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Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-only Registration

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Abstract

How has male-only draft registration been ideologically justified in the United States? Feminist International Relations and Security Studies scholars would, correctly, point to the strong association between masculinity and militarism in explaining the preservation of male-only registration. I argue, however, that feminist political-sociological scholarship on the centrality of the male breadwinner/female caregiver distinction to numerous federal programs sheds light on ideological justification for women’s exclusion from draft registration. Much like other federal programs, concerns with women’s dependency and men’s economic independence shaped the Selective Service System in 1917. Fear of unraveling the family’s sexual division of labor persisted when Congress renewed all-male draft registration in 1980, a position to which the Supreme Court deferred in 1981. I conclude by arguing that the draft’s problematic nature would endure if women were required to register with Selective Service and that the new arrangement would likely reproduce multiple inequalities.

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Notes

  1. See also Jill Elaine Hasday, “Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, and Extrajudicial Constitutional Change,” Minnesota Law Review 93 (2008): 96–164.

  2. This was especially so during WWI, when the Selective Service System was established. During WWII, dependency deferments diminished. See Dorit Geva, Conscription, Family, and the Modern State: A Comparative Study of France and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 159–205.

  3. See Karen Parrish, “DOD Opens More Jobs, Assignments to Military Women,” U.S. Department of Defense, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=67130, accessed on March 11, 2013.

  4. For example, Anna Mulrine, “Women in Combat: Will They Have to Register for the Draft?” Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2013.

  5. See Eliot A. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); George Q. Flynn, Conscription and Democracy: The Draft in France, Great Britain and the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002); Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and David R. Segal, Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

  6. K. Walter Hickel, “‘Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination’: Citizenship, Dependency, and Conscription in the South, 1917–1919,” Journal of Southern History 66 (2000): 749–80; K. Walter Hickel, “War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen’s Dependents in the South, 1917–1921,” Journal of American History 87 (2001): 1362–91; Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South,” Journal of American History 87 (2001): 1335–61; Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gerald E. Shenk, “Work or Fight”: Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  7. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, ed., Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010).

  8. Constant R. Sutton, ed., Feminism, Nationalism, and Militarism (Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the International Women’s Anthropology Conference, 1995).

  9. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 69–98.

  10. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 108–52.

  11. Elisabeth Wood, “Variation in Sexual Violence During War,” Politics and Society 34, 3 (2006): 307–42.

  12. Insook Kwon, Dong-Ok Lee, Elli Kim and Hyun-Young Kim, “Sexual Violence among Men in the Military in South Korea,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 22 (2007): 1024–42.

  13. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  14. Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12 (July 1987): 687–718; Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 (September 2003): 1–25; Mary Hawksworth, “War as a Mode of Production and Reproduction: Feminist Analytics” in War and Terror: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Karen Alexander and Mary E. Hawkesworth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–34.

  15. Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg, “The Duty to Protect: Gender in the Swedish Practice of Conscription,” Cooperation and Conflict 36 (June 2001): 153–76; Insook Kwon, “Gender, Feminism and Masculinity in Anti-militarism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15 (2013): 213–33.

  16. V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism,” in Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 17–29.

  17. K. David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  18. Hamilton Bean, “U.S. National Security Culture: From Queer Psychopathology to Queer Citizenship,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 (2014): 52–79.

  19. Orna Sasson-Levy and Sarit Amram-Katz, “Gender Integration in Israeli Officer Training: Degendering and Regendering the Military,” in Feminist Perspectives on War and Terror, ed. Karen Alexander and Mary Hawkesworth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 331–61.

  20. Orna Sasson-Levy, “Contradictory Consequences of Mandatory Conscription: The Case of Women Secretaries in the Israeli Military,” Gender and Society 21 (August 2007): 481–507.

  21. Myriam Denov and Christine Gervais, “Negotiating (In)security: Agency, Resistance, and Resourcefulness among Girls Formerly Associated with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front,” in War and Terror: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Karen Alexander and Mary E. Hawkesworth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 35–60.

