Release a Man for Combat: The Women"s Army Corps during World War II 9783412213480, 9783412206604

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kölner historische Abhandlungen Herausgegeben von Jost Dülffer, Norbert Finzsch, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp und Eberhard Isenmann Band 49

Release a Man for Combat The Women’s Army Corps during World War II

by

M. Michaela Hampf

2010 BÖHLAU VERLAG KÖLN WEI MAR WIEN

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Umschlagabbildung: Auxiliaries Ruth Wade and Lucille Mayo (left to right) servicing trucks as taught at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. December 8, 1942. National Archives and Records Administration

© 2010 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln Weimar Wien Ursulaplatz 1, D-50668 Köln, www.boehlau.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig. Druck und Bindung: Strauss GmbH, Mörlenbach Gedruckt auf chlor- und säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-412-20660-4

For Jakob Hampf

Contents

1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................

1

1.1 Military Institutions and Gender .......................................................... The Gendered Division of Labor in Military Institutions 6 - Armed Civic Virtue 10 - Citizenship, Arms & Gender 11 - “Beautiful Souls” and Martial Citizens 15 - Women’s Roles in Modern Wars 20 - “Total War” and the Mobilization of Women 27 1.2. Theoretical Concepts............................................................................. Power and Agency 34 - Power|Knowledge 36 - Strategic Apparatus 38 – Gender 39 1.3 Methodological Approaches.................................................................. 1.4 Literature .................................................................................................. Historical Perspectives on the Military 48 - Studies on Gender and the Military 54 - Research on the WAAC and the WAC 60 1.5 Structure ...................................................................................................

6

34

44 47

62

2. ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY OF THE WAAC/WAC ...............

64

2.1 The WAAC and WAC Bills in Congress.............................................

64

2.2 Training..................................................................................................... Basic Military Training 71 - Specialist Training 72 2.3 Policies and Regulations......................................................................... 2.4 Women Soldiers at Work....................................................................... 2.5 Overseas Service...................................................................................... 2.6 Demobilization and Integration............................................................ 2.7 Combat: Drawing the Line ....................................................................

70 73 78 81 85 91

3. CONSTRUCTING THE WOMEN|SOLDIER THROUGH RECRUITING CAMPAIGNS, MEDIA COVERAGE AND PUBLIC RELATIONS................................................................................

98

3.1 “Petticoat Army” or “Doughgirl Generalissimo”.............................. 101 3.2 “Release a Man to Fight” ....................................................................... 104

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Competition by Other Government Agencies 106 - Quality or Quantity: The Enlistment Standards 108 - The “toughest sales problem in the country” 109

3.3 “Self-Sacrifice” v. “Self-Interest”: WAAC Recruiting....................... 113 The Motifs of Motherhood, the Family, and Home 114 - “I joined to serve my country...and I’m having the time of my life!” 118 3.4 The “Slander Campaign” ....................................................................... 3.5 “Guilt” v. “Glamour”: WAC Recruiting ............................................. The All-States-Campaign 138 - The Attitude of Army Men 141 - “Fighting men and capable Wacs” 146 - “Comforting Our Wounded Heroes” 147 3.6 Public Relations....................................................................................... 3.7 “Petticoat Soldiers”: Ego-documents from the Field........................ Camp Newspapers 161 Songs 166

120 134

152 161

4. DRESS CODES: THE WAAC UNIFORM............................................ 174 4.1 Military Uniforms.................................................................................... 4.2 Symbolic Aspects: Planning and Design of the Uniform ................. The Pre-Planning Process 177 - A “neat and military appearance” 180 - Prêt-a-porter the Army Way 183 4.3. Material Aspects ..................................................................................... Clothing for “Women’s work” Put to the Practical Test 184 - Procurement and Supply 185 - The Overseas Experience 189 4.4 Publicity Crisis ......................................................................................... 4.5 Technologies of the Self ........................................................................

174 177

184

191 194

5. “SUBJECTED TO THE COLORED RACE”....................................... 199 5.1 African American Wacs: Fighting on Two Fronts ............................ African Americans and the War Effort: Some Socio-Economic Aspects 199 The Mobilization of African American Men 201 - Political Pressure for the Integration of African American Women 203 - Recruiting of African American Women 204 - Segregation in the WAC 207 - African American Wacs Overseas 215 - Assignment and Mal-Assignment 217 - Protest: Sit-Down Strike or Disobedience? 219 5.2 Japanese American Wacs ....................................................................... 5.3 Puerto Rican Wacs.................................................................................. 5.4 “First Class Citizenship”? ......................................................................

199

223 232 233

Table of Contents

IX

6. SEXUALITY ................................................................................................. 237 6.1 Normalizing Practices ............................................................................ 237 The Regulation of Respectability: Double Standards for Men and Women 246 Social Control: VD Policies for Wacs, Civilian Women and Servicemen 247 Respectability and the Legitimacy of the Corps: The Code of Conduct and WAC Regulations 250 - Regulating the Unrespectable: Pregnancy, Abortion, Maternity and Marriage 251 - Patrolling Respectable Femininity: AntiFraternization Policies 252 6.2 Homosexuality in the Armed Forces ................................................... 257 The “True Pervert,” the “Criminal Sodomist” and the “Intoxicated or Curious” 257 6.3 Exclusionary Practices............................................................................ 262 WAC Regulations and Procedures: In Search of “undesirable traits and habits” 262 - The “hierarchy of perversity”: Class, Race, Practice, Haircut 266 - Homosociality and Lesbian Agency: The Fort Oglethorpe Investigation 269 7. CONCLUSION: THE WAC BETWEEN INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION AND DISCURSIVE EXCLUSION ........................ 280 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... 300 Abbreviations ................................................................................................. 302 Sources and Literature .................................................................................. 304 A Note on Sources 304 - Archival Sources 308 - Published Sources 309 Secondary Works 321

1. Introduction

In 2003 and 2004, two young women from West Virginia who were serving in the United States Army became national symbols. One came home to glory, having been rescued by Special Forces from a Nasiriyah hospital in a dramatic operation that became the subject of a book, a TV movie and enormous attention by the media. The other appeared in photographs aired on 60 Minutes that showed her with a cigarette in her mouth, one hand pointing to the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi prisoner, who appears to be masturbating, the other hand displaying the thumbs-up sign. Another picture shows her holding a leash that is looped around the neck of a naked Iraqi man lying on the concrete floor of a cellblock in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Both women, Army Private First Class Jessica Lynch and Army Reserve Private First Class Lynndie England come from small towns in the hills of West Virginia. Both Lynch, who joined the military after high school, and England, who joined at the age of 17 after her junior year of high school “wanted some education and […] to serve their country,” as Lory Manning of the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington DC commented.1 Lynch’s 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed near the city of Nasiriyah during the U.S. march on Baghdad on 23 March 2003. Eleven soldiers died when Lynch and others were taken prisoner. Lynch was taken to a local hospital. Eight days later, U.S. Special Forces stormed the hospital, capturing the dramatic rescue with a night vision camera. Army officials initially reported that Lynch had fought desperately until her ammunition ran out before being captured. Reports claimed that she had stab and bullet wounds and was abused and interrogated while in the hospital. After the grainy Pentagon video of the rescue operation that resembled “action movies [such as those by] Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan” had aired at the height of the conflict, Iraqi doctors and Private Lynch herself were painting a different picture of the events.2 Lynch said she had not fired a single bullet because 1

2

C.i. Associated Press, “Two young West Virginia women symbolize war’s glory, shame,” Boston Herald, Saturday, May 8, 2004. Dr. Anmar Uday c.i. BBC News. Kampfner, John. War Spin, Saving Private Lynch Story “flawed.” Broadcast on BBC Two 18 March 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr//2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm. Accessed July 30, 2004.

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Introduction

her weapon had jammed and that she had been injured when her Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed. There had been no mistreatment in the hospitals – to the contrary, one of the Iraqi nurses would even sing to her. The Iraqi doctor who had treated her added that Lynch was provided the best treatment they could offer at the time. She was assigned the only specialist bed and one of only two nurses on the floor. He diagnosed several broken bones, but neither bullet nor stab wounds.3 It also became clear that the hospital had been given up by the Iraqi military the day before the rescue operation and that the U.S. Special Forces had known this. England went to Iraq in May 2003 as an administrative specialist with the 372nd Military Police Company guarding Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison where inmate numbers had swelled from 700 in the summer to 3,000, and then to 7,000. According to the Army Regulation 15-6 investigation conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba in 2004: “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees [between October and December 2003]. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force [the 372nd Military Police Company and other units of the 800th MP Brigade].”4

The intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts: “[P]unching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; writing “I am a Rapest” [sic] on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; a male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.”5

3 4

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Dr. Harith a-Houssona c.i. BBC News. Kampfner, War Spin. ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE. http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/iraq/tagubarpt.html. Accessed April 4, 2006. Ibid.

Introduction

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Lynndie England became the face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. She could be seen in the photographs engaged in many of the aforementioned acts, including standing by another prisoner with the word “rapest” [sic] written on his exposed buttocks. She pleaded guilty to seven counts of mistreating prisoners, telling the court “the physical beatings and sexual humiliation had been done for the guards’ entertainment.” England took responsibility for the photographs.6 Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., testified as a defense witness at England’s sentencing hearing and portrayed their handling of a leashed prisoner as legitimate. Contradicting her sworn admission of guilt, Graner said she had acted at his request in helping to remove an obstructive prisoner from his cell. Although during a court-martial at Fort Hood, TX, England had pleaded guilty to seven of the nine charges, the military judge Col. James Pohl rejected England’s guilty plea, saying he was “not convinced that she knew her actions were wrong at the time.”7 The defense presented a medical expert who testified England was cognitively impaired due to oxygen deprivation at birth. After this the proceeding was declared a mistrial. In September 2005 the jury, made up of five male Army officers, found Private England guilty of six out of seven counts of conspiracy and maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners. England was released after serving 521 days of a three-year prison sentence. In an interview with the German newspaper Stern in 2008, she depicts herself as a victim, instrumentalized by her partner and the state: “Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up’, you think it must be right.”8 Six other members of her unit, the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cresaptown, Maryland, faced court-martial proceedings in connection with the alleged abuse.9 6

7

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The Associated Press, “Graner to testify at Lynndie England’s sentencing: Purported Abu Ghraib ringleader unhappy at former guard’s guilty plea.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com /id/7683481. Accessed March 13, 2006. Christine Lagorio, “Lynndie England's Plea Rejected: Changed To 'Not Guilty' For Abu Ghraib Abuses.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/04/iraq/main692951.shtml. Accessed March 13, 2006. C.i. Streck, Michael, and Jan-Christoph Wiechmann, “Rumsfeld knew. An Interview with Lynndie England,” March 17, 2008. http://www.stern.de/politik/ausland/lynndieengland-rumsfeld-knew-614356.html. Accessed March 13, 2006. It would later be their testimony that when MP units arrived at the prison, the abusive practices were already established as part of pre-interrogation “softening up” techniques approved by military intelligence officers. For an analysis of the abuse in Abu Ghraib in the context of sexual torture and parallels to the U.S. prison industry see Puar, Jasbir K.

4

Introduction

Both women – Lynch and England – became icons of the United States engagement in Iraq. One was heralded for her “bravery” and awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War Medal; the other was portrayed to represent absolute evil. Both fulfilled military roles that had only recently been opened to women, and both of these roles had little to do with what the two women came to stand for. As 19-year old Lynch put it: “They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff.”10 What made them so exceptional in published opinion was not the fact that they were taken prisoner and rescued or put in charge of enemy prisoners and assaulted them – it was the fact that they were women.11 Neither the role of the hero, nor the role of the perpetrator had long been available to women in the military in most western societies. Early in 2004, the American public might or might not have been prepared for pictures of servicewomen coming home in body bags. It was certainly unprepared, as Melissa Embser-Herbert commented, for pictures of women “at the aggressor’s end of […] sexual torture and humiliation. This is what’s at the heart of the public response to the photos from Abu Ghraib. In short, the reversal of roles has taken us completely by surprise.”12 The idea of the peaceful woman, responsible for giving life, caring and nurturing complemented by the strong, potentially aggressive man, whose responsibility it is to protect women and their offspring reiterates a simple, but still powerful myth. At the same time, women who perpetrate violence are perceived as an aberration, which is appalling and fascinating at the same time. An expression of the mixture of shame and fascination is the game “Doing the Lynndie”

10

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“Abu Ghraib: Arguing against Exceptionalism.” Feminist Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 522534. Dora Apel has compared the photographs with images of lynching. Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, NJ; London: Rutgers University Press, 2004. C.i. BBC News. Jessica Lynch condemns Pentagon. November 7, 2003. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3251731.stm. Accessed July 29, 2010. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, PFC England’s father, Kenneth England said: “Just like what happened with that Lynch girl, this is getting blown out of proportion.” Woestendiek, John. ”W.Va. Reservist Caught Up in a Storm of Controversy.” Baltimore Sun. May 6, 2004. Harders, Cilja. “Neue Kriegerinnen: Lynndie England und Jessica Lynch.” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 49.9 (2004): 1101-11. Embser-Herbert, Melissa S. “When Women Abuse Power, Too.” Washington Post May 16, 2004: B01. Joanna Bourke pointed out that this “carnivalesque,” “pornographic” “festival of violence” was also a “bonding ritual”. “Group identity as victors in an increasingly brutalised Iraq is being cemented: this is an enactment of comradeship between men and women who are set apart from civilian society back home by acts of violence.” Bourke, Joanna. “Torture as Pornography.” Guardian May 7, 2004.

Introduction

5

that became popular among young women and men during England’s trial. The players posed in the torturer’s position, and posted tens of thousands of “Lynndie-look alike” photographs on the Internet. The “aggressor’s end,” war, and the military in general are still to a certain degree considered men’s business. When women’s permanent presence in the U.S. Army was established in 1942, the intrusion of women into the formerly all-male military institution created considerable cultural anxiety, even though the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) consisted of civilian auxiliaries who performed mainly clerical jobs. In 1943, the WAAC was replaced by the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), whose members were part of the Army and enjoyed military status like male soldiers. The focus of this study is the construction of the new category woman|soldier. How did the Army, the public and the women themselves construct this wartime role for women? How did the media conceptualize the WAC? How did these women embody their new role, cope with the disciplinary system and the gender politics of military organization? For centuries, the categories soldier and woman had been thought to be mutually exclusive and their respective boundaries had been fiercely guarded. What category, then, did these women soldiers sworn into the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1943 belong to? Was the ‘woman|soldier’ a new category born out of wartime needs and intended only for the duration of the war? Women had been enlisted as Auxiliaries by the U.S. armed forces in World War I as well as in 1942 after the United States had entered World War II. In 1943, however, military planners thought that it would no longer suffice to utilize women as civilian auxiliaries and instead recruited women for service in, no longer alongside, the Army of the United States. But were the members of the WAC really soldiers? Were they “Wacks,” a derogatory term that was eventually appropriated by the Wacs themselves had it?13 “Women soldiers?” Was this category not an oxymoron? In this study I argue that although the Women’s Army Corps was formally part of the U.S. Army, women were assigned positions within the WAC that existed outside of what had been designated discursively and through symbolic practices as the U.S. Army’s masculine core. The line of demarcation that had long been drawn between soldiers-as-men and women-as-nonsoldiers was now being redrawn inside the military institution to separate potential combatants and noncombatant auxiliaries. In order to preserve a core of military masculinity and to separate the soldiers from the “soldierettes”

13

Stewart, Jennifer Nichol. “Wacky Times: An Analysis of the Wac in World War II and Its Effect on Women.” International Social Science Review 75.1-2 (2000): 26-37.

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Introduction

discursively, as the Wacs were nicknamed, the women were ignored, belittled or sexualized. However, this happened in a dynamic and unstable discursive landscape. As the war progressed, military needs and soldiers’ attitudes changed. Wacs located and embodied new subjectivities. Wacs were indeed the first regular women soldiers. Despite the apparently inherent contradictions, the hitherto mutually exclusive categories of “woman” and “soldier” converged to a certain degree. Women soldiers were needed and the category became feasible over the period between 1941 and 1945. The construction of the woman|soldier was happening on several levels. It was at the same time a societal negotiation of values, a process of integrating a particular group into a formerly all male organization and a process of subjectivation and subjection to military discipline of the individual members of the Corps. The new category emerged in a space structured by relations of power and knowledge. Following Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I suggest examining the category “woman|soldier” as an effect of a specific formation of power|knowledge.

1.1 Military Institutions and Gender The Gendered Division of Labor in Military Institutions Among the institutions of nation states, militaries occupy a unique place. They are institutions that control and regulate every aspect of their members’ lives. They wield coercive force in the name of the state. If the state is, as Max Weber described it, characterized by the fact that it “(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” the exertion of violence to defend that territory is delegated to the military.14 Militaries demand a higher degree of loyalty and commitment than any other institution of the state – a commitment that may ultimately include to kill or to be killed. Gender is omnipresent within the military institution, in different, but interdependent and overlapping processes, practices, images, ideologies, and distributions of power. Few other institutions are so closely connected with a hegemonic masculinity in our cultural imagination as the military.15 Within military culture, attributing derogative, feminine attributes to competing mas-

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Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 78. I will come back to the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and others in chapter 1.2.

Introduction

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culinities negotiates different masculinities. Frank J. Barrett shows, for example, how Navy aviators, who claim the hegemonic, elite masculinity of the fighter pilot, distance themselves from “supply pussies” or “suppo weenies,” as they refer to male officers in noncombat positions.16 The construction of military masculinity is centered on combat, its mythical core, and it depends on the exclusion of the “other,” the “overt homosexual,” the “feminine,” the “ethnic other.” On the symbolic level, these cultural constructions have not been overcome by the integration of women into the military. Madeline Morris, a consultant on sexual harassment to Secretary of the Army Togo West, argued that there is a “masculinist” culture and “macho posturing” within the military which portrays women as “sexual targets or adversaries” and condones and promotes animosity and violence toward women.17 The institutional culture of the military, then, evidently does not support the official military policies prohibiting discriminatory behavior. As Ruth Seifert points out, there are few institutions in which essentialist justifications of gender differences prevail as strongly as in military institutions.18 Seifert and other sociologists argue that the findings of the sociology of professions also apply to the military profession: Far from reflecting any natural differences between the genders, the gender-differentiated division of labor in a profession produces those differences between men and women that appear natural only ex post facto.19 It thus constantly reproduces the circular argument that the outcome (the gendered division of labor) shows what in fact had been its prerequisite.20 The military as an institution and military discourses contribute in 16

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Barrett, Frank. “Die Konstruktion hegemonialer Männlichkeit in Organisationen: Das Beispiel der U.S.-Marine.” Soziale Konstruktionen: Militär und Geschlechterverhältnis. Eds. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999. 71-93. Morris, Madeline. “By Force of Arms: Rape, War and Military Culture.” Duke Law Journal 45 (1996): 651-781. Seifert, Ruth. “Identität, Militär und Geschlecht. Zur identitätspolitischen Bedeutung einer kulturellen Konstruktion.” Heimat - Front. Militär, Gewalt und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Eds. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum. Frankfurt/Main: Berg, 2002. 53-66, 54. Ibid., 55. Wetterer, Angelika, and Arbeitsgruppe “Profession und Geschlecht”. Die Soziale Konstruktion von Geschlecht in Professionalisierungsprozessen. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1995, 21. See also Eifler, Christine. “Bewaffnet und geschminkt: Zur sozialen und kulturellen Konstruktion des weiblichen Soldaten in Rußland und in den USA.” L’Homme 12.1 (2001): 73-97. Seifert, Ruth. “Gender, Nation und Militär. Aspekte von Männlichkeitskonstruktion und Gewaltsozialisation durch Militär und Wehrpflicht.” Allgemeine Wehrpflicht. Geschichte, Probleme, Perspektiven. Eds. Eckhardt Opitz and Frank S. Rödiger. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994. 179-94. Seifert, Ruth. “‘Militär und Geschlecht’ in den deutschen Sozialwissen-

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manifold ways to the construction of femininity and masculinity in society.21 Military institutions utilize “gender technologies” (DeLauretis) in order to foster an ideology of heterosexual masculinity that transgresses the boundary of the military and permeates civilian discourses. Barton C. Hacker has shown how the roles women played in military organizations have changed considerably. “[W]omen were a normal part of European armies at least from the fourteenth until well into the nineteenth century.”22 Women performed military support services that have been regarded as essential military functions since the 19th century until today. “The lines between army and society were not so sharply drawn [in the European renaissance] as they were later.”23 The military camp was a “vast moving city with its own community life complete with shops, services and families, all defended by walls of iron – the weapons of its soldiers.”24 The camp and train consisted of many more “mouths” – including sutlers, wives, horse

21

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schaften. Eine Skizzierung der aktuellen Forschungssituation.” L’Homme 12.1 (2001): 13443. Seifert, Ruth. “Militär, Nation und Geschlecht. Analyse einer kulturellen Konstruktion.” Krieg/War. Eine philosophische Auseinandersetzung aus feministischer Sicht. Ed. Wiener Philosophinnen Club. München 1997. 41-51. Seifert, Ruth, Militär-Kultur-Identität. Individualisierung, Geschlechterverhältnisse und die soziale Konstruktion des Soldaten. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1996. Enloe, Cynthia. “Beyond Steve Canyon and Rambo: Feminist Histories of Militarized Masculinity.” The Militarization of the Western World: 1870 to the Present. Ed. John R. Gillis. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. 119-40. Peiss, Kathy Lee, Christina Simmons, and Robert A. Padgug. Passion and Power: Sexuality in History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989. Hunter, Andrea G. and James Earl Davis., ”Hidden Voices of Black Men: The Meaning, Structure and Complexity of Manhood.” Journal of Black Studies. 25. 1 (1994): 20-40. Shuker-Haines, Timothy Maxwell. “Home Is the Hunter: Representations of Returning World War II Veterans and the Reconstruction of Masculinity, 19441951.” Ph.D. Thesis. University of Michigan, 1994. Mangan, J. A. “Men, Masculinity and Sexuality: Some Recent Literature.” Journal of the The History of Sexuality 3.2 (1992): 303-13. Shenk, Gerald Edwin. “`Work or Fight’: Selective Service and Manhood in the Progressive Era.” Ph.D. Thesis. University of California, San Diego, CA 1992. Gibson, J. William. “Feminist Ideas About Masculinity.” American Quarterly 43.1 (1991): 128-34. Curtis, Bruce. “The Wimp Factor.” American Heritage 40.7 (1989): 40-50. Jeffords, Susan. “Women, Gender, and the War.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6.1 (1989): 83-90. Klein, Uta. Militär und Geschlecht in Israel. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2001. Whitehead, Stephen and Frank J. Barrett. The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Hacker, Barton C. “Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6.4 (1981): 643-671, 643. Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 646. Parker, Geoffrey, and Angela Parker, European Soldiers, 1550-1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 34, c.i. Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 647.

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9

boys, valets and prostitutes – than of men under arms. These women, some of whom were soldiers’ wives or widows, traded in goods that were not part of the supply system or performed other tasks. Hacker noted that while women’s activities in the army differed little from their work in a peasant village – “finding, cooking, and serving food; making, washing, and mending clothes; tending the sick, the infirm, and the wounded; sporting with men, helping other women when they could, bearing and raising children” – they were “as much part of the army as men” in early modern Europe.25 By the nineteenth century, however, women appeared all but absent from military institutions as well as from the emerging military historiography. Military history was in this formative stage shaped by the absence of gender as an analytical category, thus reinforcing a double “maleness” of the historical actors as well as the historians who wrote about wars. When the establishment of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was debated in Congress, one representative called out “Think of the humiliation! What has become of the manhood of America [...].”26 How, then, had war and the military so thoroughly become ‘men’s business’ that admitting women to an auxiliary corps constituted a humiliation? Jean Bethke Elshtain observed that “woman’s noncombatant status derives from no special virtue located within her; rather, male bodies are more readily militarized.”27 In contrast to femininity, masculinity was less seen as “natural,” but rather as something to be permanently established through culture. In the context of the enlightenment construction of a bipolar, hierarchical and ontological gender order, masculinity seemed more unstable and therefore required constant affirmation through symbols, rituals, tests and sanctions to a degree that the construct could then be ontologized and go unquestioned.28 Consequently, the functions women served in pre-modern 25 26

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Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 653-4. United States, and Congress. Congressional Record. Washington, DC: GPO, 1873- Vol. 88, No. 55, 17 March 1942. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 183. For a contemporary discussion, see Goldman, Nancy Loring. Female Soldiers-Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982, 269. Hagemann, Karen, and Ralf Pröve, eds. Landsknechte, Soldatenfrauen und Nationalkrieger: Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterordnung im historischen Wandel. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1998, 29. See also Dudink, Stefan, Anna Clark, and Karen Hagemann, eds. Representing Masculinity Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hausen, Karin. “Die Polarisierung der ‚Geschlechtscharaktere”. Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben.” Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas.

10

Introduction

times became incompatible with the increasing disciplining function of the army. The implementation of a discourse of armed civic virtue in the French Republic is critical for understanding the different gender-specific personae for men and women that cultural memory and narrative provide in times of war until today. The designation of women as noncombatants and potential victims and men of a certain age as potential combatants in most Western nation states is a distinctively modern phenomenon.29 Armed Civic Virtue The discourse with which this gender order was accomplished was that of “armed civic virtue.” It had emerged in antiquity and was later re-employed during the age of Enlightenment. During the 19th century, “armed civic virtue” was applied to the newly emerging nation states. It helped not only to create the concept of the citizen of the nation-state, but can also be found at the roots of a gender-specific split of civic duties. Finally, it helped create a gender order that was constructed as ontological and became increasingly naturalized by obscuring its genealogy. The trope of “armed civic virtue” can be traced from the warrior communities of the Greek poleis to Enlightenment discourses and on to modern republican liberal democracies. Aristotle called for a “mature,” “masculine citizenship” in the citizen-warrior of the ideal polis.30 “The government should be confined to those who carry arms.”31 The polis, according to Aristotle, depended on the wisdom of the constitution as well as on the strength of the people who defended it by force of arms. Hence, the ideal constitution should entrust the same men with governing and defending the polis, not at the same time, but “but in the order pre-

29

30 31

Ed. W. Conze. Stuttgart: Klett 1977. 363-93. Claudia Honegger, Claudia. Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib, 1750-1850. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus Verlag, 1991. Frevert, Ute. Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland. München: Beck, 2001. Frevert, Ute. “Männer (T)Räume. Die Allgemeine Wehrpflicht und ihre geschlechtergeschichtlichen Implikationen.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 11 (2000): 111-24, and Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Examples c.i. Elshtain, Women and War, 181. See also Opitz, Claudia. “Von Frauen im Krieg zum Krieg gegen Frauen. Gewalt und Geschlechterbeziehungen aus historischer Sicht.” L’Homme 31 (1992): 31-44. Elshtain, Women and War, 55. Aristotle. The Politics, and the Constitution of Athens. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 111.

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scribed by nature, who has given to young men strength and to older men wisdom.”32 For enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes masculinity and warfare were intimately linked to each other and to the claim to citizenship. “Upon this ground a man that is commanded as a soldier to fight against the enemy [...] may nevertheless in many cases refuse, without injustice; as when he substituteth a sufficient soldier in his place: for in this case he deserteth not the service of the Commonwealth. And there is allowance to be made for natural timorousness, not only to women (of whom no such dangerous duty is expected), but also to men of feminine courage.” To run from battle is not necessarily unjust, but it is dishonorable and cowardly, or “feminine.” The concept of masculinity that Hobbes articulated here is contrasted with femininity by emphasizing the martial quality of the soldier. In other words, Hobbes did not talk about men and women, citizens and soldiers, but rather about citizen soldiers and feminine others. “And when the defence of the Commonwealth requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the institution of the Commonwealth, which they have not the purpose or courage to preserve, was in vain.”33 Citizenship, Arms & Gender The association of arms bearing with civic identity was also central to the work of Niccoló Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s understanding of virtù is a concept of political virtue that is closely linked to contemporary notions of virility.34 Machiavelli’s ideal of an army of citizens prepared to defend and die for the republica identified the ideal citizen to the self-sufficient, armed warrior. The male citizen subjects himself to a rigorous discipline of mind and body to help achieve unity and civic autonomy for the body politic. Civic and martial values are thus closely bound together in the public sphere where they are thought of as the source of stability and legitimacy of the respublica. Women’s place is in the private sphere, where they embody values that either serve or subvert male war making.

32 33

34

Ibid., 178 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Dutton, 1950, 151. See also Jamieson, Ruth. “The Man of Hobbes: Masculinity and Wartime Necessity.” Journal of Historical Sociology 9.1 (1996): 19-42. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, Vol. 2. New York: Vintage Books, 1945, 247.

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Introduction

Eighteenth-century thinkers revived the classical and enlightenment traditions of linking citizenship to armed service.35 For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing more than two centuries later, civic identity was also associated with virility and (armed) service. To become a citizen, according to Rousseau, a man had to invest “his will, his goods and his person” in the body politic.36 This rite de passage, the transition to a public person, distinguished the citizen from the bourgeois, who merely pursued his private interest. The citizen must be prepared to offer his private body to fight for the public body. Celebrating Machiavelli’s virilized civic virtue in contrasting the ancient Greek republics with the “decadent” Romans, Rousseau advised, “to let all kinds of womanish adornment be held in contempt. And if you cannot bring women themselves to renounce it, let them at least be taught to disapprove of it, and view it with disdain in men.”37 Rousseau’s ideas of armed civic virtue were absorbed in the French Revolution, namely by Maximilien de Robespierre who translated martial citizenship and martial motherhood into politics. To defend the republic against enemies within and without, according to this discourse of martial citizenship, the republican virtues must not be weakened by clemency and sensibilities: “Armed republican civic virtue, constituted to protect, define, and defend a way of life, translated into statist societies, is here unleashed as nationalism, and the dream of discipline is ‘made national’.”38 The new nation, in contrast to ancient cities, was not encased by walls, but by other, more symbolic boundaries and barriers. Where the will to invest in the body politic was not sufficient, universal conscription came to link military masculinity to the idea of the nation.39 The Army became the “school of the fatherland.”40 Violence,

35

36

37

38

39

Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998, 239. About fighting women: Beard, Margaret Ritter. Woman as a Force in History: A Study in Transitions and Realities. New York: Collier Books, 1962, 287-95. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Ed. Roger D. Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978, 163. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The First and Second Discourses. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1964, 55. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Government of Poland. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, 17. Elshtain, Women and War, 63. See also Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 168-169. See Finer, Samuel E. “State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military.” The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Eds. Charles Tilly and Gabriel Ardant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1975, 84-163.

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13

which was a legitimate expression of masculinity and at the same time a means to reinforce that masculinity, was centralized and nationalized. Military socialization came to serve as a rite of passage to male adulthood and determined the inclusion or exclusion of different groups and their right to citizenship.41 A national, ‘democratized’ rhetoric of patriotic citizenship, heroism and sacrifice made use of symbols and rituals to generate the willingness of citizens to fight and sacrifice themselves for their patria.42 As Karen Hagemann has shown, the emerging idea of the “national character” was articulated in gender specific terms, while gender identity was framed in national terms.43 James Burgh, an eighteenth century English philosopher who was of great influence for the American Revolution, wrote, “[t]he possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. […] Nothing will make a nation so unconquerable as a militia, or every man’s being trained to arms. For every Briton having in him by birth the principal part of a soldier, I mean the heart [...].”44 In the English colonies free men had the obligation to join the posse comitatus when riots broke out, aid the sheriff in his law enforcement duties and serve in the militia. In the eighteenth century, arms-bearing acquired the double significance of a personal right and personal duty, “an empowerment of the citizen and a constraint on governmental power.”45 This is further illustrated by the requirement to serve on slave patrols that many colonies imposed upon their white male residents, regardless of whether they owned slaves or not. The Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols of 1757 or40

41

42

43

44

45

Weber, Eugen. “Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 18701914.” Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976, 298. See also Frevert, Ute. “Gesellschaft und Militär im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Sozial- kulturund geschlechtergeschichtliche Anmerkungen.” Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Ute Frevert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997. 7-16. See also Hagemann, Karen. “Mannlicher Muth und teutsche Ehre”: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002, 23. Hagemann, Karen. “A Valorous Volk Family: The Nation, the Military, and the Gender Order in Prussia in the Time of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, 1806-15.” Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century. Eds. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall. Oxford: Berg, 2000. 179-206, 185. Burgh, James. Political Disquisitions Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, Vol. 2. London: E. and C. Dilley, 1774- 1775, 390. On Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 240. See also Michael Lenz’s excellent study on connection of arms bearing and citizenship in eighteenth-century America: Lenz, Michael. “‘Arms are necessary’: Gun Culture in Eighteenth-Century American Politics and Society.” Köln: Böhlau, 2010.

14

Introduction

dered white men between the ages of 18 and 45 to ride the roads at night to restrict the movement of Blacks and ensure white hegemony in South Carolina and Georgia. Patrol duty was mandatory and unless the men hired substitutes to patrol for them, absentees were fined. As much of the duty fell to non-slaveholders, there were considerable tensions within the white population.46 Sally Hadden suggests that the patrols to control slaves also provided a unifying ground for southern males of widely varying socioeconomic backgrounds.47 The fear of slave rebellions and the struggle to repress black resistance, helped form a masculine identity, as the patrol duty knitted together southern white males, including the poor and landless as well as wealthy landowners and slaveholders. Women, as well as slaves, were expected to be defended by their husband and masters, respectively, and hence needed no arms.48 A husband’s right to his wife’s body, property, and earning power was understood to have been claimed in exchange for his protecting her, in the civic as well as personal sense.49 Or, as Cynthia Enloe has put it, in fusing the concepts of citizen, soldier, and man, the figure of the male warrior was legitimized, among other factors, through the necessity to protect “womenandchildren.”50 Nine of the constitutions of the original thirteen states articulated the “duty of the citizen to render military service and the power to compel him against his consent to do so.”51 The republican concept of citizenship became tightly linked to race, class and gender – manhood was sharply and ritually contrasted with effeminacy and dishonor.52 “It was white men who 46

47

48

49 50

51 52

Cecelski, David S. The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Finkelman, Paul, ed. Slavery, Race, and the American Legal System 1700-1872: The Pamphlet Literature. New York: Garland, 1988. Fry, Gladys-Marie. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Lockley, Timothy J. Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 17501860. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. “[H]e who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and need no arms,” c.i. Burgh, Political Disquisitions 2:341-49, 38991, 399-407, 1774. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 240. Enloe, Cynthia. “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis.” Village Voice 25 (1990): 29-32. See also Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 242. According to Cynthia Enloe, “first class citizenship” is a privileged status, accessible only to a minority which fights, is wounded and dies in the name of the nation state. In the American tradition, death and injury during combat belong to the male domain. Enloe,

Introduction

15

offered military service, white men who sought honor, white men who dueled in its defense.”53 The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 welcomed African Americans into the armed service of the United States before they became citizens. Their service – even before the thirteenth amendment - set the terms for Reconstruction discourses.54 “Beautiful Souls” and Martial Citizens Women figured as other in the discourse of militarized citizenship, barred from political activity or embodying alternative, non-martial values of the community. Machiavelli saw women as occasions for war, as goads to action, as designated weepers and even held them responsible for the damage done when men sought revenge of women’s honor.55 Rousseau celebrated the ideal of Spartan motherhood as refracted through Plutarch.56 The Spartan mother fulfils her civic duty, not as a citizen but as a mother-of-a-citizen in sacrificing her sons who are killed in battle. In the utopian society imagined by Rousseau, women were excluded a priori from playing any military or political role. War and politics were the business of men, just as affection and domestic life were the concern of women. Yet Rousseau did not consider women’s omission from public life as a hardship, but as an advantage. According to Rousseau, true contentment and moral civility were possible only in the domestic sphere, while the public sphere was inevitably a space of vice, exploitation, and wretchedness.57 Women’s roles in serving the nation lay in their function as mothers who instilled in their sons the love of the fatherland and taught

53

54 55

56 57

Cynthia. “Die Konstruktion der amerikanischen Soldatin als ‘Staatsbürgerin erster Klasse’.” Soziale Konstruktionen – Militär und Geschlechterverhältnis. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999. 248-64. As Linda K. Kerber, 241. See also for a discussion of the citizen-soldier Cohen, Eliot A. Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service. Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 243. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Discourses. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. The respective chapter is entitled "How women have brought about the downfall of states", 477-478. See also Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Pitkin, Hanna F. Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. III. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1942. Trouille, Mary Seidman. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997, 29.

16

Introduction

them civic virtues. Without being citizens themselves, women’s responsibilities were being mothers of citizens-to-be and mothers-to-be of citizens. Mary Wollstonecraft, despite being an out-spoken critic of Rousseau’s opposition to women’s rights, shared much of Rousseau’s vision of civic motherhood, but insisted that women must be active citizens and equally educated if they are to install civic virtue and pride in their children. “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.”58 The declaration of the Rights of Man, “a generic concept shorn of historic specificity,” as Hannah Arendt stressed, marked the foundation of a new body politic: man as natural being converges with or, rather, absorbs man as civic being.59 Georg F.W. Hegel envisioned the state as the “actuality of an ethical idea,” which allows the self of the male citizen to become complete as a stateidentified being, rather than absorbed in the individualistic freedom of bourgeois civil society.60 Hegel expressed the ideal of the nation state as a warstate (“Kriegsstaat”). According to Hegel, men and women had an active but very different part in the story.61 Jean Bethke Elshtain has adopted the enlightenment term “Beautiful Souls” to show how women in the western world were collectively cast as non-combatants, as collective other of the male citizen, who was constructed, eagerly or reluctantly, as violent.62 The “Beautiful Soul, “a necessary condition for, though not an integral part of, the world 58 59

60

61

62

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Walter Scott, 1891, 281. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1977, 108-9, quoted in Elshtain, Women and War, 72. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F. Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Berlin, 1821, 241. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Thinking about Women and International Violence.” Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects. Eds. Peter R. Beckman and Francine D’Amico. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1994, 113. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Eds. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988, 433, 439-40, 520. Hegel is not the inventor of the term. The notion goes back to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the pietist tradition, and the reinterpretation of Greek classics in Germany. See Norton, Robert Edward. The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, 55-99. In the Greek terminology, however, καλοκαγατηεια was reserved for men. According to German classicist Christoph Martin Wieland and his “Plan einer Akademie zu Bildung des Verstandes und des Herzens junger Leute,” women had no part in it. From the German tradition, the concept found its way into Rousseau’s thinking, but was elaborated upon in Goethe’s and Schiller’s works and finally found its way to Hegel. Norton, The Beautiful Soul, 246-282.

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of free citizens […] serves as a repository of innocent convictions and selfdefinitions.”63 One of the bourgeois social divisions that were sealed by this construction was the division between public life in the arena of the state and the sanctuary of the private world of the family. As Natalie Zemon Davis put it, the late 18th century was the time when “absolute distinctions between men and women in regard to violence” came to prevail.64 “Pictured as frugal, selfsacrificing, at times delicate, the female Beautiful Soul in times of war has been positioned as [...] a keeper of the flame of nonwarlike values – and has thus been set up as a being, and a whole way of life, men both cherish and seek to flee, both need and despise.”65 Women could thus be considered part of the (female) nation, which was defined in cultural terms, but at the same time denied access to the area of state politics. During the 19th century, up to 50% of the professional soldiers in the U.S. Army were immigrants, predominantly from Ireland, Germany, England and Poland.66 The Naturalization Act of 17 July 1862 expedited the naturalization of male aliens who had been fighting with and discharged honorably from the U.S. military.67 Service members were exempted from the then current requirements of first submitting a declaration of intent and would not be required to have been a resident for a certain period of time, in most cases five years. In 1894 an Act was passed to extend the naturalization privileges to those who had served in the Navy or the Marine Corps. These two acts were consolidated in WWI by yet another Act on 9 May 1918.68 Defending the draft during World War I, Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglas White stated the “reciprocal obligation” between citizens

63 64

65 66

67

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Elshtain, Women and War, 140. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Men, Women and Violence: Some Reflections on Equality.”Smith Alumnae Quarterly (1977): 12-15, 15. Elshtain, Women and War, 144. Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865. New York: Free Press, 1973, 113-124 and Förster, Stig. “Ein Alternatives Modell? Landstreitkräfte und Gesellschaft in den USA, 1775-1865.” Frevert, Militär und Gesellschaft, 94-118, 108. United States. The Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America. Boston: Little, Brown; 1863. 12 Stat. 597, section 21. “Any alien, of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, who has enlisted, or may enlist in the armies of the United States, either the regular or the volunteer forces, and has been, or may be hereafter, honorably discharged, shall be admitted to become a citizen of the United States, upon his petition, without any previous declaration of intention to become such; and he shall not be required to prove more than one year’s residence.” 40 Stat. 542. See also Szucs, Loretto Dennis. They Became Americans: Finding Naturalization Records and Ethnic Origins. Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Publishing, 1998.

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Introduction

and their government: “[T]he highest duty of the citizen is to bear arms at the call of the nation.”69 The discourse of armed civic virtue was also picked up by those who favored universal military training and conscription as a homogenizing agent for “hyphenated Americans,” Italian-Americans, PolishAmericans or other such “imperfectly assimilated immigrants.”70 When President Woodrow Wilson introduced universal service in 1917, this was to help mold a new nation, a “united United States” out of a “loosely united federation with strong local and regional identities.”71 Along with the anti-German xenophobic tide he had declared two years earlier, “[H]aving poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life […] such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”72 Nevertheless, not only male immigrants embraced the opportunity to earn citizenship rights. Most of the national women’s organizations also stood firmly behind the war effort.73 Working with organizations such as the American Defense Society, the National Patriotic Relief Society or the National Security League, women threw themselves into wartime social service activities and embraced their newfound social identities, often invoking the moral imperative of their nurturing, mothering tradition.74 The civic republican tradition constructed and limited citizenship and defined who was within the body politic, who was outside and who was necessary and integral for it, though not strictly a part of it. The narrative of armed civic virtue also provided women with an empowering social location. Elshtain has pointed out that American women of the Civil War, by framing themselves as “civic republican mothers,” were not merely victims, but agents

69

70 71 72

73

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Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366, 368, 378-80, 390 (1918), q.f. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, 246. Elshtain, Women and War, 114. Ibid., 108. Wilson’s third annual message to Congress, Wilson, Woodrow. The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Edited by Albert Shaw. Vol. I. New York: Review of Reviews Co., 1924, 151. See also Greiner, Bernd. “Die Beschäftigung mit der fernen Vergangenheit ist nutzlos: Der ‘Totale Krieg’ im Spiegel amerikanischer Militärzeitschriften.” An der Schwelle zum totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte über den Krieg der Zukunft, 1919-1939. Ed. Stig Förster. Paderborn, Schöningh, 2003. 443-465. The National American Suffrage Association for instance repudiated pacifism and pledged “to formulate a definite line of action and present to the President and the Government a plan which would be followed by it’s more than 2,000,000 members” in the event of war. Harper, Ida Husted. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 5. New York: J. J. Little & Ives, 1922, 578-79. Elshtain, Women and War, 186.

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in sacrificing the bodies of sons and husbands and cherishing “public freedom” above “private devotion.”75 Against the backdrop of cultural narratives that locate women in pacific or auxiliary roles in relation to war, and that link female bodies to life giving, rather than life taking, Elshtain positioned the “Ferocious Few” as necessary exceptions to the “Noncombatant Many.” Popular discourses have constructed female violence as personal aberrations. In contrast, male warfighting was seen as a collective, structured activity that could be moralized and idealized. Violence by women, who were not fully realized as politically constituted subjects, could not be accounted for politically. These acts were rather thought of as insular riots or acts of revenge that would not become part of the society’s self-definition through narratives of war. The “Ferocious Few,” female fighters such as Joan of Arc or Deborah Samson, alias Robert Shirtliffe, have been framed throughout the history of the modern West as private transgressions rather than as transformative efforts.76 Linda Grant De Pauw distinguished four categories of women’s roles in relation to war and armed struggle: first as victim and instigator, the classic roles in which conventional military history cast women; second as combat support roles, civilian camp followers who performed “women’s work” to support the troops; and third as women in the role of “virago,” those who display characteristics commonly associated with men but without challenging the hegemonic gender construction. Women who choose to take up arms to defend their children and homes or those who command troops by virtue of their office as head of state fall into this category, as well as the mythical “amazons.” “Androgynous warriors,” the fourth category, is made up of women who choose to “become a man among men,” sometimes involving cross-dressing or the change of other gender markers. Women soldiers in to75

76

Ibid., 93. The experience of empowerment has also been expressed by Eleanor Roosevelt, later a staunch supporter of women’s mobilization and the Women’s Army Corps. For her, the Great War offered an opportunity to reinvent herself and her duties. War work provided her with a sense of loyalty, empowerment and freed her from the social restraints she had faced before. “The war was my emancipation and education,” she wrote. Roosevelt, Eleanor. This Is My Story. New York, London: Harper & Bros., 1937, 260. Lash, Joseph P. and Eleanor Roosevelt. Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982, 67. Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers. New York: American Library, 1971, 310. Elshtain, Women and War, 171-4. See also Hacker, Hanna. “Der Soldat ist meistens keine Frau. Geschlechterkonstruktionen im militärischen Feld.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 20 (1995): 45-63. Hacker, Hanna. Gewalt ist: keine Frau. Der Akteurin oder eine Geschichte der Transgressionen. Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1998.

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Introduction

day’s integrated armies sometimes assume this supposedly un-gendered role to cope with notions of incompatibility of being female and a professional soldier.77 Women’s Roles in Modern Wars The American War of Independence and the French wars after 1792 were the first “people’s wars” (Volkskriege) that were fought by citizens, not by mercenary armies, raised by princes.78 As Carl von Clausewitz noted, “War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the state.”79 Large numbers of people who were mobilized into mass armies had to be disciplined and their morale kept high. While men were expected to fight for their fatherland, women, children and elderly people were expected to contribute in other ways. The following brief examples of women’s manifold roles in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the Civil War (1861-1865) show that women were present on the battlefields from the very beginning of the nation. When the Revolutionary War disrupted life for many women, a great number of them followed their husbands to war.80 Those women who stayed at home to run the business and manage their homes alone were forced to make decisions that had been left to their husbands before the war. As British troops marched through the former colonies, many families fled to relatives, adding extra burdens to households. In many areas women were forced to quarter troops. Proximity to troops and to war also brought about the danger of rape. The Connecticut towns of Fairfield and New Haven, for instance,

77

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80

De Pauw, Linda Grant. Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). For gender roles in today’s U.S. Army see also Herbert, Melissa S. Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Förster, Ein Alternatives Modell?, 118. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1950, 582. See also Rodriguez, Cecilia A. and Patricia Shields, “Woman ‘On War’: Marie von Clausewitzs Essential Contribution to Military Philosoph.” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 11.3-4 (1993): 5-10. For women in intelligence during the American Revolutionary War see: Claghorn, Charles Eugene. Women Patriots of the American Revolution: A Biographical Dictionary. Boston, MA: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Currie, Catherine. Anna Smith Strong and the Setauket Spy Ring. Port Jefferson Station, NY: C.W. Currie, 1992. Randall, Willard Sterne. “Mrs. Benedict Arnold.” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 4.2 (1992): 80-89.

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were raided in 1779. Women were raped and brutalized in Staten Island and in New Jersey when these areas were occupied by British troops in the fall and winter of 1776. In Newark the troops also went “about the town by night, entering houses and openly inquiring for women.”81 A few women chose to dress as men and fight against the British. One of these women was Deborah Samson of Plympton, Massachusetts who disguised herself as a young man and presented herself to the American army in 1778. She enlisted for the whole term of the war as Robert Shirtliffe and served in the company of Captain Nathan Thayer of Medway, Massachusetts. For three years she served as a common soldier and was wounded twice. Her identity went undetected until she was hospitalized with a brain fever, quite common on 18th century battlefields, and quietly, but honorably discharged from the Army on October 23, 1783. In 1784 she married the farmer Benjamin Gannett and had three children.82 In 1805 the Massachusetts legislature awarded her a pension as a disabled veteran in acknowledgment for her services to the country in a military capacity as a Revolutionary soldier.83 When Deborah Sampson died at 76 on April 29, 1827, Congress gave her husband a widow’s pension.84 Another legendary figure of the Revolutionary War era that has become a household heroine is Molly Pitcher. Despite the many powerful narratives, the historic identities of these fighting women is by no means certain – Molly Pitcher could have been a generic name for any woman of the Army or entirely a fabrication, as Linda Grant de Pauw has concluded.85 Molly Pitcher is associated with the Battle of Monmouth (1778) and has been identified with Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, who lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and was the wife of John Hays, an artilleryman of the 7th Pennsylvania Regiment. The central theme of the Molly Pitcher story is of a woman whose husband was wounded or killed while serving at an artillery piece at the Battle of Mon81

82

83

84 85

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters. Boston, MA: Scott Foresman & Co., 1980), 203. Parke, John: “The Poison of Your Precepts.” The Revolutionary Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1776 to 1800. Ed. Carol Sue Humphrey. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003, 29. Dever, John Patrick, and Maria Dever. Women and the Military: Over 100 Notable Contributors, Historic to Contemporary. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995, 101-102. Ellet, E. F., Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress). The Women of the American Revolution. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848, 134. Dever, Women and the Military, 102-103. De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies, 127. Kent, Jacqueline C. Molly Pitcher. Minneapolis, MN: Lake Street Publishers, 2003.

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mouth. She took his position and his ramming staff and kept firing until relieved by an artilleryman. Some variations of the story include a cameo appearance by General George Washington who gives her either a gold coin or a promotion to sergeant or captain. Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley was also awarded a pension by the State of Pennsylvania in 1822 “for services rendered” during the war. This was more than the usual widow’s pension, which was awarded to soldiers’ wives who marched with the army. De Pauw and others suggest that she was one of at least two women who fought in the Battle of Monmouth, one at an artillery position and the other in the infantry line. When McCauley died, however, there was no mention of the Battle of Monmouth in her obituary, nor is there any other evidence linking either of the women to McCauley.86 When the USS Constitution met and defeated HMS Guerriere, the first in a succession of naval victories in the War of 1812, a woman named Lucy Brewer had been serving onboard the vessel for three years as George Baker. According to her autobiographical account, she had seen many bloody battles as a member of the Constitution’s Marine guard and fighting the British as a marksman.87 Another woman combatant was Margaret Corbin, who had taken over her husband’s gun position in the Battle of Fort Washington in Manhattan in November 1776. In July of 1779 the Continental Congress as well as the state of Pennsylvania awarded her pensions for her heroism – and a suit of clothes. In 1926 the Daughters of the American Revolution had the remains of a woman in an unmarked grave, which they identified as Corbin’s, transferred and reinterned at Westpoint.88 Interesting about these legends is not only the fact that there have been women in combat on America’s battlefields or the fact that their lives are shrouded in mystery and legend, but also the production of these tales and the elements out of which military heroines have been produced. The soldierly qualities such as bravery that were attributed to them have subsequently come to be associated solely with men. As the armies grew more and more professional, soldiering also changed considerably:

86 87

88

De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies, 4. West, Lucy Brewer. The Sexual Adventures of a Female Marine: Miss Lucy Brewer, a Native of Plymouth County, Mass. Harriman, TN: Pioneer Press, 1966. De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies, 130. Adams, Arthur G. The Hudson River Guidebook. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996, 325.

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“By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, […] the machine required can be constructed; […] mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times; […] in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him ‘the air of a soldier.’”89

Discipline not only made possible “the meticulous control of the operations of the body” by imposing upon them “a relation of docility-utility,” it also entered all bodies into a “machinery” or “mechanics” of power.90 Armies now began to assume more control over support services for which they had once contracted, but military supply remained in the hands of noncombatants still following the armies.91 To increase efficiency and flexibility of the troops the size of the train was reduced and army and civilian life became more separate. “There were the military barracks: the army, that vagabond mass, has to be held in place; looting and violence must be prevented; [...] desertion must be stopped, expenditure controlled.”92 Attempts to regulate housing and marriage policies followed, but were of limited success until the early nineteenth century.93 Sutlers came under increasing military control, which brought with it a “semiofficial status that had its compensations.”94 Women continued to move with the baggage train and some joined the battle in the American and French Revolutions as well as in other wars of the time.95 After the Thirty Years’ War, armies began to regulate marriages of the soldiers and attempted to limit the number of wives who might follow the troops on campaign. Women’s relationships to the army was increasingly formalized; some could now draw rations while at the same time their duties were more clearly 89

90 91

92 93

94 95

Foucault, Discipline, 135. See also Waldinger, Reneé, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch, eds. The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993, 162. Ibid., 137-8. On military discipline and the more strictly hierarchical organization that brought with it a separation of civilian and military spheres see Bröckling, Ulrich. Disziplin. Soziologie und Geschichte militärischer Gehorsamsproduktion. München: Fink, 1997, 31. Kreisky, Eva. Fragmente zum Verständnis des Geschlechts des Krieges. Vortrag, Wien 9.12.2003. http://evakreisky. at/onlinetexte/geschlecht_des_krieges.pdf, 2. Accessed July 30, 2005. Foucault, Discipline, 141-2. Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 660. See also: Opitz, Von Frauen. Pröve, Ralf. Stehendes Heer und städtische Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert: Göttingen und seine Militärbevölkerung, 1713-1756. München: R. Oldenbourg, 1995. Wilson, Peter H. “German Women and War, 1500-1800.” War in History 3 (1996): 127-160. Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 655. Ibid., 658. Clinton, Catherine and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 93-113. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 477, 539.

24

Introduction

spelled out.96 The pre-industrial era of the people’s war culminated during the Napoleonic Wars. The nonmilitary support services were gradually replaced by more professional and bureaucratic supply services. In 1840 the French army barred army wives from serving as vivandières, who were now provided uniforms and assigned regular duties. Soldiers’ wives were increasingly provided (and restricted to) married quarters. In general, women with the armies faced an increasingly ill reputation. By the 1860s, camp followers were commonly equated with prostitutes and cost the few remaining army women what legitimacy they had left.97 Even nuns who were trained as nurses to staff field hospitals faced this kind of discrimination. There were still large numbers of camp followers in the American Civil War, which involved women on both sides on an unprecedented scale.98 In the field of health care women made significant and lasting contributions during the Civil War.99 Although most women served as nurses or Sanitary

96

97

98

99

When after a long struggle a national army was established by act of Congress on March 16, 1802, Congress limited the number of women allowed to a particular corps to four per company and directed the Subsistence Department to furnish each of them one ration. Hacker, Women and Military Institutions, 664. Ibid., 665-70. Frank Mort pointed out that in England, too, “[t]he medico-moral strategy was consolidated in the period after the initial reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. Environmental medicine, working in conjunction with religious principles of moral education, formed a dominant response to the problems posed by the working class in the period between 1850 and 1870.” He cautions, however, that “it is tempting, but completely illegitimate, to slide from analysis of the production of official solutions to their implementation.” Mort, Frank. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830. London: Routledge, 2000, 51. Hall, Richard. Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War. New York: Paragon House, 1993. On nurses and medical women such as Dr Mary Walker, a surgeon, cross dresser and Suffragette see Attie, Jeanie. Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998, 50-86. Maxwell, William Quentin and Allan Nevins. Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission. New York: Longmans, Green, 1956, 50-69. Bullough, Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, 166. A fulllength biography of Mary Walker was written by Snyder, Charles McCool. Dr. Mary Walker. New York: Arno Press, 1974. See also Poynter, Lidya. “Dr. Mary Walker: Pioneer Woman Physician.” Medical Woman’s Journal 53 (1946): 10. Edwards, Linden F. “Dr. Mary Edwards (1832-1919): Charlatan or Martyr?” The Ohio State Medical Journal 54 (1958): 1296-98. Berlin, Jean V., ed. A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-1863. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Rose, Anne C. Victorian America and the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Nursing became more professional and more respectable during the Civil War. Dorothea Lynde Dix, who helped recruit thousands

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25

Commission workers and volunteers, a surprising number of women, both black and white, served as spies, saboteurs, and scouts or disguised themselves as men to fight in battle.100 Although it is impossible to verify the exact number of women who served with both armies, some estimates indicate as many as four hundred, not counting thousands of women who served in the field of health care and medicine.101 More than eighty women were wounded or killed on various battlefields during the Civil War without receiving any recognition.102 One of the women who disguised as men and fought in the Civil War was Loreta Velazquez alias Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, a Confederate Officer. Born in Cuba the daughter of a diplomat, she was well educated and affluent. When her husband left for the war, she donned a Confederate uniform herself, recruited a troop of soldiers, and, under the name of Lt. Harry T. Buford, became their commander.103 After being wounded and unmasked, Velazquez enlisted as an infantryman and soon secured a commission in the cavalry. Her published memories have become controversial and are much

100 101

102

103

of volunteer nurses to be trained and serve with the Union Army, led the first steps toward an organized Nurse Corps. Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. “Dorothea Dix and Mental Health Reform.”Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society. Eds. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997, 55-68, 57. Schlaifer, Charles, and Lucy Freeman. Heart’s Work: Civil War Heroine and Champion of the Mentally Ill, Dorothea Lynde Dix. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Dix, Dorothea Lynde. On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Gollaher, David. Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. New York: The Free Press, 1995, 395-422. Clara Barton, who later founded the American Red Cross, collected and distributed food, clothing and medical supplies to the battlefronts. She later served as the first president of the American Red Cross for over twenty years. Oates, Stephen B. A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War. New York, Toronto, ON: Free Press, 1994. Massey, Mary Elizabeth. Women in the Civil War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Leonard, Elizabeth D. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses. Burton, David Henry. Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, 25-64. Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses, 94, 115, 117. Wilson, Barbara A. Women Were There 1996-2003. http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/femvets2.html. Accessed April 12, 2003. Ibid. See also Blanton, DeAnne. Women Soldiers of the Civil War, 1993. http://www. archives.gov/publications/prologue/1993/spring/women-in-the-civil-war-1.html. Accessed August 1, 2010. Wright, Mike. What They Didn’t Teach You about the Civil War. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996, 190.

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Introduction

disputed.104 Her biography may well be a work of fiction, although several newspaper articles support her story and the Records of the Confederate Secretary of War contain a reference to a request for an officer’s commission from a soldier named H.T. Buford.105 Cathay Williams, who was born into slavery near Independence, Missouri in 1842, was fighting for the Union Army. Before she was liberated, she worked for a wealthy planter named William Johnson in Jefferson City, Missouri. After her master had died, she worked as a servant for Union soldiers. On November 15, 1866, after the war and her job with the Army had ended, Cathay Williams turned into William Cathay and joined the 38th Infantry, Company A, in St. Louis. She was discharged from the Army at Ft. Bayard, New Mexico on 14 October 1868.106 Even more than stories of women passing as male soldiers, many accounts of women spies belong to the realm of folklore and rest on hearsay, myth, and unsubstantiated “biographies” more than on primary documentation.107 Pauline Cushman, a New Orleans actress, is said to have spied for the Union when she was discovered and sentenced to execution, but was ultimately saved by the arrival of the Union troops.108 Sarah Emma Edmonds served in the Union army during the Civil War. Her case is one of the most thoroughly researched cases of a woman soldier enlisted in the Union military. As part of the Union Army between 1861 and 1863 Edmonds experienced combat, caring for the wounded after the Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, in northern Virginia. She also worked as a

104

105

106

107

108

Velazquez, Loreta Janeta. The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Leonard, Elizabeth D. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. See also Holm, Jeanne. Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1992, 6. See also Blanton, DeAnne. “An Analysis of Cathay Williams’ Medical Condition and Efforts To Gain Pension And Disability Allowances.” MINERVA: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, 10.3 & 4 (1992): 1-12. For a complete collection of letters from a Civil War woman soldier from the time of her enlistment until her death in 1863 see Cook, Lauren M., ed. An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers. Pasadena, MD: The Minerva Center, 1994. See Bellafaire, Judith. Review of Elisabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of the Soldier. 2001. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=15664985629067. Accessed November 30, 2003. Sizer, Lyde Cullen. “Acting Her Part: Narratives of Union Women Spies.” Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses, 114-133, 114-118.

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27

male nurse in the regimental hospital and at a general military hospital in Georgetown (Washington, DC). In 1862 she became a Union spy, impersonating “a male slave, an Irish peddlar [sic] woman, a female fugitive slave, and a Kentucky male civilian.”109 Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a Confederate spy and a key member of an espionage organization targeting Union politicians in Washington, DC. Her death during the war helped establish her reputation as one Confederate celebrity. Beginning with the election of Abraham Lincoln, she was passing on information about federal military and naval operations to Southern secessionists. During the first half of 1861, she was recruited into a Confederate espionage ring, which used a 26-symbol code for communication. After weeks of surveillance by suspicious federal agents, government agent Allan Pinkerton arrested her on her doorstep and imprisoned her and her youngest daughter, Rose, in their home. After a second prison term in the Old Capital Prison, she was exiled to the Confederate states. Here she was assigned a tour through Britain and France to lobby for the Confederate cause. Greenhow died in 1864 when the ship that was to take her home after a year in Europe ran aground under pursuit by a Union gunboat. She was buried with full military honors in Wilmington, North Carolina.110 Total War and the Mobilization of Women In the nineteenth century the people’s war became industrialized. The period between 1861 and 1945 has accordingly been characterized as the “Age of Total War.”111 The concept of total war is of vital importance for the ques-

109

110

111

Harper, Judith E. Women during the Civil War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2003, 127. Ibid., 177. Judith Harper gives ample evidence for the existence of women spies on both sides during the Civil War. Harper, 40-41, 94-95. Boemeke, Manfred F., Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914. Washington, DC, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster. The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-1939. Washington, DC, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chickering, Roger, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner. A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1947. Washington, DC, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Förster, Stig. An der Schwelle zum Totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte über den Krieg der Zukunft, 1919-1939. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002. Förster, Stig and Jörg Nagler, On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871. Washington, DC Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Introduction

tion of how gender is deployed in structuring the military as well as civilian society during 20th century wartime. Total war is, among other factors, characterized by its intensity and extension of the battle zone. Although the concept describes an ideal type (Idealtypus) that was never fully implicated, it nevertheless serves as a heuristic tool to describe several tendencies in military history between the late 18th and the mid 20th centuries. The boundaries between the battlefront and the home front have become systematically eroded. “Total war […] assumes the commitment of massive armed forces to battle, the thoroughgoing mobilization of industrial economies in the war effort, and hence the disciplined organization of civilians no less than warriors.112 Or, as Roger Chickering pointed out, it is not the intensity, but the extensity that marks total war.113 Continuing the earlier development of mobilization of mass armies and including ever-greater parts of society into the war effort, total war relies on the participation of virtually entire societies as active participants and as victims. All of the members of an enemy society are considered legitimate targets of military violence. The concept, as Stig Förster and others have shown in a series of conferences and publications, includes several elements: Total goals of war (totale Kriegsziele).114 The most radical goals during the age of total war were certainly the German genocide of European Jews and the “Generalplan Ost” during WWII. Allied goals were not limited either, but included the unconditional surrender of the German Reich, as articulated by Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca.115 Limited goals could not sustain the universal mobilization that modern war required and on both sides, the enemy (which included not only a political regime but also the entire people) was now considered an existential threat. The means for waging war were also radicalized and totalized. This includes the neglect of The Hague and Geneva Conventions, not only with respect to prisoners of war. Submarine 112

113

114

115

Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster. “Are We There Yet? World War II and the Theory of Total War.” Chickering and Förster, A World at Total War. 1-18, 2. Further on definitions and on the inflationary use of the concept see Chickering, Roger. “Total War. The Use and Abuse of a Concept.” ed. Manfred Boemeke. Anticipating Total War. The German and American Experiences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 13-28. Chickering, Roger. “Militärgeschichte als Totalgeschichte im Zeitalter des totaler Kriegs.” Was ist Militärgeschichte? Eds. Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000, 301-12, 307. Förster and Nagler, On the Road. Boemeke, Chickering and Förster, Anticipating Total War. Chickering, Roger and Stig Förster. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Washington, DC, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Chickering, Förster, and Greiner, A World. Förster, An der Schwelle, 20.

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warfare, mass killings of so-called partisans, or tactics such as “strategic bombardment” and “scorched earth” (verbrannte Erde) are also examples of totalized means of warfare.116 To supply, transport and feed the millions of fighting troops on all fronts, as well as the families on the vast home fronts, industrial means and logistics were needed and contributed to the radicalization of the methods of warfare. At the same time a paradox became aggravated that had already been apparent at the time of the people’s wars: Total control over the economy and the war-effort became impossible to attain the more the boundaries between the military and civilian society became blurred. Total mobilization required a broad consensus of society and control over financial and economic systems, which a military leadership in a modern state could not accomplish, not even by such means as conscription, propaganda and censorship. The unattainable military goal of total control over mobilization underscores the need for propaganda to break resistance and help to ‘sell’ mobilization for the war effort in all of society.117 The home front, and with it, women, became an integral part of mobilization and the war-effort.118 “The woman who meets war difficulties with a smile, who does her best with rationing and other curtailments, who writes her man overseas the kind of letters he must have to carry him through successfully, is making a great contribution to this difficult period.”119 However, not only as civilians were women doing “their share.” All nations that participated in the war relied on women performing a host of noncombat duties as auxiliaries to the armed services. Although women’s self-mobilization and voluntary contributions were overwhelming for the most part, this was insufficient for the economies that geared up towards a total war footing. Typically, women’s auxiliary units were to replace men in non-combatant roles. All of these women initially occupied a precarious position as civilians with military organization and discipline but without military benefits. In the total wars of the twentieth century, militaries relied on women’s skills and womanpower but were reluctant to integrate them into their ranks. This changed in

116 117

118

119

Ibid., 20-21. Förster, Stig.”Das Zeitalter des Totalen Krieges, 1861-1945. Konzeptionelle Überlegungen für einen Historischen Strukturvergleich.” Mittelweg 36 8.6 (1999): 12-29, 16. Boemeke, Chickering, and Förster, Anticipating Total War. Förster, An der Schwelle, 17, 24-5. In Europe and Australia this was true in a double sense: War industries, agricultural programs and conservation measures on the home-front supplied and supported the battlefront while at the same time being subject to bomb raids and enemy invasion itself. Roosevelt, Eleanor. “American Women in the War.” The Reader’s Digest 44.1 (1944): 42-44.

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Introduction

most countries during WWII, although in many cases women were not awarded military or veteran’s status until decades after their service. With industrialization, mass education and urbanization at the turn of the century, more and more businesses and industries had hired and trained women as clerks, typists, factory workers, telephone operators, and technicians. After the invention of the typewriter and telephone these and other tasks in the offices had become almost completely feminized by the time the United States entered the Great War.120 The demands for manpower and with it the migration of women into the skilled and semiskilled labor force increased in the public and private sectors as well as in the military. Shortages were most acute in so-called “women’s jobs,” particularly in the clerical field. The Army in World War I was more hesitant to employ women in auxiliary functions than the Navy, which enrolled almost 12,000 women into the Naval Reserve as clerical workers in the rank of yeoman-F.121 Although some of the highest-ranking commanders and chiefs of branches tried to convince the War to enlist women it refused to do so except as nurses and, reluctantly, civilian office workers. These women were only to be employed in “essential work for which men could not be obtained,” provided the women were of “mature age and high moral character.”122 After considerable debate on the status of these volunteers, the War Department stated that it was not convinced of the “desirability or feasibility of making this most radical departure in the conduct of our military affairs.”123 Still, roughly 5,000 American women - civilian volunteers recruited by numerous American welfare organizations - worked for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). From a military point of view, the greatest problems were overlapping functions and lack of coordinated supervision. From the perspective of the volunteers, their lack of military status, benefits and protection in case of injury, imprisonment or death were most severe.124

120

121

122 123

124

For civilian women workers during the WWI era see Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1990. [United States Navy] Online Library of Selected Images of Yeomen (F) and WAVES. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/prs-tpic/females/wave-ww2.htm. Accessed March 3, 2003. Holm, Women in the Military, 13. C.i. Treadwell, Mattie E. The Women’s Army Corps. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, 1954, 7. Zeiger, Susan. In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-1919. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999, 137-174.

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Several Army agencies, a number of women’s groups, educational organizations and the YWCA lobbied for women’s corps to equal that of the British Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC). In the summer of 1939, the new Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, directed his staff to devise a plan that called for the establishment of a women’s component modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a Depression Era project created by President Roosevelt.125 These women would not be part of the Army but would work with it as “hostesses, cooks, waitresses, canteen clerks, chauffeurs, and strolling minstrels.”126 In March 1942 the WAAC bill passed the House and passed the Senate on 14 May 1942.127 The next day it was signed by President Roosevelt and became Public Law 77-554, An Act to Establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States.128 The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was established to work with the Army, “for the purpose of making available to the national defense the knowledge, skill, and special training of the women of the nation.”129 On July 1, 1943, Congress converted the Auxiliary Corps into the Women’s Army Corps, (WAC) which provided women ranks, titles and pay comparable to that of their male counterparts. In total, 140,000 women served in the Women’s Corps during WWII.130

125

126 127 128

129 130

Breuer, William B. War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy. Westport, CT, London: Praeger, 1997, 15-16. See Stieglitz, Olaf. “100 Percent American Boys”: Disziplinierungsdiskurse und Ideologie im Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942. Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1999. Patel, Kiran Klaus. Soldaten der Arbeit: Arbeitsdienste in Deutschland und den USA 1933-1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. Breuer, War and American Women, 16. United States, and Congress. Congressional Record, 17 March 1942. Public Law 77-554, (subsequently quoted as PL). “An Act to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for service with the Army of the United States”. 77th Cong. 2nd sess., May 14, 1942. National Archives and Record Administration (henceforth cited as NARA). Record Group 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Two months later the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve and the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve were established, all of which were temporary and without full military status. In accordance with Treadwell and others I use the capitalized acronyms WAAC resp. WAC to denote the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women’s Army Corps while Waac and Wac, resp. stand for the members of these corps. WAAC Regulations. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. PL 77-554. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. PL 78-110. “An Act to Establish a Women’s Army Corps for Service in the Army of the United States.”78th Cong. 1st sess. July 1, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Litoff, Judy B. and David C. Smith, eds. American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997, 35.

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The U.S. Navy enlisted women Naval Reserve as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). President Roosevelt signed the Navy Women’s Reserve Act into law on 30 July 1942.131 Mildred McAfee, then president of Wellesley College, and other prominent female educators and professionals were commissioned as officers.132 Within a year, 27,000 women were wearing the WAVES uniform. WAVES served in a far wider range of occupations than had the Yeomen (F) of World War I. Again, most did secretarial and clerical jobs, although a fair number worked in nontraditional assignments, ranging for instance from working with carrier pigeons to working as machinist’s mates and metal smiths in the aviation community. WAVES were also serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps, in medical professions, as well as in communications, intelligence and science. Toward the end of the war, WAVES made up about 2.5 percent of the Navy’s total strength, over 8,000 female officers and 86,000 enlisted WAVES on duty or in training.133 The women’s auxiliary unit of the Coast Guard, the SPARS (named after the Coast Guard motto: “Semper Paratus - Always Ready”), enlisted about 10,000 women.134 About twice as many women enlisted as women marines and worked in 225, mostly clerical, positions. Women pilots were members of two organizations, which merged in August 1943 into one command called the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) under the command of Jacqueline Cochran.135 The first women pi-

131

132 133

134

135

Public Law 689, H.R. 6807, July 30, 1942. United States. Statutes at Large Containing the Laws and Concurrent Resolutions Enacted during the Second Session of the SeventySeventh Congress of the United States of America 1942 and Treaties, International Agreements Other than Treaties, and Proclamations. Vol. 56, pt.1. Washington: GPO, 1943, 730-31. Friedl, Women, 57. V., 57-58. On WWII WAVES see also Hancock, Joy Bright. Lady in the Navy: A Personal Reminiscence. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1972. Godson, Susan H. Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the U.S. Navy. Annapolis, MD, Washington, DC: Naval Institute Press, 2001. Harris, Evelyn D. “Sending in the WAVES, SPARS and Women Marines.” Henderson Hall News. 6 March (1992): 10,14. WAVES National. Navy Women, 19081988: A Pictorial History, 2 vols. Camarillo, CA: WAVES National, 1990. Wingo, Josette Dermody. Mother was a Gunner’s Mate: World War II in the Waves. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994. On November 23, 1942, Public Law 773 amended the Auxiliary and Reserve Act of 1941 and created the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve. Granger, Byrd H. On Final Approach: The Women Air Force Service Pilots of W. W. II. Scottsdale, AZ: Falconer Pub. Co., 1991. Granger, a former WASP herself is the official historian for the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) veterans’ organization. See also the following two pictorial histories: Williams, Vera S. WASPs: Women Airforce Service Pilots

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lots’ organization was the WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron), founded by Nancy Harkness Love in the summer of 1942 within the Air Transport Command. Its roughly two dozen members were not part of the Army Air Forces, but civilian contractors. These commercially licensed women pilots, each of whom had at least logged 500 hours of flying time before, ferried aircraft from factories to airfields. Although initially recruited to ferry only light aircraft and trainers, they later delivered fighters, bombers, and transport aircraft as well. The second organization of women pilots was the larger Women’s Air Service Pilots (WASPs). Aviator Jacqueline Cochran had been the director of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) and in 1943 had just returned from Great Britain where she had supervised twenty-five women pilots ferrying aircraft for the British Air Transport Auxiliary. The first of Cochran’s WFTD began training in Houston, TX and in early 1943 moved to Avenger Field at Sweetwater, Texas. Avenger Field, the only all-female base in the United States, was fondly called Cochran’s Convent.136 WASPs logged over 60 million miles and ferried planes of seventyseven different types, including the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress. After graduating from Avenger Field, their assignments all over the country included testing repaired aircraft, training male pilots and towing targets at gunnery schools – “aerial dishwashery,” as the women called it, “any flying job that needed doing.”137 Despite the fact that WASPs were civilian contractors without rank or benefits and had to pay for their room and board, they lived in military housing and followed military orders. In 1944 a bill to award the WASPs military status was defeated in Congress. Rita V. Gomez argues that Jacqueline Cochran and General Henry Arnold played a greater role in preventing the WASP from becoming militarized than most historians accord them.138 Given the surplus of male pilots late in 1944 as well as massive lobbying by them, the

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of World War II. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1994. Noggle, Anne. For God, Country, and the Thrill of It: Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. Friedl, Women, 12. Scharr, Adela Riek. Sisters in the Sky. Gerald, MO: The Patrice Press, 1986. Jacqueline Cochran has written two autobiographical books: Cochran, Jacqueline, and Maryann Bucknum Brinley. Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography. Toronto, ON, New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Cochran, Jacqueline, and Floyd B. Odlum. The Stars at Noon. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1954. Breuer, War and American Women, 24. Darr, Ann. “The Long Flight Home.” U.S. News & World Report 123.19 (1997): 66-70. Ibid., 68. Gomez, Rita Victoria Alexandria. “Daedalus’ Daughters: The Army Air Forces and Its Women Pilots.” Ph.D. Thesis. George Washington University, 2003, xvii.

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AAF determined there was no longer a need for the WASPs and on December 20 discontinued the program.139 By the time the Corps was disbanded, thirty-eight women pilots had lost their lives.140 In the course of the war the gendered structure of the military had been transformed. The integration of female soldiers, however, did not lead to a fundamental change in the traditional gender hierarchy. In order to analyze the changes and continuities, I draw on theoretical concepts of power, knowledge and gender.

