Roundtable: Housewife’s Secret Arsenal
Starch: Faultless Premium Spray Starch
San Francisco State University
dcohler@sfsu.edu
Abstract
An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to
investigate spray starch. The exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of
precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and
discipline; the illusion of race- and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. Braiding
together the military roots of this Cold War-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor
that produces spray starched militarized masculinity.
This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The
Housewife's Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on
particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately
tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet
persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the
deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these
objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,”
their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at
home in our lives.
Keywords
domestic labor, museums, US military training, hygiene, starch
Walk into the Museum of the American
Military Family (MAMF) in Tijeras, New Mexico, and you enter a home. Founded in 2011 by a small battalion of
volunteers—most of whom are military spouses, kids, or veterans—MAMF collects and curates material
culture and archival records of military families. Housed in a former duplex, this small community museum
displays exhibits around the living room's fireplace and in kitchen cupboards, as well as on walls and in
display cases.
An ironing board stands between the living room and the kitchen, a uniform, iron, and can
of Faultless Premium Spray Starch resting atop (Figure 1). To many veterans and their families, the humble can
of Faultless Premium Spray Starch signals authenticity: proof that the museum is getting it right, a shared
object. Spray starch denotes military precision and the domestication of war. And its origins and contexts
reveal how threads of labor, technology, and military hierarchy camouflage difference and violence.
Figure 1. Ironing exhibit, Museum of the American Military Family. Photograph by author.
Invisible Labor Made Visible
Ironing the uniform has been a key part of US military life. MAMF's ironing exhibit illustrates a
core component of the museum's mission: to make visible the necessary and invisible labor of US military
“dependents” (spouses, children). And in that spirit, I—a civilian, feminist researcher—initially
assumed that service members' spouses (wives) would be responsible for this domestic labor. Domestic labor has
been culturally assigned to women and feminized. However, when chatting at the exhibit, a female military spouse
commented that her husband did this domestic task in their family, since her ironing was not up to standard, and
a male veteran noted that ironing had been his job (field notes, June 2017). This exhibit makes the
domestic labor of military dress visible. Conversations in that museum kitchen (a public space repurposed from
domestic architecture) complicate any linear story of women's invisible labor for men's advancement.
Figure 2. A can of Faultless Premium Spray Starch. Photograph by Louis Bledsoe.
Faultless brands itself as “America's oldest, most respected fabric care brand” (Faultless, n.d.).
Embracing the rhetoric and iconography of Americana, the can's gold, blue, and white design is militarized by
its signature red star (Figure 2). The white-and-red striped ironing board cover; the blue, white, and gold on
the iron; and the can of Faultless together form a patriotic backdrop for the Battle Dress Uniform (BDUs) on the
board. BDUs were issued between 1981 and 2015 (Cole 2021); they predate current Operational Camouflage Pattern
(OCPs) designed for desert, rather than jungle, warfare. The uniform on display is historical, not
contemporary.
How did spray starch become military gear? Braiding together the military roots of this
Cold War-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched
militarized masculinity. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion
of race- and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. MAMF's starch and ironing board
represent war-making as a project of order and regulation, not carnage and death.
From Soapsuds to Spray Starch
During the Revolutionary War, laundresses accompanied General Washington's army. Often wives of
enlisted soldiers, these women received “half rations for themselves and quarter rations for each child” (Alt
and Stone 1991, 4) to clean and maintain soldiers' clothing. An order to “not throw soapsuds on the parade
ground” (4) indicates an ambivalent relationship of military discipline to the materiality of hygiene.
Simultaneously necessary and marginal, female camp-followers such as laundresses disrupted homosocial military
formations with their indispensable, messy labors.
The end of chattel slavery and the rise of
industrialization transformed work in the United States. Domestic labor became a paid, not stolen, class of work
in the South; industrialization provided waged labor in the North; some middle-class women entered newly opening
professions. As unpaid care work increasingly fell into “second shift” labor for many working women, the rise of
commodity capitalism promised increased domestic efficiency.
The first US starch production plant opened
in 1807 (Schwartz and Whistler 2009, 3). Derived from grains or vegetables, starch is mechanically extracted and
chemically processed. Long used on textiles, as powder, as food additive, or for adhesive, industrial starch
production distinguishes starches by material, chemical process, and use.
In 1892 Sarah Boone, a
formerly enslaved African American woman, patented an improved ironing board that facilitated ironing seams and
sleeves (Helton 2018). Purchasing Boone's ironing board instead of using a homemade board promised to ease an
onerous task. In 1897 Faultless Starch company was formed. Major Thomas Graham Beaham, a white retired Union
officer, joined the wholesale household supply company in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1887. A decade later, the
sale of household starch eclipsed its other products, and Beaham, now sole owner, began exclusively selling
starch. Both Boone's patent and Beaham's consolidation indicate increasing demand and commodification of
household products in the 1890s.
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century public hygiene campaigns enlisted
middle-class women to discipline immigrant and working-class women. These so-called social reformers created
arbitrary standards of household cleanliness and extolled commercially produced clothing and household products.
Such eugenics-based campaigns foreshadowed mid-twentieth-century ideologies of domestic sanitation, all tied to
new inventions that promised to reduce the domestic labor required to meet newly heightened standards.
One such invention aerosolized household starch. Developed in 1924, aerosol technology was first widely used in
the US during World War II: “Canisters filled with insecticide and propellants were used to protect U.S.
servicemen from insects carrying diseases such as malaria” (National Aerosol Association, n.d.). In 1949 World
War II Army veteran Robert Henry Abplanalp patented a plastic valve for aerosol cans, paving the way for general
use (Greenhouse 2003). In 1960 Faultless transformed its popular powdered starch into a liquid aerosolized
spray, rapidly increasing its market share (Funding Universe, n.d.). In 1972 a patent was approved for the
incorporation of “a film-forming, water-soluble polyurethane” to be added to the dry starch and water that made
up most spray starch formulas. The patent cites aerosol starch as “a great convenience to the housewife,” which
has become “a commercially important item” (Starkman and Brown 1972).
Starched uniforms signaled
military readiness during the Cold War. Colin Powell reports that in 1961 members of the Strategic Army Corps
“had our field uniforms starched stiff as boards to achieve knife-edge creases. 'Breaking starch' meant using a
broom handle to open up the pants so we could get our legs into our fatigues” (Powell and Persico 1995, 55).
Powell bemoans time spent starching rather than training for combat. Steve Loomis LTC, EN, US Army (Retired)
recalls, "Starch was not used by soldiers in combat (Vietnam or Southwest Asia) as it wasted time and could
irritate the skin." Starch was used only by "more senior person[s] in zone" or in garrison (non-combat) to look
sharp (personal communication, August 23, 2021). Basic training continued to prioritize sartorial “readiness” as
recruits were sent into increasingly deadly combat situations where a starched uniform was a detriment, not an
asset.
Concurrently, Faultless promoted its new aerosol product to suburban women. In a 1965 television
commercial, a white housewife starches her husband's sports shirt. The authoritative male voiceover and animated
stars projecting from the aerosol cannister instruct, “Even modern fabrics stay neater, look fresher, longer”
(Laundrystop 2010). As the US increased its involvement in the war in Vietnam and growing civil rights movements
challenged white supremacy, Faultless's postwar marketing not only ignored its military roots and uses, but
deliberately framed starching men's clothes as a peacetime domestic task for white, unpaid, women: part of the
erasure of the war in white, home-front iconography.
Heavy Starch: Basic Training
Uniforms enforce bodily conformity to conservative social norms, discipling individuals and covering
over cultural difference. A well-pressed military uniform should minimize race, class, ethnic, religious, and
gender differences. As the military applauds its “color-blind culture” (Lutz, 2001, 187), it manages racial,
class, and cultural differences through rigorous conformity to an able-bodied, white, male, Christian model
(Belkin 2012).
Basic training includes intensive bodily regulation: when to sleep, how to make a bed,
how launder clothes. Some veterans report formal lessons in military ironing techniques. Others recall more
haphazard approaches. ETC Kyle Boswell (USCG Retired) reports, “It was part of the student experience to look
sharp and look good” (personal communication, August 3, 2021).
Regardless of class, race, or gender,
recruits are expected to leave basic training with a systematized ability to maintain their uniforms. The
feminized labor of domesticity becomes masculine when systematized and surveilled. Discussing her basic training
in 1978, former A1C Cheryl Mathison (Air Force) told me, “They even trained you how to fold your bras” (personal
communication, July 29, 2021). Of Coast Guard basic training, Boswell reports, “Ironing culture can take on a
life of its own,” including informal competitions in the barracks: who can get the sharpest creases, for
example. When asked if he noticed gendered differences in “ironing culture,” Boswell replied, “what I saw was
much more of a meritocracy...I saw people who tried real hard and worked real hard to succeed, and I saw people
who tried not so hard and just kind of skate by not succeed.” The domestic is refashioned as part of the
equalizing of basic training: military discipline that can become a competition and is gendered masculine for
recruits of all genders as it occupies public, rather than domestic, space.
Premium Starch: “Like a Boss”
After soldiers learn regulation ironing during basic training, this task moves from a collective,
sometimes competitive, activity in the barracks to an invisible, domestic labor. When recruits leave basic
training for their first (non-combat) duty station—with or without a military spouse in tow—the
spray starch comes along.
