Women in the Military

Women have been an integral, if often marginalized, part of the American military since its inception.  As early as 1775 the U.S. Congress specified that Army units could enlist one female nurse for every 10 sick or wounded men.  Throughout the nineteenth century the linkage between women and military service remained focused on traditional female roles like nursing.   By the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898 the U.S. Army had 1,200 female nurses caring for soldiers in Cuba and the United States.  With the Army Reorganization Act of 1901, the Army officially created a permanent female nursing corps.  Like most early attempts to include women in the defense establishment, this act marginalized women by denying the nurses rank, equal pay, and retirement benefits.  In 1908 the Navy went further, establishing the Navy Nurses, the first women to formally serve as members of the uniformed services.  The first nurses, known as the “sacred twenty,” evolved into an organization with 160 members by 1917.

In some rare cases women attempted to go beyond the traditionally feminine roles that the military has tried to assign to them.  A small number of women, such as the Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson, have disguised themselves as men and participated in combat operations, sometimes with the tacit approval of their male comrades.  Such women clearly violated a widely accepted belief in the United States that, until quite recently, has placed men in the role of warrior and women in the role of those whom warriors protected.  During the Civil War, Union nurse Mary Livermore noted the presence of a “large number” of women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the war.  Scholar Linda Grant de Pauw places the number of women who disguised themselves as men at 250 in the Confederate army and 400 in the Union army, although an exact count is impossible to determine.

More traditionally, the military has accepted women into clear second-class roles or into roles more in tune with commonly accepted notions of gender.  Nursing fit most obviously into these patterns.  During World War I the Army expanded its unit of nurses from 403 in early 1917 to more than 21,400 by the end of the war.  Almost half of these nurses saw overseas service.  The Navy added more than 1,000 nurses during the war, building on its already path breaking “sacred twenty.”

The personnel needs of the Army during World War I ran counter to desires to maintain traditional gender roles.  Accordingly, the services reached a compromise that placed enlisted women in administrative roles under the status of civilian contractors.  In October 1917, General John Pershing requested 100 female telephone operators fluent in French.  These women were volunteers who, although working directly for the Army, received no military rank and had pay scales similar to those of nurses, not the uniformed male members of the Army.  The Army soon recruited women to serve under an analogous status in several administrative departments in the United States and Europe.  The Navy recruited 13,000 yeomen (F), better known as “yeomenettes.”  Although banned from service at sea, the Navy granted the “yeomenettes” full military status, pay, and retirement benefits.

The end of World War I led to a massive reduction of American military forces and military women were among the first let go.  The Navy quickly cancelled its yeomenette program and introduced legislation in the 1925 Naval Reserve Act that limited service in the Navy to male citizens only.  Similarly, despite studies showing massive female interest in military service in the event of war, the Army abolished its position of Director of Women’s Programs in 1931.  Most officers and members of Congress viewed women’s military participation during World War I as an exigent act designed to meet a temporary emergency, not as a template for future integration of women in the American military.

The personnel needs of World War II led to an even greater expansion of women’s roles.  The U.S. Army’s decision to limit the size of military forces to 90 infantry divisions, designed to maximize the number of men who could remain in industrial jobs, created an additional need for women to fill military roles.  In May 1941, with the international crisis building, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rodgers (who had served with the Army in England in World War I) and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt proposed a bill to incorporate female volunteers into the Army.  The senior leadership of the Army forced a compromise that enlisted women as part of an auxiliary unit whose members were not part of the larger Army structure and did not receive rank and pay in accordance with men.

The creation of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) set the pattern for women’s service in World War II.  WAAC members were clearly understood to be volunteers and non-combatants.  The Navy moved more slowly but in July 1942, it introduced a broadly similar organization called the WAVES, whose very name (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) underscored its auxiliary and secondary role.  WAVES were to occupy positions in the U.S. Navy in order to free male sailors and marines for service on ships and overseas duty.  In the words of one recruitment poster for women marines: “Be a marine.  Free a marine to fight.”

By the middle of the war, Army and Navy senior leaders acquiesced to external pressure and institutional reason, offering women full military status in order to simplify the legal and administrative requirements of military women.  In July 1943, the WAAC became the WAC (Women’s Army Corps), dropping “auxiliary” and providing full military rank to WAC members.  Women remained a small proportion of the armed forces (never more than 2.3 percent) but served in increasingly important roles until the end of the war in 1945.  The majority of military women (64 percent) served in administrative positions, but others challenged the definitions of “female work” significantly.  Navy scientist and WAVES member Grace Hopper used her Ph.D. in mathematics to help develop the electromagnetic Mark I and Mark II calculating machines.  She remained in the Navy until 1985 when she retired as an admiral.  Other women assumed commands and performed tasks previously reserved to men, including service on the highly technical LORAN (Long-Range Aid to Navigation) systems and the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.  Women did not serve in combat, but they did become gunnery instructors, mechanics, and truck drivers.  By the end of the war the Army had dropped its insistence on women staying stateside.  More than 17,000 members of the WAC served overseas.

Another group of women volunteered to fly combat aircraft from their point of manufacture in the United States to bases overseas.  The 1,000 members of the Women’s Air Service Pilot program (WASP) encountered more official hostility from the senior ranks of the Army, partly because the traditionally male job they performed threatened gender roles much more than did the WAC or WAVES programs.  The women who joined the WASP program received no military rank and no military benefits despite serving at more than 120 air bases and logging more than 60,000,000 miles in combat aircraft.  WASP pilots also flight tested new airplanes, a dangerous job that cost 38 WASP pilots their lives.  In 1980 Congress finally authorized veteran status for the WASP pilots, but denied them full military benefits.

As the experience of the WASP showed, women who volunteered for military service in World War II faced tremendous challenges.  In order to ensure that military women did not appear to challenge conventional images of women, members of the WAC and WAVES were depicted as being feminine even while they performed masculine work.  This image often ran counter to women’s efforts to have men take them seriously as military colleagues.  Women faced harassment, condescension, and an aggressive slander campaign by those opposed to women serving in the military.  The campaign spread rumors that alleged that the WAC and WAVES consisted of lesbians and, somewhat paradoxically, that these units were filled with women who were sexually promiscuous with their male compeers.

Army and Navy nurses served overseas in large numbers as well.  The Army employed 57,000 female nurses; the Navy, 11,000.  They often served at or very near the front lines.  Sixty-seven Army nurses became prisoners of war following the Philippines campaign (1941–42) and endured the brutal conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps for three years.  Despite the dangerous conditions in which they served, military nurses, operating in more traditional female roles, elicited much less controversy than did those serving in the WAC and WAVES programs.

Postwar Debates

The end of World War II led to a significant drawdown of the American military.  As in 1918, the women’s programs were among the first to be cut.  The numbers fell from a high of 100,000 WACs and 86,000 WAVES in 1945, to 5,000 WACs and 1,600 WAVES by 1948.  Most women, like most men, were happy to return to their pre-war lives after 1945, but many women had hoped to continue their military service.  Several senior military leaders and members of Congress disapproved and recommended disbanding the WAC and WAVES and returning the military to an all-male status.  Women remained in administrative jobs while Congress and the services continued to debate the issue.  Nursing remained an exception to the general pattern.  In 1947 the Army-Navy Nurse Act permanently integrated nurses into the regular line of the armed services and opened ranks as high as lieutenant colonel/commander to nurses.

The Army-Navy Nurse Act and the growing threat of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union led to planning for a permanent role for military women.  Senior military leaders like Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Carl Spaatz and Admiral Chester Nimitz all lent their support to the idea.  They argued against a more conservative Congressional plan to admit women only into the military reserves.  Despite these high-level supporters of women in the military, Congress opposed any legislation that would create what one Congressman called “an army of women.”  Congress also argued that providing military women with the same dependent benefits provided to military men would create an unpalatable image of women working to support their idle husbands.  Still others argued that military status was incompatible with motherhood.

