... having been breathed out

In contrast to the women whose World War II service was understood as a heroically brief interlude before marriage, this later cohort [of early Cold War female soldiers] signed up not to meet a temporary emergency but rather as part of a permanent nucleus of women within the armed services. Because they were seen as choosing the military (as opposed to marriage) for a career, these soldiers were automatically suspect, considered overly ambitious and unlikely to be satisfied with the things that “normal” women wanted. The way that these soldiers were policed, then, was related to why they were policed: antilesbian investigations aimed not only to remove a few women from the service, but to employ the threat of lesbianism to secure the subordination of women soldiers as a class. Policing this vast network of relationships [as part of investigations into alleged lesbianism of soldiers] enabled military officials to touch the lives of virtually every woman in a unit under investigation, warning each not only to monitor her own relationships with other women on her base, but to avoid appearing too driven or exercising too much authority as well. The exclusion of women believed to be lesbians was, in short, closely related to the inclusion of women in the services in general. Lesbianism was constituted by military authorities to help maintain gender hierarchy after women’s integration eliminated a historic barrier between male and female service.

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

Canaday points out that the early Cold War military was possibly the only time in 20th-century history when the US state was actually more concerned with policing homosexuality among women than among men. Not coincidentally, it coincided with the gender integration of the armed forces (predating the more widespread “lavender scare” by several years), and was used to punish women for ambition and for deviating from the feminine standard. America

As Canaday points out above, the crack-down on lesbians in the service was wide-reaching, focusing not on sexual acts but on “tendencies"—which gave military officials free rein to investigate every nuance of a female soldier’s private relationships. Unsurprisingly, these investigations came down disproportionately hard on working-class and butch women.