Motherhood and War

International Perspectives

D. Cooper, C. Phelan, D. Cooper, C. Phelan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137437952
• eBook ISBN: 9781137437945
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Traditional histories of war have typically explored masculine narratives of military and political action, leaving private, domestic life relatively unstudied. This volume expands our understanding by looking at the relationships between mothers and children, and the varied roles both have assumed during periods of armed conflict.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Shenandoah Doctrine

Sons, Soldiers, and Service to the Nation

Dana Cooper

When the movie Shenandoah was released in the summer of 1965, few Americans watched the film with much thought toward the slow but escalating tensions in Vietnam. Though one of Jimmy Stewart’s lesser-acclaimed movies, the film presents Stewart in the lead role as Charlie Anderson, a widower with seven children, including six sons, who desperately tries to maintain his neutral status during the Civil War. His primary goal throughout is to remain uninvolved in the conflict, and he repeatedly explains that his family will not take part in the war until it concerns them. Even as he tries valiantly to keep all his sons on the family farm in war-torn Virginia, and thereby out of the fighting, the conflict continues to rage around them.

Though Shenandoah was not intended to take a stand on the situation in Southeast Asia or promote a national dialogue about military service, compulsory or otherwise, a brief but notable statement by Stewart foreshadowed the controversial decision to draft young men into the Vietnam War. When a Virginia State lieutenant comes to collect Stewart’s sons, the lieutenant smugly and presumptively explains that “Virginia needs all her sons.” Vengefully justifying his decision to keep his sons on the family farm regardless of the war, Stewart passionately retorts, “They don’t belong to the state. They belong to ME! When they were babies, I never saw the state comin’ around here with a spare tit!”1 Thus the Shenandoah doctrine was born, which raises two crucial questions: To whom does a young man belong in a time of war? And does he suddenly bear an obligation to his state or nation because of a domestic or diplomatic conflict?

The idea of military service as an obligation of citizenry can be traced back to the Greco-Roman period.2 As military service and citizenship has long maintained a reciprocal relationship, the authority of the state to conscript residents in order to fulfill an army defined and validated this implicit connection. Similar military forces existed around the world over time, as seen with the rise of the Qin Empire and the Anglo-Saxon fyrd in England.3 But as “the professional military caste of the Middle Ages . . . collapsed before the mass armies of the new nation-states,” explains George Flynn, the expectation and justification of military conscription reached new heights.4 In 1789, the French National Assembly issued a report, candidly demanding that “every citizen must be a soldier and every soldier a citizen or we shall never have a constitution.”5 With Napoleon’s utilization of conscripted forces and the resulting decimation of European powers, France crushed their longtime rivals, which decidedly quashed any remaining questions as to the use of citizens in the interest of the nation. Notably, no army since that time has successfully fought a significant war without the mass drafting of civilians. In 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie made his expectations clear for all men and women of Ethiopia when he issued the following edict: “Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to [the capital] Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.”6 The notion of military service in the name of the nation is an established concept through history.7

And yet the idea of armed obligation among men as citizen soldiers took its own unique form in the American colonial period. A version of conscription existed among the colonists, though it could not be enforced or supervised. The colonies (and eventual states), with the exception of Quaker Pennsylvania, handled this soldierly responsibility at the state level with militias.8 Not until the American Civil War did the United States impose a federal level conscription policy, which met with intense resistance, as the New York City draft riots proved.9 But the raising of troops by both the North and South during the Civil War, as James Geary contends, “contributed significantly to later periods of military mobilization.”10 A national draft did not occur again in the United States until World War I, and again a short time later in World War II. The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s revived the legislation once more. The final wave of military conscription, notably without a declaration of war, ended with the termination of efforts in South Vietnam in 1973, which witnessed some of the most visible and volatile backlash against such policies in American history.11 Controversy concerning the draft continued when the nation returned to a compulsory draft registration under President Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration chose to prosecute those who resisted registration; thus the draft continued as a contentious issue even in the absence of war.12

Much of the national perception and discussion of compulsory service is often shaped by the commander in chief of US military forces, or the president of the United States. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of American presidents, particularly those who dealt with combat issues during their tenure in the White House, presented an honorable and duty-focused perspective of military service. As one with firsthand experience of war, George Washington described such service as “a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence [sic] of it.”13 More than a hundred years later, President Woodrow Wilson reiterated Washington’s focus on the obligations of the citizenry when he said, “We must depend in every time of national peril, in the future as in the past, not upon a standing army, not yet a reserve army, but upon a citizenry trained and accustomed to arms.”14 Finding himself in a world war like Wilson, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in 1940 that by adopting a conscription law in peacetime, America “has broadened and enriched our basic concepts of citizenship. Besides the clear and equal opportunities, we have set forth the underlying other duties, obligations and responsibilities of equal service.”15 Focusing less on the idea of citizenry and more on the benefit of military service to the individual solider, President Harry S. Truman claimed that universal military training “would provide a democratic and efficient military force . . . [and that it] would be a constant bulwark in support of our ideals of government.”16 Finally, President Lyndon Johnson echoed Truman’s belief of the benefit of such service to each soldier, explaining that “local citizens can perform a valuable service to the Government . . . we cannot lightly discard an institution with so valuable a record of effectiveness and integrity.”17