1.2. Theoretical Concepts Power and Agency When dealing with a military institution it is doubly important to distinguish power from domination of one individual or group of individuals over others. For Foucault, “power means relations, a more-or-less organized, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations.”141 These clusters form a network-like structure of relations, which are to be distinguished from other relations such as relations of violence. Hence, in contrast to the concept of domination (in the sense of Max Weber), “the individual […] is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is […] one of its prime effects.”142 If we look at the U.S. Army’s hierarchical structure, the members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps would be located close to the bottom of the military food chain. Looking at the attention the WAAC received from the media, however, would produce quite a different picture. Few units had so prominent advocates as the First Lady or the Chief of Staff, who repeatedly stepped in to testify in Congress or to convince the public about the merits of the Corps. This apparent contradiction suggests that power is not distributed in a linear, top-down fashion, but, as Foucault put it, in a network-like struc139

140

141

142

In 1977, almost thirty-five years after their deactivation, the WASPs were given veterans’ benefits. Cochran and Odlum, The Stars. Keil, Sally van Wagenen. Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines: The Unknown Heroines of World War II. New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979. Noggle, Anne. For God, Country, and the Thrill of It: Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990, v. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, 198. Foucault, Michel. Power. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 2000, 337. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98.

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ture. 143 “In general terms, I would say that the interdiction, the refusal, the prohibition, far from being essential forms of power, are only its limits, power in its frustrated or extreme forms. The relations of power are, above all, productive.”144 Power is not something that an individual or a group of individuals can possess; it is something that exists only as it is exercised. Although Foucault concedes that it is exercised within a field of limited possibilities and “underpinned by permanent structures,” he insists that “each individual has at his disposal a certain power, and for that very reason can also act as the vehicle for transmitting a wider power.”145 Therefore the questions are not who possesses power, how power is distributed in the State apparatus, or, and especially with regard to this study, how certain military institutions exercise power over women soldiers. Instead, I will focus on the productive aspects of power, “the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” and turn themselves into subjects.146 The construction of the woman|soldier is not a willful act by any Army authority. Neither is it an act of choice by the women themselves to take on a particular identity. Foucault makes clear that even if there is an intention behind an act within a relation of power, it can be “completely invested in its real and effective practices.” It is in these practices that he suggests to “grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.”147 In addition to looking at the WAC from an institutional perspective, this study will also concern itself with a subject perspective of individual Wacs. It is from here that we can “conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been – and continue to be – invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc., by ever more general mechanisms […].”148 By analyzing how power works “at its extremities,” at “those points where it becomes capillary,” we can understand why in a

143 144

145 146

147 148

Ibid., 98. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the self.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds. L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton. London: Travistock, 1988, 118. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 72. Foucault, Power, S. 326-7. Ramazanoğlu, Caroline. Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. London, New York: Routledge, 1993, 24. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 97. Ibid., 99.

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Introduction

specific formation the actions of a single woman can have a significant impact on larger structures, such as WAC Regulations or uniform design.149 Power|Knowledge Power produces and transmits effects of truth, which in turn reproduce this power. “[I]n any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth, which operates through and based on this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.”150 Along with an institutional as well as a subject perspective, this study will examine these “truths,” these “apparatuses of knowledge.”151 According to Foucault, “knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge [and] relations of power which pass via knowledge.”152 Countless statements organized in a variety of discourses surrounded the Women’s Army Corps. There were discourses on whether the United States should enter the war, military discourses on how to provide the armed forces with the manpower needed, and a discourse on the proper role of women, to name just a few. Statements such as “a woman’s place is at home” or “telephone switchboards are best staffed by women” are by no means outside of power relations. Instead, discourses are produced, regulated, distributed, circulated, and operated by a “régime of truth.”153 Apart from these discursive formations themselves, what needs to be studied for the period in question is the American society’s “administration of knowledge”154 as its “‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as

149 150 151

152 153 154

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 102. On “how […] to analyse relations of power” see Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Power, 326-48, 344. Foucault, Michel et al. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. With Two Lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 53. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 69. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 69.

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true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; and the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”155 When the Army studied the “suitability of military occupations for WAAC auxiliaries,” the régime of truth had to administer several “knowledges.” The situation was urgent – the Services of Supply’s operations and training section (G-3) had estimated a need for 1,500,000 Waacs. The Adjutant General’s committee concluded that 406 of the 628 military occupations listed by the Army were suitable for women and 222 unsuitable. There was much debate about the criteria. Legislation determined whether or not a job was deemed unsuitable if it involved combat. Most classification experts agreed that it should be considered unsuitable if it required “considerable physical strength,” or if the working conditions or environment were “improper for women.”156 Jobs requiring long training time were also eliminated because women’s service was considered only temporal. Despite the disagreement as to how the Waacs could be best protected from the harsh conditions of Army life, committee members seemed to agree on the fact that women needed protection. All jobs that were classified as supervisory were automatically declared unsuitable for women for the same reason that women officers were not allowed to command enlisted men. Four occupations – classification specialist, personnel consultant, personnel technician, and psychological assistant – were highly controversial. The military members of the committee considered these jobs “definitely unsuitable.” If Waacs, being noncombatants themselves, were involved in interviewing and classifying men for “potential combat duty,” they would meet ”profound psychological resistance […] and unquestionably unfavorable public reaction.”157 The psychologists, however, did not feel that the “psychological effect would be strong enough to rule out these occupations.”158 The rationale behind this dispute was less to determine how best to protect Waacs, but rather to prevent women from gaining control over military masculinity. The question was whether civilian psychologists, the United States

155 156

157

158

Ibid., 131. Report on Suitability of Military Occupations for WAAC Auxiliaries, November 25, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Memorandum Geo R. Evans, Chief, Classification and Enlisted Replacement Branch to Colonel T.B. Catron, subject: Report on Military Occupations Suitable for WAAC Auxiliaries, November 25, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Ibid.

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Employment Service (USES), Army personnel experts or the British were in a position to advise the Army and produce the “truth” about the employability of the woman|soldier. In admitting women to the profession of protectors, the knowledge of various experts had to be managed so that the “truth” could emerge for how women might best be protected from the enemy, but also from any potential backlash by men soldiers as a result of perceived infringement by women upon the structurally-assumed role men held as protectors. Again the real issue, I propose, was to prevent women from gaining authority over military masculinity. Strategic Apparatus While power|knowledge is organized in discursive formations, discourses alone cannot account for its polymorphous effects. The older concept of the episteme, which can be thought of as a specifically discursive apparatus, is replaced by the dispositive.159 A dispositive is a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and non-discursive elements that functions as a structure and medium of power, its means and at the same time, its effect. It consists of “[d]iscourses, institutions, buildings, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements and philosophical propositions, in short: the said as well as the unsaid. The apparatus (dispositif) itself is the web that can be established between these elements.”160 These interconnected elements of the dispositive form structures, which in turn provide, in the form of norms and rules, solutions to societal problems. Foucault speaks of “strategic necessities” that are not identical with personal, individual or collective interests or strategies. Rather, the dispositive can be thought of as a strategy without a strategist. In other words, an appa159

160

Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 121. The French term dispositif is translated as “deployment” by Robert Hurley in Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Lemert and Gillan translate it as “affective mechanism”: Lemert, Charles C. and Garth Gillan. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 77. I follow Colin Gordon who translates the term as “apparatus”. Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Barry Cooper calls it a “device, disposition of devices, etc. See Cooper, Barry. Michel Foucault: An Introduction to the Study of His Thought. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1981, 71. Foucault gives an account of his use of the term in “The Confession of the Flesh,” Power/Knowledge, 194-228, 194-196. Foucault, Michel. “Le Jeu de Michel Foucault.” Dits et Écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 3, 1976-1979. Eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Galimard, 1994, 299.

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ratus of power is at the same time intentional and non-subjective. Mobilizing a population for war was such a strategic necessity that involved various, at times conflicting, interests and strategies which produced very different effects. Additionally, the effects produced re-enter the mechanism and change the structure of the strategic apparatus itself, a double process Foucault called “functional over-determination” and ”strategic replenishment.”161 The construction of the woman|soldier is at every moment facilitated by several, or all, of the elements of the apparatus, which interact with each other in manifold ways. Discourses surround and permeate the ‘construction sites’: gender discourses, patriotic discourses or discourses on sexuality, to name just a few. Institutions play a role – the Army itself as an institution and organization of the nation state, or the institution of marriage in the American society of the 1940s.162 Other examples of elements of the apparatus that relate to the construction of the woman|soldier in the Women’s Army Corps include: laws that provided Congressional authorization for the WAAC; regulatory decisions and administrative measures that governed virtually every aspect of the organization’s operation as well as the women’s lives; scientific statements (from medical expertise to military science) solicited when administrative measures were being implemented; and philosophical propositions that addressed larger questions facing the nation during wartime. Gender The subjects produced in the Women’s Army Corps were gendered subjects. If we recall for a moment the two meanings of the word “subject” – being subject to someone else by control and dependence and being tied to one’s own identity by conscience or self-knowledge – both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and creates subjects.163 Gender is a relational category, as are race and class. Each of these categories is relational unto itself as well as to other categories. None of them can be treated or experienced in isolation. Rather, they are articulated in relation to and through each other.

161

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163

Ibid., 298. Grossberg, Lawrence. Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, 95. Foucault himself gave an example of how buildings interact with discourses, practices or other elements of the dispositive: He described Jacques Ange Gabriel’s Ecole Militaire as an architectural apparatus in which “[…] control over sexuality becomes inscribed in architecture. In the Military Schools, the very walls speak the struggle against homosexuality and masturbation.” Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 150. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 212.

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Introduction

How men and women experience gender has always to do with other genders, not only in terms of sexual difference, but also in relation to other axes of difference such as race and class. 164 The relations between them can be closer or less close, they are reciprocal and, at times, contradictory. Concepts of class or race can be articulated in terms of gender so that by coding certain terms with references to gender meanings can be established and naturalized. Hence, the gendered subjects produced in the WAC must also be thought of as multiple. As Teresa de Lauretis has put it, “a subject en-gendered in the experiencing of race and class, as well as sexual, relations; a subject, therefore, not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as contradicted.”165 Femininities are not simply social and cultural expressions of femaleness. Hence, there are not one but many masculinities and femininities.166 Frank Barrett’s study on competing masculinities among male officers of the U.S. Navy shows how each concept of masculinity is produced through various discourses of difference and normality and differentiated from other concepts of masculinity (e.g. homosexual) and femininity. Since none of these categories is static, masculinity has to be produced and maintained by drill, a “culture of tests,” permanent surveillance and a differentiated system of awards.167 Michel Foucault has shown how sexuality served to create a fictitious unity to a host of “anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures.”168 Sexuality then became “a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a universal signifier and a universal signified.”169 This privileging of sexuality can certainly be observed in many a Western feminist account of sexuality. Nevertheless, as Anne McClintock demonstrates for colonial set-

164

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166

167 168 169

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994. De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, IX-X, 2. On the multiplicities of masculinities and femininities see Hooper, Charlotte. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 4, 42, 54-56. Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities Body, Age, and Identity: Dress, Body, Culture. New York: Berg, 2004. For various “masculinities without men” see Judith Halberstam, who argues that female masculinity offers a glimpse of how modern masculinity is constructed. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Barrett, Die Konstruktion, 76. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 22. Ibid., 23.

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tings, an “elaborate analogy between race and gender became […] an organizing trope for other social forms.”170 Her work is an example of an analysis that does not privilege one category over others, but accounts for relations of power|knowledge in imperial modernity in terms of interrelated social categories. The crucial part that gender plays in organizing hierarchical social relations is often not made explicit. All of these aspects of gender are linked by a specific involvement with bodies, bodies as both agents and objects of the gender system. The body remains a point of reference, not a biological base but, as R.W. Connell put it, a “reproductive arena.”171 Hence, this connection is a social one, a matter of organization of social relations, and a historical process involving the body.172 According to Joan Scott’s proposition, “[g]ender is a constitutive element of social relationships, a primary way of signifying relationships of power that is based on perceived differences of the sexes.”173 Scott concluded, “man and woman are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty, because they have no ultimate and transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.”174 Similarly, in Teresa de Lauretis’ words, the gender system is a “symbolic system or system of meanings that correlates sex to cultural contents according to social values and hierarchies.”175 Gender is the product of various social technologies, institutional discourses, epistemologies and practices.176 However gender is not only the product of practices (and epistemes); it can also be looked at as a set of practices itself.177 For De Lauretis, “tech-

170

171 172 173

174 175 176 177

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995, 7. Connell, R. W. The Men and the Boys. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000, 25-27. Ibid., 27. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, 42. Ibid., 49. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 5. Ibid., 9. The sociologists Candace West, Don Zimmerman and Sarah Fenstermaker understand gender as an “accomplishment,” a “situated doing” that is locally managed in reference to normative conceptions of femininity and masculinity. The individual doing of gender – as with class, race and other categorical differences – is assessed interactionally and institutionally. This “accountability” shapes and drives the construction of masculinity and femininity however they are defined in a situation. Melissa Herbert, employing West’s and Zimmerman’s ethnomethodological approach, argues that women in the military know

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nologies of gender” are practices of representation and self-representation. “Women,” “soldiers” or “women soldiers” are not just groups of people, but also “communities of practice.”178 Gender practices are configured and processed through sometimes contradictory, ambiguous or dis|continuous concepts of masculinity and femininity. Differently gendered subjects have different investments, as Wendy Hollway put it, in power structures.179 This cathexis, to use the Freudian term borrowed by R. Connell, is one site of gender practice and the active construction of gender.180 Connell’s work provides a valuable crosscheck for feminist studies on the category of gender in summarizing the key conclusions of social constructionist research on masculinity.181 In addition to the multiplicity of masculinities and femininities, within history, societies, institutions and persons, Connell stressed the elements of hierarchy and hegemony between different masculinities and femininities. Hegemony of dominant over subordinated and marginalized forms may be quiet and implicit, or vehement or violent.182 If we take the relational character of social categories seriously, it is critical to look not only at the differences between men and women but also at the differences between women in relation to various power structures. Genders then come into exis-

178

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180 181 182

they will be held accountable both as women and as soldiers, a double accountability that presents women with a conundrum. Herbert points out a different form of agency: In “doing gender” through every-day actions or strategies, women soldiers face choices that are “interactional in that they are shaped, not simply by socialization or internalization of gender norms,” but because they are also being made “with a conscious eye to their consequences.” West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(1987): 125-51. Fenstermaker, Sarah. The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households. New York: Plenum, 1985. On hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity see Connell, Robert W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 183. West and Fenstermaker 1987, 137; West, Candace and Sarah Fenstermaker. “Doing Difference.” Gender and Society 9 (1995): 8-37, 21. See also Herbert, Camouflage, 13-4. Jean Lave. “Situating Learning in Communities of Practice.” Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Eds. Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine, and Stephanie D. Teasley. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1991. 63-82. Scollon, Ronald. Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. London, New York: Routledge, 2001, 142-158. Hollway, Wendy and Tony Jefferson. “Narrative, Discourse and the Unconscious: The Case of Tommy.” Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial Perspectives. Eds. Molly Andrews et al. London: Routledge, 2000. 136-149. Connell, The Men and the Boys, 23. Ibid., 10-14. Ibid., 12.

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tence as people act. They are actively produced, using the resources and strategies available in a given social setting.183 For Judith Butler the gendered subject is produced through discourse as “performative reiteration,” that is, the subject’s constant attempt to embody hegemonic norms.184 Butler, following Jacques Derrida’s reformulation of J. L Austin’s speech act theory and employing Derrida’s concepts of “iterability” and “(re)citationality,” suggests that “this production actually always happens through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. [...] Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed.”185 The subject is interpellated into the symbolic order, which is constituted by hegemonic norms that circulate in a society and precede the subject. The subject is then compelled to re-cite and re-iterate the norms in order to remain viable and intelligible. These performative re-iterations constitute the continuous process of signification that materializes a set of effects on the body, the sedimented effect of discourses.186 The norm ‘women’s place is really in the home,’ for instance, underpinned almost every speech the WAAC Director gave to the public. In order to present the WAAC in such a way that it was compatible with the values and sensibilities of middle class, small town America, where most of the volunteers would come from, she constantly varied the theme that the WAAC was merely an extension of women’s “natural” sphere. “The gaps our women will fill are in those noncombatant jobs where women’s hands and women’s hearts fit naturally. Waacs will do the same type of work, which women do in civilian life.”187 By no means were these speech acts limited to the Director. Waacs themselves were constantly reassuring themselves, their families and communities that they were performing the “old women’s mission,” to “hold the home front steadfast, and send men to battle warmed and fed and comforted; to stand by and do dull routine work while the men are gone.”188

183 184 185

186

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188

Ibid., 23. Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 82. Osborne, Peter, and Lynne Segal. “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Radical Philosophy 67 (1994): 32-39. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. Bellafaire, Judith A. The Women’s Army Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1993. Letter of a WAAC recruit from a training center in Georgia, c. i. Bellafaire, Judith. The Women’s Army Corps. http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/wac/wac.htm. Accessed July 30, 2005.

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Performativity is not to be confused with performance. Despite Butler’s example of drag performances, which she contends has been ill chosen because it has often been interpreted as a voluntarist performance, she emphasized that it is the notion of re-signification that is crucial for the concept of performativity.189 Performativity “consists of a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the performer’s ‘will’ or choice.”190 The power of discourse to enact what it names is constituted by the “historicity of discourse and, in particular, the historicity of norms.”191 In these constant practices of re-iteration, recitation and re-signification lies, according to Butler, the possibility for agency, resistance and change. “[T]o be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power|discourse which is open to resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks. ‘Agency’ is to be found precisely at such junctures where the discourse is renewed.”192 For this study – a cultural history of a military institution – it will be of particular importance to look at how gender (1) shaped the symbolic and ritual representation, as well as the culturally and socially coined perception of the WAC and the Army; (2) defined the scope to act and opportunities to participate within the Army as well as in relation to it; (3) established hierarchical relations of power between the military and civilian society as well as between women and men and between different groups of women and men, respectively; and (4) has shaped individual and collective identities and subject positions and, in turn, the subjective view on war and the institution of the military itself.193

1.3 Methodological Approaches In order to explore the construction of the new category woman|soldier that took place in the WAC during World War II, I employ three perspectives that inform the different aspects looked at in each chapter. (1) The Subject Perspective. For the women involved, becoming a woman|soldier was a process of subjectivation that was not solely limited to the act of enlisting in the WAC, but also involved finding one’s place in an 189 190 191 192 193

Osborne and Segal, Gender as Performance. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 234. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 135. Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte, 31.

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entirely new life of military discipline within an environment that was often less than welcoming. Through the subject perspective I will attempt to locate the women’s different subject positions in a matrix of categories such as gender, sexuality, class, race, age and ethnicity. Such localization has to be as dynamic as the categories involved. Since none of them is static or universal, each speech act, gesture, or relation can serve to position the subject in relation to others. (2) The Institutional Perspective. For the Army as institution and organization, integrating women presented an entirely new set of challenges. For the first time women were serving within the ranks of an organization that had constructed itself as a male world. While high-ranking officers supported the mobilization of women for reasons of expedience, the millions of soldiers of which the Army was comprised often had different points of view. Women were the “girls back home” the soldiers fought for, they were civilians, sometimes auxiliaries, sweethearts or prostitutes, but never “sisters in arms.” For the Army as a governmental institution, different problems arose: issues of logistics (how to house, feed, and clothe women), administrative problems (how to devise regulations for the WAAC, when it was not formally part of the Army), or disciplinary problems (Waacs could not be reprimanded, only discharged under WAAC regulations). (3) The Discursive Perspective. The rapid mobilization that involved the entire population of the United States took place in a space structured by various discourses on gender roles, the role of the military and the nature of military-civil relations. World War Two was fought on the home front and in the media, as well as on the Asian and European battlefronts. How was this discursive formation structured? How were discourses of gender used, produced and reproduced in order to mobilize an unprecedented number of women for war? How were they changed by millions of women in nontraditional occupations? This study will not be a history of organizational integration, i.e. of the process of including and integrating a group that had formerly been excluded but which then achieved token status and, finally, under-representation. Nor will it be a history of a few ‘great women’ who managed to survive in a hostile institution, thus functioning as trailblazers for many more women who came after. It will also not contribute to a meta-narrative of progress in science and reason by ‘revealing’ that the oppression of women is unjust, illogic and irrational. Instead, the methodological toolbox with which this study operates combines tools for discourse analysis with tools borrowed from social history,

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gender studies, institutional history and cultural history. By this I hope to avoid several traps: in analyzing ego-documents, such as letters, diaries and autobiographies, I will look at how the Wacs experienced their military service themselves. By this, however, I do not mean to imply that these documents are “innocent” texts that “reflect” a person’s development to a certain subjective position.194 Rather, this process of self-observation also serves as a “technology of the self” where the very act of writing is a practice of subjectivation. Author(s) of diaries, letters or notebooks often have other readers than themselves in mind, whether it is written with the intent to publish them as part of an autobiographical text or ‘merely’ to shape an other person’s view about the author.195 An institutional historiography, to name a different example, has to deal with the fact that the sources, governmental records in this case, usually have been produced by the institutions themselves. Hence, historiography that exclusively relies on this class of sources has a tendency to reproduce an “institutional blindness” or reflect a legalistic and often tilted view that is concerned primarily with the survival of the institution. Finally, a purely discourse-oriented approach would run the risk of neglecting the material factors and praxeological aspects of “doing gender” that assist in constructing the woman|soldier. As Karen Hagemann has emphasized, it is crucial to systematically differentiate between the different levels of analysis.196 The method pursued here 194

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Schulze, Winfried. Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte, Bd. 2. Berlin: Akademie, 1996. Dinges, Martin. “Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterordnung: Bilanz und Perspektiven”, Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte, 345-64. Dinges, Martin. “Soldatenkörper in der Frühen Neuzeit - Erfahrungen mit einem unzureichend geschützten, formierten und verletzten Körper in Selbstzeugnissen.” Körper-Geschichten. Ed. Richard van Dülmen. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1996. 71-98. Ulrich, Bernd. Die Augenzeugen. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit 1914-1933. Essen: Klartext, 1997. Porter, Roy. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. London, New York: Routledge, 1997, 21-22. Nead, Lynda. “Mapping the Self: Gender, Space and Modernity in Mid-Victorian London.” Porter, Rewriting the Self, 167-185. Regarding the Foucauldian “technologies of the self” see Neubauer, John. Cultural History after Foucault. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999, 43-44. Hagemann names the following levels of analysis: Firstly images, norms and representations, secondly collective economic, cultural and social practices and thirdly, the subject’s individual experiences and perceptions. She stressed that these levels constantly interact with and depend on each other. Categories such as experience, I would add, are also problematic and difficult to grasp. Hagemann, Karen. “Venus und Mars: Reflektionen zu einer Geschlechtergeschichte von Militär und Krieg.” Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte, 1348, 32.

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will attempt to analytically differentiate between the different levels, but at the same time emphasize their being steeped in formations of power|knowledge. The model of the dispositif, I argue, offers analytical discrimination, while its network-like structure provides the nodal points to grasp the interrelated elements and categories.

1.4 Literature Barton C. Hacker’s influential article “Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance” was one of the first pieces of scholarship that analyzed military institutions from a gendered perspective.197 Hacker showed the vital role women played in European armies’ camps and trains from the fourteenth until well into the nineteenth centuries. He also accounts for the absence of women from military history. When the discipline of military history emerged during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the militarization of the support systems had been completed and women performing noncombatant tasks with Western armies had vanished. Consequently, female camp followers had by the time of WWI disappeared from memory or were recalled only as prostitutes. While military nursing grew increasingly professional, the limited utilization of women’s auxiliary corps in the twentieth century could appear as completely novel. Until very recently, major publications on the history of war and on military history contained few references toward gender or women. In cases where they have, gender references constitute interesting side notes but almost never a category of historical analysis in their own right. Index entries on gender invariably concerned women – men did not seem to have a gender.198 Until recently, military historians have dealt with the concepts of race and class but have rarely integrated the category of gender in their narratives. The analysis of the important interface between gender and the military has long remained a lacuna, contributing to ideological notions of women|soldiers as invisible, othered or victims.

197 198

Hacker, Women and Military Institutions. Joshua Goldstein has counted gender-related index entries in several political science and history works on war and names numerous examples of studies in which the category is entirely absent. Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 34-35.

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Historical Perspectives on the Military Since this study emerges from a German language research community, I will provide an overview over the literature in this field. The existence of several excellent summaries allows me to be very brief.199 The stereotypical dictum ‘men make war, women make peace,’ which had been purported by the women’s peace movement as well as by traditional military history in Germany, resulted in a double absence of women and gender from military history for the better part of the twentieth century.200 German military history emerged from the older “history of war” that was purely applicatory. Historians like Hans Delbrück, who had attempted to introduce the historical method of Ranke and Droysen, failed in the universities as well as in the military.201 Only in the 1950s did military history begin to make use of the methodological concepts that were then predominant at universities, institutional

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Hagemann, Venus und Mars. Hagemann, Karen. “Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterverhältnisse. Untersuchungen, Überlegungen und Fragen zur Militärgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit.” Klio in Uniform? Probleme und Perspektiven einer modernen Militärgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Ralf Pröve. Köln: Böhlau, 1997, 35-88. Hämmerle, Christa. “Von den Geschlechtern der Kriege und des Militärs. Forschungseinblicke und Bemerkungen zu einer neuen Debatte.” Kühne and Ziemann, Was ist Militärgeschichte?, 229-62. The saying “Men make war, women make peace” however is not limited to the Germanspeaking realm. It goes back to William Ladd (1778-1841), one of the leaders of the American Peace Society. DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980, 45. See also Cooper, Helen M., Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier. Eds. Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, 20. Of 233 German-speaking full-length studies on military history published after 1970, only a single one contains a specific reference to gender or women. Stüssi-Lauterburg, Jürg, and Rosy Gysler-Schöni. Helvetias Töchter: Frauen in der Schweizer Militärgeschichte von der Entstehung der Eidgenossenschaft bis zur Gründung des Frauenhilfsdienstes, 1291-1939. Frauenfeld: Huber, 1989. The application of the historical method to the theory of war goes back to Carl von Clausewitz whose approach differed considerably from that of his contemporaries. As Stig Förster argues, the Clausewitzian approach was imported only in the late sixties by the British “War-and-Society school”. Förster, Stig. “Vom Kriege’: Überlegungen zu einer modernen Militärgeschichte”, Kühne and Ziemann, Was ist Militärgeschichte?, 273, 276. Strachan, Hew. European Armies and the Conduct of War. London, Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1983, 6. Also on the history of German military historiography Wette, Wolfram. “Militärgeschichte zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik.”, Kühne and Ziemann, Was ist Militärgeschichte?, 49-72; Deist, Wilhelm. “Hans Delbrück. Militärhistoriker und Publizist.” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 57 (1998): 371-384.

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history and political history.202 When in the 1970s social history began influencing military history, as well as German historiography in general, it was rarely applied to the men and women who were doing the fighting.203 This perspective was imported from abroad, particularly from Britain, where soldiers’ lives in the trenches of the First World War came into focus in the late 1970s.204 With the “home front,” women’s lives in wartime were paid attention to for the first time. The German “history of everyday life” situated itself in opposition to social history as it was being taught at universities, but also to the history of ideas and institutions. It was also, but not exclusively, pursued by a genuine movement that was widely carried out by non-professional, regional historians (Geschichtswerkstätten).205 For military historiography’s new

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Military history was conducted at two institutions of the Bundeswehr, the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (MGFA) and the Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut. See Wette, Militärgeschichte. Wohlfeil, Rainer. “Militärgeschichte. Zu Geschichte und Problemen einer Disziplin der Geschichtswissenschaft (1952-1967).” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 52 (1993): 323-344. For Wohlfeil’s influential definition of military history as “history of the armed force as an institutional factor of social life within the state” see Wohlfeil, Rainer. “Wehr-, Kriegs- oder Militärgeschichte?” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1 (1967): 21-29. The most prominent examples of these social and economic histories of World War I are Feldman, Gerald D. Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Kocka, Jürgen. Klassengesellschaft im Krieg. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914-1918. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973. Ellis, John. Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Leed, Eric J. No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Ashworth, Tony. Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Begalke, Sonja, Hans-Georg Bergann, and Stephanie Billib. Vernichtungskrieg an der Heimatfront. Analysen und Dokumente aus Hannover. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1998. Mechler, Wolf-Dieter. Kriegsalltag an der “Heimatfront”. Das Sondergericht Hannover im Einsatz gegen “Rundfunkverbrecher” “Schwarzschlachter” “Volksschädlinge” und andere “Straftäter,” 1939 bis 1945. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1997. Prieur, Jutta. Heimatfront Wesel 1939-1945. Frauen und Männer erinnern sich an den Krieg in ihrer Stadt. Wesel: Selbstverlag des Stadtarchivs Wesel, 1994. Roerkohl, Anne. Hungerblockade und Heimatfront. Die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung in Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1991. Werkstattgruppe der Frauen für Frieden/Heilbronn. Heimatfront: Wir überlebten, Frauen berichten. Stuttgart: H.D. Heinz, 1985. Schulze, Winfried. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945. München: Oldenbourg, 1989. See also the excellent and concise assessment by Alf Lüdtke. Lüdtke, Alf. Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1989. Lüdtke, Alf, Alltagsgeschichte: The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. For methodological problems with the sources see Ulrich, Bernd. “Militärgeschichte

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foci on everyday practices, social class and experience, analyses of soldiers’ letters (Feldpostbriefe) became central. Nevertheless most of these studies were concerned with “the ordinary man” whose gender was not an issue.206 With few exceptions, women’s roles in military institutions were also neglected.207 Since 1990 however, a growing number of social and cultural historians of war and the military is making use of the methodologies of neighboring disciplines such as sociology and cultural anthropology.208 Cultural historical approaches to overcome the division between practices and discourse (or structures and actors) have begun to spur a refined concept of experience and a more integrated historiography of war.209 After warfare and later the military as a social context, the soldier as a gendered being came into the focus of a new military history, a “differenti-

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von unten. Anmerkungen zu ihren Ursprüngen, Quellen und Perspektiven im 20. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 473-503. Wette, Wolfram. “Militärgeschichte von unten. Die Perspektive des ‘kleinen Mannes’.” Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten. Ed. Wolfram Wette. München: Piper, 1992. 9-47. Vogel, Detlef, and Wolfram Wette. Andere Helme -- Andere Menschen? Heimaterfahrung und Frontalltag im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Ein Internationaler Vergleich. Essen: Klartext, 1995. See also Hämmerle’s critical overview Hämmerle, Von den Geschlechtern, 256-57. Hämmerle, Christa. “‘...wirf ihnen alles hin und schau dass Du fort kommst.’ Die Feldpost eines Paares in der Geschlechter(un)ordnung des Ersten Weltkrieges.” Historische Anthropologie. Kultur – Gesellschaft - Alltag. 6.3 (1998): 431-458, 431-37. Exceptions include Hurni, Johanna et al. Frauen in den Streitkräften [Papers of the International Symposium in Wolfsberg, October 15 to 17, 1990.] Brugg: Verl. Effinger Hof, 1992. Blitzmädchen: Die Geschichte der Helferinnen der deutschen Wehrmacht im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Koblenz, Bonn: Wehr und Wissen, 1979. Seidler, Franz Wilhelm. Frauen zu den Waffen? Marketenderinnen, Helferinnen, Soldatinnen. Koblenz, Bonn: Wehr und Wissen, 1978. Daniel, Ute. “‘Kultur’ und ‘Gesellschaft’. Überlegungen zum Gegenstandsberich der Sozialgeschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 69-99. Sarasin, Philipp. “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper. Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte.” Kulturgeschichte heute. Eds. Eds. Wolfgang Hartwig and Hans Ulrich Wehler. Göttingen: 131-64. GilcherHoltey, Ingrid. “Kulturelle und symbolische Praktiken. Das Unternehmen Pierre Bourdieu.” Kulturgeschichte heute. Eds. Wolfgang Hartwig and Hans Ulrich Wehler. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996. 111-130. The Sonderforschungsbereich “Kriegserfahrungen – Krieg und Gesellschaft in der Neuzeit” is a case point. See further Frevert, Ute. “Gesellschaft und Militär im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Sozial-, kultur- und geschlechtergeschichtliche Annäherungen.” Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Ute Frevert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997. 7-16. Latzel, Klaus. “Vom Kriegserlebnis zur Kriegserfahrung. Theoretische und methodische Überlegungen zur erfahrungsgeschichtlichen Untersuchung von Feldpostbriefen.” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen. 56 (1997): 1-30. Kosellek, Reinhart. “Der Einfluß der beiden Weltkriege auf das soziale Bewusstsein.” Wette, Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes, 324-343.

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ated history of soldiers killing and being killed, patriotic and resistant, volunteering and drafted inside and outside the barracks.”210 The soldiers’ masculinities are intricately connected with cultural concepts of femininity as well as with war and violence, and their experiences are embedded in a context of hegemonic cultures of memory.211 A conference on war, military and gender convened by the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung of the TU Berlin (IZFG) in conjunction with the Arbeitskreis für Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit (AMG) in November 1997 brought together historians of the heretofore isolated fields of gender history and military history. While women had been largely absent from traditional military history, feminist women’s historians were also reluctant to deal with the military.212 Historical studies emerging from peace and conflict studies reproduced the double absence of women as historical actors in armed conflicts as well as scholars of military institutions. The transition from women’s history to historical gender studies, which originated in the Anglo-American sphere, occurred in Germany only with considerable delay.213 It was not before 1990 that European scholarship 210 211

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Burghartz, Susanna and Christa Hämmerle. “Soldaten”. L’Homme. 12.1 (2001): 7-10. In this issue Sandra Maß reads the male body in the older context of the relation of the social body and women’s bodies. For a more contemporary perspective see Christine Eifler’s comparison the integration of women soldiers in Russia and the U.S. where she analyzes the different symbolic practices that serve to culturally negotiate women’s positions in the armed forces. Maß, Sandra. “Das Trauma des weißen Mannes. Afrikanische Kolonialsoldaten in propagandistischen Texten, 1914-1923.” L’Homme. 12.1 (2001): 11-33. Eifler, Bewaffnet. See also the critical assessments by Opitz, Von Frauen, 32 and Hagemann, Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterverhältnisse, 37. One of the first conferences on war, military and gender in Germany was convened by the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung of the TU Berlin (IZFG) in conjunction with the Arbeitskreis für Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit (AMG) in November 1997. It brought together historians of heretofore isolated fields of gender history and military history. See reports by Hämmerle, Christa. “Militärgeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte? Von den Chancen einer Annäherung.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 9 (1998): 124-135. Planert, Ute. “Militärgeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte. Ein Colloquium an der TU Berlin.” L’Homme 9.2 (1998): 313316. All conference papers can be found in Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte, with the exception of Schulte, Regina. Die verkehrte Welt des Krieges. Studien zu Geschlecht, Religion und Tod. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1998. Offen, Karen M. et al. Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Hausen, Karin, and Heide Wunder. Frauengeschichte-Geschlechtergeschichte. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1992. Cole, Helena, Jane Caplan, Hanna Schissler. The History of Women in Germany from Medieval Times to the Present: Bibliography of English-Language Publications. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute. 1990. One of

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picked up Barton Hacker’s questions and firmly established gender as an analytical category of military history.214 Gender oriented and cultural perspectives in military histories of the early modern period and the 19th century have also illuminated how the interdependent epistemological complexes nation and military produce meaning.215 Military institutions were ideally suited to

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the earlist and most influential studies focusing on women’s experiences during wartime: Daniel, Ute. Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft. Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989. See also Daniel, Ute. The War From Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War. Oxford, New York: Berg, 1997. Higonnet, Margaret Randolph et al., eds. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. For an overview up to 1992 see Opitz, Von Frauen. A more recent overview by Christa Hämmerle shows that the field gender oriented, cultural perspectives on the military and war has grown remarkably: Hämmerle, Von den Geschlechtern der Kriege. See also Hagemann, Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterverhältnisse; Burschel, Peter. Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Sozialgeschichtliche Studien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994; Pröve, Stehendes Heer; Wilson, German Women. Burschel, Pröve and Wilson emphasize social and economic reasons for the attempt to exclude women from support functions over military reasons that have been stressed by Hacker. François, Etienne, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vogel. Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995. Frevert, Militär und Gesellschaft. Hagemann, Mannlicher Muth. Hagemann, A Valorous “Volk” Family. Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte. Hagemann, Karen, and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum. Eds. Heimat-Front: Militär und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 2002. Geyer, Michael. “Eine Kriegsgeschichte, die vom Tod spricht.” Physische Gewalt. Studien zur Geschichte der Neuzeit. Eds. Thomas Lindenberger, Thomas and Alf Lüdtke. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. 136161. The history of universal conscription particularly illustrates the interdependence of nation and military: Opitz, Eckardt, and Frank S. Rödiger. Allgemeine Wehrpflicht. Geschichte, Probleme, Perspektiven. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994; Ulrich, Bernd, Jakob Vogel, and Benjamin Ziemann. Untertan in Uniform. Militär und Militarismus im Kaiserreich 1871-1914: Quellen und Dokumente. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001. Vogel, Jakob. Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der “Nation in Waffen” in Deutschland und Frankreich, 18711914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Frevert, Ute. “Soldaten, Staatsbürger. Überlegungen zur historischen Konstruktion von Männlichkeit.” Männergeschichte, Geschlechtergeschichte. Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne. Ed. Thomas Kühne, Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1996. 69-87. Förster, Stig. “Militär und staatsbürgerliche Partizipation. Die Allgemeine Wehrpflicht im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871-1914.” Die Wehrpflicht. Entstehung, Erscheinungsformen und politisch-militärische Wirkung. Ed. Roland G. Foerster. München: Oldenbourg, 1994, 55-70. On the 19th century: Dülffer, Jost. Kriegsbereitschaft und Friedensordnung in Deutschland 1800-1814. Münster: Lit, 1994. Frevert, Militär und Gesellschaft. Langewiesche, Dieter. “Militärgeschichte heute.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22.4 (1996).

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analyze various concepts of masculinities in connection with nation and violence and it was from here that several “men studies” emerged.216 Sexual and sexualized violence during war is an aspect of the relations between gender, nation, military and war that cannot be discussed in this study, despite its ubiquity and centrality for the construction of gender. While the theme of women as victims of rape and other forms of sexualized violence has been discussed since the early days of women’s studies, other aspects such as sexual violence against men or the structural and systematic quality of sexual violence against women have been studied only recently.217 Rape in

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Hagemann and Pröve, Landsknechte, 16. Kühne, Thomas. “Kameradschaft - “Das Beste im Leben des Mannes. “Die deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkriegs in erfahrungsund geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 504-29. Kühne, Thomas. “Der Soldat,” Frevert, Ute, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds. Der Mensch des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1999, 344-71. Kühne, Thomas. “Imaginierte Weiblichkeit und Kriegskameradschaft.” Heimat - Front. Militär, Gewalt und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie SchülerSpringorum. Frankfurt/Main: Berg, 2002. 237-57. Frevert, Männer (T)Räume. Frevert, Ute. Die kasernierte Nation. Roper, Michael, and John Tosh. “Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity.” Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. Eds. Michael Roper and John Tosh. London, New York: Routledge, 1991. 1-24. Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh. Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. Tosh, John. “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender.” Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History. Ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 41-58. Horne, John. “Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850-1950.” Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History. Eds. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 22-40. Ziemann, Benjamin. Front und Heimat. Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern 1914-1923. Essen: Klartext, 1997. Kühne, Thomas. “‘Aus diesem Krieg werden nicht nur harte Männer heimkehren.’ Kriegskameradschaft und Männlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert.” Männergeschichte, Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne. Ed. Thomas Kühne. Frankfurt/Main., New York: Campus, 1996. 174-92. Seifert, Ruth. “Militär und Ordnung der Geschlechter. Vier Thesen zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit im Militär.” Ordnung zwischen Gewaltproduktion und Friedensstiftung. Ed. Klaus D. Wolf. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1993. 213-30. See the excellent overview by Schwensen, Ingwer, Sexuelle Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten. Auswahlbibliographie für die Erscheinungsjahre 2002 bis 2002, Mittelweg 36 18.1. (2009): 67–90. Mühlhäuser, Regina, and Ingwer Schwensen. “Sexuelle Gewalt in Kriegen. Auswahlbibliographie.” Mittelweg 36 10.5 (2001): 21-32. Krieg und Geschlecht. Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg und Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern. Eds. Insa Eschebach and Regina Mühlhäuser. Berlin: Metropol, 2008. Hey, Barbara, Cécile Huber, and Karin Maria Schmidlechner. Krieg, Geschlecht und Gewalt. Graz: Leykam, 1999. On military wives’ and women’s alleged ‘‘loose morals’’: Opitz, Claudia. “Von Frauen im Krieg zum Krieg gegen

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war serves a strategic function. Enemy women’s bodies are de-individualized and symbolically identified with the enemy nation (Volkskörper) so that the rape of women is seen as act of humiliation of men by men.218 The women thus suffer from a ‘double objectification’.219 Studies on Gender and the Military Since the second half of the 1980s, the field of women’s military studies in the United States has broadened considerably and has been growing rapidly since Barton Hacker’s influential article. Additionally, in the U.S. and Great Britain debates about women and the military have also had political implications for the all-volunteer armies, while in Germany until 2001 these issues were largely academic or hypothetical.220 Consequently, American scholars are

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Frauen. Gewalt und Geschlechterbeziehungen aus historischer Sicht.” L’Homme 31 (1992): 31-44, 39. On WWII: Reif, Sieglinde. “Das “Recht des Siegers.” Vergewaltigungen in München 1945.” Zwischen den Fronten. Münchner Frauen in Krieg und Frieden, 1900-1950. Eds. Sybille Krafft and Christina Böck. München: Buchendorfer, 1995. 360-71. Beck, Birgit. “Vergewaltigungen von Frauen als Kriegsstrategien im Zweiten Weltkrieg.” Gewalt im Krieg. Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in Kriegen des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Ed. Andreas Gestrich. Münster: Jahrbuch für historische Friedensforschung, 1996. 34-50. Beck, Birgit. Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten 19931945. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004. Mühlhäuser, Regina. Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941 - 1945. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010. On WW I: Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Christine Eifler. “Nachkrieg und weibliche Verletzbarkeit. Zur Rolle von Kriegen für die Konstruktion von Geschlecht.” Soziale Konstruktionen - Militär und Geschlechterverhältnis. Eds. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999. 155-86. Ruth Seifert has argued convincingly that women as civilians and females are principally, not just in deplorable but isolated cases “on the front”; Seifert, Gender, Nation und Militär. Seifert, Ruth. “Die Zweite Front. Zur Logik der sexuellen Gewalt in Kriegen.”S+F Vierteljahresschrift für Sicherheit und Frieden 11 (1993): 66-71. See also Eifler, Nachkrieg und weibliche Verletzbarkeit. Opitz, Von Frauen, 40. Mühlhäuser, Regina. “Vergewaltigungen in Deutschland 1945. Nationaler Opferdiskurs und Individuelles Erinnern betroffener Frauen.” Nachkrieg in Deutschland. Ed. Klaus Naumann. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001. 384408. Seifert, Ruth. “Der weibliche Körper als Symbol und Zeichen. Geschlechtsspezifische Gewalt und die kulturelle Konstruktion des Krieges”, Gestrich, Gewalt im Krieg, 13-33. Yuval-Davis, Nira: “Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterverhältnisse.” Soziale Konstruktionen - Militär und Geschlechterverhältnis. Eds. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999. 18-43. Seifert, Gender, Nation und Militär. For an overview see Budge, Alice, and Pam Didur. “Women and War: A Selected Bibliography.” Mosaic 23.3 (1990): 151-73. Pierson, Ruth Roach. “Beautiful Soul or Just Warrior:

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generally very aware of current public policy debates over the role of women in the military for which their work often provides the historical context. Meanwhile, the field has broadened and matured. While D’Ann Campbell in her 1987 literature report could cover virtually all material published in English on the subject of women in uniform during the World War II era in five pages. Vicki Friedl’s comprehensive book-length bibliographie raisonnée, published in 1996, summed up the impressive body of research and literature that had grown considerably on the role of women within the U.S. military which began questioning a host of essentialist assumptions to challenge the historical as well as historiographical invisibility of military women.221 Not coincidentally, Linda Grant De Pauw began Battle Cries and Lullabies, her global history of women in war with the question ‘What is a woman?’222 Women as soldiers, victims, warriors, wives and mothers, as sex workers, nurses, pilots, spies, and supporters have all been the focus of her study. Jeanne Holm’s, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution and Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Women and War deal with the historic contributions women have made to American military forces.223 Cynthia Enloe has shown that not only as soldiers are women subject to militarization.224 The military’s gender re-

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Gender and War.” Gender & History 1 (1989): 77-86. On January 11, 2000 the Court of Justice of the European Communities ruled that Germany’s blanket exclusion of women from the armed services contravened the principle of gender equality in the workplace (Directive 76/207/EEC). See Case C-285/98, Tanja Kreil v Bundesrepublik Deutschland [2000] ECRI-0069]. Beginning in 2001, the Bundeswehr opened virtually all positions to women. Friedl, Women. De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies. Holm, Women in the Military. Elshtain, Women and War. Campbell, D’Ann. Women at War With America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Campbell’s provides an overview of all American women in uniform during WWII. For an overview see also Willenz, June A. Women Veterans: America’s Forgotten Heroines. New York: Continuum, 1983. Hartmann, Susan. “Women in the Military Service.” Clio Was a Woman. Eds. Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia Cardwell Purdy. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980. 195-205. Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. See also Enloe, Beyond Steve Canyon. Enloe, Die Konstruktion. Enloe, Cynthia. “The Gendered Gulf.” Collateral Damage: The ‘New World Order’ at Home and Abroad. Ed. Cynthia Peters. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992. 93-110. Enloe, Cynthia. “Beyond ‘Rambo’: Women and the Varieties of Militarized Masculinity.” Women and the Military System. Ed. Eva Isacsson. New York: Harvester, 1988. 71-93.

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gime has been studied by looking at military families as well as by analyzing sexual harassment in historical perspective.225 A study that attempts to look at how gender is constructed, rather than taking gender categories as fixed and predetermined, cannot fail to encompass the category of sexuality as well. The point is not, however, to describe certain practices, but to analyze where some of the building blocks of a person’s gender are taken from. An historiography of sexuality, particularly of women’s sexuality, has rarely dealt with the military.226 There are, however, extremely valuable studies without which a gender history of a military institution could not be written. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman surveyed women’s sexuality from colonial to contemporary times.227 George Chauncey’s and John D’Emilio’s works on gay male sexuality are also extremely valuable for research on the military because they have analyzed the changing societal and medical conceptions of homosexuality, which the Army implemented and later adapted to women.228 In their groundbreaking history

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Weinstein, Laurie, and Christie C. White, eds. Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997. Stein, Laura W. Sexual Harassment in America: A Documentary History. Primary Documents in American History and Contemporary Issues. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Sadler, Georgia Clark. “Women in Combat: The U.S. Military and the Impact of the Persian Gulf War.” Weinstein and White, Wives & Warriors, 79-98. On the absence of lesbians see Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “Historical Denial of Lesbianism.” Radical History Review 20 (1979): 60-65. Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “Women Alone Stir My Imagination.” Signs 4 (1979): 718-39. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5 (1980): 631-60. Herbert’s Camouflage is an account of the U.S. military gender regime and the hostile environment it presents for women of any sexual orientation. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. See also McLaren, Angus. Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. For a critical discussion of the work of D’Emilio and Freedman see Ducille, Ann. “Othered Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the The History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the The History of Sexuality 1.1 (1990): 102-127, 103. Hidden from History is an overview of same gender sexuality from antiquity until the post WWII era. Vicinus, Martha, George Chauncey, and Martin B. Duberman. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, 1989. Chauncey, George. “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female Deviance.”, Peiss and Simmons, Passion and Power, 87-117. D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Lillian Faderman has analyzed lesbian love in 20th century America and earlier centuries: Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New

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of sexuality, which they understand as a history of social relations, Kathy Peiss, Christina Simmons and Robert Padgug have traced the emergence of modern sexuality from the late-18th to the late-20th centuries.229 The emergence of a modern lesbian identity and the formation of lesbian communities have been analyzed by, among other scholars, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline Davis. Their class-conscious history of a lesbian community in Buffalo, New York provides an interesting backdrop and comparison to women’s homoerotic and homosocial experiences in the WAC.230 Finally, studies on gay and lesbian soldiers are few and far between, but they do exist. Among the growing body of oral histories, Alan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire is the first to name. Bérubé has conducted an astonishing number of interviews and produced a study that while does not always conform to the most rigid scholarly standards nevertheless remains unsurpassed in its scope. It is an invaluable resource for further studies.231 A growing body of literature analyzes the lesbians experience in post WWII and contemporary

229

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York: Morrow, 1981. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. Between Men—Between Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Peiss, Simmons, and Padgug, Passion and Power. See also Kennedy, Kathleen, and Sharon R. Ullman, eds. Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993. See also Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. Eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey. Vol. New York: New American Library, 1989. 281-93. Penn, Donna. “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America.” Gender & History 3.2 (1991): 190-203. Rupp, Leila J. “Imagine My Surprise: Women’s Relationships in the 20th Century.” Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, Hidden From History, 395-410. Rupp, Leila J. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bérubé, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Free Press, 1990. Other oral histories and documentaries include: Adair, Nancy, and Casey Adair. Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco : New Glide Publications, 1978. Bullough, Vern L. Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002. Greta Schiller (director). Before Stonewall--the Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community. 1986. Marcus, Eric. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990. An Oral History. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Phelps, Johnnie, and Miriam Ben-Shalom. “Lesbian Soldiers Tell Their Stories.” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 8.3 (1990): 38-53. The latter account is seriously flawed. See chapter 6.1.

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armed forces as part of a larger framework of the victimization of women’s sexuality.232 By way of comparison, it is also worth looking at studies of women’s auxiliaries and women’s services in other countries.233 Every nation that participated in the Second World War utilized women in non-combat positions. The one notable exception is the Soviet Union, where women fought in various combat roles including the Air Force. The work of Kazimiera J. Cottam and Reina Pennington is of particular interest in this context.234

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Rimmerman, Craig A. Gay Rights, Military Wrongs: Political Perspectives on Lesbians and Gays in the Military. New York: Garland Pub., 1996. Scott, Wilbur J., and Sandra Carson Stanley. Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts. Social Problems and Social Issues. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994. On women’s WWII experience in the (Canadian) military as a state institution see Pierson, Ruth Roach. They’re Still Women After All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood. The Canadian Social History Series. Toronto, ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. See also Pierson, Ruth Roach. “Did Your Mother Wear Army Boots? Feminist Theory and Women’s Relation to War, Peace and Revolution.” Images of Women in Peace and War. Eds. Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden, and Shirley Ardener. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987. For Europe, Canada, Australia: Weitz, Margaret Collins. Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945. New York: J. Wiley, 1995. Bowley, Patricia, and Kris Wright. “Canadian Enlisted Women: Gender Issues in the Canadian Armed Forces Before and After 1945.” Minerva 15.1 (1997): 9-26. Bruce, Jean. Back the Attack! Canadian Women during the Second World War, at Home and Abroad. Toronto, ON: Macmillan of Canada, 1985. Bucher, Greta. “Women in World War II.” World War II in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, With General Sources: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Eds. Loyd E. Lee and Robin D. S. Higham. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 36782. Gossage, Carolyn. Greatcoats and Glamour Boots: Canadian Women at War (1939-1945). Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 1991. Latta, Ruth. The Memory of All That: Canadian Women Remember World War II. Burnstown, ON: General Store Pub. House, 1992. Popham, Hugh. F.A.N.Y.: The Story of the Women’s Transport Service, 1907-1984. London: Leo Cooper, 1984. Render, Shirley. No Place for a Lady: The Story of Canadian Women Pilots, 1928-1992. Winnipeg, MB: Portage & Main Press, 1992. Schwartz, Paula. “Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France.” Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, 141-53. Stone, Tessa. “Creating a (Gendered?) Military Identity: The Women’s Auxiliary Airforce in Great Britain in the Second World War.” Women’s History Review 8.4 (1999): 605-20. Terry, Roy. Women in Khaki: The Story of the British Woman Soldier. London: Columbus Books, 1988. Thomson, Joyce A. The WAAAF in Wartime Australia. Carlton, Vic., Portland, OR: Melbourne University Press, 1991. Cottam, Kazimiera J. In the Sky Above the Front: A Collection of Memoirs of Soviet Airwomen Participants in the Great Patriotic War. Manhattan, KS: MA/AH Pub, 1984. Cottam, Kazimiera J. “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Ground/Air Defense Forces.” Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Tova Yedlin. New York: Praeger, 1980. 115-27. Cottam, Kazimiera J. “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Ground Forces and the

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Navy.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 3.4 (1980): 345-57. Cottam, Kazimiera J. “Soviet Women Soldiers in World War II: Three Biographical Sketches.” Minerva 18.3-4 (2001): 16-37. Cottam, Kazimiera J. “Soviet Womenin Combat in World War II: The Rear Services, Resistance Behind Enemy Lines, and Military Political Workers.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 5.4 (1982): 363-78. Cottam, Kazimiera J. Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II. New York, Ottawa, ON: Legas, 1997. Cottam, Kazimiera J. Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers. Nepean, ON: New Military Publishing, 1998. Cottam, Kazimiera J., and Galina Markova. Soviet Airwomen in Combat in World War II. Manhattan, KS: Military Affairs/Aerospace Historian, 1983. Cottam, Kazimiera J., Nikolai Vissarionovich Masolov, and Nikolai Vissarionovich Masolov. Defending Leningrad: Women behind Enemy Lines. Nepean, ON: New Military Pub, 1998. Erickson, John. “Soviet Women at War.” World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies: World War II and the Soviet People. John Gordon Garrard, et al. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 50-76. Goldman, Nancy Loring. “Russia: Revolution and War.” Female Soldiers-Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Nancy L. Goldman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. 61-84. Mathers, Jennifer G. “Women in the Russian Armed Forces: A Marriage of Convenience?” Minerva 18.3-4 (2000): 129-41. Noggle, Anne. A Dance With Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994. Pennington, Reina. Amazons to Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Pennington, Reina. “Do Not Speak of the Services You Rendered”: Women Veterans of Aviation in the Soviet Union.” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9.1 (1996): 120-51. Pennington, Reina. “Offensive Women: Women in Combat in the Red Army.” Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945. Eds. Paul Addison and Angus Calder. London: Pimlico Press, 1997. 249-62. Pennington, Reina. “Women and Military Aviation in the Second World War: A Comparative Study of the USA and USSR, 1941-1945.” Ph.D. Thesis. University of South Carolina, 2000. Pennington, Reina, and John Erickson. Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat. Modern War Studies. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Smirnova-Medvedeva, Zoya Matveyevna, and Kazimiera Janina Cottam. On the Road to Stalingrad: Memoirs of a Woman Machine Gunner. Nepean, ON: New Military Pub, 1997. Erickson, John. “Night Witches, Snipers and Laundresses.” History Today 40 (1990): 29-35. Herspring, Dale. “Women in the Russian Military: A Reluctant Marriage.”Minerva 15.2 (1997): 42-59. Julnes-Dehner, Noel. “Under Fire: Soviet Women Combat Veterans.” Minerva 15.2 (1997): 1-12. Myles, Bruce. Night Witches: The Untold Story of Soviet Women in Combat. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1981. Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg. Women in Russia and the Soviet Union: An Annotated Bibliography. New York, Toronto, ON: G. K. Hall, 1993. Rzhevskaia, Elena. “Roads and Days: The Memoirs of a Red Army Translator.” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 14.1 (2001): 53-106. Sartorti, Rosalinde. “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints.” Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia. Ed. Richard Stites. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. 182-86. Smith, Gregory Malloy. “The Impact of World War II on Women, Family Life, and Mores in Moscow, 1941-1945.” Ph.D. Thesis. Stanford University, 1989. Zaloga, Steven J., Zaloga, Steven J. “Soviet Air Defense Radar in the Second World War.”Journal of Soviet Military Studies 2.3 (1988): 104-16. Zhigulenko, Evgenia. “Those Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines.” Soviet Life. May (1990): 12-15.

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Research on the WAAC and the WAC The classic and most comprehensive study on the WAAC and the WAC is Mattie E. Treadwell’s The Women’s Army Corps, published in 1954. Because this is an official history, its primary purpose was more to defend women’s military service and create a blueprint for further utilization of women in the Army than to analyze gendered and racialized constructions of the woman|soldier. The author served as assistant to the Director of the WAC and in other assignments and attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Although Treadwell’s book is an incredible resource, it is restricted to telling the “official version.” Treadwell’s explicit goal was to tell the success story of the integration of women in the WAAC and the WAC and to provide a blueprint for the future utilization of women in the military.235 Another comprehensive history of military women is Jeanne Holm’s Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.236 Holm, who was at the time the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in the U.S. military, covers the history of women in the armed forces from the nineteenth century to the battles of the combat exclusion policies during the second Gulf War. Her book is extremely valuable in providing the context in which the WAC and other women’s services were created and how they expanded women’s roles. Another volume that Jeanne Holm and Judith Bellafaire have edited covers the women’s services and nurse corps of the Army, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard in World War II. This richly illustrated book is also very useful in providing context and comparison between the women’s services.237

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Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps. The second volume on the WAC published by the U.S. Army Center of Military History is Morden, Bettie J. ’The Women’s Army Corps, 19451978. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1990. For a short history of the WAC see Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps. Apart from these general accounts there are also several Army publications on specific commands or units. Kovach, Karen. Breaking Codes, Breaking Barriers: The WACs of the Signal Security Agency, World War II. Fort Belvoir, VA: History Office, Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, 2001. Risch, Erna. A Wardrobe for the Women of the Army. Springfield, VA: Historical Section, General Administrative Services Division, Office of the Quartermaster General, 1945. Risch, Erna. Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775-1939. Washington, DC: GPO, 1962. Holm, Women in the Military. Holm, Jeanne, ed. In Defense of a Nation: Servicewomen in WWII. Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1998. See also Alsmeyer, Marie Bennett. “Those Unseen, Unheard Arkansas

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The most important work for this study is Leisa D. Meyer’s Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.238 Meyer analyzed the WAC’s often contradictory policies, practices, and discourses on the women’s sexual agency from a point of view that integrates the categories race, sexuality, and class in her account of gendered power relations in the Army. The book is meticulously researched and Meyer has uncovered documents that neither the official Army histories nor the ego-documents on or by gay and lesbian service members had taken into account. Specifically dealing with African American and Japanese Wacs, respectively, are Brenda Moore’s two studies To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race and Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II. Martha Putney’s When the Nation was in Need is also a very useful, nonautobiographical work on African American Wacs.239 This study builds on the groundwork Leisa Meyer has laid with her critical study focusing on sexuality and power in the WAC, but at the same time integrates the theoretical and methodological perspectives and findings of international, non-U.S. scholars on gender and the military. By employing a cultural studies approach and including the experiences of African American, Japanese Americans and Puerto Ricans Wacs, I emphasize the interconnectedness of the “mediated categories” of race, gender, sexuality, and class. In contrast to a purely discourse-oriented approach, this study also stresses the praxeological aspects of the WAC’s history. The symbolic interactions of

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Women: WAC, WAVES, and Women Marines of World War II.” Minerva 12.2 (1994): 1533. Meyer, Leisa D. Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Meyer, Leisa D. “Creating GI Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.” Feminist Studies 18.3 (1992): 581-601. “The Lesbian Threat within the WWII WAC.” Women & War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent. Ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski. New York: Garland, 1999. 186-211. Humphrey, Mary Ann. My Country, My Right to Serve: Experiences of Gay Men and Women in the Military, World War II to the Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Moore, Brenda L. Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Moore, Brenda L. To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACS Stationed Overseas during World War II. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Putney, Martha S. When the Nation Was in Need: Blacks in ’The Women’s Army Corps during World War II. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Newman, Debra L. “The Propaganda and the Truth: Black Women and World War II.”Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 4.4 (1986): 72-92.

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Wacs, the military organization, civilian society, politics, the media and the public occur not only through language, but also through practices.

1.5 Structure In the following chapter, I will give an overview of the organizational history of the WAAC and the WAC. Planning continued during the interwar years until the Act to Establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States was signed in 1942. The chapter further summarizes the training the women received, the jobs they were assigned and the policies and regulations by which they were governed. After the war debates over women soldiers arose again when Congress debated whether the Corps should become part of the Regular Army and Reserve. The chapter closes with the passing of the Women Armed Services Integration Bill of 1948. The third chapter analyzes the role of the press, the various campaigns and strategies to recruit the needed number of women volunteers and the belated attempts to support recruiting with a coordinated public relations policy. In competition with other women’s services and the civilian labor market, WAC recruiting was conducted by different Army and WAC agencies and explored different approaches that reflected conflicting discourses on women’s proper role in the war effort. The chapter analyzes press coverage recruiting material such as brochures and posters, but it also looks at collections of songs and camp newsletters that were in part produced by the Wacs themselves that provide a different angle on the discursive formation in and around the WAC. Military uniforms are a complex system of signs that allows us to analyze the women’s precarious position with the military institution. The fourth chapter explores three different aspects of the women’s uniforms. Although the Wacs are formally part of the organization, I argue that on a symbolic level the borders were redrawn in order to deny women access to the military masculinity which lies at the core of the institution. Apart from the symbolic significance, the uniform as well as the Army’s system of procurement and supply, has a material quality that further illuminates the WAC’s position within the Army. Thirdly, wearing a uniform is a corporeal practice.240 The

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On the notion of corporeal practice see Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, 157.

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uniform is at once part of the disciplinary system and subject to a host of performative acts as the women wore their uniforms. The intersections of the categories race and class with those of gender and sexuality are analyzed in Chapter Five. African American women were a double minority in the WAC whose integration was contingent on that of African American males in the Army. Besides being a minority as Wacs, they were also a segregated minority in the WAC. Their assignments were often determined by racialized stereotypes of their gender and vice versa. Although African American Wacs’ opportunities in the continental United States were extremely limited, those few who were sent overseas experienced in the absence of segregation in Europe a strong sense of purpose and cohesion. In the final chapter I will discuss the deployment of the women’s sexuality in the WAC. The Army regulated, controlled and normalized women’s and men’s sexuality according to different standards. The notion of “respectability” was central to Director Hobby, who was convinced that this was the only way to establish the legitimacy of the Corps while at the same time protecting the women from being victimized in the formerly all-male organization. The wartime standards of acceptable behavior were suspended between postVictorian sexual mores, the disciplinary regime of the Army as exemplified by the measures to control venereal diseases, and less rigid mechanisms of social control due to women’s greater mobility and autonomy. Within a regime of truth that constructs women’s agency, particularly female sexual agency, as deviant, women as agents not only reversed the gender-order of 1940’s America but were also expected to violate the sexual order. While women in the workforce, especially in the military, were already suspicious of an undue amount of agency, the quintessential violation of women’s preordained role was not the heterosexual woman who gave expression to her desire, but the female homosexual. A digression into the medical literature of the turn of the century will explore formations of knowledge that by the time of World War II had entered popular discourses as well as the tool boxes of the Army’s new psychiatric establishment that was for the first time applying these concepts to women. Finally, by examining several investigations and court-martials, I will explore women’s homosocial networks, agency, and the deployment of sexuality as a strategic apparatus in the WAC.

2. Organizational History of the WAAC/WAC 1942-1947

2.1 The WAAC and WAC Bills in Congress Apart from the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, women had served as clerical workers for the Army and the Navy during World War I, but they had done so with few exceptions as temporary auxiliaries.241 The Navy, however, interpreted existing legislation differently. In March 1917 the Navy Department authorized the enrollment of women into the Naval Reserve. A year later the Marine Corps followed suit. Almost 12,000 women served stateside in the rank of Yeoman-F with full military status.242 The women performed not only clerical duties, but also served as draftsmen, translators and recruiters. They

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242

There is an alternative account on these women that suggests that they have not only worked with the Signal Corps, but also were actually sworn into the Army and given the equivalent to the men’s rank of lieutenant. They were addressed as “soldier,” were subject to court-martial and to all U.S. Army regulations. According to this account, five contingents of the 300 selected and trained in “self-defense,” 223 women in total were dispatched to Chaumont, when the astonishing news of Victory arrived on November 11, 1918. If these women had indeed been sworn in the Army, they were the first women in the U.S. Army Signal Corps – the only military women other than nurses – to serve overseas during World War One. Even though ten of them actually received a commendation “In Grateful Recognition” from Congress, all records were lost after they had returned, and they were told they had been “contract-employees” although the Army was never able to produce a single contract. In 1978, the surviving “Hello Girls” received honorable discharges in ceremonies at their homes. On July 20, 1977, Representative Mark W. Hannaford introduced H. R. 8433, A Bill to allow service performed by members of telephone operating units of the Army Signal Corps during WWI to be considered active duty in the Army for purposes of all laws administered by the Veterans’’ Administration. The bill was referred to the House Committee of Veterans’’ Affairs but never passed. Library of Congress. Thomas: Legislative Information on the Internet. Bill Summary and Status for the 95th Congress. http://thomas.loc.gov/ home/search.html. Accessed August 23, 2005. Christides, Michelle. The Unsung Women of World War One: The Signal Corps Women. http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/signal.html. Accessed May 3, 2003. Friedl, Women, 57. Hancock, Lady in the Navy. See also Hewitt, Linda L. Women Marines in World War I. Washington: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1974. Devilbiss, Margaret Conrad. Women and Military Service: A History, Analysis, and Overview of Key Issues. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL.: Air University Press, 1990, 12. See also Gavin, Lettie. American Women in World War I: They Also Served. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1997.

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were the first women other than nurses to have full military status as part of the reserves. By the end of the war, 34,000 women had served in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps and in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. When the first peacetime Selective Service became law in September 1940 and the United States’ entrance into the war became ever more likely, pressure increased to include women in the war-effort. Women’s organizations pointed toward the example of Great Britain and the Soviet Union where women even served in capacities that were traditionally considered the domain of men. Legislation sponsored by Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers was introduced in the House of Representatives on 28 May 1941.243 Rogers had originally opted for full, not auxiliary, military status for the women.244 She argued that unlike the female civilians who had gone overseas as contract workers and volunteers during World War I, the women who were to serve with the Army in this war should receive official recognition for their military service and the same legal protection and benefits as their male counterparts.245 In a different proposal from the White House Eleanor Roosevelt suggested a pool of women that were to serve with the Army, Navy, and the Marine Corps, but were to be organized under the Office of Civilian Defense, a plan that would have severely limited control by military officials.246 The General Staff preferred a corps of originally 25,000 women “for the purpose of making available to the national defense the knowledge, skill, and special training of the women of the nation” for noncombatant service attached to, but not in, the Army.247 Congress would authorize a strength of up to 150,000 auxiliaries who were to be provided with food, uniforms, living quarters, pay, and medical care. WAAC officers would not be permitted to have command authority over men. The highest ranking and commanding officer of the WAAC would be called Director and assigned the rank of major. All other WAAC officers were ranked as first, second, and third officers, but received less pay that the corresponding Army ranks of captains and lieutenant. Enlisted women were ranked as auxiliary, a position comparable to private, through junior leader, comparable to corporal and up to chief leader, the

243

244 245

246 247

HR 4906, A Bill to Establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States, 77th Congress, 1st session, 28 May 1941. Congressional Record, Vol. 88, No. 55, 2657, 17 March 1942. Congressional Record, Appendix, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, 77th Congress, 1st sess. 17 March 1942. Vol.88, part 56:2658-59. Gulick, Administrative Reflections, 104. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 19.

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equivalent of master sergeant in the Regular Army. As Jeanne Holm noted, there was a considerable contradiction in calling for “a small, elite corps of educated, technically qualified women” in order to attain “the highest reputation for both character and professional excellence” while using them for unskilled work as charwomen and laundresses.248 The fact that the women had to be of “high moral character and […] competence” where no such standards existed for men set the scene for the double standards that were to be programmatic for the women’s services.249 Faced with fighting a two-front war and supplying men and material for that war while continuing to send lend-lease material to the Allies, however, military and political leaders realized that women could supply the additional resources so desperately needed in the military and industrial sectors. General George C. Marshall believed that manpower shortages could reach critical levels and that the Army could ill afford to train men in essential service skills such as typing and switchboard operations when highly skilled women were already available. Marshall and others felt that women were inherently suited to these tasks, which, while repetitious, demanded high levels of manual dexterity. They believed that men tended to become impatient with such jobs and might make careless mistakes, which could be costly during war. Although the Chief of Staff supported the bill almost enthusiastically, it was routinely referred to the Bureau of the Budget and “immediately sank from sight […] for a full year.”250 When the Bureau of the Budget openly favored utilizing male limited service personnel instead of women, Marshall employed the recently appointed Oveta Culp Hobby, who headed the newly founded Women’s Interests Section of the War Department Bureau of Public Relations to act as the only female representative of the War Department in the negotiations with the Bureau of the Budget and later in Congressional hearings.251 Despite their efforts nothing happened until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On 11 December 1941, however, the Bureau of the Budget withdrew its objections and the Secretary of War suggested some amendments, but otherwise informed Congress of his approval of the bill. Rogers reintroduced the revised bill as H.R. 6293. Against the utilization of women as civil service employees, the Air Corps advanced a powerful argument: the Aircraft Warning Service,

248 249 250 251

Holm, Women in the Military, 22. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 20. Breuer, War and American Women, 20.

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on which the security of the east coast and the capital depended, could not operate securely with civilian volunteers.252 After the House and the Senate hearings and their respective committees’ approval, the bill was debated on the House floor at length (ninety-eight columns in the Congressional Record) and met with considerable opposition particularly on the part of the Southern congressmen on the issue of militarization of women. “I think it is a reflection upon the courageous manhood of the country to pass a law inviting women to join the armed forces in order to win a battle. Take the women into the armed service, who then will do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself?”

was one comment. Despite the auxiliary status, fears were voiced in that a situation would result in which “women generals would rush about the country dictating orders to male personnel and telling the commanding officers of posts how to run their business.”253 Meanwhile, the War Department set up a pre-planning group and Lt. Col. Gilman C. Mudgett was assigned the task of coordinating the establishment of the new corps. There was ample misunderstanding: Firstly, the pre-planner and the various staff agencies involved assumed that Waacs were to replace not only enlisted men, but also non-civil service civilian employees. Secondly, most stations were under the impression that the Waac companies they were asked to request would not count against a station’s troop basis and consequently asked for Waacs who would be assigned not technical and skilled clerical work, but unskilled labor and housekeeping duties for which it was difficult to find civilians. Thirdly, the War Department assumed that during the first year, some 10,000 Waacs and officers were to be trained – a number that would in fact already be surpassed by the end of the year and continue to rise to in 60,243 in June 1943.254 In February 1942 the future WAC Director was added to the pre-planning group. The War Department chose the chief of the Bureau of Public Relations’ Women’s Interests Section, Oveta Culp Hobby. Hobby was a lawyer, editor and publisher of a Houston newspaper and had been a member of the Texas legislature. Her husband was the former Texan Governor William P. Hobby. She was president of the Texas League of Women Voters and a civic worker in numerous state and city organizations for both men and women.

252

253 254

Unites States, Dept. of Defense, and Civil Defense Liaison Office. The Aircraft Warning Service of the U.S. Air Force. Washington, DC: [GPO], 1950. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 15. Ibid., 121.

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“Oveta Culp Hobby was thus the perfect choice for Director of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. [...] The Director of the WAAC had to show a skeptical American public that a woman could be “a lady” and serve as a member of the armed forces at the same time. This was crucial to the success of the WAAC.”255 On 14 May 1942, the Senate approved the WAAC Bill, albeit with none of the amendments that would have placed the WAAC in the Army and would have granted the women full military status. The next day it was signed into law by the President as PL 77-554, An Act to Establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States.256 The Navy, by way of comparison, faced similar problems. The legal loophole that had made it possible to recruit the “Yeomanettes” during WWI had been closed by the Naval Reserve Act because it limited eligibility for service to male citizens.257 After this was renewed at the onset of the war and after the Navy had declined to support a joint bill to provide women auxiliaries to the Army and the Navy, the attitudes of the higher echelons of the Navy changed considerably in the months following Pearl Harbor. Naval forces that were fighting the battles of Coral Sea and Midway Island in the Pacific the summer of 1942, and which were preparing for the long struggles at Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, had to be manned by sailors released from bases in the United States. This had made it obvious that the Navy, too, was to encounter serious manpower shortages. By May 1942, a bill similar to the WAAC Bill that created a Women’s Naval Reserve and a Marine Corps Women’s Reserve was passed by Congress - with the notable difference that the Navy bill granted full military status to the WAVES but forbade them to be assigned overseas. Due to the fact that the Navy bill was not introduced until the WAAC bill had passed all committees and the House and taken the brunt of argument, the passage of P.L. 689, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, went comparatively smoothly. 258 255 256

257 258

Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps. WAAC regulations and ranks were modeled after those of the Army yet were separate and clearly distinguishable. For example the commanding officer of the WAAC/WAC was the Director, a position that corresponded to Colonel in the Army but which implied less military authority and command. WAAC officers could only command WAAC units whereas both civilian and military male superiors commanded the Waacs who worked for them. Naval Reserve Act of 1938, United States, Statutes at Large, 52 Stat. 1178. In July 1942 P.L. 689 established the Navy Women’s Reserve, which was from the onset integrated into the Naval Reserve and not a separate “women’s corps” like the WAC in the Army structure. The Navy women were, however, soon known by the acronym WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), thus establishing at least the perception of a separate women’s organization. P.L. 689 also established the Marine Corps

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The auxiliary structure of the WAAC soon proved to be problematic. Waacs did Army jobs, but were administered under a separate parallel set of regulations that led to endless controversies between various agencies.259 It became clear that these administrative handicaps would stay with the WAAC as long as it had auxiliary status. Waacs were entitled neither to the same military rank nor benefits for dependents as were soldiers of the Regular Army, nor to benefits, such as government life insurance, veteran’s medical coverage, and death benefits.260 Although they were permitted to serve overseas, they did not receive overseas pay nor would they in the event of capture be protected under existing international agreements covering prisoners of war.261 Far more important than administrative difficulties and eligibility to soldiers’ benefits was the question of a legally sound and viable disciplinary system. With very few exceptions such as deployment overseas, Waacs, like other civilians, could not be tried by court-martials or be subject to the Articles of War. Instead, the WAAC had its own code of conduct which was limited to civilian punishments such as fines, reprimands, restrictions, or discharge.262 In several instances where Waacs went “absent without leave” (AWOL), military police was unsure if Army regulations applied and whether they had the authority to arrest a Waac. The Judge Advocate General found that there was apparently no legal foundation to the whole WAAC disciplinary system.263

259

260

261 262 263

Women’s Reserve; they were known as Women Marines. In November 1942 P.L. 773 established the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve. Their acronym, SPARs, came from the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus—Always Ready. Although for organizational purposes the women were in the reserve component of their respective service branches, virtually all of these women reservists were called to serve on active duty. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 15. Holm, Women in the Military, 25-7, Hancock, Lady in the Navy, 56. WAAC Regulations included a code of conduct and covered appointment, enlistment, promotion, discipline, training, uniforms, pay, and discharge. Where WAAC regulations did not cover a particular situation, Army regulations were to be used. Punishment under the WAAC Regulations could only be administered by WAAC officers, although male officers and civilian supervisors had the authority over the women who worked for them. WAAC Regulations. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. WAAC Officers’ ranks third, second and first officer, field director, assistant director and director corresponded with the ranks of second lieutenant through colonel in the Army. Enlisted women held the ranks of auxiliary, junior leader, leader, staff leader, technical leader, first leader and chief leader which corresponded with Army ranks from private up to master sergeant. Until November 1, 1942 Waacs were paid less than their male counterparts in the regular Army. Holm, Women in the Military, 24; Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 113-121. WAAC Regulations 1942 Tentative; sec 47. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 116.

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Army historian Mattie Treadwell concluded “[I]t was now clear that the Army had little more hold over Waacs than over civilian workers. The women could leave the service at any time they desired, just as a civilian employee could. Under such conditions it would be risky to replace thousands of trained men on any very vital or secret work with an equal number of Waacs who might depart as readily as other civilians. The large women’s corps the War Department was planning could scarcely be built on such shaky foundations.”264 On 14 January 1943 Congresswoman Rogers introduced a new bill and Congress opened hearings on the conversion of the WAAC into the WAC as part of the Regular Army.265 On July 1, 1943, the act to establish a Women’s Army Corps in the Army of the United States became law. It provided the women ranks, titles and pay comparable to that of their male counterparts.266 In the Army’s organizational structure, the new WAAC headquarters was placed under the Services of Supply, the largest of the Army’s three major commands.267 This command directed and managed administration, personnel, training, and supply matters for the entire Army.

2.2 Training The first class of officer candidates trained at the First WAAC Training Center in Fort des Moines, Iowa, from 20 July to 29 August 1942. These first 440 Waacs, who had been selected from over 35,000 applicants, were welleducated women compared to subsequent groups. About 99 percent had been employed in civil life, 90 percent had college training and some held several degrees. Most of them were between 25 and 39 years of age.268 The WAAC basic and officer candidate courses were identical with corresponding courses for men, with the exception of combat subjects.

264 265 266

267 268

Ibid., 117. HR 1751. February 8, 1943; 78th Cong 1st sess. With the conversion former WAAC first, second, and third officers became captains and first and second lieutenants, respectively. Director Hobby was officially promoted to the rank of colonel; WAC service command and theater staff directors were promoted to lieutenant colonels. Company commanders became WAC captains or majors now commanded WAC companies. Enlisted women were now ranked as master sergeant through corporal and private. For a personal account of the conversion see the memoir of Irene Brion, then stationed with a WAAC contingent. Brion, Irene. Lady GI: A Woman’s War in the South Pacific. The Memoir of Irene Brion. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1997, 12. Services of Supply (SOS) was renamed Army Service Forces (ASF) in March 1943. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 58.

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The forty African American women of the first cohort were placed in a separate platoon. Although they attended classes and mess halls with the other officer candidates, post facilities were segregated, as were all army stations. Black officer candidates had backgrounds similar to those of white officer candidates. Almost 80 percent had attended college, and the majority had work experience as teachers and office workers.269 After graduation on 29 August the first of the 436 new WAAC third officers were assigned to WAAC Headquarters to Washington, DC and to the operation and instruction at the Training Center. New officer classes averaging 150 candidates began training every two weeks and upon graduation were assigned to staff the three new WAAC training centers in Daytona Beach, Florida, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Some accompanied the first WAAC companies sent to U.S. Army field stations across the country, with black officers being assigned to black auxiliary and officer candidate units. Recruiting for enlisted women started in July. The first auxiliary class began its four-week basic training at Fort Des Moines on 17 August. The average WAAC auxiliary was slightly younger than the officer candidates, with a high school education and less work experience, but still more educated than the average male recruit. Basic Military Training Recruits arrived from recruiting stations all over the nation and were grouped into classes for basic military training courses. Because of the small size of the corps, WAAC and later WAC training centers performed some of the functions that reception centers did for male recruits. After processing, the women were turned over to basic companies that were to transform a civilian woman into “a physically fit, psychologically well-adjusted, well-disciplined soldier who was informed of the duties, responsibilities, and privileges of women in the Army.”270 The WAAC basic training program, with the exception of combat courses, was almost identical to the first four weeks of the men’s basic course, including subjects such as military courtesy, Articles of War, Army organization, drill, and others. After completion of the first four weeks the women were at

269 270

Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 634.

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once assigned to the field, unless they went to specialist school or to the short technical courses for clerks, cooks, and drivers.271 The system of assignment by TA or TD company (Table of Allotment or, later, Table of Distribution) had proven too inflexible for wartime and was eliminated for non-combat units in May 1943.272 Under the new system, post commanders received a bulk allotment of WAAC spaces, and then submitted requisitions to obtain individual women with the skills needed at their posts. Disappointingly for many women who had acquired special skills in civilian life, these first units had spaces only for clerks, typists, drivers, cooks, and unit cadre but the new system increased the variety of assignments open to enlisted women. The specialist courses which were also held at the training centers immediately followed basic training and lasted for another four to twelve weeks. Driver’s training was the most popular of the technical courses offered at WAAC/WAC training centers. The six to eight week course included maintenance, repair and lubrication, convoy driving, vehicle recovery and blackout driving. Future medical technicians went to the Enlisted Medical Technicians School at Camp Atterbury, Indiana for a three to four month course as X-ray, laboratory, surgical, medical, or dental technicians. Additionally, three other schools for enlisted men were opened to women in 1944, when medical technicians became needed in ever greater numbers.273 Specialist Training After the initial class of officer candidates, future generations of WAAC/WAC officer candidates were selected from the ranks. Although WAC officers might be assigned to many arms and services, the WAC officer candidate school could only specialize in the production of officers for WAC troop administration. “In its entire two years of existence the WAC school was allowed to receive only 750 candidates, in contrast to the 5,675 that had

271

272

273

In 1944 the basic training period was extended to six weeks, the same length as the men’s course. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, Press release: The Women’s Army Corps, February 1, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 1. After May 1943, a manning document for a noncombat (sometimes called an overhead) unit was referred to as a table of allotment (TA) or, later, a table of distribution (TD); a manning document for a combat or combat-related unit was called a table of organization (TO). Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 18-19. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, Press release: The Women’s Army Corps, February 1, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 1.

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been received in only one year by the WAAC school.”274 When the ASF took over the school in 1943, it extended the course from the previous eight weeks to three months, similar to the length of men’s officer candidate courses. Enlisted women attended WAAC/WAC specialist courses or, provided that housing for women was available, could attend Army non-combat specialist schools on a coeducational basis. Some students were sent directly from training centers to fill WAC quotas allotted by the school concerned, others were sent by Army stations. Among the specialist schools that Wacs attended were the Army Finance School, the Photo Lab Technician School, and the Armored Parts Clerical Course, which covered receiving, checking, accounting and packing of small arms, artillery parts, or motor parts. Military police were trained at the Investigators School, radio operators at the Signal Corps Schools and officers at the Inspector General’s or the Adjutant General’s School. WAC officers also attended the Army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth or the ATS Wing of its British counterpart, the British Staff College, to train for doing staff work with the allied services.275 At times “faculties noted with approval a certain increased industry among competitive-minded male students.”276

2.3 Policies and Regulations When the WAAC was formed in 1942, the War Department started from scratch. Although, as mentioned above, there had been earlier plans for a women’s corps, War Department planners were not aware of them and Hobby investigated other countries’ approaches to and experiences with utilizing women. Because of the WAAC’s civilian status, Army Regulations could not be applied, particularly in matters of discipline. The uncertainty of Army officers concerning legal matters, the administrative proceedings applicable for the WAAC and the proper command channels led to much confusion. Questions regarding the status of the WAAC ranged from whether Waacs might use the franking privilege when mailing their letters to whether a Waac should be buried with military honors. Countless different opinions existed between various agencies under what circum-

274 275

276

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 648. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, Press release: The Women’s Army Corps, February 1, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 1. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 660.

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stances Waacs would be considered “persons in military service.”277 According to existing legislation, the WAAC was a separate command with its headquarters located in the Services of Supply. Nine regional directors assigned to the headquarters of each of the corps areas served as a command echelon between the Director, whose orders were issued by the Adjutant General, and the WAAC units. The field station to which a unit was assigned was responsible only for furnishing supplies, housing, medical and dental care. Army officers had supervisory authority as with all civilian employees, but no disciplinary authority.278 Discipline, promotion and discharge were the responsibility of the WAAC company commander and her superior WAAC officers. Courtmartial was only possible overseas. Unlike with men, where the uniform Army Regulations applied, disciplinary matters could not be handled at station level, but instead were always referred to WAAC headquarters. There were countless instances in which Waacs did not receive privileges granted to soldiers and WAVES. An Auxiliary received $21 where the Navy paid its recruits $50 a month. Waacs were also not eligible for disability benefits, retirement or pensions, and veteran’s hospitalization in the event a woman became injured but instead was discharged if an injury or illness became permanent. These, however, were minor administrative difficulties compared to the shortcomings of the Auxiliary disciplinary system, which in itself was reason enough to abolish the Auxiliary system. The Articles of War were not applicable to Waacs, or to other civilians, unless they were “accompanying an army in the field.” The WAAC Regulations, which included a strict code of conduct, were limited to civilian punishment for minor infractions – the women could be restricted to quarters, fined, reprimanded or discharged – but for major infractions the Army could not subject WAAC members to court-martial, imprisonment, or dishonorable discharge.279 There was much disagreement over what precisely constituted “in the field.” Could a Waac who was stationed on the Eastern seaboard, and thus potentially subject to enemy attack, be tried by court-martial, as one station commander argued?280 What were the proper procedures for military police if they apprehended a Waac who went AWOL (absent without leave)? Cases of AWOL became too numerous for the Army to ignore, but there was little it could do if civilian employees or Auxiliaries decided not to return to their sta-

277 278 279 280

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 113-5. WAAC Regulations, tentative (1942). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Ibid., sec. 47. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 115.

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tion.281 Under these circumstances it seemed risky to replace trained men with Waacs. After the bill to establish a Women’s Army Corps in the Army of the United States was signed by the President on 1 July 1943, the Army had ninety days before the WAAC would cease to exist and all Waacs had to be enlisted or commissioned in the WAC or discharged.282 For the first weeks after the conversion, despite an initial War Department directive to the contrary, WAAC regulations still governed matters of uniform, housing, training, medical care, and other issues. In matters of enlistment, discharge, and military justice, however, Army regulations applied.283 In devising the first WAC regulations, Hobby attempted to assure that Waacs would only be assigned to units commanded by a woman officer. The Army Service Forces (ASF), the War Department Manpower Board, and other Army agencies felt their prerogatives of transfer and assignment were being curtailed if they could assign enlisted women only to stations where a WAC officer was located. Although the ASF were reluctant to make any changes in Army regulations, they decided upon reconsideration that one basic Army regulation for the WAC would be required: that under no circumstances would women command men.284 The revised WAC regulations provided for the following exceptions to Army regulations: WAC units were to be commanded by WAC officers. Wacs could not be confined in the same building with men, except a hospital. WAC messes had to be separate from men’s and Wacs could not be employed in officers’ clubs, service clubs or messes. Enlistment standards also differed from those of men in age requirements and in a different physical examination. Women who had enlisted as minors, that is under the age of 20, were mandatorily discharged, as were pregnant women or those with venereal disease. Women with dependent children were ineligible.285 Additionally, some restrictions applied by act of Congress included prohibiting the promo-

281

282 283 284

285

Letter Oveta Culp Hobby on confinement of Waacs AWOL. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 186. PL 110. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 221. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 225. Ibid., 263-4. The Chief of Staff, General Marshall later authorized, over ASF nonconcurrence, the publication of the revised WAAC Regulations (1943), which contained the “safeguards” for women Hobby had proposed. A final version of the revised WAC Regulations was published in October 1943. War Department Circular 289: WAC Regulations. November 9, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entr 55, Box192. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 264.

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tion of WAC officers other than the Director to the level of colonel or higher. Additionally WAC officers could only be appointed from graduates of officer candidate schools, who in turn would only be selected from women already in the Corps. On the other hand, some requirements that were identical for women as for men nevertheless had to be spelled out explicitly because they were frequently violated: Wacs, like any other military personnel, could only be assigned military jobs, could not replace civilians, and were not to be assigned as permanent kitchen police.286 The number of exceptions and amendments to Army regulations grew steadily over the course of the war. One area in which Hobby requested many changes in Army regulations was that of standards for discharge. Unlike a male minor who misrepresented his age in order to enter the Army, the discharge of a woman found to be under age was mandatory. The concealment of dependent children, a fact which made women ineligible for enlistment, was considered fraudulent enlistment and according to Army Regulations the woman would be given a discharge other than honorable (blue). Another case in point was discharge for misconduct. The WAAC regulations and the Code of Conduct had interpreted misconduct rather broadly to include offenses such as being found “drunk in uniform or otherwise to bring discredit upon the Corps.”287 With regard to the definition of “conduct bringing discredit upon the Corps,” violations included “drinking unwisely or without moderation.” Generally, it was considered undesirable “to drink at all while in uniform, to buy packaged liquor, or to be found all evening in bars even if sober.”288 The WAAC’s discharge rules had been considerably stricter than comparable Army regulations. Under Army status and discharge regulations, however, many Army officers were reluctant to discharge a woman except for misconduct for which they would discharge a man. Drunkenness, fighting and swearing, although generally considered misconduct in a woman, were not usually considered grounds for discharge of a male soldier. Over the course of the war, Director Hobby consistently argued in favor of a double standard in this matter, which she considered essential for the morale and well-being of the Corps. Since female offenders could not be punished more severely than male soldiers for the same offenses, Hobby recommended “that

286 287 288

Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 498. Ibid., 499.

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discharge boards be informed that it lay within their authority to define ‘undesirable habits and traits of character’ in line with the right of unit members to decent surroundings as defined by American religious and social usage.”289 A double standard within the WAC was also evident in the provisions for pregnancy discharge according to the first set of WAAC Regulations. They provided only for married women to be honorably discharged when pregnant, while unmarried women would receive a summary discharge.290 A pregnancy, which made a woman ineligible for service in the WAAC was thus treated like a violation of military or civil law, although there was no legal charge that could be brought against a pregnant unmarried woman if her conduct was not disorderly. In December 1942, the regulation was changed to permit an honorable discharge on the grounds of “unsuitability for the service.”291 Henceforth, WAC and Army Regulations required an honorable discharge for all pregnant women without reference to marital status. Pregnancy “and the direct complications and sequelae thereof” would be considered as incurred “not in line of duty” but with no misconduct involved.292 Among the disciplinary issues, the lack of provisions for the confinement of delinquent Wacs soon became evident. Provost marshals did not know what to do with AWOL Wacs who had to be confined for several days or even weeks until they could be returned to their stations. An experiment consisting of a small guardhouse for detention, a WAC officer, and two enlisted women as military police in the larger cities was nevertheless disapproved by the Military Personnel Division of the ASF.293 In the absence of female military police stations, confinement of WAC AWOLs was thus handled according to local arrangements with Wacs being confined to city jails if local WAC companies would not accept custody of the delinquents. Finding a place to confine Wacs who were sentenced to long terms by Army courts-martial proved even more difficult. Hobby’s suggestion to set up a centralized WAC disciplinary barracks at one of the training centers was not approved by the War Department.294 WAC prisoners with longer sentences were transferred

289 290 291 292

293 294

Ibid., 500. Ibid., 501. WAAC Circular No. 17, 29 Dec 1942. NARA. RG 165. Entry 55, Box 193. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 501, 503. An example of a “sequel” of a pregnancy would be the case of an abortion, which was hardly distinguishable from a miscarriage. Attempts by the Director to make abortion a cause for discharge were therefore unsuccessful. Only proven “illegal abortions complete or incomplete will be regarded as misconduct.” Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 505. Memo Hobby, File: Trial and Punishment of WAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49.

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to the Federal Industrial Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. Federal facilities did accept military prisoners, provided the individual had committed a felony or violated a civil law. In cases of confinement over thirty days for offenses that did not violate civilian law, the WAC policy during the war was to direct discharge instead of confinement for Wacs who could not be transferred to Alderson and who did not appear to be useful members of the Corps.295

2.4 Women Soldiers at Work After basic training, the women were formed into companies and sent to field installations of the Army Air Forces (AAF), the Army Ground Forces (AGF), or the Services of Supply [renamed Army Service Forces (ASF) in 1943]. Initially most auxiliaries worked as file clerks, typists, stenographers, or motor pool drivers, but the number of positions increased gradually as women were admitted to fill additional military operational specialties (MOS). The Army Air Forces was the WAAC-friendliest of the major commands. They received the greatest share of the WAAC field units, or 35 percent of all Waacs.296 It was the policy of General Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General, AAF, to employ Waacs to the widest extent possible, to make up for manpower deficiencies. The first Air Forces Waac unit, fifty-seven WAAC enrolled women and two officers, arrived at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, on 3 March 1943 to work for the AAF’s Map Chart Division. By the end of the summer of 1943 there were 171 air bases that had WAAC personnel. Hobby’s former aide and Acting Deputy Director, First Officer Betty Bandel, was promoted to Major and given the title of Air WAAC Officer, the WAC’s second-ranking officer until Director Hobby retired. Toward the end of the war, when the AAF could not recruit enough qualified men, the AAF placed women in its many technical specialties. Women were assigned as weather observers and forecasters, cryptographers, radio operators and repairmen, sheet metal workers, parachute riggers, link trainer instructors, bombsight maintenance specialists, aerial photograph analysts, and control tower operators. Over 1,000 Waacs ran the statistical control tabulating machines (the precursors of modern-day computers) used to keep track of personnel records. By January 1945, only 50 percent of AAF Wacs held traditional as-

295 296

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 506-7. Ibid., 20.

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signments such as file clerk, typist, and stenographer. A few AAF Waacs were assigned flying duties as radio operators, mechanics and photographers. Some of the women assigned to the Ordnance Department computed the velocity of bullets, measured bomb fragments, mixed gunpowder, and loaded shells. Others worked as draftsmen, mechanics, and electricians, and some received training in ordnance engineering.297 The highest number of Wacs were employed with the Army Service Forces (ASF), formally the Services of Supply. Wacs served in the geographic service commands as well as in the technical and administrative services (Signal Corps, Ordnance Corps, Quartermaster Corps, etc.), each of which had a WAC staff director. Within the Army Service Forces 3600 Women were assigned to the Transportation Corps (ASF) where they processed men for assignment overseas, handled personnel files, issued weapons or served as boat dispatchers and classification specialists. The Transportation Corps also placed a senior WAAC staff director in its Washington headquarters, and others in the various ports where Waacs were to be stationed thereby greatly facilitating the requisition and assignment of Waacs. Late in 1944, a few women were trained to replace men as radio operators on U.S. Army hospital ships. Soon after this, more female secretaries and clerical workers were assigned to hospital ships.298 Waacs assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service (ASF) performed many kinds of work, in laboratories as well as in the field. For the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) Waacs were highly welcomed because their research would not be interrupted by combat duty. For this reason the CWS requested a WAAC staff director and received the first WAAC company as early as April 1943. In the summer and early fall of 1942, immediately after the establishment of the WAAC, chemical officers, under ASF direction, made a study of possible employment of Waacs in the CWS. They determined that Waacs might be employed as replacements for enlisted men doing housekeeping duties in arsenals, as fill-ins for certain types of civil service positions where it was impossible to obtain civilians, and, possibly, in chemical impregnating companies in the zone of the interior. The employment of Wacs in the CWS turned out to be “successful beyond all expectation.” The COs and lab tech-

297 298

Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps, 12. Ibid., 13.

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nicians who were at first skeptical about employing Wacs on certain types of assignments, soon changed their minds once the women got on the job. 299 About 250 Waacs who worked for the Quartermaster Corps (ASF) managed supplies stocked in depots all over the country. Over 1,200 Waacs assigned to the Signal Corps (ASF) worked as telephone switchboard operators, radio operators, telegraph operators, cryptologists, and photograph and map analysts. 300 Some were trained as photographers or became map analysts and learned to assemble, mount, and interpret mosaic maps.301 Waacs within the Army Medical Department (ASF) performed clerical and ward duties or worked as laboratory, surgical, X-ray, and dental technicians. A total of 20,869 Waacs served in the Medical Department where they made up to 50 percent of enlisted personnel in larger hospitals. About 4,000 of them served as orderlies or performed other non-medical tasks. The women of WAC Detachment, 4817th SCU, assigned to the Corps of Engineers participated in the Manhattan Project. They worked in chemical, electronic, metallurgic, and other laboratories as engineering draftsmen, chemists, physicists and clerks at the sites in Los Alamos, New Mexico, London, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Many of them college graduates, some holding a Ph.D. in chemistry, the Wacs worked twelve-hour shifts seven days a week in a highly restricted environment.302 In the Army Ground Forces, most units had combat missions, where the women’s non-combat status precluded their assignment. Many staff officers of the Army Ground Forces would have preferred to see women in the war industries, rather than in the armed forces. Moreover, most of the administration of schools and other installations was done by the ASF, so that no Waacs were needed here, either. AGF Plans Section, for example, was flatly opposed to employing any significant number of Waacs: “In view of the educational, occupational, and physical training of the average American woman, it is anticipated that it would be extremely difficult to adapt them to military duties. […] With the exception of a very limited number of assignments […] there is no reasonable field for utilization of women in the military struc-

299

300

301

302

Brophy, Leo P., and George J. Fisher. The Chemical Warfare Service: Organizing for War. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1959, 152. The WIRES (Women in Radio and Electrical Service) were assigned to the WAAC for radio, telephone, and other communications work. Thompson, The Signal Corps, 49, 95, 181, 182, 316, 495 497, 509, 516, 595, 596, 601, 602, 621. Bell, Los Alamos WAACs/WACs. Roensch, Life Within Limits.

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ture.”303 Eventually, the AGF received roughly 20 percent of all WAAC assignments, but initially were reluctant to request any women. The Ground Forces declined to accept the assignment of a WAAC staff director or any WAAC officer in its headquarters. This attitude reflected on the Waacs who were assigned to the AGF and who did not feel welcome and realized that chances for transfer and promotion were slim. Three quarters of the Waacs who worked in training centers performed routine office work. Motor pools were much more popular among Waacs, but only 10 percent were assigned there.

2.5 Overseas Service Members of the Women’s Army Corps served in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the European Theater of Operations (ETO) as well as in the Southwest Pacific Area, China, India, Burma, and the Middle East. Overseas assignments were much sought after, even though the vast majority consisted of those communications and clerical jobs for which women were believed to be best suited. Overseas assignments required a woman to possess some needed skill as well as an excellent record. Some women favored an overseas assignment over the chance to attend Officer Candidate School. Conditions differed considerably among the theaters of operations, as the following examples illustrate. On 13 November 1942, five days after Operation Torch, the landing of allied forces in North Africa had begun, Allied Commander in Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower asked that five WAAC officers, two of whom could speak French, be sent immediately to Allied Forces Headquarters to serve as executive secretaries. The troopship carrying the first WAAC officers to serve overseas – third officers Martha Rogers, Mattie Pinette, Ruth Briggs, Alene Drezmal, and Louise Anderson – was torpedoed en route from Great Britain to Algiers by a German submarine. A British destroyer plucked two of the women from the burning deck of their sinking ship. The other three escaped in a lifeboat. Picked up by a destroyer, they were delivered to Algiers with no uniforms, clothing, or supplies. After their officers had suffered these hardships, the 200 women of the 149th WAAC Post Headquarters Company, the first WAAC unit overseas, arrived in North Africa at General Eisenhower’s theater headquarters in January 1943. The unit operated the headquarters

303

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 133

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switchboard and provided clerks and typists for the postal directory service as well as stenographers and drivers. Additional WAAC postal workers joined them in May. A WAAC signal company arrived in November to take jobs as high-speed radio operators, teletypists, cryptographic code clerks, and tape cutters in radio rooms. Corps members assigned to the Army Air Forces arrived in North Africa in November 1943 and January 1944. In 1945 Eisenhower stated, “During the time I have had WACs under my command they have met every test and task assigned to them […] their contributions in efficiency, skill, spirit and determination are immeasurable.”304 Another women’s unit that served in the North African and Mediterranean theaters was the 6669th Headquarters Platoon, which was assigned to General Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army.305 Although the women performed rather traditional duties, the unit convinced skeptics of the usefulness of female units in the field. The 6669th accompanied Fifth Army headquarters from Mostaganem, Algeria, across the Mediterranean to Naples and eventually all the way up the boot of Italy. Billeting was in tents, schools, factories and vacated houses. Unit members remained from six to thirty miles behind the front lines. Nightly bombings and the extremely complicated communications networks the telephone operators had to cope with constituted hardships not encountered by Waacs in the continental U.S. The “experiment” of utilizing Waacs in the North African and Mediterranean theaters was highly successful. Wacs felt needed, useful, and well integrated into the Fifth Army and credited much of this to the policies of General Clark. Consequently, their morale was much higher than in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) or other theaters of war.306 The first Wacs to serve in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) arrived in London in July 1943. This battalion of 557 enlisted women and 19 officers were assigned to serve with the Eighth Air Force. A second battalion of Wacs arrived in September. Their duties were similar to those of the Wacs in the North African and Mediterranean theaters: operating telephone switchboards, driving staff cars, and serving as clerical workers. WAC officers also served as cryptographers, mail censors and photo interpreters. The Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), which was originally stationed in Bushey Park, London, but later moved to France and even-

304 305

306

C.i. Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps. Siciliano, Peg Poeschl. The 6669th Women's Army Corps Headquarters Platoon: Path Breakers in the Modern Army. M.A. Thesis. College of William and Mary, 1988. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 367.

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tually to Germany, was also accompanied by a detachment of 300 Wacs.307 These women handled highly classified material, worked in three shifts around the clock, and were exposed to considerable danger by nightly air raids and, after D-day, by German V-1 and V-2 missiles that hit the WAC area several times. Overseas, the hardships of soldiering were quite similar for women and men, as were the dangers they were exposed to, even though Wacs were unarmed and did not engage in combat. Wacs followed closely after the Allied troops had landed in Normandy. On 14 July 1944, the first contingent of forty-nine WAC arrived in France. WAC strength in Europe was at this moment 3,600. Assigned to Forward Echelon, Communications Zone (FELCOMZ) headquarters, they immediately took over mobile switchboards and worked in tents, wine cellars, prefabricated huts, and switchboard trailers. Lieutenant Colonel Anna Wilson remembered their arrival: “Aboard a heavily-laden cruiser the loudspeakers blared ‘WAC personnel, prepare to disembark.’ Wacs hooked helmet straps, grabbed gear, climbed down the ladder into a bouncing LCI [landing craft, infantry]. Ashore, they saw blackened steel skeletons of vehicles, smashed German and American equipment and mute rows of wooden crosses. GIs waved from tents hidden under trees as Wac trucks jolted over shelled roads.”308 The 54 Wacs lived in tents outside Valogne and quickly became used to digging drainage ditches around their tents, to K and C rations, rationed water and helmet baths. With the liberation of Paris, the Wacs packed their tents and typewriters and six days after the Allies entered Paris, Aug. 31, 1944, they moved into the city as part of an advance detachment to set up the Services of Supply Seine Base headquarters. They set up offices in a building that Germans had vacated only a few days before. The only contingent of African American Wacs to be sent overseas was the 6888th Central Postal Battalion under the command of Maj. Charity Adams. The battalion of 800 women was shipped to Birmingham, England, then moved to Rouen, France after three months, and finally to Paris. The 6888th was responsible for the redirection of mail to all U.S. personnel, civilian as well as all branches of the Military) in the European Theater of Operations, all in all over seven million people to keep track of.309

307 308

309

Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps, 19-20. Wilson, Anna W. The WAC: The Story of the WAC in the ETO. Paris: Orientation Branch, Information and Education Division, Hq. USFET (U.S.Forces, European Theater), 1945. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need. Earley, One Woman’s Army.

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The Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) was one of the last theaters to request and receive Wacs. The Wacs assigned to the SWPA arrived in Australia in May 1944. While some of them were assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, the others moved on to Port Moresby, New Guinea.310 Wacs were assigned to supply and support facilities at Oro Bay, Lae, Finschhafen, and Hollandia in New Guinea and at Tacloban on Leyte. By the end of 1944 over 4,700 enlisted women and 330 WAC officers were assigned to the Southwest Pacific Area and more followed early in 1945. In February, a WAC detachment was assigned to New Guinea, and on 7 March, three days after the Japanese had moved out, the first Wacs arrived in Manila. Most of them were needed for skilled administrative and office work, positions that had become difficult to fill by the summer of 1944. Consequently, many of the Wacs had to be retrained. Those stationed in the SWPA faced a number of difficulties, some of which were due to climatic factors, others to errors in the supply system and other factors. Censoring mail was one of the tasks that women were thought particularly well suited for. On the other hand, women were also thought to be “more sensitive than men by nature.” “Censors on the job over a year became susceptible to depression because of the endless bitter complaints and reiterated obscenities in the majority of letters home.”311 On arrival, the Wacs found that they had been poorly equipped and clothing requisitions continued to be a problem for the duration of the war. Their lifestyle in this theater was highly restricted; Wacs as well as Army nurses were housed in guarded compounds and could not move freely. Tropical climate and the lack of appropriate uniforms lead to a significantly higher number of evacuations for health reasons than that for Wacs in other areas or for men. About 400 Wacs served with the Army Air Forces in the China-BurmaIndia theater. Initially reluctant, theater commander Lt. General Joseph W. Stilwell in 1944 did request Wacs to serve as stenographers, typists, file clerks, and telephone and telegraph operators with his units. The first sixty Wacs were sent to New Delhi, India, in October 1943 where they worked in the headquarters of the Allied Commander, Southeast Asia Command. In 1944, this command moved to Ceylon, where it remained until after the Japanese surrender in 1945. In November 1944, the War Department separated the

310 311

For a first hand reports see Dammann, A WAC’s Story. Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps. http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/wac/wac. htm. Accessed March 3, 2004.

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China Theater from the China-Burma-India Theater.312 One hundred Wacs were taken from the contingent in Ceylon and assigned to the new U.S. headquarters in China at Chungking. After the Japanese surrender, the unit moved to Shanghai and then to Peking before returning to the United States.313

2.6 Demobilization und Integration When Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945 and the war in Europe was over, women could be assigned 406 different jobs, i.e. 406 of the Army’s 628 military occupational specialties (MOS). Some jobs requiring combat training, great physical strength, long training courses, or supervisory duties were still closed to women, but even without those, women could fill over 1.3 million Army positions. By V-E Day, 8 May 1945, 99,388 women had joined the Women’s Army Corps, at the same time the peak number during WWII.314 On August 29, 1945 the U.S. government officially ended recruiting for the WAC and the two remaining WAC training sites were shut down by the end of that year.315 As a consequence of the fastest demobilization in the course of American history the armed forces went down from 12.1 million in 1945 to 1.4 million in 1948. The number of women in military uniform was reduced from 266,000 to 14,000 – about 1% of all military personnel – within the same period.316 It was the new Director Westray Boyce’s “unvarying conviction was that the WAC should be disbanded as soon as possible after the war was over.”317 There was also widespread public opinion that the women soldiers should return home as soon as possible, in order “to reknit family life.”318 To achieve this, Col. Boyce suggested a separate plan for demobilization so that women could be released at the same rate as men. She realized that it would be difficult for women to go back to their civilian jobs if they 312

313 314 315 316

317 318

Bianchi, Linda Noreen. United States Army Nurses in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, 1942-1945. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Illinois at Chicago, 1990. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 23. Ibid., 24. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 658, 699. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 24. Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, c.i. Binkin and Bach, Women in the Military, 22, 46. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 726; Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 25. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 26. See also Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films.” American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War. John C. Fout, John and Maura Shaw Tantillo. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 247-66.

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were not among the first discharged soldiers and back on the labor market before the expected impact of discharged men. Demobilization followed an Adjusted Service Rating (ASR) system. Points were given for time served in the U.S. and overseas, participation in combat, decoration for gallantry and the number of dependent children. Between V-E Day and V-J Day men could be discharged with 85 and women with 44 points, a number that was hard to reach for servicewomen because they were excluded from three out of five ways to earn ASR points. The War Department, however, decided that the WAC should be disbanded the same way as other units were. When it became increasingly difficult to maintain the strength of 2.5 Million men and women necessary for the occupation, the new chief of staff, General Eisenhower, suggested demobilization should proceed slower. Massive protests at stations in Manila, New Delhi, Frankfurt, Paris and London followed. Empty ships were waiting in the ports; soldiers were waiting for the War Department to lower the minimum ASR points. Eisenhower gave in and between May and September 1945 the number of necessary ASR points was lowered several times. In July, he additionally announced the immediate release of all Wacs who wished to leave. At the end of 1946 WAC strength was at 9,655 officers and enlisted women.319 Meanwhile, the National Civilian Advisory Committee on the WAC, which had been founded in 1944, was working on plans for the integration of Wacs into civilian life. A planning group around Colonel Boyce and the WAC staff directors had already convened in the Pentagon on November 19, 1945 to devise a plan for the integration of the WAC in the post war Army and the organized reserve corps. The group prepared four plans for legislation. The first plan provided for Regular Army and Reserve status for WAC commissioned officers, warrant officers, and enlisted women. Under the second plan WAC officers, NCOs, and enlisted women would not be admitted into the Regular Army, but instead form a Women’s Reserve section in the Organized Reserve Corps. The third option provided for Regular Army and reserve status for WAC commissioned and warrant officers only. The fourth plan additionally provided for a group of enlisted women called “Auxiliary Specialists” who would serve in the Regular Army and the reserve.320 Although Colonel Boyce believed that it would be more promising to quickly pursue the reserve plan 319

320

Strength of the Army Report (STM-30), 31.3. 1947, c.i. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 28. ODWAC, Presentation of Four Plans for Inclusion of Women, Other than Those of the Medical Department, in the Post-War Military Establishment, Dec 45, History Collection, WAC Museum, C.i. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 31-2.

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and postpone the Regular Army plan for a later decision, in February 1946 Eisenhower directed G-1 Maj. General Willard S. Paul to draft a bill that would integrate the WAC both into the Regular Army and the Reserves.321 In order to generate enough momentum for this proposal, the Army had to show that enough WAC personnel on active and retired status would be willing to stay in the Army or reenlist.322 Soon the War Department launched a major campaign to convince former Wacs to reenter the Corps and persuade Wacs to extend their active duty and long enough for congress to integrate the WAC into the Regular Army. Fourteen specially trained WAC officers toured the United States and visited 105 installations within one month in order to inform Wacs about retention und reenlistment programs and advertise the legislative plans.323 These retention and reentry programs helped to keep the WAC alive during the period that the WAC bill struggled for passage in Congress. In April 1947, a bill became law that granted the Army Nurse Corps and the Navy Nurse Corps permanent military status.324 The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, had convinced the commander of the Marine Corps, General Alexander A. Vandegrift in 1947, to jointly seek legislation integrating the WAVES and Women Marines not only in the Reserves, but also in the regular Navy and Marine Corps. The Regular Army legislation, in contrast, moved haltingly. Resistance against a permanent women’s corps was much stronger than in the medical field. Deputy Director Hallaren succeeded Westray Boyce as DWAC while the WAC leadership as well as the officers and enlisted women who were still overseas grew increasingly impatient. After the WAC Integration Act of 1946 had been rejected in the respective committees of each chamber, a new measure was introduced when the 80th Congress convened in January 1947. The chairmen of the newly re-

321

322 323

324

The plan to draft a bill for the establishment of a Women’s Army Corps in the Regular Army with concurrent Reserve status was formally announced on February 5, 1946. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 33. Ibid., 35. Memos, DWAC to G-1, 2 February 1946, subject: WAC Volunteer Program, and DWAC to G-1, April 8, 1946, subject: WAC Volunteer Program, c.i. ibid. United States. Congress. Public Law 36. 80th Congress, 1st Sess., approved April 16, 1947. An Act to Establish a Permanent Nurse Corps of the Army and Navy and to Establish a Women’s Medical Specialists Corps in the Army.

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named Armed Services Committees introduced the revised WAC bill on 15 April 1947 as H.R. 3054 in the House and as S. 1103 in the Senate. 325 Gallup polls showed that a majority of American men and women favored a peacetime contingent of women.326 On 15 July the Senate Armed Services Committee combined the WAC and WAVES/Women Marines bills into one, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1947. Both General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz testified in favor of the combined bill before the Armed Services Committee. For the first time, Eisenhower spoke of the opportunity for women to make the armed forces their career: “[The time has] come when we must stabilize the Women’s Army Corps in order to offer those still in uniform and prospective members a career with prestige and security. We cannot ask these women to remain on duty, nor can we ask qualified personnel to volunteer, if we cannot offer them permanent status.” 327

On 23 July the bill was unanimously approved by the full Senate and forwarded to the House.328 Next, Carl Vinson, ranking minority member of the House Armed Service Committee, stalled the bill in the House for eight months in subcommittee before the new Republican chairman of Armed Services, Walter G. Andrews of New York, decided to bring it before the committee in a watered-down version, with the regular status of women taken out.

325

326 327

328

United States. Congress. House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Organization and Mobilization. Hearing on S. 1641. 80th Congress, 1st sess. A Bill to Establish the Women’s Army Corps in the Regular Army, to Authorize the Enlistment and Appointment of Women in the Regular Navy and Marine Corps and the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve, and for Other Purposes. Washington, DC: GPO, 1948. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 746. United States, et al. Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1947: Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eightieth Congress, First Session, on S. 1103, a Bill to Establish the Women's Army Corps in the Regular Army, and for Other Purposes, S. 1527, a Bill to Authorize the Enlistment and Appointment of Women in the Regular Navy and Marine Corps and the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve, and for Other Purposes [and] S. 1641, a Bill to Establish the Women's Army Corps in the Regular Army, to Authorize the Enlistment and Appointment of Women in the Regular Navy and Marine Corps and the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve, and for Other Purposes. July 2, 9, 15, 1947. Washington, DC: GPO, 1947. Further quoted as Hearings on S. 1641. Hearings on S.1641, 23 Jul 47, 101. The Department of the Navy had introduced legislation (H.R. 5915) in March 1946 to create women's reserve groups in the Naval Reserve and the Marine Corps Reserve as well as provide for women's limited peacetime active duty. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 38.

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In March 1948 the House Armed Service Committee voted twenty six to one to pass the Reserve-only legislation.329 Representative Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the sole dissenter. She stated that the “issue is simple – either the armed services have a permanent need of women officers and enlisted women or they do not. If they do, then the women must be given permanent status. [....] I am further convinced that it is better to have no legislation at all than to have legislation of this type.”330 Proponents of the Reserveonly solution were Carl Vinson and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Walter G. Andrews. Andrews expressed “considerable, not antagonism, but antipathy to the thought of women being brought into the regular services on exactly the same basis as men permanently.”331 Chairman Andrews, determined to jettison the regular status, listed the Reserve bill on the Congressional consent calendar, which was intended for noncontroversial bills that were reported unanimously approved out of committee and usually passed the full House without debate. Margaret Chase Smith protested and thus single-handedly prevented this legislation being “railroaded through on the consent calendar.” 332 It was better, she maintained, to have no legislation at all. Smith’s objection forced the Armed Services Committee to bring the issue to the floor. In the intense and lengthy debate, Smith proposed an amendment to the bill that would restore regular status to the House version of S. 1641, but was defeated. Opponents of regular service charged those who supported the partial or total integration of women with undermining the very substance of family life. In reference to the Wacs’ planned maximum rate of two percent of the total force Carl Vinson remarked: “If you try to bring in 35,000 [representing 5%, M.H.], you will hear the cry all over the country that you have an army of women.”333 Rep. Leroy Johnson from California opposed to any financial assistance of the servicewomen’s families by stating that this “[would] open the door for wholesale support of husbands by servicewomen.”334 Colonel Hallaren assured him that servicewomen had to prove a 50% dependency on the husband’s salary; women with small or dependent children would not be admitted into the service. The families of servicemen, in contrast, were generally assumed de-

329 330 331 332

333 334

Congressional Record, 23 Mar 48, 7338. Congressional Record, 6 Apr 48, 2411. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 49. Sherman, Janann. No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, 71. U.S. Congress. Hearings on S. 1641. Congressional Record. February 18, 1948, 5624. Ibid.

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pent entirely on his income.335 Leslie S. Perry of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also testified before the committee and proposed an amendment against “discrimination or segregation on account of race, color, religion, or national origin” in all women’s units. He showed that the WAVES had accepted far fewer colored women than the WAC, only two officers and 58 enlisted women in 1945 and six in 1946.336 Chairman Vinson pointed to the Constitution and rejected any further provision. “If Negroes are qualified and meet the requirement, we can and do accept them […] Let us legislate for the whole country and not for any particular group.”337 After the Senate had rejected the revised bill it was transferred to a joint conference committee, which was more sympathetic towards women’s integration into the regular armed forces. The conferees reached a compromise on 19 May: The House members had given in and agreed to restore the original wording with two amendments.338 Finally, the House and the Senate both voted on the original bill, which integrated the WAC in the Regular Army as well as in the Reserve.339 President Harry S. Truman signed the bill on June 12, 1948.340 Although the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act constituted a breakthrough for many women, it nevertheless permanently fixed the basis for ethnic and gendered discrimination within the armed forces during the next two decades. Women were not allowed to make up more than two percent of all armed forces and female officers could not surpass ten percent of all officers commissioned, with the notable exception of nurses.341 Promotion

335 336 337 338

339

340 341

Ibid., February 23, 1948, 5622. King, Separate and Unequal, 130. U.S. Congress. Hearings on S. 1641. Congressional Record, 5657. U.S. Congress, House, Report of the Conference Committee on S. 1641, House Report 2051, 80th Cong, 2nd sess, May 25, 1948, 22. Two amendments were added to the original bill: A maximum number for the recruitment of women between 1948 and 1950 and a limit to the promotion of women. While women were now assured of a right to serve, the act restricted their numbers considerably. It laid down restrictions on types of duty assignments, specifying that in the Navy and Air Force, women could not be assigned to aircraft while the aircraft was engaged in combat missions, nor could they serve on vessels of the Navy except on hospital ships and Navy transports. Only the Army retained their women in the WAC as separate corps. Congressional Record, 2 Jun 48, 7052; PL 625, 80th Cong, 2d sess, 12 Jun 48. 62 Stat. 357, 358 United States, Statutes at Large. During the hearing General Dwight D. Eisenhower as well as representative Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas had proposed a higher percentage of women. Hearing on S.1641, 1621-25.

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for women was limited.342 There was no restriction to noncombat positions, but existing provisions excluded women from duties that required combat training. For a limited period, women could be assigned to any branch, except Infantry, Artillery and Cavalry.343 In order to foreclose the competition of male and female officers for promotion, female officers were not allowed to obtain a commission that included command over men.344 For the same reason, Wac promotion followed a separate scheme. Female recruits could enlist at age 18 and required a written consent of both of their parents. Benefits for dependent family members were not paid automatically, with female soldiers having to prove their husbands’ need for support. Children of servicewomen were only deemed dependent after their father’s death.345 Wacs nevertheless perceived the act as progress. From the auxiliary corps of the WAAC in 1942 to temporary and permanent military status in 1943 and 1948, the act had turned servicewomen into ordinary members of the Regular Army and the Army Reserve.346

2.7 Combat: Drawing the Line The question of whether the war had a lasting effect on the American society’s gendered order or whether the obvious changes were rather temporary has received more scholarly attention with regard to women on the home front than in the military.347 The fact that American women for the first time during WWII entered several military services’ women’s components that became permanent parts of the military after the war does seem like a dramatic

342

343 344 345

346 347

The highest rank obtainable for women was lieutenant colonel or commander in the Navy. Additionally, only one woman in each service could be promoted to the rank of colonel or captain in the Navy for a limited term of four years and women could command only female units. 62 Stat. 357, 360-61. 363, 368. United States, Statutes at Large. D’Amico and Weinstein, Gender Camouflage, 41. Decision of the Comptroller General, B-35441, August 4, 1943; c.i. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 14-15. The same stipulations were employed in the Organized Reserve Corps (ORC). PL 80-625, June 12, 1948. §210, 62 Stat. 368 United States, Statutes at Large. There appears to be a general consensus that although women temporarily assumed new roles in the economy, there has been no lasting or radical transformation resulting from this. Campbell, Women at War. Rupp, Mobilizing Women. Honey, Creating Rosie. Milkman, Gender at Work. Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front. Chafe, The Paradox of Change, argues in favor of radical changes.

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departure from pre-war gender roles. How much change to the gender order could the public tolerate? For some people the question was also how the inevitable changes to the wartime gendered labor market could be prevented from becoming permanent. “Women are the invisible combatants of World War II,” argues D’Ann Campbell.348 The rendering invisible and exclusion of women from combat (still a much debated issue to this day) along with the rule precluding women from having command authority over men intended to protect a particular form of masculinity and virility which the military perceived as its core. While women in military non-combat positions constituted a blurring of traditional gender roles, women in combat positions posed the threat of their inversion. Combat, I argue, is where the American public drew the gender line. Despite this, there was no uncontested definition of what constituted combat and the boundaries of the concept were continuously probed, challenged, and negotiated through symbolic practices. General George Marshall and other military officers were willing to test women’s performance as well as public and congressional resistance in a secret experiment with integrated mixed-gender units in the Anti-aircraft Artillery (AA). They were aware of the extent and character of other countries’ utilization of womanpower, and they were the ones concerned with over-all strength, military efficiency and the ‘teeth-to-tail’ ratio. The British experiment with women in AA batteries began in 1941 when the National Service Act drafted 125,000 women into the military over the next three years with 430,000 more volunteering.349 The Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the largest of the women’s services, began as a woman’s auxiliary to the military in 1938 and was granted military status in 1941.350 The di-

348

349

350

Campbell, Women in Combat: The World War Two Experience. She refers not to resistance fighters or guerrillas, but adopts as a definition of combat “an organized lethal attack on an organized enemy that does not include self-defense in emergency situations. (Ibid.) See also Fenner and Young, Women in Combat. Goldman, Female Soldiers. Grahn, In the Company of WACs. Georgia Watson was also a graduate of OCS at Ft. Des Moines, IA and was assigned to “Battery X”. She later served in England. Watson, World War II in a Khaki Skirt. From a more contemporary point of view, Rosemarie Skaine analyzes the contradictions between definitions of combat and the way that the military has been organized. Skaine, Women at War. Wekesser and Polesetsky, Women in the Military. De Groot, ‘I Love the Scent’. Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary was one of the volunteers serving in an AA brigade. Churchill, Winston. The Second World War. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin; 1985-1986. 6 v . vol. 6. Triumph and Tragedy, 35. Pile, Ack-Ack. See also [Anonymus: J. W. N.] “`Mixed’ Batteries.” Journal of the Royal Artillery 69.3 (1942): 199-206. Thomas, Women in the Military, 629.

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vision of labor at AA batteries was such that male officers of the AA regiments commanded the batteries, women officers from ATS served as “gender commissars,” supervising the enlisted women who operated the firecontrol instruments, while enlisted men operated the actual guns.351 By late 1943, over 56,000 women were working for the AA Command, most of them close to London. ATS women were also assigned to searchlight units. These units, scattered around the gun were comprised of the women who operated the beam and a male soldier with a tripod-mounted light machine gun.352 Initially, there was considerable fear of unfavorable public comment or sexscandals in the mixed searchlight or the battery crews.353 Instead, “close working relationships” seemed to have developed, “a form of bonding which was vital when the batteries came under fire.”354 Despite harsh living conditions, morale was high in the mixed batteries. The women wore the AA Command insignia and while on duty were called Bombardiers and Gunners.355 The first woman killed in action was Private J. Caveney, who was hit by a bomb splinter. The total ATS battle casualties were 389 killed or wounded.356 Anti-aircraft Artillery corps commanders reported that the experiment with mixed units was an “unqualified success.” The ATS women performed their operational duties with “tremendous keenness and enthusiasm.”357 With regard to public opinion, the British government did not formally classify these AA jobs as combat and, at least symbolically as D’Ann Campbell argues, prohibited the women from pulling the trigger. “The mixed AA crews were as much combat teams as were the airplane crews they shot down.”358 Based on the positive reports of British officers and General Dwight Eisenhower as to how effectively mixed gender AA units could be expected to perform, Marshall decided to conduct his own experiment.359 Colonel E.W. 351

352 353 354

355 356 357 358 359

“The Second World War Memories of Miss G. Morgan,” mss PP/MainCR/115, 1, Imperial War Museum, London, c.i. Campbell, Women in Combat. [Anonymous]: “Two ATS AA Officers,” Life, 82. Pile, Ack-Ack, 227-28. See also [Anonymous], The Work. Boileau, Searchlight, 12. Bidwell, The Women’s Royal Army Corps, 127. D’Ann Campbell, Women in Combat. Pile, Ack-Ack, 36-37; Bidwell, Women’s Royal Army Corps, 130. Ibid., 126. See also [Anonymous]: “Two ATS AA Officers,” Life, 80-83. Bidwell, Women’s Royal Army Corps, 130-32. Pile, Ack-Ack, 192, 194. [Anonymous: J. W. N.] ‘Mixed’ Batteries, 202-4. Campbell, Women in Combat. Report no. 1101 Eisenhower to General Marshall, August 12, 1942. Women’s Army Corps WDCSA 1942-43, 291.9; Reel 306, Item 4688. Original in NA, copy in GM Library. Mar-

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E.W. Timberlake was the Commanding Officer of the Anti-aircraft Artillery Command (AAAC), Military District of Washington, which included the 36th Coast Artillery Brigade AA to which the Waacs were to be assigned when their training was completed. Out of concern for possible scandals over men and women working in close proximity, the project was highly secret. Third officer Elna J. Hilliard, along with Army liaison officer Major William Warrick, was put in charge of the experiment. The purpose was to determine if, and in what positions of Anti-aircraft Tables of Organization (T/O), qualified women could be found in sufficient numbers to warrant training and assignment as a standard practice.360 Hilliard and Warrick were assigned the task of drawing up command policies and procedures that were in accordance with Army policies as well as with WAAC Regulations. This proved difficult at times because the WAAC was still a civilian organization serving with the Army. The Waacs belonged to three companies, the 150th and 151st WAAC Technical Companies and the 62nd WAAC Operations Company.361 The 21 officers and 374 enrollees were trained on two composite anti-aircraft gun batteries and searchlight units from December 15, 1942 to April 15, 1943. The 150th WAAC Technical Company trained at Camp Simms for work in a regimental and a battalion headquarters and the 151st Company was assigned to an Experimental Battery in the Washington, DC area. The forward command post was at Bolling Field in DC, where the filter board was located that tracked all aircraft. By mid-February, the Waacs had replaced 46 enlisted men and had taken over the entire fire control section of the 90-mm gun battery. Composite Battery X, also a 90-mm gun battery, was then activated at Camp Simms. The women were trained and assigned to operate various instruments, among them for instance the fire control director to get on target, track the target and electrically transfer that information to the gun. The gunner then had to match two pointers on the dials for direction and elevation of the gun. In contrast to their British counterparts, Waacs were not assigned to outlying and isolated searchlight positions. They were not assigned to fire guns, nor

360 361

shall to Eisenhower, 6 Aug 1942 and Marshall Memorandum, 18 Nov. 1942 in Bland, Larry I. and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall. 5 Vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981-2003. 3:288-89, 443-444, 561. Chandler, Alfred Dupont, et al. Eds. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. 21 Vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970-2001. 1:450-51. Grahn, In the Company of Wacs, 20. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 30. 10 officers and over 200 enrolled women reported for duty in December 1942.

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were they given small arms training. Likewise, no automatic weapons batteries were included in the experiment because at those gun sites gun and fire control crews had to be interchangeable. Despite this, the Waacs were briefed on the function of automatic weapons batteries. At times during training, they also took the positions of men in the gun crews in order to “experience the end product of their work in the fire control section, thus to become cognizant of the effect of erratic tracking.”362 When Hobby inspected the unit and was erroneously told that an enlisted woman had been operating a gun, she became “furious.”363 For Colonel Timberlake, the outcome of the experiment was clear, particularly since the choice was between all-male units made up of mostly limited service personnel mixed units staffed with highly motivated Waacs. “The experiences […] indicate that all WAAC personnel exhibited an outstanding devotion to duty, willingness and ability to absorb and grasp technical information concerning the problems, maintenance and tactical disposition to all type of equipment.”364 Timberlake estimated that WAAC personnel could be substituted for men in 60% of all Anti-aircraft Artillery positions. Maj. General John T. Lewis of the Military District of Washington, his superior, came to a similar conclusion. In May 1943, he proposed to continue the experiment, increase the number of Waacs about tenfold to 103 officers and 2,315 enlisted women, and replace half the 3,630 men in his AA Defense Command with them.365 Far from discussing the question whether this constituted combat duty, the final report to the War Department concluded that “WAAC personnel can be used in performing many of the tasks of the Anti-aircraft Artillery.” The report also echoed the then widespread belief that women were “superior to men in all functions involving delicacy of manual dexterity, such as operation at the director, height finder, radar, and searchlight control systems. They perform routine repetitious tasks in a manner superior to men. […] The morale of women used in the AAA was generally high due to the

362 363 364

365

Grahn, In the Company of Wacs, 42. Ibid., 35, 42. U.S. War Department. Organization and Training Division. G-3. File 291.9 WAAC, July 7, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 211, Box 199. Ibid. 5-10; June 15, 1943 Memorandum for Asst. C/S G-3, /s/ Lewis, file 291.9 WAAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 212, Box 199.

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fact that they felt that they were making a direct contribution to the successful prosecution of the war.”366 Was the American public ready to hear that women were assigned combat positions? How would that influence proposals to draft women or the progress of the WAC Bill in Congress? In assigning the women to General Lewis’ command, Marshall knew he would have to disclose the experiment and prepare for a public debate not only on the issue of women in combat, but also on that of the WAC in the Army. For Marshall it was most important that the Wacs were able to serve overseas. The WAC bill had just been withdrawn by the War Department because of a proposed amendment to the Navy bill that would forbid WAVES from serving overseas and was to be resubmitted in May.367 If Congress learned that Marshall wanted the Wacs to serve in combat units, the WAC bill might have sunk forever or the Army’s ability to utilize women might have been severely restricted. Rumors about women firing guns or sleeping in men’s barracks would severely harm WAC recruiting. It was also clear that existing legislation would have to be changed if Congress decided to continue the assignment of women to the AA as a combatant organization.368 General Miller White (G-1), too, acknowledged that the experiment had been an unqualified success, but argued that since the present strength of the WAAC was far below total requirements, the Waacs could be “more efficiently employed in many other positions for which requisitions are already in hand, and that their use in Anti-aircraft artillery to release limited service personnel is not justified under present circumstances.”369 It was the Army staff’s consensus that “national policy or public opinion is [not] yet ready to accept the use of women in field force units.”370

366

367 368

369

370

MDW Narrative Report, July 10, 1943. File 324.5 (151st WAAC Tech Co). William H. Cartwright, Jr. The Military District of Washington in the War Years (1942-1945). [no place, selfpublished, ca. 1946.] C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 301-2. Campbell, Women at War, 20. According to the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Congress would have to change the existing legislation, and the new Section 20 would read, “Nothing in this act shall prevent any member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps from service with any combatant organization with her own consent.”ASF Director of Administration, 020 WAAC, November 18, 1942. NARA. RG 160, Box 1. Brig. General Ray E. Porter, Asst. Conf G-3, Xerox 2788, July 14, 1943, ASF, Director of Personnel, Military Personnel Division. NARA. RG 160, Entry 484, Box 491. General Russell Reynolds, ASF, Director of Personnel, Military Personnel Division. NARA. RG 160, Entry 485, Box 491.

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Marshall terminated the experiment and dissolved the mixed AA units. Over the protest of the AA command, but with Colonel Hobby’s concurrence, he reassigned the Waacs for use in overhead installations to replace combat fit men. The records were kept confidential and filed for future use. They were not declassified until 1968. G-3 Division concluded that “The experiment which has been conducted of employing WAAC personnel in Antiaircraft artillery units has demonstrated conclusively the practicability of using members of the Corps in that role.”371 D’Ann Campbell argues that if there had been a more imminent threat from the air to the continental U.S., then Waacs in AA positions might have become a higher priority. Waacs, however, were in short supply and most needed to serve in clerical and administrative positions while there were more than enough male limited service personnel to fill the current need for AA units.372 Although the qualitative distinction between combat and non-combat positions was and is somewhat artificial in the case of the Anti-aircraft Artillery, the American public would not have that imaginary line blurred. Marshall’s decision against disclosing the successful experiment to the public may well have saved the WAC Bill from being torn to pieces in Congress.

371 372

General George C. Marshall, August 13, 1943. NARA. RG 160, Entry 489, Box 492. Campbell, Women in Combat.

3. Constructing the Woman|Soldier through Recruiting Campaigns, Media Coverage and Public Relations

Even before the WAAC had its own publicity apparatus for WAAC recruiting, the news media played the most important role in getting the public informed and interested and ultimately influencing eligible women to enlist. From the first day of the Corps, it was critical for the WAAC that newspapers and magazines, radio and movie tone newsreels reported favorably. The WAAC was to be portrayed as an organization that was genuinely helping the war effort, enjoyed public acceptance and a positive image. In the initial months, all major news media gave ample coverage to the new women’ corps, which was largely responsible for the great number of applications the recruiting stations were swamped with. In this early stage, newspapers and magazines focused on explaining the purpose of the Corps, supplied information about enlistment requirements, and explored the perceived tensions between what was generally thought of as women’s role and the military. The changing focus of the media coverage directly correlated with public attitude toward military women. Recruiting figures, but also several public opinion polls, suggest that the public acceptance of the Corps plummeted to an all time low in the summer and fall of 1943 when after an initial overachievement, the WAAC had great difficulty in filling the recruiting quotas. 373 When the novelty of the Corps had worn off, the corps plunged into several image crises that were always also recruiting crises. Mobilizing women for military service on a large scale was an unprecedented challenge for the armed forces. Although women had been mobilized as part of the war effort in WWI, the Army had never depended on a large group of women voluntarily enlisting for military service. The realization that the public and eligible women needed to be ‘sold’ the idea of voluntary service for the Armed Forces was neither immediate nor unanimous. Recruiting for the Corps can be loosely grouped in several phases.374 From August 1942 to November 1942, WAAC recruiting was handled by the U.S. 373

374

Allen, The News Media, 77. Allen argues that radio and movietone news had the greatest impact after mid-1943. Both of them followed the trends set by newspapers and magazines. “A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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Army Recruiting Service, which organized first recruiting campaign in the period between December 1942 and March 1943 when the President had authorized ever larger quotas of Waacs. Between April 1943 and August 1943 WAAC recruiting came under the authority of WAAC Headquarters. After enlistment had almost come to a halt in August, the newly established WAC took up recruiting itself and launched several successful campaigns after September 1943. A woman’s decision to enlist for voluntary military service took place in a complex discursive formation ranging from a progressive sense of empowerment to a strong patriotic discourse on women shouldering their civic duty and contributing to the war effort. Moreover, women’s military service, precisely because it was understood to be outside the traditional realm of femininity, was considered a sacrifice the women were to make for the duration of the war. By constructing the home front as a mere extension of the home, however, the self-sacrificing of women also reinforced a woman’s traditional familial role as the supporter of her husband. Finally, by augmenting the fighting force as noncombatants, military women could, even in the Army, be portrayed as the preservers of peacetime virtues, moral values, and the stability of the home. All of these competing discourses were present and made use of in recruiting and publicity. The WAC emphasized femininity, for example, by frequently feeding the press stories of various post mascots or efforts to decorate their barracks and planting flowers to create a homely atmosphere. Even in the military, so the stereotypical story went, women cared for kittens, puppies and flowers while longing “for the real thing more than anything. […] A girl’s experience in the Wacs serves to accentuate her desire for home […] and children. When you put on a uniform, you don’t change nature.”375 The bottom line and perhaps the most important sales message was that the WAAC did not change “nature,” that their military service did not make the women “mannish,” but even enhanced their femininity. Millions of soldiers and civilians wanted to be reassured that “[t]he Wac who shares your Army life will make a better post-war wife!”376 This was by no means exclusive to women in uniform. In her analysis of American propaganda during the Second World War, Leila Rupp has argued that portrayals of women war workers aimed at convincing the public to accept women in “men’s jobs” and simultaneously preserved feminine identities shaped by traditional gender

375 376

“Restless Wacs demand Hand in War.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92 File 330.14. WAC News Letter Vol. 1, No. 14 September 1944, 7. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 218.

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roles.377 Women’s employment in male fields “for the duration” did not challenge traditional gender roles. WAAC and WAC recruiting reflected middle class values that were associated with the ideal of respectability and morality of women in a men’s world. The invocation of the patriotic sacrifice has traditionally worked both ways. The respectable woman who selflessly shouldered her civic duty could later hope to claim citizenship rights. In numerous speeches, Hobby appealed to women’s clubs and sororities by stressing the “secondary benefits” that membership in the WAAC paid. When addressing the African American college women of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, for instance, Hobby promised prospective Waacs that the training they were to receive would make them “better citizen[s]” and pointed out “the value of a disciplined mind and a trained body” for the women and their communities. “[W]hen peace comes, […] the woman who has served with the Corps will take her place as a leader.”378 This chapter will first examine different recruiting campaigns and the discourses that informed them. Recruiting suffered significantly from the fact that the Army was reluctant to create duplicate structures for WAAC recruiting and publicity. Existing Army recruiting and induction agencies were ill equipped to convince and enlist women volunteers. Between WAAC officers, Army recruiting personnel and civilian advertising experts concerned with WAAC recruiting different opinions existed as to how eligible women could be reached and convinced to join a military service. The various recruiting campaigns with their themes and slogans reflected this ambiguity. Secondly, the WAAC efforts to gain some control over its own public relations, despite a press coverage that was often less than favorable will be examined. Because of resistance from the Bureau of Public Relations (BPR) and other government and Army agencies, the WAC Group that actively devised PR campaigns for the WAC in the BPR was not established before 1944. After having identified the network of competing discourses and practices, we will turn to a different class of sources: songs and camp newspapers. Both are interesting because they allow for the production, storage, and transportation of the WAAC’s very own tradition, folk tales, and myths. They serve to negotiate the position the women had with or in the military organization, but at the

377 378

Rupp, Mobilizing Women, 176. Address by Oveta C. Hobby before Non-Partisan Council of Public Affairs of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Howard University, July 6, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211.

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same time, vis á vis that organization. The songs collected in WAC songbooks were of various origins. Some were old military songs that were superficially adapted for the WAAC or WAC. Some were written by enlisted women or other amateur writers and sung to existing tunes, while others were written by professional composers. The songs contain elements of many different discourses. Some appropriated patriotic themes hitherto reserved for male combat soldiers. Marching songs and unit songs were used for the same purpose of boosting morale. A number of songs reflected the women’s new life in the Corps and a surprising number re-appropriated and ironically affirmed derogatory comments by Army men and civilians.

3.1 “Petticoat Army” or “Doughgirl Generalissimo”379 The swearing-in of the WAAC’s designated Director Oveta Culp Hobby was the first ceremony staged with particular regard to the press. The first Waac had to raise her hand and repeat the oath several times for the photographers, who had difficulty with the shadow cast by her wide-brimmed hat. The following press conference exemplified many of the public relations battles that were to be fought over the next three years. The War Department through Hobby, General Marshall and the head of the Bureau of Public Relations, Maj. General Alexander Surles, was trying to convey an image of the WAAC as a “sober, hard-working organization, composed of dignified and sensible women.”380 Hobby found that the press tended to pattern news on women on three stereotypes – a woman was typically portrayed as either a “giddy featherbrain frequently engaged in powderpuff wars and with no interest beyond clothes, cosmetics, and dates,” “a henpecking old battle-ax who loved to boss the male species,” or “a sainted wife and mother.”381 For Hobby, the question was whether the public would read stories of the Waacs’ “real work and useful jobs, [or] of her underwear, cosmetics, dates with soldiers, her rank-pulling, sex life, and misconduct.”382 Indeed, reporters focused much on the issue of “feminine” versus “martial” qualities. Hobby herself was portrayed as a “slender, quietly pretty, very feminine woman, a Southern lady with an aura of breeding and gentility, wearing a

379 380 381 382

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 49. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47-8. Ibid., 48.

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straw sailor hat and a stylishly plain suit.”383The press also asked many questions of what the uniform, especially the underwear, would look like, whether make-up would be allowed and whether Waacs would march and drill with arms. The pre-planners had been convinced that women would be induced primarily by an attractive uniform. Although it was later found that clothing rated much lower on the list of reasons why women joined the service, the Army’s press releases and its secretiveness regarding the underwear did much to blow the apparent importance of the clothing issue out of proportion.384 The next publically visible task of the new Corps was the selection of the first officer candidates. Hobby’s position, backed by a General Staff decision, was not to grant any direct commissions to civilian women. The WAAC bill would have permitted the Corps to commission many of its officers directly from civil life with appropriate rank, as was also a common practice in the Army and the WAVES. Many Army officers had from the moment the bill was signed tried to secure officers commissions for secretaries or other women they believed worthy. African American women’s organizations urged Hobby to name a black assistant director.385 Finally, congressmen and public officials tried to secure commissions for constituents, friends and relatives. Hobby felt that even if few direct commissions had been granted, it would have been difficult to refuse hundreds of others with prominent sponsors. Thus, all applicants were asked to apply at their local Army recruiting stations. They were the only women who were directly selected for officer candidate school. Subsequent Waacs had to enlist without guarantees and future WAAC officers were then selected for Officer Candidate School (OCS) from the ranks of enlisted women.386 The selection of the first officer candidates was widely reported by the press. It was at the same time one of the first opportunities to attempt to steer media coverage into the direction the Director desired. The initial screening criteria strongly reflected the WAAC’s definition of respectability, which was linked to class background and education. The induction of the new officer candidates, as well as the publicity on the WAAC, reflected middle class, not working class values. Creating legitimacy and gaining public sanction for the Corps was also framed by contemporary sexualized racial stereotypes, to which I will come back in chapter six. 383

384 385 386

Pogue, Forrest C. George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1943-45. New York: Viking Press, 1973, 107. Allen, The News Media. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 59. Ibid., 54.

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About 30,000 women filed applications for the WAAC in Army recruiting stations. The applicants were then summoned for an aptitude test and those who passed the test were screened by a preliminary local interviewing board consisting of two “prominent” local women and an Army officer selected by the corps area. The pre-planners had sent out instructions that the members of the national screening board were to be “local personnel directors, business executives, YWCA supervisors, and women of like standing,” but they also included several women professors, the Dean of Women at Purdue University and the Dean of the School of Home Economics of Cornell University.387 After the physical examinations in Army medical facilities, a final screening board, the “Director’s Representatives,” conducted lengthier personal interviews with the applicants.388 Finally, an “Evaluating Board” of eleven psychiatrists looked at the applicants’ work histories, parents and family, and other background data.389 The appointment of the members of these boards underscores the WAAC director’s “boarding school” approach to recruiting women she deemed “respectable.” Moral guidance was not suspended, it was merely transferred from the parents to the Corps and its officers. Members of the evaluating board selecting future officers were asked to be guided by the question “Would I want my daughter to come under the influence of this woman?”390 During this early stage in the life of the WAAC the Corps received a fair share of media coverage. Newspapers generally used Army press releases and syndicated material or combined both with a reporter’s perspective on a local event. Smaller papers that did not maintain correspondents at the East Coast depended mostly on the news syndicates, which the Army and later WAC public relations bureaus could easily furnish with information.391 Although this meant that the Army could fairly well influence media coverage in the metropolitan areas of Washington, DC and New York City, articles about the WAAC in papers published west of the Alleghenies were rare.

387

388

389 390

391

Bureau of Public Relations, Press Branch, Committees Selecting Officer Candidates for WAAC Announced, June 30, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 55-6. Bureau of Public Relation, Committees Selecting Officer Candidates for Women’s Army Auxiliary Corpss Announced, Press release, June 30, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 57. Ibid., 56. See also “Life in the WAC: A Word to Parents.” Oveta Culp Hobby Papers, LoC. Allen, The News Media, 78.

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3.2 “Release a Man to Fight” The first WAAC recruiting campaign began on December 21, 1942 when all service commands were assigned new quotas for the first three months of 1943. The total number of women to be recruited was 75,000.392 While the original planning for the Corps had been based on obtaining 25,000 enlistments within the first fiscal year, President Roosevelt authorized a strength of 150,000 by Executive Order on November 20, 1942.393 This goal, to be attained by the end of June 1943, meant for the Corps to triple its size in four months. Although the Adjutant General had prepared the “General Plan for Enrollment of WAAC” as early as July 1942, WAAC recruiting operations were “based on expediency rather than plan,” as Hobby observed later. “[D]uring the first year of its operation it was more or less a side issue with the Army Recruiting Service to which its operation was assigned.”394 The Army Recruiting Service had never voluntarily enlisted a great number of men or women because with World War I, universal conscription in times of war had become an established tradition. With the Selective Service System handling most of the induction of men, the Army Recruiting Service was now “being forced to attempt a feat entirely outside its experience: to bring in larger numbers of women than it had ever obtained of men, and this in a nation that indorsed the idea that “women’s place is in the home.”395 The Recruiting Publicity Bureau was busy with producing publicity material for Aviation Cadets, then the main objective of the Army Recruiting Service, and had no capacities to produce material for WAAC recruiting. To make matters worse, the Army Recruiting Service had lost much of its personnel. Approximately 110 officers were assigned to WAAC recruiting.396 Most of them

392

393

394

395 396

Memorandum Colonel Clyde Pickett, Appointment and Induction Branch to Adjutant General, subject: Organization plans for WAAC recruiting drive, January 29, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4297. Executive Order 9274 Authorizing an Increase in the Number of Units and Members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, War Department Bulletin no. 58, 28 November 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 199. The Adjutant General, “General Plan for Enrollment of WAAC.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Oveta Culp Hobby, Memorandum for Director, WD Bureau of Public Relations, subject: Problems and Deterrents in Connection with WAC Recruiting, February 18, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 168. A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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were entirely unfamiliar with the WAAC or its purpose. Army officers nevertheless believed that recruitment and promotion of women should be subsumed under existing agencies, rather than to create duplicate structures.397 This worked fairly well as long as the number of Waacs authorized by Congress was small enough and women interested in the Corps far exceeded training facilities. When the expansion program increased the authorized strength from 25,000 to 100,000, the Army Recruiting Service came under more strain. According to the “Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC,” written by the planning committee of the Recruiting and Induction Section and printed by the Recruiting Publicity Bureau, the actual conduct of recruiting was left to the nine service commands.398 The new quotas posed serious challenges. The Fourth Service Command, for instance, had enrolled 1,348 women in the four months between July 20, 1942, when enrollment of Waacs began and November 30, the day when the new quotas were assigned. In the three months between then and March 1943, the Service Command was asked to enroll 9,000 new members. To create additional pressure on the Service Commands, the Adjutant General suggested breaking down the quota between the individual states in their command, thus “creating interstate rivalry in filling the quota.”399 He further requested reports on the organizational efforts each Service Command had made until the end of the year. The Army Recruiting Service sought professional help and contracted the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. Despite this, the campaign started slowly. Until November, the Adjutant General’s Recruiting Publicity Bureau (RPB) in New York City had printed and distributed only one WAAC recruiting poster and one information pamphlet. In cooperation with the Office of War Information the Recruiting Publicity Bureau devised a radio campaign and prepared short spot announcements, read “live” by announcers as well as one-minute and fifteen-minute dramatized announcements. Short announcements were included in sponsored commercial programs, which had

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In contrast, the Navy placed the responsibility for recruiting and enlisting WAVES in the hands of the Office of Naval Officer Procurement. They also directly commissioned civilian advertising and publicity experts in order to recruit WAVES. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 169 and Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 64. Army of the United States, “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 199. Letter Adjutant General to Commanding General, Fourth Service Command, subject: Enrollment quota for WAAC period January 1, to March 31, 1943, December 21, 1942. NARA. RG 407, Box 4297.

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donated time to Army Recruiting and Induction Service. One-minute scripts were prepared weekly and transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI), which scheduled them for production and distribution in transcribed form. Dramatized programs lasting 15-minutes in duration were produced by contracted actors from NBC under the supervision of RPB. Recordings were then converted into transcriptions and distributed on a regular schedule to 682 radio stations.400 For the print media, Ayer & Son produced ads appearing in 654 daily, Sunday and weekly Newspapers. Additionally, RPB produced posters, car cards, booklets, leaflets and post cards as well as material for Army Life, RPB’s own publication with a monthly circulation of 30,000. Competition by Other Government Agencies In wartime, womanpower was a much sought-after resource. One of the main competitors for women’s labor was the newly created War Manpower Commission (WMC). The WMC was given jurisdiction over the Selective Service system in December of 1942.401 One of its primary goals was to secure 4,000,000 women for civilian industry. In order to meet this goal, the WMC tried to restrict WAAC recruiting to non-critical labor areas, excluding most centers of population. From the Army’s point of view, the Commission did not possess the power to limit the recruiting of women who volunteered for military service and were not subject to a draft. The commission also tried to exempt entire occupational fields that were in short supply in the industry. This was the case in the clerical, stenographic, and other fields much needed by the Army. In many areas, WAC recruiting was under constant fire.402 The WMC was of the opinion that women would best and most efficiently help the war effort by working in the war industry, not in the military services. Other government agencies, such as the General Accounting Office 400

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By the end of 1942, the Recruiting Publicity Bureau produced 33 spot announcements, as well as 13 1-minute and three 15-minute recordings. “Summary of Organizational and Promotional Work Effected for the WAAC by the Recruiting and Induction Section, Procurement Branch, A.G.O. and the Recruiting Publicity Bureau.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Fairchild, Byron and Jonathan Grossman. The Army and Industrial Manpower. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1959, 21-33. Flynn, George Q. The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979, 15-23. Oveta Culp Hobby, Memorandum for Director, WD Bureau of Public Relations, subject: Problems and Deterrents in Connection with WAC Recruiting, February 18, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), were also concerned that their skilled female employees would enlist in the WAAC. Director Hobby felt that even women otherwise eligible should be allowed to join the WAAC and that the Corps as a voluntary organization could not afford to turn down any women just because they might also be qualified to work with other agencies or employers. On 6 February 1943, a General Staff conference decided on the WAAC’s recruiting quotas and implemented severe limitations on women’s enlistment: female federal employees and women from “war industries” would not be accepted without a release from their agencies or employers and agricultural workers were generally not accepted.403 Other military services such as the WAVES, SPARS, and Women Marines also competed with the WAAC for recruiting skilled women. Although their combined quota was less than half that of the WAAC, they had more recruiters in the field.404 The Navy was also in a position to offer various advantages to the better-qualified women. All of their members had military status and college women could be directly commissioned instead of having to serve as enlisted women first. WAVES earned more than twice the base pay for enlisted women and officers were given a money allowance for their uniforms to be individually purchased. Instead of performing mainly administrative duties with the corps, the Navy assigned WAVES operational and technical assignments right away. WAVES were also allowed to socially associate with officers, whereas in the WAAC, as in the Army and Navy, the customary nofraternization rule was applied. WAAC recruiting did not address these factors. The campaign was geared toward college women but failed to take into account the benefits offered by the Navy and war industry. At a time when the T/O system included four different jobs for Waacs, a brochure promised that “[t]he WAAC offer[ed] women one of the most brilliant careers yet opened to them. By demonstrating ability and leadership, they may advance to high commissioned rank.”405 As Capt. Harold A. Edlund, head of WAAC Headquarters’ Recruiting Section who had been in favor of an even greater target quota earlier in the fall, observed in retrospect: “[t]he job was turned over to the Army Recruiting Serv-

403 404

405

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 172. Letter Colonel Edward P. Noyes, Recruiting and Induction officer to Lt Col Vance L Sailor, AGD, Recruiting and Induction Section, March 23, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4296. “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC,” 10. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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ice […] without a proper blue print.”406 With N.W. Ayer & Son’s, whose copy policy seemed directionless, they did not have much help.407 The few recruiting aids the agency produced together with the Army Recruiting Service408 gave information about the expansion of the corps,409 the kinds of jobs to be done, pay and wage scales, and “life in the WAAC.”410 Quality or Quantity: The Enlistment Standards The WAAC’s place in recruiting was still not clear although there was to be “close liaison [...] with WAAC Headquarters” and some sixty newly commissioned WAAC officers had been assigned to Army district recruiting officers in September 1942. The Adjutant General, who was still in control of WAAC recruiting through the Army Recruiting Service, now took a very controversial step in order to meet the quotas: he lowered acceptance standards and simplified the recruiting procedure.411 In the spring of 1943 it became evident that the campaign would not be successful.412 The number of women signing-up dwindled, and because of the lowered standards more women who had previously been rejected were being enlisted .413 New recruits tended to score lower in the Army General Classifi406

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408 409

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Captain Edlund at a conference of training center commandants, March 31–April 1, 1943, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 209. “A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. The recruiting aids included two folders, two mailing pieces and four posters. Ibid. “WAAC Expanded By Executive Order!,” newspaper advertisement, Nov-Dec, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 221. “A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Certain medical tests were omitted and neither letters of recommendation nor statements on occupational training were required any longer. The WAAC questionnaire and the educational requirements were eliminated. The minimum score required in the aptitude test was lowered to only 50 points. Memorandum from Adjutant General, subject: WAAC Recruiting Campaign, April 5, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4296. In February 1943, only 12,270 had been enlisted in spite of the lowered standards. With new training centers available, the quota was raised to 27,000. This quota was not met and with 11,464 the number enlisted in March fell below that of February. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 173-4. The result of the lowered standards is illustrated by the distribution of AGCT results at Fort Des Moines: Between September and December of 1942 Army General Classification tests showed that less than 12 percent fell into the lowest two grades; by October, 60 percent were in Grades I and II, the required score for Army officer candidates. However, during the first months of 1943 standards plummeted, and over 40 percent of all recruits

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cation Test (AGCT) and had lesser educational degrees than those recruited earlier.414 Women with grade school education or less and those whose civilian experience was classified as semiskilled, unskilled, domestic service, or laborer were much more difficult to assign after their basic training. As a result they seriously overcrowded the training centers. In March Director Hobby began protesting the lowered standards and appealed to Lt. General Brehon Somervell, head of the Services of Supply, to reverse that decision. Without the requirement for a civilian doctor’s examination, medical standards were also falling alarmingly. The fact that the rejection rates for certain diseases also varied dramatically between different regions and stations suggests that the reason was most likely the absence of an adequate induction examination for women. In this matter, Hobby was able to convince the Surgeon General that “there are problems of health peculiar to women” and that consequently, the WAAC had to depart from the way the Army handled medical examinations. In May the Surgeon General appointed Major Margaret D. Craighill, formerly dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania to his office as “Consultant for Women’s Health and Welfare.” Craighill’s first task was to devise and publish standards for gynecological and psychiatric screening of applicants and for other medical problems.415 The “toughest sales problem in the country” In March the civilian advertising agency Young & Rubicam conducted a survey of WAAC recruiting at the existing recruiting stations in all parts of the United States. The survey returned quite unfavorable results. Only one third of the researchers acting as applicants believed the WAAC story given to them by the recruiter was very convincing, and all thought it lacked sufficient

414

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received at Des Moines were in Grades IV and V. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 174. In addition to physical standards (height, weight, vision, etc.), the Corps required two years of high school, a police check, employment and character references, and a score of at least 60 on the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) which measured aptitudes and capabilities. The test measured the individual’s skills in reading and vocabulary, arithmetic computation, arithmetic reasoning, and pattern analysis. The Surgeon General, “Plan for Securing Medical and Social Histories of Applicants for Enlistment in the WAC.” Surgeon General, Medical Statistics Division, “WAAC Enrollment Data: Distribution of Waacs Discharged from Service Due to Disability August, 1942 through May, 1943. August 17, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 214. See also Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 178.

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detail.416 The WAAC officers and enlisted women assigned to the Army Recruiting Service often complained about Army recruiting personnel who did not seem to know much about the WAAC and as a result kept WAAC recruiters from doing their work. Enlisted men tried to give orders to WAAC officers, Army officers overruled their decisions or used civilian women to interview applicants. As a result of disinterested and less than professional recruiting methods, only one out of every ten women interested enough to find their own way to a recruiting station ever filed an application.417 In early 1943 it became clear that the Army recruiting system would not be able to fill the quotas authorized by Congress with qualified women. In February, the monthly quota was raised from 10,000 to 13,000 and was not met, despite lowered standards. By the spring of 1943, training capacity was insufficient for the number of recruits being procured. The result was that recruits were held on the reserve list for long periods – the backlog at one time reached 10,000. This created the impression for Waacs and their families that the new recruits were not needed. With the expansion of the training facilities, Waacs who had completed their training were first assigned to the new training centers, with the result that no WAAC companies went into the field before December 1942 – hence, the public had no evidence of Waacs actually performing Army jobs until five months after training had started. When the new training centers had opened and the quota was raised to 27,000 for March, the WAAC was already receiving increasingly bad press. With 11,464 new enlistees, their number was even lower than in February. From then on until the conversion in August, the number of enrollments dropped dramatically: 6,472 women enlisted in April, 4,064 in May and 2,400 in July.418 Hobby believed that Army recruiting methods led to enrollment of “unsuitable women” and wanted authority over recruiting handed over to her office. At the end of March 1943, Harold Edlund realized “[w]e made an error when we set our quotas in January. We did not nail down quality at that time. We have let quality go down. We have been getting girls at the low end of the list.”419

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WAC Recruiting Station Investigation, prepared by Research Department, Young & Rubicam, October 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. WAC Recruiting Station Investigation,. See also Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 179-180 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 173-4 and Table 2 – Accessions of personnel in the WAC: 1942-1946, Appendix A, Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 766. Captain Edlund at a Conference of training center commandants, March 31- April 1, 1943, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 209.

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Underlying the question of who should steer recruiting in which direction was the larger issue of whether the WAAC should continue its original mission of supplying the Army with skills that were scarce among men and thus form a small highly qualified group of women with clerical and communications skills or whether large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled women should be recruited. These, however, would not be able to replace men in like categories because their fields often included heavy physical labor that was not deemed suitable for women. By March Hobby and her staff had begun working to convince General Somervell of the necessity to transfer all responsibility for the WAAC recruiting from the Office of the Adjutant General to WAAC headquarters. On 5 April she submitted a detailed WAAC recruiting plan to raise standards and a request for control over all confirmations. At the same time, the Adjutant General devised a new plan himself. Although Maj. General James A. Ulio, the Adjutant General, conceded many of the inadequacies of the present Army system and proposed extensive reforms, his plan included the lowering of the age limit to 19 or even 18, the elimination of the aptitude test for high school graduates, and further lowering of physical standards.420 Hobby’s plan to place the WAAC in control of recruiting and to raise, rather than lower, the standards was backed by the Chief of Staff General Marshall and finally approved.421 Thereupon Hobby immediately restored the enlistment standards and raised them even further after two months, which caused the number of new recruits to drop to almost a third in May.422 Finally, WAAC Headquarters realized that ”[t]he recruiting problem [was] serious” and represented “the toughest sales problem in the country to-

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The reforms included creating the office of Service Command WAAC Recruiting Officers, who were directly responsible to the commanding general, with full control of the acceptance of Waacs and WAAC recruiters. Other proposed changes included better locations for recruiting stations, to seek help from women’s clubs and Army chaplains, the increase of recruiting personnel, and public relations measures such as a Hollywood film and a Special Services campaign to change Army men’s opinions. Martha E. Eskridge, 1st Officer WAAC, Headquarters Brach Office Special Service Division, Los Angeles, CA, subject: Report of Technical Advisor, WAAC Film. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 9. Oveta Culp Hobby, Memorandum for Director, WD Bureau of Public Relations, subject: Problems and Deterrents in Connection with WAC Recruiting, February 18, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. The number of recruits fell from 11,464 in March to 6,472 in April, and in May, when the new standards were in force all month, to only 4,064. In June the requirements were raised again, to a score of 70 plus two years of high school, or 80 without high school; in this month only 3,304 recruits were enlisted. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 183.

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day.”423 With the old and new priorities of quality instead of quantity in place, the expansion program never showed any effects in terms of numbers. New enlistment figures soon returned to the level prior to the campaign. A recruiting campaign was needed that would increase numbers without lowering the WAAC’s average standards. Hobby felt that the advertising agency handling the WAAC account as part of the Army account had not given particular consideration to “women’s psychology.”424 The advertising contract went from the current contractor, N. W. Ayer & Son, to Young & Rubicam. In order to determine the best psychological approach, Young & Rubicam carried out several surveys, employing public opinion statistician George Gallup, who had been on their payroll as vice-president in charge of copy research in 1932.425 A poll made in October 1943 of a nationwide cross section of eligible women and their parents revealed that, contrary to what WAAC recruiters had believed so far, the overwhelming majority (86 percent) was well aware of the Army’s need for man- and womanpower. According to George Gallup, there were number of reasons why women did not respond to recruiting. Many women feared Army life and felt unable to adapt to rigorous training and discipline. Often, they were unaware of the existence of qualified skilled work in the WAAC and thought the Corps exclusively did menial jobs such as cooking, laundry, scrubbing, and operating as so-called kitchen police. Another factor was the negative attitude of parents, male friends and relatives. Many eligible women learned of the negative attitude of the Army towards Waacs from soldiers’ reports. An interesting piece of misinformation that was nevertheless widespread was that “half the women believed that a Waac could not marry an Army man; many others believed that a Waac was not allowed to marry at all, to have dates, or to use cosmetics.”426

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424 425 426

Captain Edlund at a Conference of training center commandants, March 31- April 1, 1943, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 209. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 184. Crane, Milton. The Roosevelt Era. New York: Boni and Gaer, 1947, 373. Conference WAC HQ with Young & Rubicam, Presentation of figures on survey conducted by Gallup in August 1943, November 10, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200.

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3.3 “Self-Sacrifice” v. “Self-Interest”: WAAC Recruiting The campaign slogan, “Release A Man For Combat” had proven unpopular. Apart from the fact that “release” or “relieve a man” lent itself too easily to sexual puns and was for this reason replaced by “replace a man,” many soldiers in clerical jobs did not appreciate being replaced for combat duty. Neither eligible women nor their relatives wished to be reminded of the possibility of brothers, sons, or sweethearts dying in battle when replaced by a woman in a safe office. In many areas, recruiting depended on civilian committees of local women. A recruiting officer reported: “Publicity about releasing a man for active duty is bad because women on these committees will not recruit, solely on the basis that recruiting women has sent their sons to the battle front.”427 When Young & Rubicam became advisors to WAC recruiters in March 1943, it was their opinion that the patriotic theme of self-sacrifice was not useful in recruiting large numbers of women into the WAC. Based on the series of Gallup polls, Young & Rubicam found that “self-interest,” not “patriotism,” was the key to convincing women to enlist. “Patriotic duty,” they pointed out repeatedly, “is not an effective advertising appeal.”428 Instead, emphasis was to be placed on the “personal benefits to be gained by enlistment, as well as an individual sales approach [and] to show the pleasant side of Army life.”429 Not everybody in the War Department agreed. Maj. General Miller G. White stated: “I do think whatever appeal you make it must be honest. We mustn’t stress excitement, or the vacation angle. We must tell the truth. Tell them what they may expect and if they want to come in, in the spirit of sacrifice, I think you will get the right people.”430

As a result, the theme “Release A Man For Combat,” was replaced by several recruiting themes. The campaign launched by Maj. Harold A. Edlund of WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam reflected many different approaches and ongoing tensions between the tropes of “self-sacrifice” and

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Capt. Miller, WAC 8th Service Command, at the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting, Chicago, IL 21-23 February 1944, 26. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. “Life in the WAC,” Recruiting pamphlet by Young & Rubicam and “WAC Recruiting Guide.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Boxes 3 and 5. “A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Maj. General Miller G. White, Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel (G-1) at Conference at WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam on Advertising & Recruiting, July 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200.

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“self-interest,” the latter of which increasingly dominated the WAC recruiting compromise.431 The Motifs of Motherhood, the Family and the Home The theme of ‘sacrifice’ had a long history in the struggle for women’s rights in the state. During the total wars of the 20th Century, it had been considered the ultimate sacrifice for women to give up home and family ‘for the duration’. This was construed as a short-term contribution to the war, not including permanent access to those rights, duties, and privileges in peacetime. The family figured most prominently in the traditional motif of women’s selfsacrifice, which was merely extended from the family to the nation. As Hobby stressed in a speech before the Poor Richard Club in Philadelphia, “thousands of American women have left their happy American homes – and thousands more will leave them – in order to keep those homes happy, and free.”432 The Lady’s Home Journal fell in step: “[t]he American family is the kernel of democracy, and that’s why U.S. women are entering the armed forces, sacrifice to save the family and democracy.”433 Press releases frequently contained stories of women enlisting to “bring home” brothers, sweethearts or fathers serving overseas. Men in their lives were said to have first priority, women joined up to hasten their homecoming. To combat the popular stereotype of the Waacs being unfeminine amazons or even figuring as the protector of men, as depicted in several cartoons, the War Department emphasized motherhood, a motif that played operated on several levels. Although Waacs could not be actual mothers of small children, they could be ‘national’ mothers. “Mothers of Families have experience particularly valuable for the WAAC, but as a matter of public policy, it is felt that children under fourteen should not be deprived of their mother’s care.”434 In the national family that the nation had become during war, 431 432

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“A Plan for Increasing Enrollment in the WAAC.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 199. “W.A.A.C: Spells Work or Women Wear Khaki Well,” Speech by Oveta C. Hobby before the Poor Richard Club, Philadelphia, PA, January 16, 1943. NARA. RG 165, E. 54, Box 13. “Our Girls in Uniform.” Ladies’ Home Journal 60, (January 1943): 63. Early women’s rights activists also framed women’s political participation as extension of duties in the home. Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT, Irvington, NY: Wesleyan University Press, 1981, 81. “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC,” 3. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 4.

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women soldiers could figure as the guarantor of the American home and its pre-war values. Hobby repeatedly pointed out to the press that every one of them would enable a married father to stay with his family: “Women as a group have always been the exponents of family life. They may now preserve and protect this family life, the core of American civilization and culture.”435 The traditional theme of women sacrificing themselves for their family also tied in with the unpopularity of the drafting of fathers: “In the absence of a draft, it is just possible that the WAC will be filled by young women who would rather join the Army than see their married brothers taken from their children.” 436 Magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle also took up the theme of the Waac who was “willing to say goodbye now…but not forever, to all the things she held dear and pleasurable.” Temporarily, she would exchange “chiffon evening dresses, weekend trips, and the off-shore cruise” for the world where “the jeep takes priority over the roadster.”437 Aside from the fact that most recruits had more likely exchanged the bus for the jeep, it is interesting how the magazine conveys middle class values such as patriotic selfsacrifice to eligible women, the majority of whom belonged to the working class, with the help of status symbols that were beyond the reach of both groups. As Ann Allen pointed out, the magazine media emphasized elitism.438 They focused more on Colonel Hobby and other WAAC officers than on the job the average enlisted woman actually performed. This did little to help recruiting because most of the educated, affluent women who tended to read these magazines were already committed to what they considered responsible war work by the end of 1942 and were highly unlikely to quit these jobs in order to enlist in the WAAC. Lower-middleclass women, on the other hand, who had held vocational or unskilled jobs before the war and constituted the bulk of the Waacs, might have been taken aback by the elitism with which some magazines portrayed the WAAC. Another level on which the motif of motherhood figured was that of Waacs as daughters away from home. In the absence of mothers to guard the moral welfare of the young women who joined the Corps, the WAAC Mothers’ Organization, which was founded in March of 1943 stepped in. Edna McCord Rohde, the group’s president, wrote she felt “as though all Wacs are 435 436

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Oveta C. Hobby quoted in The New York Times, July 1, 1943. Letter Edna McCord Rohde to Col. Westray Battle Boyce, July 28, 1945 and letter Boyce to Rohde, September 20, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, 14, File: ODWAC. Harper’s Bazaar, December 1942 and July 1943. Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1943. Allen, The News Media, 80.

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my daughters.”439 The WAC Mothers’ Organization provided care and services to both women and men, served in hospitals and with USO, packed comfort packages to Wacs, sold war bonds and mended clothes. It was among the members of this group for whom the Wacs’ return to home and hearth was awaited most eagerly after the Axis powers had surrendered. They wanted their daughters to return to “happy, successful spacious homes, where “Romeo awaited Juliet.”440 The smooth surface of the discourse of motherhood and the sacrifice ‘for the duration’ was seriously perturbed by the case of “Norma the Warrior” that had been publicized in several West Coast papers. “You’ve heard of how Rosie the Riveter left her husband home to wash dishes so she could work in a war plant. Well, here’s one about Norma the Warrior – and how she left her son home with her ex-husband so she could go off to war.”441 Norma Schoener Kunstler, a psychiatrist from New York City, had previously shared custody of her son with her ex-husband on a half-year basis. In order to join the WAC she submitted a court order relinquishing all rights to the custody of her son, thereby being relieved of any dependency. “The fact that the WAAC is responsible for this woman’s separation from her child or, at least, for condoning it,” as one War Department consultant put it, did not “help the WAAC at all.”442 Moreover, it became worse. A subsequent editorial in the Washington Post featured a picture of the six-year old blonde boy, steering a toy ship and hugging a spaniel puppy.443 Hobby could only “wish very much we knew some way to [...] suppress this type of publicity.”444 A woman sacrificing what was ‘naturally’ dear to her - her home, family and children - was well and good as long as it remained a temporary sacrifice. In Norma Schoener Kunstler’s case, her decision seemed less a sacrifice than a decision based on her own priorities that had the potential to seriously threaten the established gendered order.

Letter Edna McCord Rohde to Col. Westray Battle Boyce, July 28, 1945 and letter Boyce to Rohde, September 20, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 14, File: ODWAC. 440 “Forecasts of the Future, News and Views To and From the WAC,” published by the WAC Mothers’ Association of Chicago, IL. Vol. 1, No. 2, February 1946. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 14, File: ODWAC. 441 Letter Herbert B. Swope to Hobby, August 19, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. 442 Ibid. 443 “Mother Gives Up Son; the WAC Comes First.” Daily News (New York) August 19, 1943 and Washington Post, [n.d.]. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. 444 Letter Hobby to Herbert B. Swope, August 24, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. 439

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On the issue of “glamour” versus “duty” there were repeated clashes between Hobby, Young & Rubicam and Army personnel. A recruiting booklet compiled by Young & Rubicam, for instance, was only accepted by the Director after she had thoroughly de-glamorized it.445 At the same time, as reports from the field indicated, the patriotic approach yielded only “very discouraging” results. “[T]he impression has been subtly spread not only among women undergraduates in colleges but among women generally that the WAVE organization is composed of higher type women; that cooks, KPs, scrub-women laundresses, etc., are not needed and that drudgery is unknown. [T]he pouring on of glamour seems to work satisfactorily. It was applied successfully by the Marines to obtain recruits and also by the Navy.”446

Oveta Culp Hobby personally favored invoking the tradition of pioneer women as reflected in a recruiting brochure of 1943: “Back of the Fighting Front […] supporting it with resolute faith, is a valiant force whose spirit reflects the righteous might of our nation […] woman power. […] American women are meeting the challenge of total war with the same courageous determination that pioneer women showed when this country was a rough, frontier wilderness.”447 One poster Hobby wholeheartedly approved showed a series of pictures of “pioneer women” such as Molly Pitcher, Clara Barton, and others with the caption “It Is a Heritage To Be Proud Of – Will You Live Up To It?.”448 WAAC Headquarters now coordinated advertising in various media. WAAC cover girls appeared on the July American, the August Cosmopolitan and

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447 448

Her corrections included “change the word ‘rooming’ for ‘living’ in barracks; change ‘delicious food’ to ‘good food’; leave out how much it costs to outfit a WAAC [sic] as a blunt statement – make it relative to what it would cost a girl in civilian life, have a statement from a girl herself to this effect; also on question of wearing pretty clothes and not losing feminine traits through enlistment; […] take out about girls serving with fathers, husbands, etc. […]; strike out ‘you will be sworn into the WAC [sic] with an impressive ceremony’; take out ‘this is the Army, sister’.” Conference with Young & Rubicam, July 31, 1943 Conference proceedings. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Letter Colonel T. N. Gimperling, HQ Colorado Recruiting District to Colonel Edward P. Noyes, Recruiting and Induction Officer, March 26, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4296. The 7th Service Command included the rather thinly populated states of Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Wyoming. Its Headquarters was located in Omaha, Nebraska. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Conference ODWAC staff with Young & Rubicam personnel, October 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200.

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other magazines. The May Reader’s Digest had a story; Life used pictures sent from North Africa; the August Harper’s Bazaar showed WAAC physical training in its least terrifying aspects; a June Saturday Evening Post began a five-part serial. Through the co-operation of the Office of War Information, radio time was obtained, including plugs on shows by Bob Hope, Kate Smith, and others.449 “I joined to serve my country...and I’m having the time of my life!”450 In view of these unresolved differences regarding recruiting themes, the group employed a compromise. While women joined the Corps for patriotic motives, there was nothing wrong with their taking advantage of opportunities while they were there. Accordingly, recruiters pointed out special training and new career opportunities. An early suggestion that was not used in campaigns or recruiting aids even emphasized the cost of such vocational training: “The WAAC gives its members specialized training in many different vocations that will be useful in the future. In some cases, such training would cost hundreds of dollars in civilian training schools. Many young women, who heretofore have not had the opportunity to get training, may do so now in the WAAC. At the same time they are afforded the opportunity to express in a tangible way the patriotism they so strongly feel.”451

Accordingly, Young & Rubicam educated the public about the important and interesting work the WAAC did. The agency also secured the co-operation of the Writers’ War Board and flew ten writers to Fort Oglethorpe to write articles for national magazines and audiences.452 Young & Rubicam suggested that “every ad present the Corps in terms of importance to the war effort. Stories regarding jobs and dramatizing the urgent need – what they do to actually help and how they can help win the war sooner.453 This new approach was reflected in the 25-page brochure “Facts 449 450

451

452 453

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 187. A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC, see also recruiting poster “’I joined to serve my country...and I’m having the time of my life’.” Corporal Margaret Ritchie, Hickory, N.C. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 221, File: Advertising. Suggested Outline For Talk Presenting Basic Ideas of WAAC Recruiting Program, “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC,” 10. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Press material, notes of twelve writers. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 15. P. Fiori of Young & Rubicam at Conference at WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam on Advertising & Recruiting, July 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200.

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You Want to Know About the WAC,” which contained statements by President Roosevelt, George Marshall, “an Army private,” “a WAC private,” and a clergyman – all to the effect of stressing that the Wacs did “155 important Army jobs.” 454 Photographs of Wacs on different jobs, particularly when working with men, were another new way of communicating “why [the Wacs] are vital to victory.”455 The series of photographs “A Wac does this…” was designed to illustrate that Wacs were performing responsible work that had an immediate impact, that they worked hand in hand with Army personnel, and that they were part of the larger picture of the war effort. One caption read: “In a control tower, a Wac watches the incoming plane clear the taxi strip. She turns and speaks into a microphone […] And here’s what happens…A great bomber lifts over the field, circles, and speeds forward on its way to mission far across the seas.”456 Another image showed Wacs on a drawing board working on a military map. “[L]ater, gun fire, an officer studies this map. A signal is given, the great attack begins.”457

This combination of patriotism and self-interest that dwelled neither on sacrifice nor on glamour seemed to be a workable compromise and was used until the end of the war. “Every young woman who has the necessary qualifications should avail herself of this opportunity to serve her country and, in so doing, her own interests as well.”458 After a summer of intense recruiting, however, WAAC recruiters were confronted with the full extent of public opposition – “an impenetrable wall against which the methods of super salesmanship and expert recruiting techniques broke and fell ineffectually.” 459 In July 1943, Herbert Lenz of Young & Rubicam announced to the assembled Army and WAC personnel the sad truth in regard to the size of the task that laid before them and pointed out some of the “outside influences” that were working against the success of WAC advertising: 454 455 456 457 458 459

Brochure “Facts You Want to Know About the WAC,” 12-13. NARA. 407, Box 4292. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Recruiting, July 21, 1945 (file: December 1943). NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 190. The summer had included devising the “Cleveland Plan” in Ohio June 1-15, 1943, testing the utilization of civilian aid to locate eligible women by survey, the training of WAAC personnel in methods of recruitment, planned publicity and advertising as well as producing new recruiting aids such as the 16mm recruiting film: We’re In the Army Now. “A Summary of WAC/WAAC Recruiting by Four Periods.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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“You not only need all the recruits you can get, you need them all at once. [...] There are only five million women in this country who are eligible for the WAC. You would have to ‘fine toothcomb’ all of America to find all of your prospects. You cannot afford to do this. You have strong competition for the woman power of America – competition that permits a woman to stay at home and earn an infinitely higher income than she can in the WAC.”

Additionally, because the “unfortunate press received by the WAC [...] and the influence of parents, husbands, sweethearts, relatives, [and] friends can keep a woman from enlisting, it is necessary for you to influence favorably all public opinion – as well as to appeal directly to the prospect herself.”460

3.4 The “Slander Campaign” In the spring of 1943 the WAAC became the target of widespread gossip, rumors and bad publicity that became known as the “slander campaign,” sometimes also called the “whispering campaign” or “rumor campaign.” Early in 1943, the occasional bad publicity or ill-humored cartoon turned into more vicious attacks by word-of mouth gossip and by private letter that began to indicate a significant change in public opinion. With the mobilization of women on an unprecedented scale, traditional systems of social control lost their efficiency. Single women concentrated in industrial cities and towns around military bases. Whereas the norms dictating that respectable women should not engage in premarital sexual practices still prevailed, the war was tacitly understood to change the sexual behavior of the average soldier. Men were thought to require sexual activity and the loosening of sexual norms was not feared to overthrow society’s gendered order. The fact that very few people had actually seen Waacs on their jobs or worked with them aggravated the general ignorance about the purpose of the Corps and led some people to speculate whether the WAAC had been created as a morale booster or even in order to provide sexual services to Army men. The fear of women’s autonomy and sexual agency on the one hand and the fear of their sexual victimization on the other both indicated the fragility of the wartime gender order. Soldiers often expressed their desire to return to unchanged homes and communities, but wage earning women and, even more so, women soldiers, represented considerable change of the social order. 460

Conference at WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam on Advertising & Recruiting, July 13, 1943. Conference proceedings, afternoon session. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200.

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Under the conditions of an all-encompassing and pervasive patriotic discursive regime, these and other fears were articulated, not surprisingly, in the form of gossip and rumors.461 The Office of Censorship’s Code of Wartime Practices that the press voluntarily accepted in 1942 and other means of selfcensorship and censorship relegated the articulation of doubts regarding the purpose of the WAAC to the realm of the subversive. One “cleverly written piece of obscene literature” disguised as a “technical manual” titled Characteristics, Functioning, Care and Preservation of The WAAC, M1, (Model 1942-43) circulated among personnel of the Tank Corps at Camp Polk, Louisiana. It was discovered when an enlisted WAAC at Daytona Beach, Florida who had been sent a copy by her fiancé brought the pamphlet to the attention of military intelligence.462 The press frequently implied that Waacs had joined the Corps for questionable motives, namely to pick up men. In what seemed like news about the WAAC uniform, a story distributed by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate commented on its lack of attractiveness measured by the amount of attention Waacs and other servicewomen received by men. “The victims [of the WAAC uniform] note that a Wave or Spar usually appears in public with a man on her arm or in the offing. Secretary Stimson’s aides, on the contrary, do not so often have male companionship in their off hours. It is only human nature for them to grow lonely and dissatisfied.”463 The Associated Press did not have to imply that Waacs were really only looking for male companionship. They found a WAAC recruiting officer to quote: “[t]hey’re patriotic, too, but the quest for husbands and thirst for excitement are the principal impulses that lead the gals into the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.”464

461

462

463

464

Allport, Gordon W., and Leo Joseph Postman. The Psychology of Rumor. New York: H. Holt and company, 1947, 33-34. “Technical manual No. 38-3487 – Characteristics, Functioning, Care and Preservation of The WAAC, M-1, (Model 1942-43).” Letter Ellen Hayes 1st Lieutenant, WAC, Post Intelligence Officer to Director, Inelligence Division, HQ 4th Service Command, Atlanta GA, subject: Obscene Literature Relative to WAC, December 9, 1943. NARA. RG 319, Entry 47, Box 590. McClure Newspaper Syndicate, Press Release, May 18, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. Associated Press dispatch from Oklahoma City carried by newspapers throughout the country in May 1943, Young & Rubicam, “Report on Unfavorable WAC Newspaper publicity,” January 7, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203.

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By late spring, War Department officials began to suspect a pattern: rumors had become more frequent, more vicious, and more consistent. 465 Could it be that Axis agents were systematically spreading rumors they had fabricated out of the sporadic stories in order to discredit the WAAC, impede the recruiting of women, and thus harm the Army’s mobilization? The fact that some stories appeared in almost identical form in various cities seemed to support this theory. Among the more stereotypical rumors were variations of the pregnancy theme: “50% of the Waacs in the camps are pregnant and that the other 50% are prostitutes.”466 “300 pregnant Waacs were being kept at Camp Pickett, Va.”467 “There are 400 pregnant, unmarried women among the WAACs at Fort Oglethorpe.”468 Later investigations indicated canards like the rumor of 70% of all Waacs being pregnant, which had been started by a doctor,469 or the Cincinnati rumor reporting that “115 of 150 Waacs” were pregnant, where in reality only 15 Waacs were stationed at that post.470 Pregnancy was taken as evidence that the Waacs were generally immoral – another theme that circulated in an endless number of variations. Waacs in Florida “openly solicited men and engaged in sex acts in public places.”471 “Women joined the WAAC only for one reason – that is to have men as their companions.”472 “The WAAC consists of women who are tired of living with their husbands. They give their children away [...] while they seek adventure and chase around with all the soldiers.”473 Soldier’s letters contained refer-

465

466

467

468

469

470 471 472

473

On May 18, 1943, Director Hobby asked for the investigation of “an organized whispering campaign directed against the WAAC.” The Army Service Forces sent the request to G-2 Division, General Staff, which in turn sent it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that it was out of the Army’s jurisdiction. By early June, the G-2 Division acknowledged the “circulation of plainly vicious rumors [...] appears to be a concerted campaign [and] has assumed such proportions as seriously to affect morale and recruiting.” .C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 210. List of Rumors submitted by Third Officer Alta R. Joffee, Recruiting and Enrollment station, Roanoke, Virginia, [n.d.] NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. List of Rumors submitted by Third Officer Alice E. Graass, WAAC Recruiting Station, Staunton, Virginia, [n.d.] NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. “WAACs Here Hit Rumors as Axis-Inspired,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, June 10, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, 59 Memo 2nd Officer Blanche Belcher, Assistant Recruiting Officer Wilkes-Barre, PA, July 14, 1943, subject: Rumors of WAAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Report First Officer Helen Y. Hedekin to DWAAC, subject: Rumors, July 10, 1943. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 291. List of Rumors submitted by Third Officer Alta R. Joffee, Recruiting and Enrollment station, Roanoke, Virginia, [n.d.] NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Ibid.

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ences to the Waacs’ conduct in Africa being more than questionable: “75 Waacs,” one soldier claimed, were sent back from Africa “for immoral reasons”474 “Somewhere, in [the] central part of the United States,” the government kept a hospital that was “filled with Waacs with venereal diseases contacted [sic] since joining the Corps,” according to soldiers’ letters.475 On the one hand, the rumors expressed fears that the WAAC would morally corrupt decent young women and force them into immorality. In many cases the mere invocation of pregnancy insinuated immorality, but other comments were quite explicit: “You apparently haven’t read some information by Washington concerning the WAACS and WAVES. Do you realize they are supplied with contraceptives, and prophylactics. […] Why doesn’t our government pick special sex fiend women and send them with the army. […] And there are so many morons that follow that course of ill decency. […] But this I will say there will be a lot of sad women after this war: occupation – prostitutes.”476

Another letter seems to have been at least partly motivated by genuine concern for the enlisted women. “If the pending bill to make the WAACS of the Army (not auxiliaries) goes through, then some evil minded officer may, (under guise of military discipline,) may order a WAAC to his private tent plus her contraceptive. Are we paying taxes to foster and support an army of prostitutes?”477 On the other hand, could the WAAC be some kind of New Deal project like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) with the purpose to get ‘fallen women’ off the street? According to a rumor recorded in Baltimore, the WAAC took “women that other services will not have. [A] great many people have the idea that anybody can get in the WAACs [sic].” 478 Accordingly, the mayor of a small community in Virginia told the Commanding Officer of the recruiting station in Winchester, VA “that there were a great many girls wan-

474

475

476

477

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Letter, Cpl. Badgett to Cpl. Helen Stroude, August 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192, File: Rumors. Memo, 2nd Officer Blanche Belcher, Assistant Recruiting Officer Wilkes-Barre, PA, July 14, 1943, subject: Rumors of WAAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter A. Otrosina, Douglas Aircraft Company to Mrs. Margaret Otrosina in a Sanitarium in upstate New York, August 31, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Copy of letter to Mrs. Gold, [not signed], June 9, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Memo, Jameson B. Dowdy, 3rd Officer, WAAC Recruiting Station Winchester, VA to Commanding Officer, WAAC Recruiting Station Baltimore, MD, subject: Rumors, July 9, 1943. RG 165, Box 93.

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dering the streets of Leesburg at night, and he wished that we would take them in the WAACs, as he might have to put a curfew in force.”479 In March the Syracuse University Rumor Clinic, a regular news release run by social psychologist Floyd H. Allport, had offered help in combating rumors about the WAAC.480 At that time, however, WAAC officers deemed it unnecessary to investigate any rumor’s origin or to take active measures against it, but rather preferred to “let it die its natural death.”481 Until June, Army and WAAC authorities had chosen to ignore the rumors. However, on 8 June 1943 the nationally syndicated column “Capitol Stuff” by John O’Donnell appeared in the New York Daily News, the Times Herald and other newspapers of the McCormick chain. The “whispering campaign” had become an open “slander campaign.” O’Donnell wrote: “Contraceptives and prophylactic equipment will be furnished to members of the WAAC, according to a super-secret agreement reached by high-ranking officers of the War Department and the WAAC Chieftain, Mrs. William Pettus Hobby. [...] It was a victory for the New Deal ladies,”

O’Donnell continued by quoting “a lady lawmaker”: “Women have the same right here and abroad to indulge their affections and emotions, whether married or single, here or overseas, just exactly as do the men in the same uniform. It is high time that the Army should pay as much attention to the women wearing their uniform when it comes to their sex relations as the Army had already done to the men. After all, we’re more vulnerable.”482

479 480

481

482

Ibid. Originator of the newspaper Rumor Clinic was W. G. Gavin of the Boston Herald-Traveler. In 1942/43 he edited a weekly rumor feature with the aid of psychologists. The idea was quickly spread and imitated elsewhere. More than 40 newspapers and magazines in the United States and Canada experimented with the rumor clinic. Macdougall, Curtis D. Understanding Public Opinion: A Guide for Newspapermen and Newspaper Readers. New York: Macmillan, 1952, 361. Letter Marie Cranney, 2nd Officer, WAC to Syracuse University Rumor Clinic, March 7, 1943. See also: Allport, F. H. “Some research suggestions on morale.” Journal of Social Psychology 14 (1941): 257-261. Allport, F. H. “Chivalry toward WACs.”The Syracuse Post-Standard (August 15, 1943):3. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 13. Johnson, Blair T. and Diana R. Nichols. “Social Psychologists’ Expertise in the Public Interest: Civilian Morale Research during World War II.” Journal of Social Issues. Special Issue: Experts in the Service of Social Reform: SPSSI, Psychology, and Society, 1936-1996. 54.1. (1998): 53-78. John O’Donnell, New York Daily News, Washington Times-Herald and Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1943. “Waac Whispers,” Newsweek, June 24, 1943, 34-35; “Waac Rumors,” Newsweek, 21 June 1943, 46. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203.

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The Military Intelligence Division immediately confirmed that no contraceptives were issued to Waacs and that “in all cases of recorded sales [in post exchanges] the purchasers have been married women.” The “super-secret” document O’Donnell had referred to could have been the “WAAC Training Guide on Sex Hygiene” printed by the War Department and issued on 27 May, 1943, twelve days before the appearance of the column.483 This pamphlet was “a suitably modest version” of the Army’s required hygiene course for men that “definitely did not authorize any issue of contraceptives, and did not even tell the women what they were or how to use them.”484 Interestingly, nobody disputed the equation of the women’s morality and reputation with sexual abstinence. Neither the War Department, which was primarily concerned with filling the recruiting quotas, nor the WAAC leadership who were also interested in protecting the Waacs from sexual victimization debated the association of contraceptives used by single women with immoral conduct. Within days after the column, a subcommittee of the House Military Affairs Committee summoned Hobby and the Surgeon General Norman Kirk to appear and bring statistics on the actual cases of pregnancy and venereal disease.485 After the War Department and Hobby had decided that for the sake of the self-respect of the Waacs and their families public denials would have to be made, despite indications that a formal War Department denial increased the circulation of the column rather than curtail it.486 Such statements Memo, Maj. General Geo V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff G-2 to DWAC, August 21, 1943, subject: Origin of Rumors Concerning the WAAC. Military Intelligence Division G2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. 484 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 203. A preliminary document on WAAC policy regarding VD control of May 31, 1943 stated “no information on birth control will be given. Prophylactic facilities (stations) will not be established for Waacs. Distribution of mechanical prophylactic items through company organizations by purchase with unit funds is contrary to WAAC policy.” Memo, Lieutenant Colonel Howland, subject: WAAC Policy, May 31, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. 485 “Rumors About Waacs’ Morals under Secret Study in House,” New York Herald Tribune, June 12, 1943. See also “Intimate Message,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 14, 1943. WAAC Daily Journal, Vol. I, 10 Jun 43. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. 486 Eleanor Roosevelt’s denouncing “stories of moral misbehavior” as “nazi propaganda” [sic] for example, was dispatched by Associated Press and carried by newspapers throughout the country with a wider population than the O’Donnell column. Cottrell, Ann. “Mrs. Roosevelt Assails Stories About Waacs, Calls Them Propaganda of Foe, Blames Americans for ‘Falling for Them,’” Herald Tribune (June 9, 1943). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. See also statements by Hobby (United Press, June 9, 1943) and Stimson (AP and UP, June 10, 1943). 483

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were immediately issued by the President and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Secretary of War, General Brehon Somervell of the Army Service Forces, and Colonel Hobby and other WAAC officers.487 Stimson renounced the “sinister rumors aimed at destroying the reputation of the WAAC” in his highly publicized denial. Any “reflection on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps is, in essence a reflection on the whole of American womanhood [...] the teachers who taught your children, the wives, sweethearts, sisters and even mothers of the men who are today fighting.”488 The First Lady stated in front of the press that rumors about pregnancies among Waacs in North Africa were Nazi propaganda, and deplored that “Americans fall for Axis-inspired propaganda like children.”489 Shortly before the column appeared, a group of religious leaders had visited Fort Oglethorpe and Fort Des Moines. They now issued a statement to the press, assuring the public of the “sacrificial contribution” the Waacs were making, an “experience [that] will strengthen their womanly character. However,” the joint statement of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen went on, “we find them eagerly looking forward to the time when they may take up again those time-honored joys which surround home life and children.”490 On June 12, Eleanor Patterson, one of the editors and publishers of the Times Herald, the newspapers that had printed the O’Donnell column four days earlier, wrote to Hobby, using her private Washington address. She explained that she regretted the O’Donnell column “from the bottom of my heart” and promised to make it her business to find out how this “gross mistake” had happened.491 Hobby suggested “in an unofficial capacity, as one woman to another” that the Times Herald publish an editorial to give “reassurance to the mothers and fathers of our women in the Corps.”492 Patterson preferred to “let the unfortunate column die” rather than “breathe life back in the whole sorry mess” by further discussing the allegations, but Hobby had made up her mind and chosen to deal with the affair head on.493 Several tele-

487

488 489 490

491 492 493

“First Lady Scores Critics of Waacs,” New York Sun, June 8, 1943. “Mrs. Roosevelt Assails Stories about Waacs,” Herald Tribune, 9 June 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. “Stimson Defends Waacs’ Morals,” Cleveland Press, 10 June 1943. Washington Daily News, June 9, 1943. Ibid. “Clergy, Congresswomen Spike Slur on Waacs,” New York World-Telegram, June 11, 1943. Statement of clergymen, June 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. Letter Eleanor Patterson to Hobby, 12 June 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter Hobby to Patterson, June 15, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Letter Hobby to Patterson, June 16, 1943 and Patterson to Hobby, June 19, 1943. Ibid.

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grams were exchanged and several chances for personal meetings were missed before Kay McCarter, Patterson’s secretary informed Hobby that “Mrs. Patterson [...] although she believes [the O’Donnell column] to be a case of very bad judgment on his part, still [thinks] there is no question that the foundation of his story is based on fact.”494 The damage had been done. Although O’Donnell was forced to retract his allegations, he claimed at the same time that his information came from an “intelligent and trustworthy official who swore that his eyes had passed over an official memorandum which dealt with this specific issue.”495 The specific issue, as presented by O’Donnell, was the case of “Officer X, [age] 35, a college graduate married to a man in the service” who claimed “the same rights of regulating my private life” by means of “medical essentials” while in the WAAC that she enjoyed while she and her husbands were civilians.”496 As late as October 1944 the story was reprinted by a religious publication, The Missionary Worker, commenting on the sinfulness of promiscuity and indulgence. “Woe to America [...] we are becoming a nation of harlots and drunkards.”497 The WAAC received hundreds of letters referring to O’Donnell’s allegations, some written in considerable moral outrage. A mother of a WAAC anonymously asked whether “the government [was] trying to make an institution of prostitutes for the men of the armed forces.”498 A writer in Vermont referred to the article as a “bold and insidious argument in favor of ‚free love’ as I have ever seen in a publication pretending to be even quasirespectable.”499 Some writers were not certain what to think. A Texan wrote to his Senator asking for “criminal indictments against everyone involved in such a depraved scheme to pollute the reputations, if not the bodies, of the young ladies who enlisted in the WAAC.”500 On the other hand, in case “a conspiracy to distribute contraceptives” really existed, the Senator should be the first to propose in the Senate “the disbanding of the WAAC as well as the 494 495 496 497

498

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Letter Kay McCarter, Secretary to Eleanor Patterson to Hobby, July 1, 1943. NARA. Ibid. John O’Donnell, Capitol Stuff, June 9, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, 203. Ibid. Letter J.W. Mathews to Eleanor Roosevelt 18 Oct 1944; Letter Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Oveta C. Hobby, October 27, 1944 NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91. Letter, [anonymous], signed “Mother of a Waac” to Hobby, June 9, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter Barnard Powers, Springfield, VT to Mrs. William P. Hobby, c/o The Houston Post, June 11, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Letter Thad Putnam, Houston, TX to Senator Tom Conally, June 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92.

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indictments of the Congresswomen and Mrs. Hobby.”501 Some writers were in favor of issuing contraceptives. “It would be [a] good thing if WAACS were instructed in modern contraceptive technique[s] and all knew the place of prophylactics in the prevention of venereal diseases which are so widespread in our army.”502 From the ranks of enlisted men Corporal Jules E. Bernfeld observed that nobody had “thus far drawn a clear definition of what constitutes an act of immorality for a woman serving in the Armed Forces. I think we have failed to make clear that a woman serving in the Armed Forces of the United States is as much a soldier as the man she is replacing and should be thought of as such.” Peacetime “principles of good conduct” applied to civilian life but not to “a changed and drastic mode of living.”503 Corporal Bernfeld’s observation was correct – the only standard that was being openly discussed by the WAAC Director was sexual abstinence. Anything other than virginity for unmarried women was unacceptable in a Christian country, as a member of the fraternal organization Knights of Columbus wrote: if the women were not taught “the value of virginity and chastity” the “lowered morals” would trickle down to “girls in the lower ranks” until “we will have a nation of prostitutes.”504 Interestingly, defenders of the WAAC argued along the same lines: A gynecologist from Chicago also seemed to have regarded a woman’s hymen as some form of embodied morality. He stated that while he had been doing 826 pelvic examinations of Waacs, he found that “they are a very high class group of women. The per cent [sic] of virgins among them runs higher that in my own private practice in Evanston, Illinois.”505 The Army’s Military Intelligence Service began its full-scale investigation of possible Axis origin of the rumors in June. Army agents combed through the nation service command by service command, section by section and particularly concentrated their efforts on communities near large WAAC posts,

501 502

503

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505

Ibid. Letter Margaret Darling Platner to Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, June 11, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Letter, Corporal Jules E. Bernfeld, Groton, CT to Oveta Culp Hobby, June 8, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter Abe Reynolds, Freehold, NJ to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 16 June 1943. Letter Hobby to Reynolds, June 23, 1943. NARA. Ibid Letter Charles E. Galloway, Major, M.C., Asst. professor Gyn. Ob. Northwestern University, Chicago IL, to Representative Edith N. Rogers, June 10, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92.

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such as training centers. They held interviews with service personnel as well as with local citizens. Next, specific stories all over the nation were tracked down to their suspected sources. Hobby also issued a letter to all WAAC Public Relations Offices, all WAAC Staff Directors of Service Commands and all specialist schools and Major Bandel soliciting their help in investigating the character and source of the rumors.506 Reports from all parts of the country came back – a WAAC officer reported a conversation at a Philadelphia hair-dressers about whether soldiers and sailors liked women in uniform,507 others reported rumors that Army men and Waacs shared temporary barracks in Pennsylvania,508 as well as sightings of drunken Waacs in Toledo, Ohio, who turned out to be Women Ordnance Workers, not Waacs.509 Many stories about pregnancies, venereal disease, and immoral conduct had originated with military personnel, as the G-2 report stated: “Military personnel, commissioned and enlisted, were found to be a prolific fountainhead of WAAC rumors […] originating the rumor that ‘fantastic’ numbers of pregnant Waacs had been sent back to Lovell General Hospital from North Africa.” 510 When agents checked the hospital’s records without advance notice, they found no record of a pregnant Waac. 511 At Halloran General Hospital at Staten Island, one of 52 Waac patients admitted to the hospital was a (married) pregnant woman returning from North Africa.512 From Baltimore, Maryland, a WAAC officer reported: “A soldier expressed great surprise when refused a date by a Waac who he attempted to ‘pick up’ as he thought that was the duty of the Corps.” Civilians had commented on the “prevalence of syphalis [sic]” among enlisted women, with an unidentified soldier stating “Waacs are nothing but tramps and [are] used for one purpose. I’d kill any member of my family who’d join.” Soldiers stationed at Camp Pickett were gossiping that Waacs stationed there “rent hotel rooms for the weekends and ask men from the surrounding camps to stay with 506 507

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509

510 511 512

Draft of letter by Colonel Hobby, June 23, 1943.NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter Frances Hope Johnson, 2nd WAAC Officer, Adjutant HQ Philadelphia WAAC Recruiting District to DWAAC, July 10, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Letter, Velma R, White, Assistant Recruiting Officer, HQ WAAC recruiting Unit Scanton, PA to DWAAC, July 10, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Report Marion Lichty WAAC Recruiting Officer to Commanding General, 5th Service Command, Fort Hayes, Columbus, Ohio, subject: Investigation of Rumors in Toledo, Ohio, April 14, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 207. Ibid. Memo, Capt. F. M. Kerins to Col. Catron, July 28, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92.

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them.” Army wives spread the rumor that “Waacs at Edgewood Arsenal and the Proving Grounds [were] consistently discovered in promiscuous positions, frequently drunk” and that Waacs and soldiers were often found in the “wooded areas near [the] camps in the act of intercourse.”513 From Conway, Arkansas it was reported that a soldier who was released from the service had returned to his hometown of Hutchinson, Kansas and spread the story that “the WAAC is the Army’s solution to the prostitution problem.”514A soldier’s wife from Ohio wrote to President Roosevelt: “[A]ll those [...] girls getting paid to live with our men. Why not if they can give money to the WAC Wave etc. discharge such things and let us girls who have husbands go and spend some time with them while they’re on this side. Would you want to live with some one like that after this war is over after spending their lives with them things.”515

Another Army wife related a similar story: “My husband was at our local Army Post for examinations and this is what occurred. […] Through some source a boy in the same group with my husband was supplied with a group of names of WACs he had never known, given instructions of how to get to them even tho’ their camp is ‘out of bounds’ and assured of a ‘good time’.”516

A male letter writer claimed that “the idea of women in the Armed forces [sic] is straight out of Nazi Germany and Communistic Russia,” and used building blocks from the whispering campaign to accuse the Wacs of being “the morale problem of this nation at present.”517 Other letter writers just plain ridiculed the Waacs as dressed up impostures of soldiers: “[F]ancy these women with a few weeks of training receiving an officers commission, seems to be an Opera Comique, all dressed up for parade. […] A fine thing, when our non-commissioned men come Home [sic], they who had done the fighting, a dressed up sister, wife, etc, appeared as their officer.”518

513

514

515

516

517

518

All rumor reports from WAAC recruiting station Baltimore Maryland, July 6, 1943. Military Intelligence Division G-2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Memo, HQ WAAC Br No 3, AAS, Conway Ark, to DWAAC, July 1, 1943. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter Mrs. Irene Reed, Harrison, Ohio to President Roosevelt, August 26, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4290, F. 10 Letter Mrs. J. C. Smith, Chattanooga, TN to President Roosevelt, 11 Nov 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4291. Letter Elmer W. Serl, Nobleton, FL, December 15, 1943 to Secretary of War. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91. Letter A. Hamilton from Warren, Idaho, December 6, 1942. NARA. RG 407, Box 4290.

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The military intelligence report came to an alarming conclusion: there was “no positive evidence that rumors concerning the morality of WAAC personnel are Axis-inspired.”519 Instead, the rumors were spread by Americans, servicemen and civilians, factory workers, and businesspeople. “Rumors regarding WAAC morality furnish a lively topic of conversation in all walks of life.520 From Army officers and soldiers who resented Waacs for various reasons, among them fear that they could be replaced by a Waac and sent into combat, the rumors spread to wives, family and women friends and from there into the general public. Military Police, “because of the traveling nature of its duties,” spread rumors across service commands.521 Long-established misogyny played a role where servicemen who felt their own masculinity was being questioned or threatened by women entering the armed forces. The height of the whispering campaign occurred when the WAC bill was being debated in Congress; the safe distance from the masculinist core of the military that the auxiliary status had provided was about to shrink. Soldiers’ wives, whose husbands had been or were about to be shipped overseas sometimes resented Waacs whom they held responsible, Civilian workers who held jobs at or near Army bases also feared that they would be replaced by Waacs. In some areas, entire communities had undergone significant change when entire towns had come to depend economically on Army posts. Despite this, townspeople were at times annoyed at Waacs who during weekends came to town in groups. In very few instances the investigators found that “disgruntled and discharged Waacs” were the source of rumors. The final group the investigation report listed were “fanatics” – “[t]hose who cannot get used to women being any place except the home.”522 One worker at a defense plant in New Jersey took the matter of tracking down possible Axis agents into his own hands. A German-born co-worker spread a story of five hundred Waacs who had arrived in New York from North Africa and who were all pregnant. George Hupp, whose daughter was a corporal in the Waac dutifully reported 519

520

521

522

Memo Maj. General Geo V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 to DWAC, August 21, 1943, subject: Origin of Rumors Concerning the WAAC. Military Intelligence Division G2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Memo Maj. General Geo V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 to DWAC, August 21, 1943, subject: Origin of Rumors Concerning the WAAC. Military Intelligence Division G2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Report Marion Lichty WAAC Recruiting Officer to Commanding General, 5th Service Command, Fort Hayes, Columbus, OH, subject: Investigation of Rumors in Toledo, OH, April 14, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Memo Chief CIC, MIS, for General Strong, 13 Aug 1943, subject: Closing Report on Investigation Rumors Concerning WAAC. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 206.

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later to the Alcohol Tax Unit as well as to Hobby that “indignation caused me to strike a man down while on duty in the du Pont [sic] plant, this morning.”523 It was from overseas where most soldiers had not yet seen a Waac that the fiercest comments came.524 According to monthly Censorship Surveys of Morale, Rumors and Propaganda, it was only in March 1945 that in some theaters of operations the number of favorable comments by soldiers exceeded the number of unfavorable ones. Many soldiers tended to question the moral values of any woman attracted to military service. However, even those soldiers who commented favorably on the WAC would strongly urge women friends, sisters, and sometimes mothers not to join the Corps: “You ask me to tell you what I think of the Wacs and Waves with the idea of you joining in mind. Darling, that sort of puts me on the spot. If the idea of you joining were not involved, I would say that they have proven a proud, worthwhile part of our armed forces. But from the standpoint of you joining is something else again ... very emphatically I do not want you to join.”525

A Captain wrote to his sister in Iowa: “Incidentally I don’t want you to join any WAACS or WAVES or anything associated with overseas service. I’m disgusted with our American girls in the service […] They live with officers 1/2 or 3/4 of the night and then scram to their quarters. I’m not saying what others tell me – its what I have seen.”526

A corporal wrote from overseas: “The main need for W.A.A.C.s overseas is to provide them [officers] with women. The Germans have their Brothels [sic], the Italians carry busloads of women for their officers, but the British and Americans must disguise them as ‘Auxiliary Services’.”527

As Judith Bellafaire has pointed out, many of these mostly young soldiers had never seen a Waac. Away from home and facing unknown dangers, many kept up their spirits by imagining their return to the (increasingly idealized) 523

524

525 526

527

Letters George Hupp to District Supervisor, Alcohol Tax Unit, April 24, 1943 and to Hobby, May 14, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter Mary-Agnes Brown, Lieutenant Col. WAC Staff Director, HQ US Army Forces in the Far East. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 89. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 212. Captain D. Kerhli to Eloise Kehrli, Dubuque, Iowa on August 20, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Letter from an anonymous corporal (3rd A.S. Comm. Sqdn. APO 760, U.S. Army) to an anonymous Waac at Ft. Oglethorpe, 11 Aug 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192, F. 2.

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family and community they had left behind. “It was important that the family and community remain unchanged. Women in the military represented change.528 A number of soldiers implied this motivation in their letters, others stated it explicitly: “When you asked me the first time whether you could join the Wacs I refused and I meant that for all time. I want to come home to the girl I remember.”529 Censors reported that male Army personnel felt “almost universally […] that the presence of the WAAC in this theater [was] undesirable.”530 Some of the comments made by soldiers included: “Over here there are a great number of WAACs and the boys think they are good for only one thing – and you know what that is.” 531 Please keep making those parts for planes for I want planes here and not WAACs. I ask it of you not to join the WAAC.” 532 An anonymous postcard that was forwarded to the FBI by a friend of the recipient read, “Your daughter is a good girl if you wish to keep her that way get her out of the WAC. They are being used for immoral purposes. Take a soldier’s advice.”533 Other comments by soldiers included: “I think it is best that he and Edith are separating, because after she gets out of the service she won’t be worth a dime;” “I told my Sis if she ever joined I would put her out of the house and I really meant it. So if you ever join I will be finished with you too and I mean it;” “Honey don’t ever worry your poor head about joining the Wacs for we went over all that once before, Ha! (Remember, over my dead body. Ha! Ha!) You are going to stay at home.”

Officers expressed similar feelings: “I cannot put this on paper how I feel and I am ashamed to tell my fellow officers. She cannot even consider herself as my wife from now on. I am stopping all allotments to her and am breaking off all contacts with her. Why she did such a thing to me I cannot understand. My heart is broken.”534

Bellafaire, The Women's Army Corps, 16. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 212. 530 Files of Col. Scott Bailey, Chief Base Censor of Allied Force Headquarters, [n.d.]. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 57. 531 Ibid. 532 Ibid. 533 Letter George J. Robertson to John Edgar Hoover, Director FBI, 18 Aug 1943. Postcard directed to Mary Neary enclosed. Letter J.E. Hoover to Maj. General George V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, September 7, 1943. 534 All soldier comments are from NATO AG file 319.1 Morale, Vols. 11-V and Morale Evaluation Survey in Women’s Services, GHQ AFPAC, June 16, 1945, in possession of former Staff Director, c.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 211-12. 528 529

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The rumor campaign and the O’Donnell column had done tremendous damage to how the WAAC was seen by the public but also on a personal level. Over fifty years later, WAAC veteran Mildred C. Bailey remembered: “[A]s a commanding officer I would have women come to see me, and sit and sob from letters they were getting from their parents about they had made this decision to do this, and what a mistake they had made. I read the papers, too, and people were saying that I was a prostitute and all I was in the Army for was to find a husband or to practice prostitution, you know, and that’s not very good for the morale. But we knew who we were and why we were there and what we were doing, but it really hurt our feelings.”535

The official report by the G-2, Military Intelligence Division came to the conclusion that “rumors concerning morality of the WAAC are the outward manifestation of a psychological adjustment the American public is undergoing in regard to women in uniform.”536

3.5 “Guilt” v. “Glamour”: WAC Recruiting After the conversion to Army status in the course of which about a quarter of all Waacs had chosen to leave the Corps, the new Women’s Army Corps was immediately faced with demands for personnel. The Adjutant General estimated that of the two million total estimated necessary for the coming year more than 600,000 positions could be efficiently filled by Wacs. So urgent was the situation that Hobby was approached on this subject by General Marshall on the very evening of her swearing-in ceremony. This stood in stark contrast to the reality of WAAC recruiting, which had yielded only 839 recruits in August, a rate at which normal attrition overtook recruiting.537 More recruiting conferences with Young & Rubicam were being held in search for a recruiting theme. This summer, high-ranking Army brass were among the participants.538 George Gallup strongly advocated an appeal to a

535

536

537 538

Interviewee: Mildred C. Bailey, Interviewer: Eric Elliott, May 26, 1999. Women Veterans Historical Project. Oral History Collection - Jackson Library. 1999. http://library.uncg. edu/depts/archives/veterans/BaileyMtrans.html. Accessed July 31, 2005. Memo, Maj. General Geo V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 to Dir WAC, August 21, 1943, subject: Origin of Rumors Concerning the WAAC. Military Intelligence Division G2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 92. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 231. Participants included General White of G-1 Division, Brig. General Joseph N. Dalton of ASF’s Military Personnel Division and Major Robert S. Brown. Ibid.

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woman’s self-interest, with emphasis on the advantages of the new military status – benefits such as free medical care, mailing privileges and WAC training for postwar careers. Director Hobby was once again absolutely opposed to the “glamour” approach. To the contrary, she argued that women would respond better “the more difficult this job was painted to the woman, the more of a challenge it was to her. I wonder if a different slant, telling this woman how hard, how drab, how routine it is (and 95% of the jobs are) send something of a challenge to her. [...] Has she the courage to do the commonplace as against the courage of the spectacular?”539

Instead, Hobby favored a series of “shocker” ads, one of which showed a dying soldier on the battlefield while women were playing bridge. The proposed caption was: “Men are dying on the battle line – can you live with yourself on the sideline?”540 The Generals White and Dalton pointed out to Hobby that the censors forbade showing dead American soldiers to the American public and vetoed the draft. Hobby was of the opinion that the campaign had to instill a sense of guilt in those women who were unwilling to contribute their share. While the patriotic appeal of women’s self-sacrifice in wartime was quite traditional, she went much further in proposing an ad that showed soldier’s graves in order to “drive home a sense of shame to women not doing anything. […] We are now shooting for women doing absolutely nothing.”541 Another draft was “Women – How Many More Must Die Before You Act?” showing soldiers carrying a flag-covered coffin and a Wac at work.542 Gallup and the representatives of Young & Rubicam strongly disagreed with Hobby, but agreed to test run one advertisement of the shocker type. The poster shows a black and white photograph of five graves with crosses, one with a helmet under a dramatic sky on a yellow background. The caption “Women! They can’t do any more – but you can – Join the WAC, Women’s Army Corps, apply at nearest U.S. Army Recruiting station” was used in October, but was banned in Boston newspapers as “too gruesome.”543 A milder

539

540 541

542

543

Conference at WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam on Advertising & Recruiting, July 13, 1943 Conference proceedings, 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Ibid. Hobby at Conference at WAAC Headquarters with Young & Rubicam on Advertising & Recruiting, July 13, 1943 Conference proceedings, 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Conference ODWAC staff with Young & Rubicam personnel, October 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Poster, 9 x 12 ½ in. A023. Recruiting Publicity Bureau, U.S. Army, 1943. Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC. University Archives Poster Collection.

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example of this type was a draft that was presented in October 1943. The poster showed wounded men on a hospital ship and, below that, pictures of Wacs at work. The caption again read “They Can’t Do More – But You Can.” During the discussion Jessie Rice pointed out that “it might lead girls to think ‘if I release a man for combat that might happen to him’.”544 Hobby now tried to think of “a way we could say ‘This is your war’ without actually pointing out that they release a man.”545 As a compromise, the recruiters decided that some “glamorization” in advertising was essential (this was not true for the recruiting campaign itself). Emphasis was thus placed firstly on the many types of attractive jobs available to women in the Army, and secondly, on WAC benefits, with the advantage of full military status. An example for this course of action was the radio series Green Valley, USA on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).546 Each weekday the listener was greeted with “Hello neighbor. Welcome back to Green Valley. I’ve got a story for you, about some people you probably know. People just like you, important people, whose story is the life story of America.” The story was about young Jane Smith, an orphan, who works at the public library. Jane is bitter, restrained and lonely but proud and does not smile often. One sunny day she meets popular Danny, her former classmate – captain of the basketball team, chairman of the senior prom – who is now Sergeant and eager to go overseas, but has too much office work to do. Lonely Jane leaves the job at the library, joins up, and starts making friends the minute she boards the train to Fort Oglethorpe. Once a member of the WAAC, she is doing fine in class work, but because she is so bitter about not having a family, she is not much of a team player. A motherly WAAC Captain (who has lost a brother in combat) sets her head straight, and Jane stops pitying herself. Finally, Jane finds her “family of friendship – a family of loyalty to the ideas for which this country stands, and for which we are all fighting today in true comradeship.”547 Jane becomes “Smitty” and is “part of the gang now.” Finally, she finds romance with Danny. When he is overseas, she knows that after making her “own family […] here in the WAAC [she now

544

545 546

547

Women Veterans Historical Collection. http://library.uncg.edu/depts/archives/miscdes/ posters.html. Accessed July 12, 2005. Conference ODWAC staff with Young & Rubicam personnel, October 11, 1943, 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Ibid. CBS, Green Valley, U.S.A. 15-minute radio scripts, broadcast June 8-14, 1943, between 3:45 and 4:00 pm. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 15. CBS, Green Valley, U.S.A., script #115, broadcast June 11, 1943, 10. NARA. Ibid.

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has] the one thing that was still missing […] A picture of somebody special to show off.”548 Advertisers were experimenting to find just the right amount of “glamour” they thought necessary for “selling” the WAC to American women, but which WAC Headquarters would still tolerate. The following radio scripts were written by Sergeant Hal E. Woodard who worked at the Public Relations Office Camp in Wheeler, Georgia. Woodard was an editor of the camp paper at Camp Wheeler, an infantry replacement training center, and was in charge of “all radio activity” at the two-man public relations office. When Woodard was called to Atlanta on the WAC recruiting drive for the Recruiting District, the enthusiastic Sergeant wrote shows and spot announcements, that combined the patriotism approach with an emphasis on personal benefits and an increasing level of glamour: “The WAC offers you the chance to chose from 239 different jobs, and also the freedom to chose where you want to be stationed.”549 “There’ll be classes in military operations, world events, administration and lots of other fascinating subjects. […] Yes, [life in the WAC] is hard in many ways. Many of the jobs are routine and tedious. It certainly isn’t all glamour, but there’s nothing in it that’s impossible.”550 Announcement #3 stresses the vacation aspect. “Once you’re in, you’ll meet new people, women from all walks of life – students, opera singers, stenographers, housewives and world travelers. You’ll live a new life, an exiting life!”551 In Announcement #8 Sgt. Woodard mixes elements of fashion reporting into his patriotic appeal and perhaps gets a little carried away: “MAN (whistles, wolf type): Wow! What was that? AN[OU]NC[E]R: That was a WAC in her brandnew summer uniform! MAN: Brother, that outfit defies description. WAC: I’m wearing the cool, new tropical worsted summer tans – form fitting, with gold buttons and shoulder tabs. I have on these smart off duty pumps of brown leather, and I’m carrying a matching envelope bag. To set the ensemble off, there’s the soft chamois colored scarf and gloves, plus a jaunty garrison cap trimmed in enchanting moss green. MAN: Terrific, terrific!

548 549

550 551

CBS, Green Valley, U.S.A., script #119, broadcast June 14, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Sergeant Hal E. Woodard: WAC Recruiting Announcement #1, Public Relations Office Camp Wheeler, Georgia. Letter Woodard to Hobby, June 1, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Sgt. Hal E. Woodard: WAC Recruiting Announcement #3, ibid. Ibid.

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WAC: And that’s not all. For off-duty occasions I can switch to my soft rayon shantung one piece costume of military beige that looks like oyster white.”552

Despite Sgt. Woodard’s enthusiastic and creative advertising, the ensuing AllStates Campaign relied on more experienced personnel. The All-States Campaign One campaign that worked well with the patriotism motif Hobby preferred was the All-States Plan. This campaign was a brainchild of Jessie Pearl Rice, who had been reassigned to WAC headquarters in the summer. Rice had a background as an industrial sales manager and a year’s field experience as Staff Director, Third Service Command. As the new head of WAC Recruiting and later as Deputy Director, she was along with Hobby in charge of WAC policy. On September 7, 1943 at a WAC Recruiting Conference in Washington, DC, Rice introduced the plan. She believed that the local elites had to be included on every level of the recruiting effort. According to Rice, eligible women and their families would be more likely to listen to community members than to outside salesmen, expert or not. Her plan included making the success of WAC recruiting a competitive matter of state pride. Each state was to recruit a state company which would wear that state’s shoulder patches. Originally, the national quota was to be based on war casualties. As Major Robert Brown explained, the total quota of Wacs to be enlisted Wacs by state companies was 70,000. “It is planned to enlist 1 WAC for each Army casualty – but this must be taken literally.” However, the theme of direct replacements for local casualties was soon dropped as too offensive. “Human beings don’t react in the same way to a death in the family from war or some other cause.”553 For the recruitment period from 27 September to 7 December 1943 – approximately [sic] 70 days – the slogan was to be “70,000 WACs in 70 days.”554 Two weeks before the campaign was launched, on September 10, 1943, General Marshall personally wrote to the state governors outlining the campaign. Next, the governors were contacted by the commanding generals of each service and asked to work with WAC recruiting officers to set up committees consisting of mayors and other prominent citizens coordinated by WAC recruiters in each town. General Marshall also outlined the plan to the public in a national press release on 15 September.

552 553 554

Sgt. Hal E. Woodard: WAC Recruiting Announcement #8, ibid. WAC Recruiting Conference, September 7, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Ibid.

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This concerted effort generated an unprecedented impact. The Office of War Information in October coordinated “17,000 messages broadcast over 891 radio stations, plus 150 plugs on network programs and special, national, and spot programs.”555 The campaign was also supported by the WAC Band, by the Army’s Recruiting Publicity Bureau that printed all kinds of advertising materials and by the War Advertising Council and others that arranged free sponsored advertising for the WAC on the national as well as the local level. National civic and business organizations, women’s clubs across the country as well as businesses in all kinds of trades contributed free publicity in the publications and paid advertising was authorized to supplement it.556 In October 1943, the Research Department of Young & Rubicam conducted another investigation of a cross-section of 80 WAC Recruiting Stations. 77 local investigators visited the recruiting stations in their hometown or a near-by city where they presented themselves as applicants and went through all preliminary steps of enlistment such as the MAT but not the physical examination.557 The results were better than expected: 81% of the applicants left the station with the over-all impression that their reception had been good; 56% stated their feeling toward the WAC had been influenced favorably.558 The All-States Campaign proved more successful than any other campaign before or after WWII, and the WAC was able to enlist just over 10,000 new recruits. It also succeeded in overcoming the bad public opinion that resulted from the slander campaign. A new Gallup survey in the closing months of the year showed that public attitude was now “definitely favorable to the WACmore so than at any time since its organization.559 Slowly, the Army began realizing that recruiting women was a servicewide task that would neither take care of itself nor could be relegated to some minor understaffed office. At the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting in February 1944 Maj. General Joe N. Dalton, Director of Personnel of the Army Service Forces, opened his remarks by greeting his “fellow

555 556

557

558 559

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 245. Examples include General Federation of Women’s Clubs. General Federation Clubwoman [27page brochure] 23.5 (February 1943): Washington, DC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 12. Oveta C. Hobby. “Portia in Khaki”. Women Lawyers’ Journal 28.3-4 (1942): 5-7. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 12. Research Department, Young & Rubicam, “WAC Recruiting Station Investigation,” October 1943. NARA. 165, Entry 55, Box 203. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 245.

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recruiters.” “I use the term ‘fellow recruiters’ advisedly, for it is definitely the duty of every member of the Army to aid in solving the problem of providing sufficient manpower for our assault forces by aiding in recruiting of women.”560 In order to keep recruiters motivated, the Adjutant General’s Office in January started distributing a bi-weekly newsletter, the Recruiters’ Review in which it published progress reports, pep rallies and advice on sales techniques.561 The Adjutant General also created the Planning Branch, a group of Army officers many of whom had “civilian experience […] in life insurance sales management. As Edward Witsell, later to become the Adjutant General himself, stated, this decision was based on “the realization that the problem before us is not only one requiring expert sales technique, but the intimate personalized technique that is best found in the life insurance field, where salesmen deal daily with the intimate personal relationships of all types of individuals.”562 The All-States Campaign was succeeded by a special assignment recruiting plan for the Army Ground and Service Forces, the Station Job Assignment (SJA) Plan.563 The program, which was in effect from November 1943 until 1 March 1944, allowed for recruits who elected the plan to select for her initial assignment a specific occupational field, “depending on her aptitudes and skills and need.” The women were also assigned to a station in the same service command where they signed up. This plan proved problematic for several reasons: According to informal reports from the Service Commands, most recruiters found that the promises had caused much additional administrative work, but had not aided recruiting. Instead, the plan created a “bad morale situation” among the women who had enlisted before the inauguration of sta-

560

561

562

563

(Emphasis in the original). Maj. General Joe N. Dalton, Director of Personnel, ASF. Speech given at the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting, Chicago, IL. 2123 February 1944, 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Women’s Army Corps. Recruiters Review 1.1 (January 15, 1944). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 218. Brig. General Edward F. Witsell, Director MPD, AGO, opening remarks to the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting. Ibid. Lieutenant Col John F. Johns became Chief of the Planning Branch, which consisted of three operating sections: The Administrative Section, the Field Supervisory Section and the Publicity Section. WAC News Letter 1.4 (March 1944). Ibid.. War Department Circular No. 286, November 8, 1943. “Women’s Army Corps – Area and Job Recruiting and Assignment. NARA. RG 407, Box 4294.

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tion and job recruiting. Additionally, recruiters were surprised to learn that most women did not want to serve near home.564 The Attitude of Army Men The attitude of servicemen was extremely important to public perception of the WAAC. Many women who joined the Corps had family members in one of the armed services – as did many who did not join. Family members’ and friends’ attitudes toward military service would almost invariably play a role in a woman’s decision to enlist. As I have shown earlier, it was therefore vital for recruiting to know and positively influence the soldiers’ opinion on the WAAC. The first Survey that specifically explored the servicemen’s attitude was conducted by the Services of Supply, Special Services Division in January 1943.565 It revealed a decidedly adverse attitude of most servicemen. The survey covered almost 4,300 men at eight Army camps – four where Wacs were stationed, four where there were no Waacs. When asked, “[i]f you had a sister 21 years old or older, would you like to see her join the WAAC or not?” only 25 percent answered “yes.”566 The same was true when the men were asked whether they would advise a girl friend to join - only one fourth would. Those who answered “no” gave as their reasons: “[w]omen are more help in industry, defense work, [and on the] farm”; they would be “better off at home”; the Army was “no place for a woman”; she would have “too close contact with soldiers” or “too hard a life.”567 When asked how they thought a young woman without family responsibilities could serve her country best,

564

565

566

567

Memorandum Colonel A. P. Sullivan to Director Military Personnel Division, ASF, subject: Results of WAC Enlistments under WD Circular 340, 1943, April 25, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Report No. B-4, Attitudes of Enlisted Men toward the WAAC, Preliminary Memorandum. NARA. RG 330, Entry 93, Box 991. 25 % answered yes, 40 % no, 35% were undecided. The answers of men of different educational background were very similar, though men with less education were slightly more favorable of the WAAC. Those who indicated that there were WAAC’s stationed at their camp likewise had a more favorable attitude, and this was true in all education groups. At a conference of training center commandants, however, Captain Edlund gave different figures: he stated that 55% of the enlisted men answered no and that at camps where Waacs were stationed more enlisted men did not want their sister, friends, etc. to join the WAAC in comparison with those Camps at which Wacs were not stationed. Proceedings of conference of training center commandants, March 31- April 1, 1943, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 209. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 170.

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over half of them named the war industry, with others preferring farm or “government work.” Fewer than 20 percent named the WAAC and only two percent the WAVES. These opinions were offered although most men had never seen a Waac. The survey also revealed that the soldiers had little knowledge of what the Waacs were actually doing. One fourth said they “work for the government,” and as much as 13 percent said the WAAC performed “combat duty.”568 First Officer Martha E. Eskeridge, WAAC advisor to the Film Production Section of the Army Service Forces’ Special Service Division, conducted interviews with Army officers and enlisted men on the West Coast and came to similar conclusions regarding the soldiers’ attitude toward the WAAC.569 Apart from the fact that the average soldier “does not understand the purpose of the Corps, just what the women will do and how they are to be treated,” he was also not convinced of the need of women’s participation in the Army. The soldiers’ main objection to their sisters or girlfriends joining the WAAC was that they felt “the Army [was] no place for a woman.” In Eskeridge’s words, the men felt that “the Army [was] composed of so-called wolves and that his sister’s or girlfriend’s close association with these soldiers [would] tend to lower her moral standards.”570 At the same time, “the soldier feels too that the WAAC will de-feminize women […] and change her.”571 Eskeridge’s survey clearly revealed that for officers and enlisted men the category ‘woman|soldier ‘ did not yet exist. The officers’ confusion and insecurity toward Waacs was even greater than that of enlisted men. Eskeridge reported: “Army officers prefer to treat WAACs first as ladies and then as soldiers. They resent the fact that many Waacs insist on observing military courtesy after they have indicated by word or gesture that they prefer to treat the WAAC as they would a woman; that is, allowing the WAAC to precede them through a door, etc.”572

568 569

570 571 572

Ibid. Martha E. Eskridge, 1st Officer WAAC, Headquarters Brach Office Special Service Division, Los Angeles, CA, subject: Report of Technical Advisor, WAAC Film, April 21, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 9. Interviews with officers and enlisted men who had never seen or worked with Waacs were conducted in Los Angeles and on trains. Officers and enlisted men who had worked with Waacs were interviewed at the Los Angeles recruiting Station and the Port of Embarkation at San Francisco. Report of Technical Advisor, WAAC Film, 2-3. Ibid. Ibid.

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This ambiguity was not just due to the novelty of the Corps or the lack of established protocol regarding women in uniform. Rather, it became clear that male officers felt that their own identity was being threatened by women officers: “When in the presence of a senior WAAC officer, a junior Army officer is rather self-conscious and is extremely sensitive to any evidence of the WAAC’s consciousness of rank. When this is augmented by a superior attitude on the part of the WAAC the reaction is that of resentment toward the Corps. This attitude and approach on the part of a WAAC officer unsells [sic] the Corps quicker than anything else.”573

Although a Waac “prefers to be treated as a soldier while on duty but as a woman when off-duty,” it was up to her to “realize the WAAC does not wish to change them and make them masculine […] many of them are under the false impression that they would have to get a masculine haircut if they joined the WAAC.”574 A “masculine haircut” or “consciousness of rank” were both considered unfeminine and would thus harm recruiting. Consequently, Eskridge suggested that the most effective approach in WAAC publicity geared specifically toward Army officers and enlisted men was “the feminine angle.” Men needed to be convinced that the WAAC would not alter the women but that they would continue to “like all the things they did as civilians such as pretty clothes, perfume, nail polish, curls and most of all […] a desire for a home.”575 The “feminine angle” was also disseminated by less official recruiting aids. The WAC News Letter, for instance, produced by the Office of the Director distributed by the Publications Section of the Adjutant General’s Office, was aimed at WAC officers but also intended to provide “material of interest to all Army personnel.”576 Because of its informal nature, the newsletter was also a medium for the occasional “human interest story” such as “They All Serve” in the January 1944 issue: eleven of twelve children of Mr. And Mrs. Van Coutren of St. Louis, Missouri served in the military. The story of the “patriotic family” of “three Wacs, six boys in the Navy, one boy in the Army and one in the Marine Corps,” each of whom received a letter from Mrs. Van Coutren once a week, was geared to appeal to everybody who had any influ-

573 574 575 576

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Editorial, WAC News Letter 1.6 (November 15, 1943): 2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 218.

