The institutions of marriage and family are touchstones for how historians of the United States have examined gendered interactions with the state and how the formation of gender roles have changed over time. While the military has long been understood to reflect, influence, and police gender norms, a recent scholarship has cast the military as key to understanding citizenship claims on the state. Yet, while all of these recent works use gender as a key category of analysis, none of them have examined the enormous shift in how the military regulated sex and marriage after World War II. With the onset of the Cold War, the U.S. military reversed course, overturning long-held policy that discouraged marriage and family in favor of encouraging and supporting it as part of its “democratic” mission in the world.
More surprisingly, the military effectively remade the entirely masculine space of the military without challenging pervading norms about what marriage and family looked like within the context of the U.S. This sea change was triggered by the increased size of the U.S. military after World War II and its newly expanded international role. As the military worked to define itself as an agent of democracy in a cold war against communism, the institutions of marriage and family became key to its claims that the military supported democratic citizenship. But like all categories of citizenship in the postwar U.S., soldiers—and their families’—claims on citizenship were splintered by race, gender, and sexuality.