From Robert Westbrook, "'I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl that Married Harry James': American WOmen and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II"

My working hypothesis . . . is that, with some exceptions, Americans during World War II were not called upon to conceive of their obligation to participate in the war effort as a political obligation to work, fight, or die for their country. By and large, the representatives of the state and other American propagandists relied on two different moral obligations, neither of which constituted a claim of political obligation. First, they appealed to putatively universal moral values -- such as those enumerated in the Atlantic Charter or Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech -- values such as "freedom," "equality," and "democracy" transcnending obligations ot thew United States as a particular political community. Second, and more interestingly, they implored Americans as individuals and as families to join the war effort in order to protect the state that protected them, an appeal, philosophers have argued, characteristic of liberal states and one that, at bottom, is an appeal to go to war to defend private interests and discharge private obligations. Over the course of the war, this latter sort of prescription became increasingly prominent . . . (588)

Wartime pin-ups can tell us much about liberal political theory, as well as much about sexual politics. Or, to be more precise, theu can tell us something about the ways in which the American state attempted to draw on the moral obligations prescribed by prevailing gender roles to solve the problem of obligation posed by liberal ideology. (589)

In an essay entitled "The Obligation to Die for the State," Walzer addresses the problem of political obligation in the context of war and asks whether the obligation citizens have to the state can be made the motive for risking their lives. The answer to this question, he suggests, depends in critical respects on the nature of the state, and, in the case of the liberal state, the answer is no. The reason, he argues, is that the end of the liberal state -- as conceived in the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and their successors -- is the security of the lives of the individuals who form it. Consequently, "a man who dies for the state defeats his only purpose in forming the state: death is the contradiction of politics. A man who risks his life for the state accepts the insecurity which it was the only end of his political obedience to avoid: war is the failure of politics. Hence there can be no political obligation either to die or to fight." (590)

Walzer goes on to link more closely this problem that liberalism has with the "ultimate obligation" to its individualism and largely negative conception of liberty -- which make for a conception of the citizen as an individual whom the state protects from interference by other individuals or by the state itself. . . Walzer concludes that any theory like liberalism which "begins with the absolute independence of freely willing individuals and goes on to treat politics and the state as instrumental to the achievement of individual purposes would seem by its very nature incapable of describing ultimate obligation." (590-91)

[L]iberal states, bereft of a compelling argument of political obligation, will attempt to exploit private obligations in order to convince its citizens to serve in its defense. Indeed, it was precisely these sorts of obligations -- to families, to children, to parents, to buddies, and generally, to an "American Way of Life" defined as a rich (and richly commodified) private experience -- that formed a crucial element in the campaign to mobilize Americans for World War II. Yet few private obligations were more apparent in pronouncements about "why we fight" than those binding men and women. (591)

However, pin-ups were more than masturbatory aides. They also functioned as icons of the private interests and obligations for which soldiers were fighting. Several pieces of evidence suggest this point. First of all, many pin-ups were, as the complaints of some soldiers indicate, relatively demure . . . [S]ome of the most popular pin-ups were not those that flirted with the limits imposed by the censors. . . . Reporting on behalf of the Hollywood Victory Committee, Alan Ladd observed in 1943 that those who entertained the troops had learned that the boys preferred women who reminded them of their mothers and sisters. In search of "girls they can prize," servicemen were not interesrred in "flash.". . . (596)

Betty Grable's appeal, in particular, was less as an erotic "sex goddess" than as a symbol of the kind of woman for whom American men -- esepcially American working-class men -- were fighting. She was the sort of a girl a man could prize. (596)

Men, who have a monopoly on the use of violent power, find their identity bound up with the effectiveness of the protection they provide to their dependents. Hence, they may tend to "overprotect" them, and, even more disturbing, "there is a tendency for the protector to become a predator" who turns on his dependents, especially when things go badly.

When there is no real work or duty required of a protector the role is satisfying, it makes one proud. As role demands increase, and/or as the chances of fulfilling the role decrease, the practice of the role becomes less and less attractive. The protected becomes a nuisance, a burden, and finally a shame, for an unprotected protectee is the clearest possible evidence of a protector's failure. . . . As one gains ascendancy one gains dependents, as ones gains dependents their requirements for protection increase. . . . Thus the most wholly dependent protectees may be just the ones most likely to trigger a nihilistic impulse in their protector.