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ence on a prospective Wac’s decision to enlist.577 The newsletter generally promoted an ideal of the Waac as a professional soldier for the duration whose presence in the theater of operation could nevertheless spice up the dull GI life. After noting the high regard in which overseas commands hold the Wacs “out of an appreciation for their efficiency, adaptability, selfsufficiency and soldierly conduct,” the News Letter quotes Lt. Col Anna W. Wilson, WAC Staff Director in the European Theater of Operations: “During a raid it is interesting to observe the effect on GI Joe, or GI Jane, as she is called. There is a natural instinct on the part of the Wac not to let the GI see that she is afraid. The same is true of him. He couldn’t have a mere woman see that he is disturbed.”578

By 1944 many recruiters were convinced that the cause of the recruiting difficulties lay largely in the adverse attitude toward women in the armed forces, although few put it as drastically as Brig. General Henry S. Aurand of the Sixth Service Command: “We are all convinced that the attitude of the buck private is the reason for slow enlistment of Wacs. […] Let’s take this Command for example. Less than ten percent of the enlisted men are in combat organizations. Just tell those fellows to go out and get Wacs so they can be sent overseas, and you will see how far you get. [...] You might just as well put that in your pipe and smoke it.”579

Instead, the Army hastily devised a number of measures to influence soldier opinion positively, among them a film and a handbook to provide information on the WAAC.580 By the time the Army recruiters realized that they would have to influence soldiers’ opinion in order to meet the WAC recruiting quotas, enlisted men had “already formed rather definite opinions” on the WAC. In an orientation program for soldiers of the 4th Service Command in Savannah, Georgia, Air Corps Captain Morris Abram first addressed the typical questions: “Why don’t we draft women, why don’t we use civilians, why don’t we use 4-F’s [men rejected for military service].”581 Then, however, Adams employed a new approach: he pointed out that “in the midst of a decisive war’s most

577 578 579 580 581

“They All Serve,” WAC News Letter, 1.8. (January 15, 1944): 7. Ibid. “The WAC Overseas,” WAC News Letter 2.8 (March 1945). Ibid. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 689. Ibid., 171. Letter Captain Morris B. Abram, HQ AAF Eastern Flying Training Command, Maxwell Field, Alabama to Lieutenant Col. Jessie Pearl Rice, Assistant Director, WAC. March 31, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 2.

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critical stage” the Army was 200,000 men short of the required strength. “But,” he went on, “up to a certain point, women can be figured as men in counting the strength of the army. […] Perhaps up to seven hundred thousand can be counted as men.”582 He went on to assure the soldiers that the WAC was not designed “primarily to send you overseas [but] to bring as many as possible of our army back alive and unharmed. It was not established primarily to replace you in the job you are now doing; it was established that we might, men and women together, pool our efforts to overwhelm the enemy. […] So, let’s not talk of replacing men for combat.”583 This was a new approach toward the WAC, and it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the War Department position finally recognized Wacs as soldiers in their own right, or, as Abram put it, “there are three kinds of jobs in the army: the job for men soldiers, the job for women soldiers, and the job of the civilians […]. Healthy men are to fight; healthy women are to back them up in non-combatant military tasks; and properly classified civilians are to do the least military administrative job.”584 On the other hand this new hierarchy of male soldier, woman|soldier, and civilian administrative worker did not come about out of a sudden realization of the value of the WAC’s work. Rather, as War Department instructions telegraphed to field stations suggested, recruiting was harmed by “antagonize[ing]” soldiers. Consequently the instructions went on, stating “don’t imply that women do a better job than men except on work in which men recognize women’s superiority, such as stenography.”585 Along the same lines the WAC Director added, “[t]he soldier does not like it [Wacs replacing men]. There is not always a good civilian reaction to it, and we mothers are jealous, perhaps, of our sons […] We do not like to think that some girl has replaced our son.”586 During the winter of 1943/44 the ill-fated slogan ‘Release a man to fight’ was at last replaced. Hobby pointed out that the WAC was not any more only about ‘releasing manpower’, but: “a total part of the man and womanpower of this nation. […] Overseas […] each woman felt that she was needed there. […] The Wacs are regarded as soldiers.

582 583 584 585 586

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 691. Ibid.

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They have been given all the orientation courses that the troops are given when they go to those stations and these women know the picture.”587

A representative of Young & Rubicam confirmed that the expression had not been used at all for several months. He confirmed that the expressions ‘releasing’ or ‘replacing’ men “had definitely hurt the recruiting of women from the first time it went up on posters. […] It is very definitely out. It is a dead duck as far as publicity is concerned.”588 Finally, Hobby gave in to Young & Rubicam’s position on the motif of self-interest, rather than self-sacrifice. After a presentation of the latest Gallup figures to Air Force personnel Hobby stated: “The story of the need and essentiality has apparently been told. I think we have to do this type of advertising: appeal to people who want to travel, who want vocational training – self-interest copy.”589 Furthermore Director Hobby stated: “I think that the day of speaking of the WAC as something new or novel should be over. We should stop saying what a great job the WAC does. I think it should be an accepted part of the war effort. We should simply appeal to the womanpower of this nation and the manpower of this nation because all of us know that the manpower of this nation must be sold on the need for women in the military service or the women are not going to come in.”590

“Fighting men and capable Wacs” Secretary of War Stimson reiterated the new policy in a public speech in May 1944: “[t]he need at the moment is for fighting men and capable Wacs.”591 This General Staff decision constituted a change in personnel policy. Against the widespread belief that male 4-Fs and limited service personnel could be assigned to noncombat Army jobs, Stimson stated: “We can fit them into the Army with the minimum of training and use them on jobs where men are seldom as well-trained, as efficient, as well-suited by temperament, or as will587

588

589

590

591

Colonel Oveta C. Hobby, Director, WAC, speech given at the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting, Chicago, IL 21-23 February 1944, 9. 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Mr. Reeder, Young & Rubicam at the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting, Chicago, IL 21-23 February 1944, 28. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Conference to present Gallup survey to Air Forces personnel, November 23, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 200. Colonel Oveta C. Hobby, Director, WAC, speech given at the Adjutant General’s Conference on WAC Recruiting, Chicago, IL, 21-23 February 1944, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 685.

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ing to work as women are.”592 Women’s skills made them valuable because it minimized the training necessary and their mobility made them preferable to men who were fathers: “We need women because they have the skills we are looking for. […] It is not economy [sic] to take men from their families and from jobs in essential industry to do the work in the Army which women who are mobile and without dependents could do with less training.”593

The flip side of this new recognition of women’s place in the war was that the special skills that made Wacs so valuable were often precisely those nurturing and caring skills that were traditionally assigned to women. To accept Wacs as fellow soldiers now, to give them proper credit and support, would make them better wives when the war was over: “After the war, would you like a wife who understands the emptiness at times which steals over your heart, the sad smile with which you consider the huge importance which people attach to petty things? […] Do you want a wife as close to you as you are to your buddies from Over There? [sic]”594

For the Wacs as well as potential recruits this meant that tasks that they had performed throughout the war out of expedience were now redefined so that for example clerical and stenographic workers in Army General Hospitals were now doing a “work of healing” in keeping track of patients’ progress and treatment.595 “Comforting Our Wounded Heroes” WAC recruiting was to be essentially over as soon as the war ended. In the Fall of 1944 the defeat of Germany was prematurely expected to occur by the end of the year, so that after 31 December 1944 the “aggressive WAC recruiting” should cease. Hobby estimated that the WAC would have attained a strength of 100,000 by November 1, 1944.596 Beginning in January 1945, the 592 593 594

595

596

Ibid. Ibid. Letter Captain Morris B. Abram, HQ AAF Eastern Flying Training Command, Maxwell Field, Alabama to Lieutenant Col. Jessie Pearl Rice, Assistant Director, WAC, March 31, 1944, 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 2. Public Relations Office, Charleston Recruiting District, Standard Operating Procedure West Virginia WAC Hospital Unit Campaign. February 1 - March 31, 1945, 32. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Memorandum Oveta C. Hobby to General Stephen G. Henry, Assistant Chief of Staff, G1, subject: WAC Recruiting, August 21, 1944. NARA RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. See also

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WAC should start recruiting for smaller quotas to procure essential skills as needed and to replace losses caused by attrition.597 Late in December 1944, the Adjutant General sent letters to all service commands, virtually ending active WAC recruiting. Each service command was directed to reduce its personnel drastically and, from 1 January on, was assigned a quota of only 68 each month.598 The Battle of the Bulge made this directive obsolete even before it was sent out. The battle to counter the German Ardennes Offensive between December 16, 1944 and January 25, 1945 was the largest land battle of World War II in which the United States participated. It was also the costliest in terms of lives. In total there were 81,000 American casualties, including 23,554 captured and 19,000 killed. Most of the casualties occurred within the first three days of the battle, when two regiments of the 106th Division were surrounded and forced to surrender.599 The relief orders were immediately rescinded and the General Hospital Campaign was launched to recruit Wacs as medical and surgical technicians.600 Sick and wounded men were coming back to the United States at a rate of 1,000 a day to spend an average of five months recuperating. The number of American battle casualties that had occurred in the Army Ground Forces alone during the six months since D-day – 332,912 men – was much greater than that of the 30 months up to invasion of France.601 The overall American battle casualties as reported through January 7, 1945 were

597

598

599

600

601

Jessie P. Rice, Memorandum for General White, subject: WAC Recruiting on Defeat of Germany, August 7, 1944. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Lieutenant Col John F. Johns, Chief, Planning Branch for WAC recruiting, Minutes of War Department Planning Board for WAC Recruiting, October 23, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Letters, Maj. General A[lexander] D. Surles to Edwin O. Perrin, War Advertising Council, and to Edward Kaluber, Deputy Director, Office of War Information, both October 26, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Letter Adjutant General to all Service Commands, 20 Dec 44. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 697. In addition to the battle casualties, 74 American prisoners of war were murdered by the German 1. SS-Panzerdivision “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” on December 17 in what became known as the Malmedy Massacre. Weinberg, A World at Arms, 766-767. WAC Recruiting data compiled at conference of officers of WAC recruiting unit, Second Service Command, ASF, January 13, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 207. The total American battle casualties during the 2 1/2 years up to invasion of France on June 6, 1944 were 224,693. During the six months between D-Day and January 1, 1945 casualties on the Western Front were 332,912 (in the ground forces of the Army alone,) of whom 232,672 were wounded. WAC Medical Technician Program, WAC Hospital Assignments. January 30, 1945. NARA RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189.

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662,399.602 General Marshall assigned to the WAC the task to recruit 103 medical units, each made up of several platoons of 15 women each. These 6,500 to 8,000 additional Wacs were to be assigned to 60 Army General Hospitals and trained and functional by midsummer. The women could be promised an initial assignment to a specific unit, but the members of such a unit could be trained as either technicians or medical clerks, according to the needs of the service. An accelerated training program of six weeks was set up, with the final four-week period of basic military training given on the job in an Army General Hospital. The WAC Training Center at Fort Des Moines, which was scheduled to close down on or about 1 April, was retained and devoted exclusively to the training of WAC hospital units.603 The majority of these new Wacs were to serve as medical and surgical technicians as assistants to Army doctors and nurses. The recruiting campaign was, above all, pressed for time. Again the Chief of Staff wrote letters to the Governors soliciting their help in setting up civilian recruiting committees.604 Recruiters were given “campaign kits” and advised to comb all available sources in their communities for eligible prospects. These sources included local Red Cross Chapters, all hospitals were women could have received nurses training (whether completed or not), lists of eligible women compiled by local women’s clubs, lists of college graduates, church heads, and house-to-house canvasses.605 Anybody with some medical training was welcome: civilian nurses, senior cadet nurses, WAC medical and surgical technicians, male medical and surgical technicians, as well as paid and volunteer nurse’s aids had been authorized to supplement the Army nursing service at Army hospitals.606After recruiters “surveyed the possibilities” in their town and had given their “best sales talk,” they were to write the names and phone numbers of women “who show[ed] any degree of interest” on 602

603

604

605

606

“A report to the Women of America on our Wounded and the Critical Need for more Wac in Army Hospitals,” WAC Hospital Assignments. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Recruiters Report, WAC News Letter 2.8 (March 1945): 7. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 218. Physical Organization of Committees, Public Relations Office, Charleston Recruiting District, Standard Operating Procedure West Virginia WAC Hospital Unit Campaign February 1 to March 31, 1945, 7. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Sources for Prospect Lists, Public Relations Office, Charleston Recruiting District, Standard Operating Procedure. West Virginia WAC Hospital Unit Campaign, February 1 to March 31, 1945, 43. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Maj. General J.A. Ulio, The Adjutant General, ASF Circular No. 108, March 26, 1945, Sec. V. WAC Hospital Assignments. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189.

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“qualification cards” which were then sent to show the women’s qualifications “at a glance.”607 The campaign slogan again reflected the patriotism approach, combined with old and new values of women as nurturers: “The Need Is Imperative - The Need Is Immediate! Never in the world was a woman’s war job more clearly defined, more obvious. Sacrifice? To be able to assist in comforting our wounded heroes…in easing their pain… in speeding their recovery? No! It’s an honor – a privilege – an experience – for a woman to cherish forever!”608

Recruiting aids were hastily produced on a local basis. An example from West Virginia consists of nine typewritten pages, interspersed with sketches. The cover shows a sketch of a WAC in a tall, tired looking soldier’s arms. Both are clad in uniform and overseas caps but the only insignia visible are the Pallas Athene collar pieces of the woman. The caption seemed to be borrowed from one of the popular confession magazines: “[r]ead the story of wounded G.I. Joe from all over the globe and the medical Wac who sped his recovery to health and happiness.”609 After almost three years of continuous campaigning there was still no legislative authorization for a peacetime women’s corps, and V-E Day and demobilization were at hand. The G-1 Division of the General Staff hastened to restore the earlier orders to cease WAC recruiting except for attrition replacements. Effective 15 May 1945, the WAC Recruiting Service personnel was reintegrated into the Army Recruiting Service. Its personnel were cut from 3,600 to 300 and the Planning Branch for WAC Recruiting was abolished. When in the early summer of 1945 the demobilization process began to present unprecedented demands for clerical personnel, G-1 Division presented the service commands with the need for 10,000 Wacs in six months.610 Seventy-five percent of these recruits were to be in the scarce clerical skills – clerk, stenographer, typist – and another twenty-five percent in other skilled

607

608

609

610

Six Suggested Steps for Screening Prospects, Public Relations Office, Charleston Recruiting District, Standard Operating Procedure. West Virginia WAC Hospital Unit Campaign, February 1 to March 31, 1945, 58. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. A Report to the Women of America on Our Wounded and the Critical Need for more Wac in Army Hospitals, WAC Hospital Assignments. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Public Relations Office, Charleston Recruiting District, Standard Operating Procedure. West Virginia WAC Hospital Unit Campaign, February 1 to March 31, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, Press Release: “10,000 More Wacs Sought in New Recruitment Program,” August 2, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64.

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specialist fields: medical technicians, operators and repairmen for teletypewriter, key punch machines and tabulating machine, psychiatric social workers, and airplane instrument specialists.611 The Army Recruiting Service now faced an even more difficult situation: the Navy had just launched a campaign for 20,000 Waves, skills that had been in short supply nationwide for which the Army and Navy were searching . Neither branch of the armed services could compete with the pay and advancement opportunities being offered by the industrial private sector. Finally, women were generally reluctant to enlist just as many men were returning from Europe. Nuclear bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki intervened, and soon after V-J Day a telegram to all service commands ended WAC recruiting.612 In February 1945, a staff study of the employment of Wacs in the reconditioning programs of ASF hospitals came to the conclusion that Wacs were preferable to men. The document discusses whether combat wounded veterans “due to personality changes” should be cared for by male personnel with combat experience because the “male enlisted man” was “conditioned to be self-sufficient and to depend on his male comrades.” 613 “By nature and by training, women are not only interested, but suited for restoring the disabled veteran to his proper role as a happy and useful citizen. […] The wholesome psychological influence on male patients of women has been universally recognized since the days of Florence Nightingale. […] WAC personnel because of availability and psychological factors, could well be used to aid such agencies [American Red Cross or Special Services Division, M.H.] in providing a high standard of wholesome entertainment for both on and off duty hours of hospitalized soldiers.”614

On the other hand, the male ego of the returning combat veteran was fragile. Among other possible objections the plan states that “certain patients who because of physical disability might be unable to accomplish the physical ac-

611

612

613

614

Major Thane M. Durey, Recruiting Plans Section, The Adjutant General’s Office, Memorandum for Director WAC, subject: Meeting, July 23, 1945 in the Office of the Director, WAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. TWX, The Adjutant General to all Service Commands, August 29, 1945, c.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 699. Letter Henry B. Gwynn, Major, MC, Reconditioning Consultants Division, Office of the Surgeon General to the Surgeon General, subject: Staff Study of the employment of WAC personnel in the reconditioning programs of ASF hospitals, February 16, 1945. File: Recruiting, medical. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Ibid.

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tivities as demonstrated by the female instructor might resent their inferiority.”615

3.6 Public Relations Public relations can be defined as the practice of communicating with the public, or sections of the public, through the media, with the intention of influencing people’s actions by influencing their opinions. Although the War Department depended on women to volunteer for the organization, the idea that an active public relations policy specifically for the WAC was needed emerged relatively late. Although a central publicity agency that would have kept the public informed of the WAAC’s record during its first year might arguably could have prevented the worst phenomena of the slander campaign, there was no agency or individual in the Bureau of Public Relations charged with coordinating WAC publicity on an Army-wide basis. If we define publicity as the communication between an organization and the public that is related to a specific brand or product, it appears obvious that information on the WAC needed to be managed and that recruiting depended on an active policy of informing the public (in addition to persuading it through advertising). Yet the only news stories on the WAAC were those which news media themselves secured and got cleared or released by the BPR’s press, radio, pictorial and publications branches, each of which handled their own material without any coordination between the branches. Although a policy concerning the portrayal of the WAAC in the media had been devised when the Corps was established, it consisted of little more than a few guidelines on what type of publicity was to be avoided. To make matters worse, most Army station public relations officers in the field were not even familiar with these.616 From time to time a bulletin or memo informed Army public relations officers that although it was “to be avoided […] to defeminize members of the Corps or make them appear mannish, […] Waacs are soldiers.”617 The earliest publicity policy, agreed upon at a WAAC staff conference on June 5, 1942, amounted to little more than

615 616

617

Ibid. Bureau of Public Relations, Liaison Bulletin, “WAAC Publicity,” [July] 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Ibid.

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“[r]educing the publicity about the [the First WAAC Training Center at Fort Des Moines] by an avoidance of self-initiated publicity, save in those instances where a specific effect is to be achieved in the furtherance of a predetermined program, or to offset or correct some misapprehension. […] Exclusion of reporters and photographers from the school area for a period of about two weeks after the opening day […] would also prevent the public from receiving an unflattering picture of candidates in an early state of awkwardness.”618

With the Bureau of Public Relations not devoting any resources to a publicity campaign for the WAAC, Hobby attempted to assemble some WAAC public relations personnel in the Office of Technical Information (OTI), a small office attached to her own headquarters. This office was not chiefly intended to supply material to news media and steer them toward desired policies, but merely to check releases for technical accuracy and security. Other administrative services had similar offices, but Hobby argued that hers should be allotted more funds on the grounds that the WAAC was the object of “extraordinary public interest” and was doing its own recruiting.619 These requests were turned down by the Services of Supply and the Bureau of Public Relations did not allow the WAAC OTI to handle any publicity, neither inquiries concerning the WAAC received by WAAC Headquarters nor those received by the bureau. Although projects originated by the OTI or opinions offered on method of presentation were frequently rebutted, the WAAC OTI carefully tried to influence the bureau’s policies and decisions. WAAC recruiters realized that public relations and recruiting were closely tied together. It was here that the idea originated to use Waacs to influence public opinion in their hometowns. “All members of the WAAC, when on leave or furlough, represent the WAAC. […] Need instructions to be given to Waacs going on leave regarding what to say regarding the WAAC; would like her to do recruiting job for us. What she should say could be attached to her orders.”620

The lack of a coordinated publicity policy did not, of course, keep the press from covering the Corps. The WAC file of clippings labeled “Horrible Examples” gave ample evidence for a type of reporting that might, at least in wartime, easily have been prevented by a more coordinated and clearer policy. The file contained pictures of “Wacs in leopard skin sarongs and Wacs in 618

619 620

Memorandum, Oveta Culp Hobby to General [Alexander D.] Surles, subject: WAAC Publicity Policy, June 5, 1942. 165, 55, 192, F. 6, Publicity. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 194. Remarks of Lt Thorp at a Conference of training center commandants, March 31- April 1, 1943, 12. 165, 55. 209, F. 13

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nude-colored bathing suits vied with overweight Wacs and stern-faced mannishly barbered Wacs for Army publicity pictures.”621 All of these images and press releases originated with Army station public relations officers, who generally meant no harm, but were thoroughly unfamiliar with the implications for the image of the Corps and recruiting. Another “horrible example” of unwanted publicity was a photograph of three Waacs reviewing a line of young male cadets, one Waac holding a rifle and looking down its barrel.622 Immediately after the photograph had appeared in the press, Congressman John E. Sheridan of Pennsylvania complained to Hobby that he knew of nothing that had caused more violent protest among his constituents who inquired whether the officers in training with combat rifles had not made illegal use of the appropriation of the WAAC bill.623 WAAC public relation officer Dorothy Donlon requested an investigation as the photograph had caused “considerable comment and unfavorable criticism. It seems to connect Waacs with combat arms.”624 The reality, however, was less spectacular: It turned out that the cadet corps of Girard College, a voluntary unit for orphan boys not approved by ROTC, had held a competitive drill and “as a morale builder” had invited the WAAC officers to review and inspect the corps. The rifles the boys drilled with and the WAAC officers inspected were old Krag rifles with the firing pin removed and the barrel cut short to reduce the weight.625 This correspondence clearly illustrates the different opinions as to the symbolic significance of the rifle image. For the commander of Girard College, the Waacs symbolically upgraded his cadets, precisely by their being “military,” as symbolized by the rifle inspections. For Hobby, on the other hand, the same dysfunctional rifles symbolized a martial quality that she found extremely harmful to her Waacs’ femininity. Similarly, other Army officers saw rifles, even replicas as symbolic for military virtues the association with which would in their eyes help WAC recruiting, not harm it. The com-

621 622 623

624

625

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 700. WAACS Turn the Tables – Inspect the Boys. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter John Edward Sheridan to Director Hobby, January 20, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter Dorothy Donlon, First Officer, Director Technical Information Division to Commanding General, Third Service Command, February 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letters Colonel J.M. Hamilton, commandant of Girard College to Colonel Frederick Schoenfeld, Recruiting and Induction Officer, March 5, 1943 and Schoenfeld to Hobby, March 5, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93.

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mandant of the Atlantic Coast Transportation Corps Officers Training School, Colonel Bernhard Lentz, in a letter to Hobby regretted that orders forbade the Wacs to drill with replica rifles. He wrote: “I, myself, am convinced that drills, such as we had with our ‘replica’ rifles before the issuance of the aforesaid orders, if shown around here, would constitute a tremendous stimulant to WAC recruiting. […] Would that we, with our detachment still had the authority to drill with our rifles! Then we could give our demonstrations in connection with WAC recruiting a martial ‘oomph’ and an inspirational ‘it’ that would back the rifle-toting WAVES and the pistol-shooting SPARS clear off the map.”626

The absence of a coordinated publicity policy not only led to newspaper coverage that portrayed the Wacs as martial, but also to coverage that threatened to ridicule them on the basis of being ‘unsoldierly’. When an Air Depot Group from Alaska in early 1944 put on an amateur stage show based on the musical “Ten Thousand Knights in an Igloo,” the press got hold of “horrible (almost obscene) pictures of men impersonating Wacs in burlesque show.”627 The men had performed the show at an 8th Army Air Force show in Europe and Life photographers had taken photographs that were cleared by the Base Censor, ETO. Hence, when Hobby and other WAC officers saw the photographs, they were beyond recall by the War Department BPR. The pictures show a chorus line of ten men in wigs and WAC uniforms. One caption read: ”THEY NEVER CAME…But the WACs did come to Alaska in the form of twelve husky GI’s who donned wigs and skirts for the “WACs That Never Came” scene in the smash-hit musicale [sic], “Ten Thousand Knights In An Igloo,” produced recently by an Air Depot Group in Alaska.”628

Hobby’s letter of complaint stated that “[t]he uniform of the WAC is worn by men masquerading as women. Neither the pictures nor the captions iden626

627

628

Bernhard Lentz, Colonel, Commandant Atlantic Coast Transportation Corps Officers Training School, Letter to Colonel Hobby, November 26, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 13. Although Army regulations excluded women from combat training that involved weapons or tactical exercises and from duty assignments that required weapons, there were some exceptions to this rule. Commanders could assign women to such noncombat duty positions as disbursing or pay officers, intelligence personnel who worked in code rooms, or drivers in certain overseas areas. If the women were assigned these positions, they were issued a pistol (usually a .45-caliber automatic pistol) and given training with the weapon. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps,14. Memo JPR [Jessie Perl Rice] to DWAC, subject: Important Events 7 January 7 to 31 January 1944, January 31, 1944 Back of photo stamped “Made by U.S. Army Air Forces, Feb, 1944”. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02.

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tify the participants as men.”629 Mattie Treadwell’s later account echoes this perception: “In this month public relations officers in the European theater released to a national pictorial magazine in the United States a series of pictures of grotesque mannish-looking ‘Wars’ [sic] in obscene poses and engaged in soliciting men. The captions did not make it clear that the subjects were men dressed in WAC uniforms.”630

Photographs such as this were equally disastrous as the image of Wacs inspecting rifles. In order to harmonize publicity with recruiting policy the Director in February 1944 proposed the establishment of a specialist group to coordinating WAC publicity: “A group must be established whose primary mission is to prepare plans and follow through. […] This must be a professional job, competing in a well-organized field for the attention and interest of the public against professional attempts to attract the same people in other directions.631

The new WAC Group with which the Chief of Staff augmented the Bureau of Public Relations over their objections consisted of six male and six female officers and was headed by Colonel J. Noel Macy, formerly the WAAC’s first deputy and public relations officer. Its tasks included devising proper approaches, surveying camp newspapers for suitable material, gathering material for radio, newspapers, magazines, photographs and other news media, writing releases, reviewing copy, and guiding field public relations officers toward the original idea of the WAC as a “serious and dignified organization.”632 The group wrote copy for paid advertising as well as for “tie-ins” in radio shows, worked with sponsors to arrange essay contests on “Why I like the WAC” and “ghosted” story for officers who returned from overseas theaters.633 At

629

630 631

632

633

Letter Hobby to Commanding General, Army Air Forces, subject: Material Detrimental to the Women’s Army Corps, February 2, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 700. Ibid., 701. Document “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC” in duplicate in, Entry 55, Box 212 and NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 199. Brochure “A Plan for Increasing the Rate of Enrollment in the WAAC,” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. Charlotte T. McGraw, Captain, WAC Group, Memo for the Acting Director, subject: Report of Activities of the WAC Group, December 11, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 58. WAC Group, Bureau of Public Relations, WD, Bulletin of Public Relations Activities Pertaining to Women’s Army Corps June 1 to 30, 1944, 3. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. See also Edgar F. Swasey, Lieutenant Col, Chief WAC Group, Memo to Hobby, subject: Activities report November 1-15, 1944.

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last Army recruiters and Army public relations officers were no longer employing contradictory approaches, and the first real public relations campaign “based on an entirely new WAC public relations policy” was launched in the summer of 1944.634 Photographs of Wacs in the new winter uniform were placed in fashion magazines such as Collier’s, McCall’s, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar. Other photographs were made for rotogravure process and released to newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune. The WAC Group also “analyzed the effect of syndicated cartoon strips now appearing on the WAC” and supplied authors with “specific objectives and material intended to aid all-over public opinion on WAC.”635 In the early period of the Corps, cartoonists had often portrayed WAAC officers and enlisted women alike as “overweight, buxom, overbearing, and, in general, inept socially and militarily.”636 Parade Magazine was to print a story “to overcome a misimpression on the part of the public about Wacs engaging in combat.637 The rules for presenting the WAC to the public that were laid down in classified bulletins to field public relations officers included elements of Hobby’s own policy: “1. Wacs are just as feminine as before they enlisted. They gain new poise and charm. They do feminine jobs much like those of civilian women. They have dates and are good friends with Army men. 2. The Women’s Army Corps is no longer an experiment. It has public acceptance and prestige. ‘Present it as a success story.’ Parents are proud. Requirements are high. Only attractive pictures should appear. 3. Army jobs performed by Wacs are necessary to the war effort. Dramatize the job. Show Wacs working with men. Avoid pictures of kitchen police. 4. ‘Uncle Sam provides for the welfare of his Army nieces.’ Emphasize advantages of travel, new friends, medical care, recreation.

634

635

636 637

WAC Group, Bureau of Public Relations, WD, Bulletin of Public Relations Activities Pertaining to Women’s Army Corps June 1 to 30, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Ibid. The “Winnie the Wac” cartoons drawn for the camp newspaper at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD were collected and published in 1945: Herman Victor J. Winnie the Wac. Philadelphia, PA: David McKay Company, 1945. Winnie is portrayed as dim-witted and rather frivolous. Allen, The News Media, 80. WAC Group, Bureau of Public Relations, WD, Bulletin of Public Relations Activities Pertaining to Women’s Army Corps June 1 to 30, 1944, 2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02.

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5. Adopt an affirmative approach. Don’t be on the defensive. The WAC has a right to be proud of its record.”638

The dos and don’ts included: “Say women, not girls. Show the proper uniform always except in sports pictures. Show attractive women but not cheesecake. Avoid pictures of Wacs smoking or drinking. Do not put Wacs on radio programs in competition with male personnel, nor as stooges, nor as romantic interest. Avoid using Wacs in off-the-post theatricals.”639

An example of the type of production that was deemed appropriate for Wacs to appear in was the 1944 ”WAC Christmas Greeting Show.”640 The show, arranged by the Northern California WAC Recruiting District, was produced by KGO in San Francisco, distributed by the Blue Network and through the Armed Forces Radio Service via short wave to all theaters of operation.641 The program consisted of a WAC Choral Group performing “Adeste Fidelis,” “Silent Night,” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” as well as organ solos and solo selections of “Ave Maria” and “The Lord’s Prayer.”642 In the fall of 1944 the WAC Group devised a new system of mailing press releases concerning overseas Wacs to their local recruiting districts for use in newspapers.643 “Background material,” which was released to hometown and national papers and often printed in its entirety, included items such as “Christmas with the Wacs” that described to the folks back home how “resourceful Wacs” made “Christmas decoration in places where there is none to be bought.” Once the “trees will glisten in WAC dayrooms with the strangest ornaments of all-scraps of polished metal from downed Japanese airplanes […] practically every Wac overseas will spend part of her Christmas Holiday at an Army hospital bringing […] words of good cheer to the wounded and ill G.I.s.”644

638 639 640

641

642 643

644

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 702. Ibid. Radio Script, Women’s Army Corps Christmas Greeting Show, KGO – Bue, December 25, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Letter Dorothy P. Frome, 1st Lieutenant WAC Asst PR Officer to Lieutenant Col. Harry R. Lawton, Chief, WAC Recruiting Branch, Fort Douglas, Utah, subject: World Wide WAC Radio Broadcast. December 19, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Ibid. Edgar F. Swasey, Lieutenant Col, Chief WAC Group, Memo to Hobby, subject: Activities report November 1-15, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02. Interesting Items Concerning Wacs Overseas. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 02.

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A true asset for the Corps was former Hollywood photographer Capt. Charlotte “One-shot” McGraw who had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Sept. 1, 1942. She set up the first photographic facility at Fort Des Moines, organized a photographic section for the training center and taught trainees. McGraw volunteered for an assignment as official WAAC photographer to North Africa April 16, 1943. During her 48 days in-theater, she took and processed more than 4,600 photographs. McGraw was later sent to the European Theater of Operations, worked in the Southwest Pacific Theater and on the Chinese mainland. Her pictures (73,660 in total) were used for recruiting campaigns, public relations purposes and in many publications, including National Geographic, Life, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post and Time magazine.645 When the writer Anne McIlhenny and McGraw went to North Africa, they received detailed instructions from Hobby, Capt. Eglund and Capt. Fowler and a huge workload for the first few weeks. Among other things they were to find out about “soldier attitude toward WACs.” Furthermore, they should convince columnist and 1944 Pulitzer Prize winner Ernie Pyle and other war correspondents to write favorable stories about the WAC. McIlhenny was to write copy herself, portraying overseas service as “adventurous, fun, a great opportunity and a great experience. At the same time, she was to “play up [the] safety angle” – for example, “[p]arents attitude – [i]s there adequate protection for my daughter” and “200 WACs in midst of hundreds of thousands of soldiers – strange land – moral and physical dangers, etc.”646 At Allied Forces Headquarters Office in Algiers, however, WAC Public Relations did not have top priority. The WAC company was quartered in two different billets, both miles away from the PR office or the Signal Corps darkrooms that McGraw used, thus creating transportation problems. Although Lt. McGraw took the theater driving test the first day in Algiers so the team would not need a driver, the Public Relations Office was short on vehicles and many interviews scheduled in one of the offices scattered throughout the city had to be cancelled. The Signal Corps insisted that “the WAC project was not vital” and that with the scarcity of supplies and the facilities inadequate for their own use, McGraw could only use the darkroom and labs after they had finished their work. Wacs worked shifts “round-the-clock” and had little time for photo shootings and interviews. Due to “friction in [the] company” 645

646

Wise, Ted. WAAC “One-Shot“ McGraw Was Army’s First Woman Photographer. 2005. http://www.gordon.army.mil/AC/WWII/MCGRAW.HTM. Accessed July 31, 2005. Report on NATO Public Relations-Recruiting Publicity. Writer-picture assignment of Capt. Anne McIlhenny and 2d Lieutenant Charlotte T. McGraw to Director Hobby, [May 13 to July 1, 1943]. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 207.

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some were “not interested in cooperating.” It took “heroic work requiring four days,” as McGraw ironically remarked, to “persuade the Commanding General [Eisenhower] to give terrifically valuable time to pose again with the women soldiers.”647 After four days of “liason [sic] work,” negotiating passes and rehearsal, the team managed to get selected Wacs to participate in a parade review with a French Zouave Regiment.648 McGraw was eager to secure pictures of Wacs with Zouaves, a French-Algerian light infantry regiment clad in traditional kabylic style of gaiters, baggy trousers and a short and open-fronted jacket. McGraw pointed out that they were “the most colorfully uniformed troops in Algiers aside from Spahis [..] both making excellent color-film art.”649 Frequently, McGraw remarked that the “sloppy appearance of Wacs prevented release of pictures” or that “negatives had to be destroyed [because] many silver bracelets and rings detracted from a military appearance.”650 Among the material sent back were portraits of several WAC officers, pictures and stories of Wacs at work, in “sight-seeing shots,” “brother-sister reunions” in North Africa, “Wacs at Casablanca Conference,” “WACs with camels and Arabs” as well as “Native Arab woman and WACs.”651 The two officers also promoted an “International Tea Party” inviting officers of all French and English “women-in-uniform groups” to the WAC convent billet. This invitation “to promote friendly relations and valuable interchange of ideas” was at once reciprocated by the British Wrens [Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS], general staff officers praised the idea as “valuable to international relations” and it yielded “174 prints of 14 negatives” mailed immediately to the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations.652 One “particularly happy representation of the subject [which] showed a fine understanding of the spirit of our Corps,” as the Deputy Director of the 647 648

649 650 651 652

Report on NATO Public Relations-Recruiting Publicity, Ibid. During the conflict 1939-45 (WWII), the colonial troops of the African Army formed 16 Algerian, five Tunisian and five Moroccan regiments who had left France for Northern Africa. The same is true for the Zouave regiments, especially for the mobile infantry of the First Armor Division and the regiments of the indigenous cavalry (“Spahis”) and the Armored Rangers (reconnaissance regiments), as well as the tank regiments, the Foreign Legion of the Fifth Armor Division (First Cavalry Regiment and Infantry Regiment of the Foreign Legion). Rodier, Léon. Les troupes coloniales dans la Grande Guerre: L’armée d’Afrique. 2005. http://www.stratisc.org/TC_6.htm. Accessed August 12, 2005. Report on NATO Public Relations-Recruiting Publicity, 2. Ibid., 4-5. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 13. In total McGraw developed 4661 photos.

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WAC assured the author Arthur Bartlett of This Week Magazine, was the article “When She Comes Home.” Under the subtitle “Women returning from the wars have earned your help as they face civilian life again,” Bartlett portrays “Sgt. Shirley Angel,” who had just been discharged. First, the photographs suggest she goes shopping for shoes. Next on her list is a hat, “one with lots of flowers and veils, please.” Finally, the author quotes a discharge counselor: “[t]he average man is thinking of a job as a long-range proposition […] But the average woman, if she is not already married, thinks of a job in short-range terms. She wants something to do until the important thing comes along – namely, marriage.”653

3.7 “Petticoat Soldiers”: Ego-Documents from the Field Camp Newspapers The final class of sources in which the aforementioned formation of discourses and practices can be tracked consists of newsletters, camp papers, and songs. These documents are interesting for a number of reasons. Camp newspapers like Petticoat Soldiers,654 WAAC-TIVITIES,655 and Dear Folks656 were largely produced by the Auxiliaries themselves. The content included articles written by Waacs in the field, but also material supplied by the Camp Newspaper Service of the War Department. Although the Special Services offices ostensibly intended these newsletters “for and by the personnel of the WAAC […] for the sole purpose of promoting better entertainment and recreation,” they also served a number of other purposes. Firstly, they served as newsletters in that they contained announcements of recreational activities on the post or in the region. Secondly, they were at the same time a semi-official forum for the dissemination of War Department policies and guidelines and thus served as an alternative to the official circular. Thirdly, the camp papers functioned as recruiting mediums. The newsletter Dear Folks and several other publications contained an address label so that they could be folded, stapled and mailed to families at home, 653

654 655 656

The Sunday Star, This Week Magazine, 9 Sept 1945. Letter Helen H. Woods, Deputy Director, WAC to Arthur Bartlett, This Week Magazine, September 23, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 58. History 4th WAC TC Fort Devens, MA. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 220. Petticoat Soldier. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Ibid.

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provided that Waacs who did not enjoy the Army mailing privileges were willing to buy the one-and-a-half-cent stamp themselves. Lastly and most interestingly, because of their niched existence and the limited and low-tech production these camp papers were a forum for Waacs themselves to test various gendered roles of the woman|soldier . Different concepts of the woman|soldier , femininity, and soldiering, etc., were being negotiated on all levels. In the newsletter mode, readers were exposed to the news of a Waac marrying a soldier “in the solemn beauty of a full military wedding,”657 to the “All-WAAC musical variety show Petticoat Soldiers On Parade”658 and to the fate of the cats “Reveille” and “Retreat,” mascots of Company 5.659 As a forum for War Department and WAAC headquarters announcements, Petticoat Soldier informed the women of the implications of the conversion to Army status660 while reminding them (“just between us Waacs”) not to engage in gossip and rumors – just one week after the O’Donnell column had been published.661 These admonitions were typically expressed in the first person: “The WAAC is barely over a year old. Many people are accepting us slowly – waiting to see what kind of girls we’ll prove to be. It’s terribly important that we make a good impression upon everyone with whom we come in contact. That doesn’t mean being stiff, formal and unnatural. It means being lady-like. Feminine.”662

Additionally, recruiting material was reprinted in almost every issue in the event any copies of Petticoat Soldier made it into the Waacs’ hometowns. Sardonically, one could also speculate that this information was intended for Waacs who for several months awaited their assignment so that they could read about the “purpose of the WAAC” or “[s]ome of the jobs the Waacs do.”663 Recruiting themes were also dealt with ironically. Occasionally, the women sketched an “advertisement” for a “Vacation at Famous Ft. Devens – Your Home Away from Home. Why sizzle in a sweltering suburb when you can

657

658

659 660 661 662 663

History of 4th WAC Training Center, Fort Devens, MA. Petticoat Soldier 1.7 (June 7, 1943): 8. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 220. Petticoat Soldier 1.3 (June 22, 1943): 4. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 220. History of 4th WAC Training Center, Fort Devens, MA. Petticoat Soldier 1.6 (July 13, 1943): 8. NARA. Ibid. Petticoat Soldier, 1.6 (July 13, 1943): 1. NARA. Ibid. “Something to Think About,” Petticoat Soldier, 1.2 (June 14, 1943): 8. NARA. Ibid. Petticoat Soldier 1.2 (June 14, 1943). NARA. Ibid. Ibid.

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spend the summer in spacious Ft. Devens? […] Drilling, Swimming, Studying, Softball, Scrubbing, KP, PT, CQ, BP, Gas Drill, etc.”664 Similarly, the following: “Dine at Devens. Enjoy the hospitality of a Ft. Devens Mess Hall. All food is strictly G.I. So is the atmosphere. Pork in tasty, tantalizing forms is our specialty.”665 The most interesting function of these papers, however, was that of a testing and proving ground for concepts of the female soldier. In the first issue of Petticoat Soldiers an enlisted woman recalled the “unforgettable scene” when at a party Training Center Company 3 had thrown, “bars and barriers [were] forgotten.”666 The company commander and two First Lieutenants “in a 25mile trudge toward in imaginary front, [gave] their version of how not to get there. [T]he officers decked with pot and pan helmets tagging after each other in anything but formation.”667 In the very next issue, an article that sounded much more like the language of WAAC Headquarters explored “[t]his Business of Being Lady Soldiers.” “Although we wear sever [sic] looking clothes and do men’s work, let’s never for a moment lose sight of the fact that we are ladies. We have so much to gain if we remember this – and so much to lose if we forget. Our brothers, our husbands and boy friends have gone to war. In the blaze and stench of the battlefronts they are remembering us as the kid sisters – the little women – the girls at home. Because they are men, they prize our femininity. Let’s not lose it. Let’s not destroy their ideals of us. We women are fighting with men to preserve our way of life, but we must also fight to retain the traditional ideals of womanhood. They are a steadying factor when man’s faith falters. They are an anchor in a sea of world chaos. [...] Let[’]s WORK at this business of being LADY soldiers.”668

For those who were attempting to expand the “traditional ideals of womanhood” there were articles that clearly originated not in the office of the director, but in the motor pool of Fort Devens. Here, the “grease monkeys” – Skipper, Drip, Jeep, Butch, Wimpy, Lu, Buzz, Skinner, Slim, and Trouble – explored alternative concepts of patriotic womanhood. They got “greasy...but who cares? We’d as soon have that on our faces as cold cream. We’re here to get the job done, not to look pretty.”669 During breaks, the women “hunt 664

665 666 667 668 669

Petticoat Soldier 1.8 (August 3, 1943): 5. NARA. Ibid. [The abbreviations stand for “kitchen police,” “physical training,” general call to all stations and “charge of quarters”.] Petticoat Soldier 1.9 (July 27, 1943): 4. NARA. Ibid. Petticoat Soldier 1.1 (June 7, 1943): 5. NARA. Ibid. Ibid. Petticoat Soldier 1.2 (June 14, 1943). NARA. Ibid. “The Grease Ball Waac.” Petticoat Soldier 1.2 (June 14, 1943): 4. NARA. Ibid.

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four leaf clovers,” but “after noon mess we’re back to work. More grease and maybe a smashed finger. No, we don’t cry, nor do we swear. (We count to ten very very slowly.)”670 Another episode that involved non-traditional gender roles was made less threatening under the title “Laff of the Week.” It relates the story of a Waac who had won her first stripe, but had difficulty sewing it onto her blouse. When she sought the sewing advice of a male soldier, he took the blouse back to his barracks “and returned the next day with a perfect job.” But lest anybody thought of such threatening stereotypes as an effeminate man taking orders from a bossy career woman, the accompanying sketch showed the Waac sighing “My hero!!!”671 On the other hand, traditional concepts of femininity, which are seen as contradictory to positions of authority, were carefully guarded. The WAAC MPs at Fort Devens, for example, spent their off duty hours planting flowers, thereby “transforming a drab barracks into [something] as different from a guardhouse as possible.”672 In a eulogy for “the girl in khaki,” the Waac is portrayed to “possess a trove of personal Army anecdotes” but she is certainly not “one of the boys.” Rather, “[s]he has danced with soldiers and listened to military conversation that would not be discussed before her, were she not of their fraternity.” Waacs are listening, not speaking, they are not soldiers but have “jobs alongside soldiers” and they “add his strength to the armies on firing fronts.”673 The Waacs’ war, to juxtapose two articles in the same issue, is a “war of flowers.” Training Center Company 3, who “believe[d] that one of the best morale builders is beauty of surroundings” had planted “lovely rock and flower gardens,” whereupon a “friendly war of flowers’ developed between Co. 3 and Co. 2.”674 The story of an Iowa WAAC and her husband, both of whom were promoted to staff sergeants on the same day was immediately qualified by the sketch next to it that showed a Waac swearing an oath in front of a starspangled banner with a caption that said “For the duration + 6 months!”675 For the duration of the national emergency, women could be staff sergeants,

670 671 672

673 674 675

Ibid. “Laff of the Week.” Petticoat Soldier 1.3 (June 22, 1943): 4. NARA. Ibid. “WAAC MPs Keep Busy in Spare Time.” Petticoat Soldier 1.2 (June 14, 1943): 6. NARA. Ibid. “The Girl in Khaki.” Petticoat Soldier 1.4 (June 29, 1943): 2. NARA. Ibid. “War of Flowers.” Petticoat Soldier, 1.4 (June 29, 1943): 2. NARA. Ibid. “No Rank-Pulling Here.” Petticoat Soldier 1.7 (July 20, 1943): 6. History of 4th WAC Training Center, Fort Devens, MA. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 220.

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according to this mixed message, even captains, as the Washington Post suggested, but by no means should they dream of making the military their career. The following poem printed by the Washington Post illustrates the widespread fear of American men that “their” women could “pull rank on them.” Oh Captain, My Captain676 It seems, from the best information (From qualified sources, of course) That war was a man’s occupation In the days of rowboat and horse. For instance, a guy like Ulysses Could take half a lifetime to roam, And when he returned to his missus Be sure to find her at home. [...] But I have enlisted too late. For gone is the glory of fighting, And lost is the glamour of Mars, And war is no longer exciting, Since women wear officers’ bars. Oh shades of Macaulay’s Horatius: Of Wellington, Pershing and Lee: My Captain says “Dear Me” and “Gracious!” And asks her Lieutenants to tea! Instead of the time-honored issue Of rifle and full bandolier, The Army supplies her with tissue, Silk pants and a snug-fitting brassiere. [...]

676

H.C. Kincaid, M.D. “Oh Captain, My Captain.” Washington Post [February 1944]: Editorial page. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 90. The title is borrowed from Walt Whitman’s 1865 tribute to Abraham Lincoln. Whitman, Walt. The Portable Walt Whitman. New York: Penguin Books; 2004, 267. For poetry written by Wacs see also Sound Off: A Collection of Verse Written by the WACS of the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, which contains poetry, collected and distributed by the WAC Public Relations Office, MTOUSA, [1944]. One WAC sergeant published her poems that deal with various aspects of army life – inspections, physical training and furlough: Taggs, Margaret Jane. We Solemnly Swore. Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance & Company, 1946.

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My wife has a Captain’s commission— I’m a private, not even first class, While I will be glad to salute her When we have a moment alone, I don’t think My Captain is cuter In Government garb than her own.

Camp newsletters such as above were eliminated in 1943 when Lt. General Somervell, the commanding general of the Army Service Forces, ordered the “elimination of non-essential publications and the improvement of those that are essential.”677 Songs Songs also provided a way of inventing a military tradition for the Wacs, their units and the Corps itself. As in the Camp papers, this production was multidimensional and involved a complex discursive formation. The following song highlights the women’s contribution to the war effort. Waacs were fighting for victory and thereby justify their laying claim on citizenship rights in the “home of the brave.” The WAAC is in Back of You678 All you soldier men, Keep on fighting to win For the WAAC is in Back of You! If a plane you fly, keep it flying high! For the WAAC is in Back of You! Spread the news around that we’re victory bound With our hearts we pledge anew That our flag shall wave o’er the home o’ the brave, And the WAAC is in Back of You. Pallas Athene, Goddess of Victory

677

678

Lt. General Brehon Somervell, Commanding General Army Service Forces to Adjutant General, subject: Policies Governing Army Service Forces Publications, April 8, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Words and Music by Lieutenant Ruby Jane Douglas, copyright 1942. Lieutenant Ruby Jane Douglas was special services officer and formerly vocal music supervisor of the Bristol, Oklahoma public schools. William Brennan, New York World-Telegram, January 20, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. See also Stansbury, Jean. Bars on Her Shoulders: A Story of a WAAC. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1943.

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History tells her part in War, And our own statue of Liberty Shows what we’re fighting for, Spread the news around that we’re victory bound With our hearts we pledge anew That our flag shall wave o’er the home o’ the brave, And the WAAC is in Back of You!

Almost as popular as the earlier favorite “The WAAC Is In Back of You” was a new original at Des Moines, entitled the “G. I. Song.” The “G.I. Song” also invokes the powerful connection between the nation, military service and “glory.” Just like the Army has been the “school of the fatherland” for men, this “rookie with a girdle” is educated and disciplined by the hardships of army life. If she ever leaves the staging area, she will march on to glory and, listeners might have added, citizenship rights: Once her Mommie made her bed, Cleaned her clothes and buttered her bread. And her favorite dress was redOh me, Oh my, that ain’t G.I. Hats and shoes and skirts don’t fit, Your girdle bunches when you sit, Come on, rookie, you can’t quit Just heave a sigh, and be G.I. . . . In the Mess Hall she now stands Buried ’neath the pots and pans Getting pretty dishpan hands, Oh me, Oh my, gotta be G.I. Then she came to camp one day, Quickly learned the WAACKIE way, Underwear cafe au lait Oh me, Oh my, strictly G.I. Winter, summer, spring or fall Should you try to end it all You can’t die until sick call

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You see, if you die, you gotta die-G.I. We’re in the Staging Area And we soon will go away We’ve finished all our basic Glory be and happy day Glory Glory we are staging Glory Glory we are staging Glory Glory we are staging Before we travel on.679

Early WAAC songs, much like this one written by Ruby J. Douglas at the Training Center in Daytona Beach in late 1942, were more light-hearted than later songs. In many cases, popular songs were adapted, for example “StoutHearted Girls,” after the song “Stout-Hearted Men” from the 1928 Broadway show The New Moon by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II.680 The WAAC Songbook also contained songs that re-appropriated popular nicknames like “I Fell in Love with A Waac-y in Khaki.”681 Company songs like “The Women’s Army Corps,” where Wacs inserted the name of their company, were often written by a Waac and sung to an existing tune, in this case “The Army Air Force Song.”682 Other songs explicitly took up elements from advertising to construct a positive self-image, even though the reality was experienced quite differently. “Wait Till You See Nellie” is a case in point: Seems as ev’rybody raves about them gals They call the WAVES. So boys you better get set You haven’t seen nothing yet.

679

680

681

682

Words and music by Lieutenant June Morhman, c.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 143. WAAC Song Book, compiled and edited by Special Services Branch 2nd WAAC Training Center, Daytona Beach, FL, February 1943, 25. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. This was distributed to members of the WAC. WAAC Publications Office, Ft. Des Moines, May 1943. Song Book, 21. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. WAAC Song Book, 28. NARA. RG 165, 55, Box 210. The Army Air Force Song was composed by Robert M. Crawford in 1939. Holsinger, M. Paul. War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 231.

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Oh, wait till you see Nellie in a soldier’s uniform. Wait till you see Nellie with her shiny buttons on. It’s tailor made and goodness me It’s sharp as any tack. A little WAAC all dressed in “KAAK” She’s Yankee doolie sweet […].683

Some of these songs were sent in by civilians as part of the baskets full of unsolicited advice on recruiting that poured into the Office of the Director.684 In the 1944 version of the WAC songbook, more GI songs had been adapted and reflected the WAC’s being and feeling part of the Army.685 Examples for adapted G.I. songs include: “Marching Along Together,” written in 1932: Marching Along Together We’re the Women’s Army Corps Marching Along Together U. S. A. or foreign shore We are the Women’s Army For all the world to see [...].

Likewise, Irving Berlin’s “This is The Army, Mr. Jones” was altered to “This is the Army Mary Jones” with new words by Aux. Lillian M. Darcy:686 This is the Army, Mary Jones, No private rooms or telephones; You had your breakfast in bed before But you won’t have it there any more. This is the Army, Susie Green, We like the barracks nice and clean, You had a housemaid to clean your floor, But she won’t help you out anymore. Do what the buglers command They’re in the Army and not in a band.

683

684 685 686

Tommy Jordan, Charlie McCord and Franklin Rockwell, “Wait Till You See Nellie.” WAAC Song Book, 14. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. Letter to DWAC, September 9, 1944, c.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 448. Women’s Army Corps Song Book. Washington, DC: GPO, 1944. WAAC Song Book, 29. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. Berlin, Irving. Irving Berlin's "This is the Army," a Soldier Show in Two Acts. New York: 1942. See also Laurence Bergreen, “Irving Berlin - This Is the Army” Prologue 28.2 (1996). Holsinger, War, 212.

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This is the Army, Betty Brown, You and your baby went to town, He had you worried, but this is war And he won’t worry you anymore.

A particularly good example for this appropriation of a military tradition is the song “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” originally about a legendary episode in which a chaplain is said to have uttered those words after manning one of his ship’s gun turrets. The song was stripped of its first four lines and published in the WAAC songbook. 687 Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition [Down went the gunner, a bullet was his fate Down went the gunner, then the gunners mate Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look And manned the gun himself as he laid aside The Book, shouting] Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all stay free! Praise the Lord and swing into position! Can’t afford to sit around and wishin’ Praise the Lord we’re all between perdition and the deep blue sea! Yes the sky pilot said it You’ve got to give him credit for a son - of - gun - of - a - gunner was he, Shouting; Praise the Lord we’re on a mighty mission! All aboard, we’re not a - goin’ fishin; Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all stay free.

687

Written by Frank Loesser. WAAC Song Book, 28. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. Loesser, Frank. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition. New York: Famous Music Corp, 1942.

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On the other hand, this discourse is counteracted by songs that reflect and affirmed popular stereotypes of femininity such as “Petticoat Soldiers” or Wacs as “little soldier girls.” Yes, By Cracky688 Yes, By Cracky, I’m a little WAC-y I’m a little soldier girl, I live in barracks, best you’ve ever seen, March to mess, and always keep my shoes clean. Yes, By Cracky, I’m a little WAC-y I’m a little soldier girl. I fall in! I fall out ! I fall asleep in class, no doubt-but Yes, By Cracky, I’m a little WAC-y, I’m a little soldier girl.

Carol Burke has observed that the chorus from “Petticoat Soldiers” – “We don’t tote guns or bayonets, our powder comes in compact sets, we’re petticoat soldiers, wacky Waacs”689 – was a fairly typical example for how these training songs began with a “spirited celebration of female professionalism” and ended with a “sharp diminution of women’s role[s].”690 Many of these songs more or less humorously depicted the female soldier as incompetent. Tillie, a chronically inapt Wac, continually failed to pass inspection and perform the simplest assignments: Tillie joined the Army; She enlisted in the WAACs And soon to Fort Des Moines our Till was making tracks, They issued her a uniform, her name was on a tag, And with the other stuff she got, They gave her a barracks bag.

688 689 690

WAAC Publications Office, Ft. Des Moines, May 1943. NARA. RG 165, 55, Box 210. Petticoat Soldiers, WAAC Song Book, 13. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210. Burke, Carol. “‘If You’re Nervous in the Service...’: Training Songs of Female Soldiers in the ‘40s.” Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture. Eds. Paul Holsinger, and Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992, 127-37, 131.

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They demonstrated how to place equipment in a trunk, And said to her, “Aux. if you don’t want to flunk Your civies must be out of sight Or we will surely nag. All your personal things must go Under your barracks bag. Tillie went to mess hall, but the poor girl couldn’t eat, Exactly what the reason was our Till would not repeat, But later on it all came out, She really hit a snag, Tillie left her false teeth Under her barracks bag. And then our Tillie drew K.P, in Mess No. 8, Every time she turned around, she broke another plate, The Sergeant said, “Now this won’t do,” Her head began to wag So Tillie hid the wreckage Under the barracks bag. At Saturday inspection her hair was still too long, The General scowled at her and said “See here, your hair’s cut wrong.” Now Tillie had a wig she wore to every ballroom shag, Where do you think she kept it? Under the barracks bag. Tillie went on sick call when she caught the G.I. cold, They gave her shots on top of that That was worse than she’d been told. They gave her pills and medicine that made her pockets sag, Where do you think she put it? Under the barracks bag. At last Tillie died, it really was a shame, Her funeral was military, and everybody came. And Tillie’s last request was that, She really was a hag.

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Comrades, will you bury me, Under my barracks bag?691

Other humorous songs dealt with daily life in the WAC – for instance, the song “The K.P.s Are Scrubbing Away” sung to the tune of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” or commenting on phenomena such as “latrine rumor” [L.R.] in a song by Kathryn K. Johnson: When a Rumor Meets a WAAC Oh the Army has a thousand rumors of a sort to satisfy your slightest humors. How they start we never know but they grow and grow and grow as they’re magnified by goggle-eyed consumers. You may think our lives are ordered by a whistle, or a duly authorized H.Q. epistle, but we’re always sure to act on a highly garbled fact or on information labeled unofficial. Chorus: Yes, we believe he old L.R. has proven more effective far than the tactics of the Army Signal Corps [...].692

691 692

Ibid., 127-137, 136-137. “When a Rumor Meets a WAAC” by Kathryn K. Johnson. WAAC Song Book, 3. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 210.

4. Dress Codes: The WAAC Uniform

Despite the successful institutional integration of the women’s corps into the U.S. Army, the women remained the constitutive outside of the organization. The uniforms with their symbolic as well as material aspects highlight the contradictions in the process of integrating women into the military. Military and societal discourses on women and soldiers were materialized in the design of the women’s uniforms.693 Likewise, the way the uniforms were procured and distributed by the Army reflects the reluctance with which the Army regarded the women’s Corps as a military institution. This brings the power structures into view, within which the construction of the category woman|soldier took place. At the same time, the construction of the woman|soldier was determined by the use(s) the women themselves made of the uniform. In order to account for the complexity of the formation of power with its discursive and non-discursive elements that materialize in the (uniformed) body of the women soldiers, we need to look not only at discourses, but also at dispositives, or strategic apparatuses of power.694

4.1 Military Uniforms Military uniforms are part of a complex semiotic system. To the outside, even to the uninitiated observer, the uniform stands for the association of its wearer with the military. Since the armed forces, together with the police forces, exert violence and deadly force in the name of the nation state, its members carry a special responsibility and forfeit certain individual rights. The uniform also identifies members of the collective vis-à-vis each other, which is important for a modern army that is dependent on the loyalty of all members, their mutual trust and adherence to common rules. On the syntagmatic level uni-

693

694

A shorter version of this chapter has been published in Hampf, M. Michaela. “The Uniformed Body as Interface: Institutional Integration and Discursive Exclusion of Women Soldiers.” The Body as Interface: Dialogues between the Disciplines. Eds. Elisabeth SchäferWünsche and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007, S. 289-310. See also Hampf, M. Michaela. “‘Streng, aber anmutig’: Frauenuniformen der US-Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg.” beiträge zur feministischen theorie und praxis 27.65 (2004): 73-86. Foucault, Le jeu de Michel Foucault, 299.

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tagmatic level uniforms and the attached insignia denote the branch and other sub-classifications within the military, while on the paradigmatic level they specify the wearer’s position within the organization’s hierarchy.695 Simultaneously, the uniform replaces the semiotic system of civil garment, historically marking one’s position in a social order as well as specific occasions. Military uniforms visually abolish class distinctions or, more accurately, replace them with the distinction between officers and enlisted personnel. By choosing to wear a uniform, a person does away with the choice of clothing as a means of expressing one’s individuality and identity. The uniform as a regulative apparatus for the body serves to synchronize the outward appearance with the social order of the military. The sign system of the uniform-clad body, through which meaning is produced, organized and conveyed, is not an absolute one, but it is part of heterogeneous network of discourses and practices.696 I will focus on three aspects of the women’s uniforms developed and used in the Women’s Army Corps: Their symbolic and material characteristics as well as some aspects of their use as experienced by the Wacs. The symbolic character is highlighted by the choice and design of the uniform and insignia during the initial period of the WAAC. During the planning phase questions of how “feminine” and how “soldier like” Waacs were supposed to look in order to comply with both societal expectations and military expediency were negotiated over the design of the uniform. The enormous amount of advertising for the uniform that was thought necessary in order to convey the notion of a “respectable femininity” further emphasizes the symbolic significance. The constant changes in the appearance of the uniform during the war also express the importance and fragility of this concept. The material quality of the uniform is exemplified by the Army’s logistic problems that reveal the rejection that women experienced in the Army. The Army’s Quartermaster Corps, which had designed, produced and distributed men’s uniforms for almost 200 years, had considerable difficulties providing adequate women’s uniforms.697 Women eventually performed many chores

695

696

697

Calefato, Patrizia. “Signs of Order, Signs of Disorder: The Other Uniforms.”Uniforms: Order and Disorder. Eds. Francesco Bonami, Maria Luisa Tonchi and Stefano Frisa. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2000. 195-204. 199. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, 30, 64. On American military (men’s) uniforms see: Elting, John Robert, Michael J McAfee, and Company of Military Historians. Military Uniforms in America from the Series Produced by the Company of Military Historians. 3 Vols. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1982. Davie, James C.

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that were different from the ones that they were initially assigned by the Army. Many of these jobs could not be executed in the inappropriate and dysfunctional, yet “lady-like” uniforms that had been designed and distributed for office work.698 The norms of heterosexuality, femininity and respectability the uniform-clad bodies of the Wacs were subjected to were spelled out, for example, in a manual for woman officers: “The woman in uniform in the military setting is often doing a man’s work. Yet she must constantly remember that her effectiveness is going to be decreased if she tries to imitate the man or if she tries to trade on her sex. She must remain feminine in her personality; be military in the performance of her duty. She should not be afraid to accept gracefully the courtesies which American men naturally accord to women [...].”699

Whereas the symbolic and material dimensions reflect the conflict-ridden positions of the Army and the WAC Director from an institutional perspective, uniforms also offer an opportunity to study the subject perspective of women soldiers. Donning the uniform often proved to be a liberating and empowering experience for many women. Hence, we can also observe the formation of new identities as women as social actors assumed and embodied newly available subject positions of the female soldier. The disciplinary regime in the military was not only capable of producing docile, masculine citizen soldiers, but also helped to produce very different and very diverse subject positions in women soldiers. They, in turn, changed the institution considerably by expanding military and societal notions of proper women’s work. The uni-

698 699

“Evolution of the Military Uniform.” Quartermaster Review 22 (1943): 61-62, 122-24. Jeffries, Olen C. Military Uniforms: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. Ft. Sill, OK: The Artillery & Guided Missile School Library, 1955. Marshall, Max L. “From Homespun to Army Green.” Army Info Digest 9 (1954): 10-26. Meyler, David W. “Dressed to Kill: The Role of Uniforms in Military History.” Cmd Mag (1993): 42-47. Risch, Quartermaster Support. Windrow, Martin, and Gerry Embleton. Military Dress of North America, 1665-1978. New York: Scribner’s, 1973. Rankin, Robert H. “Story of Army Uniforms [4 Parts].”National Guardsman 8.3-6 (1954): 6-10. On Uniforms during WWII: Redlegs, Captain. “Clothes for Combat.” Infantry Journal 60 (1947): 19-20. Stanton, Shelby. U.S. Army Uniforms of World War II. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1991. Sylvia, Stephen W., and Michael J. O’Donnell. Uniforms, Weapons and Equipment of the World War II G.I. Orange, VA: Moss, 1982. U.S. War Dept. Personnel: Wearing of the Service Uniform. Army Regulation 600-40, Aug 1941 and ed. of March 1944. U.S. War Dept. Personnel: Prescribed Service Uniform. Army Reg 600-35, Nov 1941 and ed. of March 1944. Risch, A Wardrobe. War Department, WD Pamphlet 35-2, “The WAC Officer – A Guide to Successful Leadership.” Washington DC, February 1, 1945, 50; NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 222. For the concept of a “natural femininity” see Foucault, History of Sexuality, 154.

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forms were an object of very creative and partially subversive displacements, performances, and misappropriations by women soldiers.

4.2 Symbolic Aspects: Planning and Design of the Uniform The Pre-planning Process In January 1942 the War Department appointed the Cavalry Officer Gilman C. Mudgett to coordinate the establishment of the new corps while the WAAC Bill was being debated in Congress. Mudgett had the title of “PrePlanner, WAAC” and his orders from G-1 were to “build a fire under WAAC planning.”700 The WAAC uniform, its design and procurement as well as the corps’ equipment and insignia came under the responsibility of the Quartermaster General. The future WAAC Director was added to the preplanning group on 23 February 1942. The uniform proved to be one of the most difficult problems for the pre-planners. Procurement could not begin before the passage of the bill, but in order to not lose any more time and have the contracts with manufacturers ready when the bill became law, the group had to reach an agreement on the design and number of articles before that date. Representatives of three agencies attended the planning sessions: the Quartermaster General’s Office, the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, and WAAC Headquarters. The low priority the Army accorded the group was made evident by the fact that none of the staff were authorized to make any decisions.701 The responsibility for the WAAC uniform program was delegated to Colonel Letcher O. Grice of the Standardization Branch. The Insignia for the WAAC were modeled after the Greek goddess Pallas Athena. Pallas Athena, also known by her Roman name Minerva, was “wise in industries of peace and arts of war,” also the goddess of storms and battle, who led through victory to peace and prosperity, but she was also associated with a variety of “womanly virtues.” “The arts of spinning and weaving were her invention; she taught how to tend and nurse newly-born infants and even the healing art was traced back to her among other gods.”702 The virgin goddess Pallas Athena sprang fully armed from Zeus’s head, although she is of-

700 701 702

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 25. Ibid., 36. Heraldic Section, Office of The Quartermaster General. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 214.

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ten depicted without her helmet or with an open visor.703 In contrast to Ares (Mars), she finds no pleasure in rushing to battle. Rather, she is associated with defensive warfare and often portrayed as a schemer and strategist. These qualities, as well as the fact that she had “no vices either womanly or godlike,” made her the ideal symbol for the WAAC, according to the Heraldic Section of the Office of the Quartermaster General. Together with the designs of Pallas Athena’s head, they submitted their rendering of “the story.” Her character complemented Zeus, the god of heaven and supreme ruler of the universe, and she was brought into existence for the purpose of doing what he would plan but could not carry out. She is at once fearful and powerful as a storm, and, in turn, gentle and pure as the warmth of the sky when a storm has sunk to rest and an air of new life moves over the freshened fields. [...] She presides over battles, but only to lead on to victory, and through victory to peace and prosperity. When war has been fought and peace established, which is always the result of conflict and war, then it is that the goddess Athene who reigns in all gentleness and purity, teaching mankind to enjoy peace and instructing them in all that gives beauty to human life, in wisdom and in art. If we think of the two sides of her character as inseparable entities, we shall see that this goddess Pallas Athene is the ideal symbol of the WAAC.704 Before Hobby’s arrival, Colonel Grice of the Standardization Branch had several designers make sketches for a uniform in two different shades of blue that honored the word distinctive in the legislative authorization of a WAAC uniform, as it was distinct from that of the Army or any other organization, including the Army Nurse Corps. Oveta Hobby, on the other hand, was convinced that the “WAAC uniform should be identical in color with that of the Army and as much like it in design as possible, especially in view of her pending attempt to place the WAAC in the Army.”705 After a lengthy debate, the question was finally settled by the Philadelphia Depot, which pointed out that olive drab and khaki material was already procured and that it would be nearly impossible to start procuring two more shades of blue. In a next step the planning group considered sketches by various designers. The jacket included elements from all of these designs. “A belt for the jacket was on, off, and on again: it would help faulty female figures, said [the 703

704

705

Regarding Pallas Athene see Chance, Jane. Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433-1177. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994, 4. Heraldic Section, Office of The Quartermaster General. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 214. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 37.

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representative of] Mangone; it would rub holes in the jacket, said the Quartermaster General; it should be leather, said [designer] Maria Krum; cotton was cheaper, said the Quartermaster General.”706 Colonel Grice pointed out “while belts are attractive, they wear on the material.”707 Mrs. Hobby felt that “no upper pockets created a long and matronly line from shoulder to waist.”708 For conservation purposes the final decision was made for the cloth belt.709 A decision on the skirt was no easier to reach. On April 1, a suit made of enlisted serge cloth was modeled. “The skirt was favored for its grace and style.”710 However, War Production Board restrictions on the use of material dictated a narrow six-gore skirt without any pleats. While the original plan had included slacks, they were eliminated “as too troublesome to fit” (at least, it may be speculated, for a group of men’s clothing designers). Hobby had already decided that the women would wear skirts instead of slacks wherever possible, in order to “avoid a rough or masculine appearance which would cause unfavorable public comment.”711 She ruled out culottes, which she found unsuitable for mechanics. At this point the only outdoor work that Waacs were expected to perform was in motor transport. Consequently, the planning group believed that no trousers except for coveralls would be necessary. A shirt with a tie was agreed to look more “military and dignified” than an open collar, and a khaki tie was chosen instead of the ascot that some of the designers would have favored.712 The choice of WAAC headgear proved to be controversial: Hobby called for identical hats for officers and enlisted women. More importantly, the overseas cap that the Quartermaster General had suggested was then being adopted by many women’s volunteer groups and private service organizations, and Hobby wanted to avoid any confusion of Waacs with civilian women. Instead, she opted for “something with a visor [but] not too military a visor.”713 From designs the firms of Knox and Stetson had produced, the group chose the visor cap, which would later be dubbed “Hobby hat.” A heavy topcoat, similar to men’s overcoat, and a light utility coat that resembled a hooded raincoat (in place of

706

707 708 709 710 711 712 713

C.i. Treadwell 37. See also WAAC Meeting, April 27, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. WAAC Conference, April 15, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Ibid. WAAC Conference, April 1, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 38. Ibid. WAAC Conference, March 25, 1942, 2. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213.

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men’s field jacket) were designed and agreed upon. A handbag with a shoulder strap was authorized after “experiments with carrying necessities in breast pockets quickly produced a rule against even so much as a pack of cigarettes in that location.”714 With this quite unmilitary piece of equipment, certain misunderstandings occurred between the contractors and Army personnel. One manufacturer, who was unaware that the WAAC was to be an unarmed auxiliary corps, suggested a “two-in-one” solution: a smaller bag with a shoulder strap instead of an ordinary handbag and a “toilet kit, which could hold any item for refreshing purposes.” The latter should hold a stainless steel mirror and, as the manufacturer’s representative suggested, could be made with two loops so it could “be carried on a pistol belt.”715 It appears as if the women were blamed for many of the mistakes in the design and planning process, and not only by misogynist Army men. In her official history of the WAC, historian Mattie Treadwell explained why the handbag could not have been worn on the left hip with the shoulder strap over the right shoulder and across the body, as it had originally been designed. The shoulder strap was abandoned, as Treadwell notes, because “when worn by women of heavier build, it cut beneath the bust line to produce an undesirable profile.”716 The planning group argued that “most women did not have large enough shoulder muscles to prevent it from slipping off,” many handbags were snatched Wacs who hunched the left shoulder to keep the strap on “were rapidly becoming deformed.”717 A “neat and military appearance” In the uniform’s design the gendered symbolism of military clothing played a large role. Uniforms generally idealize the representation of a male physique.718 Many of the uniforms worn by women during WWI displayed styles 714 715

716 717 718

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 38. WAAC Conference, April 1, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. At another meeting, a sample bag was tested and filled with the following items: “2 Jars (Face Powder and Cleansing Cream), 1 Small Nail Brush, 1 Whisk Broom, 3 Bottles (Mouth Wash, Skin Cream, Astringent), 1 Container for Saturated Pads, Sewing Kit (Housewife), 1 Case for Sunglasses, Comb, and Emery Board, 1 Wash Cloth Pocket, 1 Hair brush and a large Comb, 1 Novelty Tooth Brush, 1 Tooth Powder, 1 Container with Soap Tissue, 1 Mirror, 1 Change Purse.” WAAC Meeting, April, 27 1942. NARA. Ibid. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 533. Ibid. See also Buckley, Richard. “Eros and Uniform.” Bonami, Tonchi and Frisa, Uniforms. 205-11, 205.

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and forms that were imitating men’s uniforms. Among these features were “trouserettes” in military or monochrome colors, affixed pockets, militarystyle insignia, and belts. Whereas it was highly desirable for most of these civilian voluntary organizations like the American Red Cross or the YWCA to allocate to themselves signs of military organization and discipline, inclusion of women during WWII was much more problematic for the military. In 1942 and 1943, the issue was the penetration of women into a hitherto exclusively male sphere, in which military masculinity was discursively created by the exclusion of women and their containment within the limits of femininity. The question of how feminine and how soldierly the members of the women’s corps should look, and sometimes the question whether women belonged in the Army at all, were sometimes disguised as discussions on the conservation of material and of the established structures of the Quartermaster Corps. The following example illustrates the symbolic charge even seemingly matter-of-fact arguments on conservation requirements and the design of the buttons carried: Colonel Grice suggested to make the gold “WAAC” and “U.S.” insignia and the tongue of the belt-buckle the same olive color as the plastic buttons and stated, “he would not like to start a new organization with any brass whatsoever.”719 It was, however, unanimously favored by the group to leave the insignia in gold. Two irreconcilable rationales became apparent as to the type and number of garments to be issued, and there was no precedent in the military to resolve them. The Army had to furnish its members all articles it required them to wear. In Hobby’s opinion, the Waacs clothing had to be judged according to accepted civilian customs for women. Most quartermaster representatives, on the other hand, thought the choice should be most fairly based on the amount and type of clothing received by men. Tan oxfords, tennis shoes, and bedroom slippers were authorized, but not the plain pumps that Hobby had wanted for dress shoes, which were deemed too expensive. In addition, on the grounds of economy her choice of lisle stockings for dress and ribbed cotton stockings for work was ignored and rayon and plain cotton were chosen instead.720 During the discussion on gym shoes and the availability of rubber, a remarkably uninformed Colonel Grice “suggested that Mr. Mormon make contact through A.G.O. [Adjutant General’s Office, M.H.] and find out

719 720

WAAC Meeting, April 27, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 38.

