Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and
Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001); Wendy Jane Gagen,
“Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the
First World War,” European Review of History 14 (2007): 525–41.
5 Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005). For more on violence, conflict, and manhood in the antebellum era, see
John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Kaplan, “New York City Tavern Violence and the Creation
of a Working-Class Male Identity,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Winter 1995): 591–617; Elliot J.
Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
6 See, for example, Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993); David Blight, “No Desperate Hero: Manhood and Freedom in a Union
Soldier’s Experience,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina
Silber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55–75; Jim Cullen, “‘I’s A Man Now:’ Gender and
African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina
Silber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 76–96; Carole Emberton, “Only Murder Makes
Men”: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (September
2012): 369–93.
7 Gail S. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American
Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
8 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 58; Christina Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinities
During World War II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004).
9 This term, of course, comes from literature, and continues to encapsulate the idea of a praised war
wound. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896).
10 See, for example, Frances Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jalynn Olsen Padilla, “Army of Cripples: Civil War Amputees,
Disability and Manhood in Victorian America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2007).

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11 Clarke, War Stories, Kindle ebook location 3091, 3216, 3195.

12 Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York:
Liveright, 2015).
13 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 59.
14 David Gerber, “Post-Modern American Heroism: Anti-War Heroes, Survivor Heroes, and the
Eclipse of Traditional Warrior Values,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David Gerber (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 350.
15 Frances Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 72. See also Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil
War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 160–227; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of
Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
16 Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2015), 54–58.
17 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 71; Sarah Handley-Cousins, “‘Wrestling at the Gates of Death’:
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post Civil War North,” Journal of the
Civil War Era 6 (June 2016): 220–42. See also Harry W. Herr, “‘The Privates Were Shot’: Urological
Wounds and Treatment in the Civil War,” in Years of Change and Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil
War Medicine, eds. James M. Schmidt and Guy R. Hasegawa (Roseville: Edinburgh Press, 2009).
18 Historians use numerous terms to refer to war trauma, as each era had its own terms and definitions for
the psychological impact of warfare. Unless quoting a historian, I use the neutral “war trauma” to
connote a psychological or psychoneurological wound.
19 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 71.
20 Christina Jarvis, “‘If He Comes Home Nervous’: US World War II Neuropsychiatric Casualties and
Postwar Masculinities,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 17 (Spring 2009), 100.
21 Sarah Handley-Cousins, “‘A Physical Wreck of His Former Self’: Gender and Disability in the Civil
War North” (Ph.D. diss., University at Buffalo, 2016).
22 David Anderson, “Dying of Nostalgia: Homesickness in the Union Army during the Civil War,”
Civil War History 56 (September 2010): 270.
23 Diane Miller Sommerville, “‘A Burden Too Heavy to Bear’: War Trauma, Suicide, and Confederate
Soldiers,” Civil War History 59 (December 2013): 462.
24 Tracy Karner, “Fathers, Sons, and Vietnam: Masculinity and Betrayal in the Life Stories of Vietnam
Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” American Studies 37 (1996): 65.
25 Padilla, “Army of Cripples,” 71.
26 Ibid., 74–75.
27 Ibid., 76. It should be noted that Padilla’s sample included only white, Northern soldiers—black
veterans had much higher rates of unskilled labor. See Donald Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of
Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).
28 David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), 40.
29 Ibid., 41.
30 Handley-Cousins, “Wrestling at the Gates of Death,” 233. See also Handley-Cousins, “A Physical
Wreck.”
31 Scott Gelber, “The ‘Hard Boiled Order’: The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York
City,” Journal of Social History 39 (Fall 2005): 161–80.
32 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 121.
33 Gelber, “The ‘Hard Boiled Order,’” 166.
34 Ibid., 169.
35 See also Michael J. Lansing, “‘Salvaging the Man Power of America’: Conservation, Manhood, and
Disabled Veterans during World War I,” Environmental History 14 (January 2009): 32–57.
36 Paul Lawrie, “‘Salvaging the Negro’: Race, Rehabilitation, and the Body Politic in World War I
America, 1917–1924,” in Disability Histories, eds. Michael Rembis and Susan Burch (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2014), 323.

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37 Lawrie, “Salvaging the Negro,” 323.

38 Ibid., 329.
39 See also Robert F. Jefferson, “‘Enabled Courage:’ Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans
in Postwar America,” The Historian 65 (2003): 1102–24.
40 Lawrie, “Salvaging the Negro,” 330.
41 Jefferson, “Enabled Courage.”
42 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 129. See also Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
43 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 137.
44 Serlin, Replaceable You, 41.
45 Lisa Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory, and the Body in the American
Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997), 120.
46 Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion,” 121.
47 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 38, 100. The emphasis on “curing” disability applied to civilians, both men and women,
as well as veterans. Audra Jennings has argued that rehabilitationists, medical authorities, and charity
professionals also drew links between gender roles, productivity, and citizenship for civilians in post
World War II. See Jennings, “Engendering and Regendering Disability: Gender and Disability
Activism in Postwar America,” in Disability Histories, 345–63.
48 Daniel Blackie, “Disability, Dependency, and the Family in the Early United States,” in Disability
Histories, 17-34.
49 Ibid., 24.
50 Nelson, Ruin Nation, 193.
51 Ibid., 195. My work on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain shows that some war wounds could pose a
serious challenge to marriages. See Handley-Cousins, “Wrestling at the Gates of Death.”
52 Miller, Empty Sleeves, 106.
53 Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies, 142.
54 Martin F. Norden, “Bitterness, Rage, and Redemption: Hollywood Constructs the Disabled
Vietnam Veteran,” in Disabled Veterans in History, 106.
55 Kristen T. Oertel, Harriet Tubman: Slavery, The Civil War, and Civil Rights in the 19th Century (New
York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 92–94.
56 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010), 158.
57 Helen Thorpe, “The V.A.’s Woman Problem,” The New York Times, August 15, 2016.
58 Alan Zarembo, “Suicide Rate of Female Military Veterans Is Called ‘Staggering,’” The Los Angeles
Times, June 8, 2015.
59 Shelley Zalis, “Designing Prosthetics That Give Female Veterans Confidence,” The Huffington Post,
November 11, 2015.
60 Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and
Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
61 Leslie J. Reagan, “My Daughter Was Genetically Drafted with Me: U.S.-Vietnam War Veterans,
Disabilities, and Gender,” Gender and History 28, no. 3 (2016): 833–53.
62 According to the Department of Defense, an estimated 20,300 people were victims of sexual assault in
the military in 2015. Department of Defense, Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, 2015,
http://www.sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/FY15_Annual/FY15_Annual_Report_on_Sexual_
Assault_in_the_Military.pdf. See also Sara Kintzle, et al., “Sexual Trauma in the Military: Exploring
PTSD and Mental Health Care Utilization in Female Veterans,” Psychological Services 12 (2015): 394–
401; Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, “Female Veterans Battling PTSD from Sexual Trauma Fight for
Redress,” The Washington Post, December 25, 2014.

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 21
THE COVERT AND HIDDEN
MEMORY OF GENDER
G. Kurt Piehler
florida state university

Memory studies have much to offer scholars interested in interrogating questions of gender and
war. As a field of inquiry, memory studies recognize that how societies remember the past is
highly malleable in much the same way that gender roles are fluid and culturally determined. As
the influential anthology edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Invention of Tradition,
demonstrates, many customs and public rituals often have quite recent origins.1 George Mosse’s
Nationalization of the Masses examines how such diverse cultural products as public monuments,
festivals, choral societies, and parades that were crucial to the rise of modern nationalism are
heavily gendered male. In Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Mosse stresses
how masculinity was central to the myth of the war experience that emerged during the First
World War and proved central to German society’s efforts to make sense of the conflict’s massive
killing.2 Feminine characteristics remained something to be feared in the eyes of those promoting
the cult centered on the masculinity. Even nurses who were admired for their courage were
celebrated for performing what were deemed as traditional feminine roles.3
How the United States commemorates war has played a central role in forging an American
national identity and defining who is classified as a citizen of the republic. The memory of war
and society is heavily gendered male in the American public sphere and often ignores or
marginalizes the role of women, even when they have served in uniform in the armed forces.
In the early Republic and antebellum eras, for example, the roles of men and women in
Independence Day were highly gendered, with men serving as the principal participants and
women serving primarily as spectators.4 Most war memorials commemorate only the role of men
in the armed forces, even after women gained the opportunity to serve openly in uniform in the
twentieth century. For instance, the national Korean War Veterans Memorial includes nineteen
male sculptural figures representing those who served the army, navy, air force, and Marine
Corps, but women—who served in each of these branches—are notably absent.5 Veterans’
organizations, key repositories for the memory of war after the American Civil War, have also
generally either excluded women or granted them a marginal status. The Grand Army of the
Republic (GAR), the most significant organization for Union veterans, only accepted men into
the membership and excluded women nurses from the ranks. Not until 1883 did it recognize the
Woman’s Relief Corps as an official auxiliary.6
Historians of memory seldom make gender a central theme of analysis, even when they
acknowledge the pivotal role women have played in the commemoration of war. Some of the

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most influential works in the field have given only passing attention to gender. John Bodnar, in
Remaking America: Public Memory Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, empha-
sizes the clash between official memory, often promoted by the federal government, and a
vernacular one. But Bodnar, while recognizing the role of women’s organizations, does not
make an explicit critique of the gendered memory of war.7 Edward Linenthal’s case-study of the
memory of war, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, is sensitive to questions of race and
ethnicity but surprisingly makes only passing reference to the role of the Daughters of the
American Revolution (DAR) in commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Moreover, Linenthal does not consider how a battle fought in the midst of civilians impacted
them along gender lines or why the Texas legislature, after purchasing the Alamo, gave this
structure associated with a battle fought by men to a women’s group.8
Considering questions of race, ethnicity, and class further complicates any effort to unpack
questions of gender and memory. In To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism, Cecilia
Elizabeth O’Leary underscores that the role delegated to a select group of women with regard to
the Alamo is hardly exceptional.9 During the Gilded Age and Progressive era, white elite women
formed such organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames
of America that, along with male-dominated veterans groups, played a central role in forging
memories of war that have served to bolster patriarchal vision for ordering American society.
Long before professional historians had an interest in the domestic sphere, women’s organizations
formed to preserve the homes of George Washington and Andrew Jackson, and other historic
sites connected to America’s military past. At same time, historians of memory have begun to
recover and analyze the dissenting traditions that have challenged the exclusion of women and
other marginalized groups, most notably African Americans, from war’s memory. Scholars such
as William Blair and Kathleen Clark have examined how black men and women often united to
hold Memorial Day programs and to commemorate the Civil War as a struggle to bring freedom
to preserve the Union and end the scourge of slavery.10
Considering the question of gender and memory can serve as a window to better understand
the experiences of the American veteran in war and peace. Masculinity is hardly fixed, and how
veterans and the wider society viewed their role as soldiers has changed over time. For instance, in
Shook Over Hell, Eric Dean observes that that Civil War veterans and the wider society refused to
openly acknowledge fear and the trauma of battle: A courageous male should display unflinching
courage.11 In contrast, Vietnam veterans accepted the fact that fear, even trauma, remained
endemic to war. Stuart McConnell in Glorious Contentment argues that the emergence of the
Grand Army of the Republic as a mass-based organization during the Gilded Age stemmed from
its embrace of many cultural patterns found in male fraternal orders, such as the Masons, Odd
Fellows, and the Knights of Pythias. The GAR adopted a series of rituals that sought to define
masculine gender roles in a society undergoing significant economic and cultural change.12
Memory studies emerged as a distinctive category of analysis for historians in the 1990s.
Historians, joined by scholars from other disciplines, including art history, literary studies, and
women’s studies, began to examine how societies forged a remembrance of the past. Literature,
motion pictures, public art, holidays, and museum exhibits all served to forge memories of the
past that would often be deemed as mythic. In embracing memory studies, historians have
recognized that their role in shaping the public memory of the past can be quite limited. While
there are many sources of memory, this essay will focus on the literature concerning cemeteries,
monuments, and veterans and hereditary organizations. Although there is a complex and
burgeoning body of scholarship on the memory of the Civil War that uses gender as a category
of analysis, this is the exception regarding memory studies and war. For instance, scholars have
not given the wave of hereditary societies that emerged during the Gilded Age, such as the DAR,

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the attention they are due, especially given their overt efforts to create a unique gendered role for
women to promote the memory of war. Although the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has attracted
significant scholarly attention, less has been devoted to analyzing the gendered clash over adding
statues representing servicemen and servicewomen equally.
What can consideration of the relationship of gender, war, and memory add to our under-
standing of American military history? On the most basic level, considering questions of gender
and memory will illuminate the role of women and war. Why the memory of the military service
of women is not only forgotten, but also at times selectively remembered, will offer insights to
why barriers to women in the public sphere, especially in the armed forces, have been so difficult
to tear down. Women are not an invisible presence in forging memory, and scholars should
continue to investigate why women, especially those from elite backgrounds, have buttressed
male patriarchy. The role of such groups as the DAR has received the most attention from
scholars, but even this organization warrants further investigation given its impact in shaping
discourse on the memory of war, and as a voice for conservatism over several generations. Equally
important, scholars should pay more careful attention to understand shifts in male masculinity and
the relationship to war. Efforts to forge a memory of war, especially by those with power, have
often used such vessels of memory as monuments, works of literature, and rituals often connected
with such patriotic holidays as Memorial Day and Veterans Day to define masculine conduct as
something to be honored.

