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Gender and the Experience of War
69 Plays1 year ago
Host: Jason M. Kelly
Guests: Amy Rutenburg and Heather Stur
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
In this episode, Jason sits down with Amy Rutenburg and Heather Stur to discuss how the history of gender and war are interrelated over the course of 20th-century U.S. History.
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Transcript
Introduction to War and American Identity
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Justice and War in American History podcast. I'm Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. War has long been an indelible part of America's story, shaping national identity, values and principles. The experience of war has transformed the lives of each generation. And because of this, it has historically elicited impassioned debates and conflicting perspectives.
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast aims to explore this history by bringing together a diverse range of voices, veterans, active service members, citizens and scholars. Through our conversations, we will consider the ways in which war has shaped and reshaped notions of justice. In the process, we will engage with broad themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty and patriotism. Our broad framework during this season is to compare and contrast the histories of the Spanish-American
00:00:56
Speaker
Philippine-American and Vietnam wars, wars that had a profound effect on the people of the United States.
Impact of War on Veterans and Families
00:01:02
Speaker
The National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided funding for this project, making it possible to have conversations about the effects of war on American veterans, their families, and the generations who bear witness to conflict.
00:01:17
Speaker
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Justice in War in American History.
Gender Roles in War
00:01:22
Speaker
Today, we're going to be looking at gender in the experience of war. And I'm very excited to be joined by faculty members from a couple of other universities. And I'm just going to have them introduce themselves to get us started, just like all of our episodes. So Heather, would you mind getting us started?
00:01:39
Speaker
Sure. Thanks for having us, Jason. I'm really, really glad and excited to be here. I'm Heather Stuhr. I'm a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society. My areas of focus include women and gender in the U.S. military. I've written about women and gender in the Vietnam War and going into the late 20th century, but particularly just kind of very interested in issues of women, gender and conflict.
00:02:10
Speaker
Thanks Heather, and thanks for being here, Amy. Hi, thanks for having me. My name is Amy Ruttenberg. I'm an associate professor of history at Iowa State University. And my area of research is also at the intersection of war and gender. I've written on masculinity and the draft in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. And I'm currently working on a project that looks at the effects of peace activism on America's all-volunteer force since the Vietnam War.
00:02:41
Speaker
Thank you Amy for being here. I'm I told you both when we were getting started I'm super excited about this episode because I heard both of you speak in our training sessions And so I'm hoping we can learn a little bit about your research as we go along But just to get us started, you know, the topic today is gender in the experience of war so maybe the best way to start this conversation is asking you both to
00:03:06
Speaker
about why the history of, why do you think the history of gender is important for understanding the American experience of war? Heather, you want to dive in or you want me to take it?
00:03:20
Speaker
Well, I think one of the issues is that gender is so central to how Americans, and I mean, I would say we could take this into an international context too, but focusing on Americans, how Americans have chosen to define who fights, who is allowed to fight. And that image typically has been, and it's changed at different points, but in one, going farther back, it's a white heterosexual male,
00:03:47
Speaker
African-American black men are integrated into the forces of then. Since then, it really has been a heterosexual male. Even as we have integrated women and LGBTQ personnel into the military, that image still has staying power. I think that's one of the reasons why gender has been significant to our understanding of US conflict.
Masculinity in Military Contexts
00:04:17
Speaker
And I think the listeners need to understand that war and gender have been mutually constitutive over time. In other words, our ideas about what makes someone masculine or what makes someone feminine is related to the ways that Americans and everyone else, but the way that war is fought.
00:04:38
Speaker
what is valued above other traits, how we make decisions, like Heather was saying about who gets to serve, but also how those folks are expected to behave, to present themselves, to interact with each other. A lot of that comes down to traits that have been defined as masculine, toughness, physical strength,
00:05:10
Speaker
you know, heroism, all of these things that get defined as something that belongs to men over time. Yeah, thank you both. You know, I started us off talking about
00:05:24
Speaker
why the history of gender is important without actually asking either of you to talk about what gender is. And so, since both of you are historians of gender, maybe you can talk a little bit about when we say gender, what do we mean? And maybe secondarily, how have historians tackled that question of gender over time? How have our views of gender kind of developed as historians maybe even over the past few decades?
00:05:54
Speaker
So the way that I describe this to my students when I teach this, I use the example of when I was expecting my children. And people would come up to me and ask me all the time, do you know what gender the baby is? And the answer is no. I knew the sex of the baby. I knew what the chromosomes or what the sonogram picture showed in terms of what the child was. But gender is the ways that we express
00:06:23
Speaker
ideas about masculinity and femininity. They're separate from sex of male and female. And while there's places where it crosses over where you can run into difficulty, the basic way is that sex is chromosomal, it's body expression and physical. And gender is the way that we express or enact masculinity or femininity.
00:06:49
Speaker
So my children's gender does not appear until they can start making choices for themselves and choose what they want to wear and what they want to play with because the thing about gender also is that it is socially constructed. And so we tend to assume or think about boys as playing with cars and playing with, you know, certain kinds of toys. And those are boys toys and therefore masculine and girls.
00:07:17
Speaker
you know, gravitating toward dolls and other things that are maybe pink and those are girls toys and they are coded as feminine even in the toy store still. And so war in general has been heavily, heavily coded as masculine and women's roles within war have been heavily coded as feminine regardless of what they're doing because masculinity and femininity can change over time.
00:07:43
Speaker
the meanings that we ascribe to actions, to traits, to all of that, it changes. And there are in fact multiple kinds of masculinity and multiple kinds of femininity. And so I imagine we'll talk about that as this podcast goes on.
00:08:00
Speaker
That's great, Amy. The only thing I would add to that is how historians have dealt with this over time. There are certain scholars that have been calling on us to use gender as a way to understand militaries, militarization, war.
00:08:19
Speaker
I always go back to the scholar Cynthia Enloe, who has been writing about these issues for more than 40 years, since the early 1980s. She was really foundational for my thinking. She asks questions about, one of her central questions of research is, where are the women? We're talking about
00:08:40
Speaker
We're talking about international diplomacy, these kinds of things that historians have tended to see as male spaces and male activities. Enlo has been asking us to go beyond that and, you know, where are the women? And as part of that, it's also to try and understand why are we only talking about men? You know, why have we gendered these spaces male?
00:09:03
Speaker
And I think that definitely in the last 25 years, historians of military issues and of war have taken up Cynthia Enloe's call and have been trying to answer those questions. Where are women?
00:09:24
Speaker
Why is fighting gendered male? Why do we say war will make boys into men? What does that mean about broader social and cultural norms and those sorts of things? So I do think that there's been a lot of scholarship in the last 20 to 25 years that has tried to broaden how we understand who it is that fights, why, who is affected by conflict, how, and those sorts of issues.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Amy, I want to pick up on something that you said that is a complex thing to maybe get some people to get their heads around, which is you said that masculinity and femininity change over time. When you say that, can you maybe give an example or expand on that a little bit? Sure.
00:10:19
Speaker
to, I'm picking examples that are perhaps accessible as opposed to necessarily related to war. But if you think about how traditional notions of femininity, right, motherly, caretaking,
00:10:45
Speaker
you know, chaste, non-sexual, like going back to the turn of the century, if you think about like women in their dresses and their corsets and don't show an ankle and all of that, right? The way that women were understood in that moment of time by doctors, by scientists, by themselves,
00:11:03
Speaker
in many cases, is that this is what women were naturally meant to do. Women were meant to be mothers. They were meant to be caretakers. They were not meant to be politicians. They were not meant to be out in the public sphere. They were not meant to be
00:11:20
Speaker
the breadwinners for the family. And these were constructions that were put forth in the media of the time. There was an expectation around what women should do. It's not necessarily the same as what women actually did, but it was the expectation of what they should do.
