Abstract
Within the institution and military community, civilian wives of service members occupy complicated roles. On the one hand, wives are undisputedly crucial to the functioning of their service member husbands. However, wives are simultaneously considered subordinate to their husbands within the military and extended community. Indicative of this attitude are the divisive stereotypes of military wives that range from lazy and irresponsible, to overly rank-conscious and entitled. Based on combined in-depth interviews from two samples of military wives, this article investigates how the women navigate the military spouse role within the institutional, community-oriented context of the military. Specifically, we ask, how do these women construct gender and exercise agency when drawing on the stereotypes of wives within the community? By utilizing such mechanisms as symbolic boundary work, gender policing, and stereotyping, women both reify stereotypes of the military spouse and exert agency in creating the military spouse identity for themselves.
Military wives face unique demands on their lives, marriages, and families when compared to their civilian counterparts. Generally, the needs and wants of servicemen’s civilian wives and their families place lower in priority order when competing against those of the service members and the military organization, an arrangement that ultimately results in a double loss of agency on the part of wives (Taber, 2009). Civilian spouses have little say or control over many aspects of the military lifestyle, especially when it comes to permanent change of station (PCS) moves. Being married to a service member often means frequent relocation away from families and friends, resulting in wives having to learn and relearn how to establish new kin networks and support systems within the military community. Building these new relationships may be challenging, as wives have to create friendships and foster communities with women who are distinctly different from them. This point is illustrated in the demographics of military spouses that reflect a population that is quite diverse, with ages ranging from late teens to 40s or even 50s and representing a widespread variety of regions, religions, nationalities, education levels, occupations, and so on (Hosek, Asch, Fair, Martin, & Mattock, 2002; Military Officers Association of America, 2014). Thus, the process of building and rebuilding support networks with other military wives, many of whom they may share only a weak situational link, can add further stress and strain to the already challenging day-to-day lives of military spouses.
While military wives continue the external work of building their networks with other spouses in the community, they also continue the ongoing internal process of establishing their identities and exerting their own agency in these social circles. While wives’ relationships to their service member husbands are important and certainly influential in building networks and navigating the military lifestyle, we chose instead to focus on how wives create and navigate relationships with each other and how divisive wife stereotypes affect the group’s social relations. Within these groups exists a complex set of stereotypes wives employ not only to self-identify and locate their own social position and standing but also to distance themselves from less desirable wife imagery. Navigating stereotypes is an ongoing exercise in the lives of these women as they continuously battle to establish their own agency and identity. On one end of the wife “continuum,” there is the woman who is a “good” wife, supportive, resilient, independent, perhaps working outside of the home in productive or volunteer labor as she performs admirably as a complement to and worthy extension of her service member husband. On the other end of the continuum, is the wife who is a “Dependapotamus.” This term is defined by the Urban Dictionary as: Traditionally a service-members [sic] dependent who is a “stay-at-home mom” that doesn’t do a damn thing all day besides sitting on the couch looking remarkably similar to Jabba the Hut leaching off of military benefits and eating anything that gets too close.
Given the structural and institutional constraints on this demographic of women, this article poses the question: How do women navigate the military spouse role within the institutional, community-oriented context of the military? Specifically, how do these women construct gender and exercise agency when drawing on the pervasive stereotypes of wives within the military community? Our questions independently emerged during data collection on various aspects of wives’ experiences as it became apparent from interviews that within the microcosm of the military community, with its diverse population, distinct patterns of dominant or “ideal” wife stereotypes are pervasive and shape these women’s self-understanding and relationship to other wives. To address these questions, combined in-depth interviews (Bishop, Gruys, & Evans, 2018) from two samples of military wives were used to address these questions. Ultimately, we find the proliferation and invocation of these various stereotypes provide a mechanism by which members of this community actively construct and maintain “ideal wife” imagery, demarcating the boundaries between the good and bad military spouse.
