The Gendered Homefront: U.S. Military Mothers and the Work of Separating the War from the Warrior.

This paper examines how the gendered ideology of separate "public" and "private" spheres organize mother's relationships to war. Through an online ethnography of military mothers' Internet support groups, I look at how the particular military doctrine of "separating the warrior from the war" is evoked by military mothers and by the military. By invoking the doctrine of "separating the warrior from the war," war is understood as a public, political issue, while the warrior is claimed to be a personal, private concern. This doctrine is especially salient in U.S. post-Vietnam conflict discourse as a prescription for how to relate to soldiers at war during times of increasing criticism of the war itself. The doctrine of separating the warrior from the war is evoked today prescriptively to suggest a kind of homefront support where soldiers are accorded respect, even when there are disagreements with the political premises of the war. I argue that this particular doctrine organizes mother's relationships in ways that highlight the gendered complexities of the public and private spheres. For military mothers, the process of separating the warrior from the war reifies mothers' gendered authority within the private homefront (giving them a space to speak about war only through their experiences), while also excluding them from public political realm where decisions about war are made. As a result, mothers' are both empowered and disempowered to participate in the political process surrounding war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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