In the course of the U.S. Senate Military Affairs Committee’s discussions in May 1944 over proposed changes to World War II draft rules, Colonel F.V. Keesling of the Selective Service System reminded his colleagues in the Senate how the draft was designed to work. Keesling explained that Selective Service – the federal administration’s organizing of the U.S. conscription system – was “the warehouse of manpower. We, by classifying men in various age groups and family status, physical status, place these men – we could say – on certain shelves.”¹ Even at the height of the war, and just three weeks before D-Day, such shelves helped Selective Service choose some men for service and defer many others, including fathers who at that point in the war were to be drafted only if the pool of non-fathers had been depleted.

Such a method would appear to have been radically different from the French Third Republic’s nation in arms, a republican citizen-soldier army that aimed at universal military service and avoided discriminating between men. In sharp contrast to Colonel Keesling’s account of the U.S. draft system, the opening articles of a conscription law passed by the French Parliament in 1905 intended to embody the pinnacle of republican egalitarianism, and proclaimed that “each Frenchman is personally obligated to fulfill military service. … Military service is equal for all. Other than for reasons of physical disability, no exemptions are allowed.”² On the surface, the twentieth-century French and U.S. conscription systems were diametrically opposed: the one selecting certain men for service, the other aiming at universal service. Conscription, Family, and the Modern State, however, challenges such characterizations. Buried further down in the 1905 French law, Article Twenty-One of the bill specified that if a man proved to a local recruitment board that he provided necessary family support, he could defer conscription on a year-by-year basis. In reality, therefore, both countries offered family-based concessions in their conscription systems.

How did France and the United States converge in extending conscription exemptions to fathers, husbands, and, to a lesser extent, sons and brothers? What do we learn from the fact that such differently organized states with distinct conscription systems both offered familial exemptions? Were these exemptions based on the same justifications? What do we learn from the differences between each state in their regime of exemptions? Finally, and most importantly to this book, what can we learn about the nexus between modern families and modern states by comparing the fate of familial exemptions in France and the United States?

Conscription, Family, and the Modern State is a feminist study that tries to answer these questions by offering the first systematic comparison of family-based conscription exemptions in France and the United States. In telling the story of how both countries formed conscription systems that grappled with whether and how to conscript family men, this book traces the dynamic tensions between modern state authority and modern familial authority in the consolidation of modern state power. By examining how conscription exemptions to fathers, husbands, and sometimes sons and brothers were present from the founding of each country’s mandatory military system, the book will argue that the importance accorded to families within conscription rules shows the centrality of familial authority to modern states. Paradoxically, the modern state recognized the legitimacy of a competing authority, namely that of the family, in order to consolidate its own authority and enable institutionalization of one of its most intrusive apparatuses.

The book pays close attention to minute details, noting the exact terms of, and exceptions to, conscription rather than presuming a vague and global trend toward “something like” universal conscription. Along the way, the book tries to convince neo-Weberian scholars to look more seriously at the dynamics of gender relations, the sexual division of labor, and the patriarchal family as important ingredients in states’ consolidation of legitimate authority, including with so masculine an institution as mandatory military service. The book also tries to convince feminist scholars of the state of the value of returning to a project left unfinished by feminist scholars of the 1980s, namely scholarship that had examined the interrelationship between men’s household authority and state authority, and of the value of combining feminist insights with Weberian scholarship on the state.

As the following chapters will demonstrate, conscription debates and policies pivoted around the presumption of citizens’ families as sites of authority that competed with state authority. The men (and yes, they were entirely men) who determined the terms of mandatory military service were concerned with weighing if male citizens should, above all, serve as soldiers for the state, or if they should remain with their families. Removing men from their families was understood as entailing a series of disruptions undermining men’s familial authority, reversing the putatively natural gender order where women were presumed to be economically dependent on men and where children were presumed to need a male authority figure, thereby also necessitating a system of financial compensation for families that temporarily, or permanently, lost a breadwinner. Modern states constructed national armies and conscription systems in order to compete in interstate warfare, yet there were limits – familial limits – to how far conscription could go. State actors understood families as entities worthy of recognition, and entities requiring some form of appeasement, in order for the very possibility of conscription to occur.³

By designating men as the primary figures of authority within their families at the end of the eighteenth century, creating a distinctly modern form of patriarchal authority, both French and U.S. law placed familial authority at the heart of their respective states. The Jacobin narrative of French political history might present the French state as having been composed of nothing but individual citizens and an abstract, universal state, but in practice, numerous policies of the French state immediately following the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century were organized around men’s authority over their families, with families as intermediaries between citizen and state. Conscription is but one productive site for displaying this. In the United States, women’s second-class citizenship throughout the nineteenth century likewise placed men in a position of authority over their families. Conscription rules during the Civil War, particularly for the Union Army, made this crystal clear, and as will be shown with greater detail, so did the formation and operation of the U.S. Selective Service System during World War I and its subsequent operation during World War II.