00:11:39
Speaker
And that was considered femininity. And then there's this period of time through the early 20th century where activists basically said, OK, that's true. Women are caretakers. Women are the ones who are supposed to care for children. So shouldn't they be doctors? Shouldn't they be politicians who can clean up the cities and get sewers so that we stop having disease run rampant through our cities?
00:12:06
Speaker
They were literally building on this idea of femininity to create space for themselves within the public sphere. And what we've seen over the course of the 20th century is that ideas about femininity, about what women can do, have changed pretty significantly.
Intersection of Masculinity, Race, and Power
00:12:21
Speaker
So there are way fewer people today who are arguing that women cannot or should not be fill in the blank.
00:12:31
Speaker
Right? Masculinity has also undergone change over time. It's not as clear sometimes because I think as Heather has pointed out, one of the things that happens is that as we talk about gender, we tend to talk about
00:12:47
Speaker
femininity, we tend to talk about women as though men have no gender, right? They're the norm, the one that everyone else who isn't them sort of builds around. And so you can talk about femininity, you can talk about non-binary gender, but people don't have a tendency to talk about masculinity in quite the same way.
00:14:12
Speaker
So Heather, you were talking about how the military can make boys into men. And I'm just wondering, is there an example or an instance that comes to mind when you're thinking about this in the course of US war in the 20th century?
00:14:30
Speaker
Well, actually, you know, there's something that always comes to mind for me on this question is the pushback against that. And I think we're probably jumping ahead with this, but this is just what I always think about when I think of that phrase, war makes boys into men, is I think about the GI and veteran anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. And something that was really surprising to me that I found in doing research on that were male soldiers and male veterans
00:14:56
Speaker
talking about how that was something that they were sold as children and when they actually went to war, they didn't feel like they became men. They felt like they were dehumanized. As they were growing into adults and some of them had girlfriends or wives, it didn't make sense to them that they were supposed to kill people to feel like a man.
00:15:21
Speaker
And so that's something that I always think about when I think about this issue or this idea that military service and fighting an war is going to make you a man, that those who actually did it are saying, actually, that's not true. It didn't make us feel like men at all.
00:15:38
Speaker
So thinking back to a time in U.S. history where we could try to understand why that idea came about. In the late 19th century, after the U.S. Civil War generation,
00:15:55
Speaker
there were conversations that like turned the 20th century conversations about American men kind of becoming soft. They didn't have a war fight. And this is an era of the Spanish American war in 1898. And so this idea that, okay, men, they don't have a war fight. They're under the control of their mothers and increasingly by their teachers and teaching is becoming a
00:16:22
Speaker
more of a, I don't know, feminine profession, you know, kind of some of the things that Amy was talking about as far as gendering professions. But this idea that, well, okay, if we don't give our young boys some kind of fight to have, they're going to become soft. And by extension, that means the US is becoming soft. So there's this interesting connection between gender and power that underlies
00:16:50
Speaker
the conceptualization of war as something you do to show your manhood, to show your strength and all of that. But this really is ultimately, it's tied to projections of American power. That's really interesting, Heather.
00:17:04
Speaker
You know, you brought up earlier, we're focusing on US history, but this is one of those moments when I think it's maybe worth looking at, maybe even a slightly broader context. You know, I think of Britain at this period, right? So even as the US is fighting the Spanish and Cuba and Philippines,
00:17:24
Speaker
the British are in South Africa fighting the Boer War, and they're saying very similar things. And they're imagining that their nation is tied up in the masculinity of their soldiers. And this language is also wrapped up in ideas about racial science of the time.
00:17:46
Speaker
as well. So the strength of the soldiers, the physicality of the soldiers, the health of the soldiers is tied to the health of Britain as a nation and as a nation in a social Darwinistic sense that is in competition with other nations. So this
00:18:11
Speaker
idea of the ideal man, the masculine soldier is blown up to the national level and then infused with this racial science. And I'm wondering if Heather or Amy, if you see this in the US as well.
00:18:30
Speaker
Well, you know, this is Theodore Roosevelt. Everything that you're saying, this is exactly what he was saying at the turn of the 20th century. The racial side of this is interesting coming from him. He had a speech where he said something to the effect of if the United States isn't proactive in asserting itself in the world.
00:18:52
Speaker
taking control and that some other nation is going to do it. And I don't remember the exact language that he used, but it was something to the effect of a more brutal nation or this, which the language definitely had kind of coded racial undertones there. But in the Russo-Japanese War, for example, Theodore Roosevelt really kind of admired the Japanese in that, which
00:19:20
Speaker
I think we could go deeply into the racial context there, but I think that kind of, I don't know that it challenges the racial attitudes of the time, but it is kind of an interesting, I don't know, way that he was thinking about who it is in the world that's masculine.
00:19:40
Speaker
And I think that speaks to the idea of multiple masculinities that I mentioned earlier, because in Roosevelt's construction, war in the Russo-Japanese War made the Japanese men, they were excellent fighters in his perspective, they made good decisions in his perspective, but they still were not white men.
00:20:03
Speaker
Um, and so they were men, but they weren't the same men. And so sort of the British American vision of a white man soldier was still, um, better as far as Roosevelt was concerned. And we saw that too, when, when he took the rough riders down to Cuba, he
00:20:22
Speaker
there were black units there that fought with his Rough Riders. And Roosevelt's ideas about these men, he thought that they, at the time anyway, he said that they had conducted themselves well, that they had fought bravely, that they had put themselves forward as men and tough soldiers. But over time, he actually began to talk more negatively about that group.
00:20:50
Speaker
because the racial needs of the moment in his particular political campaign changed. So he was sort of ranking these men, not only by what they accomplished, but also by who they were and putting those different types of masculinity into a hierarchy and setting them against each other.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that issue of the, I just want to jump in really quick, the idea of multiple masculinities I think is really important. Amy said earlier in her comments that historians have tended to, when we look at gender, although this is changing thanks in part to awesome work by Amy's,
00:21:34
Speaker
Think about women and gender.
Representation of Gender in War Media
00:21:37
Speaker
Let's unpack femininity and how we've applied that to women. But the idea of multiple masculinities is so important here. It can help us understand why there was a time when black men were segregated into
00:21:53
Speaker
kind of medial units in the U.S. military, or why until 2010, 2011, openly gay men couldn't serve in the U.S. military. So I think the idea of multiple masculinities is so crucial here. So I just want to clarify that.
00:22:11
Speaker
I'm thinking about how those ideals are constructed, right? I think if listeners think back to all the war movies that they've watched over any period of time, right? I'm thinking about multiple John Wayne movies in which John Wayne is sort of his character is the ideal
00:22:31
Speaker
masculine fighter, and there's some other character who is younger, who is a little bit more questioning of the military and its goals. And then over the course of the movie through combat, that character sort of rose into himself. But even just think about the difference between the first Rambo movie and the second Rambo movie.
00:22:55
Speaker
You know, the first one, if you watch it, is very much out of the moment of this immediate post-Vietnam era whereby war destroys men, right? That was one of the cultural things that came out of the Vietnam War is that a lot of people began questioning a lot of the messages they'd been sent, as Heather mentioned a little while ago. And that shows up in the first Rambo movie. But by the second one, the cultural moment had shifted. And there was this sort of attempt to reclaim that war as a victory.
