A Few Good Women by Evelyn Monahan & Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee

Author:Evelyn Monahan & Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59318-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Senator Margaret Chase Smith in her Air Force Reserve uniform.

It was VADM Louis E. Denfeld who approached Representative Smith and asked for her help in arguing and shepherding HB 5919 through Congress and into law. Representative Smith had already taken a public stand in favor of granting permanent regular and reserve status to WAVES and added that the Women Marines would be added and receive the same benefits as the navy women.

In the meantime, WAVES and Women Marines did not sit idly by waiting. CAPT Joy Bright Hancock, on 26 July 1946, started a campaign to learn all she could on how best to present positive arguments for the passage of the bill and the best ways to respond to arguments against the bill’s passage. Armed with the authority conveyed on her by her new position, Hancock sought the aid of CAPT Ira Nunn, USN, and a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps to help her anticipate, analyze, and counter the arguments of the bill’s opponents. Add to this the new prestige of being director of the WAVES, and Captain Hancock had new weight to add in favor of the bill’s passage.

The Women Marines were no slackers either and set about organizing reunions of the women who had served in World War II. When the various groups met at twenty-two locations across the country, they were asked to compile lists of former Women Marines, their addresses, and, if they had married, the name of their husbands so they could be located quickly when the bill passed and became law. These lists would be important since married women more often than not took their husbands’ names, and lost touch with friends and contacts they had made while serving in the armed forces under their maiden names.3

For all intents and purposes, married women lost their individual histories when they signed on the dotted line and said, “I do.” Future historians and old comrades would find that “individual footprints” of former military women were effectively wiped out or abruptly stopped when a woman veteran became “Mrs. John Jones.” In fact, it might be said that a woman veteran left her footprints in two worlds whose link effectively disappeared in city hall or at the altar. When one adds to these facts that neither the armed forces, the Veterans Administration, nor the military service organizations kept or maintained statistics and records concerning military women and/or women veterans, it is easy to understand why women veterans were difficult to identify and locate in the civilian world. Very few women veterans of World War II maintained a link with the armed forces after discharge or even touched base with the Veterans Administration. Society and history said little or nothing concerning women’s military service and veterans’ status, a fact that hastened their disappearance from our national history and our nation’s memory.

The great majority of women veterans found themselves living in a postwar world where prewar values were still the norm for gender roles, where “women veterans”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.