Gender - Gender: voices from the documents

"The harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies—whose physical fitness is not what it should be—who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation…. Thus in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security."

— John F. Kennedy on men's physical fitness and national strength, 1960 —

"The new stronghold of national security is in our homes…. For the first time, the personal defense of our homes is … being rated as co-equal in importance with our military defense."

— Katherine Howard, Federal Civil Defense Administration Women's Affairs Division, on family responsibility and Cold War national security, 1954 —

"This group of women came together to protest in the name of Womanhood against the cruelty and waste of war, and to give united help toward translating the mother-instinct of life-saving into social terms of the common good."

— Women's International League for Peace and Freedom statement, 1919 —

"Exactly as each man, while doing first his duty to his wife and the children within his home, must yet, if he hopes to amount to much, strive mightily in the world outside his home, so our nation, while first of all seeing to its own domestic well-being, must not shrink from playing its part among the great nations without."

— President Theodore Roosevelt on men's domestic and international responsibilities, 1901 —

"What does all this mean for every one of us? It means opportunity for all the glorious young manhood of the republic—the most virile, ambitious, impatient, militant manhood the world has ever seen."

— Senator Albert J. Beveridge on the annexation of the Philippines in 1900 —