00:23:25
Speaker
And you can see that even in you know, Sylvester Stallone's body, how he bulks up in terms of the messaging with regard to
00:23:36
Speaker
you know, the strength and toughness and heroism of the soldier who had been betrayed by the more feminized technocratic government, you know, represented by the guys behind the scenes in front of the computers. So you can think about how the messaging in movies, you know, in stories, in advertisements, in television, in the way that we speak about the way that who soldiers are and what they do,
00:24:04
Speaker
All of that creates messaging that becomes overwhelming at a certain point. And that's how we end up constructing these ideals. And those ideals do change over time. I just mentioned how in that immediate post-Vietnam era, there's a lot more room for questioning of what war does and whether it's beneficial and how it can actually be harmful.
00:24:27
Speaker
But even over time, I think as we were alluding a minute ago, ideas around race and masculinity have certainly changed. I'm sorry, not ideas, ideals. Again, I want to emphasize that there's the messaging and the construction of ideals, and then there's actually what people do, and that's a lot more varied.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking of some of these things, so Amy, you are alluding, I think to some extent here, in the way that cultural objects, in this case film that you're talking about, can be used as a form of
00:25:08
Speaker
maybe propaganda, but also as a way for expressing concerns or problem of tizing experience and thinking about propaganda and cultural exchange and the creation of ideals through these objects.
00:25:33
Speaker
I'm just wondering, do you, Amy and Heather, see a change in how people are being maybe recruited into these wars over the course of the 20th century? I know, Amy, I'm thinking specifically about your work on the draft here, but I'm also thinking about posters from World War I and posters from World War II on into the future, and we end up with things like
00:26:02
Speaker
first blood and Rambo and things like this in the wake of Vietnam. So I'm just wondering if you see how the cultural forms in which ideals are created through recruitment change over time. Yeah, absolutely.
00:26:21
Speaker
Listeners can literally go Google propaganda posters, World War I, World War II. There are a few things that come out in those. From both of those eras in the United States and Britain, the posters are overwhelmingly playing on potential soldiers
00:26:41
Speaker
visions of who they want to be and masculinity and what the military can do for them, as well as what their responsibilities to the nation are during a time of war, right? In terms of citizenship, in terms of helping their nation, helping particularly their families, saving women and children,
00:27:05
Speaker
All of that. And you can see that. But there are differences between the World War I posters and the World War II posters. The men in the World War II posters have a tendency to be more muscularly developed. And there is some scholarship that talks about this, particularly in the American context. Christina Jarvis is the male body at war, talking about how coming out of the Great Depression era,
00:27:27
Speaker
when one, people were in fact undernourished, but also two, the US had this image of itself as being harmed, being weak because of the depression, because of unemployment, because men couldn't be breadwinners of trying to reconstruct the masculine image of the nation during World War II. So you can see a change over time there. And I think you can also see very clear change over time as you shift from a military-based
00:27:54
Speaker
on a draft to an all volunteer force. And Beth Bailey has written about this in her book, America's Army. You know, Be All You Can Be, which has just returned as the Army slogan was the most popular, successful recruitment slogan that the Army has had over the last 50 years, which is partially about, you know,
00:28:20
Speaker
physical growth in the military, but it's also about finding a skill, finding a job, finding yourself in different ways than through combat. These are not ads that highlight combat. They highlight job skills. They highlight personal growth.
00:28:41
Speaker
So there absolutely is change over time because these are reflections of the moment in which they're created and what is going to appeal to young people. Now it is men and women, but what is going to appeal to them to want to choose to sign on the dotted line and enlist?
