This paper examines newspaper portrayals produced by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times of women in the military from Sept. 11, 2001, to Sept. 11, 2009. The purpose was to identify how the three nationally recognized U.S. newspapers depict women’s expanding combat roles on contemporary battlefields that lack definitive front lines. Because the news media are the primary vehicle to update the general public on military matters, how the news media portray military women can play a role in shaping audience perceptions of military women. In turn, this relationship can influence the public debate on issues pertaining to women in the military. For my research method, I employed a longitudinal, qualitative content analysis of news articles that revealed three distinctively themed portrayals of U.S. servicewomen. The thematic findings include: "Tip of the Spear," a largely laudatory category portraying the "new" or "first" generation of servicewomen filling historically uncommon (particularly direct ground combat) roles for women; the "Combat Debate," with coverage listing arguments for and against military women’s expansion into "direct ground combat;" and the "Sexual Assault" category that exposed women as continued victims of sexual assault across the U.S. Armed Forces. The portrayals of women in the "Tip of the Spear," and to a lesser extent in the "Combat Debate," reveal how these three particular newspapers are applying a new formula to represent military women. Rather than portraying military women in stereotypical support roles—or castigating them for transgressing gender norms—the stories from these papers cast the servicewomen performing traditional masculine military activities in a positive light. However, following objective reporting protocol, the reports in the "Combat Debate" category also covered conventional patriarchal concerns to include protecting women from harm, particularly military mothers. Overall, these two categories comprised the greater part of the coverage of military women among the reports in this study, with only a handful of reports covering women as victims. I propose that the many positive portrayals that describe women fulfilling nontraditional masculine roles and activities demonstrate a revised blueprint in how the news media report on military women. Furthermore, while these research results cannot be applied universally outside this study’s sample, I contend that these types of images representing today’s servicewomen on contemporary battlefields increase public acceptance of women in the military and their expanding military assignments.

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This thesis explores institutionalized discrimination in the United States Military by examining the rationales given for policies that exclude, or limit the military service of racial minorities, women and homosexuals, and the rationales given for altering such policies. outgroups such as racial minorities, women and homosexuals are presumed to be a threat to the white male heterosexual majority within the military services. The presence of these outgroups in the military has been officially characterized as threatening to small-unit cohesion, and therefore threatening to military readiness. This thesis was first based upon the assumption that the rationales favoring discriminatory policies, and rationales favoring reform, would be expressed in the language of small-group theories of cohesion, that is, cohesion based upon the self-categorization of group members, or the interdependence of group members. However, in the data analysis process, two other rationales emerged: the ideological and the bureaucratic rationales. Data illustrating these four rationales were drawn from a content analysis of articles and other commentary published in the New York Times. Statements were crosstabulated by the stance (exclusionist or reformist) they supported and the rationale (self-categorical, interdependent, ideological or bureaucratic) they employed to justify the stance. This analysis was first done separately for each of the three groups, racial minorities, women and homosexuals, and then the data for each of the three outgroups were compared and contrasted. Findings indicate that despite the military's official characterization of outgroups as a threat to small-unit cohesion, relatively little of the debate was expressed in terms of small-group theories of cohesion-the self-categorization of, or interdependence of group members. The most frequently employed rationales were, in fact, ideological in character. Between the three groups, however, some differences in patterns of rationales and stances emerged. The findings are placed in their historical and political contexts to help explain the results of the analysis, and to illuminate the experience of racial minorities, women and homosexuals in the United States military.

This study explored factors that lead to adaptation among married women in the military during the stressor of deployment. The Double ABCX Model of Family Stress and Adaptation (McCubbin & Patterson, 1 983a, 1 983b, 1 983c) provided a strong theoretical model for this study, on which the empirical model for this study was based. In this study's empirical model, the variables that led to adaptation include the stressor event of military deployment, pile-up of demands (marital pile-up, family pile-up, financial pile-up, and job pile-up), resources (personal resources, family system resources, and social support resources), and perception (perception of deployment and perception of all). The 1999-2000 United States Air Force Community Needs Assessment was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling and Multiple Hierarchical Regression. The Structural Equation Modeling Analysis did not yield a path model and a Multiple Hierarchical Regression was executed in order to determine which variables in the path model contribute to adaptation. In this analysis, the independent variables were entered according to the theoretical consideration of the Double ABCX Model of Family Stress and Adaptation (McCubbin & Patterson, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c) and the proposed path model. The results Multiple Hierarchical Regression indicate that pileup of demands and resources provided a significant contribution to adaptation. However, deployment and perception did not contribute to the variance in adaptation, which was incongruent to previous findings. The most significant limitation of the study is the disadvantages of conducting a secondary analysis since measures available are less than ideal for the variables in the model. There were several benefits of the study, including the inclusion of women in the military, improvement of the Double ABCX Model of Family Stress and Adaptation (McCubbin & Patterson, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c), and potential early evaluation and intervention of families during periods of stress. Future research is indicated, focusing on extended deployments, qualitative studies exploring the role of perception in adaptation, other understudied population in the military (civilian husbands, men in the military, and dual military couples), and additional model improvement. / Graduation date: 2004

This thesis is an exploration of the construction of the gendered body in combat in the late twentieth century, in Australia and the United States of America. While it is not a military history, aspects of military history, and representations of war and warriors are used as the vehicle for the analysis of the politics of representing gender. The mythic, the material and the media(ted) body of the gendered warrior are examined in the realms of ‘real’ military histories and news coverage, and in the ‘speculative’ arena of popular culture. Through this examination, the continuities and ruptures inherent in the gendered narratives of war and warriors are made apparent, and the operation of the politics of representing gender in the public arena is exposed. I have utilised a number of different approaches from different disciplines in the construction of this thesis: feminist and non-feminist responses to women in the military; aspects of military histories and mythologies of war specific to Australia and the United States; theories on the construction of masculinities and femininities; approaches to gender identity in popular news media, film and television. Through these approaches I have sought to bring together the history of women in the military institutions of Australia and the United States, and examine the nexus between the expansion of women’s military roles and the emergence of the female warrior hero in popular culture. I have, as a result, analysed the constructions of masculinity and femininity that inform the ongoing association of the military with ‘quintessential masculinity’, and deconstructed the real and the mythic corporeal capacities of the gendered body so important to warrior identity. Regardless, or perhaps because of, the importance of gender politics played out in and through the representations of soldier identity, all their bodies must be considered speculative.