Military Life
Wives’ and the Military Organization
Military spouses must navigate the demands of two competing and often conflicting “greedy” institutions (Coser, 1974): the military organization and the military family (Harrell, 2001; M. Segal, 1986). While most families experience tensions and challenges balancing work and family life, it is particularly acute in the military, specifically during times of war (Enloe, 2000; Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013). Constraints inherent to the military lifestyle including frequent moves, long periods of solo parenting, and intense bouts of spouse unemployment illustrate how markedly different military spouses are from their civilian counterparts. Often expectations from both the military institution and her service member husband are that she should conform to his needs and the needs and desires of the military. Not only does this subordinate role inform the wives’ relationship to both their husbands and the military but it also has tangible consequences on spouses’ employment, family, education, mental health, and overall well-being.
Wives’ loss of agency commences with the tying of their lives and identities to their husbands’ status as a service member (Alt, 2006; Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013; Kleykamp, 2013; Taber, 2009; Weinstein, 1997), and as a result, spouses are expected to fully participate in military life. Participation includes attending social events on installation, running spouse support groups, offering support to other military families in times of crisis, and consistently being present as the primary caretaker and backbone of their own households. The main mechanism by which spouses, especially officer wives, demonstrate their service to their husbands and the military organization is through unit or installation-related volunteerism that “falls in the category of morale, public relations, and ceremonial duties…and is related to the fact that an officer’s wife becomes an extension of the officer…” (Harrell, 2001, p. 60). From a life course perspective (Elder, 1984), military wives are referred to as having “linked lives” (Moen, 2003) with their service member husbands whose careers, with its associated moves, often negatively affect the wives’ employment trajectories, resulting in wives’ “limited career mobility, lower wages, and dampened aspirations” (Kleykamp, 2013, p. 144). While we would like to present wives as autonomous entities, doing so would fail to reveal the complex set of marital dynamics in place within many military families. From our perspective, we would suggest that military wives are perhaps only semiautonomous because within the military community, they are viewed one dimensionally as extensions of their husbands and thusly labeled with his classification, officer or enlisted, and his current rank and years of service.
Military as a Gendered Institution
In addition to being greedy, the military is a highly gendered institution (Acker, 1992; Karney & Crown, 2007; Weber, 2012) that thrives on traditional patriarchal structures, where the conforming wife is tasked with holding the family together thus enabling the husband to be free to pursue his career (Bowen & Orthner, 1983; Harrell, 2000; Harrison, 2006; Taber, 2009). Despite changing demographics, heterosexual women make up 89.9–97.7% of the military spouse population (Department of Defense, 2014), and therefore, the spouse figure is still overwhelmingly female and exists in a traditional marriage (i.e., heterosexual with traditional gender roles). To this end, we are specifically referring to “spouses” as women in this article as they constitute the majority of spouses in the military. According to Karney and Crown (2007), “To the extent that military work roles map closely onto traditional gender roles this suggests that the military will select for [service] men with highly traditional views of gender roles…” (p. 20). By strictly following this traditional gender model, military wives may not only become dependent on their husbands but also feel repressed and constrained by their limited agency (Burland & Lundquist, 2013).
Folding and subordinating the identity of women into their husbands’ lives in the military, or the militarization of wives (Enloe, 2000), upholds certain traditional gender divisions and sex roles but also produces a flexible gender script that the parties draw upon to negotiate the different stages of military life. In many ways, wives are relegated to the private sphere, or when in productive work, become workers of the “second shift” (Hochschild & Machung, 1989), as both aspects of wives’ work, inside and outside the home, are subordinated to their husbands’ breadwinning, head of household status. A tension exists where wives must be self-reliant and strong, especially during periods of deployment or other hardship, but also must be committed to the secondary status as she forgoes her own desires in order to enable her husband’s career progress. Additionally, wives must be resilient, a concept used frequently to describe the role and responsibility of the military wife (Blakely, Hennessy, Chung, & Skirton, 2012; Cooke & Speirs, 2005; Schachman & Lindsay, 2013). However, resiliency goes beyond simply being a help versus a hindrance during all phases of the service member’s military career, it becomes more of a required tool in one’s cultural tool kit (Swidler, 1986) for wives to effectively combat the everyday challenges inherent to the military lifestyle.