Women's Roles in Historical Conflicts
00:29:01
Speaker
I'll just add to that, as far as women in the Cold War era, not just Vietnam, but post World War II in general, a lot of the recruitment for the Women's Army Corps and the Women's Grant of the Service focused on things like the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to potentially meet your future husband,
00:29:28
Speaker
But the chance to kind of get out and do some things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do in your hometown for a while until you eventually meet that husband and settle down. And so that recruitment strategy I always found interesting thinking about the Vietnam War where you, and that goes on into the
00:29:50
Speaker
you know, late 60s where when we have kind of widespread American skepticism, if not opposition to the Vietnam War, this idea that women could use the military as a way to have these new experiences and travel and all of this while Americans at large are saying, you know, this is not something that we necessarily buy into anymore. Heather, you mentioned earlier in the episode
00:30:20
Speaker
that when we talk about war, we tend to default to the history of men in war. And what you're saying right now is, of course, bringing to the fore the importance of women in war and their
00:30:37
Speaker
their own experience of gender in war. And I'm just wondering maybe if you could tell us a little bit about changing involvement of women in war over the 20th century and the ways that gender was constructed in that process as well.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Gender was central to kind of defining what women would do, American women would do in war as they're mobilized both by the military and by organizations like the Red Cross really to get public buy-in for the creation of things like the Women's Army Corps. So for example, in World War II, war planners are realizing that they
00:31:23
Speaker
They're running low on manpower. There's a manpower shortage. And so they need to figure out ways that they can free up men for combat. And one of the solutions to that is to create things like the women's army corps.
00:31:35
Speaker
which is in the Women's Auxiliary, I guess that's auxiliary is not the right word, but in fact it was the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps when it was originally created in 1942, but as a way to open up non-combat jobs for women. When the Women's Army Corps was created and the promotional materials about it were created, there was an emphasis on the fact that this would not
00:32:04
Speaker
challenge traditional notions of femininity. The women are wearing their uniforms are dresses and skirts. They're wearing high heels. They're not going into combat. This is a temporary way that women can help the war effort
00:32:21
Speaker
This isn't mobilizing women the way that men are mobilized for combat. And that gender construction of the Women's Army Corps really continues into the Vietnam War era. And I've interviewed Women's Army Corps veterans from Vietnam who've talked about the
00:32:44
Speaker
the unpractical nature of that gender construction, meaning I'm wearing pantyhose and heels, but I'm on a military base in Vietnam and that's just, I need to be wearing
00:32:59
Speaker
Fatigue and boots and that sort of thing. I also got that same reaction from women that I've interviewed who served in a Red Cross program called Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas. Their nickname is Donut Dolly's and some of the listeners may have heard of that because there's been work done on the Donut Dolly's. They've written about it, documented about it.
00:33:22
Speaker
But that program actually goes back to World War I and World War II. The Red Cross would send women to serve coffee and donuts to soldiers.
00:33:31
Speaker
And so in Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. Department of Defense asked the Red Cross to send donut dollies to both of those wars to kind of do morale-boosting activities with American soldiers like serving coffee and donuts or organizing games on posts or bases.
00:33:59
Speaker
other kinds of sing-along activities and these sorts of things. The idea is to kind of take the soldier's mind off of what they're going through in war. But the Red Cross was very
00:34:13
Speaker
strict about how the donut dollies were meant to look and act. So they were supposed to be feminine, but not sexual. Amy mentioned this kind of the femininity not being sexualized. So no red lipstick, for example, they had to wear these, their uniforms were powder blue dresses. They were supposed to wear their hair kind of in a ponytail or in sort of a way to make them look like the girl next door.
00:34:41
Speaker
And so those gender constructions were central to how women in that program were meant to act and meant to look. And that affected how they did their jobs.
00:34:56
Speaker
Thank you so much for that. That's really interesting. In thinking about the experience of women in war, this has come up in a couple of other episodes where we've done reading about nurses, for example, and their experience of war and trauma that they experienced through war.