Starchy military masculinity appears in a popular YouTube video "Ironing Your
[Air Force] Blues Shirt." Viewers are exhorted to soak the shirt with heavy duty spray starch, “turn that bad
boy inside out,” and “work the edges of the rank really good” by the white male Faultless-wielder. “That's it.
Simple. Like a boss,” the video concludes (Jeremy and Ashlee Kate 2014). Produced by an Air Force husband-wife
team, the video teaches ironing through hyper-masculine performance.
Spray starch symbolizes peacetime
military, when a soldier worries about a sergeant's disapproval of a trouser crease, not survival through a
muddy battlefield. And whether a starched uniform is required depends on the duty station. Working as a medical
lab tech, Army veteran Marc Johnson wore “cook whites”—no starch required, especially on the night shift.
But when giving presentations or at special events, he wore his starched Class A uniform—“That was my
money maker” (personal communication, August 4, 2021). Dress uniforms (always starched) mark special occasions:
celebrations, promotions, funerals—events outside warzones. A well-starched uniform signals safety,
success, order, discipline, and technology. Use your spray starch and you will thrive.
But this formula
only works outside the dirty work of war. For combat engineers or ground troops, this sanitized version of
military discipline is irrelevant. When the can of Faultless spray starch on an ironing board in the MAMF
kitchen becomes a touchstone of military identity and verisimilitude, the military stands for safety, order, and
homogeneity. The physical and psychological costs of the war machine, and the military's underlying mission of
control through violence is an unseen wrinkle.
Coda: “Do Not Starch or Hot Press the OCP”
In 2015 the Army introduced OCPs—a new uniform textile designed for warfare in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The technical fabric is flame resistant, insect repelling, and cooling, the digital pattern redesigned:
the right attire for desert conditions and to survive improvised explosive devices. This is wartime fabric. Of
note for the housewife's arsenal, care instructions for OCP uniforms state boldly, “Do not starch or hot press
the OCP. Light ironing is authorized, however, repeated hot pressing or heavy ironing will accelerate the
overall wear of the fabric” (Public Affairs 2018).
The rise of “technical fabrics” may soon relegate
Faultless Premium Spray Starch to the museum.
References
Alt, Betty Sowers, and Bonnie Domrose Stone. 1991. Campfollowing: A History of the Military Wife. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Belkin, Aaron. 2012. Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cole, David. 2021. “History of US Army Uniforms.” Military.com. https://www.military.com/army/uniforms.html.
Faultless. n.d. “About Us.” Accessed August 15, 2021. https://faultless.com/about-us/.
Funding Universe. n.d. “Faultless Starch/Bon Ami Company History.” Accessed August 1, 2021. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/faultless-starch-bon-ami-company-history/.
Greenhouse, Linda. 2003. “Robert Abplanalp, 81, Inventor and Nixon Confidant, Dies.” New York Times, September 2, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/us/robert-abplanalp-81-inventor-and-nixon-confidant-dies.html?smid=url-share.
Helton, Daniel. 2018. "Sarah Boone (1832 - 1904)." Black Past. July 4, 2018. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/boone-sarah-1832-1904/.
Jeremy and Ashlee Kate. 2014. “Ironing Your Blues Shirt”. Operation AF Life: Faith, family and the fight for freedom. YouTube video, April 22, 2014. https://youtu.be/c3PIgQwwBMg.
Lutz, Catherine. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press.
Laundrystop. 2010. “Faultless Spray TV Commercial - 1965.” September 19, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8lSucjAEc.
National Aerosol Association. n.d. “History of the Aerosol.” Accessed August 15, 2021. https://www.nationalaerosol.com/history-of-aerosol/.
Powell, Colin L., and Joseph E. Persico. 1995. My American Journey: An Autobiography. New York: Random House.
Public Affairs, 315th Airlift Wing. 2018. “Updates to Dress and Appearance AFI.” 512th Airlift Wing. July 18, 2018. https://www.512aw.afrc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1578470/updates-to-dress-appearance-afi/.
Schwartz, Deborah, and Roy L. Whistler. 2009. “History and Future of Starch.” In Starch: Chemistry and Technology, 3rd ed., edited by James N. BeMiller and Roy Whistler, 1-10. London: Elsevier.
Starkman, Jesse H., and William J. Brown. 1972. “Spray Starch Containing Water-Soluble Polyurethane.” United States Patent Office. Patent number 3,639,309. February 1, 1972.
Author Bio
Deborah Cohler is a Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and is currently completing a book about US military spouses in the early twenty-first century.