While steeped in traditional gendered approaches, expectation for wives of servicemen is to have a degree of independence and self-sufficiency—particularly when their husbands are away from home—which makes for a paradoxical and fluid gender role orientation and results in various levels of ongoing sex role negotiations. From Weinstein’s (1997) in-depth interviews with military wives, she noted, Wives said that the comings and goings of their husbands gave them “independence,” and some measure of “power.” Wives became the decision makers who managed household finances even when their husbands came home. So even if wives did not actually make the money, they perceived that they had control over its dispensation. (p. 15)
Rank/Class Divisions
Within the nexus of social relations within the military community, there tends to be strong division between wives of officers, college-educated service members with supervisory and managerial roles, and those of enlisted personnel, primarily noncollege-educated members who are tasked with executing officers’ orders. An easier way to understand this class divide between officer and enlisted personnel is to translate it into the civilian terminology of white-collar versus blue-collar (respectively) categorizations (Segal & Segal, 2004). Service members’ rank effectively distinguishes one’s class and enforces the hierarchy structure within the military organization extending into wives’ social units. When viewed through an intersectional lens of class, it is the producing and reproducing of the class hierarchy that also often serves to constrain and limit military community members’ opportunities and social interaction.
This hierarchy filters into the military community where its members, including wives, often employ the phrase, “you don’t wear your husband’s rank” to describe wives’ perceived entitled behavior. Although often said, it is seldom heard as many wives employ their husbands’ rank to reassert their place in the class hierarchy. This should not be surprising because it is not just wives who maintain this class divide. The hierarchal military organization itself places greater value, thus greater expectations on certain military spouses, especially senior officer wives (Harrell, 2001). The high level of volunteer service and/or event attendance of high-ranking officers’ wives left many feeling that they already have a full-time unpaid job participating in military-related endeavors, which is consequently a condition that prevents them from seeking full-time productive employment. In most cases, fewer demands are made of senior enlisted wives who are more likely to be employed full-time in productive labor due to financial need (Clever & Segal, 2013; Hosek & Wadsworth, 2013; Segal & Segal, 2004).
Similar to the stereotype of the dependapotamus, Harrell (2000) uncovered a stereotype of junior enlisted spouses as young and immature big-haired, trailer park babes with too many children who do not know how to manage their money. This stereotype is widely held by the military community at large, including other junior enlisted personnel and spouses, who often speak disparagingly of their cohorts. (p. 12)
Drawing Boundaries and Preventing Stigma
Social actors create and uphold boundaries, both social and symbolic, to maintain, contest, and/or create social distances and identification (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). While wives must maintain a myriad of boundaries, the focus here will be on their boundary formation when it comes to the military wife identity—specifically that of the “typical” military wife imagery of the dependapotamus or the wife who misappropriates her husband’s rank, assuming his benefits and power are hers. As discussed in the previous section, the category of the military spouse is inherently subordinate to that of the service member, thereby conferring a subordinate status upon military spouses (Burland & Lundquist, 2013; Enloe, 2000). Wives engaged in boundary formation, defensive othering, and status competition in an effort to deflect stigma and maintain their sense of self. Their lower status as compared to their active duty service member husband, the class division between officer and enlisted wives, and the prevalent stereotypes of the military spouse within the community all exacerbate the need for boundary work.
