A Family Affair: Military Service in the Postwar Era

Abstract

Prior to World War II, the typical American Soldier was young and unmarried. As the old saying in the service went: if they wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued one to you. Today’s servicemember is most likely married and we customarily thank our military families in the same breath as those who wear the uniform. This dissertation is the story of how “support our troops” came to encompass the broader community of military families and how this fundamentally changed the military. Rooted in cultural and gender history, my dissertation argues that changing gender roles in the domestic sphere (i.e., fatherhood, motherhood, breadwinner, and homemaker) had a profound impact on martial roles in the military world, and vice versa. In the postwar era, as domestic roles were beginning to change, more and more married men enlisted in the Army and the Marine Corps, forcing the services to craft policies to accommodate families. Large numbers of married men in uniform was a new development in the United States, and my dissertation shows how marriage transformed civil-military relations. My dissertations addresses questions that are crucial to both the history of the military as well as American cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century. Just as military life became more family friendly, and as the services expanded opportunities for women, far fewer Americans overall chose to share in the burden of national service. Although military policymakers crafted policies to make military life more attractive, they contributed to its further isolation from the broader population by providing generous social services for military families increasingly inaccessible to other American families. Embedded within these contradictions is the story of what it meant to be an American after the Vietnam War.