gender: marriage/family

I’m not from a military family so Memorial Day has mostly been about a three day weekend, grilling, and maybe giving a tiny bit of thought to members of the military who have fought in various U.S. wars. But, in the last couple of years, Memorial Day has taken on so much more significance for me, and it seems rather fitting that this weekend I’m working on my dissertation– writing about the mothers of current U.S. service members who have been deployed in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Mothers, and all members of a service person’s family, often refer to themselves as “the silent ranks.” And they are a key part of the “ranks” of the military in many ways. Next to the troops, family members shoulder the majority of this particular war. Unlike previous U.S. wars (WWI and WWII), the public has not been asked to do much– we are not planting victory gardens, living with rations, working in factories, or collecting scrap metal and even lard for the manufacturing of weapons and supplies.

The military knows how important the families of service members are– for both recruitment and deployment support. You may have noticed the Army recruitment commercials specifically target parents. The Army knows they need parental support to enlist new Soldiers. Often these commercials focus on Army service as an opportunity for training, for an education, for a career, while also telling parents how strong their children will become when they join. Thus the motto “You made them strong: We’ll make them Army Strong.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MBbaz61kU[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TUbnGXqI1s[/youtube]

Despite the fact that the military is changing, and more women are joining, homefront support remains largely gendered. The video below “Army Families = Army Strong” is one that the Army put together as a tribute to the work these silent ranks do during wartime.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5RIHo5rh3c[/youtube]

What is striking (but not surprising) to me about this video tribute is how gendered the home front is. With a few exceptions (a few female Soldiers), this video mostly depicts wives left at home taking care of young children. These families (women and children) need to be strong to deal with the stress and anxiety of having a loved one deployed, and to carry on their day to day lives. The military also needs them to be strong– to hold down the home front, send supportive packages and emails to deployed Soldiers, and to be there for Soldiers to come home to. As the voice over says “they wear a different uniform… theirs is a uniform of strength… the strength of courage, integrity, and sacrifice.” Even if they aren’t deployed to a war zone, families are enlisted to military service along with the Soldiers.

For my dissertation I interviewed 60+ mothers of service members (and hundreds more in online support groups) who also describe themselves as part of these “silent ranks.” I would love to be able to share their incredible stories here, but I only have their permission to write about the for research purposes. So instead I’ll write about what I’ve learned from them about how complicated home front war support is for mothers.

Like other military family members, the mothers of service members also see themselves as members of the military– even when they are more removed from receiving the kinds of benefits a military wife (or husband) would receive. Here are some of the slogans mothers use to identify themselves as a strong, tough, part of the military:

Usually when we think about the mothers of service members, the most publicly active (and anti-war) ones come to mind. Like Cindy Sheehan:

While many mothers of service members take the same war stance as Cindy Sheehan, most have widely different, and often contradictory relationships to war (just as other military family members do, I imagine). My research is about these contradictions. Some mothers disagree with the war, but publicly support their child’s mission– and want the war to succeed. Others disagree with the war but would never say so publicly for fear of being seen as unpatriotic. Some just want the troops to come home safely. Others support the war fully, and some who support the war fully see anti-war mothers like Cindy Sheehan as degrading to the job their children are doing.

Mothers of service members may have opposing ideas about war, but they all feel unbelievable anxiety for their deployed child. They cry in the grocery store when they see their son’s favorite food. They panic every time an unknown car pulls into the driveway, fearing that dress uniforms will show up at their door. And they all feel a duty to their deployed child (to send care packages, buy their child supplies etc.), and feel a sense duty to all the troops and military families– taking part in efforts to make sure the troops and their families feel supported.

Here are some images of different mothers supporting the troops in different ways (these images are all public domain, and none are mothers in my study):

Finally, take a few minutes to watch this video interview with Vicki Castro, whose son was killed in Iraq (“life as you know it stops…”). I can’t embed the video here, but it is worth clicking on and watching.

This vintage add (found here) for Kenwood appliances is a nice example of how the act of preparing food is gendered, and how one side of the gendered dichotomy is valued more than the other. Men are chefs– professionals, with careers. And their wives are cooks– they cook at home. Men have prestige as professional chefs outside the home, and women have value as caregiver cooks inside the home.