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what the Army is doing about gym shoes and sport shoes of all types for the men in the Army.”721 In order to present a “neat and military appearance” the group noted that some women should be required to wear “foundation garments,” but could not be directed to do so unless the garment was issued as part of the uniform. Although the group did not want to authorize nude appearances in military installations that did not have connecting latrines, it noted that men were not issued pajamas and bathrobes. Under these circumstances Hobby preferred to discuss the “accessories” issue at first informally with a few women staff members. Brassieres with small, medium and large cups and two long sizes should be issued. Rubber usage had been reduced to a minimum and “conforms to the newly [sic] corset ruling.”722 Panty girdles were not issued because of inadequate washing facilities. Hobby suggested cotton panties with a leg length of 10 inches, which could be worn over the top of the stocking. Pajamas, a slip made of cotton or rayon, hosiery, and socks were agreed upon. For exercise, a one-piece Seersucker dress was to be issued, as well as gloves, a V-neck sweater and handkerchiefs. As it was the policy of the Requirements Division to eventually delete all items that men were not issued, plans for summer and winter pajamas, galoshes, handkerchiefs, dress shields, athletic shoes, and summer and winter bathrobes were eventually cancelled. In addition, the Quartermaster General subsequently reduced the number of several items to those authorized for men.723 Months later, according to “personal investigations at Fort Des Moines” made by a Quartermaster committee, only 25 percent of the women were wearing the issue girdles. Others purchased them commercially or preferred to wear none. In order to make the women wear these items, the Quartermaster Corps and WAAC Headquarters would have liked the Wacs to receive money in lieu of the issue to purchase their own brassieres and girdles. This would have required amendatory legislation which the Army’s Legislative and Liaison Division did not want to pursue at this time, but one colonel did not spare the Waacs his advice that “the proper physical appearance of Waacs [should] be attained by exercise and good posture, and not by the use of ‘surgical contraptions’. If the government was to issue brassieres and girdles to women, then such devices could well be considered for the officers and en-

721 722 723

WAAC Conference, April 1, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. WAAC Meeting, May 13, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 39.

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listed men.”724 While some Army officers opined predominantly on military aspects of the women’s appearance, others concentrated on aspects of femininity. Lieutenant Stark of the Signal Corps, who joined the planning group in April 1942, stated that he “did not favor tailoring the garments to conform to a man’s style, [...] although consideration should be given to the fact that the W.A.A.C. is a military organization, the women should not be made to look masculine.”725 Prêt-a-porter the Army Way Due to the rapid build-up of WAAC personnel, early mistakes in the uniform were not corrected before production on a mass-scale had begun. Soon after the opening of the First Training Center, a number of complaints were recorded. Almost all garments were cut with wide collars and narrow hips as if for men. Consequently, skirts, shirts and jackets were ill fitting and uncomfortable. Hats were out of shape before they were even issued, raincoats leaked, hems could not be easily lowered or raised. Because the War Production Board had allotted insufficient elastic, the suspenders of girdles were too short and pulled runs in stockings.726 It turned out that the Philadelphia Depot had never made a model of the entire uniform, but instead had based several items on a rough pattern cut by a manufacturer to estimate the cloth needed. This pattern was henceforth called the “master pattern” from which each contractor had developed a set of sized patterns. All manufacturers who received a contract were in the men’s-wear industry because the manufacturers of women’s clothing were deemed too expensive. In order not to lose any time for development, the correction of the defective patterns was delegated to the Philadelphia Depot, which developed a new jacket without a belt. When the contractor delivered the new jackets, they were too flat around the bust and in addition to omitting the belt, the depot had also re-spaced the buttons so that it was impossible to sit down without unbuttoning the lowest button. The skirt pattern was also modified, but because no material other than the original cotton twill that was also being used in men’s uniforms was available, it proved entirely unsatisfactory for women’s uniforms, and the original khaki skirts had to be retained. In May it turned out that the depot had not made several of the requested corrections,

724 725 726

Ibid., 166. WAAC Conference, April 15, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 213. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 156.

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had ignored recommendations, and had never given a pattern to a tailor of women’s clothing as directed. The Quartermaster General now took upon himself some of the development and finally called in representatives of four firms manufacturing women’s clothing. For the first time the designers of women’s patterns developed patterns in women’s sizes, but despite this the Quartermaster’s Storage and Distribution Division insisted on still designating the new sizes the Army way – long, regular and short – because the storage and issue system could only handle these categories. A satisfactory uniform design was not developed until late in 1943 and 1944 but as Treadwell quotes the Quartermaster General, they were then “merely a matter of academic interest” as large stocks of the earlier pattern had been ordered due to the expansion programs and new procurement could not be authorized until these uniforms were worn out.727 A newspaper syndicate release reported in May 1943 that Waacs were “so unhappy with their lot that they are grousing openly.” […] Their uniform, the Waacs complained, was not nearly as attractive as that of the other women’s services and must have been designed “not by Mainbocher […], but by some tyro tailor with a grudge against women.”728

4.3 Material Aspects Clothing for “Women’s work” Put to the Practical Test The WAAC pre-planners had only anticipated clothing for the four kinds of jobs originally authorized – clerks, drivers, cooks, and telephone operators. Clerks and telephone operators worked in the A uniform. The only work uniforms issued was coveralls to be worn over the uniform for motor repairs and white dresses for cooks. The seersucker exercise dresses, of which each

727 728

C.i. ibid., 158. McClure Newspaper Syndicate “National Whirligig” release, May 18, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55. Box 203. Main Rousseau Bocher (1891–1976) was an American fashion designer, who was known for his expensive, elegant evening clothes. He opened his Paris house of couture in 1929 and his New York house in 1939. He designed war uniforms for the WAVES and SPARS and made costume designs for stage productions. He also introduced the strapless evening gown, and made the wedding dress for the Duchess of Windsor. His signature fashion designs included pearl chokers and short, white gloves. Owen, Bobbi. Costume Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915-1985. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987, 103.

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woman was issued two, were also worn for kitchen police and barracks fatigue duties as well as for physical training. With the expansion of the Corps, more and more Waacs worked as full time mechanics, welders, pier checkers, gas pump attendants or messengers. They worked in hospital wards, laboratories, in aircraft maintenance and drove staff cars as well as light trucks. Many of these jobs involved activities such as climbing in and out of aircraft or up and down control towers. Other jobs made it necessary to wear protective clothing. Requests for trousers kept pouring in from the field. Although the WAAC Director acknowledged she had been mistaken in rejecting them in the preplanning process, the requests were refused. In the spring of 1943 Hobby again appealed to the Army Service Forces that a “trousered garment for exercise, fatigue, and other heavy work is vitally necessary.”729 The result was that the herringbone twill coveralls were now to be issued to every Waac in the field and the exercise dress was deleted from authorized issue except for use in the training center.730 Although only one instead of the requested two coveralls were issued to each Waac, some training centers had difficulties providing even this number and many units, such as the drivers at Daytona Beach who wore men’s (Class B) blue denim, were forced to improvise. Waacs who were assigned to hospitals as medical technicians usually worked in one of the two exercise dresses they also used for physical exercise, kitchen police, recreation or cleaning the barracks, provided they had received some before the issue was discontinued. Laundry service took ten days at most stations so that this practice was unsanitary even if the women washed the dresses nightly. Again Requirements Division, ASF and the Surgeon General overruled the office of the Quartermaster General and proposed the Waacs wear either the coverall or surgical gowns, which were cut for men’s heights and were open in the back. Work dresses for hospital Wacs were not authorized until 1945, just before V-E day.731 Procurement and Supply The difficulties of the rapid build-up of the WAAC resulted in severe supply problems that worsened with every new expansion plan and were never more than temporarily remedied. According to the Office of the Quartermaster General, the time customarily allowed for the procurement of men’s clothing

729 730 731

C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 162. Ibid. Ibid., 537.

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and equipment was six moths if the items could be procured ready-made and twelve months if cloth had to be purchased. However, expansion plans at the end of 1942 poured in so rapidly that figures based on which plans were made and contracts were let were often outdated as soon as they were completed. The estimates furnished the Quartermaster General in March 1941 were 12,000 in a year were replaced by estimates of 53,000 for 1943, then 113,000, then 150,000.732 In April 1943 an investigating committee sent to Fort Des Moines by the Quartermaster General determined the need for wool shirts and knee length wool stockings for all Waacs in colder climates and long-sleeved undershirts, wool drawers, trousers with a wool liner and an outer windproof cover, field jackets with liners and covers, leggings and a wool cap for outdoor workers. Wile men were issued long winter underwear and wool trousers to wear underneath their cotton coverall, Waacs had nothing but winter panties, one fourth as heavy as the men’s, and the wool shirts issued to drivers. Of the items recommended by the Quartermaster, however, the Requirements Division ruled out the field jacket, winter underwear, and leggings and considered only the trousers for drivers favorably. When a cold spell struck Fort Des Moines, Iowa in September and covered the post with snow, temperatures inside the newly constructed, unheated barracks and classrooms were near the freezing mark. The supply of summer uniforms had become erratic and almost no winter clothing of any sort was available. A health crisis arose within a few days. When Hobby hastened to the training center, she wore the summer raincoat the Waacs were wearing and immediately caught a bad cold. Apart from telephoning to Washington to expedite the shipment of clothing, she secured several thousand enlisted men’s overcoats from a neighboring station’s surplus stock. The overcoats not only provided warmth to hands and feet, but were also a source of amusement to the Waacs, who could not refrain from taking pictures of each other in the grossly oversized coats that covered the hands and trailed on the ground. We can only speculate whether the prospect of having these pictures circulate in the U.S. has expedited the shipment of winter uniforms, but the Deputy Chief of Staff, Lt. General Joseph McNarney, immediately backed the Director’s request to the Services of Supply.733 While the supply debacle at Fort Des Moines unfolded in October and November, Colonel Hobby and the Quartermaster General were still fighting

732 733

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 76.

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with the Requirements Division over the WAAC overcoat. Meanwhile, temperatures at Des Moines were between zero and -20˚ F (-18˚ to -29˚ C) so that even if full winter uniforms had been available, additional cold-weather items would have been necessary. The commandant of the post wired to Washington on November 3, 1942 that “15,000 arctic overshoes, nurses’ lambskin-lined mittens, and wool-lined trousers” were “urgently needed to safeguard health of this command.”734 The agencies involved, the Office of the Quartermaster General, the Distribution Division of the Services of Supply and the Requirements Division, thereupon agreed to hold a conference on 25 November. When Hobby returned from England in mid-November and threatened her resignation, 3,000 winter uniforms were shipped to Des Moines.735 General Styer, Chief of Staff of the Services of Supply had agreed to the Quartermaster General’s recommendation of 6 or 12 moths notice in “ignorance of the fact that the women were already at Des Moines.”736 He now reversed his decision and in order to procure the cloth for the woolen items and not diverting standard material from men’s uniforms, the Philadelphia Depot had to secure various odd lots of different colored woolen materials, which were then re-dyed in the shade for enlisted personnel. The result, as one Quartermaster historian observed, was a “grotesque combination [...] of the chocolate brown barathea and the mustard shade olive-drab.”737 After the Corps’ first winter, half of the women in some training centers went through their entire training without uniforms; others had to make do with summer uniforms. For many recruits, the WAAC was unable to provide even one set of military outer garments. An entire WAAC company was transferred from the training center at Daytona Beach to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where they arrived in the midst of a snowstorm dressed in summer cottons. Other Waacs were issued one or two shirts and sent to desert airfields with averages in temperature around 110˚ F (43,3˚ C). Ill-fitting garments and, worse, wrong-sized shoes were issued and the women were sent to stations that had obviously no more supplies of WAAC clothing than the training centers. Fort Oglethorpe had to report, “[f]ifty percent of personnel departing this station during the week of March 21-28 will not be uniformed.”738 In the same month, the Fourth WAAC Training Center opened 734 735 736 737 738

Ibid., 151-2. Ibid., 153. Ibid. Ibid. Letter 3rd Training Center to DWAAC, March 20, 1943. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 154.

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in Massachusetts without any clothing supplies whatever. After an emergency conference with Waac Headquarters, the Quartermaster General took to makeshift measures to supply the Training Center: his office obtained green blanket-coats (mackinaws) from the Civilian Conservation Corps, issued Army officers’ serge shirts to be used instead of winter jackets, and distributed 20,000 off-shade skirts as well as shoes and raincoats. A WAAC officer was now assigned to the Office of the Quartermaster General to work fulltime on supplying the WAAC. Supply to field stations was virtually nonexistent. Even in March, many Army supply officers did not know what depots stocked WAAC uniforms, what the supply channels were or how to schedule maintenance allowances for Waacs. According to numerous reports from hospitals and stations in semitropical climates, the Waacs’ warm-weather clothing was equally deficient. Instead of the heavy A uniform, many Waacs wore the short exercise dress for many types of jobs, including highly visible desk jobs in headquarters. Just when the decision was rendered to substitute coveralls for exercise dresses, many stations were pleading for four or more of the exercise dresses instead of two. The Army Air Forces, for which at one time almost one sixth of all WAAC personnel worked, had the majority of its airfields in the southern states and the southwestern desert. A study by the AAF Training Command showed that on many of these fields temperatures never fell below 90˚ or 100˚ F for months at a time and sometimes climbed as high as 135˚ F. (32˚-38˚ C, peaks of 57˚ C). Enlisted women wore two shirts a day and washed them at night since there were no laundries on the fields. The study called for the issuing of at least five additional short-sleeved shirts, three exercise dresses and cotton anklets instead of the wool socks then issued. Not only was the AAF’s request denied, the Waacs were also informed that the exercise dresses would be taken away and replaced by a heavy coverall. Although the Quartermaster General had begun to “study the problem” of developing a short-sleeved work dress in 1943, no such universal summer dress was produced before the end of the war. The conversion to Army status brought with it a set of new problems regarding the new WAC regulations. It was the Army’s policy that standards for the WAC approximate the standards for male personnel, varying only “where the differences between men and women necessitate changes and adjustments.”739 It was not before early 1944 that regulations for the WAC uniform could be agreed upon, and frequent amendments were necessary thereafter.

739

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 515.

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The mismatched uniforms women had received during the early days of the expansion program were still being used and another 15,000 the Waacs who had left when the Corps was converted to the WAC had turned in were also being reissued. These had been repaired and issued to new recruits. As the mismatching uniforms were a major source of criticism, Hobby submitted a plan to ASF in December 1943 to eliminate them by applying a liberal salvage policy that would allow for an exchange before an item was irreparably worn. Requirements Division, ASF again reiterated standard Army policy that “earlier procurement must be worn out, and reissued as long as repairable, before new stocks were issued.”740 The conversion also brought with it that Wacs were no longer allowed to wear civilian clothes when on leave or off-duty. Since Hobby believed that there existed “some universal psychological need of servicewomen for feminine-type attire for social occasions,” another one of her proposals called for the authorization for Wacs to buy an off-duty dress similar to that authorized for the Army Nurse Corps.741 The request, which addressed to the General Staff as a matter of well being, never even reached the War Department, but was returned disapproved by General Somervell’s office. Although many of Hobby’s requests for the authorization of new items such as garrison caps, lighter summer uniforms, cotton scarves and other items were turned down on the grounds that surplus stocks of uniforms were on hand, stations continued to report that they were unable to obtain maintenance stocks and replacements so that many Wacs left the training centers for their field station without even one complete uniform issue.742 Reports by the Inspector General noted that in the WAC’s second winter the clothing in units inspected was still of poor quality cloth, secondhand and showing signs of much wear even when first issued. He recommended “at least one complete outfit of outer garments suitable for appearance in public.”743 Overseas Experience Overseas assignments were much in demand. Beginning in January 1943, Waacs, and later Wacs, served in climate zones as different as North Africa and the Mediterranean theater, England, France and Germany as well as the South West Pacific, China, Burma and India, and the Middle East. Numerous 740 741 742 743

Ibid., 527. Ibid., 528. Ibid., 529. Ibid., 529.

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requests for slacks poured in, many of them backed by medical officers who pointed to health risks, such as insufficient protection in the cold European climate, the malaria control restrictions in New Guinea that required wearing of slacks after 6 p.m., or the necessity of protection against chemical warfare.744 The Wacs in the Southwest-Pacific Area arrived in winter uniforms and heavy twill coveralls issued in Australia while en route. The coveralls proved too hot for the climate and the number of evacuations for health reasons rose dramatically from 98 per thousand to 267 per thousand, significantly higher than that for men. According to historian Judith Bellafaire, this rate was directly related to the theater’s supply problems.745 Among the leading causes of illness was dermatitis, a skin disease aggravated by heat, humidity, and the heavy winter clothing the Wacs wore in the theater. The malaria rate for women was disproportionately high because Wacs lacked the lightweight, yet protective clothing issued to the men and often failed to wear their heavier uniforms properly. Pneumonia and bronchitis were aggravated by a shortage of dry footgear. One of two items added to the service uniform after 1944 was the battle jacket, which was extremely popular with men and women. It had first been procured in England and issued to European theater personnel. The standard winter uniforms the Wacs had brought from the U.S. were inadequate, especially in the Air Force where many Wacs worked night shifts in unheated buildings and underground operation centers. The situation was declared an emergency and the issue of some warm items designed for enlisted men was authorized and extra items were requested. The Quartermaster-designed trousers and jackets when finally received overseas were bulky and shrank and faded when laundered in the field. A three-piece wool uniform was finally designed in the field, slacks, skirt and battle jacket that was durable, warm and suitable for field conditions as well as off-duty and in the cities. When soldiers and Wacs brought the battle jackets back to the U.S., “it proved impossible to stem the tide of their popularity and it was necessary to authorize their wear by men in the zone of the interior.”746 When women officers began purchasing them, Hobby, who found “nothing wrong with that jacket for men,” consulted a New York manufacturer who said “a battle jacket is a bat-

744 745 746

Ibid., 396, 416, 168 and 536. Bellafaire, The Women’s Army Corps [no page numbers in electronic document]. Authorization for optional purchase and wear by officers and enlisted women in the continental United States (CONUS) was given in April 1945. Army Regulation 600-37, April 16, 1945.

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tle jacket, you cannot make it ‘fem-looking’.”747 The Quartermaster General found it had an “unbecoming appearance when worn by short or plump women,” a design for women was quickly produced that lacked the pockets of the men’s version.

4.4 Publicity Crisis In mid-1943, the WAC struggled with a severe publicity crisis, which together with the conversion led to a significant drop in recruiting as pointed out earlier. Gallup polls showed that eligible prospects for enlistment rated the uniform last in attractiveness after all of the other women’s services’ uniforms.748 The uniforms were also criticized in numerous letters to editors, newspaper columns and letters to the War Department.749 Hobby and Army recruiters were convinced that a woman’s decision to join a military service depended to no small degree on the attractiveness of that service’s uniform. Consequently, several advertising campaigns praised the “smartly tailored dress uniforms.” “They’re meticulously fitted for each individual, to assure trim appearance, [...] and are provided in sufficient number to allow frequent change.”750 “When a Wac arrives at the Training Center she is issued 34 items of clothing and equipment – from her underwear to her toothbrush. If you were to buy these things at a store, at retail prices, they would cost you about $ 250.”751

The War Department advocated wearing the uniform “for the duration,” despite stereotypical ideas about the type of clothing women would prefer in times of peace: “A Wac says: ‘Of course I like frilly dresses and flower hats as much as any other girl. But until this war is over, I’m proud and happy to wear the Army uniform.’”752 In the WAAC, the women had no need to 747

748

749

750 751

752

Telephone conversation between Hobby and Ms. Shaver, November 12, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 78. George Gallup. A National Study of Current Public Opinion toward the WAC. September 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 204. Letters from Susan Butts, New York, December 7, 1943; from Christopher Cole, Baltimore, MD, December 3, 1943; from Margaret Boyle, December 5, 1943 all to Maj. General J. A. Ulio, Adjutant General. NARA. RG 407, Box 4294. “Private Smith Goes to Washington,” NARA. RG 407, Box 4293. “Facts You Want to Know About the WAC,” Army of the U.S. - Women’s Army Corps [24. Aug 44]. NARA. RG 407, Box 4292. Additional ads: “73 Questions and Answers About the WAAC,” and “Back of the Fighting Front...Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, United States Army,” 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Facts You Want to Know About the WAC. NARA. RG 407, Box 4292.

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worry: “WAAC uniforms are neat, attractive, and practical – yet they are feminine.”753 “Your uniforms are tailored like a dream. And they’re fitted to you by experts. You get winter and summer uniforms. Clothes for working. Fine shoes. A swanklooking handbag. Even your well-cut, soft-feeling underwear! And everything’s of a quality you’d find hard to match in any store today! Wacs could even get a real kick out of wearing them. Here’s how one girl put it – ‚As a Waac, I feel like somebody.’”754

A “feminine” appearance was as important to many Wacs as it was to the WAC Director who was predominantly concerned with those situations where Wacs were visible in public. Hobby suggested in July 1942 that the women be allowed to purchase individually tailored white dress uniforms which could be worn for public appearances and when on leave instead of the ill-fitting uniforms issued. Requirements Division, however, turned down the request, as it served no useful purpose for the war effort.755 In a survey conducted in June 1943 almost two thirds of the Waacs stated that they would be in favor of the authorization to purchase a white dress uniform at their own expense. Only 19% were opposed to the idea. Over half of them would have preferred a white dress over of the suit-type uniform made of white material.756 Interestingly, the only request for change the Army Service Forces granted was the authorization for WAAC recruiters to receive an extra summer jacket, skirt and cap in August 1943, primarily because recruiters had to wear the full uniform daily and could not wear fatigue clothing while their jacket was being cleaned. “Recruiters must present the best possible picture of the Wacs to the public at all times. Neat, matched, tailored uniforms are essential. [...] Male recruiters have always had extra clothing allowances [...] it is doubly important with female recruiters. [...] Recruiters cannot present a model appearance unless their uniforms

753 754 755 756

Back of the Fighting Front, 6. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. “73 Questions and Answers about the WAAC.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 212. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 158. Report No. B-44: “Answers of 348 WAAC Enrolled Women to Questions on Desirability of Authorizing a White Uniform for Dress Wear; based on two questions asked in a pretest conducted at Fort Meade and Fort Belvoir, June 21 and June 23, 1943.” NARA. RG 330, Entry 93, Box 991.

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match. Although it is understood that present original clothing issues match, most recruiting personnel were equipped with non-matching uniforms.”757

Early in January 1944, members of Congress publicly blamed the uniform for the lag in enlistments. A senator stated, “a woman need not look like a man to make a good soldier.”758 Hobby added: “I believe every effort should be made to obtain respect for women in the uniform of the Army not only as a group but as individuals. I believe immediate action should be taken to make the uniform as attractive as possible and that the Army uniform and all it means should be “sold” as “Navy Blue” has been sold to the public.”759

A Representative from New York released to the press that the uniform lacked “military pertness,” and should be “piquant yet dignified, stern, yet charming.”760 He urged that New York stylists be allowed to redesign the entire uniform and stated: “From a strictly military and economic point of view it may be argued that there is a stock pile of half a million old WAAC uniforms. What of it? They should be used for junk. They are utterly valueless. It is worth putting this stock pile on the scrap heap if you can appreciably recruit your full quota of Wacs.”761

Since discarding stockpiles of old uniforms was out of the question, General Marshall approved several of Hobby’s proposals that could be put in effect without too much cost. These included issuing a pale yellow cotton scarf and gloves and, very popular with the Wacs, a garrison cap instead of the much despised “Hobby hat.”762 Additionally, the lighter, non-wrinkling summer uniforms made of tropical worsted that had been procured earlier for WAAC officers, but which arrived too late to be distributed before a monetary allow757

758

759

760 761 762

Memo J.A. Ulio for Director, Stock Control Division, ASF, March 4, 1944. See also correspondence subject: Recruiters uniforms and off-shade uniforms etc between July 1943 and March 1944. NARA. RG 407 Box 4282. “Recruiting Drive Failure is Laid to Wac Uniform” New York Herald Tribune (January 3, 1944). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 203. Oveta Culp Hobby, Memorandum for Director, WD Bureau of Public Relations, subject: Problems and Deterrents in Connection with WAC Recruiting, February 18, 1944, 11. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 530. Ibid. The cap and the Wacs’ dissatisfaction with it had been subject to numerous newspaper articles and columns. See for example in August 1943 alone: Marshall, MI Chronicle, August 6, 1943: St. Louis, MO Post-Dispatch, August 13, 1943; Torrington, CT Register, August 14, 1943; Prescott, AZ Courier, August 16, 1943; Waltham, MA News-Tribune, August 17, 1943; St. Marys, OH Leader, August 18, 1943; VanWert, OH Times-Bulletin, August 31, 1943.

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ance for officers was authorized, was finally issued to enlisted women during the summer of 1944. The difference from the stiff men’s weight cotton was so remarkable, that the Chief of Staff directed that all cotton uniforms be replaced by this tropical worsted. Although the Office of the Quartermaster General protested, the Chief of Staff did not change his mind and subsequently authorized the issue of one off-duty dress and the procurement of more for resale to Wacs at cost. At General Marshall’s urging, the Quartermaster even managed to get the summer off-duty dresses out by summer, despite his protests that he needed more time for procurement. This was the first garment for which women’s instead of men’s sizes had been used and which corresponded to civilian women’s sizes. The dress proved so successful, that other nation’s women’s services requested samples and much competition arose in the United States for issue of the dress. First priority was given to the Military District of Washington, where Wacs were exposed to the view of the War Department; second, to recruiters, who were highly visible to the public, third to the Fourth and Eighth Service Command areas, which were exposed to the hottest summers; all others followed in order of receipt. General Marshall also directed that the mismatched winter uniforms be replaced and that secondhand outer garments be no longer issued. The last of these changes was approved in May 1944 and the WAC now had a wardrobe comparable to that of other women’s services. After new complaints were received from members of Congress, that “soldiers receive less clothing than Wacs,” the War Department stated its final policy: “[a]s a result of two and a half years experience with women personnel in the Armed Services, the Army has found that just as in civilian life women require more clothes than men.”763

4.5 Technologies of the Self The uniform exemplifies not only the institutional perspective of the Army towards the new women soldiers but it also illuminates the construction of this new category from the subject perspective of the Wacs. Examples of the “infinitesimal mechanisms” of power, from where Foucault suggested starting such an analysis, are found in the ways the women used their uniforms, coped with the lack of proper ones or expressed their

763

C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 535.

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dissatisfaction, even within the rigid hierarchy of the military.764 Publicity campaigns of the Pentagon were of secondary interest for Wacs who worked shifts in hangars, tents or air shelter bunkers in London or New Guinea. In the interest of their own health, they improvised appropriate clothing, often with the tacit agreement or knowledge of their superiors. While the official policy on trousers was not changed until October 1944, already too late for the items to be produced and shipped to the field, the Wacs took to improvising. Early in 1945, with the prospect of victory in Europe and increasing war weariness, WAC uniform violations became quite common and officers were frequently the worst offenders. In one of her admonitions Hobby could only helplessly state “it is manifestly unfair to require and expect enlisted women to abide strictly by Uniform Regulations when the officers of their Corps are guilty of flagrant abuse thereof.”765 Wherever affordable, Wacs purchased their own cotton pants in local shops or, as a unit historian stationed in Australia noted, secured men’s trousers. “Gifts of flowers and candy were scorned, and the successful applicant for a date was one who came carrying, as well as wearing, khaki trousers.”766 In many instances, women soldiers created facts, which then had to be taken into consideration by the Army.767 The following sketch by an enlisted woman appeared on her company’s bulletin board:

764 765 766 767

Foucault, Two lectures, Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 99. C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 711. Ibid., 421. Another example was the overseas cap, which was much favored over the regulation “Hobby hat”. As the camp newspaper of the 4th Waac Training Center reported, “overseas caps invaded this post and have temporarily overthrown the regulation WAAC hat.” Within the week, the caps were verbally authorized and instructions of how to wear them properly were circulated. “Overseas Caps Blitz Ft. Devens Waacs.” Petticoat Soldiers 1.2 (June 14, 1943). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 220.

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Sketch by T/5 Jane Smith, Los Angeles, California768

The Wacs’ resistance to skirts could not manifest itself outside the discursive formation in which knowledge|power constitutes the archive of available subject positions. This sketch takes up elements of this discourse, namely the Army’s need for efficiency and readiness of its soldiers and the WAC leadership’s need for feminine neatness. It plays with the male soldiers’ gaze (“oops, my garter broke”), the ridicule the Wacs often faced, and reflects it back on

768

NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 58. Foucault defines technologies of the self as practices “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state.” Foucault, Michel; Martin, Luther H; Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick H. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, 18. http://www. gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch2.html. Accessed March 13, 2002.

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the image of Wacs as soldiers. This had to take place inside the space defined by discourse in which speaking subjects exist and in which a certain spectrum of speech acts, makes sense/can be taken seriously.769 At this historical moment, the speech act “Why We Don’t Like Skirts” by a Wac who worked as a Signal Corps draftsman at General MacArthur’s headquarters succeeded in “turning the tide [...] the General took one look and decided the Wacs might keep their slacks a little longer,” the company commander wrote.770 “We don’t mind climbing in and out of Army trucks but we do mind having to do it in skirts,” commented one Wac.771 WAC uniforms reflect the apparent contradiction between institutional integration and simultaneous discursive exclusion of women into the military. Along with military drill and “soft” disciplinary measures such as “posture contests,” the uniform plays a decisive role in the disciplining of military female bodies and helps to inscribe complex power relations literally onto women’s bodies.772 Every aspect was taken care of within the total institution of the military – whether, and which, women had to wear brassieres, which buttons could be opened when and which haircut was admissible. This subjection turned women into soldiers. At the same time, the Army tried to turn Wacs into women and thus into non-soldiers, by carefully adapting the uniforms to various hegemonic concepts of femininity and to deprive them of the insignia of military masculine authority. The logistic problems of the Army in conjunction with the WAC uniforms exhibit the discomfort of the brass with the idea that women in the Army could become a permanent phenomenon. Foucault suggested “grasp[ing] subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.773 The uniformed bodies of the Wacs are not only a product, but also a tool of power relations. Women soldiers opened up new areas for their agency and their subjectivity that did not exist before or right after WWII. Harold Ickes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, “warn[ed] men that when the war is over, the going will be a lot tougher, because they will have to be compared with women whose eyes have

769

770 771 772

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Foucault, Michel, and Sylvere Lotringer. Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-84. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989, 76. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 58. Ibid. “Correct Posture Specialty of WAAC Corporal Weber.” Des Moines Register (August 3, 1943). Foucault, Two Lectures, 97.

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been opened to their greatest economic potentialities.”774 The issue of the uniform with its significance in the symbolic as well as in the material realm highlights the fact that, even in an institution where power relations seem so asymmetrically distributed and solidified, there is power in its capillary form that is exercised, for example, through a cartoon on a bulletin board. Each effect in and of the apparatus – positive or negative, intentional or unintentional, even entirely unforeseen – enters into resonance or contradiction with others and thereby calls for a readjustment or a re-working of the heterogeneous elements that surface at various points. The body of the female soldier emerges within the Wacs’ uniform through a complex interaction of techniques of the self and techniques of power. This body is neither simply the origin nor only the passive product of societal power relations.

774

C.i. Gluck, Sherna Berger. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987, 16.

5. “Subjected to the Colored Race”

5.1 African American Wacs: Fighting on Two Fronts African Americans and the War Effort: Some Socio-Economic Aspects During the depression years African Americans had suffered disproportionally from political exclusion, social injustices and unemployment. Structural racism and the Jim Crow system continued to place them at a disadvantage in the racial-caste society of the 1940s.775 African American leaders hoped that the rapidly growing war industries would create new job opportunities and help overcome discriminatory practices in the civilian labor market as well as the segregation of the armed forces. After A. Philip Randolph, the organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, planned a march on Washington, DC to protest the exclusion of African American workers from defense jobs, President Franklin Roosevelt reacted and on June 25, 1941 signed Executive Order 8802, which outlawed racial and ethnic discrimination in the defense industry and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee to handle discrimination complaints.776 Only now could African American men and women profit from the enormous wartime rise in productivity and employment. Thousands of new jobs brought mass migration from the agrarian South to the industrial centers of the North and West, and for the first time, there were also jobs for black women in great numbers. Eventually, roughly 12 percent of the federal work force would be African Americans. 16.3 million men who became soldiers in World War II left about 6.5 million jobs that were filled by women hoping for economic independence and upward social mobility. Many African American women left their families to work in

775

776

On African Americans before World War II see Finzsch, Norbert, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. Von Benin nach Baltimore. Die Geschichte der African Americans. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999, 412-46. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 11. See also Wilson, William J. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lieberson, Stanley A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Randolph also founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Segregation, which in 1948 helped forcing President Harry Truman to end racial segregation in the armed forces.

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the defense industries or in domestic jobs that white women had given up in favor of the better paying defense jobs. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, African Americans were divided over the question of whether or not the United States should get involved in the war. While some were eager to serve in the military, others felt that “the responsibility of the Negro is to fight fascism in Mississippi rather than in Berlin.”777 The New York Daily News carried ads asking “Should We Fight to Save the World While These Things Continue at Home?” and “Negroes have No Freedom of Speech, No Freedom from Terror in the South.” “Tell your president, senators, and congressmen, that you want democracy to work properly at home before you fight for it abroad.”778 After President Roosevelt had declared war on Japan, it was clear that the participation of groups previously excluded such as African Americans and women would be vital for the war effort. African American organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), newspapers and press associations and groups of World War I veterans had for some time queried the war department about their opportunity to participate in the war effort on the same basis as other Americans.779 In 1938, the Pittsburgh Courier, then one of the largest and most influential African American papers of national circulation, started a campaign for Negro Participation in the National Defense.780 Black newspapers were able to exert some pressure and concern arose over potential “fifth column activities among a disaffected Negro population.” The New York Review warned “Negro Yanks Ain’t Coming Either – Remember 1917,” the more isolationist press made use of the “Negro issue” and leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and others were openly criticized for being too conservative and ineffective.781

777

778

779 780

781

Speech given by Edward E. Strong, national secretary of the National Negro Congress, April 10, 1943 in New York City, c.i. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 32. New York Daily News (June 4, 1941). C.i. Lee, Ulysses Grant. The Employment of Negro Troops. 2002. http://www.army.mil/CMH-PG/books/wwii/11-4/chapter3.htm. Accessed April 8, 2003. Finzsch, Horton and Horton, Von Benin nach Baltimore, 441. Dalfiume, Richard M. Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1969, 26. Pittsburgh Courier, February 19, 1938 to September 28, 1940. Lee, Ulysses Grant. The Employment of Negro Troops. Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army. GPO, 1966, 52. The Review (February 1, 1940). Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 65.

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The Mobilization of African American Men Neither political pressure nor the wartime industrial boom alone could open the doors for African American women in the Army. Their entrance was contingent on black men’s overcoming limitations to their service before 1940. The War Department was cognizant of the fact that African American manpower was needed in order to build up an effective fighting force while at the same time there was a strong tradition of racial segregation which the War Department did not intend to disrupt. African Americans who were aware of this had been fighting for full integration before the war and would not be content with any auxiliary status.782 There were three political prerequisites before African American soldiers could be mobilized in large numbers. In a 1937 plan, the War Department Personnel Division established that black personnel should be mobilized in accordance with their proportion of the population, i.e. between nine and ten percent, in order to “avoid the development of a racially unbalanced army in time of war.”783 This policy would form the basis for the subsequent mobilization of both black men and women. The policy also required that the ratio of African American combat troops to service troops be the same as that of white troops. The Selective Service Training Act of 1940, establishing the first peacetime draft, opened the armed forces to black men and prohibited racial discrimination against draftees and volunteers.784 In October 1940, three weeks after the act went into effect, a seven-point statement specified War Department policy that would remain in effect until the end of the war. While most points only reiterated issues discussed earlier, points one and seven proved the most controversial: The first point fixed the projected strength of the black personnel of the Army based on the proportion of the African American population of the country. The last point spelled out the policy of racial segregation: “The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has been

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783 784

“We will be American soldiers. We will be American ditch diggers. We will be American laborers. We will be anything that any other American should be in this whole program of national defense. But we won’t be black auxiliaries,” declared Dean William H. Hastie of the Howard University Law School. Walter White. “It’s Our Country, Too: The Negro Demands the Right to Fight For It.” C.i. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 68. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 38. Ibid., 73-4.

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proven satisfactory over a long period of years, and to make changes now would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense. [...] It is the opinion of the War Department that no experiments should be tried with the organizational setup of these units at this critical time.785

Assistant Secretary Patterson submitted this statement of policy to the White House with the comment “as the result of a conference [with African American leaders, M.H.] in your office on September 27.” It was then released to the press with the President’s “O.K.” and initials penciled on the memo. The White House in releasing the statement implied that the participants of that conference had endorsed the announced policy.786 Despite African Americans protesting specifically the last point, the War Department referred to this document as the “Presidential directive on the use of Negro troops” sanctioning all policies that would be derived from it.787 The first and the last point of the seven-point plan were adapted for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps so that here, too, the proportion of African American Waacs would not exceed 10.6 percent. Thus an established policy of racial segregation would also be followed in the WAAC. The authorized number of black personnel was in actuality never even approached. The highest percentage was 8.7 percent of all men and women in 1944. Within the WAC the strength of African American Wacs was roughly 4 percent.788 Among WAC officers the percentage of African Americans was even smaller than among enlisted women. In 1943, only 2.6 percent of the WAC officers were black. Because black company commanders could only command black units, their opportunities were limited in the WAC. White officers, on the other hand, could command African American units if no black officers were available.789 The highest rank African American Wacs held during the war was

785

786

787 788

789

Memo, Asst. Secretary of War for President, October 8, 1949, distributed to Army by Letter, October 16, 1940. C.i. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 75-6. Pittsburgh Courier, 19 October 19, 1940; Time, 28 October 28, 1940; White, A Man Called White, 186-89. C.i. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 76. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 76. Binkin, Martin, and Mark J. Eitelberg. Blacks and the Military. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982, 20, 24; Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 26. Maj. General M.G. White, Assistant Chief of Staff, Directive of the Secretary of War. Memorandum for the Commanding General, Army Service Forces, subject: Officers for Negro troops, WAC. November 4, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 40.

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that of Major, attained by Harriet West, WAC HQ und Charity Adams, the commander of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.790 Political Pressure for the Integration of African American Women Even before the WAAC Bill was signed into law, African American organizations such as the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), demanded integration and equality for black service women. The NCNW had been founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune and consisted of several black women’s organizations. In 1941 the Council invited delegates of 43 such organizations to a conference in Washington, DC to find ways to improve the social, economic and political status of black women through their participation in the nation’s defense. As early as 17 May 1942, Jeanetta Welch of the National Non-Partisan Council of Public Affairs of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority wrote to Secretary of War Stimson and Oveta Hobby to propose an African American Assistant Director: “[n]egro women shall be integrated in the WAAC from the top ranking officer down.”791 Her organization sponsored a Conference at Howard University, titled “Defense Planning for the Future: A Five Day Institute” in July 1942.792 When the Fifth All-Southern Negro Youth Conference convened at Tuskegee Institute in April 1942 to discuss “Negro women and the nation’s war effort,” Esther V. Cooper of the Southern Negro Youth Congress spelled out the goal of “Double Victory”: “[...] the speedy victory of our country over the fascist axis and towards the realization of full citizenship rights for Negro youth.”793 According to Cooper, African Americans had always been “ardent antifascists because they saw in the obnoxious race theories and brazen acts of subjugation which characterized the Axis powers a threat to themselves and to all minority and disadvantaged peoples.” Why then, asked Cooper, were African American youth not more enthusiastic about the armed forces and the war

790

791

792

793

Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 64; Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 776. Letter Walsh to Secretary of War Stimson and Director Hobby. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 10. National Non-Partisan Council of Public Affairs of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. “Defense Planning for the Future: A Five Day Institute.” July 6-10, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 10. Letter Esther V. Cooper, Southern Negro Youth Congress, Birmingham AL, to Oveta Culp Hobby, May 22, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 13.

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effort? Why was there a contradiction between “natural inclination and actual performance?” The answer, according to Cooper and the delegates, was racism: “[The answer] lies in the thousands of adverse circumstances that prevail in the every-day life of Negro youth simply because of the color of their skin. It lies in the fact that in still far too many cases our preferred services to the nation are rebuffed or shunted into menial and undignified channels, our high patriotism subjected to insult. It lies in the continuation of the flagrant practices of un-American discrimination in all phases of the war effort – in the armed forces, production, and the civilian defense program.”794

The “Double V Campaign,” originally launched by the Pittsburgh Courier, pushed for loyalty towards the war effort and for victory over Jim Crow segregation on the home front as well as for victory over the Nazis and Japanese.795 The motto of “Democracy: Victory at Home, Victory Abroad” proved very successful, especially since the black press had been criticized for pursuing their own agenda over that of the nation. Recruiting of African American Women The Advisory Council to the Women’s Interest Section of the War Department (ACWIS) was composed of the presidents of over thirty national women’s organizations, one of whom was the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune. On June 1942, Director Hobby informed the members of ACWIS about the plans for the WAAC and urged them to support the WAAC publicly.796 Bethune had been appointed Director of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration (NYA) in 1935. In 1942, she was asked to assist in the selection of the first WAAC officer candidates and as Special Consultant to the Secretary of War became a member of one of the selecting committees called the Director’s representatives. The second committee, the Evaluating Board, was made up of eleven psychiatrists. Among the roughly 794

795

796

Memo Esther V. Cooper, Southern Negro Youth Congress, Birmingham AL, June 8, 1942, p. 1. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 13. In February a logo was introduced: DEMOCRACY on top of two interlocking Vs with a crest that included “Double Victory” and AT HOME - ABROAD at the bottom of the logo and an eagle perched across. Double V clubs emerged all over the country and the Courier featured a new Double V girl in every issue, sometimes on page 1. Yellin, Emily. Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front during World War II. New York: Free Press, 2004, 223 Minutes of the Meeting of the Advisory Council on June 15 [1942] at the War Department, Records of the NCNW, Series 5, Box 37, Folder 522 Bethune Museums and Archives.

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4000 candidates interviewed, there were six black women whom Mrs. Bethune had named.797 Even before applicants were interviewed and medically examined they had to pass a Mental Alertness Test (MAT).798 Tests such as the Otis Mental Alertness Test or Thorndike’s Mental Alertness Test had been in use since the 1920s.799 The most notable of these tests was developed by A. S. Otis. Shortly before the United States became involved in the World War, Otis had prepared a set of tests that could a) be administered to a large number of subjects at the same time and b) be scored by means of stenciling almost in real time. When WWI broke out, psychologists of the armed forces found themselves confronted with the problem of testing great numbers of men with considerable accuracy in a very short time. When they took stock of tests already available, they found many of their most difficult problems already solved in the Otis MAT. Otis made available to the government all of his materials. Within very short time the army psychologists under the direction of Robert M. Yerkes had evolved the famous group tests for military aptitude.800 In 1941 MATs constituted a widely accepted tool for the selection of personnel, although there were critics who denounced the MAT as content-biased and invalid.801 Apart from arithmetic questions, tests of language skills and

797 798 799

800

801

WD, Press release, June 20, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Mensh and Mensh, The IQ Mythology, 26. Pintner, Rudolf. Intelligence Testing: Methods and Results. New York: Henry Holt, 1923, 378. See E. L. Thorndike, E. L. “The Selection of Military Aviators.”U. S. Air Service 1.5 (1919): 19-20. Hull, Clark L., and Lewis Madison Terman. Aptitude Testing. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1928, 17. Greene, Edward B. Measurements of Human Behavior. New York: Odyssey Press, 1941, 615. Brigham, Carl C. A Study of Error: A Summary and Evaluation of Methods Used in Six Years of Study of the Scholastic Aptitude Test of the College Entrance Examination Board. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1932. In 1950, a handbook of applied psychology cautioned that “[i]n the field of racial comparisons, the influence of cultural background upon mental-test performance is more clearly apparent. The test often demands specific information, which the individual has had little or no opportunity to obtain in his own environment. Thus the use of such objects as bicycles, electric bulbs, postage stamps, and mirrors in picture tests may place individuals in certain cultures at a considerable disadvantage.” Guilford, J.P. et al. Fields of Psychology, Basic and Applied. Toronto, ON, New York, London: D. Van Nostrand, 1950, 384. Anastasi, Anne. Psychological Testing. New York: Macmillan, 1954. For a recent discussion of content bias see Jencks, Christopher and Meredith Phillips, eds. The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, 56.

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those asking for historical and geographic knowledge questions included the following, which reflect a distinct white middle class bias: “82. Madame Curie carried forward her husbands work on (a) radium, (b) enzymes, (c) cancer or (d) X-rays. […] 87. A composer of the Impressionistic School is (a) Debussy, (b) Tschaikowsky [sic], (c) Beethoven or (d) Wagner.”802

It was this racial bias against which some of the psychologists protested. One member of the evaluating board, Helen Peak, who was the head of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and a member of the National Research Council, stated in an “off the record conversation” that there was “excellent leadership material among the colored applicants.” She and another psychologist were “much impressed by negro applicants.” Nevertheless, Peak also commented on the mental alertness test. In her opinion, it was unfair to the African American applicants “because it called for general information which was not part of their particular background.”803 The recruiting campaigns by the Office of War Information (OWI) were at first also geared exclusively toward white middle class women.804 Consequently, recruiting of African American women proved problematic. “Considerable difficulty is being encountered throughout this Service Command in enrolling colored applicants,” complained one officer. Because “approximately eighty-five percent of colored WAAC applicants” failed to succeed in the Mental Alertness test, the Second Service Command could not meet its quota.805 Only after massive lobbying of the African American press did the War Department include black newspapers and specific campaigns to reach African American women. Nearly every major city had a black-owned press. In 1940 there were about 230 black newspapers publishing on a regular ba-

802

803

804 805

War Department, The Adjutant General’s Office, Mental Alertness Test Booklet, March 1942. NARA. RG 165, 55, Box 216. Comments of Dr. Helen Peak, Randolph-Macon College (Lynchburg, VA), Head of Department of Psychology, and Dr. Loula Dunn, Commissioner of Public Welfare, State of Alabama (Montgomery, AL). NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 189. Honey, Creating Rosie, 117-20; Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 187. Letter 1st Lieutenant D. F. Taylor, HQ Second Services Command, SoS to Adjutant General, September 11, 1942, subject: Colored WAAC Applicants. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. On September 15, Lieutenant Col. Tasker refused to lower the minimum requirement in the Mental Alertness Test, but promised four new black Recruiting Officers. Letter Lieutenant Col. Tasker, September 15, 1942. NARA. Ibid.

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sis.806 For almost a year no black newspapers carried ads for the WAAC, and it was only after William G. Black, sales manager of the Interstate United Newspapers, had provided a list of 101 black papers interested in “carry[ing] news releases and pictures showing the activities of the WAACS” that the first advertising and features finally appeared in African American papers. In March 1943 The Call featured a number of photographs of African American Wacs in an article titled “You Are Vital to Victory.” One month later the Pittsburgh Courier printed an ad sponsored by the “Beauty Shop Owners’ Association and Friends” that welcomed the Waacs to Pittsburgh. In October the first black paper, the Atlanta Daily World, was apportioned a share of the advertising budget on a regular basis.807 The Office of War Information also placed ads in the Amsterdam News (New York), the Chicago Defender, the NAACP’s The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and others and conceived posters such as “Women Answer America’s Call” that specifically addressed African American women.808 Although Army officers denied any racist background and blamed the failure to recruit African American women in significant numbers on misinformed local recruiters, internal documents tell a different story. In a report that analyzed the reasons for the recruiting difficulties, Maj. General William Bryden wrote: “Another feature which has not helped the program is the fact that we had several negro WAAC officers recruiting negro Waacs in the Service Command. This gave rise to inquiries as to whether or not negro and white Waacs would serve in the same units; and while everything was done to combat the unfavorable ideas which arose from these inquiries, I am convinced that that feature had a derogatory effect on the program. Negro WAAC recruiters have now left this Service Command.”809

806

807

808

809

Neverdon-Morton, Cynthia. “Securing the ‘Double V’: African-American and JapaneseAmerican Women in the Military during World War II.” A Woman's War Too: U.S. Women in the Military in World War II, ed. Paula Nassen Poulos. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1996. 327-54, 328. Correspondence between William G. Black, sales manager of the Interstate United Newspapers and Maj. General J. A. Ulio. March - October 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4300. Johnson, Jesse J. Black Women in the Armed Forces 1942-1974: A Pictorial History. Hampton, VA: Johnson, 1974, 21. Letter Maj. General William Bryden to Lt. General Brehon Somervell, April 7, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4296.

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Segregation in the WAC Despite racist recruiting practices, the WAC offered more opportunities than any other branch of women’s services or any organizations found in the civilian sector. The Navy only began to enlist African American women into the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) late in 1944.810 The Marine Corps did not accept black women until 1949.811 With the sole exception of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only black women to be sent overseas were Army nurses who tended to sick and wounded soldiers in Africa, Australia and, beginning in 1944, in England. After the first forty handpicked and extensively photographed black officer candidates had begun their training, the prospects for African American women began to look bleaker.812 Many found they were subject to racist practices as soon as they set foot in a recruiting office. Eva Trezevant of Columbia, South Carolina, was not even given an application form, but was told “they were not for Colored people.”813 Some recruiters apparently took it upon themselves to deny applications to African American women. Although the WAAC’s policy of recruiting black Auxiliaries had long been made public, there was much confusion as to who would be eligible to enroll. “We are being told that no provision has been made in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Negro women,” reported G.F. Porter of the NAACP branch in Dallas, adding “[i]s that true, or is it a local attitude toward the situation?”814 Two applicants in Dallas were told by “officials at the recruiting station,” that “Negroes could not be accepted until later, possibly in the fall.” Similarly, S. Vincent Owens of the St. Paul Urban League noted: “no applications were taken for Negro women in St. Paul, Minnesota. [...] Negro citizens in this section were not permitted to register, and this was contrary to information that

810

811 812 813

814

See also Horton, Mildred McAfee. “Recollections of Captain Mildred McAfee, USNR (Ret.).” WAVES Officers in World War II. Ed. [U.S. Naval Institute] Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1971. Ibid., 41. Earley, One Woman’s Army, 22. On media attention, 18-19 and 31-32. Letter E. P. Trezevant to “U.S. Army Recruiting Corps” May 29, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Letter G. F. Porter, Secretary Dallas Branch NAACP to William H. Hastie, Attorney and Civilian Aid, [sic] to Secretary of War. May 29, 1942. Letter Porter to Truman K. Gibson, Asst. Civilian Aide, July 1, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206.

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[had been] released, that Negro applicants would be accepted in the WAAC.”815 For the new recruits who had made it through the application process, racial segregation began even before they had taken their oaths in the induction centers. “Negroes on one side! White girls on the other!”816 ChineseAmerican Waacs, Native Americans and others served together in integrated units.817 For women from the north, this was a new experience. Lanora G. Robinson from Buffalo, New York wrote to President Roosevelt: “[A]s I await call to active duty in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, [...] I am told that because of my pigmentation, I shall now be subjected to new experiences both embarrassing and demoralizing. I hear that when I arrive at the post, I shall be discriminated against, that I shall be segregated in barracks, service clubs, and recreation facilities.”818

Bernadine Flannagan from New England also recalled: “[W]e [black Waacs] had our own barracks and white Waacs had their own barracks. We had our own training facilities and they had their own training facilities. I was surprised because in New London, Connecticut, where I grew up, everything was integrated. I left New London with white girls to travel to Fort Des Moines. We got on the train going south and we were separated when we got down to the Mason-Dixon line. [...] The whole military service was a shock to me because I had no idea it was segregated.” 819

Because of its high visibility as the first of the WAAC Training Centers, the black press and women’s organization closely watched Fort Des Moines. Numerous complaints against racial segregation reached WAAC headquarters and Eleanor Roosevelt’s office.820 Emily Hickman of the YWCA wrote to Hobby in “sincere protest” regarding the segregation at Des Moines, which “negates the democratic philosophy and Christian tradition of the United 815

816

817 818

819 820

Letter S. Vincent Owens of St. Paul Urban League to Hobby, July 17, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 206. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 4. Charity Early Adams added, “after the ‚colored girls’ had been pushed to the side, all the rest of the women were called by name” to be led to their quarters. Earley, One Woman's Army, 19-20. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 5. Letter Lanora G. Robinson, Buffalo, NY to President Roosevelt, December 25, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Letter Bernadine Flannagan, Ibid. “WAAC Segregation [of service clubs in Des Moines] Slackens.” Guide, Omaha, NE (November 28, 1942); “Mrs. Bethune Scores WAAC Segregation – Alarmed Over Reported Approval Of Army’s Discrimination.” Chicago Defender, Louisville, KY. Press clippings: NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211.

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States.”821 An investigating committee sent by the NAACP listed several complaints, racial segregation in classes just being one of them. Opportunities for African American Waacs were said to be generally more limited than those for whites and this was allegedly misrepresented by recruiting. The investigation did find the opportunities for black enlisted women to attend specialist schools limited to “administrative, motor corps and the cooks and bakers school.”822 If and when commissioned, a black officer was usually assigned to recruiting and company work. Organizations such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority (AKA), the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (DST) were campaigning for a clause that would prohibit racial discrimination in the WAAC.823 Congress deemed such legislation unnecessary and the War Department was reluctant to implement any changes. Racial segregation was considered “a practical matter that must be handled in coordination with accepted social customs. For the War Department to attempt the solution, by regulation or by experiment, of a complicated social problem which has perplexed this country for a number of years, can only result in diminishing or endangering the effectiveness of the war effort.”824

Racial segregation, the War Department argued, was a long established social practice and any experiments with integrating the Army would be detrimental to morale and readiness. The Army was simply not the place and wartime not the moment to conduct any tests in social policy. At the time when newspaper editor and lawyer Charles P. Howard was sent to the Training Center in August 1942 by Mary McLeod Bethune, there was one platoon of 39 black officer candidates at the Training Center. Together with two white platoons, they formed the First Company. According to Howard’s report, segregation at Fort Des Moines seemed to have worked without ‘colored’ signs. For the first few days of school the tables assigned to the Negro Waacs had indeed been marked “Reserved C.” After numerous

821

822

823 824

Letter Emily Hickman, YWCA, to Hobby, December 15, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Report of NAACP Investigating Committee On WAAC Complaints, May 12, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 60. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 56. Letter Maj. General J.A. Ulio, Adjutant General to George M. Johnson, Asst. Executive Secretary, Office for Emergency Management, War Manpower Commission, August 22, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49.

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complaints Colonel Faith had the signs removed. This did not mean, however, that the mess hall was now integrated or segregated by platoon. Howard noticed that the African American Waacs still sat “at special tables in the southeast corner of the dining room. As the third platoon of the First Company, they [the African American Waacs] do not in their proper order fall into this seating arrangement.”825 Another informal visit confirmed that although the “facilities [were] equal,” the “arrangement in eating facilities [was] a more conspicuous segregation than the segregation of barracks” and thus was “more keenly resented by the colored group.”826 According to Colonel [Don C.] Faith, “Negro girls [were] given absolute equality of opportunity.”827 Classes were integrated if they were taught to more than one platoon. Howard’s conclusion was that “Colonel Faith is administrating his post with the minimum of segregation consistent with his interpretation of ‘army policy.’ Before Howard concluded his report, he added: “I know of no Federal Law that requires the segregation of Negroes in the Army. The State Laws of the State of Iowa directly prohibit the segregation of Negroes in eating places. There is no State Law [sic] in Iowa, requiring the separate housing of Negroes nor is there any State Law in Iowa, requiring separate recreational facilities for Negroes. It is to be noted that the army purports to justify its segregation of Negroes in southern training camps to conform to State Law. It is difficult to understand how violation of State Law in this camp is justified. I do not have access to complete army regulations, but seriously doubt that there are any Federal Laws that justify segregating these Negro girls at Fort Des Moines.”828

Howard was correct. There were no laws in Iowa requiring racial segregation. In fact no Jim Crow laws had been enacted there since the Civil War. On the contrary Iowa barred segregation of public facilities in 1884. The law was expanded in 1892, and additional statutes were passed in 1931 and 1946.829 De-

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Howard’s Report. A letter by Harry McAlpin of the Chicago Defender also supports this. He wrote that after the signs reading “Reserved C” had been removed, “the girls have been given military orders to use no other tables, and the white girls have been given similar orders not to sit at the reserved tables.” Harry McAlpin, Chicago Defender, letter to Col. Tasker, August 25, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Report of Informal Visit to Training Camp for WAAC’s, Des Moines, Iowa Made by Edwin R. Embree in Company with W.W. Alexander, September 21, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Charles P. Howard Report to Mary McLeod Bethune, subject: Handling of Negro Officer Candidates, August 26, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Ibid. Iowa was one of 15 states that did not have any segregation laws at the time. See map “The History of Jim Crow: Jim Crow outside the South.” 2003. http://www.jimcrowhis-

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spite these legislative efforts, the First WAAC Training Center in Fort Des Moines, Iowa was segregated. The African American bi-monthly magazine The Crisis commented on segregation: “The first implication of segregation is inferiority. [...] We believe this inescapable feeling of inferiority, and the shame and resentment of Negro soldiers and civilians that their government should force it upon them as a national policy in a war against racial bigotry and barbarity, are the underlying causes of all the headaches the War Department has had over Negro soldiers in training this past year.”830

Several weeks after Howard’s visit to Fort Des Moines, an anonymous black WAAC officer informed Bethune about an official memo dated 22 October 1942 which prohibited African Americans from using Service Club No. 1, except when “on business,” and only then could they use the back door.831 When the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) protested this, Harriet West, the only black officer on Hobby’s staff, was sent to Iowa. In accordance with WAAC headquarters policy she was unsuccessful in ending the practice of segregation, instead only managing to have the signs that denoted segregation removed. J.A. Hoag, Commandant, WAAC Training Center des Moines wrote to Hobby after West had left: “With regard to the questions put to me by Mrs. West, the memorandum on use of the two Service Clubs has been withdrawn from all offices and from all bulletin boards. Its intent was plain but I believe the wording was unwise. [...] There are no signs or notices anywhere in the Post indicating any difference between colored and white enrollees.”832

Harriet West had been Bethune’s administrative assistant as a civilian and was strongly opposed to the Army’s policy of segregation. As the ranking African American officer and a member of WAC headquarters, however, she was forced to act in accordance with Army policies and minimize racial tensions

830

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http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/geography/outside_south.htm. Accessed August 9, 2003. Schultz, Jeffrey D., et al. Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics. 2 Vols. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 2000, Vol 1, 244. The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races 49.2 (February 1942): 47; c.i. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 30. Report on segregation in Fort Des Moines, field trip, November 2, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Letter J. A. Hoag, Commandant, WAAC Training Center des Moines to Hobby, November 18, 1942. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. First Officer Harriet West, Report on Field Trip to 6th and 7th Service Commands, May 17, 1943. File: Negro. NARA. RG 165, Series 55, Box 211.

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while keeping the segregation policy intact.833 In recommending that all “reference to white and colored personnel be completely eliminated,” she hoped to minimize “embarrassment to the colored personnel” and further the “feeling that a forward step [had] been made toward democracy.”834 The War Department’s main concern was that “incidents” could occur. After the references to race had been removed from the bulletin board, black Auxiliaries started to use the Service Club No.1, formerly for use by whites only. White auxiliaries protested their presence, and the African American women “were not requested to leave but were asked if they were aware that there were equal facilities in the Service Club No. 2.”835 Commandant Hoag commented: “I have the feeling that there is no objection on the part of certain of the new auxiliaries to create an incident or incidents and I would not be at all surprised if there has been instruction from certain sources. As you know, I feel that this is no time to bring up or to solve the Negro question. However, I realize that it is being pressed by outside sources.”836

In November 1942, in part due to political pressure and partly because the small number of African Americans seemed to no longer warrant segregation, the living and recreational facilities at Fort Des Moines were desegregated.837 The War Department received letters protesting integration as well as segregation. Numerous letters directed to congressmen, the Secretary of War, or the President displayed outright racism. An anonymous letter to Henry Stimson protested “[…] the way the white girls that have joined the W.A.A.C. organization at Des Moines, Iowa, are being subjected to the colored race; the white girls are being forced to dine with and share their room with them. If they protest, they are told they have a strong (aryan flavor) [sic] and they are trying to sabotage the war effort. [...] Many are young and afraid to protest, and are ashamed to write home to

833

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Major Harriet West was chief of the Planning Bureau, Control Division at WAC Headquarters in Washington, DC Berry, Mary Frances and John W. Blassingame. Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 325. First Officer Harriet West, Report on Field Trip to 6th and 7th Service Commands, May 17, 1943. File: Negro. NARA. RG 165, Series 55, Box 211. Letter J. A. Hoag, Commandant, WAAC Training Center des Moines to Hobby, November 18, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Ibid. Letter Hobby to Reverend Palfrey Perkins, Secretary Boston Urban League, November 17, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 71; Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 591. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 335.

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relatives of how they are subjected to negro equality. [...] Why should white people have to accept negroes as equals socially? Will the white race have to fight to free themselves of the negro in the future?”838

Similarly, John C. Leissler, Jr., editor and publisher of The Southwest Insurer in Dallas, Texas, wrote he was “shocked beyond words” when he visited Des Moines: “I learned that at intervals, the commanding officers of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps require crews of white women to kitchen police duties for the negro women who also are in training there. They have two mess halls, one for the white women and one for the negro women, and it is logical to assume that there are enough negro women there to take care of their own needs. Yet under the plan, the white women must go into negro quarters, serve the food, wait on the negro women while they eat, which means fetching and carrying water, coffee, and other necessities [sic] during the course of the meal and then must clean up after the negro women. Remember there are numerous women from the South. [...] [Does] Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, a Texan, [...] believe that humiliation is conducive to good morale? Does she think that the white women who are thus forced to perform chores wholly foreign to their upbringing and training, will contribute to making good soldiers? [...] It is bad enough that both white and negro women should be quartered in the same post at the same time, but when white women are required to perform menial tasks for negro women that is carrying the authority of the military too far.”839

Hobby’s answer to Sumners once again revealed the ambivalent attitude of WAAC headquarters. She points out that “every effort is made to form at least a platoon of Negroes” so that African American women within a company may be housed and deployed to the field separately. Almost apologetically she goes on to explain that since the number of black officer candidates is so small, they will have to be placed in “regular officer candidate companies.”840 In a telephone conversation between Hobby and congressman Joe Starnes of Alabama, who had been forwarded a letter from Belvedere, South Dakota, Hobby assured the Congressman: “Mr. Starnes, I just come back from there [training center]. I know exactly what the situation is. There is complete segregation. No white woman sleeps in the same barracks with a negro wom-

838 839

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Letter to Secretary of War, May 29, 1943, not signed. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter John C. Leissler, Jr. Editor und publisher The Southwest Insurer, Dallas, TX to Hatton W. Sumners, TX, Chairman Committee on the Judiciary, 78th Congress, April 24, 1943. Sumners forwarded the letter to Hobby on April 28, to Hobby. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Letter Hobby to Sumners, May 5, 1943. NARA. Ibid.

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woman.”841 Apparently the honorable Starnes was not convinced, so Hobby went on to reveal some inside information via a telephone call: “[Hobby:] Now, I want to tell you something completely off the record. You know as well as I do what the situation in the South is. We did get complaints. There is nothing on paper in the War Department any where that relates to this, but actually what is happening – the girls from the South are now being sent to Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., training. There are no negroes training there. So I think we have, without announcing any War Department policy, cured something that was causing… Starnes: I think that’s a very smooth and fine way to handle it. It’s a delicate problem.”842

This telephone conversation with Representative Starnes suggests that neither the War Department nor the WAAC Headquarters were interested in desegregating any WAAC units or posts. Like the Southern Democrat Starnes, Hobby was rather interested in avoiding any racial incidents. It was understood that announcing any WAAC policy different from that of the War Department would cause violent protest in the South. Hence, Hobby’s approach was to avoid conflict by appeasing both sides and keeping them apart from each other. Black women from the North like Bernadine Flannagan and Lanora Robinson were best trained at Fort Des Moines so Representative Starnes’ white constituents would not have to share the barracks with black women when being trained at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. African American Wacs Overseas When African American Wacs were finally deployed to the European theater, it was due in no small degree to political pressure by African American organizations and individuals.843 Once black Wacs had been requisitioned in 1942, Director Hobby “refused to let the women be scattered in uncontrolled small

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Transcript of telephone conversation between Hobby and Representative Starnes, June 8, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 78. Joe Starnes was strong promoter of xenophobic immigration laws, served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was labeled a “negro hater” by contemporary author Henry Lee Moon. Moon, Henry Lee. Balance of Power: The Negro Vote. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948, 23. Ibid. Letter, Malvina Thompson to DWAC, 1 Nov 44, included letter from city editor of AFRO-American (October 26, 1944) and reply (November 4, 1944). C.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 599. See also Letter Mable Alston, Washington Afro American to Mrs. Roosevelt, October 26, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91.

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field units near male Negro troops.”844 As directed by the War Department, the European theater submitted a requisition for approximately 800 black women to set up a central postal directory in September 1943. At its peak strength in late March 1945, the 6888th Central Postal Directory consisted of thirty-nine officers and almost nine hundred enlisted women. Major Charity Adams, the designated commander and Captain Abbie Noel Campbell traveled to England late in January 1945. As soon as the women set foot into the city of London “a funny thing happened [...]. Suddenly, our minority status disappeared. London was filled with representatives of all the Allies and neutrals, and every conceivable kind of uniform could be seen on the streets, worn by all races, colors, shapes, sizes, sexes, and religious persuasions.”845

The 6888th Central Postal Battalion arrived in Europe in February of 1945. Before it went on to Rouen and Paris, it was stationed in Birmingham, England, and billeted in a discarded boys’ school building. The battalion was a separate Table of Organization (T/O) unit with its own headquarters company for administrative and support functions. All workspace, barracks, offices, and recreational areas were housed in one building. Its function was the redirection of mail to U.S. personnel in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). This included not only military service personnel, but also civilian specialists, technicians, and Red Cross workers – a total number estimated at about seven million. The handlers of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion kept an address card for every person in the theater. When they started in February, there was a large backlog of over three million pieces of mail and undelivered Christmas packages. The battalion’s members worked three eighthour shifts, seven days a week. As Anna W. Wilson, WAC Staff Director in the European Theater of Operations later lauded, the unit “broke all records for redirecting mail. Each [...] shift averaged more than 65,000 pieces of mail. Long-delayed letters and packages reached battle casualties who had been moved too frequently for mail to catch up with them.”846 Despite commendation racism was all but absent on the other side of the Atlantic, as illustrated by the emphasis Adams placed on the physical appearance of her troops. When she requested Special Service supplies to set up a beauty parlor, the commander commented: “[h]ow in the world could we

844 845 846

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 599 Earley, One Woman’s Army, 135. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 97-108. Earley, One Woman’s Army, 151.

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keep morale up if the women did not feel that they could look their best?”847 With the help of Major Margaret Philpot, the necessary items could be secured: “straightening combs, marcel [curling] irons, special gas burners, and customer chairs.”848 Adams knew that the first black WAC unit in the European theater would be under constant surveillance, and not just with regard to their duties. As Army historian Mattie Treadwell noted: “the unit was congratulated by the theater on its ‘exceptionally fine’ Special Services program. Its observance of military courtesies was also pronounced exemplary, as were the grooming and appearance of members and the maintenance of quarters.”849

Before African American women soldiers had arrived with the 6888th Battalion, there had been no racial segregation in the Red Cross clubs or other Birmingham recreational facilities for military personnel. At the Red Cross Club for enlisted personnel, the staff was “at least receptive if not cordial to Negro troops. Apparently the social activities were successful, under controlled racial tension.”850 This changed with the arrival of black women and, without any ‘incident’, the Red Cross attempted on several occasions to set up separate facilities “just for Negroes.”851 According to the battalion’s commandant, none of these attempts were successful.852 Assignment and Mal-assignment Black Wacs were disproportionately employed in low skilled work. This mirrored the Army caste system stratified by race and class as well as unequal access to economic opportunities among women in the civilian job market. The Army rating system that was also used for the WAC designated grades based on the women’s score on the Army General Classification Test (AGCT). Women in the higher grades – I through III – were usually assigned clerical and office jobs, while the grades that were considered unskilled (IV and V) consisted of more menial duties. African American Wacs, who had been denied the same access to education and higher skilled work before their entry into the corps, were overrepresented in the lower grades. In addition, WAC policy required that Army commands and posts explicitly requested African 847 848 849 850 851 852

Ibid., 145. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 600. Earley, One Woman’s Army, 162. Ibid. Ibid.

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American personnel. If not specifically marked “colored” personnel, the request would be considered “white only.” One result of these difficulties to assign black women was that there was a significant backlog of African American Wacs at all of the training centers awaiting assignment. At Des Moines it became necessary to house the women in the company day rooms, with fifty Waacs in each.853 The few assignment requests that came in were mostly for jobs where segregation could be maintained and where unskilled personnel, or basics, could be used.854 Opportunities for specialist training for blacks were more or less limited to attending one of the specialist schools at Fort Des Moines for either motor transport or cooks and bakers. Several of the Army specialist schools that also admitted women, such as the cryptographic courses of the Signal Corps and the Army physiotherapy schools, were closed to black women.855 In July 1943 600 African American Wacs at Des Moines and 240 at Ft. Devens had completed basic and specialist training and were awaiting assignment.856 At the Fourth WAAC Training Center Fort Devens, Massachusetts, the situation was similar. In June 1943 more than half of the enrolled African American women at the post (295 of 518) were unassigned basics with nothing to do.857 After the Fourth Training Center at Fort Devens closed in August 1943, all African American Waacs at Ft. Devens, 21 officers and 589 enlisted women, were transferred to Fort Des Moines and further aggravated the situation there.858 This in no way helped maintain morale. Harriet West and other officers repeatedly toured the country to inform and persuade commandants to request “colored” personnel as well.859 West reported back to Hobby that

853 854 855 856

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Earley, One Woman’s Army, 79. Ibid. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 336. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 43. First Officer Harriet West, Report on Field Trip to 6th and 7th Service Commands, May 17, 1943. File: Negro. NARA. RG 165, Series 55, Box 211. Report of inspection of 4th WAAC Training Center Fort Devens, MA. June 20-23, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Letter Lula Jones Garrett, editor The Afro-American (Baltimore, MD) to OWI, August 6, 1943; and reply from Col. Hobby on August 18: NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Report Harriet West of Field Trip to 6th and 7th Service Commands May 1943: Situation in Des Moines; West also visited HQ 7th Service Command in Omaha, Nebraska, Fort Riley, Kansas, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, Fort Sheridan and Fort Custer, Michigan, to give talks on the requisition of African American Wacs. File: Colored Personnel in WAAC. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Memorandum for the Director, subject: Enrollment and Assignment of Negro Personnel, May 24, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49.

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“post commanders are at a loss to determine how Negro personnel (WAAC) can be used other than in laundries, mess units, or salvage and reclamation shops.”860 She went on to recommend that “the most hopeless cases […] be formed into companies for unskilled work in hospitals, messes, and salvage depots.”861 This would not have worked for several reasons. Firstly, WAAC Tables of Organization had too few slots for unskilled personnel so that there was no way to form entire companies of them. Secondly, such assignments would have to have been made equally available for whites according to War Department policy. And finally these jobs were mostly civilian and could not have been staffed by Waacs. If black Waacs were requested, their assignment within the lowest grades of IV or V was based on racial stereotypes. After her field trips to the WAAC companies at Williams Field, Higley, Arizona, where 53 of 154 black Waacs were classified as grade V, and Victorville, California WAAC Staff Director Helen H. Woods reported: “[s]o low grade mentally or so uneducated as to be assignable only to the simplest form of menial work. [...] The assignments consist mainly in “grease-monkey” work around the aeroplanes [sic] which calls for no mental effort and is under constant supervision.”862 African American WAC officers were also often assigned in a discriminating way. Unlike white officers upon graduation from Officer Candidate School, black officers often found themselves in assignments usually reserved for noncommissioned officers.863 Black officers were not allowed to command a white unit, whereas the opposite was quite frequent. Despite this, exceptions to the segregation policies had to be made in the case of black enlisted women who were trained at specialist schools because their low numbers did not warrant segregation. Although the segregation policy ironically allowed black officers to develop military leadership skills, their career was hampered by racial stereotypes.

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First Officer Harriet West, Report on Field Trip to 6th and 7th Service Commands. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. Memo Harriet West, April 19, 1943 on Progress Report on Motor Transport School (Colored), Possibilities at Fourth Training Center Fort Devens. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 211. See also Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 593. Letter Helen H. Woods, First Officer, WAAC Staff Director toColonel T. B. Gatron, Executive office, WAAC HQ June 3, 1943: Requested report on the WAAC Company at Williams Field, Higley, AZ, and Victorville, CA. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 60. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 336.

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Protest: Sit-Down Strike or Disobedience? In some instances, African American servicewomen resorted to acts of resistance in order to protest racial discrimination. One of these occurred before the WAAC was part of the Regular Army. Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky was a post commanded by a “devout racist” who felt he had to remind Captain Myrtle Anderson, the WAAC company officer and her executive officer, Margaret Barnes Jones, that although they might both be from the North, his post was in the South.864 African American Waacs at Camp Breckinridge were assigned to a laundry after they had protested their original assignments of stacking beds and scrubbing floors in a salvage warehouse. On the afternoon of June 25, 1943, twenty-one Waacs did not return for duty. In protesting discriminatory mal-assignment, segregation, and the fact that they had fallen under civilian supervision as a result of having been used to replace private sector workers rather than soldiers,, the women organized “what amounted to a strike which is absolutely contrary to military customs or regulations.”865 Colonel Clyde Parmelee went on to have the group lectured about what constituted mutiny. “When you get involved in insubordination, it is mutiny and next to murder, it is possibly the most serious thing in the service.”866 A board of investigation, however, could find “no evidence supporting any attempt to create or begin, excite, cause or join in any mutiny or sedition, […] leaving their jobs was [merely] simultaneous.” Six auxiliaries leaving the service who had not planned to reenlist were given summary discharges.867 At the Lovell General Hospital in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, Wacs who were trained as medical technicians were assigned duties as hospital orderlies – for which they were clearly overqualified.868 Private Alice Young, one of the four Privates whose case received nationwide attention, had had some training as a nurse. Other members of this black company assigned to Lovell had experience in hospital work. The division of labor at Lovell was such that the members of the black unit were assigned orderly duties, regardless of training

864 865

866 867 868

2nd Lieutenant Margaret Barnet Jones, c.i. Moore, 20. Testimony Colonel Clyde D. Parmelee, Report of Preceedings of Board of Officers, 3562nd Service Unit, Section #2, WAAC, Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky. June 26, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4281. Ibid. Ibid and Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 60-61. The duties of MOS 657, medical aid man, were included in those of MOS 409, medical technician. Additionally, medical technicians took temperatures, pulses, monitored respiration, charted notes, and kept ward records.

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or previous experience. African American Wacs had to “wash walls, scrub floors, cook and keep the wards clean.”869 “The girls are very disgusted because they were not drafted into the organization but volunteered so that they could help to get the war over soon. These girls have become so disgusted that three have tried to commit suicide as they thought it was the only way out.”870 The WAC Director’s office did not see any immediate need to act. “The fact that enlisted women were asked to perform such duties as cleaning the wards and cooking does not signify discrimination [...]. [T]here is no evidence to prove conclusively that the attempted suicides were the result of the conditions described in the letter of complaint.”871

When the commander of the hospital, Walter H. Crandall, saw Young taking a patient’s temperature (part of the job of a medical technician, the supervising nurse explained), Crandall made it clear that in his hospital no black servicewoman would be “taking temperatures” – that is, working with patients.872 Their job was to “scrub and do the dirty work.”873 Young then asked to be assigned to the motor pool. Colonel Crandall told her black Wacs were not wanted there, either.874 The next morning most of the 60 African American Wacs did not report for duty.875 Although the unit’s commanding officer and other black WAC officers were present at the post, the Army brought in the commanding general of the First Service Command, Maj. General Sherman Miles. He ordered the women back to duty under the authority of the Ninth Article of War, prohibiting the willful disobeying of a lawful command or order.876 Eventually, all but four returned to duty.

