Militaries have a long-standing close association with masculinity and the making of
men. Militaries have historically depended on female labor for a wide range of necessary support
work, but with very few exceptions, men have been the combatants. With the end of the draft
and the inception of the all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973, the US military became dependent on
women to fill at least some portion of its “manpower” needs. Before the end of the draft, women
made up less than two percent of the US military. As of September 2005, women made up 14%
of the Army (70,454 out of 492,728), 14% of the Navy (52,381 out of 362,941), 19.5% of the Air
Force (69,151 out of 353,696), and 6% of the Marine Corps (10,963 out of 180,029). Women
comprise almost 15%, roughly 203,000 service members, of an active duty force of just under
1.4 million. The armed forces have struggled with the question of how to attract and utilize
women while still keeping core military functions, namely combat, exclusively male, and how to
integrate women without disrupting the association between military service and masculinity that
has helped to draw in men. The US military has had to find ways to attract women recruits
without alienating young men, who are still the main focus of recruiting efforts.
This paper will examine the ways that the various branches of the US military have
portrayed women and tried to motivate them to enlist, and the ideas about soldiering and gender
that they reflect and produce in the process. It will also provide a general history of women’s
participation in each of the services, to put the recruiting issues in context, and discuss the
recruitment of women during the period of the AVF within the context of each service’s larger
recruiting strategies. The title of this paper, “A woman in the Army is still a woman,” refers to a
line in an Army recruiting advertisement from 1995. Recruiting advertisements may try to
reassure potential recruits and their families that women in the military don’t lose their
femininity, even though they are joining an institution known for conferring masculinity and
making men out of boys. They may also offer women equal opportunity, or the chance to have
experiences and acquire traits that are typically associated with masculinity, like adventure,
independence, and challenge. In some cases, a military branch may make no effort to reach out
to women; those women who respond to appeals aimed at men will be made somewhat
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Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense Harold Brown ordered Navy commander Dr. Richard W. Hunter to undertake
an analysis on the use of women to fill military manpower needs. According to Holm (1992), Hunter found that
“the recruiting and advertising effort and expense that had to be put out in order to attract enough high quality men
(i.e., high school graduates, upper mental categories) to meet the services’ requirements for new recruits also
attracted more women high school graduates, top mental categories, than the services planned to accept” (253). This
implies that advertising meant to attract men to the military can also attract women, though I suspect the reverse
isn’t true. Women, who have been told the word “man” represents a generic human, may be used to looking to male
models of behavior or paying attention to messages that aren’t tailored to them.
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Convention