Revolutionary Memories Remembered and Forgotten

In the popular imagination, war memorials are associated with male generals on horseback, male
soldier sentinels in bronze, and majestic monuments on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Most of these memorials are heavily gendered male with only a few recognizing the role of
women. But in the early republic, few war memorials were built, and Kirk Savage documents the
considerable partisan and cultural opposition to them. For instance, Savage explores how efforts
to build a national memorial to George Washington floundered in Congress in 1801 with
Jeffersonian Republicans charging that the monuments smacked too much of decadent Europe.13
Parades, most notably on the Fourth of July, remained one of the preeminent rituals of
remembrance in many communities. As Susan Davis delineates in Parades and Power: Street
Theatre in Nineteenth Century, in Philadelphia the early republic Fourth of July ceremonies
remained a gendered affair that largely relegated women to the role of spectator. Len Travers
in Celebrating the Fourth offers a more complicated reading of women’s role in one of the
preeminent early national and antebellum eras’ public rituals to commemorate the
Revolutionary War. Travers observes that at times men organizing Independence ceremonies
sought the inclusion of women as spectators, and he offers a gendered reading of the toasts often
made following a ceremonial dinner to women’s passive support of male protectors.14 David
Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820
stresses the association of partisanship with men and the divergent nationalist appeals made by
Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans during Independence Day ceremonies. While women
were accorded a role in rituals commemorating the Revolutionary War, by virtue of their gender
and their limited participation in ceremonies, women embodied a vision of national unity that
stood above partisan politics.15
Women and a majority of men were excluded from the nation’s first veteran’s organization,
the Society of Cincinnati, founded by a group of senior officers in George Washington’s army,
and which set forth an elitist patricidal vision of the American Revolution. Membership in this
society was only open to the officer’s corps of the Continental Army and the state militias; enlisted

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men were excluded, emphasizing a conservative view of the meaning of the Revolution that
implied a distinct hierarchy, even among white males. Envisioned as a hereditary society with
membership passing to the eldest son of successive generations, Minor Myers traces how this
society provoked opposition from Jeffersonian Republicans who asserted that it remained as
inconsistent with the values of a republic. The founders of the Cincinnati envisioned their
organization as succoring the needs of the widow and orphan, but the bulk of state chapters’
activities centered on organizing festive dinners on the Fourth of July that were preceded by a
public oration. Efforts by the Cincinnati to secure from the U.S. Congress half pensions for life
failed, although after the War of 1812, a more broadly based pension system emerged for both
officers and enlisted ranks.16
Oral traditions remained an important source for the memory of the Revolution. We have
strong evidence of a vibrant oral tradition as a result of the bureaucratic imperative created by the
Pension Act of 1818 and subsequent laws. In order to receive a pension, Congress mandated that
veterans provide a deposition that outlined their Revolutionary war service. John Dann’s
anthology of these depositions, The Revolution Remembered, provides evidence to the richness of
many of the narratives that are more than simply a recounting of dates and names of units.
Moreover, their voices, while dominated by white officers and enlisted men, also include those of
African American soldiers and even women who were camp followers.17 Gregory Knouff’s case-
study focusing on the pensions records of Pennsylvanians shows that the memories of
Revolutionary War veterans from this state remained highly gendered. White male veterans
used their depositions to bolster claims for a citizenship based on white male identity to the
exclusion of Indians, African Americans, and women. Knouff observes that these testimonies
offer a significant malleability of memory, especially in how many veterans characterized the
aristocratic Washington as a populist leader.18 Although a broad-based veterans organization for
all male veterans, not just officers, would not emerge until the formation of the GAR after the
Civil War, the claims made by Revolutionary veterans represented a democratization of the
memory of the Revolution, albeit based on an ideology of white male service that excluded black
Americans.19
Although there is a small body of literature examining the role of women in the Revolutionary
army, most notably as camp followers, there is scant literature focusing on how society remem-
bered their service. Alfred Young’s biography of Deborah Sampson is an important exception and
offers a detailed examination of how the memory of her Revolutionary service was remembered
and often disremembered by Americans. Moreover, Sampson was not a passive agent, but wrote a
memoir (with a male collaborator) and even engaged in a public lecture tour. Her memory waxed
and waned over time. John Quincy Adams evoked the service of Sampson when building against
the gag order imposed by Congress on petitions seeking to abolish slavery. Asserting women’s
right to petition Congress, Adams in 1838 offered a recounting of women’s role as historical
agents in history, including Sampson’s distinctive service in the Revolution. Sampson had been
largely ignored by her hometown of Sharon, Massachusetts while alive, but by the turn of the
twentieth century her fame was restored and prompted a wave of commemorative activities,
including the dedication of a memorial that both commemorated her service and that of the
town’s GAR veterans. Although the U.S. Navy named a warship in her memory during World
War II, during the Cold War, Sampson’s memory faded, only to be rediscovered by second wave
feminists.20
How representative was Deborah Sampson? Linda Grant DePauw argues that women served
in significant numbers in the Continental Army, specifically with the artillery. In a seminal article,
DePauw seeks to discern the significance of the conflicting accounts surrounding “Molly
Pitcher.” One contemporary eyewitness claimed that after her husband collapsed during the

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Battle of Monmouth she took over firing his artillery piece.21 As Carol Klaver observes, public
interest in identifying and honoring Molly Pitcher emerged years after her death when residents
of Carlisle, Pennsylvania commemorated the Revolutionary service of Mary Ludwig Hays as
“Molly Pitcher” with a monument.22
Only two women warriors received Revolutionary pensions specifically on account of their
martial service. Emily J. Teipe stresses that male patronage remained central to Deborah
Sampson and Mary Corbin in receiving recognition and meager pensions.23 DePauw speculates
that the excision of camp followers and women combatants from the memory of the early
republic represents part of a broader wave by conservatives to turn back the more radical
elements of memory of the American Revolution beginning in the 1780s. The existing scholar-
ship on the memory of Molly Pitcher suggests that the shifting of interest in this figure does not
fit a neat paradigm. For instance, Jessica Waldman interrogates why a lithograph, “Women of
’76, Molly Pitcher, The Heroine of Monmouth,” was conceived and widely circulated in
1860.24 Although there is some question as to whether the true identity of Molly Pitcher will
ever be discerned, her memory is preserved in one of the thirteen rest stops on the New Jersey
Turnpike. The only other woman whose memory is memorialized on the Turnpike is Clara
Barton, a Civil War nurse and founder of the American Red Cross.25 In contrast to Sampson,
Molly Pitcher awaits a biographer and scholar to fully unpack the gendered meaning of her
memory over time.
The reluctance of the federal government to build war memorials and promote other forms
of commemorative activity offered the opportunity for other groups to fill this void. During
the antebellum era, Congress refused to even purchase George Washington’s home at Mount
Vernon and make it into a national shrine. Strict constructionists successfully argued that the
federal government lacked the constitutional authority to undertake this endeavor; others
asserted that purchasing Mount Vernon would set a bad precedent that would lead to demands
that other historic homes associated with the founders be purchased by the federal
government.26
As Patricia West explains in Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House
Museums, women stepped into this heritage vacuum and purchased the home of Mount
Vernon. After considerable lobbying, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union
(MVLA) ultimately gained a corporate charter from the Commonwealth of Virginia legislature
and raised funds to purchase Washington’s estate. West examines the differing motivations for
women and their male allies in making Mount Vernon a public shrine. Ann Pamela
Cunningham, daughter of a southern planter from South Carolina, initially wanted to make
the preservation of Washington’s home a project taken on only by southern women in order to
underscore the identity of Washington as preeminently a southerner and slaveholder. However,
the need for funds prompted Cunningham to expand the membership and fundraising efforts to
include northern women. Those involved in the Mount Vernon Memorial recognized the deep
sectional discord within American society and envisioned the preservation of Washington’s
domestic home as a way to mitigate the sectional divisions present in the 1850s over slavery.
According to West’s analysis, the assertion of civic roles by a small group of elite women also
reflected changing gender roles among men. Universal male suffrage required a countervailing
force that Cunningham and her supporters sought to undertake, claiming a distinctive virtue for
women since they remained above partisan male politics. Like other women’s organizations,
those involved in the MVLA gained through a corporate charter the right to exercise a series of
legal rights denied to them by virtue of their gender. As West underscores, the preservation of
Mount Vernon did little to preserve the ties of the Union, and the MVLA was wracked by
sectional discord during the Civil War.27

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The Civil War Casts a Long Shadow

The Civil War marked a dramatic shift in the American pattern of remembering war. Even before
the conflict ended, the federal government made plans to provide burial in a permanent cemetery
for Union soldiers who died in battle. Mourning the war dead spawned unique holidays,
including federal Memorial (Decoration) Day on May 30 and Confederate Memorial Day,
whose date of observance varied by region and state. Thousands of war memorials were built
to this war on the local, state, and national level. Beginning in the 1890s, the federal government
created national military parks to preserve Civil War battlefields as sites of memory. With some
notable exceptions, such as Mary Dearing’s study of how Union veterans in the GAR sought to
preserve a memory that ensured the gains of the war were not lost, most scholarship until the
advent of memory studies focused on white southerners’ efforts to commemorate the Lost
Cause.28 Although scholars such as C. Vann Woodward, Rollin G. Osterweis, and Charles R.
Wilson offer differing interpretations, they all agree in regard to the significance of the Lost Cause
in shaping the postwar South.29
Gaines Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy offers one of the earliest gendered readings of the
sectional memory of the Civil War in the South. In his account, Foster recognizes the vital role
of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMA) in burying the war dead in permanent cemeteries
and building the first wave of monuments, as opposed to the male-dominated Confederate
Memorial Society. Seeing a shift in commemoration after the end of Reconstruction, he
identifies a continued gender divide between the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and
the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in their clash over the memory of this
conflict. As they aged, Confederate veterans were more likely to embrace reconciliation while
the UDC remained more militant, especially in wanting Confederate women memorialized in
bronze memorials.30
Recent scholarship on the rise of the Lost Cause has expanded on Foster’s analysis and places
women more at the center of the story. In Caroline Janney’s Burying the Dead but Not the Past:
Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause, members of the LMA are portrayed as having a
pivotal role in fostering and sustaining the memory of the Lost Cause. While the LMA on the
surface embraced what has been viewed as a traditional role for women mourning the dead, the
memorializing of the Confederate dead, especially in Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies,
remained intensely political. Moreover, Janney observes that the predominant role of women
partly stemmed from the fact that during Reconstruction, federal authorities limited the political
participation of former Confederate soldiers.31 William Blair’s case-study of Virginia also sees
southern women playing a dominant role in fostering a memory of the Lost Cause. At the same
time, Blair emphasizes the other divide in this state with African Americans united in observing a
federal memory of the Civil War that saw emancipation as a central legacy of the conflict.32
Most scholarship on the memory of the Civil War has focused on the South, but Nina Silber’s
monograph marks a departure by looking at the North through a gendered perspective. Silber
seeks to understand why the victors embraced the defeated and to define the cultural forces at
work in promoting union. During the war, northerners denigrated southern masculinity and
characterized southern white males as effeminate. Perhaps the high point of this image of the
defeated South was the scores of cartoons portraying Jefferson Davis captured wearing his wife’s
dress. Over time, northern elites embraced a culture of reunion that would be tinged for a
nostalgic view of antebellum southern society as a more harmonious society. Southern femininity
would be reinterpreted as a positive characteristic that many affluent northerners experienced
when they vacationed in post-bellum southern resorts. Northerners’ embrace of reunion also
entailed a gradual acceptance of southern autonomy regarding race relations. Moreover, Silber