00:35:16
Speaker
And we also read texts from women who fought for North Vietnam or served as nurses in North Vietnam and their experiences. And I'm just wondering, the U.S. soldiers' perceptions of women
00:35:36
Speaker
in Vietnam working on, participating on both sides. So maybe as nurses on the US side, but also fighting against women who were part of the North Vietnam forces. Do the US soldiers have a sense of the multiple femininities that are emerging from their experiences on the ground? I don't know as far as,
00:36:06
Speaker
Soldiers thinking about those multiple femininities. I don't know. Maybe Amy might have some some anecdotes on that I do know that in the Vietnam context American soldiers were aware that The National Liberation Front North Vietnamese had women fighting and so that women were fighting against them and that because of that that fed into
00:36:34
Speaker
these GI soldier myths about Vietnamese women being dangerous. So there's this kind of pop culture or sort of underground literature and myth-making among
00:36:48
Speaker
soldiers about how Vietnamese women can harm them. And that often comes out through, you know, these women are going to harm us sexually. So a Vietnamese prostitute who is actually trying to kill us or maim us, you know, there are really kind of graphic myths about Vietnamese women who would put things inside of their vaginas, for example, as a way to maim an American man's manhunt. And that became part of
00:37:14
Speaker
kind of Vietnam's American soldier myth-making during the Vietnam War about the dangerous nature of Vietnamese women. Now, there also were legends and myths about Vietnamese women fighters. There was a very young woman, she was a teenager, she was 19 when she died, named Le Thi Ho Pham, who was a fighter with the National Liberation Front, or what Americans called the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front.
00:37:41
Speaker
the PLAF, the People's Liberation Armed Forces, Vietnam, who was known to be this sniper who had shot down an American helicopter, and she was a great shot, and American soldiers knew about her too. She died fighting, and so she was made into myth in Vietnam, but American soldiers knew about her too. So they were aware that the dangerous, quote unquote, dangerous Vietnamese woman wasn't just
00:38:10
Speaker
someone who was trying to harm them sexually, but actually a fighter.
Contemporary Gender Issues in the Military
00:38:14
Speaker
And I think that speaks to the racial hierarchy that a lot of Americans carried with them. And we just talked a little bit about the history of where that came from. I doubt if you walked up to a soldier at any firebase and said, Hey, do you know about multiple femininities? They would be like,
00:38:31
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Let's talk about multiple femininities. But I do think that it is likely that if you ask them about the difference between American women and this idea of the girl next door and the chaste donut dolly, who maybe they might like to date versus a North Vietnamese woman or a South Vietnamese woman,
00:38:53
Speaker
they would talk to you about the differences because their perception most likely was that Asian women were supposed to be sexually available, but they were also dangerous and unknowable and therefore somehow different from white American women. And so that meant that they could be sexual partners, but also that they were somewhat dangerous, but also that they could be fighters in a way that American women at that moment were not understood to be.
00:39:23
Speaker
You know, in talking about change over time, this is shifting gears slightly. But if you think about recruiting for American women of all races today in the United States, right now that all combat positions are open to women, it's still
00:39:41
Speaker
hard and questionable, right? It is definite change over time. You compare a recruitment ad from the 1950s, which is very much going to play up a certain kind of femininity with, you know, hairsprayed hair and skirts and heavy makeup and all of the rest of it compared to a recruitment ad for women today is going to look very, very different with women in fatigues and combat boots and hair, you know, up and under cap and less makeup and whatnot. But
00:40:11
Speaker
We're still not seeing as many images of women in actual combat. They may be shown with weapons, but it's in training or in silhouette or
00:40:24
Speaker
or maybe in a humanitarian mission. But I recently saw a presentation at the annual conference of society of military historians, or sorry, the Society for Military History. But, you know, looking at this stuff, actually making the comparisons in marine recruitment ads.
00:40:43
Speaker
The question then becomes, for women to succeed in the military today, do they have to develop their masculine traits and be seen as one of the boys? Are they developing their own martial femininity that's somehow different from civilian ideals of femininity? Or is it something else? So all of these different discussions talk about these hierarchies and these multiple ways of constructing gender.
00:41:14
Speaker
So we've spent a lot of time over the last 40 minutes or so talking about gender ideals and their difference between ideal and experience and how people performed gender. I'm just wondering, you know, as we're
00:41:35
Speaker
getting a little closer, maybe talking about more contemporary events in the military. What we haven't talked about, for example, are transgender individuals and their participation in the military. And I'm just wondering if either of you can talk about the history of transgender individuals in the military, even if we're talking about a very contemporary history.
