ABSTRACT
Describing the military-or its object, war-as an engine of social change is a kind of truism; certainly so in our century. We have to remake our lives, forget our old hatreds and learn new ones." As a prominent feminist historian recently concluded, "although government propaganda exhorted women to brave unfamiliar work, the appeals were contained by nationalist and militarist discourse that reinforced patriarchal, organistic notions of gender relations. When one examines the military's role in stimulating government actions or innovations that later become institutionalized, the effect of war in driving social revolution grows evident. The essential plot, of course, is the manner in which the military tears down their regional biases and loyalties, and builds instead a common Americanism, which goes out to vanquish the fascist foe. The Good War also brought to culmination the federal government's campaign against the family as an autonomous institution, with the military serving as the vehicle for another kind of social engineering.