Conscription, Family, and the Modern State accepts that conscription is a key marker of state modernity. However, at virtually the same moment that the French and American states created the possibility of extracting a male blood tax from resident families, husbands and fathers were placed in a position of regency over wives and children, while sons owed the duty of aiding in the support of their family members. With this was born the competing, antagonistic, and at times concordant dynamic between familial authority and abstract rational-bureaucratic authority immanent to state modernity. Although we have seen a decline in patriarchal familial authority especially as of the second half of the twentieth century, the tension between familial and state authority is dynamic, constant, and, in this author’s view, never-ending. Familial authority is the jack in the box of state modernity. Sometimes political elites have sought to quash it in order to legitimate state policies, and at other times they have drawn from it in order to legitimate their positions. Either way, this tension did not disappear. Organizing for twentieth-century total war came close to quashing familial authority, but even that could not definitively subvert it. In tracing the politics of conscription exemptions, we can see how recognition of familial authority enabled the possibility for state authority to be perceived as just and legitimate.

Max Weber, Familial Authority, and Modern Western Political Development

Max Weber and his followers have done the most work relating the formation of national conscript armies to the development of the modern nation-state.⁴ However, nearly a century of such work has ignored the centrality of familial authority in the process of modern Western political development. In Max Weber’s view of the modern state, the sources of the modern state’s legitimate domination sprang from the modern state’s basis in rational-bureaucratic authority, articulated in clearly prescribed rules, and staffed by salaried officeholders. With the bureaucratization of the state and its depersonalization of administration, a marked separation emerged between the public sphere – that is, the sovereign state – and the private sphere of individuals. Furthermore, Weber claimed that state sovereignty was no longer vested in individual authority, but in a rationalized, objective legal order. This form of impersonal rational-bureaucratic authority stood for him in contrast to two other forms of legitimate domination, namely traditional and charismatic authority, both of which were grounded in personal authority. Traditional domination was most commonly found in patriarchal, patrimonial rule, where the household of the lord had been decentralized and extended, and where subjects outside the narrow household remained dependent on the master and had to continuously prove their loyalties. In turn, the ruler’s power was deemed legitimate insofar as it was understood to be grounded in tradition.⁵

Weber noted in Economy and Society that the army of the modern state was characterized by its bureaucratization, tying it to the modern state’s capacity to engage in constant territorial pacification.⁶ Through the transfer of military service from the propertied to the “unpropertied,” the modern military needed to expand its bureaucratic apparatus in order to furnish soldiers with material provisions for soldiers who would not otherwise have had the necessary equipment for training and warfare. Weber further elaborated that such an expansion in functions also entailed increased costs, and thus states needed to further organize new bureaucratic structures in order to finance the assimilation of military provision into the state apparatus. Weber presumed a fairly wholesale transition to universal conscription, and viewed this transition as entailing a transformation of military service from an honorific privilege or from hiring the underprivileged to a more expansive and uniform institution.

Weber did not, however, elaborate further on how the modern army’s incorporation of unpropertied masses affected the character of the modern bureaucratized army alongside its principles of legitimation. This is notable given that his investigation into the bureaucratization of the modern army is embedded within his typology of social structures of domination and their respective principles of legitimation. For Weber, types of political domination could not be reduced to mere form, but were fundamentally rooted in types of legitimation.⁷ Weber might have presumed that as a public organization operating through rational rules, the expansion of military service gained legitimacy through the very application of impersonal, rationalized rules, especially because he believed that bureaucratic organizations tended to level economic and social differences so that bureaucracies were a regular characteristic of mass democracy.⁸ Still, he left it to subsequent generations of scholars to further specify the principles of legitimation grounding the shift to mass armies.

Conscription, a major ingredient in modern states’ coalescence of the legitimate means of violence, is a telling site for gauging the legitimacy of state authority. Extractive policies requiring duties of citizens especially necessitate a threshold of legitimacy to be achieved among a state’s citizens. This has been Margaret Levi’s key insight in explaining the low levels of conscription evasion and popular dissent against twentieth-century conscription.⁹ Levi argues that the general trend toward elimination of class-based privileges in conscription rules, in addition to some exemptions provided on the basis of conscientious objection in countries such as France, the United States, and other liberal democracies, explains the contingent consent modern states generated among their citizenry, creating a policy bargain wherein citizens perceive conscription rules to be fairly distributed. Few scholars other than Levi have analyzed the veracity of the supposed “universality” of military service.¹⁰ Strict universality in itself does not legitimate conscription. Rather, exceptions perceived as fair do.