The result of these debates was the compromise Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948.  Like the Army-Navy Nurse Act of the previous year, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act made women a regular and permanent part of the active and reserve portions of the American armed services.  The act also set important limits on women’s service, including: a ceiling on women’s participation set at 2 percent of total service strength; separate promotion lists by gender; parental consent for women under the age of 21; a ban on dependent access to health care unless a woman could claim that she was responsible for more than 50 percent of the dependent’s financial support, and a ban on female service in combat aircraft and on board ships other than hospital ships and transports outside combat areas. 

The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act and subsequent legislation assumed that women did not want a career in the military.  In 1951 President Harry Truman signed legislation mandating that women separate from the military if they became mothers by giving birth, by marrying a man with children, or by adopting.  The services also allowed women to abandon their military commitments without penalty if they married.

As a result of the limits of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, the percentage of women in the military never exceeded 2 percent and rarely reached 1.5 percent, even during the Korean War (1950–53).  The low numbers of women in the military reflected the clear second-class status of military women, more so than a lack of interest among women.  By another clause in the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, only the heads of the WAC, WAVES, and WAF (Women in the Air Force) could attain the rank of colonel/captain.  The logjam of the promotion system limited the abilities of women to attain rank commensurate with their knowledge and experience.  The poor job opportunities and continued sexual harassment that military women, both officers and enlisted, faced led to high attrition rates.  By the late 1950s less than 1.3 percent of American military personnel were female.

Consequently, more than 80 percent of American military women who served in the Vietnam War were nurses.  Army nurses served in areas dangerously close to the Demilitarized Zone and were often under fire.  Eight Army nurses were killed in action during the war.  Members of the WAC, WAVES, and WAF also served in Southeast Asia, most commonly at the Military Assistance Command headquarters in Saigon in South Vietnam.  Despite their service in a combat zone as medical personnel they were forbidden to take weapons training or carry side arms.

As the Vietnam War grew increasingly unpopular and selective service increasingly controversial, Army planners began to reconsider the use of military women.  Enlisting more military women offered the possibility of reducing the number of men that the selective service system had to draft.  As early as 1964 the armed services had officially supported a revision of the 2 percent limit on women’s service legislated in the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948.  In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed Public Law 90-130, which removed the 2 percent quota and also removed the limits on women’s promotions, although separate promotion lists by gender remained.  By 1973 women were 2.6 percent of the Army, 2.2 percent of the Navy, and 2.9 percent of the Air Force.  These modest increases were less than supporters of Public Law 90-130 had envisioned, but did demonstrate significant growth compared to the 1950s.  The law, however, did not change the fundamentally unequal status of military women.

The end of conscription in 1973 had a dramatic impact on the nature of women’s military service.  With the armed services no longer able to count on the draft to compel men to serve and with the military in generally low regard among young males, the new All-Volunteer Force (AVF) had to reconsider the employment of women.  In the absence of the draft, military pay and living conditions also improved, making the military a more attractive career option for women.  Although many members of Congress and many in the Pentagon still hoped to keep the number of military women small, senior uniformed leaders like the Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt supported taking active and aggressive steps to improve the numbers and the status of military women.

As part of his package of reforms, Zumwalt argued for the abolition of the WAVES on the grounds that a separate structure for Navy women was incompatible with the Navy’s desire to offer women equal opportunity.  In 1973 the WAVES were disbanded, quickly followed by the abolition of the WAF (1976) and WAC (1978) programs as well.  Zumwalt and the Air Force’s Theodore Marrs led the move to open Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programs to women in the early 1970s on the same terms as men.  These programs opened a large officer corps accession program to women and allowed them to take weapons training alongside men.

The success of the ROTC integration program led to the opening of the service academies to women in 1976.  New York senator Jacob Javits had first recommended a woman for appointment in 1972 but the Naval Academy rejected the nomination.  Congress began to take action in response to law suits alleging that denying women access to the academies also unfairly denied them access to senior rank.  Colorado senator Patricia Schroeder led a bi-partisan effort to introduce an amendment to the 1975 Defense Authorization Bill that would integrate the academies.  It passed by a voice vote and was signed into law by President Gerald Ford with little Congressional controversy.

