Abstract: Recent and ongoing efforts by the Canadian Armed Forces to recruit and retain more women, promote a more gender equal workplace, and support military spouses suggest that the military's gender order is potentially being disrupted. In this article, we interrogate the contemporary gendering of militaries by centering the experiences of Canadian women who are both military members and military wives. We show how women in heterosexual dual-service relationships negotiate the tensions between competing gendered demands from military and family: the requirement to be a soldier first and the requirement to be a loyal military wife. These tensions are often reconciled in ways that place greater burdens on women and sustain the military's heteropatriarchal culture. Our analysis underscores the necessity of empirically and theoretically attending to both public and private elements of the gendering of militaries. This calls for a deeper analytical integration of the feminist literature on military women and the feminist literature on military wives going forward.