
- rplant@ucsd.edu
- (858) 353-1941
-
Ridgewalk Academic Complex Arts and Humanities Building, Room 833
Professor, History
Rebecca Jo Plant is a Professor of History and an Academic Senate Distinguished Teacher. Her research interests focus on gender and family history and the social and psychological impact of war in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Born in 1968, she grew up in Kansas City, attended college at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later moved to Baltimore to pursue graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. She taught for two years at Vanderbilt University before coming to UC San Diego in 2002.
Plant’s most recent book, coauthored with France M. Clarke (University of Sydney) is Of
Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press,
2023). It won the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the 2024 Grace Abbott Award
from the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. Plant is also the author of
Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago, 2010) and co-
editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the
Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2012). She has held fellowships from the American
Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the
American Council of Learned Societies, and the Australian Research Council. From 2019
to 2024, she coedited Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. In
2024-25, Plant will serve as vice-chair of the UCSD Academic Senate.
Coauthored with Cayla Regas and Frances Clarke, “‘Do not toss this letter away’:
Women’s Hardship Petitions to the U.S. Federal Government during the Civil War,”
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, 27:1 (Spring 2023)
“‘Combat Exhaustion’ versus ‘Psychoneurosis’: American Psychiatrists and the
Terminology of War Trauma during the Second World War,” Gender and Trauma
since 1900, ed. Paula Michaels and Christina Twomey, London: Bloomsbury, 2021,
79-100
Coauthored with David Dawson, “Women and the Obligations of Citizenship during World War II: U.S. Debates over Proposals to Conscript Civilians,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, Fall 2020
I am currently researching the history of psychiatry and war trauma during World War II. Americans do not typically associate war trauma with World War II or the “greatest generation” that fought it, but the Army in fact suffered enormous manpower losses due to neuropsychiatric disorders, with rates of discharge proportionately far higher than in World War I, Korea, or Vietnam. And contrary to popular perceptions today, the issue was widely aired in the press, ultimately leading to the passage of 1946 National Mental Health Act, which for the first time designated federal monies for psychiatric research. This project will show how military psychiatrists capitalized on wartime opportunities to legitimate their expertise, and how their efforts affected both professional and popular notions of mental illness and masculine subjectivity. It focuses on psychiatrists’ theoretical and clinical approaches to war trauma, their attempts to overcome public and military skepticism and outright hostility, and the models of democratic manhood they advanced. Tracing the professional, intellectual, and gendered implications of the psychiatric war effort, this work will document a pivotal era in the history of psychiatry while illuminating its larger cultural effects.