mmo Books

Women’s work and the public sphere

page four

In Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, anthropologist Catherine Lutz asks the question: “How have bombs and bases come to live in so many American communities and why are their burdens so little recognized?” Homefront uses the history of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, NC to critically examine the social and economic costs of militarization. While Homefront was published just before September 11, 2001, her analysis is relevant to the social context of the current war on terror. According to Lutz, residents of the United States “inhabit an armed camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state of war readiness that has been with us since WWII.”

Today, Fort Bragg is home to, among others, the 82nd Airborne Division and a variety of Special Operations Forces, whose soldiers and officers are deployed to the war on terror’s hotspots. The fortunes of Fayetteville, NC have been tied to Fort Bragg since 1918 when the town’s civic boosters began a successful campaign to lure a military installation to the region.

Lutz provides an enormous amount of information that shows how much of American society is influenced and funded by the military. While the United States may be proud of its “volunteer army,” that volunteer army requires “standing” resources.

For example, by 1999 the US government’s military operations covered over 27 million acres. In the state of Nevada alone, the government controls large portions of airspace and more than three million acres of land, some of which was used as a weapons testing site.

Since WWII, military projects have doubled, in some sense, as public works projects by spending fifteen trillion dollars between 1946 and 1991. In 1992, just over 40 percent of all tax dollars went to military purposes. If you add civilian employees who work on military projects to its regular employees, the military is the country’s largest employer.

Given the huge sums of money involved, one might think that living next to a military installation would be economically beneficial. As Lutz shows, this is far from the case. For one reason, military spending is one of the least efficient job creation engines. A billion dollars given for military projects will create 26,000 jobs. The same amount give to health care will provide 37,000 jobs and if given to education, will provide 48,000 jobs.

An economy dominated by the military creates other problems. Military needs pull researchers away from other industries, giving the research and profits in consumer items like electronics and automobiles to researchers in countries such as Germany and Japan that have small militaries. A powerful military also prevents the development of social policies, such as universal health care. While millions of military veterans and workers receive a wide range of benefits, these benefits are not race, class, or gender neutral:

The high-paying jobs designing and crafting advanced Cold War weaponry were in the engineering and technical fields whose workforces were overwhelming white and male. The women who did get jobs on military contracts found a gender pay gap even wider than in civilian work. More well-known than this effect is the GI Bill’s disproportionate assist to men, both in the late 1940s and now.

The result of this implicit labor policy of military spending is that blacks of both sexes and women of all races have been left comparatively worse off and so more in need of welfare programs. The idea of unearned benefits is then associated with blacks and women in the minds of many Americans.

Fayetteville illustrates the problems of living in such close proximity to a large military base. As Lutz points out, one way to imagine Fayetteville’s relationship with Fort Bragg is to imagine it as a city dominated by “one gigantic firm.” While not everybody works for the firm, it influences wages and benefits, working conditions, development opportunities, and what resources are available to the town. In such an environment, it is only relatively small segments of the population that benefit

The combination of more soldiers having families, advertising, and easy credit means storeowners in Fayetteville, who sell goods not available on base, do well. For retail workers, however, the situation is much different. The region’s exceptionally large labor pool, composed of military retirees and dependents, local residents, and the unemployed, ensures that wages are lower than in other areas of the state because there will always be someone to take the job.

Fayetteville loses tax money through exemptions for federal land and exemptions for consumer goods sold on the base. However, soldiers and their families use public resources, which the local community must provide for a population that is larger than its tax base. Since Fayetteville cannot collect property taxes from the military, one area affected is public education. While many of the children of military families attend Department of Defense schools located on the base, those living off-base as well as all high-school age students attend public schools. Because of the small tax base, the area has one of the North Carolina’s lowest rates of school spending.

The majority of people in the military are young, which means that a greater burden is places on city resources that support children and young families. The area has one of the state’s highest rates of child poverty and infant mortality. Fayetteville also has a large number of other features that are considered to be low-income markers—trailer parks, substandard housing, poor roads, and neighborhoods without water and sewer hookups. Although there are women in the military, as a labor force, the military is still overwhelmingly male, leading to a situation in which “[s]trip clubs and prostitution spill into the daily lives of people in the poorer neighborhoods in town.”

It turns out that proximity to the military creates a strange kind of social dependency:

[W]hile Fayetteville’s military dependency has made fortunes for some as the post continued to grow through the 1970s and 1980s, its economy was increasingly based on selling goods and services to soldiers, creating retail jobs that pay less than any other category of work. Despite the egalitarian pay and strong benefits packages military works bring to town, overall the installation established a low-wage economy, a vulnerable labor force of dependent women and teens, the high crime rates that come with poverty, and a weak democratic culture and public sphere.

What these books vividly show is the constraints government policy, entrenched ideas about gender, and attitudes toward what counts as employment have on women’s abilities to create a life which honors their personal, familial, and professional needs--however those needs may be combined. In today’s America, the government wants to own its successes, but not solve its problems. Until the government is forced to do so, women will find their ability to achieve the full benefits of citizenship determined by forces outside their influence and control.

mmo : march 2005

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