Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Woman

Women in Khaki is the first sociological study of the experience of the first generation of American women to enlist in the U.S. army in large numbers. After the family and educational institutions, the military is the most important socializing institution in American society. From 1948 to the early 1970s, U.S. women were employed in less than one percent of military jobs. When women did participate in the military, they served in low-status ancillary roles or worked as military nurses or clerical workers. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the role of women in the military changed dramatically and enlisted women increasingly served in de-differentiated roles. By July 1, 1973, the draft was replaced by the all-volunteer military. By the mid-1970s, the U.S. military was turning to large numbers of relatively well-educated women to enlist in the volunteer military because of the difficulty of recruiting high quality men in sufficient numbers. The number of women increased from 40,000 in all services in 1972 to 200,000 women serving in the active forces. This expansion placed women in traditionally all-male domains such as the artillery, telecommunications, mechanical maintenance, and the Signal Corps. This book is an ethnography of a large garrison community in Germany that Rustad calls Khaki Town, where large numbers of women worked in the Signal Corps. Chapter One is a historical and cross-cultural study of the history of women in the military. Chapter Two examines the reasons why the U.S. military expanded its deployment of women during the early years of the volunteer military. This chapter compares the Defense Department ideology about the military as an equal opportunity employer with the less acknowledged reasons for expanded women soldiers. Chapters Three through Seven present an ethnography of male-female relations in Khaki Town. Rustad contends that there were two armies — His and Hers. His army was an occupation that was stressful for males who experienced work/family interference, but Her Army was all of the His Army stressors plus the problems of being token females in the Signal Corps. Chapter Four outlines the problems of female tokenism in Khaki Town and chronicles the social injuries of being alone or nearly alone in a male-oriented garrison community. I develop a paradigm of female accommodations drawn from in-depth interviews with women soldiers working in the field. As a response to tokenism, women soldiers coped with two broad patterns of under-achievement and over-achievement. The under-achieving accommodation was when women soldiers coped with status inconsistencies by highlighting subservient roles such as (1) Daddy's Little Girl; (2) The Sex-Pot; or, (3) Mama. The relatively few over-achievers took on roles such as "Super-Soldier" and the "The Lone Ranger of Women's Liberation. " Chapter Five is a field study of how male soldiers in the Signal Corps in Khaki Town resisted the assimilation of women in their units. Chapter Six describes how women soldiers shared common grounds with Max Weber's concept of the pariah group. Chapters Six and Seven bring together observations from the field study to recommend social policies to help women attain equal status in traditionally-male military specialties. The Appendices describe how I was able to conduct my field study of women and men in the Signal Corps for such an extended period. In 1997, Judith Mann, in a column called “The Lords of Brutality” in the Washington Post, noted how my book predicted problems that women faced in the Virginia Military Institute, West Point, and other traditionally-male enclaves in the military. She wrote: "Michael Rustad, a professor at Suffolk University Law School, in Boston, predicted the problems women would confront in the military in his 1982 book, Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Woman. Rustad found patterns of isolation and powerlessness on the part of women when men outnumbered them by more than 10 to 1. "