While American presidents maintain an enthusiastic stance on military service in various forms, the fulfillment of such a noble service, at present, varies a great deal from a global perspective. While the United States, United Kingdom, and much of Western Europe require no military service to the nation, other rising and arguably ambitious nations, including Brazil, Israel, North Korea, South Korea, Mexico, Greece, Russia, Austria, Egypt, and Iran all have some level of mandatory military service. Notably, Israel, Norway, and China require that men and women serve in the military. Given the events of September 11, 2001, the subsequent and ongoing wars on terror, seismic changes to military power, and the reach and abilities of resulting intelligence, the mere discussion of military obligation can incite passionate debates on the expectations of society and obligations of citizens around the world. Just as mandatory military service claims to rely equally on an entire populace to support the nation, the very same and seemingly democratic process has its drawbacks. As a Greek army captain recently remarked, “Greece could never have gone into Iraq. Because every mother in the country would need to know why.”18

For all citizens of any nation, military service often connotes strong gendered expectations, especially for women. Whether it was the “white, middle-aged American ‘Mom’ [that functioned as] the predominant image of womanhood in the war culture of the First World War,” as Susan Zeiger maintains, or the “eroticized and youthful ‘pinup girl’” who served as the face of “wartime femininity in the 1940s,” military service, as a cultural byproduct of the nation at hand, has often demanded a particular response from its female citizenry, but particularly from mothers of military men.19 As an example of the reliance on mothers to support the national war effort, and specifically to bolster military recruitment efforts, a 1916 Canadian advertisement boldly asked, “Have you Mothered a Man?” and went on to describe a man as one who wore “the King’s Khaki somewhere in France.” The advertisement pressured mothers “not to use their influence against the enlistment of sons” but rather to provide a man for the front who would fight “for Freedom and Liberty and civilization . . . [and] for the sacredness of Home and Womanhood.”20

Given the heavily gendered attachments to ideas such as masculinity, militarism, and maternalism, much is at stake for individuals—men and women, mothers and sons—as they seek to find a balance between private provocations and national needs.21 Whether such participation is labeled as compulsory or is compelled by societal pressures, whether an individual is coerced or otherwise shamed into “volunteering,” as was often the case with the White Feather Brigade in Great Britain during World War I, much is on the line for individual respectability and family honor, not only for sons, but for mothers as well.22 Such “gender ridicule,” as Kathleen Kennedy describes it, “was a common tactic in American politics . . . [which emphasizes] the close relationship between the family, citizenship, and the states.”23 Consequently, the nature of military service as a result of war is highly dependent on the political and societal forces, and especially culturally constructed ideas of gender, in place at the time of military conflict. Consequently, the use of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Mother
• 1. Introduction: The Shenandoah Doctrine: Sons, Soldiers, and Service to the Nation
• 2. Mothers, Warfare, and Captivity in the Eastern Woodlands of North America, 1607–1763
• 3. Sailing Sons: The Personal Consequences of Impressment
• 4. Las Madres Guerreras: Testimonial Writing on Militant Motherhood in Latin America
• 5. The Women’s Resistance Movement in Argentina: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo
• 6. Japanese Mothers and Rural Settlement in Wartime Manchukuo: Gendered Reflections of Labor and Productivity in Manshû Gurafu (Manchuria Graph), 1936–43
• 7. Dear Okāsan . . . : An Analysis of Farewell Letters from Kamikaze Pilots to Their Mothers
• 8. Social Trauma and Motherhood in Postwar Spain
• 9. Barbara Hepworth and War: Themes of Motherhood and Sacrifice in Hepworth’s Madonna and Child, St. Ives Parish Church
• 10. War Opponents and Proponents: Israeli Military Mothers from Rivka Guber to “Four Mothers”
• 11. Reproducing a Culture of Martyrdom: The Role of the Palestinian Mother in Discourse Construction, Transmission, and Legitimization
• 12. Motherhood as a Space of Political Activism: Iraqi Mothers and the Religious Narrative of Karbala
• 13. Mothers and Memory: Suffering, Survival, and Sustainability in Somali Clan Wars
• 14. Grieving US Mothers and the Political Representations of Protest during the Iraq War and Beyond
• Notes on Contributors