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The California desert, for 28-year-old Madie Chapman, was a shock to the system.
Chapman became a desert resident last summer, when her husband, a field radio operator, was stationed at the Twentynine Palms combat center, the largest US Marine Corps training base in the world. Within just a few months of receiving orders, the couple moved with their three young children to the secluded outpost near Joshua Tree national park, joining the thousands of other active-duty service members and their families who live there.
But in Twentynine Palms, almost everything feels far away. The closest Walmart is 30 miles (48km) down the highway. Palm Springs is an hour’s drive and Los Angeles is three. The isolated base, spread across roughly 1,000 sq miles (2,590 sq km) of open desert, is flanked on several sides by nothing more than rolling hills of sand and a string of unpopulated, low-slung mountains. The landscape isn’t the only otherworldly part of Twentynine Palms; every summer, temperatures in the triple digits descend on the community.
“There’s just nothing out here,” Chapman said.
In a setting that removed from the urban world, finding work can seem next to impossible. Despite having a college degree in sociology and economics, Chapman was laid off from her remote job in August, and then struggled to find an in-person role in human resources – a position she’s held at previous bases. Chapman and her family have moved to three states in six years.
“Being a mom of three, I was like: ‘I have to do something or I’m going to go crazy,’” she said. “You know, we have groceries and bills and things that we have to do.”
So Chapman started her own small business instead: C&O Gifts, a one-woman operation where she assembles themed gift baskets for holidays, birthdays, baby showers or any day of the year that might warrant a pick-me-up. Her business is a welcome financial boost for her family, but it also serves as an emotional boost to other spouses in Twentynine Palms. “It just makes it a little less lonely,” she said. Chapman is one of many spouses on the base with a burgeoning business; others sell handmade earrings and bracelets, pillowy loaves of sourdough and even mini photoshoot sessions for couples and families.
Even on far less remote military bases, a glaring unemployment crisis has persisted for decades. Across the country, military spouses, who are predominantly women, have one of the highest rates of unemployment of any demographic: an estimated 22%. In 2021, amid the pandemic, that figure was reported to have soared to 38%. Although the vast majority of active-duty spouses have some college education or higher, 90% of spouses agreed in one study that military service negatively affected their careers.
Many factors make finding a job difficult: frequent moves from base to base, the challenge of finding reliable childcare, the difficulty of transferring professional licenses among states and countries, and the lack of accessible remote jobs beyond customer-service roles. And many military families say that relying on only one income is less feasible than in generations past, especially as the cost of living goes up nationwide.
In that employment vacuum, many women have turned to entrepreneurship.
On the Twentynine Palms base, Chapman and a tight-knit network of other spouses host “small-business expos” each month, where they showcase their businesses and sell their most recent creations, often to other wives and families from the base.
Being a business owner also offers military spouses something much more valuable than just a job, said Stephanie Brown, the CEO and co-founder of non-profit the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce.
“Don’t get me wrong, we’re very proud to support the mission of our service members. But you do tend to lose some of that sense of self-identity,” Brown said. “So if we can help military spouses find that sense of purpose – as a small-business owner, as an independent contractor, as someone who is self-employed – then that’s a gift.”
In the hours before Twentynine Palms’s most recent business expo – a Valentine’s Day-themed event staged in one common room on the base – more than a dozen business owners buzzed around their homes, preparing for the day ahead.
I was denied access to the base for this story (Twentynine Palms stated that they didn’t have enough staff to escort me, as a member of the media, to the expo), so a handful of spouses met me just outside the barbed-wire confines of the combat center instead. Their cars were loaded down with supplies for the expo, and their children waited restlessly in the back seats. Half a mile away, armed guards stood watch at one entrance to the base. The muffled sound of artillery echoed regularly in the distance.
Chapman rifled through stacks of plastic bins piled high in her trunk, putting together a sample Valentine’s basket, complete with a stuffed animal, body scrub, a heart-shaped pillow, chocolate candy and other small items. The first basket she ever made was for a spouse celebrating her 18th birthday while her husband was deployed, she said. Since then, Chapman has made similar gifts for military spouses who have given birth while their husbands were gone, or have been forced to celebrate wedding anniversaries alone.
“You just see on Facebook the young wives that are out here, who are newly 18 and whose spouses are gone for months at a time, and you’re in this remote location by yourself,” she said. “I’ve been through my fair share of deployments with my spouse, and I know what it’s like to be alone at those special times.”
Another Twentynine Palms spouse-turned-business-owner, Emma Salazar, showed off the jewelry she planned to sell at the expo that day: tiny rings made of twisted metal, earrings studded with small shells and quartz, and stacks of colorful, beaded bracelets.
Salazar started her business, Lil Sumthin’ Jewelry, a few years ago as a “side hustle”, after learning from her grandmother how to forage for natural materials and then transform them into handmade jewelry. But when she moved to the desert with her husband in 2023, it was tough to find a regular job to supplement that passion project. It was also Salazar’s first time living on a military base – and she had just given birth to her first child.
“I ended up just doing my business full-time, since I can’t work anywhere else,” she said.
Salazar now crafts jewelry from her home on the Twentynine Palms base, in whatever room “baby wants to be” at that moment. The ultimate goal for her business, she said, would be to sell her pieces in local boutiques.
“People automatically just view you as a dependent,” she said of her role within the military. “But it is nice having your own outlet, and your own identity, because you can get so lost in just being a wife, and a military wife.”
Groups like the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce are working to bolster that community of entrepreneurs, said Brown, the co-founder, who is a military spouse herself. The non-profit awards free certification to spouse-owned businesses, offers guidance and resources, and helps to connect them with nationally recognized companies in the private and public sectors.
“All we’re trying to do is legitimize them,” Brown said, “and give them a seat at the table.”
Still, both the isolation and the highly controlled nature of any military base can affect almost every part of daily life.
After our meet-up in the desert, the Twentynine Palms spouses eventually left to set up for the expo, driving back inside the base.
As I stood outside the barbed wire, taking a few photos of a welcome sign for the combat center, a guard approached. I would need to delete those photos in front of him, he said, as he quickly called for backup. After a small squadron of security officers and other guards assembled at the gate to investigate, they finally admitted that, no, I was not required to delete the photos and was not being detained.
I drove back into the desert, the base in my rearview mirror. Somewhere behind me, the spouses prepared their booths, artfully arranging their merchandise and readying for customers.
Twentynine Palms, as Chapman had described it, can often feel like “a step back in time”; spouses have to figure out how to make their own luck. This month, Chapman even started working a second job: a new role in human resources, which had just opened up on the base.
“You really have to learn,” she said, “how to stand on two feet, on your own.”