The courts also began to take an interest in many aspects of the unequal legal status of military women.  By early 1973 30 states had approved the Equal Rights Amendment, making its ultimate passage seem likely.  The military assumed that if passed, the Equal Rights Amendment would lead to legal challenges to any aspects of military service that made distinctions according to gender.  Even though the amendment ultimately failed, these challenges began almost immediately.  In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that the military had to offer women the same dependent benefits offered to men.  As a consequence, the military also decided to replace the terms “husband” and “wife” with “spouse.”  Other court cases led the military to change its policy requiring unwed women who became pregnant to give up their duties and declared that the Navy could not refuse women service aboard ship based solely on their gender.

The smooth integration of women in the 1970s into analogous institutions undermined the military’s arguments against the further integration of women into the military.  Women became successful members of police forces, fire departments, the Secret Service, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  Moreover, the military’s own studies determined that the integration of women did not undermine unit cohesion.  The Army’s MAX WAC study of 1977 and REF WAC study of 1978 found that the presence of women in a unit did not impair that unit’s performance.  The military also found that women applicants had on average higher test scores than men and that women in the services missed far less time due to alcohol, drug use, and going AWOL.  Even with pregnancy leave figured in, men still had nearly twice the absentee rate of women.  The services soon found solutions to other problems such as restroom facilities, uniforms, and pregnancy policies.

These changes led to a dramatic rise in the numbers of military women.  The administration of President Jimmy Carter firmly supported the recruitment of more military women, which led to the appointment of Department of Defense officials sympathetic to the expansion of the numbers of military women as well as an expansion of their roles.  Between 1973 and 1981 the percentage of female Army personnel rose from 2.6 percent to 9.4 percent.  The percentages in the Air Force rose from 2.9 percent to 11.1 percent and in the Navy from 2.2 percent to 7.4 percent.  The number of women entering the services led to increasing pressure to open more jobs to them.  In 1978 the Coast Guard, part of the Department of Defense in times of war only, opened all sea going billets (quarters) to women on exactly the same terms as men.  Although pressured to follow suit, the Navy continued to ban women from ships designated as combat vessels.   The Air Force and Army also held to policies prohibiting women from combat.  The Army’s Direct Combat Probability Coding system coded each Army job P1 to P7 based on its likelihood to be in combat.  Those at the highest end of the scale were closed to women.

The administration of President Ronald Reagan supported limiting the number of women in the military but did not support the desires of some officials to roll back the military participation of women.  As a result the percentages of female military personnel continued to grow throughout the 1980s, although at a slower pace than in the 1970s.  As a result military operations and deployments during the Reagan years such as those in Grenada and Panama inevitably included women.  They also showed that the Direct Combat Probability Coding system could not keep women safe from the dangers of military service.  In some cases, the system proved to be dangerously inefficient: in some cases unit commanders decided to deploy to combat areas without their female soldiers, leaving the units without mission critical personnel.  In one case an army division commander ignored the Direct Combat Probability Coding system and sent his unit’s women into combat areas.

At the same time, women were demonstrating proficiency in more and more military specialties.  The Defense Department therefore had to deal with women performing more jobs within the context of the services’ desires to keep women away from combat.  In 1988 the Pentagon discarded the Direct Combat Probability Coding system in favor of a “Risk Rule” system that reduced the Army’s seven classifications to two: combat and non-combat.  The change opened more jobs to women but retained the presumption that women could be protected from harm by denying them the right to serve in certain jobs.  The Risk Rule failed to operate as designed in Panama where several women came under fire.

The first Persian Gulf War (1991) witnessed the deployment of more than 33,000 women overseas and demonstrated two important points that military studies had long concluded: first, that women had become a necessary and competent component of any large military operation and second, that no amount of legislation could eliminate the risk to female military personnel.  The intense media attention that accompanied the war placed these issues directly in the national spotlight.