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acknowledges that not all northerners embraced the romance of reunion, but argues that
objections by the fading ranks of the veterans in the GAR were increasingly “drowned out.”33
Silber stresses romance as a metaphor for reunion, but other historians have stressed the cross-
sectional embrace of male comradeship borne in the battlefield.34 Gerald Linderman, in Embattled
Courage, maintains that over time northern and southern veterans came to embrace a masculinist
remembrance of mutual valor and courage on the part of former combatants.35 In terms of
memorialization, I note that this remembrance was embodied by the decision of the War
Department to allow Confederate memorials in national military parks. Blue-Gray reunions
bringing together Confederate and Union veterans became an increasingly common
occurrence.36
David Blight agrees that reconciliation emerged between the North and South, but stresses
that it was undergirded by mutual acceptance of white supremacy. At the same time, he observes
dissenting traditions, most notably the refusal of Frederick Douglass and many in the black
community to abandon the emancipationist memory of the Civil War.37 Caroline Janney, in
Remembering the Civil War, does not discount the embrace of reunion, especially by veterans on
both sides, but also sees a gender divide persisting in both regions. In the South, white women
were less susceptible to calls for reunion and reconciliation. Moreover, white southern males
embraced women’s organizations such as the LMA and later the UDC as agents of memory in
part because Confederate veterans returning in defeat required a reaffirmation of their manhood.
While most war memorials commemorate the service of men, Janney recounts the effort to build
monuments in several southern states specifically commemorating the participation of loyal
Confederate women on the home front to the Lost Cause.38
In contrast, northerners were the victors and did not require the same level of affirmation.
Women did participate in early Memorial Day ceremonies, but they did not dominate them as
they did in the South during Reconstruction. Moreover, the care of the dead was gendered by
region and there existed no need for organizations such as the LMA in the North, because the
U.S. Army Quartermaster General took responsibility for creating a network of national ceme-
teries for the Union dead. Monuments memorializing the service of women in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century were largely confined to memorializing women nurses who served in
the Union Army. Janney joins Gaines Foster in seeing a gender divide regarding reconciliation.
The Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) in the North and the LMA and later the UDC in the South
remained less susceptible than male veterans to call for reconciliation. Moreover, the racial divide
was stark. In contrast to Confederate organizations, both the WRC and the GAR had significant
black membership. In the South, black members of the WRC and GAR often were the only
southerners to visit the graves of the Union dead and hold ceremonies on federal Memorial Day.
Even when the UDC embraced reconciliation, it sought to shape it in such a way as to affirm the
racial and gendered order of the south.
Gendered images of the Civil War bring into sharp contrast the racial attitudes of white
northerners and southerners. Despite the significant participation of African Americans, both free
people of color and ex-slaves, Kirk Savage examines why so few Union Civil War memorials
offer representations of African Americans and the destruction of slavery. White Americans, even
most northerners, could only imagine black males in a subservient position and sought to
minimize their historical agency in toppling slavery. For example, Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s
Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (1876), the first major memorial to commemorate Lincoln’s role in
abolishing slavery, portrayed a conventionally dressed Lincoln standing over a kneeling, half-
clothed allegorical figure who represented black slaves. In Savage’s reading of this monument, the
black figure is “stripped literally and figuratively, bereft of personal agency, social position, and
the accouterments of culture.” Although built with privately raised funds from the African

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American community, this Memorial located in Washington, D.C. asserted a continued vision of
white masculinity as inherently dominant and categorized the quest for equality by black
Americans as something that remained “outside the imagination.”39
The role of black women was also marginalized in the few instances they were memorialized.
One of the few monuments to include images of African American women was the Confederate
Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Located on the grounds of what had been Robert
E. Lee’s plantation, the cemetery initially contained only the bodies of the Union dead. In a
gesture of reconciliation, Confederate graves buried in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. were
relocated to the cemetery at the behest of President William McKinley. In 1907, the UDC
spearheaded efforts to build a privately funded monument to commemorate the sacrifice of
Confederates interred there. The ceremonies unveiling the memorial represented one of the high
points of sectional reconciliation with presidents of both the GAR and UCV addressing the
audience attending. Karen L. Cox argues that the Confederate Monument at Arlington inscribed
in bronze and stone what amounted to a textbook embodiment of the Lost Cause. Most striking is
the depiction of the roles of black men and women. One frieze shows a loyal slave and body
servant marching with Confederate soldiers. Another frieze depicts a “black mammy” handing a
white child to a Union soldier.40
The Confederate Memorial was not the only effort to portray African American men and
women as loyal slaves. Micki McElya recounts the aborted efforts by the UDC to build a Mammy
monument in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s. A bill authorizing such a monument passed the U.S.
Senate only to be derailed by public opposition. McElya unpacks the “racialization of the domestic
sphere” that sought to distance “white womanhood from private labor and the responsibilities of
daily household upkeep.”41 In a more recent article, McElya documents the continued gendering
of Civil War memorialization that minimizes the agency of black women. One of the legacies of the
Civil Rights Movement was an increasing recognition of the black soldiers and the vital role they
played in destroying slavery. But these commemorative efforts centered on black military service
marginalize the struggle for freedom waged by African American women. For instance, the African
American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. completed in 1998 includes the monument
by Ed Hamilton, Spirit of Freedom, that exemplifies a binary portrayal of black women as wives/
mothers and black men in uniform bearing arms. This marginalization of the role of black women
in the struggle for emancipation can be found in other cultural forms of memory. McElya is critical
of Steven Spielberg for largely ignoring the role African American women played in the struggles
for emancipation, despite the rich memoir left behind by Elizabeth Keckley, a former slaver,
dressmaker, and confidant to Mary Todd Lincoln.42

Gender and the Heredity of Memory

The literature on the memory of the Civil War is burgeoning, but we have far less scholarship on
another important pattern of remembrance that emerged during the Gilded Age. After
Appomattox, Americans not only sought to commemorate the Civil War, but also expressed
renewed interest in commemorating earlier wars, most notably the American Revolution. The
moribund Society of Cincinnati underwent a revival spurred in part by the Centennial of 1876
and was joined by a host of new hereditary organizations, beginning with the Sons of the
American Revolution in 1889. A year later the DAR came into existence, promoted by the
decision of the Sons not to accept women members. The DAR promoted a conservative
conception of the memory of the American Revolution. The 1890s witnessed a flowering of
similar organizations, many of which were exclusively female, including the Colonial Dames of
America, United States Daughters of 1812, and others.

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Wallace Davies, Michael Kammen, and Karal Ann Marling are among the first scholars to
consider the DAR in the context of memory of war. Their consideration of the DAR stresses the
elitist character of the organization in how it asserted the claim of lineage to serve as custodian of
the American Revolution. As Marling observes in George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals
and American Culture (1988), the DAR founders favored leadership positions for those who not
only had the right ancestry, but also the right social status. The connection to power was reflected
in the election of Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, First Lady of the United States as President General.43
Carolyn Strange argues that DAR promoted a deeper racialization of American society that
stressed the primacy of certain blood lines over others. Strange observes this fixation on blood
lines occurred in an era when the federal government sought to categorize the blood lines of
Native Americans, Jim Crow segregation emerged in scores of states, and amidst a growing elitist
embrace of eugenics.44
Despite the flowering of scholarship on gender history, our understanding of the DAR and a
host of similar organizations remains limited. Wallace Davies’s classic study of veterans and
patriotic societies, Patriotism on Parade, and Cynthia O’Leary’s more recent To Die For both
place these hereditary societies in a broader context, but unfortunately neither takes the story into
the twentieth century.45 Although the membership of the organization remained elitist, the
DAR and other hereditary organizations found common cause with the GAR and WRC, as well
as the UCV and UDC. As O’Leary observes, women often held interlocking membership and it
was not uncommon to find a woman who belonged to the WRC, the UDC, as well as the DAR.
Patriotic societies joining with veterans groups proved successful in the forging and adoption of
the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, suitable textbooks that promoted patriotic values,
veneration of the American flag, and the adoption of the “Star Spangled Banner” as the national
anthem. McElya’s The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery observes
that the DAR and the Colonial Dames of America provided support for the war effort against
Spain in 1898. In the case of the DAR, the society sought not only to honor the distant past, but
also support the war effort against Spain. A committee of DAR members in 1898 organized
efforts to provide nurses to the American army fighting in Cuba. Based on claims of ancestry, the
Colonial Dames of America took charge of building a memorial to the war dead from the Spanish
American War buried in Arlington National Cemetery.46
The DAR’s vision of the Revolutionary War for decades ignored the role of African Americans
in the struggle. Scott Sandage offers the best analysis of the controversy surrounding the decision of
the DAR to bar the African American singer Marian Anderson from the organization’s
Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.47 Although the DAR supported the ultimately unsuccess-
ful efforts to build the Black Revolutionary War Patriot Memorial in the 1990s, Kristin Ann Haas
describes an organization reluctant to afford membership to the African American descendants of
those who fought in the Revolution, a record on race that the DAR is still reluctant to admit. While
the organization admitted one African American member in 1977, it also changed membership
requirements in 1984 to mandate that applicants submit proof of “legitimate descent,” a require-
ment that made membership an impossibility for many descendants of slaves and free people of
color who fought in the Revolution.48

The Age of Total War

The First World War represented an unprecedented mobilization of all sectors of society in
pursuit of violence that not only conscripted men to serve in the armed forces, but also led to
women being mobilized as war workers to replace them. Not only did the conflict solidify the
position of women as nurses serving army and navy nursing corps, but also it opened the way for a

