La trampa de la dependencia

When a woman marries a member of the United States Armed Forces, she is administratively classified as a dependent. This article examines how a category initially created to regulate access to family benefits can progressively become a condition of socioeconomic dependency. Drawing on a conceptual and structural analysis of official Department of Defense documents, federal legislation, and the existing literature on military families, the study examines the relationship between the operational demands of military service, military spouses’ labor-market position, and the architecture of military family benefits. It introduces the concept of the dependency trap to explain how the interaction between institutionally imposed mobility, the gendered division of labor, and a system of derivative and conditional benefits can progressively undermine spouses’ ability to generate independent income, increasing the economic cost of losing dependent status. The article argues that military spouses’ dependency should be understood not simply as an individual or marital characteristic, but as the outcome of an institutional mechanism.