A fresh contribution to women’s history.
A military historian examines women’s volunteer efforts to support American troops.
An adviser to a PBS documentary on the United Service Organizations, Vuic (War, Conflict, and Society/Texas Christian Univ.; The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, 2017, etc.) draws on extensive archival sources to create a thoroughly documented, anecdote-filled history of women’s roles as recreation program volunteers from World War I to the present. Besides illuminating women’s significance in military life, the author chronicles changes in assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race in American culture for the last 100 years. Under the auspices of the Red Cross, the USO, and the military’s Special Services, young women worked on bases and battlefields “to distract lonely men from war’s boredom and brutality,” serving as “representations of ideal femininity and womanhood, and as reminders of the civilian and domestic life to which the men would return.” Preferred volunteers were college-educated, attractive, vivacious, and independent, eager for the adventure of an overseas assignment. Above all, they needed “to embody a particular kind of middle-American wholesomeness” that would contrast favorably with scantily clad USO performers and “exotic, sexualized native women” such as prostitutes, who thronged around military bases. Volunteers cooked, handed out doughnuts, and danced with servicemen; however, they were warned, romance and sex were not in their job description. During the Vietnam War, the Red Cross rotated women often during their tour to keep them from becoming too close to soldiers. Some volunteers chafed at restrictions, which included living behind barbed-wire fences, obeying curfews, and never leaving camp alone. In 1973, the transition from conscription to the All-Volunteer Force meant that more families accompanied servicemen and servicewomen, changing the volunteers’ role from being “wholesome symbols of desire” to offering programs such as community centers and summer day camp. Still, even with increasing numbers of servicewomen, officials continued to sanction “hypersexualized entertainment,” evidence of the “conflicting, yet intertwined ways” that women have been used by the military.
A fresh contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-98638-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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