Domestic Containment or Equal Standing?: Gender, Nationalism, and the War on Terror

“The true symbols of the War on Terror are the Islamic veil and the two-piece woman’s business suit.”

— USA Today, 26 September 2005

This article is inspired by the work of Jane De Hart, who has written incisively on the history of women’s rights, and on the impact of international engagement on gender roles and American national identity. Historically in the United States, military engagement has deeply influenced the development of American citizenship and social policy. War and military engagement also affect the development of governing institutions in ways that have long-term implications for political incorporation of various social groups. In periods of war, American political leaders have been particularly attentive to the way that gender roles and ideals represent the nation, as they sought to differentiate the United States from its international enemies—such as the Nazis in World War II, the Communists during the Cold War, and Islamic Radicals in the War on Terror today.¹ In justifying the current war, the Bush administration employed a rhetoric of women’s emancipation in Afghanistan and Iraq that set out a vision of what rights matter most for women, and implicitly invoked a comparison to U.S. gender politics. A similar comparison was made after World War II, in comparing American gender relations to the totalitarian demands imposed upon women by the Nazi regime in Germany and the Communist regime in the Soviet Union. In this article, I will explore the parallels in the framing of gender and nationalism during the Cold War and in the War on Terror today.

The Cold War and its Legacy

During the Cold War (1950s–1980s), the nation’s status in the world relative to the Communist bloc influenced the way that gender roles and rights were regarded in the United States. As Elaine Tyler May (1988) wrote in Homeward Bound, just as the United States sought to contain communism internationally, the nation also sought to contain social forces that seemed to threaten domestic life at home. The turn to containment grew out of the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s: “Cold war ideology and the domestic revival [were] two sides of the same coin: postwar Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future” (10). Jane De Hart (2001, 1999) has explored May’s theme of domestic containment more fully in several essays that explore gender relations and national identity during the Cold War. De Hart (2001) notes that in times of national crisis “formative configurations of gender, sexuality and nationhood” are “often reasserted, sometimes coercively, in constructions of national identity” (143). Domestic containment operated in the 1950s at a time when “fear of communism permeated American life” and policymakers believed that “stable family life [was] necessary for personal and national security as well as supremacy over the Soviet Union” (125).

The turn toward domestic containment came after a moment in which some Americans were advancing a more egalitarian vision of gender relations in the United States. The 1940s was a period in which there was a more clearly articulated standard of universalism that was represented in a commitment to common rights for all persons. World War II had made apparent the costs of using status demarcations (such as race, religion, or ethnicity) to create a segregated or stratified legal and political order. Following the war, previously marginalized ethnic and minority groups articulated new rights claims,² and were eligible for new social benefits under the GI Bill. It even appeared for a time as if women would be able to make new rights and equality claims based upon their war service and support (Ritter 2006, chap. 6). Yet, in the process of securing social provisioning for veterans, the nation reordered the terms of social citizenship such that there was a new hierarchy of civic standing that was gendered. Under this new hierarchy, the civic virtue of the male veteran was recognized as superior to all others. The female dependents of veterans were awarded civic recognition as well—indirectly, through their association with male veterans. In...