Caleb Woodall

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, working with Professor Andrew Preston. My research explores how men on the American home front responded to the rise of a militarized vision of masculinity to a position of cultural hegemony during World War II. I assess how conscientious objectors and veterans’ organizations produced their own new conceptions of masculinity as they grappled with the social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications of martial masculinity’s rapid ascent. COs, I claim, produced new “pacifist masculinities” that drew on aspects of militarized masculinity while rejecting its core premise. Veterans’ organizations like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, meanwhile, attempted to expand the scope of the new militarized hegemon by forcing it to incorporate disabled veterans who no longer satisfied its most critical condition: active combatant service during wartime.