Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980

Abstract

In this insightful addition to studies of Cold War militarization, women's post–World War II labor, and civil rights, Tanya L. Roth analyzes how “womanpower” was constructed, negotiated, and experienced from 1945, when the U.S. military began to consider permanently integrating women, to 1980, when the first cohort of women graduated from the service academies. Through a variety of sources, including women veterans' oral histories, military and government documents, and cultural artifacts such as films, pamphlets, and advertisements, Roth illustrates how women's integration and the struggle for gender equality in the U.S. military reflected (and sometimes preceded) broader societal debates and change regarding gender equality and how women could contribute to the nation's growing postwar defense needs in ways that did not undermine normative standards of femininity. The result is an eye-opening and often delightfully comical account of the U.S. military as a laboratory for social change after the passage of the Women's Armed Services Integration Act (Waisa) in 1948. By equating femininity with military service and selling the American public the image of servicewomen as the “real Miss Americas,” the armed forces recruited womanpower with the promise that military training better prepared women for their seemingly natural and inevitable future roles as mothers and homemakers (p. 40). Like military wife guidebooks in the Cold War era, servicewomen's training included instruction about proper diet, hygiene, appearance, and comportment, discouraging (among other things) lesbian romances and various types of walking, including the “duck walk, debutante slouch, masculine lope, and teenage wiggle” (p. 66).