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870 871

872 873

874 875 876

Letter William T. Granahan (DEM, House of Representatives, Philadelphia, PA) to Stimson, March 13, 1945. Granahan quoted from the letter of a WAC Private, possibly Pvt. Harriet Warfield, who had enlisted on January 26, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91. Warfield was classified as 409, medical technician, but was assigned MOS 657, medical aid man, and did not report for work the next day. On February 14, Warfield was reported “surplus in kill” to be assigned to another station. Ibid. Letter Major Kathryn K. Johnson, Executive Officer, ODWAC, March 16, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 97. Major Herman and Captain Chance, WAC, transcript of conversation on situation at Fort Devens. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 97. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 61 Ibid., 62; Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 97. “Any officer or soldier who [...] shall disobey any lawful command of his superior officer, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as shall, according to the nature of his offense, be inflicted upon him by the sentence of a court-martial.” United States. Articles of

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In contrast to the Waacs at Camp Breckinridge who could just leave the Corps at the time of conversion, the four Wacs were ordered to stand trial before a general court-martial. This was one of the most visible and publicized cases of resistance against discriminatory practices during the war. The NAACP hired Julian D. Rainey, a Boston attorney, black WWI veteran, and Professor at the Suffolk Law School to represent the four Privates.877 Tenola T. Stoney, the commanding officer of the black unit, testified before the ninemember court of which none was a black WAC officer. The verdict was guilty and all four were sentenced to one year of hard labor and dishonorable discharge from the service. The NAACP, the ACLU and Mary McLeod Bethune’s NCNW were sympathetic to the Wacs, although most had been reluctant to support any extralegal activities such as the strike during the war, the verdict was followed by a storm of protest. In view of the conditions at Lovell Hospital, Bethune and Charles H. Houston, a civil rights lawyer, pushed for the formation of an investigating committee to posts where black Wacs were stationed to improve their situation.878 African American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and other Congressmen from New York petitioned the War Department to bring Colonel Crandall up on charges and reverse the verdict against the four Privates, which, in view of the racist hostility on the post, seemed unduly harsh.879 Hundreds of individuals wrote letters in which they protested the “decidedly excessive punishment,” which seemed “grossly out of proportion. One cannot but feel that strong racial prejudice influenced the decision of the military board. The fact that two Negroes were sitting on the Board argues nothing against this impression for reasons, which are too obvious for me to state.”880 The War Department did not charge Colonel Crandall for disobeying Army directives against racial discrimination. In view of the storm of protest, however, the War Department had the case reviewed by the Judge Advocate General and reversed the verdict of the four Wacs and restored them

877

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War: An Act for Establishing Rules and Articles for the Government of the Armies of the United States. Washington, DC: [n.p.] 1806, Art. 9. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 63. Johnson, Charles. African American Soldiers in the National Guard: Recruitment and Deployment during Peacetime and War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992, 124. Memo for Hobby, subject: Request by Bethune, Lovell Hospital, March 20, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 191. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 98. Letters Ellen A. Kennan, New York, March 28, 1945 and Dorothy Leon, New York, April 1, 1945. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 91.

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to duty. Colonel Crandall was placed on terminal leave in April 1945, and then retired.881

5.2 Japanese American Wacs The history of Japanese American Wacs’ enrollment and service provides a different angle at the intersection of race and gender.882 If, as was often the case in the United States before WWI, race is constructed between the two poles of black and white, it is entirely a function of powerlessness on one side versus privilege on the other.883 Asian Americans have historically been placed somewhere between black and white in the racial hierarchy. As Brenda Moore argues, at certain times Japanese Americans have been regarded as being “near whites,” while at other times they were considered “just like blacks.”884 However, this approach of placing Asian Americans on a black|white continuum fails to address issues specific to non-white and nonblack groups: “The racial experiences of Asian Americans (…) diverge fundamentally from the experiences of blacks. Subordination falls along a separate axis. (…) The axis is not white versus black, but American versus foreigner. [T]he color dichotomy that operates to cast blacks as inferior to whites differs from the citizenship dichotomy that operates to cast all Asian Americans (…) as foreign-born outsiders.”885

During WWI Japanese Americans, immigrant Isei, and second generation Nisei an occupied ambiguous position. They were neither black nor white, but rather located somewhere between American and alien. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese American men were drafted under the Selective Serv881 882

883

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Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 63 for newspaper accounts. See Moore, Brenda L. “Reflections of Society: The Intersection of Race and Gender in the U.S. Army in World War II.” Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discrimination in Military Culture. Ed. Mary F. Katzenstein and Judith Reppy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 12542. Moore, Serving Our Country. Hirose, Japanese American Women. Neverton-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V’. Examples for the use of the black/white paradigm for Asian Americans include Okihiro, Gary Y. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994. Loewen, James W. The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Moore, Serving Our Country, 3. Ancheta, Angelo N. Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998, 64.

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ice and Training Act and had been assigned to white units. When the United States declared war on Japan, most Nisei soldiers were summarily discharged and their induction into the services was discontinued. Although Americans by birth, many Nisei soldiers were stripped of their weapons and some were forced into prison compounds or reclassified as “enemy aliens,” who were considered undesirable for service.886 On February 10, 1942 Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary: “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or even trust the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.”887

Many shared Stimson’s racist bias against Asian Americans. Brenda Moore argues that “it may appear, because of the extreme form of racial oppression they were subjected to, as though [their] position shifted toward that of blacks. Upon close inspection, however, it becomes evident that Japanese Americans became racialized during World War II, occupying a racial identity separate from that of whites or blacks.”888

At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly 113,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, were living on the West Coast in the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. The west coast had a long history of anti-Asian sentiment.889 Widespread feelings of suspicion and fear led to accusations of sabotage and fifth column activity by the press and Congressmen. Two months after Pearl Harbor, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, allowing for the Secretary of War and Military Commanders to designate areas, so-called Military Districts,” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Executive Order No. 9102, signed by the President on March 18, 1942, established the

886

887

888 889

Moore, Serving Our Country, 4-5. An exception was made for Nisei soldiers who were assigned to the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) and those who worked as military translators, interrogators and spies. The Truman Presidential Library. The War Relocation Authority and the Incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_ collections/japanese_internment/1942.htm. Accessed July 14, 2004. Moore, Serving Our Country, 5. Expressed for example in the denial of naturalization to Asians (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922 (Ozawa v. U.S.) and the 1924 Immigration Act which barred Asian immigration.

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War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency in the Office for Emergency Management that provided for the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry from those areas denoted under Executive Order No. 9066.890 The Authority started planning and building ten relocation camps that would house more than 110,000 Japanese Americans who lived in the western halves of California, Oregon, Washington, and the southern third of Arizona in what was designated Military District 1.891 The War Relocation Authority (WRA), headed by Milton S. Eisenhower, was authorized to remove the evacuees from the Military District to “provide for evacuees’ relocation, to supervise their activities, and to provide for their useful employment.”892 Public Law 77-503 then made it a federal crime for a person ordered to leave a military area to refuse to do so. Beginning in March 1942, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent were first taken to temporary assembly centers and then moved inland to ten relocation centers in California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.893 The WRA divided the people of Japanese descent in the Pacific Coast military zone into different categories. The largest group were the Nisei or second generation Japanese Americans, children of immigrants who were American citizens by birth and had been educated in the U.S. Their parents, called Isei or first generation, were Japanese citizens residing in the U.S. The other groups were the Sensei: second-generation American-born children of the Nisei or Kibei but who were educated either wholly or partly in Japan. Kibei knew the terrain, language, and customs well enough to pass for natives and if they were deemed loyal, their expertise to the U.S. Army as translators and cryptanalysts was highly valued. The purpose of the WRA was to resettle the evacuees to new locations well away from the Pacific Coast and not to detain them indefinitely in the relocation centers. The first evacuees to be released in 890

891

892 893

Broom, Leonard and John I. Kitsuse. The Managed Casualty: The Japanese-American Family in World War II. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1956, 18. Daniels, Roger and Eric Foner. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese American in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. University of Washington Press: Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988, 214. Truman Presidential Library, The War Relocation Authority. Hayashi, Brian Masaru. Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kiyota, Minoru and Linda Klepinger Keenan. Beyond Loyalty: The Story of a Kibei. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Yamada, Mitsuye. Camp Notes and Other Writings. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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spring 1942 were linguists, agricultural laborers and college students. Others resettled in states such as Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Utah, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York. In order to quell Japan’s assertions that this was a racial war, evacuees had to respond to a loyalty questionnaire administered in early 1943.894 In May 1943, Dillon S. Myer, the new director of the WRA, stated that the relocation centers were “undesirable institutions and should be removed from the American scene as soon as possible. Life in a relocation center is an unnatural and un-American sort of life. Keep in mind that the evacuees were charged with nothing except having Japanese ancestors; yet the very fact of their confinement in relocation centers fosters suspicion of their loyalties and adds to their discouragement. It has added weight to the contentions of the enemy [Japan] that we are fighting a race war that this nation preaches democracy and practices racial discrimination.”895

At the same time, the manpower shortage in the Army was becoming severe, particularly after the Army had suffered one of its biggest defeats in Bataan, where more than seventy thousand men, Filipinos and Americans, surrendered to Japan on April 9, 1942. In January 1943, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced plans to accept Nisei volunteers for an all-Nisei special combat team, “It is the inherent right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the nation’s battle.”896 In February 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the orders creating an all-Nisei army unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.897 In January of 1944, the Selective Service began drafting the same Japanese American men it was guarding in the relocation centers, provided that they were cleared individually for service. The Japanese American Citizenship League had urged the President to reinstate the draft as early as November 1942, after the battle of Bataan and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands.898 As was the case with African Americans, policies on the utilization of Japanese American women were contingent upon the policies regarding Japanese American men.899 Early in 1943 the War Department discussed possible 894 895 896

897

898

899

Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 329-30 and Moore, Serving Our Country, 16. C.i. Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 276. 1,500 Hawaiian volunteers of Japanese descent were to fight on the European front. Newspaper clippings, January 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. “President Approves Combat Team of Citizens of Japanese Ancestry.” War Department, press release, February 1, 1943. NARA. Ibid. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, 188. Amott, Teresa L., and Julie A. Matthaei: Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991, 230.

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ways to recruit Nisei women as linguists for the WAAC.900 Japanese was one of the languages much sought after for cryptography and communications. Director Hobby discussed the question of Nisei Waacs with Dillon Myer, the new director of the WRA who had met with Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy.901 A conference in January proposed that one WAAC officer should accompany each of the operating teams that were being sent out to the Relocation Centers. Their purpose was to determine whether Japanese American women generally supported the war effort and whether they would be available for military service or employment. According to a general survey of the WRA, there were roughly 21,000 female American citizens of Japanese ancestry in the relocation centers, of whom 10,347 were unmarried and between 18 and 45 years of age.902 Occupational statistics compiled by the WRA from the 1940 census reveal that the occupational distribution among the Nisei women was just what the military needed.903 Original plans called for two to four WAAC companies “composed entirely of American citizens of Japanese extraction.” They were to be trained at Fort Des Moines “where they can receive their complete training at one camp.” Finally they were to “serve with the American-Japanese unit” and should “be recruited and trained in time to be ready for duty soon after the male units are in the field.”904 In March 1943 WAAC officers began accompanying Army teams going on field trips to relocation centers to conduct interviews with Nisei women. As Captain Norman Thompson reported from the Gila River Relocation Center in Rivers, Arizona, male Japanese Americans were strongly opposed to serving in segregated units. “During our volunteer period we encountered, as did the officers at the other nine relocation centers, considerable opposition to our “separate combat team idea.”905 Thompson also called a meeting of the “female citizens” and noted that “[t]he usual resistance to separate combat teams was stronger than with the boys.” Of the 40 to 50 qualified women who seriously considered enlisting,

900 901 902

903

904

905

Correspondence re: Nisei Waacs and integration. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Transcript of conversation between Hobby and McCloy. NARA. RG 407, Box 4297. Draft Memorandum, undated. “Enrollment of American Born Japanese Women in WAAC” Conference 26-28 January 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Letter E.M. Roall, Acting Director of the WRA to Hobby, January 26, 1943. File: SPWA 291.2. c.i. Moore Serving Our Country, 89. Memo to DWAC, February 1, 1943. Memos and letters re: enrollment of JapaneseAmerican WACs. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Report by Captain Norman Thompson from Gila River Relocation Center in Rivers, Arizona. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49.

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none would volunteer for a separate unit. “At home we were spread out through the Caucasian race. It smacks too much of race segregation.” The women inquired whether Chinese Americans and African Americans were in separate units, and then stated “[w]e don’t want to be classed with negroes.”906 Other surveys conducted by WAAC officers Hazel Milbourn and Emily U. Miller at the relocation centers in Tule Lake, California, Topaz, Utah, and Hunt, Idaho also indicated that at least half of the women surveyed were interested in volunteering for the WAAC, but “they emphatically [did] not want segregation to all-Japanese units.”907 One report also stated that the “Caucasian personnel professed great admiration for the Nisei and said they would have no objection whatsoever in being assigned to units with them.”908 It became clear that the young women were determined not to serve in racially segregated units. They were also among the most highly educated women in the United States and, although their number in the Army would remain small, Japanese-speaking women were much needed for specific skilled occupational positions.909 Most of the young women indicated that they would be more interested in signing up for the Army instead of working in civilian jobs. Perhaps more importantly than the fifty dollars a month they felt that the Army was able to offer some sense of physical security. According to WAAC officer Joyce Burton, the women also prided themselves on being “modern American women who had outgrown oriental ideas” and were eager to leave the relocation camps to get some distance between themselves and the “old Japanese school.”910

906 907

908

909

910

Ibid. Emily U. Miller , 3rd Officer, WAAC. “Survey to determine desirability of recruiting Japanese women for service in the W.A.A.C.” March 6, 1943. Report by Hazel Milbourn, First Officer WAAC Service Command Director, 9th Service Command to WAAC HQ, March 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Ibid. 2nd Officer Manice Hill’s findings at Rohwer Relocation Center revealed similar interests. NARA. Ibid. On Nisei women and education see Nakano, Mei T., and Grace Shibata. Japanese American Women: Three Generations, 1890-1990. Berkeley, CA, San Francisco, CA: Mina Press Pub., National Japanese American Historical Society, 1990, 117-18. See also: Adler, Susan Matoba. Mothering, Education, and Ethnicity: The Transformation of Japanese American Culture. New York: Garland, 1998. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986. Sone, Monica Itoi. Nisei Daughter. Boston, MA: Little, 1953. Sarasohn, Eileen Sunada. Issei Women: Echoes From Another Frontier. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1998. Letter Second Officer Joyce Burton, WAAC, to Commanding General, Ninth Service Command, Fort Douglas, Utah, March 11, 1943, c.i. Moore, Serving Our Country, 93.

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Finally, the Military Personnel Division announced that “Women of Japanese descent will be accepted for enrollment and service in the WAAC subject to all rules and regulations that govern the enrollment and service of other women.”911 The only exceptions were the special weight and height requirements prescribed by the Surgeon General of a minimum height of fiftyseven inches (145 cm) and a minimum weight of ninety-five pounds (43 kg). On 23 July the Adjutant General informed the service commands that a quota of 500 would now be accepted into the WAAC.912 Unlike Nisei men and African American personnel, Nisei Waacs were to serve in racially integrated units. The first Nisei woman inducted directly from a relocation camp was Iris Watanabe from Santa Cruz, California. Japanese American newspapers such as the Pacific Citizen generally reported favorably on Nisei Wacs.913 When reporter Harry P. Tarvin attempted to interview her, the commanding officer of the WAC recruiting office in Denver, Colorado, Lt. S. O. Reed, denied his request on the grounds that “publicity regarding Miss Watanabe’s induction might have an unfavorable effect upon WAC recruiting.” Reed stated that on the West Coast, where she was from, “there was considerable doubt that it was possible to differentiate between loyal and disloyal Japanese.”914 Despite their initial enthusiasm, Nisei Wacs entered the WAC at a slow rate. A report on the enlistment of Japanese-American Wacs revealed that by February 17, 1944 only 13 (out of a projected 500) had enlisted. Hobby suspected parental influence to be the reason deterring the women from joining.915 Some Nisei women who decided to join directly from the relocation centers did indeed face opposition by relatives. 2nd Officer Henriette Horak reported from the Tule Lake Relocation Center that “one Nisei woman was beaten, allegedly because she had expressed her desire to be a WAAC.”916 The Tule Lake relocation center from the summer of 1943 on was used by the WRA to segregate “disloyals” from “loyals.” Measured by the question911

912

913 914

915

916

Memo Hobby to Surgeon General, subject: Special Physical Requirements. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Letter Adjutant General’s Office to Commanding Generals, each Service Command, July 28, 1943. NARA. Ibid. Moore, Serving Our Country, 25-7. Letter Harry P. Tarvin, Regional Reports Officer to Dillon S. Myer, Director, War Relocation Authority, December 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 49. Letter Hobby to Secretary of War, Enlistment of Japanese-American women in the Women’s Army Corps. NARA. Ibid. 2nd Officer Henriette Horak, Report from Tule Lake Relocation Center, March 7, 1943. NARA. Ibid.

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naire results, Tule Lake had already had the highest proportion of disloyals of all the Relocation Centers. After the construction of new barracks, Tule Lake became the largest of the relocation centers. By the spring of 1944 over 18,000 people were interned there. A high fence, topped with barbed wire and several watchtowers secured the perimeter of the camp and even the farm fields of the center.917 Horak went on to describe “an atmosphere of hate, fear, suspicion and violence. Seventy-four Kibei had just been jailed. Numerous beatings had taken place among the three Japanese factions. The apparent misunderstanding over the purpose of registration had pitched the Project into a struggle among the Isei, Nisei and Kibei. The camp was rife with rumors. A run on the center’s bank was in process.”918 According to Steven A. Chin, resistance and protest at Tule Lake took four forms: filing lawsuits questioning the legality of internment, disobeying camp regulations, campaigning for the restoration of constitutional rights, and renunciation of American citizenship.919 The Japanese American press, on the other hand, enthusiastically encouraged women to enlist. The recurring motif in all of these efforts was the chance to prove one’s loyalty to the U.S. as well as one’s love for American democracy as opposed to the Japanese Empire. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for my people,” wrote recruiter Chizuko Shinagawa from Denver, “to participate actively in the greatest battle for democracy the world has ever known. By serving in the WAC, I’ve found the true meaning of democracy. […] Before I joined up, I felt useless and restless because I wanted to do something for my country. […] If we shirk our plain duty to our country in a time of its greatest need, we must be prepared to have our loyalty questioned. Indeed, I think it should be questioned.”920

After having completed their training, Nisei Wacs were assigned to various stations including the Army Air Forces (AAF) that were completely closed to Nisei men.921 Air Wacs performed a large variety of jobs, including weather 917

918 919

920

921

Jacoby, Harold S. Tule Lake: From Relocation to Segregation. Grass Valley, CA: Comstock Bonanza Press, 1996. Shirai, Noboru. Tule Lake: An Issei Memoir. Sacramento, CA: Muteki Press, 2001. Takei, Barbara, and Judy M. Tachibana, Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History and Guide to the Tule Lake Internment Camp Site. Sacramento, CA: T&T Press, 2001. Horak, Report from Tule Lake Relocation Center. Chin, Steven A., and David Tamura. When Justice Failed: The Fred Korematsu Story. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1993. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 340. “Urge Japanese American Girls to Join Women’s Army Corps: Pvt. Shinagawa Recruits Nisei Volunteers in Denver Area,” Pacific Citizen, May 27, 1944, 3, c.i. Moore, Serving Our Country, 96-7. Ibid., 105.

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forecasting, aerial photo interpretation, and air traffic control. As all Wacs, most of them were assigned to clerical and administrative jobs. Others worked as medical and dental technicians, instructors and chaplain’s assistants.922 Japanese American women were also among those that joined the WAC from Hawaii. The 58 women in this Hawaiian unit were of very diverse ethnic backgrounds and received training together at Fort Oglethorpe.923 Since basic training was similar for all members of the WAC, accounts of Nisei Wacs are not much different from that of women of other ethnic groups. The Nisei Wacs who served with Caucasian Wacs in integrated units were treated much the same with the exception of a few instances where some were relieved of certain duties such as marching a dress parade or doing KP with minor injuries because of their height. As Moore documented, none of the women she interviewed felt they were treated any differently, let alone discriminated against.924 Contrary to the expectations of some military officials, not all Japanese American women who spoke Japanese could be employed as translators. However, the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) at Fort Snelling, Minnesota specifically enlisted a few Nisei women for service at that school and four were assigned to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC.925 Fifty-one mostly Japanese-American Wacs were assigned to the MISLS for training as military translators. They learned heigo (Japanese military and technical terms), Japanese geography and culture, grammar, reading and writing Kanji in various styles as well as translating and interpreting. They also practiced radio monitoring and interception of messages.926 Some 150 Wacs, including Nisei women, were stationed in Manila in the South West Pacific Area and did secret work for the Allied Translator and Intelligence Service.927 Twenty-one were assigned, to the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Here they analyzed and translated captured Japanese documents, extracting military information, as well as eco-

922 923 924 925 926

927

Ibid. 111-14. Ibid., 101-104. Ibid. 107-9. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 589. Report Colonel Kai E. Rasmussen, History and Description of the Military Intelligence Service Language School. NARA. RG 319, Box 1, c.i. Moore, Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II. 119-20. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 435.

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nomic and political information that impacted Japan’s ability to conduct the war.928

5.3 Puerto Rican Wacs The Spanish colony Puerto Rico had been invaded and occupied by U.S. forces during the Spanish-American War. It became a colonial protectorate despite its continued struggle for autonomy. In 1917, and conveniently in time for them to be eligible for military service in WWI, Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship by the Jones-Shafroth Act. Although some reforms and investment improved the economy for the U.S. dominated sugar industry and other large landowners, the Great Depression and natural disasters impoverished the island. The U.S. Navy also appropriated extensive agricultural lands during WWII. When the War Department sent a recruiting team of one WAC officer and three enlisted women to Puerto Rico in 1944, there was an enthusiastic response. Although the orders were to recruit not more than 200 women for service in the United States, some 1,500 applications poured in immediately. The recruiters were “literally swamped with applications,” and each applicant’s “desirability” was determined by USO personnel and a psychologist.929 Since the commanding general of the Antilles Department had decided that “at least a token group of colored women should be enlisted for obvious reasons,” “197 white and 10 black” women were enlisted, sworn in, and shipped to Fort Oglethorpe for training.930 WAC historian Mattie Treadwell wrote that of 1,500 applicants “many had to be rejected for failure to pass the aptitude test, or because of parental objections. In addition, later employment was handicapped by language difficulties.” 931 Similarly, 350,000 Puerto Rican men registered for military service but only 65,000 were called and served in segregated units.932

928

929

930 931 932

Bellafaire, Judith. Asian-Pacific-American Servicewomen in Defense of a Nation. http://www.womensmemorial.org/Education/APA.html. Accessed March 6, 2002. Report of WAC Recruiting Activities in Puerto Rico, December 11, 1944. NARA. RG 407, Box 4292. Ibid. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 478-9. Villahermose, Gilberto. “On the Frontlines: America’s Hispanics in America’s Wars.”Army 52.9 (2002): 62-66.

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One of the few commands that enthusiastically requested and employed Puerto Rican Wacs was the Transportation Corps which maintained large WAC detachments in the eight major ports of embarkation located in New York, Boston, Hampton Roads, Charleston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New Orleans. Since most ports were in labor-short areas it was difficult to replace general service men with civilians or Wacs, as directed by the ASF. The Transportation Corps creatively pursued every possible way of recruiting Wacs, including that of transferring Wacs deemed unassignable by other commands because of low aptitude, lack of skill or “possible language difficulties.”933 Perhaps anticipating this verdict, the recruiters’ report is quite apologetic: “It is our opinion that the recruits accepted were the very best obtainable under existing conditions. It should be pointed out that women of the socially elite families were not available for enlistment because of social customs. These women appear in public only with chaperons. Eliminating the top social class, the best of the remaining women were accepted. It should be noted further that as a whole, women of Puerto Rico do not have the same standard of conduct, customs and living as do women of the continental United States. Standards of these women as to integrity and emotional stability are below that of continental women.”934

Here the recruiter does not appear to speak of language skills. Rather, she seems to be apologizing for her team’s inability to recruit the white, middle class ‘high type’ of respectable woman of which the WAC allegedly consisted. The example of Puerto Rican Wacs, despite their small number, exposes a colonial attitude of the WAC recruiters that is not identical with other ethnic and racial stereotypes.935

5.4 “First Class Citizenship?” World War II saw changes in the military structure that were in part due to technological innovation. The military depended increasingly on skills that women had recently acquired in civilian workplaces. A shift in the ratio of combat troops to support and overhead personnel occurred toward a

933 934

935

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 331-2. Report of WAC Recruiting Activities in Puerto Rico, December 11, 1944. NARA. RG 407, Box 4292. Cabán, Pedro A. Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999, 203-07.

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stronger emphasis on administrative and support functions and further aggravated existing personnel shortages. Or, according to Morris Janowitz’s typology, the emphasis shifted from the “heroic leader,” who embodied an older warrior tradition, toward the military “manager” and the “military technologist,” which put greater emphasis on the technical and managerial aspects of warfare.936 One result was that the armed forces depended to a greater extent on personnel in clerical and communications functions. Here, women and minorities could be used without changing the stratified structure of the organization. Since African American men and all women were excluded from combat positions, the role of “heroic leader” embodying valor and glory was still reserved for Euro-American men . The percentage of officers among black men was 0.35 percent in 1942, indicating that most black enlisted men served in units commanded by white officers.937 Thus with the status of “warrior” and “protector” reserved for white men, white women could be discursively construed as the “protected” and in turn, black women as “unprotected.”938 African American women’s discrimination was thus a double one: Not only were they marginalized as women and as African Americans, but the concepts of “protector” and “protected” were itself separated by gendered and racialized lines of demarcation. Racist and sexist practices were intertwined in the regulation of black women’s sexuality. Whereas the racist stereotype for African American men was that of the potential rapist, African American women would be portrayed as promiscuous and immoral.939 In contrast to traditional concepts of “women’s work,” which the WAC did much to broaden and extend, neither the Army nor the WAC were inter-

936

937

938 939

Janowitz, Morris. The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. New York: Free Press, 1971, 21, 154. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 107-10; Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 31. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 85. See for example the letter of one Texan to his Congressman, in which he relates the experience of a white Wac: “[S]he was one of the group retained, to help train the new arrivals. Those arrivals were colored folks, or as we refer to them ‘niggers’. This fine girl along with others are now forced to share the same living quarters, bath room facilities, rest rooms, and reception rooms with niggers. A bunch of negro men sit in the reception room, probably waiting to date their nigger gals, or visit with them in the reception room – what’s the use? You picture the rest.” Congressman George Mahon, TX to Col. Howard Clark, II, April 22, 1943, quotes from a letter from “a newspaper man in my District.” NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 50. By the same logic, “negro prostitution” was allowed to continue in several communities of the South in spite of the general repression of commercial prostitution. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 103.

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ested in challenging existing racial stereotypes or discriminatory practices. The structural racism that African Americans encountered in the military created an atmosphere in which individual acts of racism could be facilitated or condoned. Institutional racism and remnants of the Jim Crow system would sometimes converge at military posts in the South. As did Chinese Americans, Native Americans, women of German or Italian descent, and all other minority women with the exception of the roughly 100 Puerto Rican women, Japanese Americans Wacs served in racially integrated units.940 Although there was considerable anti-Japanese sentiment among the civilian population, especially along the West Coast, few if any instances of Nisei Wacs being systematically discriminated against are known.941 Women, particularly those of ethnic minorities, took the opportunity to push back gendered and racial barriers and take decisive steps toward firstclass citizenship. Many African Americans saw their service as part of a larger struggle against institutional and structural racism. In many cases, their protest against segregation, differential treatment, and inequality foreshadowed issues and practices of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. A survey conducted in 1942 by the Office of War Information supported the War Department’s idea that African Americans felt a considerable affinity with Japanese Americans.942 War Department officials stated: “Japan [sic] is a colored race assertedly trying to oust the white man from exploiting other colored races of the Far East. The sympathy of the Negro for this point of view should not be underestimated. He knows what it is like to be kicked around because of color. Better to show that Japan is no democracy.”943

Japanese Americans, on the other hand, tried to distance themselves from African Americans, or as Brenda Moore uses Frank Wu’s concept, “these

940

941

942

943

In October 1944, two groups of enlisted women from Puerto Rico received basic training at Fort Oglethorpe. Because of “language difficulties,” they were trained and assigned as a unit. All other women of Hispanic descent served in integrated units. Moore lists some cases, but argues that these were isolated instances. Moore, Serving Our Country, 132. Survey of Intelligence Materials Supplement to Survey No. 25, Bureau of Intelligence, Office of War Information, 5. NARA. RG 107, Box 226, c.i. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 330. C.i. Neverdon-Morton, Securing the ‘Double V,’ 331.

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women positioned themselves as ‘honorary whites’ rather than ‘constructive blacks’.”944

944

Wu, Frank. “Neither Black nor White: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action.”Boston College Third World Law Journal 15 (1995): 225-84. 225-6. See also Moore, Serving Our Country, 20.

6. Sexuality

6.1 Normalizing Practices The war had a profound impact on the lives of American women, regardless of whether they donned the uniform of one of the women’s services, stayed at home, or went to work in defense plants in one of the industrial centers. Marriage and birth rates dropped significantly. Mobilization and the wartime labor market also had an impact on popular discourses on women’s sexuality. With roughly twenty million women who were not in their proverbial place, traditional notions of femininity and respectability were challenged. Still, single women were supposed to be sexually abstinent while simultaneously increased mobility and movement towards the cities provided greater autonomy for women and relaxed the social constraints found in the pre-war years. This chapter focuses on women’s sexuality, conceptualized as a combination of various discourses, diverse practices and material factors. Knowledge, for example about women’s sexual morality, constitutes a way of organizing and structuring relations of power. This does not mean that there is a unidirectional flow of power from the WAC Director, the War Department, or from an Army psychiatrist to an enlisted woman as the target. Rather all of them take part in the emergence, allocation, and diffusion of power by participating in discourses and practices.945 Sexuality as a dispositive includes material components such as buildings and monuments, societal components such as institutions, administrations and bureaucracies, and philosophical propositions, scientific statements, laws and discourses as part of a practice that is founded in language. What is said and what is known about sexuality is not only part of a truth that becomes accepted in dominant discourses, it also supports new claims to political power and cultural authority by dominant groups. Through the open or veiled focus on both the body and gender, medical, socio-scientific and psychological modes of analysis and intervention preserve or radically alter a social order. This chapter will not give a full enumeration of all elements of the dispositive of sexuality, but it will bind the different elements loosely and highlight the network-like structure of the discursive and non-discursive elements that

945

Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92.

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make up the strategic apparatus. The approach pursued in this thesis stresses the fact that many of the developments that occurred at the end of the Victorian Age did not surface before the impact of WWII. An intellectual history of sexuality could, for instance, underline the importance of WWI for changes in the perception of sexuality in general and women’s sexuality in particular. A history of ideas might focus on the post-WWI period as a period of heightened awareness of sexuality, expressed in phenomena such as ‘moral panic’ over syphilis, the publication of marriage manuals, the condition of male neurasthenia, or the invention of homosexuality in contrast to inversion in the medical literature. Many of these elements of professional discourses can be found in the medical literature of the early 20th century; however, they become tangible only much later in popular discourses and practices. The publication of Clelia Mosher’s 1892 survey of sexual attitudes of middle class women is a case in point. Mosher’s “Study of the Physiology and Hygiene of Marriage,” in which she probed the sex lives of 45 Victorian women by asking them about their practices and desires regarding sexual intercourse, illuminated for the first time that the Victorian view on women’s sexuality might have had little to do with prevalent practice among middle class women.946 This report fundamentally challenged the perception of the late Victorian Age as an epoch of a totalizing puritan sexual code. Although conducted in the late 1800s, the report was not published until 1980. The reason behind this time lag can be explained with the acceptability of the “truth” that women as a rule did enjoy “healthy,” active and (hetero)sexual relationships, a truth that became only acceptable during the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies of the 20th Century. Thus if we look for power formations that construct and take the form of knowledge, the fact that Clelia Mosher’s survey was not published until 1980 might be as significant as the report itself. When studying women’s relationships or any other aspect of the history of sexuality, we must be cautious when using contemporary concepts of sexual orientations and identities for homoerotic or homosocial practices of the 1940s.947 A quick note and a caveat on the use of the word ‘lesbian’ in this

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Degler, Carl. “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.”American Historical Review 79.5 (1974): 1467-90. MaHood, James, and Kristine Wenburg, eds. The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of 45 Victorian Women. New York: Arno Press, 1980. For an overview see Jonathan Katz’s introductions, both in Katz, Jonathan. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary in Which Is Contained, in Chronological Order, Evidence

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context are in order. Although some of the WWII Wacs have identified as ‘dykes’ or ‘girlfriends’ of other women, few would have used the word lesbian or identified with a lesbian culture as we understand it today. Leila Rupp has argued that women’s relationships in the 20th Century included both “women who identify as lesbians and/or are part of a lesbian culture, where one exists, and a broader category of women-committed women who would not identify as lesbians but whose primary commitment in emotional and practical terms was to other women.”948 Many of the close and/or homoerotic friendships between women within the WAC fit into this broader category. But were they lesbians? Since Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s article “The Female World of Love and Ritual” on the many facets of women’s relationships in the Victorian era, published in 1975, hers and others’ work on the nineteenth century notion of romantic friendship have frequently been misunderstood to desexualize women’s relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.949 Other feminists have reacted to this “historical denial of lesbianism” by bestowing the label ‘lesbian’ on historical women who did not identify as such.950 Blanche Cook has argued that “women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians.”951 While we can identify the practice of “crossing” in the 1940s, a working-class phenomenon connected with a lesbian bar culture, the older middle- and upper class notions of ”romantic friendship” and “Boston marriage” did not cease to exist.952 The complexity of women’s relationships requires a conceptual

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of the True and Fantastical History of Those Persons Now Called Lesbians and Gay Men. New York: Harper & Row, 1983, 1-19 and 137-173. Rupp, Imagine my Surprise, 395-410, 408. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” Signs 1 (1975): 1-29; Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. Cook, Historical Denial. Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Chrystal Eastman, Emma Goldman.” Chrysalis 3 (1977): 43-61. 48. The term “crossing” originally referred to “cross-dressing,” dressing as the opposite biological sex – an activity that in itself involved different degrees of exploration of alternative gender identities. Gradually, the term has acquired a broader meaning and has come to denote the crossing of all kinds of boundaries and barriers related to gender and sexuality. “Boston Marriage” refers to the late nineteenth century practice of two unmarried, often college-educated women sharing a household. Boston Marriages were a socially acceptable alternative to traditional marriage. They may or may not have included a sexual relationship and were often long-term unions. See also Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. On the concept of the Boston Mar-

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approach that pays attention to the specific context of 1940s America, an approach that differentiates between identity and sexual behavior and other practices and keeps in mind the formations of power|knowledge in civilian society that also determined what could be said. In Leila Rupp’s words, “the best we can do as historians is to describe carefully and sensitively what we do know about a woman’s relationships.”953 The following note on the sources may at the same time serve to illustrate some of the aspects mentioned above. One episode on “lesbian” soldiers during the war has been told by WAC veteran Nell “Johnnie” Phelps. The following narrative is a story about General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the “soldier’s soldier” – a story about camaraderie, but above all of courage. Shortly after the war, the story goes, Phelps, a “military police sergeant,” was stationed in Germany where she worked “under the direct command” of the General. When Eisenhower received a report that “there were lesbians in the WAC battalion,” he ordered Phelps to “find them and give me a list. We’ve got to get rid of them.” Phelps claims she said she would happily compile the list, but “you’ve got to know, when you get the list back, my name’s going to be first.”954 After he had contemplated the possibility of losing his file clerks, typists, section commanders and his “most key personnel,” and after Eisenhower’s secretary had come out as lesbian as well, he allegedly said, “forget the order.”955 Phelps went on: “There were almost nine hundred women in the battalion. I could honestly say that 95 percent of them were lesbians.”956 After Phelps had given the interview to Mary Ann Humphrey, who published it in her book My Country, My Right to Serve in 1990, it was published in

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riage, see McCullough, Kate. Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885-1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 15-92. Rupp, Imagine My Surprise, 409. Humphrey, Mary Ann. My Country, 39. All of Phelps’ quotes from interview with Phelps, Humphrey, My Country, 39-40. Ibid., 40. In 1993, the first annual “Sgt. Johnnie Phelps Awards Banquet” was held in Portland, Oregon by the Veterans for Human Rights. Rachelle R. Sparks, posting to H-Minerva discussion list on women in the military and women and war, (hereafter: H-Minerva). Posted: 22 Jan 1998, 01:22:49, subject: Johnnie Phelps. http://h-net.msu.edu/cgibin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=hminerva&month9801&week=d&msg=E5Ry9e1wKEL4Y8 UfkPwttQ&user=&pw=. Accessed July 14, 2004. All postings can be viewed in the Minerva discussion logs.

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other books and in the Minerva Quarterly Report on Women and the Military.957 Phelps also appeared in the documentary film Before Stonewall. When the interview was carried by the Minerva Quarterly Report on Women and the Military,958 editor Linda Grant DePauw, who at the time was also the editor of the HMinerva discussion list, received a letter by an Ex-WAC: “I can’t believe she said it! My ex-Wac friends can’t believe she said it! Who is this person? If we had not served in the WAC we might just believe what this person said. […] I served in the WAAC/WAC from February 1943 to November 1945 and never did I meet a lesbian, not in basic training, not in my first station, nor overseas.”959

Writers of the gay and lesbian communities, she suspected, “only quote just the part that they then slant to their sexual persuasion. This is a minority trying to be a majority.”960 “I, and others who served in the WAC in WWII, do not like being tarred with the lesbian brush. [...] What is repeated often enough, then becomes the truth. Phelps has tarnished our reputations.”961 The very next day a heated debate arose on the list. One group of former Wacs was “appalled and disgusted.” They felt that because of “a few ‘bad apples’,” they had to defend themselves against “accusations [...] that all the women in the WACs in WW-II [sic] were gay.”962 Another Ex-Wac wrote: “I spent almost 7 years in the WAAC/WAC and to my knowledge never ran into any [lesbians]. […] In fact, most of us would have been scandalized if we’d known any. I always thought we were a pretty pure lot. We were wives, mothers, sisters, daughters – all in it for the same cause – to serve our Country.” 963

For others, lesbian servicewomen had a proud record without ever receiving any official recognition from the military. For fellow veterans to dismiss them 957

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960 961 962

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Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 180, mentions Phelps, but does not quote the questionable elements of her story. Shilts, Randy. Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 106-107. Ben Shalom, Miriam, and Johnnie Phelps. “Lesbian Soldiers Tell Their Stories.” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 8.3 (1990): 38-53. Letter Margaret Salm, posting on H-Minerva by Linda Grant DePauw, Subject: COMMENT: Johnnie Phelps and Lesbians in World War II, date posted 12 Jun 1996. Ibid. Ibid. Letter Ada B. Jones, posted to H-Minerva by Linda Grant De Pauw, Subject: COMMENT: Lesbians in the Military, Thu, June 13, 1996. Letter Rose McGowan, February 7, 1995, posted to H-Minerva by Linda Grant De Pauw, Subject: COMMENT: Lesbians in the Military, 13 Jun 1996. Letter Rose McGowan, February 7, 1995, posted to H-Minerva by Linda Grant De Pauw, Subject: COMMENT: Lesbians in the Military, 13 Jun 1996.

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as “a few bad apples” perpetuated this situation. “If tarred with a lesbian brush sets someone in the valued ranks of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, Martina Navratilova, Gertrude Stein, well, tar and feather me. [...] Lesbians have served shining brightly and [have been] awarded medals of honor.”964 Nobody debates that any estimate of the percentage of lesbians among women soldiers could only be based on pure speculation. Surely the number Phelps had given was too high, but what if their numbers had indeed been grossly underestimated? Because Waacs and Wacs would not be admitted to the Corps if they had dependent children and were discharged if they became pregnant, should not their number be expected to be higher than in the general population?965 Phelps’ stories appropriated the sort of military folklore on the horrors of war and heroism that military women had been denied for so long: “The war was pretty much in full swing and I got transferred overseas. And it was on the way to go overseas that I had my first, what I call my ‚real, down deep, hope-to-die-and-go-to-hell love affair’. [...] But then she didn’t come home – she was one of those unnamed, ‘nonpresent’ women who were in combat positions but weren’t supposed to be there. [...] The landing craft had to put us off in the water sooner than they expected [...]. [S]he got a direct hit, and I saw it happen. I saw the person I had recently made love to get blown up right in front of me. [...] She was just never reported as killed in action. I saw it happen. I saw her take the hit...a horrible sight, still etched on my mind today. War is such a futile waste of humankind.”966

When Phelps died in 1997, she was widely considered a heroic figure, a courageous woman who stood up against inequity in the profession she loved. Her obituary read: “Johnnie Phelps, widely remembered for her conversation with General Eisenhower in the film documentary “Before Stonewall,” passed away December 30th. […] Joining the first WAAC battalion during WWII, she first served in the South Pacific and later under the occupation forces in Germany under Eisenhower.

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Barbara Eichberger, posting to H-Minerva, subject: COMMENT: Johnnie Phelps and Lesbians in World War II, date posted 13 Jun 1996. Lois Shawver estimates the percentage of lesbians among servicewomen to be 12 to 18 percent. Shawver, Lois. And the Flag Was Still There: Straight People, Gay People, and Sexuality in the U.S. Military. New York: Haworth Press, 1995. Miriam Ben Shalom estimated “that about 10% of WAC Units may have been homosexually oriented,” but pointed out that there is the problem of terminology. Miriam Ben Shalom, posting to H-Minerva, Subject: COMMENT: Lesbians in the Military, 4 Apr 1997. Humphrey, My Country, 38.

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Eisenhower. Wounded in action, she received the Purple Heart, awarded to soldiers injured due to enemy action.”967

In 1999, Phelps’ narrative was featured once again in the film Free A Man to Fight: Women Soldiers of World War II (Mindy Pomper, director). The same year, Pat Jernigan, Margaret Salm, and Lois Beck researched Phelp’s and others’ stories by submitting a Freedom of Information Act Request to the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St Louis, Missouri.968 Little of Phelps’ story withstood the inquiry. Phelps claimed to have joined in 1943, but trained with the first class of officer candidates and graduated a Second Lieutenant. Then she allegedly left the WAAC when it was disbanded and reenlisted in the WAC as an enlisted woman because she did not want to be an officer. After the death of her lover – “war shows no sympathy, you are forced to go on” – she claimed to have volunteered to go to the South Pacific as a medic and received a Purple Heart while working in a surgical tent under Japanese fire.969 In reality, the only women personnel working in surgical tents were nurses (ANC) and very few women doctors. Wacs never worked as medics during the war. The Eisenhower episode supposedly occurred when Phelps reenlisted “to go to Germany as part of the Army of Occupation” where she was stationed in Frankfurt as “the European Motor Sergeant.”970 As Jernigan’s, Beck’s and Salm’s findings indicate, Phelps had never been in the WAAC. She did serve in the WAC as a clerk and truck driver at Ft Oglethorpe, Georgia and Langley Field, Virginia, but her highest rank was corporal and she never served in the Pacific. In fact she never left the Continental United States. After the war, Phelps reenlisted and was assigned to Camp Shelby, Missouri, and from October 1946 to February 1947 to the WAC Detachment in Frankfurt, Germany. General Eisenhower, however, had left Europe in November 1945 to become the Army Chief of Staff. The conversation with General Eisenhower never took place.971 After her return

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Rachelle R. Sparks, posting to H-Minerva, subject: Johnnie Phelps, January 22, 1998. Pat Jernigan, posting H-Minerva, Subject: COMMENT: Checking Historical Facts for Accuracy [was “Free a Man to Fight”], Sun, 21 Nov 1999. Humphrey, My Country, 38. Ibid., 39. Pat Jernigan, posting to H-Minerva, subject: Flawed Film - Women’s History Month, Thu, Mar 2001. Another list member had requested and received copies of her service records from her partner before Phelps died. She confirmed that Phelps had largely fabricated her record. “As a gay vet, I am dismayed that someone would put my/our history at risk. Quite frankly, there are many from my community who served richly and well. [...] Ms.

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to the U.S., Phelps was hospitalized for over a year and discharged in May 1948, still as a corporal.972 Miriam Ben Shalom, who had introduced Phelps to writer Randy Shilts, recalled: “I had met Johnny at a GLBVA [Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Veterans of America] meeting at DC, and felt overwhelmed at meeting such an heroic woman [...]. I cried when I met her and felt humble that there was such a one before me. Now shall I cry again, and for only the reason that it is hard to meet those whom I would honor and tell them how much they meant to me to some damnably dark times.”973 How could Phelps’ story, which so completely lacked any basis in fact, become so widely quoted? How could journalists, activists and scholars repeat this source over and over until three former Wacs did some research?974 Even after that, Free A Man to Fight was featured five times during Women’s History Month in 2000.975 Times had indeed been hard for Ben Shalom and other lesbian, gay and bisexual service people in all of the services. During the 1980s there was a total ban on gay men and lesbians in the military. Homosexuality was deemed “incompatible with military service” and this was true for “homosexual conduct” as well as for “statements […] that demonstrated a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct.”976 During the 1980s, almost 17,000 people were discharged under the lesbian/gay exclusion policy. The power|knowledge formation in which the collective production of this “truth” took place, I argue, was framed by two major developments, both of which took place in the ten year period between the mid-eighties and midnineties. In 1991 then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton promised to rescind the ban on lesbian and gay soldiers if he were elected. Lesbian and gay activists were thrilled. The Pentagon, senior military officers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, were vigorously opposed to overturning the ban. Several comparative studies on other countries’ policies were undertaken during the

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Phelps had been a hero to me.” Miriam Ben-Shalom, posting to H-Minerva, Subject: Homosexuality during the era of WWII, 18 Dec 2001. Pat Jernigan, posting to H-Minerva, Subject: Women’s History Month, 3 Mar 2002. Miriam Ben Shalom, Subject: COMMENT: Lesbians in the Military, Tue, 25 Mar 1997. Wilson, Barbara A. Flawed Film Making the Rounds Again. 1996. http://userpages.aug. com/captbarb/filmfacts.html. Accessed February 2, 2004. Pat Jernigan, posting to H-Minerva, subject: Flawed Film - Women’s History Month, March 1, 2001. Uniform Code of Military Justice, Articles 125 and 134 and DoD Directive 1332. 144 section H1, c.i. D’Amico, Francine. “Race-Ing and Gendering the Military Closet.” Rimmerman, Gay Rights, Military Wrongs. 3-46. 6-7.

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first half of the nineties.977 The resulting ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ compromise “has not made life easier for many gay servicemen and women” and has had severe consequences for military women’s “race/gender/sexuality interfaces,” as Francine D’Amico has referred to it.978 The second shift that occurred during this time that had an influence on the changing formation of power|knowledge concerns discourses on women and combat positions. After the United States had essentially been at peace since the all-volunteer force was introduced in the mid-1970s, military operations in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1988/9, and the Persian Gulf in 1990/1 put women soldiers in harm’s way and demonstrated that ‘combat’ is not easily defined. Some 41,000 military women deployed to the Persian Gulf. “During the operation, American military women did just about everything on land, at sea, and in the air except engage in the actual fighting, and even there the line was often blurred—it was obvious from the beginning that the front lines were not what they used to be and noncombat units regularly took casualties. In the Gulf War there were no fixed positions or clear lines in the sand—Iraqi longrange artillery and especially the surface-to-surface missiles were unisex weapons that did not distinguish between combat and support troops.”979

It became clear that the traditional concepts of ‘front’ and ‘rear’ did no longer exist on high-tech post-Cold War battlefields and that the military’s gender specific division of labor had to be redefined. Military women generally embraced this change, which seemed to pave the way for a more gender-blind military. But they also lacked role models on whose experiences they could draw and from whose contributions they could craft their own military traditions. It was at the interface of these two fields that Phelps’ heroic story of a woman|soldier killed in action – a courageous professional soldier who was

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United States, and General Accounting Office. Defense Force Management: DOD’s Policy on Homosexuality. Report to Congressional Requesters. Washington, DC, Gaithersburg, ND: General Accounting Office, 1992. United States, and General Accounting Office. Homosexuals in the Military: Policies and Practices of Foreign Countries. Report to the Honorable John W. Warner, U.S. Senate. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, 1993. United States, Dept. of Defense, and Rand Corporation. Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1993. Rimmerman, Gay Rights, 123. D’Amico, Race-Ing. See also Osburn, C. Dixon, and Michelle M. Beneke. Conduct Unbecoming: Second Annual Report on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue’. Washington, DC: Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, [1994]. Osburn, C. Dixon, and Michelle M. Beneke. “Conduct Unbecoming Continues: The First Year under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue’” Rimmerman, Gay Rights, 249-268. Holm, Women in the Military, 445.

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“an American first, a soldier second [and] a woman third” – was repeated until it became ‘truth’.980 Regulation of Respectability: Double Standards for Men and Women Gender and sexuality are not only intertwined or mediated categories (with each other as well as with other categories such as race and class), but refer back to each other in that they profoundly shape the modern subject’s sense of self. Sexuality constitutes a field of contention in itself and as part of other struggles along the lines of gender, race, roles of men and women, class and race relations, religious ideologies, and relations between the state and individuals. Efforts to control the organization and meaning of sexuality both delimited and opened up possibilities of sexual expression. The WAC leadership believed firmly in different gender norms and standards of behavior for servicewomen and men, thereby invoking a late Victorian model of a sexualized division of labor between men and women. Only insisting on differential treatment could ensure the “high moral standard” of the WAC and protect the Corps from bad publicity as well as the individual Wac from sexual exploitation. “The woman in uniform is on an equal footing with men, but equal does not mean alike. Especially in regard to sex conduct, social standards are more exacting for women, the physical hazards greater.”981 Respectability for women soldiers depended on sexual restraint and chastity. Military masculinities, in contrast, depended on emphasizing heterosexual promiscuity. According to the WAC administration, the Corps only contained ”honorable” women, and honor in the case of the WAC was defined as heterosexual orientation, white middle class background, modesty, and chastity.982 A WAC pamphlet assured parents that “[your daughters will] make the kind of associations you want them to have at home.”983 Not coincidentally, the guarantors for the moral well being of the women were a group of clergymen and religious leaders who were invited to Ft. Oglethorpe one summer day in June 1943. Representatives of various Christian churches, a Rabbi from Cleveland, and several Army and Navy chaplains

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Humphrey, My Country, 39. War Department. “The WAC Officer – A Guide to Successful Leadership.”WD Pamphlet 35-2, 50-55. February 1, 1945 NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 222. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 64. Pamphlet: A Word to Parents. “Life in the WAC, the Women’s Army Corps.” Box 12, Hobby Papers, Library of Congress.

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toured the training center. After the group had eaten in the mess hall and listened to a concert by the WAAC band, the PR Officer held a “seminar on the WAAC and the place its women will hold in the American way of life.” After a concluding parade with “thousands of WAACs,” Mr. Ready had nothing but praise: “You’re the answer to Hitler and Mussolini and the rest that said you and your brothers would not defend the freedom of the United States. You answered the challenge. We’re proud of you.” Carroll C. Roberts of the International Convention of the Disciples of Christ agreed in a letter to Hobby: “It was the consensus of all that the Army is doing a splendid job of training these young women for service, and in safe-guarding their moral and spiritual lives.”984 Social Control: VD Policies for Wacs, Civilian Women and Servicemen The different cultural conceptions of venereal diseases (VD) were never as visible as in wartime. VD could either be treated as infectious diseases caused by certain microorganisms or they could be dealt with as social, spiritual, or moral problems.985 They were objects of medical practices as well as objects of racial stereotypes. One approach chosen above all by the American Social Hygiene Association, was to link VD to immorality, vice and prostitution and to focus on ‘bad women’ i.e. prostitutes as the source of contagion. Vice reformers were hopeful that American boys could be protected from VD if provided with distractions such as athletic games and if prostitutes, compared to mosquitoes carrying yellow fever, were eliminated.986 However, the campaigns went further – besides prostitutes, not even the quintessential girlnext-door could be trusted, as a 1940s poster depicting a young woman in a white blouse warned. In contrast to the cigarette-smoking, heavily made-up prostitute in other posters, this particular caption read: “She May Look Clean—But pick-ups, good-time girls and prostitutes spread syphilis and gonorrhea. You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD.”987 Another government

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Letter PR Officer 3rd WAAC Training Center, Ft. Oglethorpe, GA, to National Catholic News with photos included, June 2, 1943. Letter Carroll C. Roberts to Hobby, June 7, 1943. Ibid. Fee, Elizabeth. “Venereal Disease: The Wages of Sin?” Peiss, Simmons and Padgug, Passion and Power. 178-98, 178. See also Brandt, Allan. No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. McLaren, Twentieth Century Sexuality, 14. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, http://profiles. nlm.nih.gov/VC/B/B/C/F/. Accessed July 14, 2004. On poster campaigns see also

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poster of the time represents VD as a skeleton woman in a dress, arm in arm with the archenemies of America, Hitler, and the Japanese Emperor.988 As in WWI, “social hygiene” programs and the attempt to control prostitution through compulsory medical examinations, which resulted in thousands of women being incarcerated, were the answers until, in 1941, the May Act made it a federal offense to practice prostitution in the vicinity of military bases.989 In addition to the focus on prostitutes in WWI, however, moral reformers during the 1940s pointed to “amateur girls” such as the “khaki-wackies.”990 These measures did by no means stop infections, but the Army could not afford to stigmatize VD so much that soldiers would not have the diseases treated. As part of their two-fold strategy, the Army issued prophylactic kits to the soldiers and made early treatment after possible exposure compulsory. In the late 1930s a nationwide campaign attempted to separate the most common disease, syphilis, from the notion of sin by portraying “innocently infected” people – that is, white people – who had been infected through “morally harmless, casual contacts.”991 Devising a policy for women in the Army was based on even more contradictory standards. WAC officers carefully avoided the mere terms ‘sex hygiene’ and venereal disease control. When the Surgeon General tried to introduce a VD control program for Wacs in August of 1942, he met strong resistance from Director Hobby, who feared “the serious jeopardy of the military and civilian acceptance of the whole idea of the Corps.” Both Hobby and the Director of the Army Nurse Corps believed in the different treatment of women and men and particularly in “higher moral standards” for women. Throughout the war, VD was a cause for rejection, although the Surgeon General argued that from a public health standpoint it would be best to treat the infected women, rather than sending them back to their communities.992 The civilian scientists of the National Research Council who advised the Sur-

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Schön, Susanne. “Das Bild der Frau in den US-amerikanischen Massenmedien während des Zweiten Weltkriegs.” Ph.D. Thesis. Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, 2004. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Déja Vu: AIDS in Historical Perspective - Illustrations: Glimpses at Past Efforts to Control STDs. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/ Aids/aidspix1.html. Accessed July 5, 2005. See also Hegarty, Marilyn Elisabeth. “Patriots, Prostitutes, Patriotutes.” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, 1998. Hegarty, Marilyn E. Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II. New York: New York University Press, 2008. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 261. Fee, Venereal Disease, Peiss, Simmons and Padgug, Passion and Power, 182. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 615-6.

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geon General on VD control advocated that Wacs, as well as male soldiers, should be educated in matters of sexual health and that contraceptives should be issued or dispensed from vending machines in WAAC latrines.993 This approach was out of the question for Director Hobby, who was convinced that because of the ”high type of woman expected in the Corps” no such measures would be needed and that Army regulations concerning these matters intended for male personnel were not applicable to female personnel.994 Instead, the Surgeon General’s Office prepared a pamphlet instructing women in health and hygiene which, after a rewriting by Hobby’s office, was framed in entirely moralistic terms. ”Every member must insist that the conduct of the Corps be irreproachable […] It is difficult for one person to realize the damage she can do to the Corps by her conduct alone.”995 The pamphlet contained very little medical information and none on prophylaxis except that “for women, all means were neither effective or [sic] practicable.”996 Neither mechanical nor chemical means of contraception were discussed, nor was there any mention of where to obtain or how to use these prophylactics. The fact that condoms not only provided some protection against infections but also against unwanted pregnancies made matters worse in the eyes of the WAC Director because she feared that issuing cheap and effective contraceptives could be seen as encouraging promiscuity. On the contrary, some medical officers followed the Surgeon General’s recommendation and lectured WAC personnel regardless or ignorant of WAC policy. With some indignation, Auxiliary Martha Chandler wrote: “Just before we came up here we had a lecture on sex and were to carry our own protection in our utility bag, as the boys might not have any. Isn’t that something! What do they think we are, anyway. And on our bull[etin] board in the bks. [barracks] are the places where such things may be purchased here. My God if the civilians knew that they would think that was all the WAACs were for. Joe would die if he knew that. My face gets red everytime I think of that.”997

To prevent such misunderstandings in the future, the commanding officer decided to “amend the wording in future bulletins, injecting the thought that such stations are solely for the use of men only. […] It was decided that the

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Ibid., 616. War Department Circular 172, May 2, 1944, sec. IV c.i. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 618. Ibid., 617. Ibid. Letter Aux. Martha Chandler, Camp Polk, LA to Mary, Dow Field, Bangor, ME. May 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93.

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next sex talk should be delivered by someone, preferably a woman, accustomed to addressing women on the subject.”998 Respectability and the Legitimacy of the Corps: The Code of Conduct and WAC Regulations While the Army’s policy of de-stigmatizing VD concentrated on blaming the women with whom soldiers were involved, WAC policy kept the stigma in place. The regulation of servicewomen’s sexuality had to emphasize respectability – defined as asexuality, chastity and modesty. Women’s sexuality was policed by the WAAC’s separate Code of Conduct and, after the conversion to the WAC, by special additions to Army regulations. These regulations allowed for an immediate trial by court-martial and discharge of women who had transgressed the limits of respectability in displaying a ”conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the WAAC,” meaning public drunkenness, extramarital sex or homosexual acts. Together with more stringent enlistment requirements, their purpose was to prevent deviant behavior from reflecting negatively on the Corps. In contrast to the Army, there was no room for rehabilitation by means of punishment or disciplinary measures. In 1943, when the WAC Bill had passed and the WAC came under Army regulations, the separate Code of Conduct had to be abolished. In contrast to Hobby’s insisting on the exceptionality of the WAC, most Army officers favored dealing with one set of regulations only. In July 1943, two weeks after the bill was signed into law, Colonel Hyers of the Judge Advocate Branch spelled out the position of many senior Army officers. Now that Congress had made the WAC a part of the Army, all laws and regulations that had been applicable to enlisted men were applicable to enlisted women of the WAC as well. “The women who make up the WAC are, therefore, to be treated as enlisted and commissioned personnel of the Army rather than as inmates of some wellchaperoned young ladies seminary. As long as the conduct themselves decently and without bringing discredit or disgrace upon the uniform or the military service, their private life is and ought to be recognized as a matter for their own direction and ordering.”999

998

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Letter Major W.B. Collett, Base Intelligence Officer Bangor, ME, to Director, Intelligence Division, 1st Service Command. May 29, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. Headquarters Eighth Service Command, Services of Supply. Col. Julien C. Hyer, Chief, Judge Advocate Branch, Office Memorandum to Acting Chief, subject: Board Proceedings – Aux. Agnes R. Skipper, A-402646, WAAC Branch. July 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 48.

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“Ordinary social intercourse” did not cause any “serious damage either to morale, customs of the service or discipline” and was “not condemned by any military law or directive.”1000 To the contrary, it was considered recreation the ‘Army way’ and the WAC should not insist on special treatment. “The imbibing of intoxicants, if done in moderate quantities and temporarily indulged in, is rather anticipated and provision [was] made for the toleration of the same.”1001 Regulating the Unrespectable: Pregnancy, Abortion, Maternity and Marriage The ideal of sexual abstinence also informed the WAC’s policy on pregnancy, abortion, and maternity. Despite the efforts of birth control activist Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control League, who had fought for the use of contraceptives for years, birth control was still loaded with moralistic implications and by many deemed acceptable only for married couples with regard to medical or eugenic goals.1002 The American Birth Control League (ABCL), formed in 1921 and headed by Margaret Sanger until 1928, undertook numerous campaigns to make douches, condoms, and pessaries widely available. The ABCL allied with physicians in promoting bills at the state and federal levels that gave doctors the exclusive right to prescribe contraceptive devices. The organization also opened the nation’s first legal birth control clinic in 1923. In 1926 membership was around 37,000. In 1939 the ABCL merged with another organization into what became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. The ABCL fought against the infamous Comstock Act of 1873, officially an Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, which criminalized publication, distribution, and possession of information about or devices and/or medications for “unlawful” abortion or contraception. Remnants of the act endured as the law of the land into the later part of the twentieth century.1003 1000 1001 1002 1003

Ibid. Ibid. McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality, 65-66 and 81-83. Brodie, Janet Farrell. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 255-56. For a treatment of Anthony Comstock and his success at implementing the Comstock Laws in the 1870s, see Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s.” Journal of American History, 87 (2000): 403-434. Pertaining to the black market birth control trade that flourished even in the period of the Comstock Law see Tone, Andrea. “Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age.” Journal of American History 87(2000): 435-459.

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The first substantial amendment of the Comstock Law came only in 1936 with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, United States v. One Package. The decision made it possible for doctors to distribute contraceptives across state lines.1004 Thus, the discussion of the issue of contraceptives to women soldiers within the Army was a fairly recent one and would have widely been understood as condoning extramarital sexual relations. While women with dependent children and pregnant women were excluded from the WAAC, the Corps consisted of both married and unmarried women. Contraceptives could thus neither be banned completely nor issued generally. While the pregnancy rate in the Corps was in reality quite low, a high rate was considered detrimental to the public image as pointed out earlier. Some Army medical officers disregarded directives and decided to include information on contraceptives such as condoms and diaphragms into their lectures.1005 The WAAC’s official focus was again to protect the reputation of the Corps by getting rid of illegitimately pregnant women as quickly and as quietly as possible. The Code of Conduct called for the immediate discharge of pregnant auxiliaries. Initially, the Code had differentiated between married and unmarried women’s pregnancies and provided honorable discharges for the former and summary discharges for the latter.1006 This differentiation was problematic because the women had not violated any military or civilian law that would have warranted a discharge “other than honorable.” This policy was revised even before the conversion and an honorable discharge was provided for all women, regardless of marital status.1007 Undesirable discharges were still being issued to unmarried women if the Code of Conduct had been violated. Patrolling Respectable Femininity: Anti-Fraternization Policies The social interaction of male soldiers with officers was regulated by the Army’s informal and unwritten anti-fraternization policies that were aimed at

1004

1005

1006

1007

United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 13 F. Supp. 334 (E.D.N.Y. 1936), aff’d 86 F. 2d 737 (2d Cir. 1936). Memo Lt. Col. Thomas B. Turner, Medical Corps to DWAC, August 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 145. See also RG 165, Entry 54, Box 93. WAAC Regulations. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Discharge WAAC Circular NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 207. WAAC Circular No. 10, April 9, 1943. Discharge - Changes in WAAC Regulations (WAAC Circ. No. 3 is rescinded) Minority (under 21), Dependency, Pregnancy. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 209 and RG 407, Box 4282.

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socially separating enlisted from officer personnel. This long-standing policy was aimed at prohibiting potential favoritism of officers who held power over other men by separating the realm of command from that of social interaction. Interestingly, women figured in the Army’s formerly all male social caste system. According to initial policies, Auxiliaries and WAAC officers were to be treated like male personnel. A memorandum of April 22, 1943 titled “Relationship Between Waacs and Military Personnel,” which was read to all enlisted personnel, stated: “There will be no social mixing of rank between the Army and the WAAC. […] Under no condition will Army officers or enlisted men frequent the WAAC area unless specifically ordered to do so on official business.” Army personnel were to meet “their WAAC dates” at some place “other than the WAAC area.”1008 Director Hobby, although she had originally advocated the acceptance of this Army tradition during the days of the WAAC, later came to support a far more liberal policy and argued that Army fraternization policies should not be extended to women. In the context of evaluating “problems and deterrents in connection with WAC recruiting” of which she believed the nonfraternization policy to be a major factor, she stated: ”The young people of this country are in uniform. It does not seem possible to change a social system because we are at war. The old system that is an accepted custom in the Service seems to the American public a caste system when it operates against normal social relationship between men and women.”1009

Wacs, who felt that they were only serving “for the duration” complained quite vocally. “Many of us have husbands, brothers, fathers and friends who are officers serving in the armed forces and we feel that we have the right to chose our friends as we did in civilian life.”1010 But the exemption of women from these policies was not just a question of hampering recruiting by limiting the Wacs’ potential friendships or dates. It was also an issue of class, race and place. WAC officers argued that in terms of class background, the Wacs’ counterparts with whom they were most likely to associate were officers, not enlisted men.1011 Frequently, male soldiers feared the potential competition Memo, April 22, 1943 “Relationship Between Waacs and Military Personnel.” NARA. RG 407, Box 4282. 1009 Oveta Culp Hobby, Memorandum for Director, WD Bureau of Public Relations, subject: Problems and Deterrents in Connection with WAC Recruiting, February 18, 1944, 12. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 64. 1010 Cited in Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 133. 1011 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 376, 512-513. 1008

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with officers for dates with Wacs if the fraternization policies were relaxed. A corporal wrote to a Waac at Ft. Oglethorpe: “[t]here is no absolute means of forcing them [Waacs] to become playthings for the officers, but the power is there to make things unpleasant if they don’t[.]”1012 At some stations, Wacs were quite busy entertaining themselves the way WAC Headquarters prescribed: “Two night clubs for enlisted personnel are located nearby. The Wacs have received standing invitations to visit these clubs and receive countless invitations to attend parties and dances given by neighboring soldier companies[...] An attractive bar is operated by and for the enlisted women and is located within the immediate area. One night weekly the bar is open to the male guests of the women.”1013

The availability of “good, clean fun,” i.e. opportunities to interact socially with men, was deemed very important. In the absence of heterosexual encounters a woman always ran the risk of developing “abnormal emotional tendencies, because all her interests centered on girls.”1014 Within the WAC, enforcement of the fraternization policy was rare and appears to be limited to those cases where charges of homosexuality were involved. A lieutenant at the Second WAC Training Center remarked that in the Daytona Beach motor pool, despite the regulations, it was “a customary action for officers to invite non-coms over to their homes.”1015 Overseas policies and practices varied considerably. Under field conditions, favoritism did occur, as the following letter intercepted by the censor illustrates: “I am having drinks at a General’s beautiful home and met a man who is leaving for Washington and is kind enough to post this. […] Algiers is fun (as if by now you didn’t know I am here). We have a few disadvantages here names a ‘bitch’ of a C.O., pardon my language but this is my chance to get away with murder[,] so I

1012

1013

1014

1015

Letter from a corporal (3rd A.S. Comm. Sqdn. APO 760, U.S. Army) to a Waac, 11 Aug 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Harriet S. Martin, 1st Lieutenant WAC, Commanding. Unit history of 1st WAC Detachment Headquarters Delta Base APO 772, May 1, 1945 through December 31, 1945, January 13, 1946. NARA. RG 94, Box 23999. Testimony of Captain Alice E, Rost, ANC, taken at Fort Oglethorpe, GA on June 26, 1944, by Lieutenant Colonel Birge Holt, IGD, 107. Birge Holt, Lieut. Colonel, IGD and Capt. Ruby E. Herman, IGD to acting inspector general. subject: Investigation of conditions in the 3rd WAC Training Center, Fort Oglethorpe, GA. July 29, 1944 (hereafter cited as Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe). NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. NARA. RG 407, Box 4280.

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am doing it. Well my dear, from time to time I’ll sneak these letters thru, I’ve made many friends – most of them influential.”1016

In other instances the issue of fraternization was curiously absent. In June 1943 a group composed of four Waacs, seven Army Air Corps officers, and two staff sergeants had had a small party in a hotel suite in El Paso, Texas. According to some of the witnesses, Auxiliary Agnes B. Skipper and Lt. Theodore F. Smith, Jr. were found in one room, he being shirtless and without shoes. Other witnesses claim Aux Skipper had been sleeping alone in her room and had admitted that she had had too many drinks. The WAAC administration’s policy and the conclusion by a board of officers was that if Auxiliary Skipper was unable to “avoid the appearance of evil,” she was unfit to associate with enlisted women and should be discharged. Despite the recommendation of the board of officers, Colonel Julien C. Hyer of the Judge Advocate Branch wrote to Colonel Hobby: “While it might be readily surmised that this young woman and young man after a certain amount of congenial imbibing might have withdrawn to a bedroom of this suite to indulge in more intimate relationships and while it might be conjectured that two people of opposite sexes alone in a bedroom with the articles that were discovered to be present were there for other purposes than to repeat their ‘pater nosters’, […] no conclusive evidence was produced, to show that the presumed act took place.”1017

Neither Auxiliary Skipper nor Lt. Smith should have been tried by courtmartial but rather be administratively admonished and transferred to another post. “It is to be assumed,” the Colonel concludes: “that, in a citizen Army of ten million persons, men and women, occasions will arise when, in ordinary social intercourse, officers and enlisted personnel, male and female, will find themselves in the same gatherings in private homes without serious damage either to morale, customs of the service or discipline.”1018

While the Colonel’s protest at first glance suggests a permissive attitude, he also displays the same proprietary attitude as the soldiers who claimed “their” enlisted women for themselves and objected to their dating men of other groups. Occasionally, white enlisted men complained of white Wacs who

1016

1017

1018

Letter from “Daisy Lou, Algiers” [WAC] to Mrs. P.L.Crooks [her mother]. Censorship evasion report, December 11, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192. Memo Headquarters Eighth Service Command, Services of Supply. Col. Julien C. Hyer, Chief, Judge Advocate Branch to acting chief, WAAC Branch, subject: Board proceedings – Aux. Agnes R. Skipper, July 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 48. Ibid.

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dated African-American soldiers.1019 Army and WAC procedures differed considerably in the punishment (or lack thereof) of such minor infractions as the gathering in El Paso. While male personnel might or might not receive a reprimand when a woman was involved, the same behavior (or merely the appearance) by a Wac could, and often would, result in a discharge other than honorable and, thus, social stigmatization.1020 The WAC leadership had no influence on the behavior of Army personnel but, in a military culture that tolerated and sometimes encouraged men’s heterosexual activities, nevertheless contributed to the victimization of servicewomen. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). According to SPWA Headquarters, the Wacs who arrived in New Guinea in 1944 had to be protected from the servicemen’s unstoppable sex drive. Some of the white troops stationed in the vicinity in great numbers allegedly “had not seen […] a white women in 18 months.”1021 The women were housed in a barbed wire compound under armed guard, which they left only when being escorted to work, or recreational activities. Policies were extremely restrictive, no leaves or passes were issued. Morale was very difficult to keep up and complaints kept reaching the War Department.1022 Under the banner of protecting individual women from sexual exploitation as well as protecting the Corps from bad publicity, servicewomen were subjected to sexual control. In the following chapter, I will turn to cases where this proprietary and patronizing attitude was not applicable because the women were engaging in practices outside the heterosexual paradigm.

Rumor reports by censors. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 192 and RG 165, Entry 54, Box 16. 1020 Headquarters Eighth Service Command, Services of Supply. Office Memorandum, subject: Board Proceedings – Aux. Agnes R. Skipper, A-402646 from Col. Julien C. Hyer, Chief, Judge Advocate Branch to acting chief, WAAC Branch. July 13, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 48. 1021 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 421. Solinger, Rickie. Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade. New York: Routledge, 1992, 24. 1022 Unit Historical Report, WAC Detachment, Base “B,” APO 503, June 2, 1945 [southernmost base in New Guinea] NARA. RG 94, Box 24001. The idea that the WAC was really there for morale building purposes was further strengthened by rumors of Wacs being deployed to post war Germany in order to curb fraternization of G.I.s with enemy women. James McDonald. “Sending of Women to Germany Urged – Suggestion Is Made That Wacs and ATS Follow Troops to Curb Fraternization.” New York Times (December 5, 1944) and “WACS, ATS Plenty Angry at New Role.”(8 Dec 1944). NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 14. 1019

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6.2 Homosexuality in the Armed Forces The “True Pervert,” the “Criminal Sodomist” and the “Intoxicated or Curious” Before the Second World War, homosexuality had not been an issue for the Army or the Navy. Instead they had targeted the act of sodomy, defined as anal and sometimes oral sex, as criminal. The Articles of War, Article 93, first codified “consensual sodomy” as a dischargeable offense in 1920. Samegender sexual relationships nevertheless have a long tradition in the United States Armed Forces. General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who trained the Continental Army at Valley Forge, is believed to have had male lovers and Lieutenant Gotthold Frederick Enslin was drummed out of the Continental Army for sodomy on 11 March 1778. Female soldiers, who lived with women fought, disguised as men, in the 15th Missouri regiment during the Civil War.1023 Thus soldiers and officers who engaged in same-sex relations were court-martialed, usually imprisoned, and dishonorably discharged on the grounds of their behavior, not their sexual identity per se.1024 In World War II a fundamental reorganization of the management of homosexuals and military personnel policy occurred. The medical profession with its growing authority had succeeded in redefining homosexuality as a medical instead of a criminal concept. In October 1940 several million men had registered for the draft and the Selective Service System for the first time excluded a certain group of people.1025 In 1942 the revised regulations for the disposition of homosexual personnel reflected the shift in the interpretation from a criminal offense to a psychological illness. Towards the end of the war, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) replaced the varying policies of the different services. Article 125 prohibited sodomy, defined as anal or oral penetration, whether consensual or coerced 1023

1024

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Chambers, John Whiteclay, and Fred Anderson. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 287 Of 18 million men examined during the war, the military rejected 4,000-5,000 for homosexuality. After the war, 9,000 gay men and lesbians who had served but received “section eight” or “blue” discharges for undesirable habits or character traits, were disqualified from obtaining benefits under the G.I Bill. Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 33. Of the 36,677,000 draftees who were classified, 17,955,000 were examined, 6,420,000 were rejected, and 10,022,000 were inducted. The average duration of service was 33 months for enlisted personnel, 39 months for officers. Unites States, and Bureau of Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1989, part 2, series Y856-903, 1140.

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and regardless of whether it occurred between heterosexual, homosexual, or married couples. For the first time assaults with the intent to commit sodomy, indecent assault, and indecent acts were also covered.1026 Men who engaged in oral or anal same-gender sex could be subjected to court-martial and five years incarceration. Acts of sodomy between a man and a woman or between women, on the other hand, have rarely resulted in court-martial or incarceration. Military investigators detained suspects and forced them to disclose their peers’ sexual orientation. Confessions were not uncommonly extracted by threatening incarceration during interrogations.1027 The new policies vastly expanded the military’s administrative apparatus for disposing of homosexual personnel that relied on hospitalization, diagnosis, surveillance, interrogation, discharge, court-martials and mass indoctrination. The psychiatric profession had been promoting psychiatric as well as physical screening with the Selective Service System since the summer of 1940 when Congress had authorized the expanded defense budgets and passed the Selective Training and Service Act. Psychiatrists, most notably Harry Stack Sullivan, Winfred Overholser, and Harry A. Steckel, were eager to show the War Department how psychiatry could contribute to the war effort.1028 One of the lessons from the First World War was the necessity for

1026 1027

1028

Article 134 UCMJ. See also D’Amico, Race-Ing, 6. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 203, 205. Hampf, Dykes or Whores: Sexuality and the Women’s Army Corps in the United States during World War II.” Women’s Studies International Forum (2004): 13-30. Sullivan was a practicing psychiatrist who lived with his “devoted male companion” in Bethesda, Maryland. He had broken off from traditional psychiatry and created a theory and practice of “interpersonal psychiatry”. As coeditor of the journal Psychiatry and president of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation he was determined to apply the principles of psychiatry to society as a whole. Overholser had already studied psychiatric therapy for soldiers during the First World War, while working in the neuropsychiatric section of the U.S. Army Medical Corps in France. After the war, he helped enact the Briggs Law, which provided for the mental evaluation of any person convicted of a serious crime. In addition to working for the rights of mentally ill criminals, he taught at Boston University and George Washington School of Medicine in Washington, DC. In 1937 Overholser was nominated by the American Psychiatric Association to be the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a government run institution in Washington, DC and chairman of the National Research Council’s Committee on Neuropsychiatry. Steckel was chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Military Mobilization Committee, of which Sullivan and Overholser were members. Evans, F. Barton. Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory and Psychotherapy. London, New York: Routledge, 1996. Philipson, Ilene J. On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press, 1993, 25. Miller, Char Roone. Taylored Citizenship: State Institutions and Subjectivity. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, 72.