  22. Sandra Via, “Gender, Militarism, and Globalization: Soldiers for Hire and Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Gender, War, and Militarism, ed. Sjoberg and Via, 42–56.

  23. Cynthia A. LeardMann, Amanda Pietrucha, Kathryn M. Magruder, Besa Smith, Maureen Murdoch, Isabel G. Jacobson, Margaret A.K. Ryan, and Gary Gackstetter, “Combat Deployment Is Associated with Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault in a Large, Female Military Cohort,” Women’s Health Issues: Official Publication of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health 23, 4 (August 2013): 215–23.

  24. M. Denise Horn, “Boots and Bed Sheets: Constructing the Military Support System in a Time of War,” in Gender, War and Militarism, ed. Sjoberg and Via, 57–68.

  25. Maya Eichler, Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-Soviet Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

  26. The Norwegian parliament, however, voted last year to include women in conscription.

  27. See Cohn, “Sex and Death”; Cynthia Enloe, “Margins, Silences and Bottom Rungs: How To Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations,” in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, ed. Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186–202; Heidi Hudson, “‘Doing’ Security As Though Humans Matters: A Feminist Perspective on Gender and the Politics of Human Security,” Security Dialogues 36 (June 2005): 155–74; Anne Sisson Runyan and V. Spike Peterson, “The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversions of IR Theory,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 16 (Winter 1991): 67–106; Laura Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

  28. Exceptions are Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 2; and Dorit Geva, Conscription, Family, and the Modern State: A Comparative Study of France and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  29. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

  30. Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Basis of American Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986): 221–38; J. Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123–51; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19 (1994): 309–36; Linda Gordon, “Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880–1920,” American Quarterly 37 (1985): 173–92; Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State: 1890–1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); B. Michael Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the ‘Underclass,’ and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); L. Joanne Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); W. Karen Tice, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

  31. Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

  32. For example Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Gwendolyn Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State,” in Women, the State and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 92–122; J. Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Sonya Michel, “The Limits of Maternalism: Policies Toward Wage-earning Mothers during the Progressive Era” in Mothers of a New World, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 277–320; Ann Shola Orloff, “Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States,” American Sociological Review 58 (June 1993): 303–28; Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled.

  33. Mettler, Dividing Citizens.

  34. See especially Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency.”

  35. Extensive student deferments were introduced later in 1951 during the Korean War, and most were cancelled in 1971.

  36. Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency.”

  37. Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection.”

  38. Martha E. McSally, “Defending America in Mixed Company: Gender in the U.S. Armed Forces,” Daedalus 140 (2011): 148–64.

  39. On French and Prussian conscription innovations during the nineteenth century, see Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2004); Meyer Kestnbaum, “Citizen-Soldiers, National Service and the Mass Army: The Birth of Conscription in Revolutionary Europe and North America,” Comparative Social Research 20 (2002): 117–44; Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Isser Woloch, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” Past & Present 111 (1986): 101–129.

  40. John Whiteclay Chambers, II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York; London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1987); George Q. Flynn, Conscription and Democracy: The Draft in France, Great Britain, and the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002).

  41. Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); William L. Shaw, “The Confederate Conscription and Exemption Acts,” The American Journal of Legal History 6 (1962): 368–405.

  42. Jean Edith MacKellar, The Draft in the Civil War (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1907) (on file with the University of Chicago Library).

  43. Peter Levine, “Draft Evasion in the North during the Civil War, 1863–1865,” The Journal of American History 67 (1981): 816–34; Mark A. Weitz, A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

  44. John Whiteclay Chambers, II, “American Views of Conscription and the German Nation in Arms in the Franco-Prussian War,” in The People In Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution, ed. Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75–99; Graham A. Cosmas, “Military Reform After the Spanish-American War: The Army Reorganization Fight of 1898–1899,” Military Affairs 35 (1971): 12–18.