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small number of women to serve in with the army, navy, and Marine Corps.49 After the war, the
service of women as nurses would warrant memorialization, while other women who served in
uniform or as war workers would fade from memory.
War fostered deep divisions within American society over the role of the United States in
world affairs and in how to respond to the Bolshevik Revolution. The war called forth deeper
gendering of questions of war and peace. For instance, female activists such as Jane Addams forged
distinctive women’s organizations for peace. Within two years of the Armistice, women received
the vote nationally, but the unity of this movement, according to Kirsten Marie Delegard in
Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States, fractured ideolo-
gically. In the 1920, memories of the Bolshevik Revolution fostered deep divisions among
American women with the DAR and the American Legion Auxiliary, leading a successful
campaign to discredit moderate women’s group and to reform efforts in the areas of child
labor, welfare reform, and disarmament. Conservative women in these organizations based
their claims to authority in part on their keepers of the memory of past American wars. But as
Delegard also emphasizes, women in these organizations offered a deeply gendered reading of the
Russian Revolution’s changes to the status of women and their children, fearing it would lead to
state-required free love and collectivization of child rearing.50
The deep divisions engendered by the First World War were mirrored by federal efforts to
forge a national memory of the conflict. In contrast to earlier conflicts, the federal government
sought to nationalize the war dead by creating overseas cemeteries maintained by the American
Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). Lisa Budreau, Rebecca Jo Plant, and I examine how a
diverse coalition of national elites sought to follow British precedents and have the War
Department mandate that all of the American war dead be buried overseas.51 But opponents of
this appropriation of the dead by the federal government saw mourning in highly gendered terms.
The grief of mothers who had lost their sons in the nation’s service surpassed those of fathers,
widows, and even orphans. Opponents of the creation of overseas cemeteries stressed the
preeminent bond between mother and son to argue against creating overseas cemeteries for the
American war dead. In order for mothers to properly mourn their sons, opponents of overseas
cemeteries insisted that war dead be repatriated to the United States. Permitting repatriation was
not easy to accomplish, in part because of significant French opposition, as Budreau demonstrates
in Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933. Not all
nations thought a mother-son bond supplanted the obligations of the war dead to continue to
serve the nation; the British government determined that all soldiers from the country and empire
would be buried near the battlefield where they died.
Ultimately, the federal government, while establishing overseas cemeteries, opted to allow
widows and parents to make the decision of whether or not to allow their husbands or sons to
remain buried in overseas cemeteries. Only thirty percent of families opted for overseas burial,
and as a result approximately seventy percent of the war dead were repatriated with burial in a
national cemetery or private burial ground in the United States. The maternal bonds of mother
and son continued to carry great political symbolism throughout the 1920s. Gold Star Mothers
formed not only their own organization for mutual support, but also lobbied successfully for the
government to finance an overseas pilgrimage. According to Plant, maternalist claims proved
pivotal in convincing the U.S. Congress and President Calvin Coolidge to fund a pilgrimage to
Europe for mothers and to visit the graves of their sons overseas.52 Although widows were also
accorded the privilege of participating in the pilgrimage, the bulk of public attention focused on
the Gold Star Mothers. In an era of federal government retrenchment that included the end of the
Shepherd Towner Act, which had provided funding for maternal and children’s health care, the
Gold Star Mothers received military-escorted voyages to Europe.

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Mirroring the segregation of the armed forces, the military segregated black and white Gold
Star Mothers and widows over the protest of civil rights organizations, and several black Gold Star
Mothers publicly refused to participate. Gender divided African Americans over the issue, as
Plant describes, with black male leaders categorically opposing the participation of black women
in the pilgrimage and the response of black women leaders proving more muted. Plant’s work
highlights how President Herbert Hoover and the War Department refused demands to integrate
the pilgrimage, but also strived to ensure black women had no cause for complaint on the
pilgrimage in order to limit the political damage. Ultimately, these efforts were only partially
successful, and the widespread memory of the pilgrimage propagated by Democratic opponents
of Hoover was that African American women participating in the pilgrimage were transported in
ships traditionally reserved for cattle.53
One of the most enduring cultural legacies of the First World War was the literary and
cinematic representations of the war, especially the entrance into the literary canon of the Lost
Generation of writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos.
Steven Trout reminds us that not all literary authors of the interwar years remained disillusioned
with war, most notably two of the most prominent woman writers of the era. Willa Cather and
Edith Wharton contributed works that saw the First World War as a redeeming experience for
America. Trout also explores not only how the American Legion sought to serve as the custodians
of American memory of the war but also the paradoxical challenges to this effort when author and
former YMCA canteen worker in France Mary Lee won a literary prize jointly sponsored by
Houghton Mifflin and the veterans group. In a nuanced story, Trout examines how the Legion
honored the terms of its contract with Houghton Mifflin to serialize portions of the largely
forgotten It’s a Great War! in the organization’s official magazine. The Legion also saw Lee’s
success at the literary competition as challenging the male-controlled American Legion as
principal custodians of the memory of the war. The Legion had buyer’s remorse about the
competition and distanced itself from Lee. Trout contends that the saga of Lee’s novel and
its reception underscore the “dangerous gap between the legion’s masculine construction of
memory, within which direct exposure to violence remained central, and a new, broader
definition of war experience endorsed by feminists and upheld by modernist writers of both
sexes.”54
The First World War saw the coming of age of motion pictures as a cultural art form that both
reflected cultural memories of war and also forged them. Gender roles as depicted in war films
warrant further reflection, especially relating to the role of women. Although Hollywood created
a normative role for women in war as a romantic partner or dangerous predator, there were
exceptions to this pattern. Rochelle Sara Miller offers a fascinating gendered critique of The
Fighting 69th, produced by Warner Brothers in 1940. This film remained part of a stable of
pictures, including Sergeant York (1941), designed to promote American intervention in the
Second World War. Miller observes how the filmmakers eschewed the traditional romantic
angle in part to simplify the plot, emphasize the homosocial ties among warriors, and to also
bolster an interventionist message.55

The Second World War

The temptation to author a Whig history of progress or the reverse, a story of declension, when
considering change over time is tempting to most historians. In considering the memory of the
Second World War, Margaret and Patrice Higonnet’s argument for seeing change over time as a
double helix explains the shifts in gender roles that took place in the two world wars.56 On one
level, the Second World War can be viewed as a watershed moment in the role of women in the

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American society and the armed forces. Women, even those with small children, were encour-
aged by a federally sponsored propaganda campaign to work in defense plants to replace men.
Ultimately, all branches of the armed forces created auxiliary branches for women to serve in
uniform, and the U.S. Congress made women a permanent part of peace-time armed services
shortly after the Second World War ended.
If war expanded opportunities for women, many of them proved fleeting. For example,
women served as civilian aviators for the Army Air Force and played important roles testing new
planes, ferrying planes within the continental United States, and towing targets. But even before
V-J Day, efforts to make the WASP a permanent branch of the service floundered over
opposition from civilian pilots and significant opposition in Congress over the blurring of gender
roles. As Sarah Myers points out, if it had not been for the WASPs’ lobbying campaign in the
1970s to gain veterans’ status, the memory of their service would have largely disappeared.57
The memory of women’s service as defense workers in the Second World War faded quickly
after V-J Day. John Bodnar observes in The “Good War” in American Memory that citations to
Rosie the Riveter in the New York Times Index numbered only twenty from 1946 to 1959.58
Novels and films about the Second World War, pouring forth after V-J Day, seldom focused on
the role of women in uniform with the exception of army or navy nurses. The majority of female
characters in war films appear as spouses, girlfriends, lovers, or prostitutes.
The Second World War dominated public memory, but in a complex way. For instance, in
contrast to either the Civil War or World War I, there emerged no great wave of memorial
building. As I have shown in my own work, most memorials were either living memorials, or
First World War memorials updated with names of those who served in the Second World War.
Although during the war the service of defense workers was widely hailed by the federal
government, postwar adulation was directed at male veterans who received significant social
welfare benefits through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944.
The Second World War fostered a flowering of interest by historians and social scientists in
giving voice to the American GI. This pattern emerged with the journalism of Ernie Pyle during
the war and in the oral history work pioneered by S.L.A. Marshall and Forrest Pogue and
continued by Cornelius Ryan and Stephen E. Ambrose.59 Collectively, this scholarship and
especially the role of Ryan and Ambrose as public intellectuals helped make D-Day a major point
of memory in postwar society. Beginning in the 1970s second wave feminist scholars such as
Sherna Berger Gluck in Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change drew upon
oral history to rediscover Rosie the Riveter and her contribution to the war effort.60 For feminists
seeking to shatter gender-based restrictions in employment, Rosie the Riveter offered a usable
past that demonstrated that women could—when granted the opportunity—perform in a range
of occupations traditionally reserved for men. This would be the theme of Connie Field’s widely
screened documentary, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), that, though featuring just
five women, was based on over seven hundred interviews. Rosie the Riveter has also captured
the public imagination with the propaganda poster “We Can Do It” and its frequent appearance
on a range of consumer products. The U.S. Congress established a Rosie the Riveter National
Park in Richmond, California, and Hollywood has issued motion pictures examining women’s
role as defense workers.61
Most major belligerents in the Second World War saw the boundaries between home front
and the battlefield collapse. Women and children became targets of war as a result of area
bombings, and few land battles were fought in uninhabited regions of the world. Military
historians seldom discuss the impact of land battle on non-combatants and continue to define
battle as a masculine endeavor and make only passing reference to women. One of the few
scholars to focus on civilian experience of battle is Peter Schrijver in his account of the Battle of

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the Bulge. Far from a battlefield containing only male warriors, countless civilian women were
engulfed in cauldron of destruction.62 Sam Edwards, in his trans-Atlantic examination of the
memory of the Second World War, focuses on the commemoration of D-Day and the air
campaign of the Eighth Air Force. In the case of D-Day, the ABMC created a permanent
cemetery for the American war dead overlooking Normandy Beach, and veterans built memor-
ials marking their units. Even the French Government and local communities built relatively few
memorials to the substantial casualties endured by the civilian population. In the case of veterans
of the Eighth Air Force, their commemorative activities centered around memorializing their
comrades who had lost their lives in the campaign, and generally avoided focusing on those who
were targeted by their bombs who often including war workers, but also women and children.63
Not all societies ignore the impact of war on civilians, and after the death of Mao, the People’s
Republic of China memorialized the civilian victims of the Rape of Nanjing. For South Korea
the victimhood endured by the “comfort women” who were impressed into sexual slavery by the
Japanese is a pivotal part of national memory of the Second World War.64

Second Wave Feminism and Commemorating Women

The advent of the Cold War with its threats of thermonuclear war and the emergence of mutually
assured destruction ended the free security of the United States and made the entire nation subject
to a possible enemy attack. The era witnessed a remarkable reassertion of patriarchal roles. For
instance, while women served in uniform during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, only a
small percentage served in-country, with the exception of army nurses. In promoting civil
defense during the early Cold War, federal officials sought to discount the cataclysmic nature
of nuclear war and emphasized ways to safeguard the home that strived to co-opt women and
their families. Women involved in the peace movement offered a gendered opposition to these
efforts not only by protesting mandatory civil defense drills, but also by campaigning against
atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. They stressed the harm it did to pregnant women and
young babies drinking contaminated milk from atomic fallout.65
The rise of second wave feminism coincided with broad political and societal upheaval,
including significant debate over the Vietnam War. America’s withdrawal from the war in
1973 and ultimate withdrawal from the country promoted a remarkable revival of the war
memorial. In contrast to long delays in memorializing earlier wars, the national Vietnam
Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982, only seven years from when the last helicopters left
the American embassy in Saigon. Patrick Hagopian and Kirk Savage offer among the most
comprehensive accounts of the controversies surrounding this innovative design by Maya Lin,
who at the time was a student at Yale University. Savage’s critique observes the distinctive
attributes of the Vietnam Memorial, arguing it was the first monument in Washington, D.C. to
memorialize all who died in service by inscribing names of all the American war dead. It also
served as the first national memorial to be conceived as a therapeutic monument that eschewed
many of the conventions of early war memorials.66
Savage, while documenting the conservative opposition to Lin’s original design, traces the
subtle but significant changes made to her plans that included the addition of an American flag and
inscriptions that bookend the list of names. He says little of the gender implications of the statues
added to the memorial. Hagopian’s work and Susan Eastman’s forthcoming book offer the most
comprehensive discussion of the decision to add Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers and Glenna
Goodacre’s statue of three women coming to the aid of a wounded male soldier to the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Conservatives, by insisting on a realistic statue to honor veterans
with Hart’s statue, only depicted the service of servicemen, and women were absent from the

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representation. Women veterans and their supporters, as Hagopian and Eastman document,
objected to the absence of women in Hart’s statue and argued that a sculptural representation
of women should serve as counterpoint. The Commission of Fine Arts objected that granting
women Vietnam veterans a memorial on the Washington Mall would open the floodgate of new
memorials.67
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial spurred a wave of monument building in Washington, D.C.
with a host of new ones proposed and several completed, including the Korean War Veterans
Memorial, the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism in World War II, and the
National World War II Memorial. Among the memorials completed was the Women in Military
Service for American Memorial. Kristin Ann Hass is one of the few scholars to trace the history of
this movement, and she underscores how this memorial is located away from the National Mall
and placed in a recycled building near the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery.68
What explains the reluctance to embrace memorials to women veterans of Vietnam and other
wars? Susan Jeffords argues that a broader cultural pattern after the Vietnam War favored a
remasculinization of American society through film, literature, and television.69 Jerry Lembcke
argues this pattern of remasculinization is crucial to understanding why Jane Fonda was so harshly
demonized by many Vietnam Veterans and their allies. In Hanoi Jane, Lembcke stresses that Fonda
was only one of many prominent anti-war activists who travelled to North Vietnam during the
war and that she garnered scant media attention during her visit. Only several years after the war
ended did Fonda earn the public ire of many Vietnam veterans and their conservative allies.
Lembcke argues they fostered a memory of her anti-war activism that bore little relation to actual
events, most notably claims that Fonda’s betrayal of American POWs that led captors to torture
them. Detractors of Fonda drew upon a trope of female betrayal stories that stretched back to
Sampson and Delilah in the Hebrew Bible. The myths and lies about Fonda’s controversial visit
forged a new memory that, according to Lembcke, offered a stereotypical scapegoat for under-
standing the reasons behind America’s defeat in Vietnam.70

Can War Be Gendered Female?