I guess that this ad is from the early-1980s. How much of this gendering of cooking changed over the years?

Something I read in another blog sent me digging into the statistics on homicide between husbands and wives or other “intimates.” I remembered from my days in the crim biz that the US was unique in that wives here killed their husbands almost as frequently as husbands killed wives. This statistic, the “spousal rate of killing” (SROK), was introduced in a now-classic 1992 article by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. In most countries, that rate is 25-30%. In the US, Wilson and Daly pointed out, it was about 75%.

But something has happened, over the last thirty years or so (data here). And as far as I can tell from a quick search on the Internet, nobody seems to have noticed.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Between 1976 and 2005, the number of women killed by their male partners decreased by about 25%, less than the decrease in all homicides nationwide. But the number of men killed by women dropped dramatically, from 1300 to 330, a 75% decrease (since the population increased in those three decades, the change in rates is probably even greater. The SROK fell from 82% to 28%.

My Internet search for explanations was cursory at best, but it turned up nothing. I have only two ideas:

1. Men Behaving Better. Men have stopped doing those things that made women want to kill them.

I offered this explanation to two women in the Justice Studies department here. They rejected it out of hand and without comment. (Maybe they didn’t like the blaming-the-victim assumption: if women kill men, it’s because of what men do. Or maybe they were using a convenience sample of anecdotal data on men’s behavior.). One of these women, Lisa Anne Zilney, offered a counter-explanation . . .

2. Women Having Options. Women’s shelters and other facilities have given women an alternative. Without these, the only way to escape an intolerable situation at home was to get rid of the cause. Providing abused and desperate women a safe place to go saves lives – and apparently not just the lives of women.

I’m not wild about either of these explanations for the steep decline in the SROK (and as I recall, Wilson and Daly weren’t wild about any of their explanations of why it was so high).

Any ideas?

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Thanks Jay!  Read his other guest post: When grown men loved teddy bears.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

When Rihanna was beaten by Chris Brown, many people blamed Rihanna for enraging him.   Laura McDe sent in another example of victim-blaming in a case of domestic violence.  This time a man killed his five children, and then himself, after discovering that his wife had left him for another man.  Many headlines placed the blame on his wife (via Shakesville):

The Seattle Times:

Yahoo News:

Kansas City.com:

Google News:

Instead of focusing on the husband’s abusive and frightening behavior, his mental instability, and his horrific decision to kill five children, the headlines focus on his wife’s behavior and how it “ignited” his own.  To complete the metaphor, if you are flammable, when you burst into flame, it is the match striker’s fault.

NEW! Shakesville highlighted another example of the excusing men’s violence against women:

That’s right.  Poisoning your wife is an act of love.  You see, they were estranged and he wanted to make her ill so that he could nurse her back to health and have-her-no-she-can’t-get-away-I’ll-make-sure-of-it.  Story here.

Also in blaming the victim: mothers are responsible for their children’s addiction, renters are responsible for lead poisonous apartments, girls are responsible for internet predators, and women are responsible for preventing sexual harassment.

We’ve offered many examples of companies co-opting feminism in order to sell products.  In the video below, we see that the co-optation of feminism is nothing new:

(At Vintage Videosift.)

Actually, I shouldn’t be so flippant.  Inventions like the washing machine did, indeed, save women a great deal of time and effort.  From what I understand, however, as women’s cleaning became more efficient, standards of cleanliness rose.  So even as time-saving devices were introduced, the time women spent cleaning did not substantially change.  I’d love to hear more from scholars who have a better handle on this history.

Here’s another step in the trajectory, this one from 1971, also about cleaning appliances (found here):

Text:

The American Appliance Industry has always championed women’s liberation.

There was a time when women washed clothes by hand in water carried from a well…

…shapped every day because there was no way to refigerate food…

..tried to keep house with just a broom…

…made clothes without a sewing machine!

It’s obvious.  America’s appliances have freed women from the oppression of endlessly dull, backbreaking work.  They’ve helped liberate the American woman to enjoy a more stimulating, more interesting life…

In or out of the home.

Women who seek successful careers in the arts, sciences, business, industry, education, or the professions are finding themselves.

It’s all part of America’s new freedom of preference.  And Republican Steel Corporation, a leading supplier of steels to the appliance industry, is proud to be a part of it.