The dynamic Stiehm describes, may help explain the misogynistic, often violently misogynistic, character of much of the literature produced by soldiers . . . Though pin-ups are not the best documents through which to explore this dynamic, there is a hint of it in the use of a Grable pin-up to instruct troops in map-reading (Fig. 8). (602)

from Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (1944):

And this is how I was first introduced to Sergeant Frank ("Buck")
Eversole, one of the old timers. He shook hands sort of timidly
and said, "Pleased to meet you," and then didn't say any more. I could
tell by his eyes, and by his slow, courteous speech when he did talk,
that he was a Westerner. Conversation with him was rather hard, but I
didn't mind his reticence, for I know how Westerners like to size people
up first. The sergeant wore a brown stocking cap on the back of his
head. His eyes were the piercing kind. I noticed his hands, too--
they were outdoor hands, strong and rough.
Later in the afternoon I came past his foxhole again, and we sat
and talked a little while alone. We didn't talk about the war, but
mainly about our West, and just sat and made figures on the ground with
sticks. We got started that way, and in the days that followed I came
to know him well. He was to me, and to all those with whom he served,
one of the great men of the war.
Buck was a cowboy before the war . . . (199)

Thousands of our men will soon be returning to you.
They have been gone a long time, and they have seen and done
and felt things you cannot know. They will be changed. They
will have to learn how to adjust themselves to peace. Last
night we had a violent electrical storm around our
countryside. The storm was half over before we realized that
the flashes and the crashings around us were not artillery
but plain old fashioned thunder and lightning. It will be
odd to hear only thunder again. You must remember that such
little things as that are in our souls, and will take time.
And all of us together will have to learn how to
reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so
fair that another great war cannot soon be possible. To tell
the simple truth, most of us over in France don't pretend to
know the right answer. Submersion in war does not necessarily
qualify a man to be the master of the peace. All
we can do is fumble and try once more--try out of the memory
of our anguish--and be as tolerant with each other as we can.
(204-205)

from Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942):

Freud has made a fierce and wondrous catalogue of examples of
mother-love-in-action which traces its origins to an incestuous
perversion of a normal instinct. That description is, of course, sound.
Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth,
have been unable to benefit from Freud's wisdom because they can prove
that they do not, by and large, sleep with their mothers. That is their
interpretation of Freud. . . .
Meanwhile, megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand.
Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron
strings crisscrossing it that railroads and telephone wires. Mom is
everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her
depends all the rest of the U.S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old
mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at
every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and
die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away,
and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous
articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of
both in a way. She may therefore soon be granted by the House of
Representatives the especial supreme and extraordinary right of sitting
on top of both when she chooses, which, God knows, she does. . . (239)

From Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947):

The spawning ground of most neurosis in Western civilization is the home. The basis for it is laid in childhood, although it emerges strongly later, usually from late adolescence until middle age, provoked by circumstances and conditions encountered in life. And as we have pointed out, the principal agent in laying the groundwork for it is the mother. Many women classified as housewives and mothers are just as disturbed as were the feminists, and for the same general reasons. There are mothers, for example, who, although not neurotic, feel dissatisfied with the life they are leading. The home offers them few energy outlets. The work they do in it does not bring them prestige. Others, neurotic by reason of their own childhood upbringing and the failure of life to provide them with satisfactory outlets, suffer from the same general affliction as the feminists--penis-envy. It is more repressed than it was in the feminists, but it is at work in the psychic depths. . . .

Lundberg and Farnham list four categories of neurotic motherhood:

1. The rejecting mother, who in various degrees . . . apes society around her and rejects the child. . . .

2. The oversolicitous or overprotective mother, who underneath closely resembles the rejecting mother but whose entire activity represents a conscious denial of her unconscious rejection.

3. The dominating mother, who is also very often a very strict disciplinarian. This type obtains release from her misdirected ego-drives at the expense of the child. Denied other opportunities for self-realization, she makes her children her "pawns" . . . .

4. The over-affectionate mother, who makes up for her essentially libidinous disappointments through her children. Her damage is greatest with her sons, whom she often coverts into "sissies"--that is, into passive-feminine or passive-homosexual males.

There is, on the other hand, the fully maternal mother, who fortunately accounts for perhaps 50 per cent or more of the births because she has more children than the other types. She does not reject her children, attempt to overprotect them out of her guilty anxiety, dominate them or convert them into lap dogs. She merely loves her children.