Women in the Services: Morals or Morale?

Abstract

Women and men as responsible citizens were positioned differently in the context of the Second World War as the military sought to impose and maintain a particular conception of sexual orthodoxy. Gender divisions and social relations were used to support the ideol-ogy of the military. Positive masculinity meant men were active, they would fight for their country. Women, as Nira Yuval–Davis and Floya Anthias (1989), point out, were the ‘signifiers of ethnic/national differences – as a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national categories’.