Visit your nearest appliance dealer and you’ll see hundreds of our modern steels — intricately shaped and beautifully finished in the world’s finest consumer appliances.

Like to help liberate the women in your life from some hard work and drudgery?

Buy her one of the new convenience appliances this weekend.

Or maybe a whole houseful.

Notice that women’s liberation DOES NOT involve men sharing housework responsibilities, but men replacing women’s labor with tools he purchases for her.  Ultimately, even if she has a “successful career” in “the professions,” it is her responsibility to make sure that the housework is completed (and apparently still wouldn’t be able to buy herself one of these machines).

For contemporary examples, see these posts on make up (here and here), botox, cigarettes (here and here), right-hand diamond rings, cooking and cleaning products, fashion, and other miscellaneous products (here, here, and here).

The documentary, Hearts Suspended, points to one way that immigration policy disadvantages women.  When a non-U.S. citizen is granted the permission to live and work in the U.S., their spouses are often given permission to accompany their spouse, but not to work.  These spouses, wives more often than husbands, find themselves completely dependent on their husbands.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/Nj34k6fLpf4[/youtube]

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Instead of affirming the idea that husbands and wives cooperate to raise a child, this commercial affirms the idea that women nurture their children alone. Her husband is not her partner; he is just another human in the home whom she is responsible for nurturing. Women, then, are mothers and wives whose sole job is to nurture children and husbands. Accordingly, the husband and the child are, inevitably, pitted against one another.

When considering which media text I wanted to analyze based on its ideology, I immediately thought about the unsettling yet intriguing relationship between the main characters in one of my favorite TV shows of all time: Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. About a year ago, I began watching the show when a friend bought the entire series on DVD. Despite the fact that I absolutely loved almost every episode, the story arc of these two main characters as co-workers and a couple reinforces tired gender roles.

The below clip is a climactic scene where Mulder and Scully argue about Scully leaving the X-Files in the 1998 film “The X-Files: Fight the Future.” I think this scene exemplifies their basic relationship, and is a good example of what I would like to analyze.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/esJNnh-d2E0[/youtube]

What I like about Scully is that she is intelligent, scientific, and witty. She joins up with Mulder to be the counterpart to his obsessive interest in the paranormal. Since Scully is the fact-spouting hard ass of the two, one might think the character is breaking stereotypes. Unfortunately, she is only obscuring them.

Scully plays a traditional mother figure to Mulder more so than his love interest. She continually questions her work in the FBI duo, but she stays because Mulder needs her. In her, he has found someone who tries to understand his work, someone to care for him, and someone to love him unconditionally. The few times that she has an interest in other men is when she is trying to get over Mulder or get back at him.

Throughout the series, the fact that Mulder is a “typical bachelor” is driven home. He’s quirky and boyish. He never cooks, he’s obsessed with baseball and porn, he can’t keep house, and he usually just sleeps on his couch. Scully is seemingly unconcerned by all this. She laughs it off when he flirts with other women, she rolls her eyes at his housekeeping, and she is always there whenever Mulder decides he needs her.

The video above is an example of a sort of backwards rationale. Yes Mulder is thanking Scully for being there for him, but he’s also pleading with her to continue to deprive her own happiness. Though the scene directly references her giving up her own interests to be with him, it also romanticizes the concept of a woman selflessly caring for her man. The scene resonates with his emotional “thank you” and begs the viewer and Scully to come to his rescue. It reinforces the idea that in order for a woman to be perfect for a man, she must be willing to do anything for him at all costs and should never as for anything in return. If he so much as thanks her for years of servitude, then he’s the knight in shining armor. Read it as: The perfect women are level-headed and enjoy cleaning up the messes that their boy-in-a-man’s-body significant others create without any appreciation.

I think the X-Files is a good example of a show that manages to skirt the issue of gender roles by throwing a few curve balls. In reality though, it’s just more of the same.

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Sarah Mick is a student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  She is currently double majoring in graphic design and media studies.  She enjoys playing music, writing, and consuming media of various sorts in her spare time.  I found her post here, where students in a Principles of Media Studies class are posting their insights.  Special thanks to the instructor, Michael Newman, for facilitating the blog and allowing all of us to enjoy it!

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.