civilian labor shortages alongside relatively high civilian wages, the armed forces could no
longer rely on contractors to perform these noncombatant tasks (Keene 2001, 51). Moreover,
fighting overseas precluded significant reliance on unpaid non-military resources—i.e. wives and
mothers—to support soldiers as they had in earlier wars on American soil (Keene 2001, 51). As a
result, and enabled by the 1917 establishment of the national draft, the armed forces—the army
in particular—significantly expanded its population of noncombatant troops.
implications for logistics support, but for the organization of reproductive work as well.
Beginning with World War I, units of the armed forces increasingly became “self-
sufficient societ[ies]” (Brotz and Wilson 1946, 374). In the early 20
th
century military, soldiers’
duties in these self-contained societies were numerous, extending into social reproductive labor,
or “housekeeping functions” (Brotz and Wilson 1946, 374). This reorganization of the division
of labor destabilized what had become conventional gendered orderings, with male soldiers
uneasily assuming “feminine” reproductive tasks. As described by sociologists in the 1940s, “to
a former professional who is an enlisted man, policing the area, cleaning latrines, kitchen police,
and care of the barracks is at first an imposition” (Brotz and Wilson 1946, 374). As evidence of
its undesirability, KP, or kitchen police has historically been assigned either by rotation, or as
punishment for minor infractions.
It is not hard to imagine that in a military system that promulgated the image of the
soldier as warrior, this extensive reliance on soldiers to perform among other tasks those
associated with women in the gendered division of labor sat uneasily alongside soldiers’ sense of
their masculinity. Writing of the huge pool of noncombatant soldiers in World War I, historian
Jennifer Keene suggests that these soldiers struggled with the disconnect between the aggressive
ideal of soldiering fostered by the armed forces culture and the actual work they did. She writes,
4
In the Civil War 90 percent of troops were combat troops. By WWI, this had dropped to 40 percent Keen 2001, 39.
11
Convention