Even so, why the prevalence of familial exemptions? Levi emphasizes the abolishment of class-based exemptions, with some space for conscientious objection as a just outlet. Yet, why do we find familial exemptions in both France and the United States, where the ideological and institutional organization of conscription differed significantly from one another? One cannot find an answer to this question through a direct application of Max Weber’s ideas regarding the modern army, bureaucratization, and the modern state’s rational-bureaucratic authority, for the simple reason that the possible persistence of familial authority in Western political development was outside the sphere of Weber’s interests.

In surveying Economy and Society, we can note that Weber frequently commented on the salience of household authority and kinship networks in organizing a wide variety of social and political patterns, yet household authority and kinship networks were vested with explanatory power in describing developments in the past or in faraway cultures distinct from modern European (or American) social and political life. Where household organization was once key to economic action, he argued, households lost their centrality as the seat of economic activity with the rise of Occidental capitalism¹¹; the monopolization of physical force by the modern political community supplanted the competing and sometimes contradictory overlap between kin, household, and neighborhood loyalties¹²; patrimonialism was forged from the extension of administrative offices out of household patriarchal authority, yet this too had all but disappeared with the rise of rational-bureaucratic authority that ruptured the primacy of the political household and the protective functions of kinship associations; in the Occidental Medieval city, citizenship was already premised on a dissolution of clan ties and a direct sworn allegiance of the individual citizen to the city’s local associations.¹³ All told, Weber persistently placed modern Western political development along a developmental axis that disembedded political organization away from the household, the oikos, the clan, or the sib.

More recent followers of Weber’s sociology of domination identify conscription systems as a central variable in explaining states’ monopoly of violence, and the national state as the principal modern state form. Drawing form Weber’s characterization of modern statehood, they too view the state as a modern organization of domination that co-opted control and access to means of violence away from other entities such as kinship groups and “warrior consociations.”¹⁴This Weberian conception of the state forms the backbone of some of the most prominent scholarship characterizing modern state power, alongside scholarship arguing for the importance of geo-military competition in accounting for modern state formation and disparate regime development.¹⁵ Charles Tilly’s Capital, Coercion, and European States, AD990–1992 especially articulates the interrelationship between war-making, revenue raising, and the formation of modern citizenship.¹⁶ However, Tilly and others also neglected consideration of what happened to familial authority with the development of modern states, likewise presupposing that the overlap between patriarchal authority and state authority typified by older forms of state rule such as that of patrimonial rule is no longer relevant in accounting for modern state development.¹⁷

Randall Collins’s unique synthesis of Weber’s sociology of family and kinship proposes that economic and military conditions determine family forms, and to the best of this author’s knowledge, he is the only scholar to have noted the systematic link Weber made between the configuration of kin groups, internal household dynamics, and types of military organization.¹⁸ Collins stands out in recognizing that family, kin, and/or household organization were often integrally linked to types of military organization, and throws light on how the correlation Weber notes between the disarmament of households with states’ monopoly of violence is not a discrete observation in Weber’s sociology of domination, but rather is one specific arrangement within a long and diverse history of family and military organization, which Weber uncovers. However, while Collins comments on the decline of the “military kin group” and hypothesizes about the factors enabling the development of the modern nuclear family, he does not further postulate how the modern nuclear family might continue to be related to states’ monopoly of violence and military organization. On the whole, a view of the modern state as based on bureaucratic, impersonal rational authority, free of familial authority, is so completely taken for granted by neo-Weberians that it is never explicitly reflected on.¹⁹

There are obvious parallels between my criticism of Weberian approaches to modern state development and feminist criticisms of liberal political theory. Such criticism has shed light on the web of human dependencies and inequalities within the family ignored by classical liberal thought, a silence that enabled the construction of a theory of formally equal male citizens composed of abstract, disembodied, and rational individuals, effected by contrasting the abstract rational male to the embodied, dependent, and domestic woman.²⁰ While agreeing with this assessment, Conscription, Family, and the Modern State wishes to move the feminist gaze elsewhere; rather than inquiring into the exclusions enabling a theory of individual equality and rights, the book scrutinizes political debates, state practices, and the actual embeddedness of state authority in familial authority. The false abstraction that begs to be reconsidered within the Weberian tradition of state theory is the supposed abstraction and disembeddedness of the modern, rational-bureaucratic state and its formal legal structure from gendered structures of familial authority. If we understand familial authority as a competitor to the modern state, we can comprehend that successfully extracting military service from conscripts’ families would have been untenable without some modicum of legitimacy for doing so. Familial exemptions were seen as just, legitimating the institutionalization of such a difficult and potentially unpopular extractive policy. Familial exemptions were the sugar that helped the medicine of conscription go down.

Feminist State Theory – Going Back, Going Forward

Julia Adams has argued in her retooling of the Weberian ideal type of patrimonial rule that gender and family have been neglected in considering the development of state power and institutions. Adams finds that the patriarchalism underpinning the development of patrimonial rule is treated by Weber as a natural form of superiority, where men are “normally” physically and intellectually superior to women and hence are dominant in the household and, by extension, over their patrimonial dependents.²¹ In her study on Dutch patrimonialism, Adams offers her own corrective to this assumption by elaborating on the hard work of maintaining patriarchal rule intrinsic to patrimonial authority, tracing the complex strategies adopted by elite families in the early modern Netherlands in reproducing power, forging alliances, and recruiting new members through marriage, inheritances, and distribution of state offices. Notably, Adams does not treat patriarchy as a form of monolithic male domination over women, but rather examines familial practices organized around male heads of extended families whose patriarchalism overlapped with political authority.²² Such familial practices proved to be malleable in some exceptional cases where women could co-opt the symbol of political parent. Still, Adams associates patriarchalism with early modern European rule and does not challenge Weber’s sequencing of modern Western political organization.

Adams stands in discussion not only with Weberian approaches to patrimonialism, but also with feminist scholars of patriarchy dating primarily from the 1980s. Marxist-feminist work from that period argued that modern states were deeply patriarchal and worked to undermine female autonomy and gender equality by forcing women’s economic dependence on husbands and sometimes on the state.²³ Catherine MacKinnon’s work from the late 1980s took the Marxist-feminist insights further by claiming that the liberal state was essentially masculine in its interests.²⁴ Her account of patriarchy stripped the concept of patriarchy of its distinctly familial content. The next wave of feminist scholarship from the 1990s especially rejected MacKinnon’s view of the liberal state as essentially male. However, scholars such as Eileen Boris and Peter Bardaglio, whose work had preceded that of MacKinnon, had treated patriarchy as a relationship where husbands and fathers held sovereign power over wives and children, and where this household authority over wives and children was supported and usurped to varying degrees by the modern state. MacKinnon, and then her feminist detractors, led to a subtle, but consequential, redefinition of patriarchy as an extensive form of masculine domination embedded within the state, emptied of its familial origins, and 1990s scholars in turn began to shun grand statements about the interplay between patriarchal (read: masculine) authority and the modern state in favor of more focused country case accounts of men and women’s social citizenship.

Turning to work on the development of the welfare state, feminist scholarship on the state as of the 1990s has therefore mostly abandoned patriarchy as a valuable analytic in analyzing the modern state. By offering a gendered analysis of welfare, and shedding an explicitly Marxist framework, this work has showed how numerous welfare states have reinforced men’s paid labor market participation and women’s unpaid labor in the domestic sphere, and has offered alternative typologies of welfare regimes that account for state support of caregiving and women’s participation in paid labor markets.²⁵ Subsequent work on “maternalism,” the “masculinist” state, the “multilayered” state, “familialism,” “parentalism,” and state regulation of fatherhood has shown the limits to viewing the modern state as a political organization primarily representing male interests.²⁶ However, by paying more attention to complexity, contradiction, and the multilayered set of interests represented by the state, feminist state theorists have moved away from earlier feminist explorations of the internal affinity between familial authority and the modern state.

Of prime importance to this book is the fact that in eschewing the concept of patriarchy altogether, and in turning primarily toward country-specific accounts of welfare state development, questions about the deeply embedded and often contradictory relationship between familial (patriarchal) authority and state authority have been left unanswered. I am proposing that we therefore go back in order to go forward. Big questions such as why and how it came to be that the modern state determines who can legally marry whom, why the state can determine who is a legitimate parent, how children’s schooling became mandatory,²⁷ or how a state can demand military service of its male populace can only be answered if we consider the long and vexed competition between families and the state, and the modern state as having usurped some – but not all – authority from one of its main domestic competitors, the family.

Bridging Feminists, Weberians, and Foucauldians

Weber’s sociology of the state can offer a surprising resource for feminist scholars in considering the aforementioned questions. His work was centrally concerned with how political structures can be legitimated, and despite the serious shortcomings noted previously, large parts of his corpus interrogate how kinship or family authority relates to political authority and political organization. However, with a few recent exceptions,²⁸ feminists have not viewed Weber as an intellectual ally. Wendy Brown has offered the most sustained feminist criticism of Weber’s account of state formation, arguing that Weber presumed the existence of a contract between male state actors and male heads of households, with male family patriarchs offering physical protection to weaker members of a household and state actors agreeing to this convenient arrangement.²⁹ Like Julia Adams, Brown points to Weber’s presumption that men have a natural physical dominance over women and children, legitimizing men’s patriarchal authority within the family. However, to be more precise, Weber presumed that patriarchal authority (that is, familial authority) weakened relative to that of the state within modern Western political organization. Furthermore, as the rest of this book attempts to demonstrate, despite Weber’s shortcomings, his work can help us uncover the unstable and conflicted relationship between household and state authority.

Unlike Weber’s sociology of the state, Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, biopolitics, and the regulation of sexuality has been treated as a more natural, if troubled, ally for feminist scholarship.³⁰ Foucault deliberately set the modern state on an equal footing with other operatives of relational power who deploy disciplinary discourses and knowledge. He brilliantly brought into relief the ubiquity of distinctly modern modes and nodes of power. However, an unfortunate consequence to this approach is that it has obscured the power of the modern state, the family, and the interplay between the two. Discipline, biopower, and the expertise of demographers, psychiatrists, and pedagogues were arguably most extensively institutionalized by the modern state. Thus, for scholars of the state, the claim that the state is but one node in a network of nodes of power is not convincing.

Additionally, Foucault’s theorizations of modern state power lack any thorough analysis of the centrality of modern warfare and the modern state’s monopoly of violence as a distinguishing characteristic of the modern state. Although Foucault opened his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France by offering a brief historical overview of the “statification” (étatisation) of war, alongside which a discourse of constant war spread across multiple domains of state action and state theory, creating, he claimed, the conditions of possibility for the political theories proposed by figures such as Hobbes and Machiavelli,³¹ actual state practices around interstate warfare were not of interest to Foucault. Despite suggesting in his 1978 Collège de France lectures that he would pursue a line of inquiry into the place of the military with the rise of the modern state, Foucault proceeded to inquire more thoroughly into the nature of police power in the production of internal security and the management of populations, offering only a superficial account of the rationalization of war in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.³²

Finally, even though Foucault recognized the distinct sovereign power of the patriarchal family, defined by the authority of blood-right and the individuated power of the patriarch standing at the family’s helm, and followed the sovereign family’s interplay with disciplinary institutions, he never offered a coherent account of the relationship between the state and the family.³³ There was no reason for him to do so, as the modern family and the modern state were treated by him as two objects through which disciplinary power could operate, and were thus not privileged by Foucault as generative of power and authority. If this book were to take a Foucauldian approach, then perhaps it would focus on the articulation of disciplinary power through the family and the state in the construction of the modern citizen soldier. There is no doubt that the making of twentieth-century soldiers entailed interventions on the parts of pedagogues, psychiatrists, and developments such as screening for intelligence and sexual health. Yet, the making of “boys into men” was only made possible by a preceding step, namely states’ ability to conscript men to begin with, and the concessions families made to modern states enabling this increasingly disciplinary institution to exist. That is, in the sequencing of modern state development, there was first a Weberian process of consolidation of authority through processes of legitimation, and only later more Foucauldian infiltration of discipline, power/knowledge, and biopolitics into the institution of conscription.

Thus, while remaining sympathetic to Foucault’s approach in his grappling with the relationship between familial sovereignty and disciplinary power, this book turns to Weber’s work in arguing that the monopoly of legitimate violence is an exemplary attribute of modern state development, and in locating how familial and state authority are central sites for the organization of modern political domination. Whereas Weber’s own approach to modern political organization, or what this book calls state modernity, treats the absence of household or kin authority as a marker of modernity, I seek to recapture the essence of Weber’s otherwise anti-teleological methodology by showing how familial and state authority can compete, intertwine, or overlap in specific case histories. In so doing, it is possible to abandon a view of the state as essentially male and still consider modern state development as tied to gendered structures of familial authority.

Conscription, Family, and the Modern State thus strategically examines conscription during the nineteenth century and especially the twentieth century in order to substantiate the claim that one of the pivotal institutions for modern states’ war-making capacities was shaped by recognition of modern familial authority. An interplay between modern familial authority and modern state authority marked French and U.S. conscription, yet as the following chapters relate, such an interplay varied over time and between each state. Modern state authority had to wrestle with patriarchal authority in order to consolidate its own authority, so that the state acceded to men’s household authority to some degree in order to consolidate its own authority. State authority became embedded in familial authority, bringing to the heart of its own authority its own contradiction, and thus the front lines between state and family authority were unstable and continue to be so.

The Two Exceptions? Tracing Similarities and Differences

Sociologists, political scientists, and historians often treat France and the United States as the two great exceptions. Following a tradition that is at least as long as Alexis de Tocqueville’s commentaries on French and U.S. societies in the nineteenth century,³⁴ the French state has been conventionally characterized as a highly centralized state where the political center determined policy throughout the provinces with subunits of political organization that were merely administrative, and with the central state standing as a republican center directly conferring universal citizenship on its members regardless of particular attributes. Additionally, following Tocqueville’s perspective, many have accepted a view of an absence of intermediate bodies standing between the French state and individual citizens. Tocqueville famously implicitly and explicitly contrasted U.S. civil society to the lack of such intermediary associative life in nineteenth-century France. Such a picture of modern France certainly stands in contrast to the complex, hybrid American state where the federal government could only loosely consolidate its power over the autonomy of states, local governments, and civil society, and where intermediate bodies and courts standing between individuals and the federal government are treated as the lifeblood of U.S. politics.³⁵

However, as I argue in the chapters to follow, there were more commonalities between the two countries than is normally accepted. It is true that when comparing the two countries, the centralized versus federal structures of both states especially come into relief. And in certain ways, French and U.S. conscription systems did reflect these differences. Alongside his many administrative reforms, Napoleon established a centralized conscription system with local prefects acting as spokes organizing the hub of national conscription. In contrast, U.S. conscription was typical of the Anglo-liberal model of conscription where military service was largely locally organized and quasi-voluntary, with the exception of the American Civil War, when a strong form of conscription was organized in the late nineteenth century in both the Union and Confederate armies. By the time of World War I, the U.S. Selective Service System was formed in order to organize the first truly federal draft. However, in contrast to the bureaucratically centralized organization of French conscription, the U.S. draft system institutionalized during World War I operated with a great degree of discretion at the hands of local boards, and additionally, never aimed at universal service.

Historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, however, that the differences between France and the United States tend to be overstated.³⁶ France never truly eradicated intermediate organizations such as workers’ associations from its political and social life, and I would add to Rosanvallon’s account that it was not just intermediate bodies, such as workers’ associations, that filled the supposedly empty space between citizen and state, but also French families. As Part II of this book shows, there were some surprising similarities in French and U.S. conscription in the nineteenth century. The Confederate Army of the Civil War enacted a form of conscription that was not so dissimilar from the French system, and the U.S. Selective Service System during the world wars was a more centralized government administration than is often recognized, especially during World War II. Furthermore, of particular interest to this book, each conscription system showed a salient place for the family in their respective organization of conscription. In both countries, regardless of differences such as a centralized versus federal national state, and universal versus episodic and selective military service, their respective military service systems offered special terms of military service to fathers, husbands, and occasionally sons and brothers.

Nonetheless, while Conscription, Family, and the Modern State traces similarities between French and U.S. conscription, it also uncovers some telling differences. Part I focuses exclusively on France. Chapter 1 argues that in France, a highly centralized administration ostensibly embodied an abstract and uniformly applied set of regulations and institutions, with clearly codified rules emanating from the political center and applied outward toward localities. The administration of conscription supposedly reflected this too. However, already as of the French Revolution, family-based concessions were made within French conscription rules. Formal, codified rules expressed a degree of substantive justice in that particular familial situations were recognized, especially around forms of familial authority, enabling conscription to be considered just and further institutionalized.³⁷ Exceptions were clearly designated within French conscription laws during Napoleonic conscription and in subsequent nineteenth-century regimes preceding the French Third Republic. Familial authority was understood as a legitimate rival to state authority, and one which needed to be respected for conscription to take hold.

Chapter 2 focuses on a turning point that occurred in the midst of the Third Republic at the start of the twentieth century. While conscription rules moved toward more universal incorporation of men from all strata, a highly politicized demographic crisis crept into conscription debates and rules. French men and women were admonished during the Third Republic for failing in their reproductive duties for the state. Special considerations continued to be given to men after World War I for family-related reasons within French recruitment laws, yet most special dispensations were given to men from large families whose reproduction for the state was rendered equivalent in the French Third Republic to the citizen-soldier duty. Furthermore, by World War I, the mass conscript army had become a normal aspect of French political and civic life. The experience of total war during World War I also caused military and political elites to prioritize the security needs of the state at the expense of protecting men’s household authority. Some conscription exemptions continued to be offered to men from large families, but these dramatically declined in the years leading to World War II.

Concealed beneath an apparent continuity from nineteenth-century family-based dispensations to twentieth-century dispensations was a shift in the position of familial authority vis-à-vis the French state. Whereas nineteenth-century dispensations expressed state actors’ recognition of familial authority as autonomous from the state, Chapter 3 discusses how the Third Republic’s pronatalist turn in combination with severe security concerns in the interwar years resulted in a demise in autonomous familial authority, or what Foucault might have viewed as the infiltration of disciplinary power into the sovereign family. Heads of families were viewed as failing in their duties and no longer a rival authority to the state. French women were blamed for selfishly marrying at a late age and choosing to give birth to fewer children, and French men too were castigated for failing to marry and produce future soldiers for the state. Special conscription considerations became primarily organized around the number of children in a family. The French state co-opted familial authority through a potent combination of demographic and security concerns.