Military wives partake in symbolic boundary maintenance to create distance between themselves and what they and others perceive are typical military spouses, a categorization that often includes the dependapotamus label and the status-hungry wife. Following Lamont and Molnár (2002), symbolic boundaries are, “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality” (p. 168). Women construct these boundaries by utilizing the following mechanisms: stereotyping, self-identification, and categorization (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). When a wife invokes these stereotypes to describe another wife or other individuals they are, “robbing the ‘othered’ of control over defining ‘who she is’ and ‘what she is all about” (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2007). Interestingly, while stripping other individuals of power, stereotypes are also a device of agency (Armstrong, Hamilton, & Armstrong, 2014).
When expressing contempt or distaste, they engage in “defensive othering” where they can deflect the stigma they experience as members of a subordinate group (Schwalbe et al., 2000). By discursively distancing themselves from military spouse stereotypes, women are participating in both their own identity construction/presentation and reifying the categories that produce and reproduce their subordinate, inferior status. Essentially, they are defining what makes a good wife versus a bad wife within the context of the military, contributing to the construction of the ideal wife figure. A good wife works toward the mission, appreciates the military and her family, whereas a bad wife, for example, the dependapotamus trope, is lazy, opportunistic, and a drain on both her husband and the community as a whole.
Doing Gender
We posit that when spouses engage in symbolic boundary work and social distancing they are “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987) whereby they are normalizing particular gendered presentations of the military spouse role. Despite the changing demographics and social attitudes geared toward more inclusivity, the term “wife” continues to be used in lieu of the more expansive, nongendered term “military spouse.” From publications such as The Army Wife Handbook, organizations such as the family readiness group (FRG), and in social circles the consistent use of the word wife indicates the historically entrenched, gendered-specific orientation of this role. Additionally, by maintaining the gendered language of the role, women are sustaining a sense of ownership, linking them both to historical precedence and providing sources of agency in a community where it may be challenging to find. Women embrace the gendered component of their role and, as noted by Hautzinger and Scandlyn (2013), it is a core aspect of what this identity means to them. Social reproduction on the home front is work for which the wives want credit and some portion of control…many want gendered credit, as women shouldering the formidable labor remaking their domestic social worlds, and relatedly, to reproducing the US military itself. They claim that they do this work better than their husbands could, and want this to be part of the record. (p. 166)
By failing to conform to the femininity standards established by both the military organization and the military community, the figure of the dependapotamus becomes the epitome of a “bad girl,” or inferior wife, defined as being lazy, fat, unemployed, catty, gossipy, and opportunistic. The risk associated with being categorized with this label effectively polices the spouse community into performing appropriate and acceptable feminine behavior (Armstrong et al., 2014; Bettie, 2003; Currie et al., 2007; Miller, 2016). Conversely, a good military spouse is independent, organized, neat, hardworking, helpful, empathetic, supportive, fit, and physically attractive. In most cases, the dependapotamus slur is primarily used to describe enlisted wives of low-ranking personnel, who are assumed to be young, uneducated, low class, sexually promiscuous, and overly rank conscious (Harrell, 2001). The attachment of this label to those at the bottom of the hierarchy demonstrates how the unequal power dynamic positions and reifies the social structure within the spouse community and the military community in general.
Method
Original Studies
Following Bishop, Gruys, and Evans (2018), we used a comparative study design, drawing on our separate studies of military spouses to look for patterns of how subjects described themselves and military spouses in general. Study A’s project data were collected through in-person and telephone semi-structured interviews with 33, geographically dispersed military spouses who either had been or were currently a surrogate (a woman commissioned to gestate a birth a child for a third party). The researcher utilized purposive and convenience sampling and recruitment initiated via online support forums for military spouses and surrogates and eventually grew to include closed Facebook groups. Given the researcher’s outsider status, as neither affiliated with the military nor with surrogacy, study recruitment was quite slow initially. Once the researcher received access to the closed Facebook group, purposive and snowball sampling commenced. Participants were then scheduled for in-depth interviews which consisted of three parts: (1) demographic and background data gathering, (2) wife’s experiences as a military spouse, and (3) her surrogacy experience(s).
