“All Personnel Profit”: Domestic Labor of Military Families in the Postwar and Early Cold War Era

Kelley Fincher

Advisor: Peter N. Stearns, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Jennifer Ritterhouse, Christopher Hamner

Horizon Hall, #3223
May 22, 2024, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation asks how millions of Americans managed their domestic lives in an environment that, from the outset, appeared quite hostile to family life. Military families in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, after World War II but before overt involvement in the Vietnam conflict, served in a period that experienced unprecedented growth in the number of dependents but before the military had expanded its family support policy to care for them. Within this historical context, using categorization of domestic labor borrowed from sociological studies and an underexplored set of historical documents, “All Personnel Profit” reveals how military families resourcefully balanced three solutions to their expanded domestic challenges. They leaned on nascent military family support strategies, such as burgeoning medical care and midcentury housing projects. When these programs proved insufficient to meet broader familial concerns, military dependents engaged in mutually beneficial transactional solutions, finding solutions to their housing, care, and consumption needs among their peers, acting nearly independent of the military itself. Finally, military families leaned on benevolent undertakings spearheaded by military wives who worked within the waning military community structure that demanded their uncompensated labor.   

This dissertation introduces a new demographic to qualitative studies of housework by uncovering additional domestic burdens levied on military families that went beyond the household work normally assigned to Americans at midcentury. In particular, frequent mandatory relocations and spousal absences exacerbated the physical, emotional, and mental labor demands of service families. Notably, this was housework that if not managed, could have potentially compromised national defense. “All Personnel Profit” also reperiodizes the history of military policy to include the postwar and early Cold War era. It gives military wives more direct credit for conceptualizing and starting today’s military family support programs. It also places enlisted wives in a new position within military social history. Whereas sociologists generally see the increase in enlisted dependents as the reason for the creation of broader family support policy, this dissertation shows instead how enlisted wives clubs initiated some of these programs as well. Lastly, by discovering work that is traditionally “invisible” being performed by military wives, we can find greater appreciation for the domestic labor being performed by their civilian sisters as well.