In charting an agenda for scholarship on questions of war, memory, and gender, it is imperative
that we provoke a broader shift in the study of war and society. Scholars of war and society, with
some important exceptions, have not fully unpacked the questions of masculinity and femininity
in shaping the American way of war. For the Civil War, Eric Dean and Gerald Linderman suggest
a gendered view of masculinity that both sustained men in the battlefield and came at a high
psychological cost. Andrew Huebner, in his study of the war imagery from World War II, Korea,
and Vietnam, observes a shift in how photographers, visual artists, and journalists depicted male
warriors responding to the toll combat took upon them. During the first years of the Second
World War, the dominant image centered on depicting the male warrior as “tough, dependable,
and honorable.” Even before the Second World War ended there existed a countervailing image
that cast the GIs as victims of war. By Korea, photographers were more likely to depict male
soldiers breaking down emotionally at the loss of a comrade and show images of beleaguered
combatants holding out under grim circumstances. By the time of the Vietnam War, the image of
the warrior who experienced great harm became so dominant it helped shape the memory of war
after the fall of Saigon.71
In seeking to understand the role of gender, memory, and war, there is a dearth of scholarship
focusing on veterans and veterans’ organizations. Veterans served as important vessels of memory,
playing a vital role in the establishment of federal Memorial Day, Veterans Day (Armistice Day),
and a series of national memorials, most notably the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. While

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William Pencak offers an excellent history of the American Legion during the interwar years, no
comprehensive scholarly monograph focuses on the post-1945 history of this organization. The
Veterans of Foreign Wars’ impact on veteran policy has been dissected by Stephen R. Ortiz, but
like the Legion, this organization warrants further study.72 While Ortiz situates his work in the
political history of the New Deal and challenges to FDR’s polities, he is silent on questions of
gender.73 Without Kirsten Delegard’s monograph, we would know even less about women’s
roles in these organizations, especially the part played by auxiliary organizations. Liberal World
War II veterans made an effort to forge a progressive veterans’ organization, the American
Veterans Committee, to serve as a counterweight to the more conservative American Legion.
Red-baited, this organization never became a mass-based organization like either the Legion or
VFW, but it did remain aligned with civil rights organizations in the postwar era.74 Was the
American Veterans Committee more supportive of women veterans? As Kristin Ann Hass notes,
the AVC played a pivotal role in gaining legislative approval for the Women in Military Service
for America Memorial in the 1990s, but this is only a passing reference.75 Sarah Myers’s study of
Women Airforce Service Pilots does examine the successful postwar public relations and lobby-
ing campaign to garner Congressional legislation that granted them veteran status in 1979 over
the opposition of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.76
The end of the Cold War resulted in a series of wars that led to bending and eventually
breaking the barriers preventing women from serving in ground combat. The asymmetric nature
of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq meant that women in non-combatant specialties found
themselves under enemy fire. For instance, Army Private Jessica Lynch, a member of a transport
unit captured by Iraqi forces in 2003, attracted widespread media attention as result of a concerted
public relations campaign of the Defense Department to hail her liberation from Iraqi captivity by
American forces. A small boomlet of articles seeks to dissect the creation of Lynch into a war hero
who resisted capture bravely, endured unspeakable cruelty from her captors, and was rescued by
Special Forces. Drawing on investigative reporting by the BBC and seeking to conceptualize the
making of a female war hero, these scholars seek to understand why the military sought to
fabricate so much about Lynch’s capture and liberation as a way to uncover the gender expecta-
tions for male servicemen and servicewomen. Deepa Kumar offers a detailed analytical critique of
the Defense Department’s media strategy of using Lynch as a symbol to justify American
involvement in the Iraq War. Kumar observes that Lynch’s race and physical beauty played a
significant role in why she emerged a hero, while Shoshana Johnson, an African American
member of the unit also held captive by the Iraqis, received scant public attention.77
The scholarly interest in Lynch has faded along with the wider public engagement with the
war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ongoing nature of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq has
discouraged interest in commemorating the wars through memorials. How will the combat
service of women in Iraq and Afghanistan be remembered? The decision by the Defense
Department mandating that the full integration of women into the combat arms may ensure
that women’s service will be fully recognized in memory. At the same time, the women who
serve in the armed forces in combat and non-combat specialties along with their male counter-
parts may go unrecognized.
Gender roles in wartime have often bended and shifted, but have proven quite resilient in
returning to older patterns once the fighting has passed. One of the most remarkable instances
from a comparative perspective would be the case of women in the Soviet Union during World
War II when scores of women fought in the armored forces, in infantry units, as sharpshooters,
and as pilots. When the war ended, however, women’s role in Soviet forces dramatically
diminished, and the service of these warriors was largely forgotten by Soviet society. Will this
pattern repeat itself in regards to the memory of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars?

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The most significant memorialization efforts related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the
widespread efforts to memorialize the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Not only did the site of World Trade Center emerge as a major memorial site, but
also scores of memorials were erected in countless communities, especially in New York, New
Jersey, and Connecticut.78 Moreover, Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in issuing
movies centered on these two conflicts, with some notable exceptions. The current wars differ
from earlier conflicts, fought in the twentieth century, such as the world wars, Korean War, and
Vietnam War that required the service of large armies of citizen soldiers and were made up of a
substantial number of conscripts. Women and men who have fought in recent wars serve in a
professional army that comprises only small minority of the public. Will the service of both
genders be remembered when they represent so few Americans?

Notes
1 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983, reprint, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
2 George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany
from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (1975, reprint, New York: Howard Fertig, 2001).
3 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
4 Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1986).
5 Kristin Ann Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013).
6 Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 123.
7 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
8 Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1991).
9 Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
10 William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Kathleen Clark, “Making History: African
American Commemorative Celebrations in Augusta, Georgia, 1865–1913” in Monuments to the Lost
Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, eds. Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 46–63.
11 Eric Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
12 Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
13 Kirk Savage, “The Self-made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National
Memorial,” Winterthur Portfolio 22 (Winter 1987): 225–42; G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the
American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
14 Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 135–141.
15 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
16 Minor Myers, Jr., Liberty without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1983).

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 G. Kurt Piehler

17 John C. Dann, The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976).
18 Gregory T. Knouff, “Masculinity, Race, and Citizenship: Soldiers’ Memoirs of the American
Revolution” in Gender, War, and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830, eds. Karen
Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 325–42.
19 Sarah J. Purcell argues there existed a significant movement to democratize the memory of the
Revolutionary War as early as the 1790s. See Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and
Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
20 Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York:
Knopf, 2004).
21 Linda Grant DePauw, “Women in Combat: The Revolutionary War Experience,” Armed Forces and
Society 7 (1981): 209–26.
22 Carol Klaver, “An Introduction to the Legend of Molly Pitcher,” MINERVA: Quarterly Report on
Women and the Military 7, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 35–61.
23 Emily J. Teipe, “Will the Real Molly Pitcher Stand Up?” Prologue 31, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 118–26.
24 Jessica Waldman, “Gender in Crisis: Women of ’76, Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth and
the Woman’s Rights Movement” (M.A. Thesis, University of Delaware, 2007).
25 Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland, Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 138–39.
26 G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1995).
27 Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), Chapter 1.
28 Mary R. Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1952).
29 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, History of the South Series, vol. 9 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause,
1865–1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The
Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
30 Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South,
1865–1913 (New York; Oxford University Press, 1987).
31 Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
32 William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
33 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993), 11. Silber is the author of a superb historiographical essay on the question
of reconciliation and Civil War memory. See Nina Silber, “Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed
and Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 103, no. 1 (June 2016): 59–83.
34 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, passim.
35 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York:
Free Press, 1987).
36 Piehler, Remembering War, chapter 2.
37 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
38 Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
39 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 90, 119.
40 Karen L. Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconciliation” in
Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory, eds. Cynthia Mills
and Pamela Simpson (Knoxville University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 149–62.

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41 Micki McElya, “Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy
of the 1920s” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and Landscape of Southern Memory, eds.
Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson (Knoxville University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 211.
42 Micki McElya, “Unknowns: Commemorating Black Women’s Civil War Heroism” in The Civil War
in Art and Memory, ed. Kirk Savage (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2016; distributed by New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 213–26.
43 Wallace Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and Hereditary Organizations in America,
1783–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of
Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 223; Karal
Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
44 Carolyn Strange, “Sisterhood of Blood: The Will to Descend and the Formation of the Daughters of
the American Revolution,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 105–28.
45 O’Leary, To Die For.
46 Micki McElya, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016).
47 Scott A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement,
and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 135–67.
48 Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall, chapter 2.
49 Kimberly Jensen, “Women, Citizenship, and Civic Sacrifice: Engendering Patriotism in the First
World” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 139–59.
50 Kirsten Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Also useful is Christine K. Erickson, “‘So
Much for Men’: Conservative Women and National Defense in the 1920s and 1930s,” American
Studies 45, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 85–102; Carol Meldicott, “Constructing Territory, Constructing
Citizenship: The Daughters of the American Revolution and ‘Americanisation’ in the 1920s,”
Geopolitics 10 (2005): 99–120.
51 Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933
(New York: New York University Press, 2010); G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold Star:
American Commemoration of the First World War” in Commemorations: The Politics of National
Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 168–85.
52 Rebecca Jo Plant, “The Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimages: Patriotic Maternalists and Their Critics in
Interwar America” in Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policy in the Twentieth
Century, eds. Marian van der Klein, et al. (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012).
53 Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke, “‘The Crowning Insult’: Federal Segregation and the Gold
Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 102, no. 2
(September 2015): 406–32.
54 Steven Trout, Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2002) and On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–
1941 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 210.
55 Rochelle Sara Miller, “No Women, Only Brothers!” in Heroism and Gender in War Films, eds. Karen
A. Ritzenhoff and J. Kazecki (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 51–65. Scholars of cinema have written
extensively on the war in film, especially with regard to those related to the Second World War, but
many only give passing attention to questions of gender. For example, see Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and
Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2002). For an important set of essays examining war films and gender from a global perspective, see
Karen A. Ritzenhoff and J. Kazecki, eds., Heroism and Gender in War Films (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
56 Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L .R. Higonnet, “The Double Helix” in Behind the Lines: Gender
and the Two World Wars, eds. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret
Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 31–47.

