Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

American cultural fears and fantasies attached to shifting ideologies of gender were powerfully influenced by World War I and World War II. A new and fast-evolving industrial revolution, the growing social and political power of the New Woman, and cultural changes facilitated by the Industrial Revolution coalesced in the early twentieth-century and contributed to a sense that traditional masculine prerogative was in danger. Both World War I and World War II were propagandized as the solution to this perceived instability in gender relationships. In both cases the war failed to return American gender relations to the more clearly bifurcated private/public spheres of the nineteenth century.;Militarism, as the process by which communities and cultures come to be controlled by the military itself or military ideas, capitalized on the fears of the nation in order to foster public acceptance of the war and to encourage the enlistment of young men. I argue that the spectacular failure of either war to re-create a sense of masculine primacy in these young men is then documented in the American war literature of the era. Struggles to locate a more stable paradigm of gender play themselves out through war texts in which the disillusionment of soldiers who suffered physical, emotional, and psychological trauma is linked to a failing tradition of separate spheres between men and women. Anxiety regarding shifting modes of gender and power are expressed in a sense of betrayal felt by men who believed themselves to have been misled by their country into fighting, and preyed upon by their country's women.;In my first chapter, "Nursing an American Fantasy: Catherine Barkley and the Obfuscation of Masculine Trauma in A Farewell to Arms," Catherine Barkley's role as the military nurse and love object for her soldier hero reveal a powerful negotiation of social, literary, and national concerns regarding sex and power during World War I. My second chapter, "Dropping Bombs and Picking Up Bombshells: Wartime Prostitution in Alfred Hayes' The Girl on the Via Flaminia" addresses the nurse's perceived cultural other, the wartime prostitute. In my third chapter, "Raspberry Jam and Refugees: the Housewife at the Front in The Deepening Stream " I move to female authors in my analysis of Dorothy Fisher's popular novel. This move from more traditional war texts written by men to a so-called "domestic novel" entails an analysis of the social and literary definitions of value that were used to disenfranchise female authors who sought to politicize their personal opinions. In my final chapter, "Sissy Boys and Servicemen: Evaluating Masculinity and Militarism in Willa Cather's One of Ours," I evaluate Willa Cather's imagining of early twentieth-century masculinity, revealing the deep insecurities of men in this era, and the role that World War I played in the mediation of those insecurities.