00:41:59
Speaker
Yeah. So I actually, I served as an expert witness on a case that was brought challenging then President Donald Trump's banning of open transgender service. So former President Barack Obama had
00:42:21
Speaker
had made it legal for transgender people to serve openly in the US military. And then when Trump became president, he reversed that, which to my knowledge is that was the only case of a president re-segregating a group that had been
00:42:42
Speaker
kind of, as for lack of better word, integrated into an institution or context. But in any case, so then there were a group of transgender service personnel, either people who had been in the military or those who had tried to enlist and then were more denied because of the ban against that legislation.
00:43:04
Speaker
And then the case actually, thankfully it went away because President Biden then reversed Trump's reversal of President Obama's opening of transgender service to
00:43:24
Speaker
to serve openly. I think one of the big issues that is discussed in that context is whether the military should provide gender-affirming care to service personnel. So there are those who will say, yes, transgender Americans can serve openly in the US military, but does the military have a responsibility to provide gender-affirming care for those
00:43:53
Speaker
individuals, which speaks to broader issues about what the military provides for its members, which is a lot of things. Again, one of the largest social welfare institutions in the country. But that's one of the issues that came up a lot for me as I was serving on this case that I heard people talk about is whether the military should or should not provide gender-affirming care for transgender individuals.
00:44:23
Speaker
And I think it's tied also to ideas about sexuality and about deviance that go back a long way. So for example, same-sex sex has always happened in military contexts, but it was
00:44:42
Speaker
The behavior was frowned upon, and there are examples of sting operations happening during the World War I era to get men who had sex with other men out of the military, but it was the behavior itself. And then ideas about the meaning of same-sex-sex shift around World War II, it becomes more psychologized, basically, and so it becomes the tendency or the belief that someone might
00:45:08
Speaker
have sex with someone of the same sex as them. And that leads to folks being removed from the military. The GI Bill at the end of World War II is in fact the first piece of federal legislation that addresses directly people who are homosexual. And so that's an interesting connection, I think.
00:45:31
Speaker
But at that point in time, the idea of transgender people didn't exist in the same way. There were, of course, people who dress differently from their biological sex or behave differently, but the categories that we tend to use today didn't yet exist. They were in the process of being formed through the 1950s. So
00:45:52
Speaker
You know, all of that is to say that there's a history here that policymakers are still mired in as they're trying to figure out what to do with people who are quote unquote deviant from the norm.
Conclusion and Resources
00:46:09
Speaker
Ideas around homosexuality are shifting, but those around people who are trans are, I think, a step or two behind with regard to change over time. For example, selective service registration, trans women who are born biologically male,
00:46:32
Speaker
are required to register with selective service still when they turn 18, but trans men who are men in their everyday lives and the way that they appear to the world are not. So the laws, policies, all of it, it's all in still in flux.
00:46:58
Speaker
Well, this seems like a good place to end because it opens up questions for our next season of this show that I think are really worthy of pursuing. So Heather and Amy, I want to thank you both for joining us for the podcast. It's been great to have you both involved in this program in different capacities over the last six months or so.
00:47:25
Speaker
And I do hope you might consider coming back for a future podcast. Definitely. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'd love to. This is great, Jason. I really appreciate it. It's been great being part of it. Thanks for listening to Justice and War in American History. Please stay tuned for our next episode, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or through any of your favorite podcast providers.
00:47:51
Speaker
Please be sure to rate the podcast and to be in touch with us if you have any questions or feedback. You can find more information about this podcast and the broader justice and war project at justiceandwarseminar.org.
00:48:02
Speaker
If you are a veteran or concerned about a veteran who has experienced a mental health crisis, there is 24-hour support with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Dial 988- impress1 or text at 838-255. For more information on support from the VA, visit mentalhealth.va.gov. And, as always, special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this project possible.