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 G. Kurt Piehler

57 Sarah Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used’: The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War
II” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 2014).
58 John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010), 193–96, 198.
59 G. Kurt Piehler, “Veterans Tell Their Stories and Why Historians and Others Listened” in The United
States and the Second World War: New Perspectives on Diplomacy, War, and the Home Front, eds. G. Kurt
Piehler and Sidney Pash (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 216–35.
60 Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (New York:
Twayne, 1987).
61 Alice Kesslar-Harris, “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (U.S., 1980)” in World War II in Film
and History, eds. John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 107–22.
62 Peter Schrijver, The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2005).
63 Sam Edwards, Allies in Memory: World War II and the Politics of Transatlantic Commemoration, c. 1941–
2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
64 Jie-Hyun Lim, “The Second World War in Global Memory Space,” The Cambridge History of the
Second World War, Volume III: Total War: Economy, Society, and Culture, eds. Michael Geyer and Adam
Tooze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 698–724.
65 Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006); Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the
1960s, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
66 Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the
Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam
War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2009).
67 Susan L. Eastman, The American War in Vietnam: Cultural Memories at the Turn of the Century (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, forthcoming 2017).
68 Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall.
69 Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinzation of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989).
70 Jerry Lembcke, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2010).
71 Andrew J. Huebner, Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam
Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 275.
72 William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1989).
73 Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era
(New York: New York University Press, 2010).
74 Robert L. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee: Out of a Hot War and into the Cold,”
American Quarterly 18 (Fall 1966): 419–36.
75 Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall, 104.
76 Myers, “‘A Weapon Waiting to Be Used.’”
77 Deepa Kumar, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch
Story,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 297–313. On memory and Lynch, see also Veronique Pin-
Fat and Maria Stern, “The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, and the ‘Feminization’ of the
U.S. Military,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30, no.1 (January–March 2005): 25–53; Stacy Takacs,
“Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post 9/11” Feminist Media Studies 5,
no. 3 (2005): 297–310; Gioia Woods, “Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and the
Great American Makeover,” Studies in Popular Culture 29, no. 1 (October 2006): 17–39.
78 Carrie Rowe Malanga, “New Jersey September 11th Memorials” (D. Litt. Thesis, Drew University,
2005).

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 CONCLUSION

Republicans swept the presidency and both houses of Congress in the November 2016 election.
The Republican Party platform adopted prior to the elections called for the review of what it
termed “ideology-based personnel policies” such as women’s combat service, and so it remains to
be seen how the changing political tides will affect not only women’s service, but also the service
of gay, lesbian, and transgendered personnel.1 Whatever happens, military personnel policies will
—as they have always done—both reflect and signal broader changes in the social and cultural
meanings of gender. And as the American public grapples with these changes, we still have much
to learn about the history that can inform our understanding of what they might mean.
Although many recent historians have shifted their focus from the study of women to the study
of gender, historians still need to uncover many aspects of women’s martial service and how that
service shaped their postwar lives. In particular, future scholarship needs to address the entangled
relationships among gender and other factors. While all women’s experiences during wartime are
shaped by legal, social, and cultural practices that determine how women can participate, those
experiences are further differentiated by interrelated factors such as race, ethnicity, class, age, and
type of work performed. Not all women have experienced war or military service in the same
ways, even if they wore the same uniform, worked in the same war industry, or offered the same
kind of homefront support. Many of the earliest histories of women’s wartime and military
service focus on white women, and though there is still much to be written on their experiences,
future works should expand their focus. We know little, comparatively, about the martial and
wartime experiences of Native American, African American, and Latina women.
Men’s service needs similar attention. Although at first glance it might seem surprising to say
that historians need to write more about the history of military men, we do need continued
examinations. Many historians have conflated distinctions among men’s military service by
focusing on or privileging combat as the normative experience. The percentage of men assigned
to combatant positions has always varied by war, military branch, and theater, and, well into the
mid-twentieth century, by race. Further, the percentage of men in combat positions declined
precipitously during the twentieth century, though this reality has not influenced scholarship to
the degree that it should. Historians could illuminate men’s diverse services by examining the
experiences of men who, for example, served in labor battalions or in the quartermaster corps, or
who repaired trucks, played in the band, or cooked in the kitchen. Likewise, we need more
studies of men who have not served in the military but have performed other kinds of martial or

355
 Kara Dixon Vuic

wartime service. What can we learn about the relationship between masculinity and war by
looking at men who remained far from the battle lines? How were men’s experiences of war
framed not only by definitions of masculinity but also by intersections with class, race, ethnicity,
age, or religion?
These studies would help to problematize the gendered nature of combat as having been not
merely a masculine domain but a particular kind of masculine domain and would contextualize
postwar memorializations that privilege the combatant experience. With the opening of combat
roles to women, this is an especially apt moment for historians to consider historical definitions of
combat. As Cynthia Enloe wrote in Does Khaki Become You?, militaries have often redefined
combat depending on women’s presence; definitions of “combat” change to exclude women and
thereby maintain conventional notions of gender.2 But many men—indeed, most in the twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries—have not served in combatant positions. Moreover, the U.S.
military is supported today by foreign nationals and migrants who perform undesirable work that
has historically been gendered female, while private contractors provide security and other
services that have historically been gendered male.3 Tomorrow’s wars will also demand new
understandings of combat that account for remotely controlled weapons and attacks that occur far
from conventional battlefields. Uncovering the complex history of “combat” and all varieties of
military service will go a long way to helping us understand the roots of today’s concerns. Might
wars fought on American soil, or even between Americans themselves, have blurred the defini-
tions of combat and service in ways that can shed light on modern-day discussions about what
constitutes combat?
We are only beginning to understand the deep significance of sexuality to the experiences of
wars and military service. Although some scholars have highlighted the service and regulation of
homosexual men and lesbians at particular moments, we need a fuller examination of their
experiences across history, as well as a deeper consideration of how all kinds of sexuality have
helped to define martial gender roles. We know that the military has fluctuated in its regulation of
homosexuality, but we also need to examine the ways the U.S. military has regulated hetero-
sexuality among service members, their families, and civilian communities. This investigation
will help us better understand the broad functions of sexuality in military culture, including the
ways sexuality frames how servicemen and women view each other, how military families
function as critical support structures, how U.S. personnel understand foreign peoples, and
how military forces engage with foreign peoples and governments. As sexual harassment and
assault continue at appalling rates and the military begins to integrate transgendered people into
the service, a deeper understanding of martial sexuality can provide the history we need to
contextualize contemporary matters.
Scholars interested in martial gender would also do well to situate their work in an interna-
tional context. In an obvious way, all U.S. wars (even the Civil War) have had an international
dimension, but the effects of transnational relationships, foreign settings, and cultural differences
largely remain hidden. While scholars have documented the ways that gendered ideologies
shaped some calls for war and framed the decision-making of policymakers in given eras, notable
chronological gaps remain. Scholars need to continue to flesh out the ways notions of gender
have informed recruitment efforts, justifications for war, battlefield tactics, and negotiations with
foreign powers. And, we should continue to explore the ways that U.S. gender norms have been
constructed in relationship to those of other peoples, whether enemies or allies.
As we consider new approaches and topics, historians investigating the history of war, gender,
and the U.S. military could benefit from a broadened chronological and theoretical focus.
Historian and legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak argues in Wartime: An Idea, Its History, Its
Consequences that in the twentieth century “wartime” has been a near constant, unconfined by

356
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formal declarations of war’s beginning or ending.4 This framing of war implores scholars to
broaden our studies of war to include mobilizations and demobilizations, certainly, but it should
also compel us to expand our histories of the militarization of American society in all eras. Many
works on militarization focus on the twentieth century for good reason, but we need to consider
the ways American society was militarized much earlier. The nation was founded and then
expanded through martial acts, and Americans were compelled to support those actions in formal
and informal ways. What should we learn from the experiences of civilians who were engaged in
the expansion of American militarism? What was the relationship between martial and civilian
gender norms? And how might antiwar movements have offered alternative gender models?
Relatedly, historians need to explore the military’s relationship to gender during times of peace.
How did peacetime militaries, contracted in size and not pressed by wartime demands, fashion
gender roles for women and men? How have military maneuvers, demonstrations of power, and
peace keeping and humanitarian missions utilized gender in their extension and, in turn, created
martial gender roles that were unconnected to war?
The essays in this collection have highlighted the vast scholarship on the history of wars,
gender, and the U.S. military and have demonstrated the importance of this study to the larger
fields of gender and military history, as well as U.S. history writ large. Military historians,
women’s historians, gender historians and scholars, peace historians, diplomatic historians,
historians of international relations and foreign policy, legal scholars, and film studies scholars
have all contributed to the development of the rich literature discussed here. And, we will all
benefit from the continued cross-fertilization of scholars, who bring their tools and perspectives
to bear on the history of war, gender, and the U.S. military.

Notes
1 http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/donald-trump-women-combat-obama-military-policy;
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/11/08/congress-require-women-register-draft.html.
2 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (Boston: South End Press,
1983), 7.
3 See Micah Zenko, “The New Unknown Soldiers of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Foreign Policy, May 25,
2015, available at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/29/the-new-unknown-soldiers-of-afghani
stan-and-iraq/.
4 Mary L. Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012).

357
 INDEX

9/11 144, 149–54, 159nn25–26, 218–19 131–48, 235, 244–45n5; women and 3, 132,
134–37, 146n58, 221–24
Abu Ghraib 152–54, 293, 299n56 See also Lynndie American Battle Monuments Commission 345, 348
England American Legion 307–09, 312, 319n51,
Afghanistan War 144, 149–58; George W. Bush and 345–46, 350
150, 151, 152, 153; contract laborers 220–21; American Red Cross 52n31, 340; women and
feminism and 151, 159nn25–26, 221–24; gender World War I 75–76, 77f, 79 See also Donut
as cause for 150–54, 219–20; media and women Dollies
150–51, 159n21; Soviet war in 137; women in American Revolutionary War 27–30; African
military during 1, 149–50, 154–56 American soldiers 27–29, 31, 188; age of soldiers
African Americans: in All-Volunteer Force 132; 27; bachelors seen as ideal soldiers 31–32; British
American Revolutionary War and 27–29, 31, soldiers 185; camp followers 17, 29–30;
188; citizenship through military service 95, enlistment 27; gendering the enemy 187–88;
218–19, 237–38; Civil War and 59, 61–62, 169; memory 338–40; pensions 31, 304, 339;
Civil War monuments and 342–43; Civil War Republican Motherhood 32, 69, 187, 234,
pensions and 305; Daughters of the American 321n78; women and 29–30, 234
Revolution and 344; disabled veterans 328–29; American Veterans for Equal Rights 309, 311,
freed slaves 54–55; French and Indian War and 320n59
26; militarism in U.S. culture 218–19, 221; rape antiwar movement See conscientious objectors,
and 62, 74, 97, 277, 292, 294, 299n37; Vietnam, antiwar movement
Reconstruction and 54–55, 61–63, 71–72, 342; Army Nurse Corps: 119–20, 135, 243, 280, 304,
relations with European women 74, 218, 255, 309, 332, 348; acceptance of men 243; World
256–57, 260–61, 277; Theodore Roosevelt’s War I and 98n1; World War II and 347; Vietnam
view of 218; segregated military service 71, War and 119–20, 135, 242–43, 280, 332
237–38, 240, 346; Tuskegee Airmen 95; Vietnam aviation: duty opened to women 134; pilots and
War antiwar movement and 122; women’s sexu- masculinity 48, 95 See also Women Air Force
ality 62, 71–72; War of 1812 and 34; World War I Service Pilots
and 71–72, 74, 75, 95, 240, 276–77, 328–29;
World War II and 90, 92, 94–96, 258, 273 basic training 3, 107, 120, 142, 149; Army 137,
Ali, Muhammad 122 146n62; denigration of recruits 119; Marine
All-Volunteer Force (AVF): advertisements for Corps 125, 135, 146n43
123–26, 133; African American women in 132; berdaches 12, 43
benefits 124, 133, 304, 314n6; demographics birth defects, service-connected 155, 162n73,
131–33; Gulf War (1991) 126, 140–42, 155, 221, 332–33
273–74; marriage and 132; military contractors British soldiers and sailors 25, 28, 185; quartered in
144, 220–21; recruitment 133–34; social welfare American homes 26
and 133; standards 132, 135, 146n38; transition to brothels See prostitution

358
 Index

camp followers 17, 19, 26, 29–30, 35, 143, 249–50, comfort women 257, 348
339–40 Commission on Training Camp Activities 72–73,
Carter, Ashton B. 1, 156 74, 275, 276
Carter, Jimmy 137, 244n5 communism 110, 117–120, 178, 179, 205, 208;
cause of war, gender as 167–84; Afghanistan War anti-communism 176–79, 194; homosexuality
150–54, 194–96, 219–20; Civil War 55–58, and fears of 111, 178
168–70, 188–89; Cold War 110–11, 176–80; conscientious objectors 83n19, 92, 94–95, 122,
colonial warfare 187–88; imperial expansion 240–41
170–71, 189–90; War of 1898 171–75, 189–91, conscription 4–5, 7n3, 17, 31–32, 107, 140, 270,
218; World War I 68–70, 191–92; World War II 274; activism against 70; during the Civil War
192–94; Vietnam War 117–20, 175–81 169; during the Vietnam War 119–20, 122;
children: boys become men in war 14, 27–28, during World War I 70–73, 75, 79, 82, 191–92;
116–17; effects of parents’ service on 155, during World War II 91–92, 95, 236–38, 241;
294–95, 297, 332; images of 70; in military camps end of 116, 124, 131–34, 137, 139, 143–44,
249, 251; in military families abroad 249, 260, 314n6; of women 1–2, 137, 244 See also Selective
263; of military fathers 73, 74, 106, 194, 254–56, Service Act
258, 261–62, 267n83, 273; of military mothers containment policy 181: domestic containment
131, 134–35, 140–41, 295; Native American 105–07, 118; See also Kitchen Debate
12–13, 19; and physical fitness 107; slave children Continental Army 19–20, 24, 27–29, 250, 270,
55–56, 61; of veterans 329–30; victims of war 338–39
69–70, 157, 210, 252, 291–92, 347–48 Critical Period (1781–89) 31–33
citizenship and military/wartime service 3, 5,
31–33, 76, 79, 240–41, 243–44, 271–72, 274; Daughters of the American Revolution 337, 344
African Americans 95, 218–19, 237–38; dependents See children; wives
American Revolutionary War 27–30, 339; disabled veterans 323–33; of the Civil War 324–30;
Critical Period and Federalist era 31–33; French husbands and fathers 330–31; masculinity and 79,
and Indian War (1754–1763) and Imperial crisis 305–07, 323–27, 330–31, 340; prosthetics 329;
(1763–1775) 24–27; Vietnam War 238–39; War psychological wounds 310, 326, 334n18;
of 1812 33–35; for women 76, 79, 117, 237, public view of 305, 307, 316n17, 316n19;
241–42 see also conscription rehabilitation of 79, 304–10, 328–31;
Civil Rights Movement 95, 116, 121–22, 137, reintegration 326–27; of Revolutionary War 330;
331, 343 suicide rate of female veterans 332; women and
Civil War 54–67; disability 63–64, 327–28; freed 331; women 331–32; of World War I 79, 325–29
slaves 54–55; gender as a cause of 55–58, 168–70, See also PTSD
188–89; General Law of 1862 304; homicide rate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (1993) 5, 117, 138–39,
170; internecine guerrilla war 57; manhood 147n68, 156–57, 195, 220, 232, 238, 244,
56–59, 63, 168–171; medical care 54, 325, 327; 270–74, 288, 296, 312
memory of 341–43; paternalism 55, 56; pensions Donut Dollies 120, 208, 242, 293
72, 304–05, 327–28; secession 57–58, 169; Double V Campaign 95, 218
sectional crisis and 55–58; sexuality during 58, draft See conscription
60–61; suicide of Confederate soldiers 326; views
of the enemy 188–89; women cross-dressing to England, Lynndie 152, 154
serve 18, 20, 58 See also Deborah Sampson Equal Rights Amendment 124, 134, 137
Cold War: American family during 105–07,
205–06, 259–60; civil defense 107; domesticity family: and diplomacy 205–06, 247–64; war as
103–06, 117–18; physical fitness 107; gender as a threat to 70–71, 91; war as way to strengthen
cause of 109–11, 117, 176–80; manhood 105–11; 72–73 See also military families
Red Scare 177–79; sex and national security Federalist Era (1790s) 33
107–09, 176–77, 207, 239 See also Kitchen Female Engagement Teams (FETs)
Debate; Korean War; Lavender Scare; 155–56
occupations; Vietnam War female masculinity 97, 101n76, 279
colonialism: and disease 46; and domesticity 46, feminism 45, 61, 117, 151, 153, 159n21, 191–92,
253–55; and violence 12–16 204, 208–10, 220–25, 348
combat exclusion policy 124–25, 137, 140, 142–43, filibusters 44, 49, 56–57, 170–71, 324
156, 236; aviation opened to women 134; foreign policy See cause of war, gender as
removal of 1, 6, 215, 281, 286n110, 296; Risk fraternization: African American men and European
Rule (1988) 139, 141 women 74, 256–57, 260–61, 277; post-World

359
 Index

War I Germany 256–57; post-World War II Kennedy, John F.: and masculinity 110–11, 117–18,
Germany 256, 260–61 120, 176–77, 179–81, 218; as motivation for
French and Indian War (1754–1763) 24–27; African national service 120
Americans and 26; camp followers 26; enlistment Kitchen Debate 103–04, 110, 120
25; homosexuality 26; motivations for 25; Korean War (1950–53) aftermath 106–07, 261, 262,
Parliament’s Quartering Act of 1765 26; pirates 305; memory of 336, 349; prisoners of war 106,
25–26; Royal Navy 25 109; prostitution during 45, 122, 261–62; soldiers
in 106–07; war brides 261–62; women veterans
German soldiers, American views of in World of 312, 348
War II 185, 192–93; German soldiers, American
views of in World War I 69, 191 labor See work of war
G.I. Bill (1944) 272, 306–07, 317n31 Ladies Memorial Association 62, 341–42
G.I. Bill (1980s) 133 Lavender Scare 109, 176, 178–81, 184n52, 207
Gold Rush 43 lesbians See homosexuality/homosexual
Gold Star Mothers 81, 345–46 Lost Cause 62–63, 341–43
Grand Army of the Republic 308, 336–37 Lynch, Jessica: 152–54, 160n47, 161nn50–51, 350
Gulf War (1991) 131, 155, 185, 273–74; masculinity
and 141–42, 281; technology and 48; women in manhood/masculinity: 9/11 150–51; All-Volunteer
126, 140–42, 155, 221 Force 136, 220; Anglo and Native American
11–16, 42–43, 47; George W. Bush 150–53,
hairstyles, military 116 218–19; Civil War 56–59, 63, 168–171; Cold
homosexuality/homosexuals: acceptance into War 105–11, 176–77; disabled veterans and 310,
military 5–7, 154, 157; during the American 323, 324–26; equated with military service 74,
Revolutionary War 28–29; during the Cold 94, 269; Gulf War 141; imperial expansion and
War 108–10, 113–14n29, 272; and conscription 170–75, 189–90, 199n27; inadequate manhood
270; cultural hostility to 108–09, 113–14n29, and its consequences 118, 180, 326; Lyndon
157, 163n93; debates about military service of Johnson and 111, 117–19, 180–81; John F.
156–57, 220; discharged from military 108, 109, Kennedy and 110–11, 117–18, 120, 176–77,
113n23, 139, 270–72, 283n14; dismissal 179–81, 218; militarized society and 217–219;
from government service 107–109, 178–79, 180; military labor and 239–41; pilots and 48, 95;
and fears of communism 111, 178; gay veterans’ protecting and dominating women and children
advocacy 303, 306–07, 313–314, 322n90; Gold 27, 68–69, 78, 94, 150, 188, 191; proving/
Rush and 43; lesbians in Women’s Army Corps earning through war 14, 27–28, 240; Puritan 43;
138–39, 273, 280; military service of 5–7, 26, rehabilitation and 305–306, 310, 316n26;
156–57, 220, 272, 296; military service and restrained and martial (mid-1800s) 44; Spanish
psychiatry 272, 283n21; mothers blamed for 106; colonies imagined as effeminate and childlike
reception in military 138, 139, 147n68, 185, 186; technology and 48, 133, 233, 240, 244;
270–71, 274; service women stereotyped as Uncle Sam 94, 190; Vietnam War 110–11, 118,
lesbians 91, 109, 126, 135, 138–39, 192, 281; 179–81, 218–19; and virility 95, 97; John Wayne
during World War II 96, 97, 238–39 as masculine symbol 111, 117–18, 122, 124,
See also berdaches; Don’t Ask, Don’t 151–52; World War I 75; World War II 94–95,
Tell; Lavender Scare 269 See also African Americans; Native Americans
Manifest Destiny 42, 44, 170–71
Imperial Crisis (1763–75) 26 Manning, Chelsea 157
Iraq War (2003–2011) 1, 144, 149–50, 157–58, 215, marriage 205–06; in All Volunteer Force 132–33; of
224, 262; George W. Bush 151; civilians in 262; freedpeople 62; in Korea 261; to Native
Lynndie England 152, 154; gendered American women 252, 265n27; in Philippines
justifications for 150–53, 219–20; Jessica Lynch 254; in Vietnam War 261–62; in World War I 74
152–53, 160n47, 161nn50–51, 350; memory of See also military families
350–51; military women in 1, 154–56, 210, 221, May Act (1941) 275, 278–79, 284n51, 285n81
350; sexual assault in 287, 293; veterans of memory: Afghanistan and Iraq Wars 350–51;
323, 313 American Battle Monuments Commission 345,
348; Civil War 337, 341–43; Daughters of the
Japanese-American internment 193 American Revolution 337, 344; Gold Star
Japanese soldiers, American views of in World War Mothers 81, 345–46; Korean War Veterans
II 185, 192–93 Memorial 336; Lost Cause 62–63, 341–43;
Johnson, Shoshana 153, 350 Revolutionary War 337–40; veterans

360
 Index

organizations and 309–10, 349–51; Vietnam pacifists See conscientious objectors

Veterans Memorial 310, 338, 348–49; Vietnam peace activists 69, 192, 203–04, 241, 345, 348
Women’s Memorial 310, 348–49; Women in pensions: American Revolutionary War 31, 304,
Military Service to America memorial 311, 339; Civil War 72, 304–05, 327–28; to reaffirm
349–50; of World War I 344–46; of World traditional gender roles 73, 304–08; World War I
War II 346–48 79–81; World War II 306–07 See also G.I. Bill
Mexican War (1846–48) 34, 56, 249 Persian Gulf War See Gulf War (1991)
militarism and U.S. culture 215–26; African pirates 25–26
Americans and 218–19, 221; George W. Bush Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 308; causes
218; defining 216–17; and gender 207–08; differ between sexes 282; and MST 155
Hispanics and 219, 222; homosexuality and 220; pregnancy 76, 134–35, 143, 273, 282, 295
Iraq War 220–21; masculinity/manhood and Prisoners of War: Americans in the Gulf War 141;
217–19; military wives and mothers 222–23; Americans in the Iraq War 154; Americans in the
Vietnam War 218–19; women’s labor and Korean War 106–07, 109; Americans in the
maintenance of 221–24 Vietnam War 349; Americans in World War II
military families 247–68; American Revolution to 91; concerns about women becoming 91, 125;
Civil War 249–51; children 254, 256; as cultural enemy prisoners 152
ambassadors 58, 222, 259–61; intercultural mar- prostitution: during the Civil War 58; in Hawaii
riage 252, 254, 258; Mexican War 249–50; post- during World War II 269, 278, 293; in Korea
World War II occupations and early Cold War 261, 293; in the Philippines 191, 253–54; in post-
259–61; prohibitions against 256–57, 260–61; World War I Germany 256; in post-World War
War of 1898 and United States-Philippines War II Germany 106, 209, 258; in post-World War II
(1899–1902) 253–55 See also fraternization; wives Japan 257–59; in Vietnam 121–22, 261–62, 291,
Military Sexual Trauma (MST) 154–55, 162n71, 293–94; in World War I 71–73, 256, 275; in
270, 273, 281, 313 See also sexual violence/assault World War II 96, 257, 279 See also May Act
militia service 24–25, 27, 33–34, 168, 188, 338 Puritans 43
monuments See memory
mothers: blamed for softening of American men Rape 293–94; at Aberdeen Proving Grounds (1996)
106; expected to sacrifice sons for wars 70, 81, 288; accusations against African Americans 62,
191–92; military mothers 131, 134–35, 140–41; 97, 258, 277, 292; in the Civil War 291; of
during World War II 69, 70, 191–92 See also Gold civilians 262, 290–92; gang rape of 13-year-old
Star Mothers; Republican Motherhood Japanese girl in Okinawa (1995) 294; Geneva
conventions (1929 and 1949) 291; intramilitary
Native Americans: Anglo-American women 154–56, 281, 287–90, 295; of Native Americans
captured by 14; berdaches 12, 43; citizenship and 12, 13, 43, 291–92; and military culture 155, 293,
251; homosexuality and transvestism 12; 295–96; and PTSD 282; Rape of Belgium 69;
importance of warfare to 14, 16; interactions with recruits with history of rape 294; same sex rape
white Army wives 251–52; masculinity 13–14, underreported by heterosexuals 271, 322n89; in
16, 26, 43, 188; perceptions of by white the Vietnam War 280; in wartime propaganda 69,
Americans 14, 19, 43, 251–53; rape of 12, 13, 43, 191; in World War I 292; in World War II 257–
291–92; religion of 14, 16; U.S. Army wars (ca. 58, 277–78, 280 See also sexual violence/assault
1848–1890) 251–53; violence of 13, 16; World Reconstruction 54–55, 61–63, 71–72, 341–42
War II military service of 272 See also women, Republican Motherhood 32, 69, 187, 234, 321n78
Native American Reserve Officer Training Corps 144; and debates
Nixon, Richard M. 103–04, 110, 120, 131, 244n5 about women in combat 124–25; Junior Reserve
nurses 47, 143, 203, 238–39, 291, 304, 329, 336, Officer Training Corps 222, 224; opened to
344–45; in the Civil War 340, 342; male nurses women 134
47, 98, 250; in World War I 76, 77f, 78, 317n28, Revolutionary War. See American Revolutionary
344–45; in World War II 91; in the Vietnam War War
221, 243, 308–11, 332 See also Army Nurse Corps Risk Rule (1988). See women in combat
Rosie the Riveter 88, 192, 347 See also women,
occupations 47, 208–10; of Germany post-World civilians
War I 255–57; of Germany post-World War II
44–45, 209–10, 257–58, 260–61; of Japan 44–45, Sampson, Deborah 20, 29, 32, 35, 315n11, 339–40
110, 208–09, 258–59, 260–61; of South Korea Selective Service Act: of 1917 (World War I) 70–72;
45, 210, 261–62 of 1940 (World War II) 94, 241; reestablished
Order No 28 (“Woman Order,” Civil War) 60–61 1980 244–45n5; and women 1–2, 7n4, 137, 244

361
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service academies 281, 296; opened to women veterans 313, 321n84; Military Sexual Trauma
(1975) 3, 126, 134–35 patients 313; organizations 308–09, 319n51,
sexuality: in the Civil War 58, 60–61; in the Cold 349–51; representations of 308–12; of the
War 107–09, 295; and diplomacy 206–07, Vietnam War 123, 308, 310, 312, 326, 332, 337,
247–48, 252–59, 261–62; and manhood 95, 97; 348–49; Vietnam War and benefits 307–08,
and martial service 238–39; and national security 317–18n41; women veterans 32, 307, 310–13,
5, 107–09, 176–77, 207, 239, 295; service 332; of World War I 305–06, 328; of World War
women stereotyped as lesbians 91–92, 109, 126, II 306–07 See also disabled veterans; Grand Army
135, 138–39, 192, 280–81; in World War I of the Republic; memory; pensions
73–75, 85n32; in World War II 95–97, 278–80; Veterans of Foreign Wars 307, 309–10, 350
see also Commission on Training Camp Vietnam War: African Americans and 122, 218–19;
Activities; homosexuality/homosexuals; antiwar movement 120–23, 219; challenge to
manhood/masculinity; prostitution; sexual militarism 123–26, 218–19; counter-insurgency
assault/violence; venereal disease 179; gender as a cause of 117–20, 175–81;
sexual violence/assault: against civilians 290–95; at masculinity changing 121–26, 218–19; Mexican
Abu Ghraib prison 152–54, 293, 299n56; during Americans and 122, 219; nurses 119–21, 135,
the Civil War 291; and colonialism 12–14, 18; 242–43, 280, 308–11, 332; prostitution 121–22,
definitions of 289; domestic violence 294–95; 261–62, 291, 293–94; U.S. view of Vietnamese
efforts to reduce 281–82, 289, 295–96, 297n9; 194; veterans 123, 308, 310, 312, 326, 332, 337,
intramilitary sexual assault 154–56, 281, 288–90, 348–49; veterans’ benefits 307–08, 317–18n41;
295; and military culture 154–56, 292–96; to Vietnam Veterans Memorial 310, 338, 348–49;
prove manhood 291, 298n29; public scrutiny and Vietnam Women’s Memorial 310, 348–49;
awareness increasing 288; punishment for 291, Vietnam Veterans Against the War 123; Winter
294; reporting rates and problems 282, 287–90, Soldier Investigation 123; women soldiers
322n89, 335n62; during the Vietnam War 121, 119–20; work of war and 241, 242–43 See also
261–62, 293; during World War II 257–59, 292; Donut Dollies
as a wartime tactic 13, 290–92 See also rape;
Military Sexual Trauma; Tailhook scandal war brides 74–75, 106, 206, 261–62
soft power 44, 106, 204 War of 1812 (1812–15) 33–34
support roles See work of war War of 1898 171–75, 189; Cuba as U.S. dependent
Spanish-American War. See War of 1898 175; gender as a cause of 171–75, 189–91, 218;
Rough Riders 175, 177; USS Maine 174–75;
Tailhook scandal (1991) 143, 288 William McKinley 174–75
technology and masculinity 48, 133, 233, 240, 244 War Risk Insurance Act (World War I) 72–73,
transgendered people: acceptance into military 6, 77, 79
149, 157, 166, 232, 244, 282, 355–56; and Western expansion 57, 68, 118, 172, 185, 189,
military service 215, 220, 296; veterans 303, 313; 250–53
women cross-dressers (Civil War) 18, 20, 58 See Winter Soldier Investigation 123
also Deborah Sampson wives 222–23; antiwar activities of (during Vietnam
War) 122–23; and Army family support programs
uniforms, for military women 135, 146n40, 132–33; Cold War housewives 103–104; and
269, 280 colonialism 47; and domestic labor 66n21,
United Daughters of the Confederacy 62, 341–44 222–23; and domestication of military camps
United Service Organizations 96 251–54, 259–61; of Loyalists 29; of Southern
planters 55; traveling with military 249–51; see
venereal disease 274–78: in the Civil War 250, 275; also camp followers; families; war brides
Native Americans and 252; penicillin as treatment Women Air Force Service Pilots 91–92, 98,
for 275; post-World War I Germany 256; in the 100n36, 307, 317n40, 347, 350
War of 1898 and United States-Philippines War women, civilians: abolitionists 55, 59–60; in
(1899–1902) 253–55; in World War I 72–73, American Revolutionary War 28–30, 32, 187,
275–76; in World War II 96, 97, 275–78 See also 339–40; bread riots (Civil War) 60; captives 14,
Commission on Training Camp Activities; 18; and Lost Cause 62–63; and militarism
prostitution 221–24; in military auxiliaries 76; plantation
veterans: African American 31, 305, 315n14, mistresses 55; suffrage 59–60, 79, 192; and
328–29; of the Civil War 304–05; gay veterans War of 1812 32; on World War I home front
306–07, 309, 311–14, 319n55, 320n59, 322n90; 75–79 See also peace activists; sexuality; wives;
homeless women veterans 313; medicalization of World War II

362
 Index

women in combat 124–25, 140–41, 142–43; ban 140, 233, 241; Vietnam War 241, 242–43;
lifted 1, 6, 154, 156, 286n110; in Grenada, women’s labor 17, 29, 76, 78, 88–94, 221–24,
140–41; Ranger School 215; Risk Rule (1988) 234–37, 241–43 See also camp followers
139, 141; in AVF 124–25, 142–43 See also combat World War I (WWI) 68–86; African Americans in
exclusion policy 71–72, 74, 75, 95, 240, 276–77, 328–29; antiwar
women, in military: in All-Volunteer Force 3, 132, effort 69, 70; burials and cemeteries 345–46;
134–37, 146n58, 221–24; cross-dressing to serve conscription 70–71; disabled veterans of 79,
(Civil War) 18, 20, 58; homeless veterans 313; 325–29; and the family 70–73; gender as a cause
integration into military forces 124–26, 136, 242, for 68–70, 191–92; impact of war on gender
281, 296; integration into regular Army 235; 77–80; manhood and 75; marital citizenship 79,
restrictions on service 81, 95, 98, 124, 135, 138, 82, 86n60; religion and 75; suffrage and 68, 76,
139, 140, 321n78; veterans 32, 91, 307, 310–13, 78–79, 192; veterans of 305–06, 328; women in
332; Vietnam War 119–20, 125–26, 128n24, the military 76, 98n1; women in Red Cross
135; during World War I 76, 98n1; during World during 75–76, 77f, 79 See also Selective Service
War II 87, 90–92, 135; weapons training 135, World War II (WWII): African Americans and 92,
146n44; See also nurses; Deborah Sampson; 94–96, 258; conscription 91–91, 95, 236–38,
sexuality; Women Air Force Service Pilots; 214; depictions of German and Japanese soldiers
women in combat; Women’s Army Corps; 185, 192–93; Double V Campaign 95, 218;
Women’s Armed Services Integration Act gender as a cause of 192–94; G.I. Bill (1944) 272,
Women in Military Service to America memorial 306–07, 317n31; homosexuality during 96, 97,
311, 349–50 238–39, 272; Japanese American internment 193;
women, Native American: Cherokee 18–19, 43; masculinity and 94–95, 269; memory of 346–48;
marriage to army men 252, 265n27; and power Mexican American women in work force 90;
17, 18, 43; women and captives 17, 18, 43; mothers during 69, 70, 191–92; muscularity and
women and children as slaves 12–13 national strength 94; Native American military
Women’s Armed Services Integration Act (1948) service in 272; nurses 91; Prisoners of War 91;
111, 242 propaganda 89f, 90, 93f, 94, 96, 99n22;
Women’s Army Corps (WAC): African American prostitution 96, 209, 257, 279; rape during
women and 92, 273; in All-Volunteer Force 257–58, 277–78, 280; Selective Service Act of
134–35; dissolution of (1978) 135–36, 235; 1940 94, 241; sexuality 95–97; sexual violence/
lesbian culture in 138–39; opposition to 91–92, assault during 257–59, 292; United Service
100n27, 138–39, 192, 235, 279, 295; pregnancy Organizations 96; venereal disease 96, 97,
and children 135, 295; sexuality and 91–92, 96, 275–78; veterans of 306–07; women in military
273, 279–80; in Vietnam 119–20, 242; in World 87, 90–92, 242; women in workforce 89–90
War II 91–92, 242
work of war 233–44; definition of 233; manhood Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)
and 94, 239–41, 243, 355; militarism and 221–24; 47–48, 79
racial segregation and 71, 94–95, 237–38, 240, Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)
346; sexuality and 238–39, 278–81; support roles 47–48, 79

363
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