after and cared for their own men, earning their subsistence by cooking and washing for troops in
an era when the offices of the quartermaster and commissary were inadequately run” (1980, 55).
A sense of women’s distinctive civic duty came to be associated with this social reproductive
labor, as captured in the words of James Fenimore Cooper’s character Elizabeth Flanagan, a
“female sutler, washerwoman, and… petticoat doctor to the troops” in his novel The Spy.
Emphasizing the civic significance of her work, she asks, “What would become of the States and
liberty if the boys had never a clane shirt, or drop to comfort them?” (qtd. in Kerber 1980, 56).
Based on the work performed by women, alongside the cultural narratives that emerged on the
subject, the Revolutionary War occasioned the attachment of civic importance to women’s work
in the gendered division of labor, all the while clearly demarcating the masculine work of
soldiering.
Women have always had a place in supporting members of the army, though they have
not always been celebrated. Cynthia Enloe notes that, historically female “camp followers” were
generally associated with promiscuity and disorderliness; however, their labor was absolutely
essential with women playing key roles as “soldiers’ wives, cooks, provisioners, laundresses, and
nurses” (1988, 3). In the twentieth century, as the armed forces modernized, reproductive work
on the battlefield was undertaken less frequently by women than by soldiers themselves. In spite
of this, however, Enloe is certainly right to point out that the paradoxical dynamic of misogyny
towards and simultaneous dependence on “camp followers” has permeated the military’s
unspoken reliance on military wives to sustain soldiers (Enloe 1988, 4-6).
The twentieth-century reallocation of reproductive work as tasks folded into the armed
forces dovetailed with an overall reorganization of the logistical support needed to maintain a
modernized and highly bureaucratic military (Keene 2001, 39). During World War I, due to
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Convention