As the number of women in the work force has steadily increased over time, the number of women in the military has also simultaneously increased in the twenty first century. Now more than ever, women comprise a growing percentage of the United States military. Serving in all branches of the military, women are proving to be an important asset, especially in these times of war. What is even more significant is that a large percentage of these women are mothers. As experienced by mothers entering the mainstream work force, women in the military are finding it especially difficult (probably even more so) to juggle their careers and their life at home with their families. Serving in the military and trying to parent children is far from easy and requires a great deal of choice and sacrifices to be made. The New York Times article, “Wartime Soldier, Conflicted Mom,” discusses the hardships women in the military face when trying to balance their two lives and having to choose between serving their country and staying at home with their families. This article highlights the fact that despite the strides made to accommodate women in the military, there still remains major shortcomings, as women try to carryout their duties not only to their country, but also to their families.
The author, Lizette Alvarez, conducted interviews with several mothers who served or are currently serving in the military. The women’s responses clearly demonstrate the difficulties a mother faces while enlisted, and the consequences experienced by her and her family. The two wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have made these women’s lives even more complicated, as more soldiers are being deployed and the possibility of injury or death has increased. Since 2001, the number of female recruits has actually declined by 5 percent, a much more significant number than the decline in the number of male recruits. Of the number of women who have served in the two wars, 100,000 are mothers, and half of them have been deployed to the war zones. Furthermore, the majority of these mothers in the military are primary caregivers, or single parents. Without a draft and a dwindling number of recruits, the military is now faced with the challenge of boosting interest in joining. The first step is to try to make service members (especially women) feel as if they don’t have to choose between their family life and their military careers. Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, a director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University, comments on this dilemma military mothers face, “They leave when they can’t figure out a way to do both.” Because of job security, good pay, and great benefits, women are often compelled to maintain their military careers because it ultimately provides a better life for their families. Additionally, many women feel a sense of pride and responsibility to defend their country. These reasons are used to weigh against the repercussions felt at home. At times it is difficult to find care providers for children, especially for single mothers, while on tour. Even more troublesome, are the effects children of women serving in the military experience. Children often: become depressed, develop anxiety, suffer in school, start wetting the bed, cry more, or become reclusive and defiant. The women interviewed were faced with the difficulty of weighing the consequences of their absence, due to their career choice, and trying to strike a balance between the two. Unfortunately, the current nature and demands of a military career do not make this an easy task. In some of the interviewed women’s situations, they ultimately decided to retire from the military life and devote their full attention to their families, while others decided to return for another tour.
Just like other women in the mainstream workforce, women serving in the military are being forced to make some tough decisions when it comes to their careers and families. But it seems like even more so than mainstream working women, these military women have a more difficult time balancing these two aspects of their lives because their careers are so demanding and require them to be away from their families for extended periods of time. Not only are these women feeling pressure from the military to choose, but their families and the repercussions of their decisions put them in a tougher situation. The double bind mothers in the military experience tends to be especially exaggerated. While patriarchal society pushes women to stay home and take care of their families, there is another aspect of this society that promotes staunch patriotism and calls for people to defend our freedom. For these women caught between the call of these two duties, the choice can be almost impossible to make. The context of Marilyn Frye’s article, “Oppression,” is easily applicable to the oppression mothers in the military experience through the creation of this double bind. When describing an oppressive double bind, Frye writes, “One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind – situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation.” Mothers in the military are especially prone to penalties from both sides. Many of the interviewed women talked about the penalties they incurred. While on tour, some mothers missed their child’s first steps or words and other precious family moments. And when home with their families, some of the women experienced guilt for not being on the front line defending the country, or sacrificed financial gains by having to retire early. Based on the interviewed women’s responses it is glaringly obvious that mothers in the military are susceptible to the “mommy tax.” When forced to choose family over career, especially before reaching their retirement time, mothers in the military are heavily “taxed.” Crittenden explains the consequences of this tax, “For working-class women, there is increasing evidence both in the United States and worldwide that mothers’ differential responsibility for children, rather than classic sex discrimination, is the most important factor disposing women to poverty.” Crittenden identifies a key point about the “mommy tax’s” ability to drive a family into poverty. This point is especially true for service women. A large percent of the people serving in the military are of the middle to lower class. Without the steady income and benefits coming in from a military job, mothers (especially single mothers) are often forced into poverty. As if serving in the military while two wars are going on were not stressful enough, the double bind oppressing mothers serving in the military is enough to send them over the edge.
The double bind and oppression experienced by mothers in the military is intrinsic of our patriarchal society. The military is founded upon patriarchal ideology. Since males dominate the military, there is little understanding of the issues these women face, or effort made to make accommodations for them. This prevailing patriarchal system is further perpetuated by women desire to prove themselves as an integral part of the military. Just as national pride provokes men to prove their masculinity, women in the military often experience a similar need to show aggression and prove their toughness. While Cynthia Enloe writes in The Curious Feminist that only men experience this type of national politics, the women interviewed in the article talk about the difficulty in switching mentalities when returning home and caring for their children. The women explain that upon returning home from a tour, they would often become agitated with the children and react more harshly towards them than they would normally. Additionally they discussed how the military’s expectation of them to be tough and to be on their “A game” makes it extremely difficult to balance the different emotions and interactions as a mother then as a soldier. When talking about her children, one woman stated, “To hear them cry and miss me would keep me out of the game. It would make it hard to put the game face on.” From these interviews it is clear that the strain put on mothers in the military to fall in line with the ideology of the extreme patriarchal system that is the military is relatively unrealistic when trying to balance their careers and family life. While these issues and inadequacies are prevalent, Johnson’s article, “Patriarchy, the System,” demonstrates that system is not only influenced by just men, and states that women need to “take a different path” to stand up for their rights in order to invoke positive change.
Although the military has recently started making accommodations for women and mothers serving in the military in order to boost recruitment numbers, there is still not enough being done. Regardless of the military’s argument that these women are not being forced to decide between their careers and families, the strains being put of them from both sides is way too overwhelming. Surveys show that women respond much better to more flexible schedules than financial incentives. Perhaps if the military began allowing serving mothers to spend more time with their families without penalizing them, then they would be able to retain a higher number of enlisted women. Serving in the military is such a honorable job, it is unfair that mothers are being forced to decide between their duties to their country and to their family.
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