Playing to Win

Wanda Ellen Wakefield is Assistant Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University and is a judge with the International Luge Federation (FIL).

• Acknowledgments 1. War and Sports: From the Spanish-American War to 1917 2. World War I and Military Athletics at Home and in the Face of Battle 3. Playing in the Post-War World and Planning for the Future of Military Sport 4. Building Strong Men and New Facilities for Another War 5. Creating the Military Sports Machine: Special Service Officers and World War II 6. Strong Men, Strong Bodies, Off to War, 1941-1945 7. WACs, WAVEs, "Sissies;' and the "Negro Soldier:" Military Sports for the Marginalized 8. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

"Playing to Win is a thoughtful analysis of the motivations of those who planned and provided the sports progammes and–in less detail–an account of the responses of those who participated in them." — Reviewed by Allen Guttmann, Amherst College, for Culture, Sport, Society"Wakefield has demonstrated the deep psychological links between sports and war; she has gone beneath the surface world of intersecting metaphors and explored how sports, both as metaphor and activity, have become an integral part of the American military scene. Her work gives historical depth to the demarcation of sports and war as a distinctly male domain, showing how sports serve the interests of war and how war illustrates the themes of sports." — Michael S. Kimmel, coauthor of Men's Lives: Readings in the Sociology of Masculinity"This is an eminently readable tour of a segment of American cultural history that has hitherto been undiscovered. Wakefield brings military athletics into the light of day, which will please feminist scholars, men's studies practitioners, sociologists of war, and military scholars. This book provides insight into links between masculinity, social hierarchy, values and ideology, and warfare. The inclusion of gender in the analysis of the war problem/phenomenon is new, cutting edge, and a logical addition to the substantial corpus of historical and sociological literature on war. There are revelations in this book, connections between race and gender, for example, that leap out. It draws forth a sensibility—a new sensibility for most readers—that war is a gendered phenomenon." — Don Sabo, coauthor of Sex, Violence, and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity