Woman Warriors

Editor's Note:

Since the Revolutionary era, American women have played vital roles in defending our country in multiple roles.  We know Abigail Adams made ammunition. Deborah Sampson, a former indentured servant, disguised herself as a man and joined a Massachusetts regiment in 1782. Stitching her own wounds, she was not discovered until, unconscious, she was taken to a hospital. She received a state military pension.  In colonial militias, wives frequently followed their husbands.  In addition to domestic roles, they fought on the frontline. The name “Molly Pitcher” identified women like Margaret Corbin, who carried buckets of water to cool cannons before reloading.  In the Battle of Fort Washington, she was shot three times, earned a pension and was buried at West Point.
         
In the Civil War, more than 1,000 women on both sides disguised themselves as men to fight; others were spies.  Driving her medical wagon onto battlefields prompted Clara Barton to found the Red Cross in 1881.  Dorothea Dix, an advocate for improving care for the mentally ill, was Superintendent of US Army Nurses, insisting on medical training for 3,000 Union women.
         
The Army formally established a Nurse Corps in 1901, with 403 volunteers.  The Great War was the first for which women were officially recruited.  Black nurses lobbied to join the Corps but were denied a role until the Spanish flu epidemic increased the demand for help.  Eighteen Black nurses served in Army camps in Ohio and Illinois in November 1918.  Because of the Armistice, they did not receive military pensions or benefits.
         
The Naval Reserve Act of 1916 omitted gender requirements, so 97 women became “yeomanettes,” non-commissioned officers in noncombatant roles.  By the end of the war, 11,274 women worked as clerks, translators, telegraph operators and camouflage designers. The first active-duty female who was not a Navy nurse, Loretta Perfectus Walsh, 20, became the first female Chief Petty Officer.  Women earned the same pay as men ($28.75/month) and were treated as veterans after the war.

African American women served in a single, segregated yeomanette unit, working in the Muster Roll Unit, tracking which ships seaman served on.  Black military women were not allowed to serve in to Europe.  Volunteers were nurses and canteen workers with the YWCA or the Red Cross.

To recruit clerks and cooks, the Marine Corps created a Women’s Reserve, nicknamed “Marinettes,” in 1918.  Admission standards were high:  women had to be “perfect in every respect” and “100% girls.”  As clerks and messengers, they earned pay equal to their rank and were discharged after the Armistice.  Their benefits included insurance, hospitalization, a $60 discharge bonus and burial at Arlington. Opha Mae Johnson, 39, was the first of 305 women to enlist.  A clerk at Marine Corps Headquarters, she was promoted to sergeant, the highest-ranking woman at that time.

The War Department did not want women in the Army but field commanders insisted. The first women to serve in uniform overseas were Army nurses and members of the Signal Corps. America was not manufacturing armaments but contributed technology. Officers relied on telephones to communicate to the front lines and between trenches.  The task required bilingual switchboard operators who could memorize codes and perform with agility and accuracy.  

When his troops could not manage, General “Black Jack” Pershing called for female volunteers. (His nickname related to his command of African-American “Buffalo soldiers” in the 10th Calvary in the 1890s.) Known as “Hello Girls,” 223 women were given rank, long-skirted uniforms, helmets and gas masks. They worked under fire, averaging ten seconds per message. Female operators were under military order and discipline but did not have veteran status and returned to America uncelebrated, without benefits or honors. Descendants are still lobbying Congress for the Hello Girls Congressional Medal Act.  
         
Independent white women, like Edith Wharton, drove ambulances. Lou Henry Hoover, who became first lady a decade later, organized war relief committees. The patriotism of women volunteering on the front in Europe and in fields and factories at home finally convinced President Wilson to support woman suffrage.  Addressing the resistant Senate in September 1918, Wilson declared suffrage a war measure. “This war could not have been fought . . . if it had not been for the services . . . women . . . rendered in every sphere . . . [including] upon the . . . edges of battle.”

During World War II, there were 416,800 American military deaths, 291,557 in combat; 431 women died; 88 women were prisoners of war.  Army Nurse Corps Lieutenant Annie Fox was the first woman to receive a Purple Heart, for wounds received at Pearl Harbor.  The war overturned traditional sex roles.  The military actively recruited women for every branch of service except combat.  More than 25,000 women applied to be Women’s Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs):  1,830 were accepted and 1,076 completed training.  Native American Ola Mildred Rexroat flew as a WASP, as did two Chinese Americans, including Hazel Ying Lee who died in service.

WASPs ferried untried planes from factories to military installations and toward practice targets for anti-aircraft practice. “Girl pilots,” according to Life magazine, were “very serious about their chance to fly . . . even when it means giving up nail polish.”  Thirty-eight died in service, without military death benefits.  President Carter granted WASPs full veteran status and benefits in 1977, but it took a bureaucratic battle before they were permitted burial at Arlington.  In 2010, President Obama presented survivors with the Congressional Gold Medal.
         
The original legislation for the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), drafted by Representative Edith Rogers (R-MA), did not give women equal standing.  “Auxiliary” was removed in 1943 because the Army needed more women to serve as stenographers, drivers, mechanics, telegraphers and telephone operators.  Having WACs in the regular Army raised issues of authority.  Female officers could not command men; instead, they repeated orders coming from male commanding officers.  Around 150,000 WACs held ranks equivalent to men for less pay and no benefits, including death benefits for women killed overseas.  Florence Blanchfield supervised over 57,000 members of the Army Nurse Corps, who served on every battlefield.  None received the pay or privileges of male officers of equivalent rank.

More than 6,500 Black women served as WACs.  Major Charity Adams, 26, was the first African American WAC commanding officer.  In January 1945, she led 855 Black women in the 6888th  (“six-triple-eight”) Central Postal Directory Battalion in bombed-out Birmingham, England.  They sorted a backlog of seventeen million letters and packages intended for troops on the front line.  Inspired by the motto, “No Mail, No Morale,” and working around the clock, they completed the task in three months.  In 2023, the Department of Defense replaced the name of Fort Lee in Virginia, along with the names of eight other bases named for Confederate traitors.  Now called Fort Gregg-Adams, it is the only base named two African Americans, Lt. Col. Arthur Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Early.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
The Navy made women members of the Reserves and the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) but did not allow them serve on ships or overseas.  In addition to administrative, clerical and medical roles, they worked as control tower operators, aviation mechanics and parachute riggers.  They taught gunnery and aerial photography and tested planes in wind tunnels.  Black women were admitted in 1943, by order of Secretary of Navy James Forrestal. 

In 1948, three years after the end of World War II, President Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which allowed women to serve as permanent (rather than auxiliary) members of all branches of the armed forces and granted veterans benefits. The act restricted the number of women who could serve to 2% of each branch and limited how many could become officers. Women would be discharged if they became pregnant and were forbidden from commanding men or serving in combat. Regardless of obstacles, the Act was a step forward.  One month after it passed, President Truman issued the Integration of the Armed Forces executive order, desegregating the military and ensuring that Black women could  serve in all branches of the military. 

From 1950 to 1953, during the Korean War, 120,000 service women were engineers and military police as well as nurses in M.A.S.H (Mobile Army Surgery Hospital) units. President Kennedy eliminated quotas on women officers. President Johnson opened promotions to general and flag ranks, including four-star general. By 1972, women were allowed to command units that included men. Over two decades, 90% of the 11,000 women who served in Vietnam were nurses; others were intelligence officers and clerks.
         
On July 1, 1973, the Army established an All Volunteer Force and ended 23 years of uninterrupted conscription, the longest in history.  The result has been the enlistment of poorer, less white, more rural and more female service members.  Women operated construction equipment, directed air traffic, flew helicopters, worked as chaplains and MPs, protected embassies and guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  In 1975, President Ford signed a bill allowing women to attend the military academies and participate in ROTC.  In 1978, the Coast Guard let women serve on ships.

As the nature of warfare and weapons changed and frontlines disappeared, combat got harder to define.  In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, women were 7% of American forces.  They drove trucks, crewed planes, directed artillery and came under enemy fire.  Five women were killed in action and two were prisoners of war.  In 1994, President Clinton signed a defense authorization bill repealing the combat exclusion for female fighter pilots.  The Defense Department still forbade women from serving in units “whose chief mission [was] to engage in direct ground action.”

In 2005, in the Second Gulf War, Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, 23, was the first woman since WWII to earn a Silver Star and the first to win it for combat valor.  She was guarding a supply convoy when it was ambushed outside Baghdad.  Her team outflanked and eliminated the attackers.  She shot three enemies in close quarters.  The body count was 27 insurgents dead, six wounded, one captured.  Every member of her unit survived.  “She’s the type of soldier you want next to you in combat,” declared one of her male comrades.  After Iraq, Hester served as a police officer before joining the National Guard.  She spent eighteen months in Afghanistan in 2014, after President Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, lifted the combat ban in 2013. 

In 2011, then Navy reversed its position about women serving on submarines, assigning 24 women officers.  Vice Admiral John Donnelly, now retired, recalled the move to integrate: “Honestly, [it] was not political correctness. . . . We were having to compete . . . [for] the quality cut we needed and we were ignoring half the population.”  Today more than 700 women serve on submarines; 609 in nuclear operations.

Three women completed the Marine Corps Infantry Training course in 2013, ready to serve as a rifleman, machine gunner and mortar Marine.  Two other women failed the Marine Infantry Officer Corps “gender integrated curriculum.”  In 2015 Army Ranger and Navy Seal units opened to women.  Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver were the first women to graduate from Ranger School.  Griest transferred to the regular Army and became its first female infantry officer.  Every year after that, more women passed – first Latina, first Black woman, first mother.  By 2022, more than 100 women wore the Ranger tab. 

In 2016, Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the military to “fully integrate women without compromising our readiness, morale or war-fighting capacity,” adding “right away.”  Progress for women in the military has still been an obstacle course.  Less than 10% of “Special Ops” are women, compared to 19% female participation military-wide.  By 2020, when every military role was open to women, they represented 16.5% of active-duty troops, including infantry, cavalry and fire support roles.  One-third are Black women. 

Uniforms are an issue.  Originally, for propriety, the military insisted that women wear skirts; length depended in the decade.  In WWII Marine Betty Prinz Sims trained fixed gunnery fighters, using a simulator.  It was difficult to “operate the stick” wearing a skirt.  The quartermaster granted permission for her to wear pants but if she appeared in the mess hall
wearing trousers, she was turned away until she produced her permission slip.  Army nurses in Vietnam were required to wear white uniforms with girdles and heels, a practice soon abandoned in the heat and muck of operating rooms.  Thousands of women served in uniforms designed for men, including unsuitable body armor.  In the last decade the military has designed maternity wear and a “tactical bra.” 
         
Few women are leaders.  President Nixon nominated the first female generals in 1970.  By 2020, of 976 generals in the US military, 69 are women.  The first female four-star, Army General Ann Dunwoody, appointed in 2008, retired in 2012.  There were no women among the 43 four-stars and admirals serving in 2020.  To avoid President Trump’s intervention, the Pentagon delayed promoting Air Force General Jacqueline Van Ovost and Army Lieutenant General Laura Richardson to four-star status until 2021.  Since then, Admiral Linda Fagan has been promoted to Coast Guard Commandant and Admiral Lisa Franchetti serves as Vice Admiral of Naval Operations. 
         
Van Ovost, Richardson, Fagan, Franchetti
Women are 28% more likely than men to leave the military.  One reason was their inability to pass fitness tests.  Efforts “to establish gender blind standards [to] improve soldier readiness” did not improve performance.  Women failed at significantly higher rates than men, 54% to 7%. There were different tests for different career fields, but they were still difficult for women, who on average weigh less, have less muscle mass and less upper body strength.

The primary reason is sexual assault.  The Pentagon reported a 38% spike in “unwanted sexual conduct,” ranging from groping to rape.  During a 2019 hearing on assault in the military, Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ), the first female pilot to fly combat missions, revealed being raped at the Air Force Academy.  The Department of Defense has a zero-tolerance policy but, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “sexual assault and . . . harassment remain persistent and corrosive problems.”

To date, eight female veterans have served in the US Congress. 
·      Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM, 1998-2009), a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar, credentialed in international affairs, served as an advisor at NATO (1978-89); promoted to Captain.  She served as Secretary of the Air Force in the first Trump administration.
·      Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI, 2013-21), a member of the Hawaii National Guard (2003-present), served in Kuwait and Iraq in Civil & Psychological Operations; promoted to Lt. Colonel.
·      Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL, House 2013-17, Senate 2017-present), a Thai-American, US Army Reserve (1992-92), National Guard (1996-2014), lost her legs when a rocket hit her helicopter in Iraq in 2004.  She retired as a Lt. Col., with a Purple Heart.  In 2011, the DAR erected a statue of her and Molly Pitcher, dedicated to female veterans, in Mount Vernon, IL.
·      Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ, House 2013-19, Senate 2019-20), AF Academy graduate, fighter pilot, commanded squadrons in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan (1988-2010); retired as a Colonel.
·      Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA, 2015-present), joined the ROTC in college, serving in the Army Reserves (1993-2001) and Iowa Guard (2001-15) as a transportation and logistics officer in Kuwait and Iraq.  As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she has pressed the Defense Dept. to remove investigations of sexual assault from the chain of command.
·      Rep. Mikie Sherrll (D-NJ, 2019-present), graduated from the Naval Academy, trained as a helicopter pilot, worked as a Russian policy expert for the chief US Navy commander in Europe (1994-2003).  She was about to be promoted to Lt. Col. when she retired.
·      Rep. Christina Houlahan (D-PA, 2019-present), Stanford and MIT graduate, specialized in air and space defense policy and retired as an Air Force Captain (1989-91 active, 1991-2004 reserve).  She won her 2024 reelection by 56%.
·      Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA, 2019-23), an Annapolis graduate in physics, history and French, served her entire career (1997-2017) on combat ships as a commander of nuclear reactor operations.  In Congress, she was the longest serving active-duty veteran in the Democratic Caucus.  She lost her seat after serving on the January 6 Committee.
Earlier women members had played auxiliary roles.
·      Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-MA, 1925-1960), elected as the widow of a Congressman, volunteered as a “Grey Lady” with the Red Cross in France, where she observed the rank and respect given British nurses. Half of her 1200 bills addressed veterans or military issues, including creating the WACs.
·      Rep. Ruth Jennings Owen (D-FL, 1929-33), daughter of anti-war Congressman, Secretary of State and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, volunteered as a nurse in the Egyptian-Palestinian theater, 1915-18.
·      Rep. Helen Douglas Mankin (D-GA, 1946-47), ambulance driver and mechanic in WWII, and possibly more.  The French gave her the Medaille de Reconnaissance.  Mankin won a special election with the support of African Americans, defeating a white supremacist by 807 votes, because the “white primary” rule did not apply.  She did not survive the general election.
·      Rep. Catherine Small Long (D-LA, 1985-87), another Congressional widow, served as a US Navy pharmacist during WWII.
         
WOMEN VETERANS MEMORIAL, Mount Vernon, IL:  Tami Duckworth & Molly Pitcher
In 2024 Vice Admiral Yvette Davis, the mother of twin boys, became the first woman to lead the 178-year-old US Naval Academy.  Air Force Second Lieutenant Madison Marsh became the newest Miss America, the first active-duty military officer to win the pageant.  Captain Emily Lilly, 39, the oldest female graduate of Army Ranger School, mother of two, added a tattoo:  “The question is not who will let me in, but who will stop me.”
SOURCES:
Photo credits:  public domain unless noted
Danielle DeSimone, “Over 200 Years of Service:  The History of Women in the U.S. Military,” (February 28, 2023), https://www.uso.org/stories/3005-over-200-years-of-service-the-history-of-women-in-the-us-military
Holly A. Mayer, ed., Women Waging War in the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2022).
Debra Michals, “Deborah Sampson,” National Women’s History Museum (2015), www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/deborah-sampson
Shaune Lee, “Women at War:  The Navy’s First African American Yeomanettes,” Boundary Stones (August 7, 2018), https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/08/07/women-war-navys-first-african-american-yeomanettes
Elizabeth Cobbs, The Hello Girls: America’s First Female Soldiers (Harvard University Press, 2017).
Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart:  The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam (Presidio Press, 1986).
Sarah Percy, Forgotten Warriors:  The Long History of Women in Combat (Basic Books, 2023).
Sally Jenkins, “Waiting for a First,” Washington Post (November 8, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/08/kamala-harris-woman-president/
Petula Dvorak, A Marine Wasn’t Allowed in Combat, So She Taught Others How to Shoot,” Washington Post (December 12, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/11/betty-printz-sims-marine/
Janay Kingsberry, “A New Army Mission: Its First Official Bra,” Washington Post (August 15, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/11/army-uniform-tactical-bra/
Petula Dvorak, “A Decade of Women in Combat: ‘I Had Everything They Had, Plus 120 Tampons,” Washington Post (January 26, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/26/women-combat-military-special-forces/
Norah O’Donnell, “The Four Highest Ranking Women in the US Military Speak Out About the Obstacles They Overcame,” CBS Evening News (March 23, 2023), 
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/4-highest-ranking-women-u-s-military-speak-about-obstacles-challenges/
Office of the Historian, “Women Members with Military Service,” history@mail.house.gov.
Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
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