Women in the Military

Early Roles

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 ten sick or wounded men. Throughout the 19th 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 group of 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 tried to assign to them. A small number of women, such as the [Page 932]Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson, 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 the 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 armed services reached a compromise that placed enlisted women in administrative roles under the status of civilian contractors. In October 1917, Gen. 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, “yeomenettes” received full military status, pay, and retirement benefits.

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