• DOI:10.1057/pol.2015.6
• Corpus ID: 152359164

Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-only Registration

@article{Geva2015DependencyAA,
  title={Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-only Registration},
  author={Dorit Geva},
  journal={Polity},
  year={2015},
  volume={47},
  pages={199-224}
}

• Dorit Geva
• Published 1 April 2015
• Economics
• Polity

How has male-only draft registration been ideologically justified in the United States? Feminist International Relations and Security Studies scholars would, correctly, point to the strong association between masculinity and militarism in explaining the preservation of male-only registration. I argue, however, that feminist political-sociological scholarship on the centrality of the male breadwinner/female caregiver distinction to numerous federal programs sheds light on ideological justification for women’s exclusion from draft registration. Much like other federal programs, concerns with women’s dependency and men’s economic independence shaped the Selective Service System in 1917. Fear of unraveling the family’s sexual division of labor persisted when Congress renewed all-male draft registration in 1980, a position to which the Supreme Court deferred in 1981. I conclude by arguing that the draft’s problematic nature would endure if women were required to register with Selective Service and that the new arrangement would likely reproduce multiple inequalities.