The manifest success of military women in the first Persian Gulf War led to a movement to change the legislation governing the military service of women.  On May 22, 1991, two members of Congress, Democrat Patricia Schroeder and Republican Beverly Byron, sponsored a bill to remove the exclusions of women from combat service in the Navy and the Army.  The Pentagon initially supported the bill, but later joined President George H. W. Bush’s administration in opposing it.  A controversial non-binding Presidential commission on the issue of women in combat issued a report opposing women in combat just after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

The Clinton Administration ignored the report and moved quickly to open more military jobs to women.  Soon after his appointment, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, a longtime supporter of expanding roles for women, dropped the Risk Rule and opened combat aviation to women.  In the early months of 1994 the Air Force welcomed its first female fighter pilot and the Navy assigned its first women to aircraft carriers.  The Clinton Administration issued guidance to the Pentagon stating that women could not be banned from a military assignment based solely on the danger that the assignment posed.  Aspin also announced that the Clinton Administration intended to open all military jobs to women except special operations, ground combat, and service on submarines.

The progress that women made in breaking barriers stood in marked contrast to the pervasive problems of sexual harassment and assault.  In 1979 the Baltimore Sun ran a series of stories on sexual harassment incidents and rapes at Fort Meade in Maryland.  These articles brought the issue to public attention and led to a series of Congressional hearings in 1980.   The Army’s own investigations revealed that half of all female personnel had experienced harassment and that sexual harassment was a primary reason for women choosing not to reenlist.  With the new attention came new discipline including the Army’s first-ever court martial conviction for sexual harassment.

Military studies also revealed that the problem of sexual harassment was more pronounced overseas than in the United States.  A tour of European and Pacific bases by a Congressionally-appointed committee in 1986 and 1987 showed that sexual harassment was a commonplace occurrence that went unpunished by chains of command in Hawaii and the Philippines.  The Pentagon classified the committee’s report, but it was subsequently leaked to major American newspapers.  A new round of investigations followed and several Philippine commanders were reassigned, but the problem remained, as evidenced by the rape of 24 women in 18 months at the Navy’s Orlando training center in 1990.

Sexual harassment jumped on to the front pages as a result of the behavior of several Naval aviators at the bacchanalian 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas.  More than 80 women were assaulted at the conference while some officers looked on and others took pictures.  Forcing women to “run the gauntlet” at Tailhook had been a feature of the conference for years.  In 1991, however, the events at Tailhook stood in sharp contrast to the treatment of military women months earlier during the Persian Gulf. A Tailhook victim and aide to an admiral publicized the events at the conference after the admiral ignored her pleas to investigate.  The Tailhook scandal grew as some Navy officers refused to cooperate with investigators.

In 1996 a sexual assault scandal at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground underscored the continuing depths of the problem.  In 2003 allegations of sexual assault and harassment emerged at the U.S. Air Force Academy as well.  To some, the assaults and harassment serve as a function of male opposition to the intrusion of women into the traditionally male world of the military.  To others, they are representative of failures of leadership.  One Army study concluded that sexual harassment and sexual assault cost the Army more than $500 million per year in litigation and lost work time.

The recent experiences of women in the American military is thus a history of achievement amidst abiding problems.  In both world wars women served on a temporary emergency basis, laying a foundation for the accomplishments that followed.  In the past 30 years, military women have shattered glass ceilings and demonstrated marked proficiencies in numerous jobs previously held only by males.  At the same time, however, the persistence of sexual harassment and sexual assault highlights the serious issues that military women continue to face.

Bibliography

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De Pauw, Linda Grant.  Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Holm, Jeanne.  Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.  Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1992.

McMichael, William H.  The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U. S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal.  New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997.

Morden, Bettie.  The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978.  Washington: United States Army Center of Military History, 1990.

Rustad, Michael.  Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Woman.  Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger, 1982.

Stiehm, Judith Hicks.  Arms and the Enlisted Woman.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Treadwell, Mattie.  The United States Army in World War II Special Studies: The Women’s Army Corps.  Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1953.

United States Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces.  Women in Combat.  Washington: Brassey’s, 1993.

Van Devanter, Lynda.  Home Before Morning: The True Story of An Army Nurse in Vietnam.  Reprint. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Westbrook, Robert.  “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligations in World War II.” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 587–614.

Military Nurses; Sampson, Deborah; Sexual Abuse and Harassment; Tailhook Convention

Michael S. Neiberg