The Routledge History of Gender, War and the U.S. Military 1315697181, 9781315697185

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
PART I: Military Manpower: Gender, Service, and Citizenship in American History
1. The Shared Language of Gender in Colonial North American Warfare
Gender, Sexuality, and Contested Masculinities
Women and Warfare
Future Directions in Scholarship
Notes
2. Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era and New Republic
The French and Indian War and Imperial Crisis
The American Revolutionary War
The Critical Period and the Federalist Era
Jeffersonian Republicans and the War of 1812
Conclusion
Notes
3. Beyond Borders and Combatants: Wars of Empire and Expansion
Gender and Soldiers in Colonies
Looking Beyond 1898 and the Formal Colonies
Looking Beyond Combat
Further Directions for Research
Notes
4. Beyond the Brothers’ War: Gender and the American Civil War
Gender and the Sectional Crisis
Gender on the Battlefield
Gender, Race, and Reconstruction
Questions for Future Scholarship
Notes
5. Gee! I Wish I Were a Man: Gender and the Great War
Gender and the War’s Meaning
Gender and Conscription
Wartime Politics of Gender and Race
War and the Family Man
Sex and the Soldier Over There
Masculine Virtue at War
Women and Gender on the Home Front
The War’s Impact on Gender
Conclusion
Notes
6. “The Women Behind the Men Behind the Gun”: Gendered Identities and Militarization in the Second World War
Laying the Foundation: Background of the Field of Gender and World War II
Wartime Work
Man Up: Defining and Contesting Wartime Masculinities
Regulating Sexuality: Maintaining Troop Morale and Assuaging Public Fears
Future of the Field
Notes
7. Homophobia, Housewives, and Hyper-Masculinity: Gender and American Policymaking in the Nuclear Age
The Cold War Home Front and the American Family
Sex and National Security
Political Rhetoric and Policymaking
Gender Analysis and the Future of Cold War Studies
Notes
8. Gentle Warriors, Gunslingers, and Girls Next Door: Gender and the Vietnam War
Gender, the United States, and the Vietnam War
Gender and the GI Antiwar Movement
Post-Vietnam Shifts in the Military’s Image
Future Scholarship
Notes
9. Transitioning to an All-Volunteer Force
The Demographics of Service
Recruitment
The 1970s: Women’s Participation Transformed
The 1980s: Womanpause, Resurgent Masculinity, Restrictions on Gays andLesbians
The 1990s: The Gulf War
Women and Combat in a Volunteer Force
A Completed Transition
Notes
10. 9/11, Gender, and Wars without End
Assertions of National Masculinity
Gendering the Cause for Invasion
The Increasing Roles of Women
Out of the Camouflage Closet
Conclusion
Notes
PART II: Mobilizing Gender in the Service of War
11. Gender as a Cause of War
Manhood, Honor, Slavery, and the Civil War
Manhood and Imperial Expansion—The Filibusters
Manhood and Imperial Expansion—The War of 1898
Cold War, Lavender Scare, and the Gendered Politics of the Vietnam War
Future Directions
Notes
12. Gendering the “Enemy” and Gendering the “Ally”: United States Militarized Fictions of War and Peace
United States Warfare and the Gendered Work of Creating the “Enemy”
An Increasingly “Globalized Militarism” and the GenderedWork of Creating the Ally
Conclusion
Notes
13. Gender and American Foreign Relations
Women Internationalists Doing “Women’s Work”
The Missionary Impulse
Marriage and Family
Gender and Sexuality
Gender and Militarism
After the War Is Over: Gender and Occupation
What’s Happening Now: Gender and Policy
Notes
14. Gender and Militarism in U.S. Culture during the Long Twentieth Century
Defining Militarism
Masculine Ideals and the Maintenance of Militarized Society
Highlighting the Non-Masculine in Defense of American Militarism
Women’s Labor and the Maintenance of Militarism
The Future of Gendered Militarism
Notes
PART III: Gender, Sexuality, and Military Engagements
15. “Patriotism Is Neither Masculine nor Feminine”: Gender and the Work of War
Historiographic Treads in the Late Twentieth Century and the Work of War
The State and the Citizen: War Work and Martial Roles
Sexuality and Martial Service
American Manhood, Military Masculinity, and War Work
Constructing the Female Soldier
Civil-Military Relations and Gender Identities
Gender and the Work of War in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
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
The American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War
The U.S. Army-Native American Wars ca. 1848–1890
The Wars of 1898 and the U.S.-Philippines War (1899–1902)
World War I and the Postwar Occupation of Germany
World War II
U.S. Servicemen and Families Abroad in the Post-World War II Occupations and Early Cold War
The Korean and Vietnam Wars and Their Aftermaths
Conclusion: Directions and Sources for Future Scholarship
Notes
17. Homos, Whores, Rapists, and the Clap: American Military Sexuality Since the Revolutionary War
Homosexuality
Venereal” Disease
Women’s Sexuality
The Future of the Field
Notes
18. Rape, Reform, and Reaction: Gender and Sexual Violence in the U.S. Military
Intra-military Sexual Assault
Sexual Violence Against Civilians
Sexual Violence in Military Culture
Directions for Future Scholarship
Notes
PART IV: Gendered Aftermaths
19. To Recognize Those Who Served: Gendered Analyses of Veterans’ Policies, Representations, and Experiences
From Service Member to Veteran: Social Policy and Rehabilitation
Veterans in Society: Social Identities and Representations
Conclusion: Navigating a Changed Landscape
Notes
20. Best Men, Broken Men: Gender, Disability, and American Veterans
Disability and Manhood
Reintegration
Federal Support
Husbands and Fathers
New Directions
Notes
21. The Covert and Hidden Memory of Gender
Revolutionary Memories Remembered and Forgotten
The Civil War Casts a Long Shadow
Gender and the Heredity of Memory
The Age of Total War
The Second World War
Second Wave Feminism and Commemorating Women
Can War Be Gendered Female?
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

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 worldrenowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700 Edited by Deborah Simonton The Routledge History of Slavery Edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard The Routledge History of the Holocaust Edited by Jonathan C. Friedman The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World Edited by Paula S. Fass The Routledge History of Sex and the Body Edited by Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan The Routledge History of Western Empires Edited by Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie The Routledge History of Food Edited by Carol Helstosky

The Routledge History of Terrorism Edited by Randall D. Law The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity Edited by Robert Swanson The Routledge History of Genocide Edited by Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire The Routledge History of American Foodways Edited by Michael Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach The Routledge History of Rural America Edited by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg The Routledge History of Disease Edited by Mark Jackson The Routledge History of American Sport Edited by Linda J. Borish, David K. Wiggins, and Gerald R. Gems The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700 Edited by Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó

The Routledge History of the Renaissance Edited by William Caferro

The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic

The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health Edited by Greg Eghigian

The Routledge History of the American South Edited by Maggi M. Morehouse

The Routledge History of Disability Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown and Nancy E. Hansen

The Routledge History of Italian Americans Edited by William J. Connell & Stanislao Pugliese

The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells

The Routledge History of Latin American Culture Edited by Carlos Manuel Salomon

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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 Acknowledgements

x 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 Ann M. Little

11

2 Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era and New Republic John Gilbert McCurdy

24

3 Beyond Borders and Combatants: Wars of Empire and Expansion Karen E. Phoenix

41

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

54

5 Gee! I Wish I Were a Man: Gender and the Great War Andrew J. Huebner

68

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

vii

87

Contents

7 Homophobia, Housewives, and Hyper-Masculinity: Gender and American Policymaking in the Nuclear Age Matthew W. Dunne

103

8 Gentle Warriors, Gunslingers, and Girls Next Door: Gender and the Vietnam War 116 Heather Marie Stur 9 Transitioning to an All-Volunteer Force Melissa T. Brown 10 9/11, Gender, and Wars without End Anna Froula

131

149

PART II

Mobilizing Gender in the Service of War

165

11 Gender as a Cause of War Robert Dean

167

12 Gendering the “Enemy” and Gendering the “Ally”: United States Militarized Fictions of War and Peace Tessa Ong Winkelmann 13 Gender and American Foreign Relations Molly M. Wood 14 Gender and Militarism in U.S. Culture during the Long Twentieth Century David Kieran

185

202

215

PART III

Gender, Sexuality, and Military Engagements

231

15 “Patriotism Is Neither Masculine nor Feminine”: Gender and the Work of War Charissa Threat

233

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 viii

247

Contents

17 Homos, Whores, Rapists, and the Clap: American Military Sexuality Since the Revolutionary War Donna B. Knaff

269

18 Rape, Reform, and Reaction: Gender and Sexual Violence in the U.S. Military Elizabeth L. Hillman and Kate Walsham

287

PART IV

Gendered Aftermaths

301

19 To Recognize Those Who Served: Gendered Analyses of Veterans’ Policies, Representations, and Experiences Jessica L. Adler

303

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

323

21 The Covert and Hidden Memory of Gender G. Kurt Piehler

336

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 x

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 UrbanaChampaign 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 civilmilitary 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 xiii

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.

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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 announcement 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

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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 citizenship. 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 transformative 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? 3

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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 transitioning 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, militarism, 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 experienced 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 deepening 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 personnel 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 consensual—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

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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 consequences. 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 9

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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.

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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 institutions 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 11

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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 berdaches 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 12

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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 Worldcentered 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-emphasized 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, ornamentation, 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

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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 borderlands 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 AngloAmerican 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 recognized 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.

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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 EighteenthCentury 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 accelerating 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 bloodletting 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 AngloAmerican 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 postmortem 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

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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

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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 Algonquianspeaking 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 18

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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 selfredemption 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, maintenance, 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

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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 borderlands. 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. 21

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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, 22

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16 17

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21 22

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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). Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), chapters 4–5, especially 146–47.

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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 colonialindigenous conflict and imperial contests for the continent, North America erupted in a conflagration 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 displacement 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 experiences 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 immigrants, 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

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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 allmale 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 28

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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

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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 31

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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 opportunity 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 32

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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 commemorations 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 33

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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 wideangle 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-ofthe-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 manhood 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 dimensions 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-USZ6258264. 35

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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 AngloAmerican 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 EighteenthCentury 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

Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era 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. 37

John Gilbert McCurdy 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

Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era 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 SmithRosenberg, 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 MexicanAmerican 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 engagements 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 imperialism 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 41

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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 42

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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 demonstrate 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 construction 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. 43

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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 occupation 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 44

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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 uncontested. 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 45

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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. administrators 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 specifically 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 pathologizing 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-toperson 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 “civilization” such as neurasthenia, instead of the contagious diseases of “barbarism” and thus strengthened 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 photography 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. 46

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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 nonChristian 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 47

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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 imperialism 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; 48

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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—particularly 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 49

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and Undoing Imperialism in the Visual Arts,” serves a useful model for how to look at nontextual 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 participation in World War I and rising nationalist movements which questioned the British characterization 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). 50

Wars of Empire and Expansion 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 51

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27 28 29 30

31

32

33 34 35

36

37

38

39

context) is Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Wexler, Tender Violence, 32. Vincente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 55. Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry, 21 (1995): 640–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343940. 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. 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). 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). 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. Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13. 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). 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). 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). 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. Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 52

Wars of Empire and Expansion 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 mobilization. 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, 54

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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’ 55

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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 coordinates 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 nineteenth-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 56

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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, northern 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 proslavery 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. 57

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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 themselves 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 nineteenth-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 58

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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 wellknown 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 understanding 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 59

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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 60

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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 freedwomen’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 61

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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 62

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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 network 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 childrearing 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 HandleyCousins 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 63

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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 historiography 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). 64

Gender and the American Civil War 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 FoxGenovese, 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 HandleyCousins, “‘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/proceedingsofmee00wome/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 66

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27

28 29

30

31 32

33

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). 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). See Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 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). 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). 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. 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). 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. 68

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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, according 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 disapproval, 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 gendered 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 69

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 71

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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 72

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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 underwriting 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 73

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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 workplace, 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 diversionary 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, coercive, 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 censorship 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’ homoeroticism 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 74

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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 friendships 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 internationalism, 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 battlefield experience, but few explicitly scrutinize the ways he consciously or unconsciously incorporated 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 individuals 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 75

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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 participation 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 companionship 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, 76

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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 institutionalize 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 temporary 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.

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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 corresponding 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 remuneration. 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 79

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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 80

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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 campaigns, 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. 81

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 forthcoming 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 83

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

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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). In addition to Kennedy’s book and Zeiger’s article in Feminist Studies, see Brewer, Why America Fights, 67. Stone, Perilous Times, 164–8. Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 9. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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). Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 7. See Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 52; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 32–9. 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. 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). See Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 101–3. 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. 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. 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. 84

Gender and the Great War 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 85

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46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

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). 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. 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). See Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 83–103. Ebel, Faith in the Fight, 129–37. 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. Quoted in Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 148. 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. See Zieger, America’s Great War, 144. See Kennedy, Over Here, 284–7; Zieger, America’s Great War, 143–51; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 153. 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). 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. Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 140–1; Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service, 168–70; Bristow, Making Men Moral, 179–214. Kennedy, Over Here, 285. 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. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 130. 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. Wilson quote and Zieger comment in America’s Great War, 150. See Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 166–7. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 104. 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). Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill, 1–28. Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort, 6. 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 conceptions 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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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 89

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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 opportunities, 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 evidenced 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 90

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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 “denigrating” 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 controversy 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 determined to confront the enemy, there were men who preferred to serve on the home front and away from combat roles.28 91

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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 92

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.

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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 “opposition to dominant cultural representations” of muscular masculinity. Popular culture tried to reconcile these images through emphases on men overcoming their injuries or utilizing technologies 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 94

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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 95

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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 homosexuality, 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 professionals, 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 96

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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 contemporary constructions of sexuality and the body. 97

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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 booklength, 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. 98

Gender Identities in the Second World War 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. 99

Sarah Parry Myers 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 militarization 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. 100

Gender Identities in the Second World War 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). 101

Sarah Parry Myers 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 housewife 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 104

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influencing ordinary Americans’ perceptions and anxieties about national security and international 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 treatment 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 105

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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, commonlaw 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 interpretation 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 106

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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 thirtythree 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 expectations 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 107

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Figure 7.2

A young man defends his firing from the State Department as coming down to incompetence, 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 108

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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 hyperanxiety 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, 109

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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 wholeheartedly 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 110

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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, barechested 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 predominantly 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_conversions/16/1959-07-24.pdf.

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Matthew W. Dunne 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, 112

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17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

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. Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number, 152. 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. Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind, 141–142 and Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number, 152–161. 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. For her full analysis, see Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 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. 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. Quoted in Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1990), 261. 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. 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. Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 82–84. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 177. 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 113

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30

31 32 33

34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43

44

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. 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. Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind, 125–129. K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), ix. 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. 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. Quoted in Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 182. 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. 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. 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. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 6. 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. Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147–153. 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. 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. 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 114

Gender and Policymaking in the Nuclear Age 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 questioning, 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, 116

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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 servicemen 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 117

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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 international 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 118

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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 modernization 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 yellowskinned people and hippies.” Additionally, references to women and femininity were synonyms for homosexuality, an even more damaging accusation because military law prohibited homosexual 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 119

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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 midtwentieth 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 incorporation 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 discontent 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 120

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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 specifically 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 governmentissued 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 – 121

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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 imperialistic 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 122

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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 oneyear 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 123

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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 124

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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 brainwise, 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 development.” 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 125

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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, citizenship, 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 126

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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 masculinity 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, cowardly, 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 127

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24

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). Stur, Beyond Combat, 217. For a detailed examination of Cold War gender imagery and U.S. foreign relations, see Stur, Beyond Combat. 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). 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. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 252. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 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). Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 71–72. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pluto Press, 1983), xxix. 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). Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 169. 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. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 269. 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. 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). Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 35. Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 101–102. Stur, Beyond Combat, 161. 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, 128

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25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

40

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. 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. Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 4. 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). Stur, Beyond Combat, 64–141. May, Homeward Bound, xxiv–xxv. 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). Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980). “GIs and Asian Women: The Army’s Deadly Game,” Fatigue Press, May 1971, 7, Wisconsin Historical Society. Lifton, Home from the War, 30–31. Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 132. 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). 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. John Lewis, “Legalized Prostitution: Brass’s New Weapon Against GIs and Vietnamese Women,” The Bond, January 27, 1972, 4, Wisconsin Historical Society. 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). 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). 129

Heather Marie Stur 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) succeeded, but the Gates Commission was wrong about the make-up of the forces. The demographics 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 131

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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 participation 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 lowincome, 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, lowerranking 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 “intensified the army’s already existing emphasis on traditional gender roles—the male soldier-breadwinner (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 132

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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 133

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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 fundamentally 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 undergraduate 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 134

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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 administration, 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 campaigns 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 135

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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 masculinity. 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 organization’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, 136

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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 137

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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 servicemembers; 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 discriminatory 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 138

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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 compromised 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 suspicious 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 shorthanded 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 139

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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 intelligence 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 consciousness 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 professionalized 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 140

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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 retroactively 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.”98 141

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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 sociocultural 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 colocate 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, 142

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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 institutions 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 debauchery 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 143

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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 ‘allvolunteer’ 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 outsourcing, 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. 144

Transitioning to an All-Volunteer Force 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. 145

Melissa T. Brown 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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Transitioning to an All-Volunteer Force 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. 147

Melissa T. Brown 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

Boose, “Techno-Muscularity,” 88. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 100. Niva, “Tough and Tender,” 110–111. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 122. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Ibid., 250. Ibid., 255. Marlowe, “The Manning of Force and the Structure of Battle,” 195. Ibid., 194. Elaine Donnelly, “Constructing the Co-Ed Military,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14.2 (2007): 815ff. Ibid., 836. Ibid., 849–850. Ibid., 930. Brian Mitchell, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military (New York: Regnery Gateway, 1989). Martha McSally, “Women in Combat: Is the Current Policy Obsolete?,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14.2 (2007): 1011ff. Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 233. Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 280. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 280. 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. 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.”4 149

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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 antiAmerican 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 continual 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 150

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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 remaining 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 151

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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 152

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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 womenpleasing “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 153

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in Abu Ghraib—proof first of Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then American. Many scholars commented 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 discussions 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 personnel 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 154

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Schumer’s skit “A Very Realistic Video Game” criticizes this phenomenon—and hypermasculine 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 misconceptions 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 155

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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 bloodiest 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 156

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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 commission 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 antimilitary 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 157

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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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11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31 32

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. J. Anne Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives of 9/11,” International Studies Perspectives 3 (2002): 333–50. 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. Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 71–93, quote on 71. 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. Pierre Guerlain, “New Warriors among American Foreign Policy Theorists,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 116. 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. Ibid., 5. Hélenè Cixous, “The Towers: Les tours,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 431. Susan J. Brison, “Gender, Terrorism, and War,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 437. Marita Sturken, “Masculinity, Courage, and Sacrifice,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 444–45. 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, heteronormativity, neocolonialism, homophobia, and racism.” “Keeping the Home Front Burning,” 246, 258. Faludi, The Terror Dream, 5. Diana Taylor, “Ground Zero,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 453. Faludi, The Terror Dream, 9. 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. 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). Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives of 9/11,” 333. 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. Faludi, The Terror Dream, 4. David Brooks, “The Age of Conflict: Politics and Culture after September 11,” Weekly Standard, November 5, 2001. Guerlain, “New Warriors,” 109. 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. 159

Anna Froula 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. AbuLughod 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 construction 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.globalmediajournal.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. 160

9/11, Gender, and Wars without End 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. 161

Anna Froula 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 portapotty.” 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-assaultin-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. 162

9/11, Gender, and Wars without End 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-policyon-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-b87c476db8ac34cd_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 warmaking. 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. 165

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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 scholarship 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 constructed. 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 167

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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 dramatization.” 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 selfexposing, seemingly effeminate feelings that could prompt ill-recognized anger and melancholy: and third, a lust for fame and immortality in men’s memory.”9 168

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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-producing 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 constitutive. 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 AfricanAmerican 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 169

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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 masculinity,” 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 170

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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 determination 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, humiliation, 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, racialized 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 industrializing 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.24 171

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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 selfhardening as a radical antidote to modern ills. These men imagined a tough collective 172

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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 circumstances, 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 AfroCuban 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—enfranchised 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-milliners,” 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, selfpublicized 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 173

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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 174

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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 congratulated 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 intervention 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 175

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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-thecentury 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 anticommunism, 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 “containment,” 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 intervention 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-thecentury 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 neostoic 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 176

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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 universities 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 credentials 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 functionaries 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 communists, 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 177

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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 “organization man” that David Riesman, William H. Whyte, and other commentators and pundits deplored. Pushing paper rather than hewing an empire from the wilderness, modern, “otherdirected” 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 selfconscious 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-communism 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 diplomacy,” 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 178

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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 179

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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 “weakness” 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 “aggression.” His Republican opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, presented a militant hypermasculine 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 gaybaiting 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 conducting “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 180

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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 overwhelming 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 “appeasement,” 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 concerning 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 crosscultural 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. 181

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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. 182

Gender as a Cause of War 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-CubanFilipino 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: 183

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61 62 63 64

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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). 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. Much of the following argument is derived from Dean, Imperial Brotherhood. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 62, 77. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 1–36; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (New York: Riverside Press, 1949), 1. 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). 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). 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. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, especially 164–67; Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 40–66. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 83, 87, 118. 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. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 179–86. Ibid., 184. 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). Halberstam, The Best and Brightest, Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little Brown, 1982). 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. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 164–67, 201–40. Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 221–26. 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. 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 heteronormative 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 nonallied 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 185

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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, anticolonial 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 anticolonial 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 186

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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 establishing 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 undermining 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 selfindulgence.” 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.”9 187

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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 inconsistencies 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 188

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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 understandings 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 189

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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 190

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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 191

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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 supporters 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 prewar 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 participation 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 192

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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 simultaneously 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 envisioned 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.51 193

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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 elements 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 194

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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 hetereosexist 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 195

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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 accommodation 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 196

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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 “enemies” 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, 197

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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. Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg, eds. Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices (New York, London: Routledge, 2012), 7. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in NineteenthCentury 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). 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). Elaine Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 209. 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. 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. Yokota, Unbecoming British, 217. 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). Dudink and Hagemann, Masculinities in Politics and War, 8–9. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Jim Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses, 76–91. Leeann Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses, 3–21. 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. 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. 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). 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). 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). 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. 198

Gendering the “Enemy” and the “Ally” 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 PhilippineAmerican 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). 199

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. 200

Gendering the “Enemy” and the “Ally” 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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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 selfidentify 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 202

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critical theory. And gender. In the gender chapter, historian Kristin Hoganson provides a wideranging 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 transnational 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 203

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League.” As Alonso notes, the War Resisters League “is one of the longest lived peace organizations 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 nationalist 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 consciousness” 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 “domesticity” 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.”12 204

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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 internationalism 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 quasiofficial 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 205

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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 transatlantic 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 AngloAmerican “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 subfields 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 “willingness 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.”22 206

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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 context” 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, 207

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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, perceiving 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 photojournalists 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 effectively 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 208

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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 postcolonial 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 geopolitical 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 209

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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 reconciliation 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, masculinity 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 particularly 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 longforgotten 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. 210

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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 clearcut 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. 211

Molly M. Wood 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.” 212

Gender and American Foreign Relations 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. 213

Molly M. Wood 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. 215

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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 twentiethcentury 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 216

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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 alternatives. 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 217

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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 SpanishAmerican 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, AfricanAmerican 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 218

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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 nonwhite 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 “connection 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 SpanishAmerican 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 administration’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 219

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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 differentiation and denigration has manifested itself in anxieties about perceived threats to military masculinity. 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] 220

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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 conventional 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 221

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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 nonAmericans” 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 222

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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 nowclassic 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 223

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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 arguments 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 interrogate 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 disenfranchisement 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. 224

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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 performances 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 scholarship 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 scholarship 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, 225

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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/femalelawmakers-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. 226

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Sjoberg and Via, “Introduction,” 8. Ibid. Eisenstein, “Resexing Militarism for the Globe,” 35. 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. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 11. Ibid., 105–106, 143; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 191. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 125, 133, 136–38. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 45, 154; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 14, 191. 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). Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 180. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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). Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 49. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 190; Kieran, Forever Vietnam, 17–18. Phillips, War! What is it Good For?, 190. Ibid. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 246. Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No!, 109. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 193. Ariana E. Vigil, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in Latina/o Cultural Production (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 15. Ibid., 9. Jennifer L. Fluri, “‘Rallying Public Opinion’ and Other Misuses of Feminism,” in Feminism and War, 144. 227

David Kieran 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. 228

Gender and Militarism in the 20th Century 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 responsibilities 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 understandings 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 233

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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 environment 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 contemporary 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 234

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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 masculine 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 235

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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 236

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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 characteristic 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 237

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minorities, who had neither the income nor connections necessarily to avoid the draft, overwhelmingly 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 heterosexual 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 homosexuality 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 238

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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 239

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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 generation 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 nineteenth 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 particular 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 240

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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 citizenship. 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 uniform, 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 complicated 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 circumstances 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 241

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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 242

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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.45 243

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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 renegotiation 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 opportunity 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 244

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6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27

to the current Selective Service law that would authorize the president to order women to register for selective services. 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). 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). Mattie E. Treadwell, U.S. Army in World War II: The Women’s Army Corps (Washington: Center of Military History, 1985). Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, CA: Presido Press, 1982, revised and updated, 1992), xv. Ibid. 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). Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, 3. Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, xvi. 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. Chad Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3. 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. 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. See Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1997). Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 7. Ibid., 256. See also Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years,” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 759–75. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 265–79. 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, forthcoming, April 2017). 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. 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). 245

Charissa Threat 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 SpanishAmerican 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 247

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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. dominance 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 longterm, 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 interactions 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 248

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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 249

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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 engagements 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 complication 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 FrenchCanadian 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 250

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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 consideration 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 interactions 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, friendliness, 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 251

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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 252

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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 supposedly 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 relationships 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 253

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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 aforementioned 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 exceptionalism 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 interactions 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 “insurrection” 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, presumably 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.42 254

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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 independently 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 LentzSmith, “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 255

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the War Camp Community Service (WCCS) sought to cultivate “a more gentle and domesticated 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 “intimate 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 sanctioned 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 associated 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 256

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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. servicemen’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 encounters 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 occupations. 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 257

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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. militaryFrench 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 relationships 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 258

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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 leadership 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 “victimization” 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 259

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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 heterogeneous,” 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 assumptions 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 260

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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 disillusionment 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 262

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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 personnel 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 examined 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 263

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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 HomeFront 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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Military Personnel and Families Abroad 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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Donna Alvah 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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Military Personnel and Families Abroad 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: 267

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84

85

86 87 88

89 90

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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). 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). 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.” Joseph Goldstein, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,” New York Times, September 20, 2015. Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors, 102–16, 153–55. 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. Paula S. Fass, “Childhood and Memory,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 2 (2010): 162. 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. 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 uniform. 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 sometimes 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-soacademic 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 270

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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 activeduty 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 largescale 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 271

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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 criminological 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. 272

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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 servicewomen’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 abstinence “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 273

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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 inspirational” 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 breakdown 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 274

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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” environments 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 foregrounded 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 techniques of keeping soldiers busy and afraid of venereal disease.49 Since penicillin was not in widespread 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 professional 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 275

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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 contradictions 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 treatment between African American and white soldiers. This inequity was especially apparent in “social hygiene” education for African American soldiers. Bristow notes the CTCA’s understanding 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 276

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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 encounters 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 fundamental 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 277

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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 semirespectable 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 considerable 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 278

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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 characterization 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 advertisements, 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. 279

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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 infections—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 characterization 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 liberation 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 280

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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 announcements 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. 281

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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, contextualized historically and culturally. 282

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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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Donna B. Knaff 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 lowercase “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. 284

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82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 180–82. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 163. Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 108. Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 240–41. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 261. 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.” Ibid., 95. Ibid., 100. 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. Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 104–05. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 132. 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. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. 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.” Ibid., 85. Ibid., 85–86. Ibid., 86; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pandora Press, 1983). Hegarty, Victory Girls, 104. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter, 9. Ibid., 20. 285

Donna B. Knaff 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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18 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. 287

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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 undermined, 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 allvolunteer 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 288

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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 periods, 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 protections 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 highprofile 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 dominance 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 dangerous, 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 289

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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 290

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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 consequences 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 291

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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. 292

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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 assumption 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 293

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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 294

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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.75 295

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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 accountability 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 296

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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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16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

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/08Panel_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/08Panel_Reports/05_JPP_StatData_MilAdjud_SexAsslt_Report_Final _20160419. 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. Ibid., 37–38, 173–80. 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. 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. 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. Cohen, Green, and Wood, “Wartime Sexual Violence,” 8. Wood, “Rape During War Is Not Inevitable,” 390–91. 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. Kim Murphy, I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War (Batesville, VA: Coachlight Press, 2014). Barber and Ritter, “‘Physical Abuse … and Rough Handling,’” 50. 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. Ibid., 207–41. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 32. 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. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 32. Ibid., 151–52. Ibid., 151–52.

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Sexual Violence in the U.S. Military 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 (quoting 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. 299

Elizabeth L. Hillman and Kate Walsham 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’ entitlements 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 fundamentally 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 301

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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 303

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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 “monarchical” 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 304

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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 expectations 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 inevitable 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 “delegitimize 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 305

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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 dependence; 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 vocational 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 disproportionately 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 lowerpaying, 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 306

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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 government 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 undertook “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’ organizations 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.”40 307

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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 readjustment 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 “PostTraumatic Stress Disorder” in its diagnostic manual. Also, the Veterans Administration restructured 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 problematic 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 selfinterest 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 308

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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 antiauthoritarian 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 … 309

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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 disabilities, 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 maintains. “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 310

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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 311

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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 classifications 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 experiences and perceptions of veteran identity have varied based on race, ethnicity, and social background, 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 312

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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 networks, 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 313

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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 ReInvention 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). 314

Gendered Analyses of Veterans’ Policies 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. 2 315

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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). 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. 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. 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. 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. Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 101. 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. Gagen, “Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender,” 527, 538. 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. 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. Linker, War’s Waste, 101. 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. 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.” 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 316

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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. Linker, War’s Waste, 31. 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). “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). Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 144–60. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 229. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 176. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 317

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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. Lynda Van Devanter, Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1984), 301. 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). 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. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ix. 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). 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. 318

Gendered Analyses of Veterans’ Policies 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 “singlepopulation” 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 319

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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. “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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits,” 71–74. 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 Daniel J. Sherman, “Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France after World War I,” Gender and History 8, no. 1 (1996): 84. Diane Carlson Evans, “Moving a Vision: The Vietnam Women’s Memorial,” http://www.vietnam womensmemorial.org/pdf/dcevans.pdf. 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. Suzanne Loudermilk, “Monument to Service Military: Almost 2 Million Women Have Served,” Baltimore Sun, October 18, 1997. Jacobs, “Redefining ‘Veteran,’” 239. “Work to Begin This Week on Overdue Memorial,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, June 19, 1995. Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman, 183–84. Kristin Ann Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 116, 121. 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 320

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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. Gerber, “Post-Modern American Heroism,” 347, 357. Ana Carden-Coyne, “Introduction,” in Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Ana Carden-Coyne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5. Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 249. 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: CrossCultural and Historical Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 6. June A. Willenz, Women Veterans: America’s Forgotten Heroines (New York: Continuum, 1983), 69, 139, 143–44. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 321

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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). 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. Paige Whaley Eager, Waging Gendered Wars: U.S. Military Women in Afghanistan and Iraq (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 72. 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. 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. 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 incompatibilities 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. 323

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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 twentiethcentury 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 manhood. 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 experience 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.6 324

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Gail Bederman and Kristin Hoganson argue that contemporary anxieties over the “over-civilization” 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, nonwhite 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 pegleg 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 autobiography, 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 325

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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 casualties.” 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 326

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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 whitecollar 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 everybody’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 eliminate 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 327

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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 assumption 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 328

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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 supremacy. 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 ablebodiedness. 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. 329

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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 humiliation. 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 relationships between disabled men and their families only became more complicated. John Kinder 330

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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 331

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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 encroaching 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 332

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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). 333

Sarah Handley-Cousins 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. 334

Gender, Disability, and American Veterans 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 336

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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, emphasizes 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, 337

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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 understanding 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 338

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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 casestudy 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 remembered 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 339

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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 scholarship 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.27 340

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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 341

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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 crosssectional 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 cemeteries 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, halfclothed 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 342

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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. 343

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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 unsuccessful 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 requirement 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 344

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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 ideologically. 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. 345

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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 346

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American society and the armed forces. Women, even those with small children, were encouraged 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 347

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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 memorials 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 348

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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 understanding 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 349

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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 lobbying 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 expectations 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 counterparts 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? 350

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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). 351

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. 352

The Covert and Hidden Memory of Gender 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. 353

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 PinFat 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). 354

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

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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 twentieth 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 definitions 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 heterosexuality 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 international 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).

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9/11 144, 149–54, 159nn25–26, 218–19 Abu Ghraib 152–54, 293, 299n56 See also Lynndie England Afghanistan War 144, 149–58; George W. Bush and 150, 151, 152, 153; contract laborers 220–21; feminism and 151, 159nn25–26, 221–24; gender as cause for 150–54, 219–20; media and women 150–51, 159n21; Soviet war in 137; women in military during 1, 149–50, 154–56 African Americans: in All-Volunteer Force 132; American Revolutionary War and 27–29, 31, 188; citizenship through military service 95, 218–19, 237–38; Civil War and 59, 61–62, 169; Civil War monuments and 342–43; Civil War pensions and 305; Daughters of the American Revolution and 344; disabled veterans 328–29; freed slaves 54–55; French and Indian War and 26; militarism in U.S. culture 218–19, 221; rape and 62, 74, 97, 277, 292, 294, 299n37; Reconstruction and 54–55, 61–63, 71–72, 342; relations with European women 74, 218, 255, 256–57, 260–61, 277; Theodore Roosevelt’s view of 218; segregated military service 71, 237–38, 240, 346; Tuskegee Airmen 95; Vietnam War antiwar movement and 122; women’s sexuality 62, 71–72; War of 1812 and 34; World War I and 71–72, 74, 75, 95, 240, 276–77, 328–29; World War II and 90, 92, 94–96, 258, 273 Ali, Muhammad 122 All-Volunteer Force (AVF): advertisements for 123–26, 133; African American women in 132; benefits 124, 133, 304, 314n6; demographics 131–33; Gulf War (1991) 126, 140–42, 155, 221, 273–74; marriage and 132; military contractors 144, 220–21; recruitment 133–34; social welfare and 133; standards 132, 135, 146n38; transition to

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131–48, 235, 244–45n5; women and 3, 132, 134–37, 146n58, 221–24 American Battle Monuments Commission 345, 348 American Legion 307–09, 312, 319n51, 345–46, 350 American Red Cross 52n31, 340; women and World War I 75–76, 77f, 79 See also Donut Dollies American Revolutionary War 27–30; African American soldiers 27–29, 31, 188; age of soldiers 27; bachelors seen as ideal soldiers 31–32; British soldiers 185; camp followers 17, 29–30; enlistment 27; gendering the enemy 187–88; memory 338–40; pensions 31, 304, 339; Republican Motherhood 32, 69, 187, 234, 321n78; women and 29–30, 234 American Veterans for Equal Rights 309, 311, 320n59 antiwar movement See conscientious objectors, Vietnam, antiwar movement Army Nurse Corps: 119–20, 135, 243, 280, 304, 309, 332, 348; acceptance of men 243; World War I and 98n1; World War II and 347; Vietnam War and 119–20, 135, 242–43, 280, 332 aviation: duty opened to women 134; pilots and masculinity 48, 95 See also Women Air Force Service Pilots basic training 3, 107, 120, 142, 149; Army 137, 146n62; denigration of recruits 119; Marine Corps 125, 135, 146n43 berdaches 12, 43 birth defects, service-connected 155, 162n73, 332–33 British soldiers and sailors 25, 28, 185; quartered in American homes 26 brothels See prostitution

Index camp followers 17, 19, 26, 29–30, 35, 143, 249–50, 339–40 Carter, Ashton B. 1, 156 Carter, Jimmy 137, 244n5 cause of war, gender as 167–84; Afghanistan War 150–54, 194–96, 219–20; Civil War 55–58, 168–70, 188–89; Cold War 110–11, 176–80; colonial warfare 187–88; imperial expansion 170–71, 189–90; War of 1898 171–75, 189–91, 218; World War I 68–70, 191–92; World War II 192–94; Vietnam War 117–20, 175–81 children: boys become men in war 14, 27–28, 116–17; effects of parents’ service on 155, 294–95, 297, 332; images of 70; in military camps 249, 251; in military families abroad 249, 260, 263; of military fathers 73, 74, 106, 194, 254–56, 258, 261–62, 267n83, 273; of military mothers 131, 134–35, 140–41, 295; Native American 12–13, 19; and physical fitness 107; slave children 55–56, 61; of veterans 329–30; victims of war 69–70, 157, 210, 252, 291–92, 347–48 citizenship and military/wartime service 3, 5, 31–33, 76, 79, 240–41, 243–44, 271–72, 274; African Americans 95, 218–19, 237–38; American Revolutionary War 27–30, 339; Critical Period and Federalist era 31–33; French and Indian War (1754–1763) and Imperial crisis (1763–1775) 24–27; Vietnam War 238–39; War of 1812 33–35; for women 76, 79, 117, 237, 241–42 see also conscription Civil Rights Movement 95, 116, 121–22, 137, 331, 343 Civil War 54–67; disability 63–64, 327–28; freed slaves 54–55; gender as a cause of 55–58, 168–70, 188–89; General Law of 1862 304; homicide rate 170; internecine guerrilla war 57; manhood 56–59, 63, 168–171; medical care 54, 325, 327; memory of 341–43; paternalism 55, 56; pensions 72, 304–05, 327–28; secession 57–58, 169; sectional crisis and 55–58; sexuality during 58, 60–61; suicide of Confederate soldiers 326; views of the enemy 188–89; women cross-dressing to serve 18, 20, 58 See also Deborah Sampson Cold War: American family during 105–07, 205–06, 259–60; civil defense 107; domesticity 103–06, 117–18; physical fitness 107; gender as a cause of 109–11, 117, 176–80; manhood 105–11; Red Scare 177–79; sex and national security 107–09, 176–77, 207, 239 See also Kitchen Debate; Korean War; Lavender Scare; occupations; Vietnam War colonialism: and disease 46; and domesticity 46, 253–55; and violence 12–16 combat exclusion policy 124–25, 137, 140, 142–43, 156, 236; aviation opened to women 134; removal of 1, 6, 215, 281, 286n110, 296; Risk Rule (1988) 139, 141

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comfort women 257, 348 Commission on Training Camp Activities 72–73, 74, 275, 276 communism 110, 117–120, 178, 179, 205, 208; anti-communism 176–79, 194; homosexuality and fears of 111, 178 conscientious objectors 83n19, 92, 94–95, 122, 240–41 conscription 4–5, 7n3, 17, 31–32, 107, 140, 270, 274; activism against 70; during the Civil War 169; during the Vietnam War 119–20, 122; during World War I 70–73, 75, 79, 82, 191–92; during World War II 91–92, 95, 236–38, 241; end of 116, 124, 131–34, 137, 139, 143–44, 314n6; of women 1–2, 137, 244 See also Selective Service Act containment policy 181: domestic containment 105–07, 118; See also Kitchen Debate Continental Army 19–20, 24, 27–29, 250, 270, 338–39 Critical Period (1781–89) 31–33 Daughters of the American Revolution 337, 344 dependents See children; wives disabled veterans 323–33; of the Civil War 324–30; husbands and fathers 330–31; masculinity and 79, 305–07, 323–27, 330–31, 340; prosthetics 329; psychological wounds 310, 326, 334n18; public view of 305, 307, 316n17, 316n19; rehabilitation of 79, 304–10, 328–31; reintegration 326–27; of Revolutionary War 330; suicide rate of female veterans 332; women and 331; women 331–32; of World War I 79, 325–29 See also PTSD Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (1993) 5, 117, 138–39, 147n68, 156–57, 195, 220, 232, 238, 244, 270–74, 288, 296, 312 Donut Dollies 120, 208, 242, 293 Double V Campaign 95, 218 draft See conscription England, Lynndie 152, 154 Equal Rights Amendment 124, 134, 137 family: and diplomacy 205–06, 247–64; war as threat to 70–71, 91; war as way to strengthen 72–73 See also military families Federalist Era (1790s) 33 Female Engagement Teams (FETs) 155–56 female masculinity 97, 101n76, 279 feminism 45, 61, 117, 151, 153, 159n21, 191–92, 204, 208–10, 220–25, 348 filibusters 44, 49, 56–57, 170–71, 324 foreign policy See cause of war, gender as fraternization: African American men and European women 74, 256–57, 260–61, 277; post-World

Index War I Germany 256–57; post-World War II Germany 256, 260–61 French and Indian War (1754–1763) 24–27; African Americans and 26; camp followers 26; enlistment 25; homosexuality 26; motivations for 25; Parliament’s Quartering Act of 1765 26; pirates 25–26; Royal Navy 25 German soldiers, American views of in World War II 185, 192–93; German soldiers, American views of in World War I 69, 191 G.I. Bill (1944) 272, 306–07, 317n31 G.I. Bill (1980s) 133 Gold Rush 43 Gold Star Mothers 81, 345–46 Grand Army of the Republic 308, 336–37 Gulf War (1991) 131, 155, 185, 273–74; masculinity and 141–42, 281; technology and 48; women in 126, 140–42, 155, 221 hairstyles, military 116 homosexuality/homosexuals: acceptance into military 5–7, 154, 157; during the American Revolutionary War 28–29; during the Cold War 108–10, 113–14n29, 272; and conscription 270; cultural hostility to 108–09, 113–14n29, 157, 163n93; debates about military service of 156–57, 220; discharged from military 108, 109, 113n23, 139, 270–72, 283n14; dismissal from government service 107–109, 178–79, 180; and fears of communism 111, 178; gay veterans’ advocacy 303, 306–07, 313–314, 322n90; Gold Rush and 43; lesbians in Women’s Army Corps 138–39, 273, 280; military service of 5–7, 26, 156–57, 220, 272, 296; military service and psychiatry 272, 283n21; mothers blamed for 106; reception in military 138, 139, 147n68, 270–71, 274; service women stereotyped as lesbians 91, 109, 126, 135, 138–39, 192, 281; during World War II 96, 97, 238–39 See also berdaches; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; Lavender Scare Imperial Crisis (1763–75) 26 Iraq War (2003–2011) 1, 144, 149–50, 157–58, 215, 224, 262; George W. Bush 151; civilians in 262; Lynndie England 152, 154; gendered justifications for 150–53, 219–20; Jessica Lynch 152–53, 160n47, 161nn50–51, 350; memory of 350–51; military women in 1, 154–56, 210, 221, 350; sexual assault in 287, 293; veterans of 323, 313 Japanese-American internment 193 Japanese soldiers, American views of in World War II 185, 192–93 Johnson, Shoshana 153, 350

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Kennedy, John F.: and masculinity 110–11, 117–18, 120, 176–77, 179–81, 218; as motivation for national service 120 Kitchen Debate 103–04, 110, 120 Korean War (1950–53) aftermath 106–07, 261, 262, 305; memory of 336, 349; prisoners of war 106, 109; prostitution during 45, 122, 261–62; soldiers in 106–07; war brides 261–62; women veterans of 312, 348 labor See work of war Ladies Memorial Association 62, 341–42 Lavender Scare 109, 176, 178–81, 184n52, 207 lesbians See homosexuality/homosexual Lost Cause 62–63, 341–43 Lynch, Jessica: 152–54, 160n47, 161nn50–51, 350 manhood/masculinity: 9/11 150–51; All-Volunteer Force 136, 220; Anglo and Native American 11–16, 42–43, 47; George W. Bush 150–53, 218–19; Civil War 56–59, 63, 168–171; Cold War 105–11, 176–77; disabled veterans and 310, 323, 324–26; equated with military service 74, 94, 269; Gulf War 141; imperial expansion and 170–75, 189–90, 199n27; inadequate manhood and its consequences 118, 180, 326; Lyndon Johnson and 111, 117–19, 180–81; John F. Kennedy and 110–11, 117–18, 120, 176–77, 179–81, 218; militarized society and 217–219; military labor and 239–41; pilots and 48, 95; protecting and dominating women and children 27, 68–69, 78, 94, 150, 188, 191; proving/ earning through war 14, 27–28, 240; Puritan 43; rehabilitation and 305–306, 310, 316n26; restrained and martial (mid-1800s) 44; Spanish colonies imagined as effeminate and childlike 185, 186; technology and 48, 133, 233, 240, 244; Uncle Sam 94, 190; Vietnam War 110–11, 118, 179–81, 218–19; and virility 95, 97; John Wayne as masculine symbol 111, 117–18, 122, 124, 151–52; World War I 75; World War II 94–95, 269 See also African Americans; Native Americans Manifest Destiny 42, 44, 170–71 Manning, Chelsea 157 marriage 205–06; in All Volunteer Force 132–33; of freedpeople 62; in Korea 261; to Native American women 252, 265n27; in Philippines 254; in Vietnam War 261–62; in World War I 74 See also military families May Act (1941) 275, 278–79, 284n51, 285n81 memory: Afghanistan and Iraq Wars 350–51; American Battle Monuments Commission 345, 348; Civil War 337, 341–43; Daughters of the American Revolution 337, 344; Gold Star Mothers 81, 345–46; Korean War Veterans Memorial 336; Lost Cause 62–63, 341–43; Revolutionary War 337–40; veterans

Index organizations and 309–10, 349–51; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 310, 338, 348–49; Vietnam Women’s Memorial 310, 348–49; Women in Military Service to America memorial 311, 349–50; of World War I 344–46; of World War II 346–48 Mexican War (1846–48) 34, 56, 249 militarism and U.S. culture 215–26; African Americans and 218–19, 221; George W. Bush 218; defining 216–17; and gender 207–08; Hispanics and 219, 222; homosexuality and 220; Iraq War 220–21; masculinity/manhood and 217–19; military wives and mothers 222–23; Vietnam War 218–19; women’s labor and maintenance of 221–24 military families 247–68; American Revolution to Civil War 249–51; children 254, 256; as cultural ambassadors 58, 222, 259–61; intercultural marriage 252, 254, 258; Mexican War 249–50; postWorld War II occupations and early Cold War 259–61; prohibitions against 256–57, 260–61; War of 1898 and United States-Philippines War (1899–1902) 253–55 See also fraternization; wives Military Sexual Trauma (MST) 154–55, 162n71, 270, 273, 281, 313 See also sexual violence/assault militia service 24–25, 27, 33–34, 168, 188, 338 monuments See memory mothers: blamed for softening of American men 106; expected to sacrifice sons for wars 70, 81, 191–92; military mothers 131, 134–35, 140–41; during World War II 69, 70, 191–92 See also Gold Star Mothers; Republican Motherhood Native Americans: Anglo-American women captured by 14; berdaches 12, 43; citizenship and 251; homosexuality and transvestism 12; importance of warfare to 14, 16; interactions with white Army wives 251–52; masculinity 13–14, 16, 26, 43, 188; perceptions of by white Americans 14, 19, 43, 251–53; rape of 12, 13, 43, 291–92; religion of 14, 16; U.S. Army wars (ca. 1848–1890) 251–53; violence of 13, 16; World War II military service of 272 See also women, Native American Nixon, Richard M. 103–04, 110, 120, 131, 244n5 nurses 47, 143, 203, 238–39, 291, 304, 329, 336, 344–45; in the Civil War 340, 342; male nurses 47, 98, 250; in World War I 76, 77f, 78, 317n28, 344–45; in World War II 91; in the Vietnam War 221, 243, 308–11, 332 See also Army Nurse Corps occupations 47, 208–10; of Germany post-World War I 255–57; of Germany post-World War II 44–45, 209–10, 257–58, 260–61; of Japan 44–45, 110, 208–09, 258–59, 260–61; of South Korea 45, 210, 261–62 Order No 28 (“Woman Order,” Civil War) 60–61

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pacifists See conscientious objectors peace activists 69, 192, 203–04, 241, 345, 348 pensions: American Revolutionary War 31, 304, 339; Civil War 72, 304–05, 327–28; to reaffirm traditional gender roles 73, 304–08; World War I 79–81; World War II 306–07 See also G.I. Bill Persian Gulf War See Gulf War (1991) pirates 25–26 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 308; causes differ between sexes 282; and MST 155 pregnancy 76, 134–35, 143, 273, 282, 295 Prisoners of War: Americans in the Gulf War 141; Americans in the Iraq War 154; Americans in the Korean War 106–07, 109; Americans in the Vietnam War 349; Americans in World War II 91; concerns about women becoming 91, 125; enemy prisoners 152 prostitution: during the Civil War 58; in Hawaii during World War II 269, 278, 293; in Korea 261, 293; in the Philippines 191, 253–54; in postWorld War I Germany 256; in post-World War II Germany 106, 209, 258; in post-World War II Japan 257–59; in Vietnam 121–22, 261–62, 291, 293–94; in World War I 71–73, 256, 275; in World War II 96, 257, 279 See also May Act Puritans 43 Rape 293–94; at Aberdeen Proving Grounds (1996) 288; accusations against African Americans 62, 97, 258, 277, 292; in the Civil War 291; of civilians 262, 290–92; gang rape of 13-year-old Japanese girl in Okinawa (1995) 294; Geneva conventions (1929 and 1949) 291; intramilitary 154–56, 281, 287–90, 295; of Native Americans 12, 13, 43, 291–92; and military culture 155, 293, 295–96; and PTSD 282; Rape of Belgium 69; recruits with history of rape 294; same sex rape underreported by heterosexuals 271, 322n89; in the Vietnam War 280; in wartime propaganda 69, 191; in World War I 292; in World War II 257– 58, 277–78, 280 See also sexual violence/assault Reconstruction 54–55, 61–63, 71–72, 341–42 Republican Motherhood 32, 69, 187, 234, 321n78 Reserve Officer Training Corps 144; and debates about women in combat 124–25; Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps 222, 224; opened to women 134 Revolutionary War. See American Revolutionary War Risk Rule (1988). See women in combat Rosie the Riveter 88, 192, 347 See also women, civilians Sampson, Deborah 20, 29, 32, 35, 315n11, 339–40 Selective Service Act: of 1917 (World War I) 70–72; of 1940 (World War II) 94, 241; reestablished 1980 244–45n5; and women 1–2, 7n4, 137, 244

Index service academies 281, 296; opened to women (1975) 3, 126, 134–35 sexuality: in the Civil War 58, 60–61; in the Cold War 107–09, 295; and diplomacy 206–07, 247–48, 252–59, 261–62; and manhood 95, 97; and martial service 238–39; and national security 5, 107–09, 176–77, 207, 239, 295; service women stereotyped as lesbians 91–92, 109, 126, 135, 138–39, 192, 280–81; in World War I 73–75, 85n32; in World War II 95–97, 278–80; see also Commission on Training Camp Activities; homosexuality/homosexuals; manhood/masculinity; prostitution; sexual assault/violence; venereal disease sexual violence/assault: against civilians 290–95; at Abu Ghraib prison 152–54, 293, 299n56; during the Civil War 291; and colonialism 12–14, 18; definitions of 289; domestic violence 294–95; efforts to reduce 281–82, 289, 295–96, 297n9; intramilitary sexual assault 154–56, 281, 288–90, 295; and military culture 154–56, 292–96; to prove manhood 291, 298n29; public scrutiny and awareness increasing 288; punishment for 291, 294; reporting rates and problems 282, 287–90, 322n89, 335n62; during the Vietnam War 121, 261–62, 293; during World War II 257–59, 292; as a wartime tactic 13, 290–92 See also rape; Military Sexual Trauma; Tailhook scandal soft power 44, 106, 204 support roles See work of war Spanish-American War. See War of 1898 Tailhook scandal (1991) 143, 288 technology and masculinity 48, 133, 233, 240, 244 transgendered people: acceptance into military 6, 149, 157, 166, 232, 244, 282, 355–56; and military service 215, 220, 296; veterans 303, 313; women cross-dressers (Civil War) 18, 20, 58 See also Deborah Sampson uniforms, for military women 135, 146n40, 269, 280 United Daughters of the Confederacy 62, 341–44 United Service Organizations 96 venereal disease 274–78: in the Civil War 250, 275; Native Americans and 252; penicillin as treatment for 275; post-World War I Germany 256; in the War of 1898 and United States-Philippines War (1899–1902) 253–55; in World War I 72–73, 275–76; in World War II 96, 97, 275–78 See also Commission on Training Camp Activities; prostitution veterans: African American 31, 305, 315n14, 328–29; of the Civil War 304–05; gay veterans 306–07, 309, 311–14, 319n55, 320n59, 322n90; homeless women veterans 313; medicalization of

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veterans 313, 321n84; Military Sexual Trauma patients 313; organizations 308–09, 319n51, 349–51; representations of 308–12; of the Vietnam War 123, 308, 310, 312, 326, 332, 337, 348–49; Vietnam War and benefits 307–08, 317–18n41; women veterans 32, 307, 310–13, 332; of World War I 305–06, 328; of World War II 306–07 See also disabled veterans; Grand Army of the Republic; memory; pensions Veterans of Foreign Wars 307, 309–10, 350 Vietnam War: African Americans and 122, 218–19; antiwar movement 120–23, 219; challenge to militarism 123–26, 218–19; counter-insurgency 179; gender as a cause of 117–20, 175–81; masculinity changing 121–26, 218–19; Mexican Americans and 122, 219; nurses 119–21, 135, 242–43, 280, 308–11, 332; prostitution 121–22, 261–62, 291, 293–94; U.S. view of Vietnamese 194; veterans 123, 308, 310, 312, 326, 332, 337, 348–49; veterans’ benefits 307–08, 317–18n41; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 310, 338, 348–49; Vietnam Women’s Memorial 310, 348–49; Vietnam Veterans Against the War 123; Winter Soldier Investigation 123; women soldiers 119–20; work of war and 241, 242–43 See also Donut Dollies war brides 74–75, 106, 206, 261–62 War of 1812 (1812–15) 33–34 War of 1898 171–75, 189; Cuba as U.S. dependent 175; gender as a cause of 171–75, 189–91, 218; Rough Riders 175, 177; USS Maine 174–75; William McKinley 174–75 War Risk Insurance Act (World War I) 72–73, 77, 79 Western expansion 57, 68, 118, 172, 185, 189, 250–53 Winter Soldier Investigation 123 wives 222–23; antiwar activities of (during Vietnam War) 122–23; and Army family support programs 132–33; Cold War housewives 103–104; and colonialism 47; and domestic labor 66n21, 222–23; and domestication of military camps 251–54, 259–61; of Loyalists 29; of Southern planters 55; traveling with military 249–51; see also camp followers; families; war brides Women Air Force Service Pilots 91–92, 98, 100n36, 307, 317n40, 347, 350 women, civilians: abolitionists 55, 59–60; in American Revolutionary War 28–30, 32, 187, 339–40; bread riots (Civil War) 60; captives 14, 18; and Lost Cause 62–63; and militarism 221–24; in military auxiliaries 76; plantation mistresses 55; suffrage 59–60, 79, 192; and War of 1812 32; on World War I home front 75–79 See also peace activists; sexuality; wives; World War II

Index women in combat 124–25, 140–41, 142–43; ban lifted 1, 6, 154, 156, 286n110; in Grenada, 140–41; Ranger School 215; Risk Rule (1988) 139, 141; in AVF 124–25, 142–43 See also combat exclusion policy women, in military: in All-Volunteer Force 3, 132, 134–37, 146n58, 221–24; cross-dressing to serve (Civil War) 18, 20, 58; homeless veterans 313; integration into military forces 124–26, 136, 242, 281, 296; integration into regular Army 235; restrictions on service 81, 95, 98, 124, 135, 138, 139, 140, 321n78; veterans 32, 91, 307, 310–13, 332; Vietnam War 119–20, 125–26, 128n24, 135; during World War I 76, 98n1; during World War II 87, 90–92, 135; weapons training 135, 146n44; See also nurses; Deborah Sampson; sexuality; Women Air Force Service Pilots; women in combat; Women’s Army Corps; Women’s Armed Services Integration Act Women in Military Service to America memorial 311, 349–50 women, Native American: Cherokee 18–19, 43; marriage to army men 252, 265n27; and power 17, 18, 43; women and captives 17, 18, 43; women and children as slaves 12–13 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act (1948) 111, 242 Women’s Army Corps (WAC): African American women and 92, 273; in All-Volunteer Force 134–35; dissolution of (1978) 135–36, 235; lesbian culture in 138–39; opposition to 91–92, 100n27, 138–39, 192, 235, 279, 295; pregnancy and children 135, 295; sexuality and 91–92, 96, 273, 279–80; in Vietnam 119–20, 242; in World War II 91–92, 242 work of war 233–44; definition of 233; manhood and 94, 239–41, 243, 355; militarism and 221–24; racial segregation and 71, 94–95, 237–38, 240, 346; sexuality and 238–39, 278–81; support roles

363

140, 233, 241; Vietnam War 241, 242–43; women’s labor 17, 29, 76, 78, 88–94, 221–24, 234–37, 241–43 See also camp followers World War I (WWI) 68–86; African Americans in 71–72, 74, 75, 95, 240, 276–77, 328–29; antiwar effort 69, 70; burials and cemeteries 345–46; conscription 70–71; disabled veterans of 79, 325–29; and the family 70–73; gender as a cause for 68–70, 191–92; impact of war on gender 77–80; manhood and 75; marital citizenship 79, 82, 86n60; religion and 75; suffrage and 68, 76, 78–79, 192; veterans of 305–06, 328; women in the military 76, 98n1; women in Red Cross during 75–76, 77f, 79 See also Selective Service World War II (WWII): African Americans and 92, 94–96, 258; conscription 91–91, 95, 236–38, 214; depictions of German and Japanese soldiers 185, 192–93; Double V Campaign 95, 218; gender as a cause of 192–94; G.I. Bill (1944) 272, 306–07, 317n31; homosexuality during 96, 97, 238–39, 272; Japanese American internment 193; masculinity and 94–95, 269; memory of 346–48; Mexican American women in work force 90; mothers during 69, 70, 191–92; muscularity and national strength 94; Native American military service in 272; nurses 91; Prisoners of War 91; propaganda 89f, 90, 93f, 94, 96, 99n22; prostitution 96, 209, 257, 279; rape during 257–58, 277–78, 280; Selective Service Act of 1940 94, 241; sexuality 95–97; sexual violence/ assault during 257–59, 292; United Service Organizations 96; venereal disease 96, 97, 275–78; veterans of 306–07; women in military 87, 90–92, 242; women in workforce 89–90 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 47–48, 79 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 47–48, 79

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