Study B’s data were gathered through 12 in-person semi-structured interviews with heterosexual military wives of enlisted service personnel from the mid-Atlantic region of the United States to assess how education and employment affected their lives as well as to investigate military wives’ perceptions of themselves, their perceived status, their goals, and their challenges. The researcher utilized purposive, convenience, and quota sampling methods to recruit qualified participants for the project’s in-depth interviews. Sample restrictions included items such as husband must be in nondeployed status and no previous or current service by the wife. The sample represented clustered rank categories, E1–E3, E4–E6, and E7–E9 in order to capture different socioeconomic statuses, ages, and life course stages. The final sample consisted of one wife from each rank category from each branch of service, Army, Navy, Air Force (AF), and Marine Corps (USMC). The researcher also attempted to consider race when recruiting for the small sample achieving limited proportional representation with the inclusion of African American, Latina, and Asian military wives.
Combined Sample and Procedures for Current Study
This project developed after discussions between the researchers noted the similarities and patterns in their data generated by their own individual studies. As a result, interview data pertaining to women’s experiences as a military spouse, relationships with their husbands, and experiences with employment from both samples were combined for analysis (see Table 1 for a list of interview questions from each study that prompted the data utilized for the current study). Once combined, data were coded and analyzed utilizing inductive qualitative content analysis that served as the method of reducing, categorizing, and interpreting the data. As coding progressed, specific themes and patterns emerged with regard to the perceptions of military spouses and the stereotypes associated with this demographic. Additionally, researchers analyzed subjects’ opinions of military spouses and self-identifiers. Analysis also included memo writing and note-taking to supplement coding (see Table 2 for sample demographics). While patterns uncovered in data analysis indicate strong particularities of the military spouse role, any attempt to generalize these patterns requires study of other, more specifically larger, groups of military wives.
Select Interview Questions From the Original Studies.
Participants’ Demographics.
Note. A range has been provided for each subjects’ age in an effort to preserve confidentiality and better conceal the subject’s identity.
Findings
Subordinate Status
You are second to the military. Always. No matter what happens, the military comes first. There are a lot of women that can’t handle that. They’re like “it’s me first” and it’s really like “no, you’re second.” If he gets called at 4:00 in the morning and he’s gotta go on base, then he’s gotta go on base (E-7 AF spouse).
In interviews, women expressed acute awareness of their status in relation to their husbands. The majority of participants echo this stark difference in status. One longtime civilian spouse of an E-9 Marine illustrated the gendered household hierarchy that positioned her needs and desires behind those of her husband and children in noting after yet another PCS move, “After about three months in a new place I get to start thinking about a job for me.” An E-4 Army spouse recalled of her marriage, I think…you know…as a military wife I felt less of a dominant force in the relationship and that I had to concede to him. You’re doing it for the lifestyle, this is not a discussion, this is what is happening…he’s going into work, he’s going there, he’s doing that…and you just have to accept it. It kind of plays into the whole relationship as well.
Along these same lines, both a USMC E-6 wife and an AF E-6 wife expressed dissatisfaction but acceptance of having their careers put on hold, or “losing time” in order for their husbands to pursue their career aspirations. However, their responses differed in that the USMC wife, though challenged by pausing her career, found peace in accepting that the “good outweighed the bad” in what she had gained from her husband and the military, including American citizenship. The AF E-6 wife, a stay-at-home mom with two small children, spoke flatly of her aspirations to open her own hair salon after her husband ends his military career, “whenever that is.” During the interview, the AF E-6 wife’s demeanor appeared melancholy as though she felt defeated in acting upon her agency to try to change her situation that included physical, social, and emotional isolation. The various iterations of isolation and subordination, felt by women in both samples, manifested in varied ways. Given the close-knit nature of this community, in either actual relationships or simply geographic proximity, how women navigate the subordinate, yet pivotal, military spouse status can have significant implications for their marriages, friendships, and sense of self.
