nuclear power plants guarantees himself a firm foothold in the future.” The wording of the
advertisements, however, sometimes made an effort to acknowledge that women could also
enlist. For example, an ad from 1972 which features a 1919 recruiting poster states, “The new
Navy still gives young men and women the opportunity to visit exotic places,” and it promises
“the kind of training that helps a man or woman go places inside the Navy or out.” Another ad
from the same year also mentions women—the copy reads “The new Navy still gives young men
(and women, too!) a chance to see the world”—but the use of parentheses and the exclamation
point make the presence of women seem like a novelty, and the same paragraph goes on to claim
that the Navy offers “the kinds of jobs a man can build a world of his own on.” Ten years later,
some recruiting materials retained this pattern of making a reference to the service of men and
women, but also using language that indicates that the generic sailor is a man. For instance, an
ad from the “Navy Adventure” series claims that “today’s Navy depends on modern equipment
and the men and women who operate and maintain it,” but the copy begins by stating “most guys
go through job after job” and the picture shows a man with a clipboard in front of a set of
controls. The references to women in these advertisements seem like a formality.
Visually, Navy ads from this period send mixed messages about women. They seem both
to be trying to reach out to women as possible recruits, and to offer women up as a potential
prize for men’s service. The subtext in many ads seems to be that joining the Navy will make a
man attractive to women. The advertisements that contain several pictures, showing sailors at
work and at play, often include one of a man in uniform with a woman in civilian clothes (or
several men and women together). Often, the man has his arm around the woman. In the ad
sample, women were as likely to be presented in civilian clothes as a male sailor’s companion as
they were to be presented as sailors themselves. These ads hint at the sexual rewards of being a
sailor. The traditional pattern of naval life is long stretches of duty at sea, punctuated by liberty
in ports of call around the world, where sailors could indulge themselves with women and
alcohol, and while the ads don’t explicitly mention this aspect of Navy life, the references to
travel and the images of civilian women subtly evoke it.
When women are shown dressed as sailors, they are presented in a different way than the
male sailors are. Female sailors are almost always shown with a male sailor or sailors. Only one
of the ads in my sample that featured multiple pictures included a shot of a woman alone—a
headshot of a woman in dress uniform. (None of the ads that only pictured one sailor featured a
woman.) Men are pictured in a range of situations. They are shown performing a variety of
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Convention