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Women are expanding their numbers and roles in the United States military. This new generation of military women is exposed to unique factors related to their gender that contribute to challenges for psychosocial well-being and optimal performance. In support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), researchers have identified unique factors for military women, including increased combat exposure, continued military sexual trauma and harassment, and conflicting dual roles. These factors may create obstacles that inhibit help-seeking behaviors and support for military women, and remain an under-researched topic of study. Gender-specific research on military women is limited; current research has primarily focused on discharged veterans and has been remiss in addressing women-specific issues for those currently serving in an active duty status. This study sought to address this under-researched phenomenon by exploring the military experiences of women on active duty in the United States Marine Corps. The purpose was to learn more about military women’s experiences and perceptions of stressors, coping behaviors, and sources of social support within this context. This study used a feminist phenomenological methodology to better understand military women’s experiences and specific stressors that influence their coping behaviors. A phenomenological data analysis procedure revealed five core themes and sub-themes that were synthesized into the essence. Implications for practice, policy, and future research are included to enhance women Marines’ psychosocial well-being and optimal performance while they serve on active duty.

As the Vietnam War extended into the 1970s, concerns arose in Washington about the decreased number of men enlisting in the armed services. Conscription kept the ranks full temporarily, but the draft’s end precipitated a crisis. Due to the increased need for humanpower, the military broke with precedent and disbanded its female auxiliary organizations, admitting women as full-fledged members. This dissertation explores the first twenty years of women’s service after integration, from 1972 (the year that the last draft calls were issued) to 1992 (just after the First Gulf War) to examine the experiences of American women in uniform and how they affected a gendered military structure. In doing so, it argues that servicewomen were seen as both “ladies” and “brothers.” It explores how these contradictory identities affected women’s military experiences, striving to tell this story in the voices of the women involved by drawing on previous interdisciplinary scholarship, supplemented by archival research and oral historiesWomen’s experiences in the United States military were inherently different than men’s. This dissertation seeks to determine how concepts of gender changed in the military, and how those changes impacted servicewomen’s experiences. Just as important is an assessment of how female veterans viewed their own experiences after they returned to civilian life. Sexual harassment and assault will loom large as examples of some of the gendered obstacles women faced. Since those two transgressions concern power, not sex, most of these incidents involve men exerting control over women. This dissertation therefore looks at the ways in which sexual harassment and assault affected the lives of servicewomen: how the military and the women themselves conceptualized their experiences as gendered or not. Despite the marked change in servicewomen’s status, the Defense Department maintained a policy that pretended there was no role for them in combat. The United States would rather cling to the fantasy that women had not served under fire than admit that they were in dangerous situations. This dissertation offers case studies that challenge the fiction that women did not enter combat until the 21st century. Beginning with the invasion of Grenada, women saw themselves as warriors in a combat zone, regardless of the military’s blinkered point of view. In exploring women’s service during the 1980s and the First Gulf War, I am contributing to the recent historiographical trend that challenges the idea of women as noncombatants. These women’s roles, in fact, blurred the line between combatant and noncombatant. Setting the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in the context of liberalized women’s participation in the armed services, this dissertation explores the unappreciated changes that transformed the military during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. While the AVF marked the beginning of increased opportunities for women in the United States military, the backlash against women that occurred in the 1980s did not impact only civilian affairs. The military therefore reflected both positive and negative changes that swept the civilian world. This dissertation will assess how women navigated those changes and explore why they occurred by attempting to create a comprehensive historical narrative of women’s military experiences that traces the service and lives of military women from the end of Selective Service through their active involvement in the First Gulf War. / History