Mean Girl Avoidance: Gendered Boundary Construction
One particularity of this world is how interconnected the military community is—even when spouses attempt to maintain distance from unit or base activities, they are often pulled into the military spouse group’s interpersonal drama and inner workings. As one respondent married to a Marine E-6 explained: It [the military] really is a way of life, there is so much that goes into it. With civilian jobs, it really doesn’t go into your personal life but with the military it’s everything. They know all about your personal life and what you do, but that’s just part of it because you’re always moving around and having to deal with stuff, working late hours, and everyone is tight knit here [on base] anyway. We always know what is going on. We’re tight knit as far as families…me and other wives and we all know each other. Because you do not want to be friends with military wives. You just don’t. I tried and there’s so much drama….I mean, all the experiences are bad that I’ve had…I tried to get out there and meet people. Every experience was the same…they’re nosy, they want to be in your business and then when they found out things they’d try to cause drama…so I stopped being involved.
They are also constructing acceptable femininity that has an air of maturity about it as well as a marked component of responsibility and poise that connects to both constructions of class and age. As an E-3 Army spouse expressed, “I’m a grown up, I don’t do drama.” These implications are also evident in the interview with an E-5 Navy spouse: This is going to sound horrible, but my take on it is a lot of the wives, they’re young. They’re like 19 and 20 years old and have 2 kids. And I think we are just at totally different points in our lives. I’m like mid-career and they like, haven’t finished high school. And not that it’s bad…they just like spend all day gossiping, getting into neighborhood quarrels and I’m like, “Really?” so I just distance myself. I’ve never had a problem…but they have Facebook pages and there is cattiness back and forth and I’m just like, “Oh, gosh!”
For some, the drama stemmed from the wives’ sense of entitlement. An E-4 AF spouse, who served in the military prior to having children, noted the sense of entitlement some wives have and the relationship between that and “high school” like politics: It’s very different interacting with the spouses on a spouse level and it’s very different interacting with spouses that have never been in [the service] versus the spouses that have been in. There’s a lot of entitlement as a spouse which confuses me. There’s a lot of like, “I’m also in the military,” even though they’re spouses so it’s a lot like being in high school and they’re dating the popular kid if they’re like an officer’s wife. [But] like you’re a civilian. We’re all civilians. We’re not in the military. We have no power. We’re all just the same and it just goes over their heads.
Some women construct gender by appealing to their lack of stereotypical feminine interests or by asserting that they are a “guys” girl. As an E-7 Navy spouse explained, I’ve always been the kind of girl, or woman, whichever you want to say….I don’t make friends with other women easily. I don’t gossip, I don’t buy shoes, I don’t go to Pampered Chef® parties, I don’t like the uh, the stereotypical female relationship. It is annoying to me. So I just dug into whatever I could do for my kids.
While the majority of respondents expressed frustration with other military spouses, it is important to note that some women found great satisfaction in being part of a military spouse community and that feelings of frustration and satisfaction were not entirely mutually exclusive. Even those who identified problems with the role and community also talked about things they liked in this lifestyle. When asked whether they participate in on-base activities, an AF E-6 replied, I try to be as active as I can…we want to start volunteering…and then he’s [been] deployed 5 times already. Unless you’re a military wife you don’t know what it’s like to have a husband who is deployed…and at one point, we realized, I think in like 11 years we had been apart 7 years total. I just really like the military community….I try to be as much a part of it as possible.
Independent Women: Exerting Agency to Construct Their Own Identity
During interviews, the “independent” label arose often utilized in a variety of ways. Primarily used as a descriptor, independent created distance between the spouse and the perceived drama of the “stereotypical” spouses who either act as though they are entitled by their husband’s rank or too closely resemble the dependapotamus figure. When discussing military spouses, an E-7 AF spouse told the researcher: When you think of the ‘typical’ military wife you think of the one who is sitting at home, on base, you know…however many kids…but, um, when you think of the normal, typical military wife I do not think I fall into that category. I’m not the stereotype. You think about the ones that have deployed soldiers or a lot of them are stay-at-home moms or they live on base, or you know like all, everything, their whole little world is like military and they don’t look beyond military and I’ve just never been that way. I’ve got my own career, my own independence….
