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

Under her industrial uniform, that World War II icon Rosie the Riveter ostensibly concealed an alter ego: the “patriotute.” Marilyn Hegarty explains that federal officials coined this term in order to describe “women who, in responding to the nation’s call to service, crossed an all-too-ambiguous line between the good and bad woman” (13). In her impressive book, Hegarty argues that government agencies attempted both to mobilize and to control female sexuality during the wartime emergency. In doing so, policymakers drew upon familiar beliefs in female sexual danger as well as upon associations of black people’s bodies with deviance and disease. Despite widespread ambivalence about the (prostitution) repression program and women’s isolated attempts to resist sexual policing, Hegarty maintains, the “social protection” agenda expanded government intervention into women’s lives around the nation, deepened the sexual double standard, and contained the threat of independent womanhood by marking thousands of women’s bodies as hazardous and even as potentially treasonous. Because the analysis centers on policing and regulation, the book tells only part of the story of women’s wartime sexual experience and may downplay girls’ and women’s creative evasion of state control. Nevertheless, scholars of gender, sexuality, and the wartime state will find this book convincing, engaging, and important.

Methodologically, Hegarty draws upon cultural and feminist theory and the history of science to interpret an otherwise conventional source base: government records and, to a lesser extent, print culture such as women’s magazines. The result is a sophisticated and often compelling interdisciplinary analysis. Feminist scholarship, for example, leads Hegarty to consider how sexualized women resisted state control by deriving women’s own explanations of their sexual histories and present actions from the forms filled out by those who were apprehended on morals charges. Such sources support some of Hegary’s most significant points, including her indictment of wartime officials for ignoring evidence of family sexual abuse and statutory rape in their rush to criminalize and pathologize women who exercised social and/ or sexual independence during the war.

In chapter 1, “The Long Arm of the State,” Hegarty identifies the constellation of government agencies that made up what she calls the “apparatus of the state.” They included the Federal Security Agency’s Social Protection Division as well as the US Army and Navy, state health departments and the US Public Health Service, police officers and associations, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the Children’s Bureau, and the American Social Hygiene Association. This chapter explains how these different agencies and organizations worked together, if occasionally at cross-purposes, to prevent the transmission of venereal diseases “from” civilian women “to” servicemen (as if it were a one-way street) by waging “war against the patriotutes.” Hegarty’s analysis of public policy in this chapter is robust, and the rest of the book would benefit from more of the specificity that it exhibits. Even here, for example, broad claims such as “the apparatus of the state took notice” (41) and “the state fully agreed” (45–46) leave the reader wondering which public authorities were responsible for particular actions.

In chapters 2 and 3 Hegarty locates the ideological origins of the wartime social protection campaign in early twentieth-century social and scientific discourses that reframed young female sexuality as requiring discipline rather than as victimized or exploited. The author traces officials’ conflation of prostitution and promiscuity—a defining feature of the wartime campaign—to “older attitudes toward female sexuality” (45), thereby characterizing the repression campaign as a (final?) chapter in a familiar story of social control. The beginning of chapter 3 sees Hegarty at her most theoretical, highlighting the social dimensions of disease, the marking (and leaving unmarked) of particular bodies, and prior “myths” associating the “sexually promiscuous and diseased woman” with monstrosity, otherness, depravity, and peril (63). A short...