The Men Who Stayed at Home: Civilian Masculinities on the American Home Front During World War II

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My research examines the ways in which male American civilians constructed, reconstructed, and expressed theirmasculinities and manhood in the 1940s. I situate my study in the period during which the Selective Service Act was inoperation (1940-1947), because, as James Sparrow has argued, the ways in which Selective Service officials classifieddifferent groups of men 'had momentous consequences for the manhood' of 'the men subjected to them'. I focus on threegroups deferred from service by the Selective Service administration: COs (conscientious objectors who receivedCategory IV-E status); 'war workers' and agricultural labourers deferred because of the importance of their work to thewar effort (Category II); and men, including homosexuals, deemed 'physically, mentally, or morally unfit' for service(Category IV-F). By pushing women into traditionally male occupations and further idealising the combat GI as the ideal-type male, the war forced these three civilian groups to reconstruct, and negotiate the challenges to, their own genderedidentities. Investigating these processes will provide a fuller picture of gender on the WWII home front.