Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (review)

In 1942, under the auspices of a wartime campaign to protect American soldiers from venereal disease, a twenty-nine-year-old white woman, identified only as "Mrs. A," was picked up in Leesville, Louisiana, and charged with vagrancy. Mrs. A drew the attention of local law enforcement when she stopped on her way home from her waitressing job to eat lunch and sat alone. Although she maintained she "only had sex with her husband," she was kept in the local jail for seven days until she gave in to pressure from the health department to take up residence in the isolation hospital (p. 138). Fortunately for Mrs. A, her tests for venereal disease came up negative. Mrs. A, though, was only one of thousands of women caught in the net of a massive effort to control women's sexuality during the Second World War, a program explored with depth and nuance in Marilyn E. Hegarty's superb book, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II.

In 1939 government officials from the Federal Security Agency (FSA), the army and navy, and state health departments joined forces with the American Social Hygiene Association to develop a plan to protect American military men from venereal diseases, which remained difficult to treat or cure until the discovery of penicillin late in the war. The resulting Eight Point Agreement, with its emphasis on the repression of prostitution, was followed by the creation in early 1941, inside the FSA, of the Social Protection Division, charged with protecting the sexual safety of American fighting men and civilian women. Then, in the summer of 1941, still months before American entry into the war, Congress passed the May Act, making prostitution within range of military bases a federal crime. With this legislative and institutional foundation laid, other agencies and committees followed, joining the fight against prostitution and creating a program that combined the power of government at the federal, state, and local levels with law enforcement agencies, public health departments, and reform groups. Setting out to eliminate prostitution to protect the men in uniform, this program soon exercised unmatched authority over women's sexual behaviors.

The outbreak of the war and the militarization of women's responsibilities, though, complicated these efforts. Mobilized to work outside the home and to provide entertainment for men in the military, American women stepped up to serve during the war, acting in ways they understood as patriotic. But women's new behaviors, not only on the factory line but as they moved through the public sphere—along streets and in dance halls, in train stations and parks, in saloons and restaurants—stretched the boundaries of gender norms and created fears that they were a threat, not only to the men in uniform but to the war effort and to community life. Such tension created the central paradox of the government's program, as Hegarty ably demonstrates. While men's sexual activity was understood as normative, a fittingly masculine quality of America's soldiers, women's sexuality was mobilized but then criminalized. Officials quickly expanded definitions of women's sexual deviance and targeted not just prostitutes but, as one commentator at the time explained, "the promiscuous girl, the khaki-wacky and the girl who has become unbalanced by wartime wages and freedom" (p. 144), or, as Otis Anderson of the United States Public Health Service termed them, patriotutes.

During the war, government at the local, state, and federal levels penalized women on the basis of traditional stereotypes and assumptions about gender, race, ethnicity, and class, and Hegarty is especially effective in attending to the intersections between these social categories in her analysis. Certain American bodies—those of women, and especially women of color and poorer women, as well as those of men of color, particularly African American men—were inscribed, Hegarty explains...