ABSTRACT
This chapter synthesizes literature regarding how gender shapes veterans' experiences and identities from a policy, health, and social perspective. Scholars have shown that state-funded pensions and domicile institutional care offered in the nineteenth century were imagined and granted as a means of recompense for dutiful, masculine service, and that rehabilitation programs during and after the World Wars were intended to alleviate dependency and ensure that veterans could be workers and family breadwinners. The chapter examines veterans' organizations, activism, and ideals regarding public commemorations of service. Policy debates offer rich terrain for tracing how gendered notions of veteran status are built and challenged, but some scholars urge against reducing the veteran experience to an endless quest for government entitlements. The practices and principles of veterans' mutual aid and fraternal organizations, historians have shown, are in many cases reflections of the gendered ideals of larger society. As such, veterans' groups are hardly unique.