An E-5 Army spouse discussed the push and pull she feels between being independent and embracing the military spouse role: It’s been a complicated thing [being a military spouse] because I want to be my own person and I kinda like being a military wife and that’s all I’ve ever known myself to be because we have been together since he was in the army. It’s hard to not try to connect myself as a military wife, I know I don’t carry any of his rank or anything like that. I don’t have that personality that some wives do but, um, I dunno. It’s, I think it can be also a negative thing because when you are trying to apply for a job people will think that since you’re a military wife you’ll have to move away a lot.
Spouses that do have careers can experience negative judgment from other spouses. Two senior Army wives, E-6 and E-8, expressed feeling isolated by other military wives, both officer and enlisted, because of their education, employment, and class (enlisted). Both wives were educated, the E-8 having a master’s and the E-6 her bachelors’ and were working career professionals who had geographically separated from their service member spouse to maintain their careers. Both shared that this last fact did not cast them in a favorable light to other wives in their husbands’ units making them the subject of gossip. The Army E-8 wife related that when her husband received PCS orders to move to Fort Campbell from Langley in Southern Virginia, she remained in Virginia for 2 years until she found a similar job 1 hr from the Kentucky base. When she did join him at Fort Campbell, she received an unwelcoming reception from the wives in the unit describing that she appeared to be an officer’s wife, dressing nicely with a fashionable hairstyle, and “polish.” Yet, once officers’ wives found out she was married to an enlisted soldier they ignored her, and she speculated that once the enlisted wives found out she had a career, they thought, “She must think she’s too good for us.” Unit wives rebuffed her efforts to organize unit FRG events because they did not work and preferred daytime-only activities during children’s school hours, times that were inconvenient for the working wife. She added that upon joining the enlisted spouses club at previous duty station, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, “The other wives in the group complained that I should have to pay more in dues because I worked.” The Army E-6 shared a similar experience in that her professional and educated appearance did not “win her friends” in the wives’ social circle in her husband’s unit.
Instead of invoking the descriptor of independent as a way to distance themselves, some do credit the military for increasing their sense of independence. For example, one E-4 Navy spouse expressed, “I think being a military spouse helped me to be more independent and strong….” Some wives believed the military fostered their independence as they dealt with long involuntary separations such as deployments and raising their children as single parents while managing the home front. In contrast to the spouses discussed earlier, some women described their independence as something that connected them to the military spouse identity. As another E-7 AF spouse noted, “You need to make Dad feel needed when he is present but also need him to know that you will be ok when he is not there. You need that balance, ‘Yes, we need you, but we will be ok without you’.” This E-7’s performance required a delicate negotiation of demonstrating her independence to assure her husband that she was capable to handle the family in his absence, while at the same time, reaffirming his status as the head of the household and maintaining his ego by making him feel needed and important.
Discussion
Within the institution and community of the military, spouses are crucial to the functioning of service members yet are simultaneously subordinate to them. The paradoxical figure of the military wife is supposed to be on the one hand, supportive of her husband and the mission, independent, and self-sufficient when he is gone (Bowen & Orthner, 1983; Harrell, 2001; Taber, 2009), but on the other hand, completely dependent on him when he is home (Burland & Lundquist, 2013; Enloe, 2000). Divisive stereotypes of military wives ranging from lazy, opportunistic, and irresponsible, to overly rank conscious and entitled, serve to police the military spouse role. Through interviews with military spouses, it became evident that the status insecurity manifested by the institution and the demands of navigating a world that they may not have chosen for themselves, both play roles in the construction of their spouse identities. By utilizing such mechanisms as symbolic boundary work, gender policing, and stereotyping, they reify the stereotypical imagery of the military spouse while shaping the perception of the ideal wife and exerting agency in creating the military spouse identity for themselves.
