Feminist scholars have developed a large literature on women in the military (e.g.
Elshtain, 1987; Enloe, 1983, 1993; De Pauw, 1998; Herbert, 1998; Steihm, 1989), and they
recognize that the military is an important site for the production of masculinity and socially
dominant ideas about gender. Very little of this work, however, examines recruitment materials.
The two main exceptions are a brief analysis of the recruiting materials of several NATO
countries by Megens and Wings (1981), and in Does Khaki Become You? Cynthia Enloe’s
(1983) groundbreaking book on women and military systems, a chapter on women soldiers that
includes a brief discussion of how recruiters attempt to appeal to women and what attracts
women to the military.
Recruitment is one of the military’s most public faces. It is an attempt to legitimate
service in the eyes of the public. The images of service in recruiting materials are meant to
appeal to potential recruits, as well as to those in a position to influence them, including parents,
teachers, siblings, coaches, guidance counselors, and other members of the recruit’s community.
Recruitment involves overt image-making and an attempt to sell particular pictures of military
service, making it an especially fruitful site to study the construction of gender by the military.
Examining recruitment materials also provides insight into perceptions of women’s roles in each
of the various branches. Each service has its own history and institutional culture, and each one
struggles with the relationship between gender and military service in its own way. Looking at
recruitment materials is a way to examine the differences among the branches in terms of how
they construct gender, instead of treating the military as a monolith.
I collected print advertisement for each of the four armed services, excluding ads for the
reserves, ROTC, and the combined forces, from the magazines Life, Sports Illustrated, and
Popular Mechanics, from 1970
through 2003.
My sample consists of 257 different
advertisements, most of which were published multiple times, including 127 for the Army, 61 for
the Navy, 43 for the Air Force, and 26 for the Marine Corps. I chose these magazines because,
for most of the period of the all-volunteer force, this is where the services were placing their ads.
In the late 1990s, the services began to branch out into other kinds of publications, including
Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, XXL (a magazine about hip-hop music), and publications
2
Although the All-Volunteer Force was officially inaugurated in July 1973, in fiscal year 1971 the VOLAR
volunteer army field experiment began, and by 1972, the Army, Navy, and Air Force were advertising in
anticipation of the AVF.
3
The sample covers this entire period, but for each particular magazine there are gaps in coverage. In the case of
Life, the magazine stopped publishing from 1973 to 1977, returning in 1978 as a monthly rather than a weekly
publication. In the case of the other two magazines, I am missing part of the early 1990s for Popular Mechanics and
much of the 1980s for Sports Illustrated due to gaps in the collections of the libraries where I gathered the material.
3
Convention