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In her new book, sociologist Wendy Christensen, PhD, an associate professor of sociology at William Paterson University, takes a decade-long look at the War on Terror through an unexpected lens. She follows mothers of U.S. service members through the stages of recruitment, deployment, and post-deployment, chronicling the impact these women have on war – and the way war impacts them – in Mothers of the Military: Support and Politics During Wartime.
Christensen provides readers an inside view of military recruitment, finding it is heavily geared toward convincing fearful mothers to support enlistment of their children. Mothers need to be assured that their sons and daughters will be safe and will, as a result of the military, grow into educated, career-ready adults, recruiters tell the author in interviews. Such is the focus in recruiter training material, collected and analyzed by the author, as well as in military advertisements, which since casualty numbers began mounting in 2006, have focused less on the adventurous part of military duty and more on the opportunities for personal advancement, she explains.
Christensen also takes a look at the racial divide in recruitment, finding that single black and Latina mothers of sons are more actively sought by recruiters, where messages are repositioned to emphasize how the military will serve as the father figure a son needs.
During deployment, Christensen paints a picture of how military moms quickly and painfully become separated not only from their children, but from their entire social circles. “Their sons were going to college, and I just couldn’t relate,” one mother explains. “I was sending my son to do something potentially dangerous, not worrying about which towels to get for his dorm.” As a result, many military mothers turn to Internet-based groups, such as Semper Fi – explicitly recommended by military recruiters, in an effort to provide moms with some type of support.
Christensen takes a deep dive into this and several other online groups, joining the discourse, and analyzing the types of imagery and messaging their administrators promote, as well as the type of communication in which the women engage. As one of these women frantically emails the researcher in the middle of the night, panicked about how she doesn’t know how to contact her son, the story of such women’s often-invisible struggle becomes more and more apparent to readers.
The military population, the researcher notes, is a much smaller segment of our society than during previous wars: One percent of our country is in the military today.
Many mothers subsequently report feeling like they need to be the face of the war, organizing care package drives, having school children write holiday cards for troops, and sending letters to the editors of local newspapers. “A militaristic kind of motherhood surfaces,” Christensen explains, where mothers feel like they must be pro-war publicly in order to support the troops. “But while many of these mothers in their in-person and online social groups seem very patriotically pro-war on the surface, many confide that they grapple with the idea of war and feel our country was wrong to get into it.”
In the third part of her book, on post-deployment, Christensen follows up with some of her original pool of interviewees, finding that the mothers’ work as activists and advocates only intensifies when their sons and daughters return home. “Service members today are younger than they were in past years, and are getting married later in life, so their parents are often the primary avenue for support,” she explains. Many mothers subsequently quit their jobs or relocate in order to become physical caregivers of injured children, and others pound the pavement to fight for suicide awareness and support for PTSD.
Overall, Christensen says she was surprised to learn, through writing this book, how complex a relationship mothers have with political activism and the military during wartime. She hopes her work will shed light on such for the civilian population, while helping military mothers feel like they are not alone.
10/01/18