Specific patterns emerged when women discussed their understanding of what it means to be a military spouse and how they feel about socializing with other spouses. First, there was a clear understanding of the inherent subordinate status of the spouse within both their households and the greater military community. This status not only infiltrated how they saw themselves, it also had bearing on their relationships with their partners in addition to within their social circles. Within their household, women were acutely aware that their needs come second and that they were representative figures of their husband. In regard to the broader community, while drawing on the rank of their husbands gave some women a sense of power, it also served as a source of ridicule from other wives, thus illustrating a significant paradox of the military spouse experience: ultimately representing one’s husband yet not being the service member (Alt, 2006; Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013; Kleykamp, 2013). An ideal wife would be able to stand on her own and support her husband without drawing on his rank. Older spouses and women with careers were able to separate from these stereotypes; however, they were still acutely aware of these issues and spoke in ways that discursively distanced themselves from them. Furthermore, the negative stereotypes that are referenced draw on both classed and raced (Harrell, 2000) based assumptions about what is the military ideal wife as most evidenced by what it is not: the figure of the dependapotamus.
Almost all of the women invoked their independence as a way of navigating or negotiating this subordinate status and as a means to overcome it. Some, such as women who were employed, drew on their independence as a way to create distance, therefore taking power away from this assigned status, while others, those who had been part of the community for a long time or who had positive experiences, used it to embrace their military spouse role and to demonstrate mastery of said role. Lastly, the majority of women professed a distaste for the dramatic or catty spouses, claiming that they are too mature for them or that they do not enjoy such negatively stereotypical “female activities.” This assumption of cattiness on the part of other wives stems from both constructs of gender within the realm of the military community and everyday constructs of gender that we find in civilian life (Armstrong et al., 2014; Bettie, 2003; Currie et al., 2007; Miller, 2016); moreover, the stigmatization of drama, catty, or “bitchy” behavior serves to police women in their daily lives while also constructing femininity. These stakes are ever heightened in the super masculine world of the military, as feminization is arguably exponentially stigmatized (Karney & Crown, 2007; Weber, 2012).
Analysis of this specific group of women can shed light on how social identity and self-understanding function within institution- and community-oriented contexts. We also gain a better understanding of how adult social relationships unfold in this type of setting and how the continued reliance on gender policing endures long past the tumultuous phase of adolescence. Additionally, through analyzing the perpetuation of these stereotypes and their use as both pejoratives and as markers for reference, potential avenues for women to exert their agency may appear as they negotiate and navigate a heavily gendered institution and resulting social relations from a subordinate status. To clarify, not all interviewed women engaged with these stereotypes to the same degree. For example, spouses who held employment outside of the household or who were older than their counterparts appeared to engage less with the community than younger and/or unemployed participants. However, all women regardless of their levels of engagement were well aware of these stereotypes and invoked them in conversation in some way.
While informative, this current study does have limitations. First, only military spouses who fulfilled specific demographic criteria were included in the study thus providing issues of generalizability. Additionally, the comparative study design utilized allowed us to identify patterns across two groups of military spouses that originated from separate, but related, interview protocol that could limit the scope of the claims made. Although significant patterns emerged from this sample, more research would deepen the level of understanding of how wives’ function in this community at large. Moving forward, a broader sample of wives could shed light on any claims of universality found in these patterns within this specific social group, as well uncover other mechanisms by which wives go about performing their military spouse role.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Shannon Davis, Angela Hattery, Laura Martin, Mario Hernandez, and Kumiko Endo for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Their criticisms and suggestions have been invaluable. We are also thankful for the rich and detailed feedback provided by the reviewers from the journal, we very much appreciate their time and attention to our work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material provided from Elizabeth Ziff is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant 1332926. The material provided from Felicia Garland-Jackson is based upon work supported by NPS CESU agreement # P11AC30805.