Part I shows how familial authority in France stood as a rival to abstract state authority until the Third Republic, when autonomous familial authority declined. Conscription rules from the early twentieth century illustrate that ideals of correct familial duties to the state, rather than respect for the boundaries of familial authority, determined who would see service and for how long. Clear codification of conscription rules exhibit how familial authority was displaced by state regulation of familial roles. This was not simply a process whereby rational-bureaucratic authority displaced familial authority. Rather, rational-bureaucratic guidelines maintained a familial hue in specifying in great detail the distinct conscription conditions for men with distinct familial roles. However, whereas nineteenth-century conscription could not proceed without recognizing and reinforcing some boundaries for citizens’ familial authority, the threshold of legitimacy for state authority had passed by the early twentieth century. Exemptions stemming from an aversion to unraveling men’s patriarchal authority were no longer a necessary precondition for conscription to occur. Third Republic politicians and social movements proclaiming the failure of French men and women to reproduce for the state created the conditions for an encroachment by the state on familial authority.

Here, Foucault’s theorization of governmentality and Jacques Donzelot’s thesis on the rise of the social sphere and the policing of families in modern France will sound familiar as theorizations of state infiltration into French family life for the sake of governing populations.³⁸ However, while French paternal sovereignty declined during the French Third Republic, following the fate of conscription rules shows that in the years just prior to World War II, conscription rules no longer sought to govern population as an end. Rather, population concerns became secondary to anxieties over the state’s security situation, and pronatalist concerns were pushed aside in light of concerns that the French state needed as many soldiers as possible, even if this harmed families and could disrupt governing the French population through families. Military security needs ruptured French families in the 1930s. The state sought to conscript fathers and sons irrespective of the putative benefits to familial order, and hence social and political order, which had been emphasized for much of the nineteenth century and the Third Republic.³⁹

Part II uncovers the persistence of familial authority in twentieth-century United States, and further challenges the presumption that modern political development and the state’s monopoly of violence entails the disembedding of political organization from familial organization. A vastly underappreciated feature of the twentieth-century draft system was the continued importance of men’s familial status in determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, national Selective Service headquarters, many members of Congress, local draft board members, and President Woodrow Wilson during World War I all maintained that men with economic dependents should be treated with special care in determining their draft status. The Selective Service System did not instruct local draft board members to apply predetermined rules. Rather, local board members were vested with the prerogative of applying their own judgment in order to determine a man’s draft status. Local board members acted like a network of temporary courts by weighing evidence, interviewing registrants and potentially other witnesses, and delivering binding decisions. Chapter 4 further demonstrates that local boards engaged in what Weber termed a “freely creative” administration,⁴⁰ where local board members made determinations on individual bases rather than through the application of precise codes or precedent. Such free creativity, in line with Weber’s account of modern administration, allowed degrees of personal discretion, but not of the kind where judgments were entirely individual. Rather, the bureaucratic reason of state remained paramount in selecting men for the twofold ends of maintaining family life and securing soldiers for the state.

Chapter 4 also shows that another organizing logic that was not explicitly codified yet is evident when examining who was drafted and on what grounds, was that of race and class. African-American men faced a higher likelihood of being drafted. One probable factor was that local draft board members were less likely to view them as legitimate breadwinners, especially if a man had a wife who worked for wages. While national headquarters left it to local draft board members to determine the draft status assigned to registrants, national trends indicate that these judgments were not random, and during World War I worked against men who earned low wages and whose family members also worked for wages.

Chapter 5 shows how resuscitation of the draft in 1940 revived much of the logic of the World War I draft. However, during World War II, such personal discretion at the hands of local boards was limited by the newly formed War Manpower Commission (WMC), which was vested with extensive emergency powers by President Roosevelt and was authorized to oversee the Selective Service System. Especially concerned with balancing between manpower needs for wartime industry and the armed forces, the WMC preferred to defer men for occupational reasons rather than for reasons of dependency. Chapter 5 follows how the so-called father draft crisis catalyzed a showdown between Congress and the WMC and resulted in a humiliation for WMC Chairman Paul McNutt when Congress successfully curtailed the WMC’s war powers and reinstated the autonomy of the Selective Service System. A duel between Congress and executive wartime powers was settled in such a way that Congress reasserted its authority relative to the president’s wartime executive agencies by simultaneously reasserting men’s paternal authority. However, by 1943, the quality of men’s parenting, and the family as a moral good, was becoming the object of protection, more so than the U.S. household as an economic unit.

Justification for the Selective Service System’s formation in 1917, which, with the important exception of the Civil War, went against the grain of more than a century of aversion to a large federal army and federally organized conscription in the United States, was certainly related to the new scale of total war and the late entrance of the United States into the Great War. In that sense, objective security needs do account for some of the legitimacy in establishing a federal draft system. Yet, of equal importance, it was also grounded in an explicitly stated commitment to minimizing the impact of the draft on American family life, especially in leaving white male breadwinners at home. U.S. policy makers did not want the federal government to shoulder the costs of supporting draftee’s dependents, nor did they wish to throw families into turmoil. Hence, selecting men based on their familial status, in combination with their potential participation in wartime industry, provided the justification for a radical transformation in the organization of conscription in the United States. During World War I, protection of household autonomy was a prime end for Selective Service, and unlike France, deferments were not intended to govern population growth.

The Selective Service System differed from the French conscription system in its decentralized federal form and in its refusal to prescribe rigid codes specifying who would be drafted, and it furthermore came to contrast with the French tradition in terms of how the French changed the contours of familial authority when carving out their twentieth-century conscription system. Both French and U.S. policy makers initially shared concern for families as economic units, with men fulfilling an especially pivotal role in supporting families and acting as heads of households. Yet the timing of these concerns differed within each respective state. French exemptions were based on economic considerations throughout the nineteenth century, but took a natalist turn in the early twentieth century. In contrast, the U.S. system of draft deferments and classifications maintained its economic logic for much of its existence from 1917 until 1973, although in the middle of World War II, policy makers started showing more concern over the family as a site of moral education. The modern household as a unit that functioned to meet the material needs of the head of the household was recognized as vital to French conscription in the nineteenth century and to U.S. conscription in the twentieth century. At the same time, while the Selective Service System left intact some men’s household authority, it selected who could remain with their families and who would be drafted, based on draft boards’ assessments as to which men were genuine heads of households.

The degree of institutional centralization and bureaucratization of each conscription system does not directly correspond with the degree to which state institutions co-opted familial authority. The already highly centralized French state did not entirely co-opt familial authority in the nineteenth century, but did make inroads into familial authority in the first half of the twentieth century with its natalist transformation followed by security fears. The decentralized and localized Selective Service System left draft decisions to the determination of individual local board members and selectively co-opted familial authority from men seen as having abandoned, or never taking on, the role of being head of an economically self-sufficient household. By the start of World War II, France had more thoroughly co-opted men’s household authority, whereas the United States only partially did so from men perceived as never having actualized their familial sovereignty.⁴¹

In outlining the shape of familial considerations within French and U.S. conscription, the pages to come seek to challenge several conventional narratives about conscription, nation-state development, and the place of the family relative to modern Western political organization. Conscription, Family, and the Modern State argues against the Weberian political modernization thesis that presumes that familial authority evaporated as grounds for modern political authority, and also questions much scholarship on conscription that has too easily accepted national myths about how men’s military service came to be organized. By returning to an older feminist set of questions looking at the link between family and state, and by looking at the politics of conscription through a feminist eye, we will see how conscription is a telling source for exposing how the modern state, through its uneasy relationship with familial authority, extended its domain of authority while engendering its own limits.

In addition to offering an account of the impact of familial authority upon state development, this book concludes by suggesting that feminist political sociologists expand their scope of analysis beyond twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments, and to domains of politics and the state that on the surface might appear far from “family policy.” Ever since rejection of the concept of a patriarchal state as too essentialist and simplistic an approach to the relationship between the state and gender inequality, feminists have shunned asking bigger questions about mechanisms driving long-term directions and transformations in state development, moving more toward nuanced accounts of twentieth-century social policy developments in specific country cases. However, considering questions like how modern states came to be the primary arbiters in determining the legitimacy of certain familial relations over others requires feminist political sociologists to be more historically oriented than has been the case over the past two decades.

Considering the nexus between family and state authority also raises questions about interpreting the present. Although women have gained recognition as heads of families or coequal heads of households, the competition between state and family persists, and perhaps with the rise of women as recognized heads of family there has also been a decline in familial authority as a competitor to state authority. Controversies such as the legality of same-sex marriage, why states engage in pro-marriage policies, or who is recognized as a legitimate dependent can also be seen as the latest front lines between state and familial authority. Thus, while Conscription, Family, and the Modern State is one modest attempt at offering a feminist historical sociology of modern state development, it not only hopes to encourage further feminist investigations of the past, but also raises some new questions about the modern state as an arena for contemporary struggles over gender and sexual equality.