  45. John Garry Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers; the Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1972); George C. Herring Jr., “James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915–1916,” The Journal of Southern History 30 (1964): 383–404; Michael D. Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

  46. See Chambers, Raise an Army, chapter 5.

  47. The Provost Marshal General Office was established in the Union North during the Civil War to oversee the draft “enrollment” boards. See Levine, “Draft Evasion,” 817. It was revived again during WWI.

  48. David Alexander Lockmiller, Enoch H. Crowder: Soldier, Lawyer, and Statesman (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Studies, 1955).

  49. See Chambers, Raise an Army, chapter 6.

  50. Selective Service Act of 1917, Pub.L. No. 65–12,40 Stat. 76, 78 (1917).

  51. Ibid.

  52. R. J. Q. Adams, “Asquith’s Choice: The May Coalition and the Coming of Conscription, 1915–1916,” Journal of British Studies 25 (July 1986): 243–63.

  53. Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993); Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers’ Families in the Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004).

  54. Dorit Geva, “Different and Unequal? Breadwinning, Dependency Deferments, and the Gendered Origins of the U.S. Selective Service System,” Armed Forces & Society 37 (2011): 598–618; Geva, Conscription, chapter 4.

  55. Ibid.

  56. “Selective Service System, The Classification Process, Special Monograph, No. 5, 23” (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1950).

  57. Geva, Conscription, chapter 4.

  58. Calculations are based on: United States. Provost Marshal General’s Bureau and United States. War Department, Second Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War on the Operations of the Selective Service System to December 20, 1918 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1919), Appendix 31-A, 401–04.

  59. Ibid., Appendix 73-A, 459. See also K. Walter Hickel, “‘Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination’: Citizenship, Dependency, and Conscription in the South, 1917–1919,” The Journal of Southern History 66 (2000): 749–780; K. Walter Hickel, “War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen’s Dependents in the South, 1917–1921,” The Journal of American History 87 (2001): 1362–91; Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gerald E. Shenk, “Work or Fight!”: Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). For more detailed data on racial differences in classifications during WWII, see Geva, Conscription, 200–03.

  60. See Geva, Conscription, 159–205.

  61. Selective Service Regulations vol. 3, § 15, para. 328, as prescribed by Executive Order No. 8545, 5 Federal Register 3779 (September 23, 1940).

  62. See Military Selective Service Act, 50 U.S.C. § 453 (1948).

  63. “Army Secretary Urges Revival of Draft Registration,” Washington Post, January 12, 1979.

  64. Drew Middleton, “Military Draft: An Issue that Doesn’t Fade,” New York Times, May 2, 1979.

  65. See, for example, A Bill to Require the Reinstitution of Procedures for the Registration of Certain Persons under the Military Selective Service Act, and for Other Purposes, S. 109, 96th Cong. (1979); A Bill to Provide for Military Registration and Mobilization Assessment, and for other Purposes, S.226, 96th Cong. (1979).

  66. See, for example, Reinstitution of Procedures for Registration Under the Military Selective Service Act: Hearings on S. 109 and S. 226, Before the Subcommittee on Manpower and Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, 96th Cong., First Session (1979).

  67. Ibid., 11.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Marjorie Hunter, “House Bars Registration for Draft; Manpower Study Is Sought Instead,” New York Times, September 13, 1979.

  72. For example Women in the Military: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the House Committee on Armed Services, 96th Congress (1979).

  73. House Committee on Armed Services, Presidential Recommendations for Selective Service Reform: A Report to Congress Prepared Pursuant, Pub. L. 96–107, 96th Cong.(1980).

  74. Ibid., 27–28.

  75. Registration of Women: Hearings on H.R. 6569, Before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the House Committee on Armed Services, 96th Cong.(1980).

  76. Ibid., 6–7.

  77. U.S. Const. amendment XIV specifies that, “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws … .” The Due Process Clause of U.S. Const. amendment V. places the same constraint upon the federal government.

