Skip to main content

Women & Military

After her death, Dickey Chapelle’s editor at National Geographic paid tribute to the gutsy war correspondent he knew.

Editor's Note: Bill Garrett was Dickey Chapelle's primary contact at National Geographic and often worked with her on assignments in the field. He wrote these observations about his friend and colleague shortly after her death.

America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators making sure critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.

The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs

For the first time in U.S. history, women are fighting alongside their male their male counterparts—so far 110 have died in Iraq and Afghanistan

McGrath was th

The Women Airforce Service Pilots seemed strange and exotic to World War II America. In fact, not even the military could quite fiqure out what to do with them.

She was “one of the most active and most reliable of the many secret woman agents of the Confederacy.”

She began her career as a spy and ended it as an actress, and there are no two professions more thickly larded with myth and lies. At least one historian, despairing of seeing anything real behind the mists, concluded that she had never lived at all.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this magazine of trusted historical writing, now in its 75th year, and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate