Male Military Spouses: Increasingly Common Yet Still Invisible

"It's a He!" Military Spouse magazine declared on its May cover, when it named Jeremy Hilton (pictured above) its "Military Spouse of the Year" -- the first man to ever win the distinction. And while husbands may not come to mind when you're flipping through the pink-tinged pages of Military Spouse, or browsing the Army Wife Network, there are droves of them out there.

Department of Defense numbers show women as making up 14.5 percent of the active duty military in 2011 -- up from 1.4 percent in 1970. That data showed 46 percent of those 207,000 women as married, and 48 percent of their partners as also being active duty members of the military. That translates to roughly 51,000 civilian spouses of the active duty female force, and rising.