  78. See Craig v. Boren.

  79. Registration of Women, 13 (emphasis added).

  80. See Judith Wagner Decew “The Combat Exclusion and the Role of Women in the Military,” Hypatia 10 (1995): 56–73.

  81. Ibid., 17.

  82. For example: “Mr. Hillis [Representative from Indiana]: So you are going to register 4 million women to perhaps – hopefully we wouldn't want to have to draft anyone, but to meet our needs perhaps to raise womanpower needs of 80,000?Mr. Pirie [Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower]: That is correct.Mr. Hillis: That is a very, very small fraction of a percentage; is it not? Don't you think 80,000 could be met by volunteers?” Ibid., 22.

  83. Ibid.,125–31.

  84. “Draft Registration Wins Key Vote in Senate Unit,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1980.

  85. See126 Cong. Rec. S13, 880–13,881 (daily ed. June 10, 1980).

  86. Ibid., 13,880.

  87. Ibid., 13,881.

  88. H.J. Res. 521, Pub.L. No. 9282, 94 Stat. 552 (1980).

  89. Proclamation No. 4771, 3 C.F.R. 82 (1980).

  90. 126 Cong. Rec. S13, 894 (daily ed. Jun. 10, 1980). The lottery was re-introduced in 1969 by President Richard M. Nixon when he amended the Military Selective Service Act of 1967. See Selective Service Amendment Act of 1969, Pub. L. No. 91–124, 83 Stat. 220 (1969). The lottery, however, did not cancel the classification and deferment system.

  91. Ibid., 13867–68.

  92. Selective Service Act of 1917, Pub.L. No. 65–12, 40 Stat. 76 (1917); Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, Pub.L. No. 76–783, 54 Stat. 885 (1940); Selective Service Act of 1948, Pub.L. No. 80–759, 62 Stat. 604 (1948); Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951, Pub.L. No. 82–51, 65 Stat. 75 (1951); Military Selective Service Act of 1967, Pub.L. No. 90–40, 81 Stat. 100 (1967); Military Selective Service Act, 50 U.S.C.

  93. The suit had originally started in 1971 by a group of male plaintiffs who had argued that the draft was unconstitutional on multiple grounds. See Rostker v. Goldberg, at note 1, for a brief review, and Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 221–302, for a fuller account.

  94. Goldberg v. Rostker, 509 F. Supp. 586 (1980).

  95. See Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 294.

  96. See Rostker v. Goldberg, 76.

  97. Ibid., 82.

  98. Ibid., 96–97. Emphasis in original.

  99. 417 U.S. 733 (1974)

  100. Diane H. Mazur, “A Blueprint for Law School Engagement with the Military,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy 1 (2005): 473–525. See also Sara MacDwyer, “Rostker v. Goldberg: The Uneven Development of the Equal Protection Doctrine in Military Affairs,” Golden Gate University Law Review 12 (1982): 661–90.

  101. See Reva B. Siegel, “She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,” Harvard Law Review 115 (2002): 948–1046.

  102. See David F. Burrelli, “Women in Combat: Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress (2012); Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel and Readiness, Report to Congress on the Reviews of Laws, Policies and Regulations Restricting the Service of Female Members in the U.S. Armed Forces (2012).

  103. Ibid.

  104. See Military Selective Service Act, 50 U.S.C.

  105. See Kerber, No Constitutional Right.

  106. See Craig v. Boren, 199.

  107. Although as noted earlier, research shows that militaries remain highly masculine and hetero-normative institutions despite integration of women and sexual minorities.

  108. Current law requires individuals “born male” and who undergo a sex change to register; individuals “born female” and who have transitioned to male are not required to register.

  109. One should keep in mind that implementation of a federal draft system during the first years of WWI also seemed inconceivable before its creation in 1917. See Chambers, Raise an Army.

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The author wishes to thank John McCormick, Julie Cooper, Mara Marin, Daniel Levine, Mildred Schwartz, Lis Clemens, Craita Curteanu, Anat Geva, and Aaron Lambert for their support, and the Polity editors and blind reviewers for their guidance.

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Geva, D. Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-only Registration. Polity 47, 199–224 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.6

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