Recruiting through mothers: you made them strong, we’ll make them Army Strong

ABSTRACT

This article uses narrative analysis to examine how the military relies on gender inequality to recruit new enlistees through parents, specifically focusing on mothers. Recently, the military shifted strategy to consider parents a critical gateway to enlisting new recruits. Using a network of websites aimed at convincing mothers service is right for their children, military recruiters sell enlistment as an avenue where children become adults and productive citizens. To do this, the military draws on gendered understandings of fatherhood and motherhood in recruitment materials. The military shows fathers approving their children’s enlistment. In contrast, recruitment advertisements spend time addressing and challenging mothers’ perceived emotions and misconceptions about the military. Mothers are assumed to not understand the military institution (as women), and to ‘naturally’ worry about safety (as mothers). By recruiting through mothers, the military strategically reinforces gendered divisions of labour during wartime.

KEYWORDS:

• family issues
• gender issues
• media
• recruitment/retention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All quotes in this analysis come from Go Army Parents, Go Coast Guard, Marine Recruiter, or Today’s Military, and were retrieved between September 2006 and September 2009. Due to impermanence of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and the use of Adobe Flash content, original URLs for the quotes and images are no longer available.

2. There were no significant differences in themes among branches.