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the armed forces to reduce the number of returning soldiers who had displayed symptoms that came to be subsumed under the term “shell shock.” By 1942, WWI shell shock cases accounted for 58% of all Veterans’ Administration’s patients.1029 These psychiatric casualties had cost the federal government over one billion dollars.1030 Screening, the psychiatrists argued, could greatly reduce these costs by weeding out potential psychiatric cases before they became military responsibilities.1031 Despite the fact that Sullivan’s initial plan for psychiatric screening contained no references to homosexuality, the military bureaucracy did not follow his belief that “sexual aberrations” played only a minimal role in causing mental disorders.1032 The massive mobilization was expected to include many homosexuals and it became clear that the military would no longer be able to handle its homosexual discipline problems by charging offenders with sodomy and sending them to prison. By mid-1941 an administrative apparatus for screening inductees at local draft boards was in place to eliminate those “neuropsychiatrically unfit” or those with “psychopathic personality disorders,” including homosexuals.1033 After Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had warned commanding officers in November 1942 that the increasing number of court-martials was unacceptable and indicated a lack of leadership and enforcement of discipline, officials from the Judge Advocate General’s Office relaxed their hard-line position. They considered alternative approaches to the sodomist problem that did not require court-martials in all cases.1034 An alliance of reform-minded military officials and psychiatrists proposed what they described as a more

1029

1030

1031 1032 1033 1034

Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. See also Leed, No Man’s Land. On Shell Shock Jones, Edgar, and Simon Wessely. Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Maudsley Monographs. New York: Psychology Press, 2005. Léri, André, and John Collie. Shell Shock, Commotional and Emotional Aspects. London: University of London Press, 1919. Southard, Elmer Ernest. Shell-Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems Presented in Five Hundred and Eighty-Nine Case Histories from the War Literature, 19141918. Boston, MA: W.M. Leonard, 1919. Menninger, William Claire. Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge. New York: Macmillan Co., 1948, 267. Ibid., 267. The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation. Bulletin, 1940. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 12. Memorandum, Chief of Staff to Commanding Generals, November 10, 1942, subject: Discipline and Courts-Martial. NARA. RG 407, Decimal File 250-4, c.i. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 135. Memorandum, from. Col. John M. Weir, Executive, JAG, to The Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, December 6, 1942, in AGO “Sodomists” File, c.i. ibid.

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“enlightened” and efficient system for handling homosexual offenders. To prevent additional strain on the already overburdened military prisons, the new system provided for discharge without trial of certain homosexual personnel, while allowing the retention of those whose services were deemed essential. Slowly the clinical term homosexual began to replace the legal term sodomist as jurisdiction over homosexuals was transferred from the criminal justice system to an expanded system of hospitalization, diagnosis and discharge. The psychiatric consultants started implementing their theories by educating administrative officials on their developmental model of human sexuality based on Freudian psychoanalysis. They described “normal” development as one passing through the homosexual stage and then on to heterosexual maturity. All individuals retained a “homosexual residual” as a component of their sexuality that when “adequately sublimated” became the “foundation of social solidarity.” Some people never reached that stage and remained homosexuals. But even “normal individuals,” when placed under unusual circumstances such as prison or the military, might “revert” to their homosexual stage of development and engage in homosexual practices. Three psychosexual categories emerged from this developmental model: the mature ‘normal’ heterosexual, the immature ‘deviant’ homosexual, sometimes referred to as a “true” or “confirmed” homosexual, and the regressive homosexual who “reverts” to homosexuality due to environmental factors. Since “true” homosexuals could not be cured, there was no need to imprison them. Three administrative categories were developed to dispose of homosexual personnel that corresponded with the psychiatrists’ psychosexual categories. The “true pervert” who had sex with consenting adults was to be administratively discharged as mentally ill. The criminal “sodomist” category was narrowed to include only those offenders, whether they were regressive heterosexuals or homosexuals, who raped or had sex with minors. The third category, who were not “by nature homosexuals” but “submit[ted] to practice” through “intoxication or curiosity” were to be “rehabilitated and retained in the service” without trial or discharge.1035 By January 1943 the new policy was in place: Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson issued a new Army directive, conservatively titled “Sodomists,” that codified the new compromise between the reformers and the hard-liners. It stated that sodomy was a serious crime and that all offenders should be tried by court-martial. However, exceptions were

1035

Memorandum, from. Col. John M. Weir, Executive, JAG, to Director of Military Personnel, Headquarters Services of Supply, December 17, 1942, in AGO “Sodomists” File.

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applicable to the “confirmed pervert” who did not use force or violence to be examined by a board of officers and discharged under the provision of Section Eight of Army Regulation 615-360. This category of undesirable discharge, often nicknamed “blue discharges” or “section eights,” which permitted the discharge of personnel with “undesirable habits or traits of character,” had to be broadened to include those individuals psychiatrists now defined as “sexual psychopaths.” The other exception was the soldier who engaged in homosexual activity but was not a “confirmed pervert.” He or she was to be examined by a psychiatrist and if the individual “otherwise possesses a salvage value” could be disciplined and returned to duty by an officer exercising general court-martial jurisdiction.1036 The new procedure was finalized when the War Department in January 1944 issued WD Circular No. 3, a revision of the 1943 policy that was followed by similar directives for the Navy and would remain in effect for the rest of the war.1037 Suspected homosexuals, which for the first time included “latent homosexuals” who were reported or declared themselves without having committed any offence, were placed on sick call or sent to sickbay to be hospitalized. They were then interviewed by a psychiatrist to determine the diagnostic and administrative category. Afterward the medical staff observed their behavior, compiled a life history, and contacted the family. Intelligence officers frequently interrogated suspects to obtain the names of other homosexual personnel. An administrative board of commissioned officers that was required to include a psychiatrist whenever possible would finally determine whether the patient was to remain in the hospital, return to duty, be discharged, or forced to resign as an officer. Enlisted personnel were subject to the decision of the board without the benefit of counsel and with neither the right to present or cross-examine witnesses nor to obtain a copy of the proceedings.1038 Although the new discharge system saved some men from prison, it vastly expanded the military’s anti-homosexual apparatus and created new forms of surveillance and punishment. Gay men and women would now be regarded with suspicion and could be punished even if they were sexually abstinent. If military officials determined they belonged to a class of people deemed “undesirable,” they were denied rights to which they

1036 1037

1038

“Sodomists,” Memorandum No. W615-4-43, January 10, 1943. “Homosexuals,” WD Circular No. 3, January 3, 1944. Circular Letter No. C-44-12, subject: Procedure for the Disposition of Homosexuals among Personnel of the United States Naval Service, January 28, 1944. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 143.

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would have been entitled had they been defendants formally charged with a criminal act.

6.3 Exclusionary Practices Wac Regulations and Procedures: In Search of “undesirable traits and habits” Allan Bérubé and others have suggested that the fact that sodomy laws were rarely applied to lesbians was due to a ”history of invisibility” of lesbians in the military, but also society in general. While the remnants of the Victorian ideal of ”passionlessness” might account for part of this invisibility, I argue that the emergence of a lesbian subculture in the WAC as well as the administrative apparatus to manage lesbianism in the Corps also has to be examined against the background of performativity: discursive categories for lesbianism in the 1940s were not sodomy, but instead gender disguise and crossdressing.1039 The management of homosexuality within the WAC was based on educational rather than on military traditions: lectures, guidance, supervision, and/or reassignment of personnel. Criminal prosecution, court-martials, and discharge would be used only as a last resort against the most overt, disruptive, and “unreformable” homosexuals. Many WAC officers had been recruited from women’s colleges for their administrative experience and as a reassurance to parents and the public. Their in loco parentis approach addressed lesbianism primarily as an environmental problem due to ”conditions of group living unnatural to the majority of mature women.” Lesbian relationships were considered inappropriate ”crushes” that should be countered by giving trainees ”opportunities of wholesome and natural companionship with men,” creating living conditions more ”unfavorable to the development of homosexuality,” and minimizing curiosity by avoiding ”as much as possible any talk regarding homosexuality.”1040 The psychological redefinition went as far as instructing officers that “every person is born with a bisexual nature” and that “every woman possesses some traits that are usually regarded as masculine.” Echoing the new Freudian paradigm, a WAC Officer’s Guidebook stipulated that

1039

1040

For a discussion of cross-dressing and passing see Garber, Marjorie B. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. WD Pamphlet No. 35-1, Sex Hygiene Course, Officers and Officer Candidates, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, May 27, 1943, 26-28. See also Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 46.

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“[t]he normal course of sexual development is for a child to progress from infantile absorption in herself to a real affectionate relationship to both parents; thence, to an absorbing interest in friends of her own sex; this, in turn, giving way to increasing interest in the opposite sex, culminating in mature love for a lifepartner.”1041

Any Wac could ”gravitate” toward homosexual practices and ”turn to homosexual relationship [sic] as a means to satisfy [...] the universal desire for affection.”1042 Interestingly, homosexual tendencies in women could be channeled into qualities that made them better soldiers. Psychiatrists sought to apply their concepts of transference and sublimation to the women soldiers. Trainees who had ”potential homosexual tendencies,” they advised, could be ”deterred from active participation” in sexual relations and should be encouraged to sublimate their desires into a ”hero-worship” type of reaction or into ”a definite type of leadership.”1043 This attempt to desexualize women’s relationships by redirecting their sexual energy to military purposes stood in stark contrast to the military’s traditional and official position that (male) homosexuality threatened morale and discipline and was incompatible with military service. While effeminate men challenged the very core of military masculinity, lesbians, as women, were already excluded from this core. Thus, their sexuality, when sublimated or properly channeled, could be put to service to slot them into the military structure of rank and command. Based on the Army’s guidelines, formulating a policy on lesbian relationships in the corps proved difficult for WAC officers and their medical staff. Due to the pressure to fill personnel quotas and the absence of specific criteria most women until 1945 were accepted into the Army “without even a semblance of a psychiatric exam,” as William Menniger, the Army’s chief psychiatric consultant, complained.1044 Only when Hobby and WAAC personnel officers lobbied for more thorough screening procedures of applicants in an attempt to win public support for the corps, the adjutant general issued a confidential letter to all commands ordering recruiters to look into “the applicants local reputation” and to consider “homosexual tendencies” among nine categories of “undesirable habits and traits of character” when interviewing

1041

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1043 1044

War Department, WD Pamphlet 35-2, The WAC Officer – A Guide to Successful Leadership, Washington DC, February 1, 1945, 50-55. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 222. Ibid., 24-29; Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 46; Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 616-17, 625. Ibid. Menninger, Psychiatry, 112.

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applicants.1045 Responding to Hobby’s pressure in May 1943, the Surgeon General appointed Maj. Margaret D. Craighill as his first consultant for Women’s Health and Welfare to oversee matters of health and welfare in the WAC. In late September 1943, Major Craighill succeeded in convincing the War Department to order gynecological and psychiatric examinations for every applicant to the WAC and to establish standards of acceptance and disqualification specifically for women.1046 Policies aimed at identifying and rejecting lesbian applicants to the corps were gradually developed over the course of the war. This screening process was based on class, education, behavior and family background. Recruiters selecting women for officer training were advised to look out for candidates with “rough or coarse” manners, “stocky or shapeless” build and “masculine” demeanor or “voice type.”1047 “Emotional demonstrativeness” according to the WAC’s official historian Mattie Treadwell, “was an accepted trait among women, who thought nothing of kissing or embracing female friends or walking arm-in-arm with them.”1048 But the authorities knew what to watch for: “There is always one who acts, walks, and pays attention to the other, the same as a devoted male” reported the assistant chief of the military police at Fort Oglethorpe, “for instance, a girl spills a little bit of water on her skirt, and the other is patting her knees, and so forth; lighting her cigarette, [...] just acting like a man.”1049

“Straightforward, scientific education” such as the sex hygiene courses implemented by Major Craighill was designed to instruct officers in the proper ways of handling cases of venereal disease and pregnancy under their command.1050 Because of the Corps’ environmental approach, however, WAC Memoranda Director of Personnel, WAAC to Adjutant General, subject: Enrollment of Auxiliaries with Physical Defects or Doubtful Reputation, November 19, 1942; Chief, Appointment and Induction Branch to DWAAC, November 23, 1942; and DWAAC to Adjutant General, Appointment and Induction Branch, December 5, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 111. 1046 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 602. 1047 Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 156. 1048 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 625. 1049 Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 113, 115. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. Data WAAC Officers NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. 1050 Lecture Series on Sex Hygiene for Officers and Officer Candidates, WAAC, 45-55. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 145. The new screening procedures agreed upon at a WAC Selection Conference held July 27-29, 1944 were of particular importance to Col. Hobby in the wake of the “Slander campaign” of 1943. Albert Preston, History of Psychiatry in the Women’s Army Corps, 9-10. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 143, File 700. See also Meyer, 1045

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policy was against discussing the question of homosexuality with enlisted women in order not to “make trainees too curious about homosexuality and suspicious of ordinary friendships without preventing lesbians from engaging in covert sexual activity.1051 Officers were advised to deal with individual cases with “fairness and tolerance,” not because of the Army’s tolerant attitude toward women’s sexuality but because of concerns with the image of the Corps. “The girl who in childhood has not been able to shift her interest from her own to the opposite sex, and so has become, potentially or in reality, adjusted at a homosexual level, presents a different problem.” […] The question confronting the officer when gossip arises over such a relationship is whether there is involved just a close friendship or an unwholesome attachment. […] The officer’s two criteria should be: does the relationship affect the physical or mental health of the woman, and hence her efficiency? Does it, by its conspicuousness, affect the morale of the group and the reputation of the Corps?”1052

At times when personnel shortages were pressing and when officials were acutely aware of the detrimental effects of “smear campaigns,” officers were warned not to “indulge” in “witch hunting or speculating” and threatened with punishment if they did.1053 “[T]here was a tolerance for lesbianism if they needed you. [...] If you had specialist kind of job [to do] or if you were in a theatre of operations [...] were bodies were needed, they tolerated anything, just about.”1054 WAC officials believed that rumor spreading and false accusations were more serious threats to the Corps than were lesbian relationships.1055 WAC psychiatrist Captain Alice E. Rost, one of the Army’s sixteen female psychiatrists, adhered to a liberal position based on the Freudian developmental model and, accordingly, considered lesbian sexuality a “hangover from adolescence” caused by factors in the “home [which] does not permit such normal development” so that the woman “remain[s] arrested at an im-

1051 1052

1053

1054

1055

Leisa D. "The Myth of Lesbian (In)Visibility World War II and the Current ‘Gays in the Military’ Debate." Modern American Queer History: Critical Perspectives on the Past. Ed. Allida M. Black. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 271-84. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 225, 288. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 47. War Department, WD Pamphlet 54-55, The WAC Officer – A Guide to Successful Leadership, Washington DC, February 1, 1945, 50-55. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 222. “Sex Hygiene Course,” May 27, 1943 and May 1945, War Department Pamphlet No. 35-1, Lecture 5, “Homosexuality”. Weiss, Andrea, and Greta Schiller. Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1988, 34. Menninger, Psychiatry, 106. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 625.

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mature level.”1056 Her task was to assess according to the new psychosexual and administrative categories whether an individual before the Board of Inquiry had been involved in “accidental” homosexual relationships and thus could be rehabilitated through psychiatric treatment or whether she was a “true homosexual or addict” and should be discharged.1057 The “hierarchy of perversity”: Class, Race, Practice, Haircut How would these categories be determined and distinguished in the WAC? The “hierarchy of perversions” as Leisa Meyer has termed it, was organized along class as well as cultural and racial divisions. “Crossing” women, who dressed and worked as men and frequented lesbian bars, had been visible and identified as sexual agents even before the war. In the military, too, butch|girlfriend dyadic couples, consisting of a “dyke,” “lesbian,” or “butch” courting her “lady,” “girl,” or “girlfriend,” were largely working-class phenomena. Lesbian slang was widespread even among women who did not have sexual relationships with other women. At the same time, there was the continuing tradition of “romantic friendship” and “Boston marriage” among middle class and upper class women that de-emphasized erotic and sexual components.1058 Although common psychiatric wisdom was changing, many medical specialists such as the WAC psychiatrist Major Albert Preston still adhered to the theory of gender inversion being one of the major criteria to identify lesbians. “Cross-gender behavior,” such as the desire to enter the WAC itself, and male dress were linked to what was called “sexual confusion,” the rejection of femininity and heterosexuality.1059 The classification of “masculine” women as the most threatening to contemporary standards of white, middle class sexual morality was again based on older theoretical frameworks, namely the degeneration theory taught by Havelock Ellis who had developed a continuum, marking female “romantic friendships” as the least degenerative form

1056

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1058 1059

War Department, WD Pamphlet 35-2, The WAC Officer – A Guide to Successful Leadership, Washington DC, February 1, 1945, 51. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 222. “Tomboyishness” was a “behavior characteristic of adolescence,” while one of the marks of mature behavior was “heterosexual adjustment.”(Ibid.) Tab A and B, Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe. Data WAAC Officers NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Rupp, Imagine My Surprise, 398. See also Kennedy and Davis, The Reproduction. Preston, History of Psychiatry, 4. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 143.

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of homosexuality.1060 Since the WAC regulatory system was based primarily on the attempt to protect public legitimacy of the corps and thus targeted women’s sexual agency as such, the “mannish” lesbian, who was by definition a sexual agent, came to embody the “undesirable habits and traits of character.”1061 The association of “mannishness” with homosexuality in women was not only imposed upon them but also embraced and recreated by lesbian members of the WAC in order to establish and make visible their sexual identity to others in the Corps. Sporting a “mannish haircut” was “considered the thing to do if you were out to attract another girl.” A butch presented herself “by the manner of wearing the clothing, by posture, by stride, by seeking ‘to date’ other girls such as a man would and when with other girls pay all the bills and be solicitous.”1062 Before conversion to Army status, Waacs were not required to wear the uniform when off-duty, making it easier for them to visit bars or even to wear civilian men’s clothes off-base.1063 Within this framework, butch or “mannish” women, particularly when engaged in butch|girlfriend dyadic relationships, became the most visible and targeted victims of hostility, accusations and sanctions such as discharge while often forming the nucleus of emerging lesbian communities within the corps.1064 From the perspective of the medical establishment, it was also the type of sexual activity that, besides education, class background and appearance, determined whether a woman could be characterized as a victim of seduction or “an addict of such practices.”1065 While kissing and embracing could be tolerated, “oral practices” marked the “true pervert.”1066 An example of a particular form of female masculinity was Sergeant Loos, about whom Capt. Alice Rost wrote:

1060 1061

1062

1063 1064 1065

1066

Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 151. Memo 3rd Officer Virginia Beeler Bock, executive officer, Personnel Division, WAAC, to the Adjutant General, Appointment and Induction Branch, Attn: Col Sumner, subject: Enrollment of WAAC Auxiliaries with Doubtful Moral Standards, December 15, 1942. NARA. RG 165, Entry 54, Box 111. Testimony of Pvt. Virginia Clark Churchill, WAC taken at Patterson Field, OH, by Lieut. Colonel Birge Holt, IGD. June 23, 1944, 17. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 29. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 56 Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 151. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, Draft of suggested letter to Commanding Officers at the stations of certain WAC personnel suspected of homosexuality. June and July 1944. NARA. Ibid. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 14.

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“She was certain that in her relations […] she had never experienced physical release, had never experienced orgasm, although her partner (Churchill) did. She took the male roll [sic] in this interplay and was never satisfied herself. But it pleased her to be the male partner, to be the generous giver.”1067

The Sergeant, who might have identified as stone butch,1068 represented the far end of the scale, the very bottom of the “hierarchy of perversion” while enjoying a higher social status in the WAC than an effeminate man would in the Army.1069 In some cases themselves the NCOs of a unit, butches, and their girlfriends were often the center of gay cliques. Estelle B. Freedman has explored a complex re|configuration of the class and racial meanings attached to sexuality in her work on prison lesbians, a scenario that bore a great deal of similarity to the WAC in the eyes of contemporaries. Freedman has analyzed the depiction of lesbian inmates of prisons as “menacing social types” and a “dangerous sexual category” that emerged in the mid-twentieth century.1070 In the early twentieth century, most of the criminologist discourse on lesbian relationships within women’s reformatories identified black women as lesbian aggressors and white women as their temporary partners. After psychologists and criminologists had become intrigued with the prison lesbian, the lesbian label was extended to white working-class women, emphasizing the “contaminating effect” of their “aggressive homosexuality” on society. 1071

Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 107. Testimony of Captain Alice E, Rost, ANC, taken at Fort Oglethorpe, GA on June 26, 1944, by Lieutenant Colonel Birge Holt, IGD, 102. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. 1068 The term “butch” denotes a masculine woman, usually a lesbian, although it is sometimes applied to both men and women. Likewise, a “femme” or “fem” is a woman who acts very feminine. The “butch|femme” paradigm describes a relationship in which one person is “butch” and the other is “femme”. This social structure was prevalent primarily in working-class lesbian bars up to the early 1970s. In the emerging lesbian feminism of the 1970s, butch|femme was shunned because it was perceived to reproduce a heterosexual gender dichotomy. In a butch-fem relationship the butch was often presumed to be the active partner whose foremost objective it was to give sexual pleasure to her partner. A woman would identify as “stone butch” if she gained sexual pleasure exclusively from pleasing her partner and did not liked to be sexually touched herself. See also Kennedy and Davis, The Reproduction. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics. 1069 Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 56 1070 Freedman, Estelle B. “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965.” Feminist Studies 22.2 (1996): 397-423. 1071 Freedman, The Prison Lesbian, 397, 398. On middle class lesbian history, see for example Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. SmithRosenberg, The Female World. Rupp, ‘Imagine My Surprise’. On working-class lesbian 1067

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Homosociality and Lesbian Agency: The Fort Oglethorpe Investigation The records of the early court-martials in Fort Oglethorpe and elsewhere show that flourishing homosocial networks existed within the WAC. The records further suggest that lesbian women’s agency was exercised in a variety of ways in which Wacs dealt with the Army’s investigations that ranged from denial to accusing others to self-indictment in order to protect their partners. In May 1944 Mrs. Josephine Churchill from Westby, Wisconsin wrote a letter to the Judge Advocate General. “I am writing to you to inform you of some of the things at Ft. Oglethorpe that are a disgrace to the U.S. Army. It is no wonder women are afraid to enlist. It is full of homosexuals and sex maniacs.”1072 When her daughter, 20 year-old Private Virginia Churchill, was home on furlough “she received some of the most shocking letters I have ever read in my life from a woman of thirty yrs [sic].” The Sergeant who wrote those letters had “ruined other girls and will continue to use her spell over other innocent girls who join up with the W.A.C., because of their patriotic spirit.” Mrs. Churchill went on to name not only Sgt. Mildred Loos but also “many others who are practicing this terrible vice.” Her daughter, however, had “repented and says she will never make friends with another strange girl again.”1073 The Office of the Inspector General immediately ordered an investigation. Out of the many letters that the two women had written, even after Mrs. Churchill had reported them, 20 written by Sgt. Loos and 13 written by Private Churchill were secured as evidence. The investigating officers’ report speaks of letters “replete with salacious language and references, with professions of passionate love, of jealousy, of longings for each other and suggestive references.” Apart from passionate love, the letters also testify that the women knew what to expect from the military institution. “I can’t stand Oglethorpe anymore without you. [...] Oh! God if you don’t come to me

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1073

history, see, for example, Katz, Gay American History, esp. “Passing Women,” 209-81. Davis, Madeline, and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy. “Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960.” Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 7-26. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics. On medicalization, see Chauncey, From Sexual Inversion. Terry, Jenny. “Lesbians under the Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable Differences.” Journal of Sex Research. Special Issue on Female Sexuality 27.3 (1990: 317-39. Letter Josephine Churchill to JAG, Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe. Data WAAC Officers. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Ibid.

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soon so help me, this Damn Army is going to look for Loos & when they find her, she will be in Virginia’s arms somewhere.”1074 In their testimonies both women chose to deny “having engaged in homosexual practices” and downplayed their role in the relationship. “All those letters, of course,” Pvt. Churchill testified, “are fictitious.” Sgt. Loos testified that although she “used to let [all of] the girls go up in my room,” Pvt. Churchill “made it a habit of coming up to my room” and that she frequently found her in her bed late at night and would have to chase her out. Pvt. Churchill “tagged around me like a little dog” and “acted like a sick pup.” The letters she wrote to Churchill were “written in an attempt to discourage her,” as her father had advised her to “give her her way and play her game.”1075 Pvt. Churchill in turn testified that she liked Sgt. Loos but that it had been the Sergeant who had made the initial pass at her. She had felt sorry for the “rather grim aspects of her life history” but it was Loos who came to her bunk “night after night” with “actions that were anything but discreet.” She testified that she did not report Sergeant Loos to her commanding officer at Patterson Field because “she was Lieut. Patricia Warren who was having an affair with this Cpl. Ruth Kellog.” On the letters she had written she commented that she “ feared this girl and very often said things to her and wrote things to her to calm her down, and I used to think if I could just make her wait, until I could get out of her reach [...].” The “kisses to Rosemary,” according to Churchill’s testimony, referred to “things that she herself did. I had no part in them. I mean, I didn’t return those things.”1076 Captain Alice Rost, who conducted a neuropsychiatric examination and testified before the Board, found that both had indeed engaged in “a homosexual love affair,” but that “physically Sgt. Loos [was] normal.” The psychiatrist then testified that “Sgt. Loos does not present a medical problem such as is involved when a case is presented involving women who are real perverts, those who engage in oral prac-

1074

1075 1076

Letter from Sgt. Mildred Loos to Pvt. Virginia Churchill, April 30, 1944, Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe (Exhibit C, Incl. 2). Ibid. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe (Exhibit B, 10, L. 7-8). Gay male and lesbian authors of love letters faced the problem of wartime censorship and frequently used abbreviations, slang and “guarded terms that only our kind can understand” as one G.I. advised his friend in 1943, c.i. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 120.

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tices with other women; persons in the latter category being definitely abnormal. [...] This particular girl has high moral ideals.”1077

In Rost’s opinion it was “entirely possible that she will never engage in any other homosexual practice.”1078 The psychiatrist managed to draw the Board away from the language of religious sin that Mrs. Churchill used when she spoke of the “terrible vice” that “ruins innocent girls” unless they “repent.” Instead, Captain Ross employs military and medical discourses when she states that Loos’ “usefulness as a member of the WAC” could be restored by psychiatric treatment, that not only she “has been a very good soldier” but one with particularly “high moral ideas.” The report concludes accordingly: “Clearly the language and references in the letters are vulgar and obscene. However, it should be noted that under all the facts and circumstances developed by this investigation, questions are raised as to the extent to which the letters furnish evidence that in fact they engaged in homosexual practices. In part, the language used is considered to be expression of grotesque and fanciful imagination. The fact [...] that Sgt. Loos does not have dual sex organs demonstrates that the references [...] are only fanciful. However, it is considered that the letters do furnish strong evidence in support of the allegation that they did engage in homosexual embraces.”1079

This example illustrates the desexualization of lesbian relationships. Lesbian sexuality in the eyes of the psychiatrist was either modeled after male sexuality or virtually non-existent and merely a product of “fanciful imagination.” The second example shows a different response to the charges. Although the women in both cases were victims of the military’s systemic homophobia, they exercised agency in a variety of ways and managed to negotiate a range of lesbian identities. Thirty-one years old Lt. Patricia Warren had been practicing law for eight years and had been married and divorced before she became Company Commander at the 3rd WAC TC at Fort Oglethorpe. When Corporal Ruth Kellog was assigned to her Company as Platoon Sergeant, the two became acquainted and soon developed an intimate friendship. Kellog was at the time thirty-six years of age and unhappily married. (Her husband’s drinking had aggravated due to his syphilitic condition, which had reached the paresis state.). She confided to her friend and commanding officer her worries about her brother, a Japanese prisoner. The two women appeared to have truly found each other and seemed to have made no attempts to hide their intimacy from others. Witnesses testified the two “always paired off at social 1077 1078 1079

Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 14 (Exhibit B, 104, L. 1-2). Ibid. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 8.

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gatherings and were constantly together.” Occasionally, they managed to spend a few days’ furlough with each other. Of the “voluminous correspondence” between the two women the Board obtained two letters, both of which were “full of love impressions and denote longings.” “Kelly, I love you. I love you so much that I get mad at myself for not being able to find words to express what I am feeling – God, sweetheart, I never would have believed that people could feel what you and I feel for each other. Even though we live the rest of our lives together I will never be able to show you or tell you how very much you mean to me.”1080

When Cpl. Kellog was told by the investigating officers of the “allegations that indicated an abnormal relationship between her and Lieutenant Warren” she answered, “I admit them, sir.”1081 In her testimony, Cpl. Kellog stated that “she and Lieut. Warren love each other and enjoy each other’s company more than that of men.” The night before Cpl. Kellog was due to testify for the second time, she and Lt. Warren met in Chattanooga, Tennessee, some fourteen miles from Fort Oglethorpe.1082 The next morning the officer voluntarily appeared before the Investigation Board. When asked whether she cared to make any statement regarding the charge that “she had engaged in an abnormal love affair, such as would normally be expected to occur between a man and a woman, and that she had promiscuously associated with an enlisted woman,” she answered “[a]bout the only thing I want to do is take all the blame for and clear the kid.”1083 She denied none of “the implications of the language used in the two letters” and stated “[i]t would be utterly impossible to deny it, sir, and as far as I know, I do not think even doctors can explain.”1084 Here Warren invoked the psychiatric discourse herself, suggesting that it was she, the commanding officer, who “seduced” the “kid.” She knew that the enlisted woman’s best chance not to be dishonorably discharged was if the Board reached the conclusion that Kellog was a “first time offender.” Thus she concluded her appearance – and ended her career in the Army – by convincing the Board that “this was an initial experience for Cpl. Kellog.”

1080 1081 1082

1083 1084

Ibid., 16. Exhibit F. Ibid., 17. Exhibit B, 63, L.4. Further testimony of Cpl. Ruth Mildred Kellogg, WAC, taken at Fort Oglethorpe, GA on June 29, 1944, by Lieutenant Colonel Birge Holt, IGD, 314. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. Ibid., 318. See also Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 18. Exhibit B, 318, L. 32-33. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 18. Exhibit B, 318, L. 35-38.

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Moreover, it worked. The Psychiatrist commented on the love affair between the two women: “It is certain that she [Kellog] loves her [Warren] as an emotional expression, but I am inclined to believe that the two did not have any approximation to physical intercourse. They were very affectionate with each other […] they liked to share the same pillow, but I am inclined to believe that there was no mutual masturbation.”1085

Second Lieutenant Patricia L. Warren was “offered the opportunity to resign for the good of the Service.”1086 Pvt. Virginia Churchill, Sgt. Mildred Loos and Cpl. Ruth Kellog were ordered “to be hospitalized for psychiatric treatment [...] with a view to being either restored to duty or separated from the service, depending upon the results of such treatment.” The fact that the issue of fraternization which would otherwise have inevitably played a role where a Commanding Officer and a Platoon Sergeant were involved was totally absent in the inquiries of the Board makes it clear that female sexuality carried a very different set of meanings than did male sexuality in the armed forces. 1087 The situation at the Second WAAC Training Center in Daytona Beach, Florida indicates the insecurity the Army and WAAC authorities had regarding anti-homosexual policies before the end of the war. In contrast to the Cold War years where witch-hunts and purges took place, this was the time when those policies were formulated and strategies to deal with homosexual behavior in the Corps were being developed and tested. Most WAAC trainees and personnel in Daytona Beach were trained and quartered in leased downtown hotels, churches, garages and other buildings so that outside the workplace discipline was much more difficult to enforce than at traditional Army posts.1088 The supply situation at the Training Center had been difficult from its opening in December 1942. Housing in the scattered billets often pre1085

1086

1087

1088

Testimony of Captain Alice E, Rost, ANC, taken at Fort Oglethorpe, GA on June 26, 1944, by Lieutenant Colonel Birge Holt, IGD, 104. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26 F, Box 17A. Report, Investigations at Fort Oglethorpe, 28. Lieutenant Warren was offered resignation for the good of the service under provisions of paragraph 2a (1), WD Circular No. 5, 3 January 1944. This is an administrative discharge for officers in lieu of court-martial, which does not entitle the individual to veterans benefits and in most cases made finding civilian employment very difficult. Homosexuals came to be regarded as “security risks” and cases were referred to the FBI. Conference Memo, April 1951, on the subject of homosexuality with particular reference to the Women's Army Corps. See also Army Regulation No. 600-443. Personnel: Separation of Homosexuals. April 10, 1953. NARA. RG 319, Entry 2, Box 720. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 78.

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sented serious health risks and recreational facilities were virtually nonexistent in the resort city full of civilian nightclubs. Six thousand women lived in a tent camp, five women per tent, eight to a double hotel room. Since there was not even one service club and initially no theater for the 10,000 trainees, the women spent their evenings in the city where they interacted with and were more visible to civilians than at most stations.1089 One resident complained in March 1943 that “[t]here is altogether too much drinking here – particularly of hard liquors. Every night the bars are crowded with women.”1090 Other rumors were more vicious, but military intelligence officers could never prove any of them. The official WAC history points out that while rumors were rampant at Daytona, the actual military police report for a typical Saturday night revealed an exceptionally low number of delinquencies.1091 Ninety percent of the women, Treadwell quotes the investigating officer, “stayed in their quarters and suffered low morale, while only 10 percent were seen in the city, but this 10 percent totaled a thousand women.”1092 What she does not mention, however, is that some of those women did not stay in quarters by themselves. In fact Daytona was the site of a remarkable network of enlisted women and officers, many of them working in the motor pool, who spent their off-duty hours, and sometimes nights, together. A group of women around two sergeants were “double dating.” This group included Sergeant Chostner and “her friend Sergeant Bennett” and Betty Taylor, whom Helen Pagett had approached and asked for dates several times. When rumors about Pagett reached First Lieutenant Georgia Joyce, she reported to Lt. Woody and both were called in by Major Bryant (Chief of Section Motor Transport), who, according to Joyce’s later testimony, said “Evidently there is fire where there is smoke. All you have is rumors now. To go on you could possibly take it up to headquarters. I think you’re smart enough to go ahead and see what you can get on it.”1093 On August 10, Pagett did ask Joyce for a date, and with backing by her superior officer, Joyce

1089 1090

1091 1092 1093

Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 101, 123, 209. Letter of H.D. Fulmer, physician from Daytona Beach, FL, March 43. NARA. RG 407, Box 4290. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 209. Ibid., 210. Proceedings of Board of Officers convened at Daytona Beach, FL to determine whether Private Helen G. Pagett, A-909232 should be discharged from Service under the provisions of Section VIII, AR 615-360. October 2, 1943. (Hereafter cited as Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL). Testimony of First Lieutenant Georgia Joyce, WAC, 13-14. NARA. RG 407, Box 4280.

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agreed.1094 The two, Chostner, and several others went to a downtown establishment, the Riviera Grill, for drinks and dancing. According to First Lieutenant Joyce, Pagett bit her ear while they danced to the jukebox and stroked and kissed her on the porch. “It was a kiss that wasn’t just a friendly kiss of affection between two well known friends; it was the kind of kiss you slap a man for.”1095 “We got to talking about this other affair of Sergeant Pagett and Betty Taylor who happened to be a very good friend of Sergeant MacPhers. At that time Sergeant Pagett did confess she did have an affair with Betty Taylor.”1096

On several occasions, the group met in Lt. Joyce’s house, which she had allowed them to use (as, she insisted, had been suggested to her by headquarters). The house seems to have been a more than welcome retreat to meet and relax. In a letter dated 28 Aug 1943, Pagett thanks Joyce. “Goodnite, my darling. We had a wonderful time. Pritchard thanks you, I thank you. Chostner thanks you. We sat here tonite listening to the hit parade.” Joyce later testified that it was also here where Pagett had “grabbed” and “felt” [her breasts] several times, even in bed. Pagett also wrote: “Darling, this is real…You’ve given me something that I’ve never had before – peace in my heart, trust, believe. I love you so very much. Will see you early in the morning. Won’t disturb you. Time is so short for us I must be with you every moment. Pat.”

In another letter Pagett assured her that she was still single. “Don’t believe I have anybody yet.[…]You’ll see me as often as I can arrange it, else I’ll write. Your 1st Sgt. HGP.”1097 Lt. Joyce recruits Lt. Leonhardy to help her with her investigation and to participate in the meetings at her house, but at the same time urges Pagett to be more cautious: “Darling, you’re telling me to be “careful” … Meeting you – rather ‘finding you’ was the reason. Remember, you told me to be careful. Won’t ever stop saying it. […] Yours, Pat.”1098

On 2 Oct 1943 a board of officers convened to determine what type of discharge Pagett would receive. Captain John Bender Medical Corps, Chief PsyProceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL. Testimony 1st Lieut. Joyce, 14. Ibid., 15. 1096 Ibid., 16. 1097 Letter Helen G. Pagett to “Jo” [Georgia Joyce], Exhibit 4-b. Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL. NARA. RG 407, Box 4280. 1098 Letter Helen G. Pagett to “Dearest Jo” [Georgia Joyce], Exhibit 4-a. Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL. NARA. RG 407, Box 4280. 1094 1095

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chiatric Section at Station Hospital, testified “having [had] but limited time for examination [it has been determined] that the patient is not a true homosexual, but has practiced sexual perversion.” When asked for a “short definition and also the differentiation between homosexuality and perversion,” he stated: “Homosexuality is a desire of like sex for each other. Perversion represents a regression to the infantile level to the stage of partial impulses without the production of conflict or the necessity of fear. Perversion in itself, philosophically I might qualify that a little by saying that if an act is not performed to attain desired end or the end for which it qualifies and that act is repeated, that in itself would be perversion. Homosexuality as we understand it today does not necessarily contain perversion.”1099

He went on to explain that “repeated kissing or caressing or fondling of each other of members of the same sex” as well as “the writing of letters which contain rather passionate passages” [letters Pagett to Lt. Joyce] constituted “abnormal conduct […] and the repeated act would be perversion.” Furthermore, Captain Bender asserted to the board that “some individuals under stress or confinement […] are more prone to resort to abnormal sex acts or perverted sex acts,” whereas a “normal individual would not be as apt to resort to such practices even under stress” so that the former might be “classed as a bad influence.”1100 Private Pagett takes up the ‘boarding school argument’ – the argument that blames environmental factors. She explains she is victim of circumstances (inactivity, no furlough, lack of occasion to meet men “to give them the understanding, love and affection that they have needed, that I have needed.”1101 “I am not ashamed of anything that I have done. I am not trying to hide the fact that I have craved love and affection like a lot of other kids out there. I do flatly deny ever at any time to indulge or ever thought that I ever would let myself go to the extent revealed to you in actually indulging in abnormal sex acts of any kind. […] There is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I am not abnormal. I want kids. I want a man. We don’t have the opportunity to meet men. You come into town to have a drink at a bar or something like that. I would feel like a pick-up unless I

1099

1100 1101

Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL. Summary of Testimony in Hearing of Helen G. Pagett. Captain John J. Bender, Medical Corps, Chief of Neuropsychiatric Section, Station Hospital, 1. Ibid., 1-2. Ibid.

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went with a group of fellows. Most of the fellows the kids joke about as being wolves. They are.”1102

She continues: “I have never in all my life indulged in anything sexual with any woman. I have never had any reason to. But I have needed love and affection to the extent that someone would reciprocate to it like she [Lieutenant Joyce] did and supposedly mean it. […] It was a cruel thing to do. […] What we need is a doctor and psychiatrist to straighten this out.”1103

The question whether Pagett would fall in the category of abnormal conduct or that of the pervert was important for the type of discharge she would receive. Pagett pleaded to be represented as a normal “kid” who not only craved “understanding, love and affection,” but was also willing to give it to a man, perhaps a future husband.1104 However, the military denied her the opportunity to meet decent men while retaining her respectability. Lieutenant Joyce on the other hand was not only cruel but might also have tried to protect herself. She was, according to Pagett’s and Lieutenant Knox’s testimonies, “practically accusing half the officers and some of the non-coms of the same thing. She caused so much talk about it.” “[E]veryone at the Coquina Hotel was being accused by little remarks here and there.” On the other hand, Joyce could point to testimonies that confirmed that she had always been the passive part, the one who Pagett had approached and courted. In one of the letters it said, “May I have this dance, Lt? You dance beautifully – so easy to lead and that ear I’m really sorry I couldn’t help but bite it.” The other members of the clique, Private Neoma Chostner, “whose only particularity in dress is her mannish job,” and Private Arvonia Pritchard also gave “evidence of habits or traits of character which serve to render her retention in the service undesirable.” Both received discharges “other than honorable.”1105 Private Helen G. Pagett received a blue discharge with the remark “not recommended for re-enlistment, induction or re-induction.”1106 The final example illustrates that during the war years, Army and WAC administration were generally more concerned with the public image of the Corps than with rooting out homosexuals. Capt. Doris V. Clark was accused 1102 1103 1104 1105

1106

Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL. Testimony of Helen G. Pagett, 54. Ibid. Testimony of Helen G. Pagett, 52. Hearings before Board of Officers re: Private Neoama Chostner and Private Arvonia Pritchard, 2nd WAC Training Center, Daytona Beach, FL. September 29, 1943. NARA. RG 407, Box 4280. Proceedings of Board, Daytona Beach, FL.

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of having had an affair with Sgt. Grace Randall (AAF WAC Ft. Worth, Texas) and resigned her commission in lieu of court martial. Two weeks later, on 1 March 1044, Clark stated that she had been pressured to resign by “other officers [who] held a personal grudge against her” […] “not realizing that it would be anything other than a honorable discharge as she had been told that it was for good of the Corps.”1107 When she tried to withdraw her resignation, her father, a lawyer, made an appeal to War Department and the Senate Military Affairs Committee. The G-1 recommended probationary assignment of 90 days, favorable efficiency report rendered.1108 Clark’s mother was chairman of WAC recruiting and member of WAC Mothers Club of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio. When it turned out that this could become a high profile case, Colonel Hobby and Colonel Morisette decided during two phone calls in March 1943 that the negative publicity was really not worth keeping up their resistance to Captain Clark’s reassignment.1109 In a 28-page letter, Captain Clark’s mother explained her daughter’s view of the charges. According to her detailed letter, the only thing the two women were accused of was spending the night together in a Ft. Worth, TX hotel room, but only after an incident which had involved an enlisted woman under Clark’s command and a military police officer who had allegedly instructed Randall to get in the room and stay there. “She thought he meant all night so she called the post and signed out. She spent that night in Capt. Clark’s room which no doubt is against army rules.”1110 Doris Clark was the third commanding officer the detachment at Ft. Worth has had and since there was no executive officer, Sgt. Randall had assisted her with her company work. The next morning, Mrs. Clark continued by saying that “when Sgt. Randall returned to the post she was sent to the hospital. […] A psychiatrist visited her and tried to get her to admit that she had homosexual relations with Capt. Clark. She would not admit this, as it was not true. They even offered to release her from the hospital if she would admit it. She said that at times she felt like admitting it if they would only let her along, as she could not stand any more pressure. […] She was in a bad state of mind. I went to the hospital to see her when I was in Ft. Worth and if she is kept there much longer she will be a mental case. [..]”1111

1107 1108 1109

1110 1111

Memo, Asst. Chief of Staff, G-1, October 17, 1944. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Ibid. Transcript of telephone conversation between Col. Morisette und Col. Hobby, March 28 and 31, 1943. NARA. RG 165, Entry 55, Box 201. Letter Mrs. J. N. Clark, Williamstown, KY to Col. Hobby, March 20, 1944. Ibid. Ibid.

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Randall was reduced in rank although Clark tried to get her transferred, not knowing that charges had been made against her. When she was informed of this by Capt. Hargrave from Central Training Command, she asked to see the accusing statements but was refused. Clark then went to the judge advocate and told him that rather than to resign, she would stand court-martial. The Captain then massively threatened the Sergeant and coerced her into submitting her resignation. “He told her they were prepared to make it a dirty case and would promise no freedom from publicity. [She] did not feel that she was able physically and mentally to stand more. The tiredness of nineteen months in the Army, let go, she was in a state of collapse, as she felt she didn’t want publicity because of the Corps and because of the work I was doing recruiting and having a hard time. She hated to involve others – so she handed in her resignation, not realizing that it would be anything other than a honorable discharge as she had been told that it was for good of the Corps.”1112

With a discharge other than honorable Clark would not have been able to find a position in her field as a chemist. After consulting with Hobby and Morisette and after Clark’s appeal to War Dept and Senate Military Affairs Committee, the G-1 recommended probationary assignment of 90 days and Clark was retained in the Service and, after a favorable efficiency report, reassigned.

1112

Ibid.

7. Conclusion: The WAC between Institutional Integration and Discursive Exclusion

When the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was established in 1942 and replaced one year later by the Women’s Army Corps, the exclusion of women from modern Armies of the Western world had been so thorough that the concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘soldier’ appeared to be mutually exclusive. In contrast to the widespread assumption that war had exclusively been men’s business, European Armies from the fourteenth until well into the nineteenth centuries had consisted not just of soldiers, but also of a vast field train. This train consisted of men and women who furnished supply, maintenance, and evacuation services to a unit and generally performed what we consider today combat support and combat supply support. In early modern Europe women’s work in a military camp differed little from that in a peasant village, making them an integral part of early modern armies. It is also safe to assume that women have fought on all of the battlefields of North America. Women were affected by war in manifold ways. They were forced to assume new duties, quarter troops or to move the household and flee approaching troops. Many women followed their husbands to war and some stepped in when the men were wounded or killed. Others had stayed home and took up arms to defend their home. In the American Civil War, many women volunteered as nurses and sanitary commission workers. Some women chose to disguise as men, joined the army, and fought as officers or common soldiers. Women also served clandestinely as spies, saboteurs, and scouts. When military service became universal, it acquired a closer connection to the emerging concept of the nation. More professional armies consisting increasingly of conscripts became an agent for disciplining and civilizing provincials into nationals. The universal draft, culminating in the French levée en masse, linked the emerging idea of a national character to a militarized masculinity. This entailed two things: firstly, as armies became more professional and more permanent, the size of the train was reduced and the armies assumed greater control over their supply system. In order to make the organization more efficient and flexible, army and civilian life became more and more separate. Nursing also became more professional, more respectable,

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and more feminized. Despite their official assignment, the nurses’ status was strictly non-military. Secondly, military discipline became a rite de passage, a “school of the fatherland.” Drawing on the classical discourse of armed civic virtue, the modern concepts of man, citizen, and soldier converged. The result was not only a gendered division of labor, but also the emergence of gender specific national personae. War (fighting) had become men’s business. In the early American republic, women were cast as embodying the non-war like qualities and figured as “other” in relation to the concept of masculine, militarized citizen. With the totalization of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, warfare increasingly involved warriors and civilians from all parts of societies, but the gendered split between the battlefront and the home front deepened. In as much as each nation relied on the participation of virtually all of its members, different forms of mobilization and self-mobilization were employed for men and women. Women were needed in a variety of functions. As homemakers they were expected to ‘make do’ with scarce resources; as industrial workers they had to “man” the assembly lines of the war industries; and as auxiliaries with the armed forces they were expected to replace male soldiers and take over clerical and supply functions. The patriotic roles of Rosie the Riveter and Winnie the WAAC provided women with empowering idealizations, as had the role of the republican mother in the civic tradition of the early republic. The employment of women to serve with a military institution posed a dilemma. During WWI, but particularly during the WWII, the manpower needs of the United States armed forces had become exceedingly great. No military branch could afford not to employ women in a host of administrative and clerical tasks and other “women’s jobs” for which they were thought to be particularly well suited. As contemporary gender roles cast men as the protectors of “women and children” and women as the carers for their families, the legitimacy of the hegemonic civilian masculinity as well as the militarized masculinity of the soldiers depended on maintaining the discursive boundaries between the protector and the protected. It is against this backdrop that this study attempted to shed light on two questions. The first hypothesis this study presented was that the category woman|soldier did not represent an oxymoron, but rather an entirely new category that emerged during World War II. Whereas the woman|auxiliary of the WAAC was slightly more compatible with pre-war gender roles, the woman|soldier of the WAC was de jure a member of the United States Army. As I have shown, however, this meant that the boundaries between Wacs and

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male soldiers were redrawn within the organization. Although Wacs were formally in the Army, they were assigned positions outside the core of military masculinity through a variety of symbolic and other practices. The second question this study examined was the viability and usefulness of Foucault’s model of the dispositive. I have argued that the specific formation of power|knowledge in which the concept of the woman|soldier emerged called for a model that would take into account discursive elements as well as practices and material factors. The debates over the WAAC Bill in Congress illustrate the positions toward women’s military service. While Chief of Staff, George Marshall, and other senior military officers were most concerned with the severe manpower shortages they anticipated, members of the House of Representatives worried about gender roles in civilian society. They feared that the roles of protector and provider would be usurped by women along with that of the soldier. Not incidentally, similar resistance occurred when the conversion to the WAC in 1943 and the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 were debated. This shows that institutional, discursive, and subject perspectives produce a three-dimensional image of the formation of power in which the Women’s Corps operated only when considered together. Because the military does not exist irrespective of the citizenry in democratic societies, changes in the personnel structure of the former have profound influence on the gendered order of civilian society and vice versa. Moreover, WWII like any total war had an impact on gender roles in the U.S. I have argued that the virile, militarized masculinity perceived to be at the military’s core needed to be protected from differently gendered persons – for example limited service men, effeminate men, and women. This concept of masculinity now had to be reframed under the conditions of the draft and women’s service. As I have shown, the line of demarcation was discursively redrawn inside the organization: combat separated men from non-men. On a practical level, however, this sharp distinction of tasks made little sense as a short-lived secret experiment in the Anti-aircraft Artillery proved. Within a mixed tactical unit of the Coastal Artillery, equipment such as height finders, fire directors, and guns were operated, but great care was taken that the women members of the AAA units were limited to operating the searchlights. Mixed units proved to perform exceptionally well and the British example further testified to the viability of using women in mixed-gender AAA units. Despite their exemplary performance, General Marshall decided not to disclose the successful experiment or his optimistic estimates for the future to the American public in order not to endanger the passage of the WAC Bill.

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In analyzing the press coverage of the WAAC/WAC and the Corps’ own efforts of communicating to the public its desired image via recruiting campaigns and public relations efforts, several phases can be distinguished. In the initial months WAAC recruiting was handled by the U.S. Army Recruiting Service, an agency unprepared for the task of recruiting large numbers of volunteer women into a military organization. Between April 1943 and the conversion to the WAC, recruiting was in the hands of WAAC headquarters. After enrollment had almost come to a complete halt, the WAC took up recruiting and launched several campaigns that lasted until 1945. Each of the various recruiting themes devised by the agencies involved reflected a particular approach to recruiting that was an effect of the competing discourses surrounding the WAC. The women who considered joining one of the women’s services faced military service as a non-traditional occupation that provided the opportunity to leave home, learn new skills, and acquire greater self-confidence. At the same time, the military was a place outside the accepted realm of femininity that was widely considered to corrupt a woman morally. As a result she had to be on constant guard not to loose her respectability, modesty, or femininity. Finally, military service provided an opportunity to do her country a patriotic service. Recruiting campaigns made use of all of these discourses. As was the case in the defense industries, advertisers tried to convince the public that women could make vital contributions in men’s jobs, while at the same time retaining their traditional feminine identities. The important point to be stressed in both cases was that femininity suspended “for the duration” would not lastingly challenge traditional gender roles. The press, at first considered more of a threat than an asset by Director Colonel Hobby, took ample interest in the Corps from day one. Their coverage focused much on the perceived difference between ‘feminine’ and ‘martial’ qualities. “Womanpower” was much sought after and competition by other women’s services, the civilian labor market, and other government agencies made the task of recruiting women difficult, especially when the WAAC had comparatively little to offer in terms of pay or benefits. The question of whether the WAC’s purpose was to provide large numbers of women for unskilled or semi-skilled work or whether it was to be a small, highly skilled corps that made available to the Army the special skills highly qualified women had acquired in the civilian labor market was never resolved as long as the Corps existed. This was also the reason for much disagreement between the War Department and the Director over minimum re-

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quirements and enlistment standards, the lowering of which was felt to have caused great problems with “unassignable” personnel. Recruiting oscillated between the themes of “self-sacrifice” and “selfinterest,” between appeals based on glamour on the one hand and guilt on the other. After the first campaign slogan “Release a Man for Combat” had proven extremely unpopular, the advertising agency Young & Rubicam and George Gallup advised against appealing to a woman’s “patriotic duty” and advocated pointing out the personal benefits to be gained by enlisting. Director Hobby, on the other hand, insisted on emphasizing the traditional trope of the sacrifice women were making for their family and, by extension, for their nation. The resulting advertising compromise was a patriotic approach with some “glamorization.” The so-called slander campaign that hit the WAAC in 1943 exposed the shortfall in public knowledge regarding the purpose and the work of the WAAC. The association of Waacs with camp followers and prostitutes by columnist John O’Donnell and many others who spread the rumors did great harm to recruiting, not to mention the feelings of the Waacs themselves. The hundreds of letters, remarks, and articles typically reveal one of two arguments: Either the WAAC morally corrupted young unsuspecting women who joined the Corps out of patriotism, or it attracted deviant characters – “mannish” women and women of doubtful reputation. In either case, the Waacs’ alleged purpose was to provide soldiers and officers with sexual services. An investigation by the War Department revealed that while there was no evidence for any influence of enemy powers, most of the rumors were started by servicemen or originated in communities close to military bases. Possible motivations to spread rumors of immorality on the part of the Waacs included resentment of being replaced by a WAAC, the fear of being sent overseas and into combat, or of losing one’s employment with the Army. Many soldiers wrote explicitly in letters that they expected their home, including their wife, girlfriend, or sister, to remain unchanged until they returned. Several opinion polls among servicemen revealed the decidedly adverse attitude of soldiers toward the WAC. Few of them knew much about the Corps’ purpose and duties, but even many of those who worked with Wacs did not want their sisters or woman friends to join. Towards the end of the war, with recruiting figures disastrously low, WAC recruiting tended to emphasize the point that Wacs were non-combatant soldiers in their own right. Recognizing the woman|soldier’s place in the war, however, was only a small step toward re-essentializing her nurturing and caring skills. Wacs were now recruited as medical technicians to “comfort our

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wounded heroes,” a “feminine” skill that would also make them “better wives” once the war was over. Whereas recruiting and public relations remain interesting because they attempted to condense discourses into sales messages and public opinion into poll figures, documents such as camp newspapers, poems and songs, written and composed by Wacs, illustrate that Waacs embodied a variety of subject positions as women|soldiers and that they were actively carving out spaces for themselves within the organization. Wacs toyed with different concepts of femininity, reflected their experience of non-traditional work, or tested the limits of the anti-fraternization policy. They used some of the recruiting themes quite affirmatively or in an openly ironic manner. Finally, they invented their own military tradition, heroic narratives, and rituals of camaraderie just like other soldiers. In the WAC, as in any other military organization, the discursive effects of power|knowledge and discipline materialized in the uniformed body. Hence, the uniformed body was at the same time the site of subjection and of subjectivation. The uniform also acted as a sign system used to communicate and negotiate relations of power within the organization as well as in relation to civilian outsiders. Finally, the WAC uniform was a material object that had to be designed, procured, and distributed and worn. I have used this double character of the uniformed body to explore the intricate connections between symbolic and material aspects as well as those between disciplinary technologies and technologies of the self. During the pre-planning process, representatives of several Army agencies and the WAAC met extensively with designers and manufacturers to discuss and develop the design of an entirely new uniform for the new women’s corps. This process carried an enormous symbolic significance - behind lengthy debates on buttons and hems lay the question of how ‘soldierly’ and how ‘feminine’ the Waac should be. Despite the fact that Waacs had to do jobs that involved driving, climbing in and out of airplanes and motor repair work, their uniforms were designed for respectable, middle class office workers. Because donning a military uniform was already considered a deviance from existing gender roles, great care was taken to convey a “lady-like” appearance. The fact that the design was repeatedly revised shows the fragility of this concept. Due to the rapid build-up of WAAC personnel, and the fact that few people involved in the planning process had any experience with women’s uniforms, the design of the WAAC uniform proved unsatisfactory and continued to draw complaints and criticism until shortly before the end of the war. The Army supply system also proved inadequate. Training Cen-

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ters opened without any stock, Waacs/Wacs graduated and went to the field without even one proper uniform. The lack of suitable clothing for extreme climates posed a serious health risk. Despite all of these shortcomings, Director Hobby and the War Department believed that the appearance of the uniform played an important role in a woman’s decision to join the service. Consequently, the uniform, its elements, and their retail value were featured in many recruiting ads. Among the many appeals that Hobby made with regard to the uniform, one of the few that the Quartermaster General approved of was the authorization for additional items for personnel on recruiting duty. Nevertheless, the uniform further aggravated the publicity crisis of 1943. Besides the symbolic and material aspects, I have also looked at the practices involved in wearing the uniform. These practices, I have argued, are located where power has the quality of capillarity and thus provides insight into how Waacs/Wacs constructed themselves as women soldiers. Where adequate supply was not found, Wacs took to improvising. They bought or traded slacks where needed for malaria prophylaxis, they secured men’s uniforms and even sewed pieces such as bathing suits that were needed, but not issued. Although this involved violation of uniform regulations, superiors often sanctioned these measures in the interest of well-being. Like the rest of the Army, the Women’s Corps was racially segregated. African American women were mobilized according to earlier plans the War Department had devised for African American men. African Americans could only make up about ten percent of the troops corresponding with their proportion of the population. Although the Army offered the greatest opportunity for racial minorities among the women’s services, the percentage of African American servicewomen never even reached that number but stayed around four percent of all enlisted women and under three percent of the officers. Racial segregation, the War Department argued, was a long established social practice that had “proven satisfactory” and that the Army would experiment with during wartime. Finally, the Army made sure that black officers could not command white troops, although the opposite was possible. African American women’s organizations began lobbying even before the WAAC Bill had become law. Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women tirelessly advocated the integration of African American women and continued to monitor the Corps’ regulations and practices of segregation in the training centers and field stations. African American women were also active in the Double-V campaign the Pittsburgh Courier and other black papers had launched. Even before WAAC recruits set foot in a training center, they were subject to racially biased application and test procedures.

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African American Waacs/Wacs were not only subject to institutional racism, but also to racist bias in the communities near their bases. Citizens of several states addressed several hundred letters to their congressional representatives, the Secretary of War or the President in which they complained about their perceived lack of segregation. The WAC/WAAC reacted evasively to such letters and claimed segregation was long standing Army policy. The Army in turn rarely defended racial segregation openly, but claimed it was either in accordance with state law or merely a social tradition with which to break would endanger the Army’s efficiency. African American Waacs/Wacs were limited to fewer specialist schools than their white counterparts, which in turn limited the number of potential assignments. They were rarely requested by commanders to fill specific positions and were often assigned low skilled work, even when better qualified. In several instances, African American women chose to protest discriminatory practices, racial segregation, and outright racist remarks by their superior officers. The racial-caste society of 1940s’ United States placed African Americans at a lower position than other ethnic and racial groups. As women in the Army, they were also regarded second-class soldiers. Hence, although they placed the highest hope in serving in the military to attain first-class citizenship, African American woman|soldiers were a double minority. A colonial element is present in the case of Puerto Rican Wacs, who, although they were identified as white, served in segregated units. Officially segregated because of “language problems,” recruiters were convinced that Puerto Rican women’s “integrity and emotional stability” was below that of “continental” women. The example of the Puerto Rican Wacs, although few in numbers, highlights the colonial attitude and the centrality of white, middle class values in the WAC. The history of Japanese American Wacs also highlights the intricate connections between the categories race and gender. Here, however, subordination and disadvantage do not fall along a color line of black versus white. Instead, the axis was American vs. Alien. In contrast to African Americans, Japanese Americans became racialized only during the war. About half of the over 20,000 women of Japanese ancestry who were interned at so-called relocation centers across the West were eligible for the Corps. Moreover, their occupational and language skills were exactly what the Army needed most. Extensive interviews with the women revealed not only their qualifications and loyalty, but also their firm opposition to serving in segregated units. Their unanimity proved successful: beginning late in 1943, Nisei Wacs were being

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trained and assigned to integrated units. Wacs of all ethnic minorities considered military service a step toward full citizenship rights. In the final chapter, I have explored how gender related to sexuality in the WAC. Sexuality, along with race and class, was one of the lines along which the WAC leadership’s concept of “respectability” was organized. Director Hobby believed firmly in different standards of behavior for men and women in the Army in order to safeguard their “moral welfare.” Only this, she argued, could ensure the ”high moral character” that would protect the women from sexual victimization and the Corps from bad publicity. This respectability was based on white, middle class values and on the ideal of sexual restraint and chastity. The construction of military masculinity, in contrast, depended on emphasizing qualities such as aggressiveness in fighting or otherwise. Sexual promiscuity was, if not encouraged, at least tolerated. This double standard became evident for instance in the policies to control venereal disease. The Army’s policy was based on attempting to rid VD of the social stigma attached to it so that infected soldiers would seek treatment. To achieve this, the Army used a two-fold strategy of issuing prophylactic kits to male soldiers and make early treatment compulsory. During the war, social hygiene campaigns against prostitution were also aimed at “amateur girls,” “pick-ups” and “khaki-wackies,” thus further underscoring rumors that the Wacs were offering sexual services. For the Women’s Corps, on the other hand, infected women were not treated but discharged. Whether the women should receive education and lectures in matters of sexual health and whether contraceptives should be made available to them was constantly under discussion. In contrast to senior Army officers and medical personnel, Hobby was of the opinion that these lectures were uncalled for and would do more harm than good. The in loco parentis approach of the WAC Director and the ideal of sexual abstinence also determined the Corps’s policy on pregnancy, abortion, and maternity. Women with dependent children would not be accepted into the WAC and Wacs who became pregnant were immediately discharged. In the early days of the WAAC, unmarried Waacs had received a summary discharge when pregnant while married Waacs were honorably discharged but this policy was rescinded even before the conversion. The varying degree to which the Army’s anti-fraternization policy was enforced highlights gendered and sexualized issues of race and class. Initially, the social “mixing of rank” between Waacs and Army personnel, as well as within the WAAC, was prohibited. Hobby later changed her opinion when many Wacs, who thought of their military service as only temporary, complained about this policy. It also became clear that the anti-fraternization pol-

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icy was a major deterrent to WAC recruiting. Originally devised to limit favoritism in the army by separating issues of rank and command from the realm of social interaction, between WAC and Army personnel it became more of an instrument to sort out class positions. Heterosexual social encounters were in principle considered desirable, if only to prevent the women confined to a single-sex environment from developing homosexual tendencies. Wacs argued that in terms of class background, their counterpart would be Army officers, not enlisted men. Male officers, on the other hand, often feared the competition with enlisted men for dates with the Wacs if the policy were relaxed. Violations of the anti-fraternization policy were generally tolerated if no interracial or homosexual contact and no other offenses were involved. Particularly under field conditions overseas, the WAC leadership argued, the white, heterosexual, middle class morality of the Corps had to be protected from black men and other women - even more so than from white soldiers and airmen who “had not seen a woman in months.” Like other women in the workforce, the woman|soldier’s respectability was threatened by her greater mobility and autonomy. Against the backdrop of the gender system of the 1940s, agency in women, particularly sexual agency, was considered deviant. The quintessential threat however was not the heterosexual woman who gave expression to her desire, but the “mannish” lesbian who usurped not only man’s role as provider, but was also fantasized to seize his role as the active and aggressive sexual partner of a woman. The epitome of gender and sexual deviance was the lesbian woman|soldier, who by donning a uniform even attempted to appropriate the role of the protector. In order to explore the connections of these popular discourses with the Army’s disciplinary and medical approaches, I have undertaken an excursus into the medical literature of the turn if the century. The ideas of the Army’s emerging medical and psychiatric establishment, as well as popular discourses, drew heavily on the older concepts of degeneration, sexual inversion and the Freudian concept of latent homosexuality. Without the “sexual modernists” Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, the pertinent concept of homosexuality could not have emerged in this form. Before and during World War II, a major conceptual shift had reached the Army, which hitherto had dealt only with the concept of sodomy. Under the condition of a universal draft and with the growing authority of the medical profession, homosexuality gradually came to be redefined as a medical, not a criminal problem. While “consensual sodomy” had been defined as a criminal act in the Articles of War, homosexuality was now considered a mental illness

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which, however acquired, could be treated or at least managed. Perhaps the most important change, however, was that with the medical definition a new class of people came into existence. Homosexuals did not need to commit any offense to make themselves subject to dishonorable discharge. The WAC dealt with women’s homosexuality in different ways. One reason for this was that, although Wacs were also subject to the Universal Code of Military Justice and to Army regulations, homosexuality in the WAC was managed according to traditions of educational, rather than military, institutions. The deans of women’s colleges, who were in a way the intellectual godmothers of the Corps, were used to homosocial and homosexual practices as an environmental problem of women’s dormitories. They had brought with them a moral approach: guidance, education, lectures, supervision, and re-assignment of jobs, stations, and quarters. Disciplinary measures such as court-martials and discharge were used as a last resort for incurable “homosexual addicts.” Another reason for the different treatment of women homosexuals was that the WAC regulatory system was mainly based on the attempt to protect the public legitimacy of the Corps. The Director was always aware of the publicity side to exposing lesbians. She advised officers to deal with individual cases with tolerance and not to indulge in witch hunting. As a corps of volunteers, the WAC’s strength depended directly on the numbers of women rejected and the success of the recruiting campaigns. More importantly, in order to win public support and Congressional backing, the impression that the WAC was ‘full of homosexuals and sex maniacs’ had to be avoided at all costs. The strategies for identifying and classifying lesbians in the WAC were based on what Leisa Meyer has called a “hierarchy of perversion,” where practices associated with working class women on the one hand, and African Americans on the other hand were considered most deviant. According to racist stereotypes, African American women were considered more sexually active while working class women were stereotypically accorded a lower morality than white, middle class women. Categories of performativity played an important role in the process of determining who was just suffering from a “hangover from adolescence” and who was an “addict.” In this respect, lesbianism was considered more a question of a woman’s gender than of her sexuality. It was “cross-gender behavior” that led to “sexual confusion” – confusion not only of the object of a woman’s object of desire, but also of her proper role: the problem was her sexual agency per se. Practices that drew on Victorian upper middle class traditions, such as the romantic friendship, could be tolerated as long as feminine, white women were involved. The oc-

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casional crush on a fellow Wac could be dealt with by a benevolent superior officer by re-assigning the women in question and lecturing them about natural, wholesome relationships. Cross-dressing, butch-femme relationships, and ‘mannish’ haircuts, on the other hand, were practices associated with working-class women and belonged to the visible spectrum that would mark the true homosexual woman. Although these categories were part of the disciplinary system of the WAC, they were by no means merely imposed on the women. Women’s and lesbians’ identity, agency, and experience in World War II were shaped by a complex dispositive of discourses, practices, laws, regulations, and truths. Women’s sexuality was controlled by discourses of desexualization and|or hypersexualization as well as by fear of their sexual agency and fear of their victimization. Regardless of whether the WAC was indeed “the quintessential lesbian institution” as John D’Emilio has put it, or what the actual numbers of lesbian women within the Corps were, lesbian soldiers explored new strategies, established networks and formed communities inside the military as well as in many major cities where lesbian networks and a bar culture that had developed and expanded during the war provided some safety and support in public. Many lesbians who had received “blue” discharges returned to port cities where they formed the nuclei of emerging gay communities. Compared to before the war, they could now move much more freely. During the war, they had begun to visit bars, cafes, and movie theaters with their girlfriends and unescorted by men. Lesbian and heterosexual women’s experiences in the WAC highlight the conflicting meanings of women’s sexualities and their role in the construction of the woman|soldier during the war. From auxiliaries serving in a separate Women’s Corps of the 1940s to members of the All-Volunteer Force when the WAC was disbanded in 1978, Wacs were the first female regular soldiers to serve in the United States Army. Their service laid the groundwork for the eventual integration of women into today’s all-volunteer force. Gender continues to exist and structure servicewomen’s experience until today. Military masculinity has depended and continues to depend on the “other,” the feminine, the homosexual, the ethnic other. Although the ongoing construction of the woman|soldier, now as the “professional” woman|soldier of the post-Cold War all-volunteer force takes place in an apparently entirely different Army, it is structured by the same formations of power|knowledge as that in which the “respectable” woman|soldier of World War II took her first steps. The integration of women is on no account an unqualified success story. I will close this study

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by pointing to a few examples that illustrate how the category gender continues to structure military institutions. All of them illustrate how pervasively and all encompassing the gender regime operates within military culture. After the draft ended with the expiration of the Selective Service Act in 1973, the proportion of women in the armed forces rose significantly. Since 1976 women have been eligible to enroll in all of the service academies. During the 1980s and 1990s, women deployed to Grenada and Panama where they found themselves in combat-like operations. Various policies to regulate the exclusion of women from combat positions have been devised and revised over the course of the decade in which many new jobs were opened to women and in which they served in the Persian Gulf War and in various international peacekeeping missions from Bosnia to Somalia and Rwanda.1113 Never before were U.S. military personnel involved in so many and complex UN peacekeeping operations as in the 1990s.1114 Peacekeeping missions, being by definition different than combat missions, brought with them an even stronger ‘need’ for the symbolic affirmation of masculinity and difference. On the interpersonal level this development is underscored by a large number of incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assaults. These include domestic violence within military families, large-scale assaults on and around military installations at home as well as abroad and individualized cases of sexual harassment at the unit level. On the socio-political level, a conservative discourse on “the feminization of the military” has been gaining ground along with the weakening of institutions like DACOWITS.1115 1113

1114

1115

On combat exclusion laws see Francke, Linda Bird. Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997. United Nations. General Assembly. Security Council. Comprehensive Review of the Whole Question of Peacekeeping Operations in All Their Aspects [Brahimi Report]. 2000. http://www.un.org /peace/reports/peace_operations/. Accessed May 5, 2005. Proponents of this position include Webster, Alexander F. “Paradigms of the Contemporary American Soldier and Women in the Military.” Strategic Review 19.3 (1991): 22-30. Adair, R. D., and Joseph Myers. “Admission of Gays to the Military: A Singularly Intolerant Act.” Parameters 23.1 (1993): 10-19. Gutmann, Stephanie. The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? New York: Scribner, 2000. Van Creveld, Martin L. “Armed But Not Dangerous: Women in the Israeli Military.” War in History 7.1 (2000): 82-98. The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) was created in 1951 by then Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall. Intended as a civilian advisory board on matters of policy relating to women, DACOWITS’ recommendations have often included opening positions to women, implementing antiharassment policies and removing restrictions to command positions. In 2002, however, the DoD issued a new charter which reduced the number of members by half and severely modified the committee’s mission.

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At the 35th Annual Tailhook Symposium at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel in September 1991, eighty-three women and seven men were assaulted during the three-day aviators convention, the nature of which can be read as an attempt to reaffirm a hegemonic masculinity that was perceived to be threatened by a number of factors.1116 First, the convention of the Tailhook Association was to be an unofficial celebration of the quick victory in the Persian Gulf. As it turned out, servicewomen in combat support positions had received much more media attention than had the Navy aviators, who traditionally perceive themselves as an elite within the Navy. Tailhook took place during a climate of downsizing in the military that threatened service member’s job security. Additionally the Risk Rule was about to be rescinded, and pilots anticipated the opening of one of their last male sanctuaries – combat aviation – to women. 1117 A private organization, the Tailhook Association is comprised of active duty, reserve, and retired Navy and Marine Corps pilots, defense contractors, and others. 1118 In the early years the conventions centered around social gatherings and parties held in numerous hospitality suites funded by defense contractors. In the late 1970s, new Department of Defense rules restricted this practice and suite sponsorship fell to the individual naval squadrons and commands that collected funds from members. As the number of naval hospitality suites increased, so too did the competition among them to create a

1116

1117

1118

Regarding Tailhook see: United States, Dept. of Defense, and Office of the Inspector General. The Tailhook Report: The Official Inquiry into the Events of Tailhook ‘91. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Chema, J. Richard. “Arresting Tailhook: The Prosecution of Sexual Harassment in the Military.” M.A. Thesis. Judge Advocate General’s School, 1993. Ebbert, Jean, and Marie-Beth Hall. Crossed Currents: Navy Women From WWI to Tailhook. Washington, DC: Brassey’s , 1993. McMichael, William H. The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Zimmerman, Jean. Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook. New York: Doubleday, 1995. One officer commented: “This was the woman that was making you, you know, change your ways. This was the woman that was threatening your livelihood. This was the woman that wanted to take your spot in that combat aircraft.” Pohl, Frances K. Tailhook ‘91: Women, Violence, and the U.S. Navy. 1994. http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/june94pohl. htm. Accessed August 11, 2005. The first Tailhook symposium took place in Tijuana, Mexico in 1956 as a get-together of naval aviators. In 1963, the meeting moved to Las Vegas and added a number of professional development activities to its program. Official Navy backing for the symposium grew after this point, and the arrangement for official task was carried out by the headquarters of the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations. The Navy made available free office space for the organization in Miramar, California, and used its aircraft to fly participants to Las Vegas.

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popular suite. Popularity was achieved in “disciplines,” practices such as drunkenness, prostitution, public nudity, and public sexual intercourse. Several of the suites hired strippers to perform in the evenings, and some officers paid them for oral sex. An estimated 5,000 people attended Tailhook ‘91 over the course of the three-day event. Approximately 4,000 of these were Navy and Marine Corps personnel.[citation?] When Paula Coughlin, a helicopter pilot, made a formal complaint on 10 October 1991 backed by twenty-six other officers and enlisted women who had attended the convention, investigators at the DoD interviewed 2,900 attendees and obtained evidence of crimes and gross misconduct by naval aviators. Soon it became evident the Navy was dragging its feet and seemed more interested in protecting the careers of the men charged with harassment rather than investigating the charges.1119 The Inspector General and the Naval Investigative Service issued a lengthy report that plainly detailed lurid scenes at Tailhook ‘91 where dozens of women were waylaid and sexually molested. The report motivated anger and a call for a more thorough investigation. On 18 June 1992, the DoD took over the investigations, Coughlin went public with her charges, and the Senate Armed Services Committee delayed the promotions of 4,500 Navy and Marine Corps officers.1120 Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned on June 26, 1992. In September of 1992 the Pentagon’s Inspector General issued its initial report, a very serious account of how senior Navy officials deliberately diluted their own investigation in order to avoid bad publicity. The Navy’s inquiry had, among other things, ignored the involvement of senior officers at Tailhook, including Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, a top Naval officer who witnessed the sexual misconduct, had not tried to stop it, and subsequently worked to cover it up.1121 In April 1993, the second part of the Pentagon’s Inspector General report was issued and stated that the files of at least 140 officers had been referred to the military services for possible punitive action for indecent exposure, assault, conduct unbecoming an officer, and failure to act in a proper leadership capacity – but not for sexual assault or rape. Moreover, fifty-one individuals were found to have made false statements during the investigation. None of these 140 cases ever went to trial. Approximately half were dropped for lack of evidence. Most of the rest of the men “went to the mast” – an in1119

1120 1121

D’Amico, Francine. “Appendix Tailhook: Deinstitutionalizing the Military’s ‘Woman Problem’,” Weinstein and White, Wives and Warriors, 235-44, 236. Ibid., 235. On April 19, 1994, the U.S. Senate voted 54-43 to allow Kelso to retire as a fourstar admiral, with an annual pension of $84,340, rather than at two stars at $67,422. Ibid., 237.

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ternal, non-judicial disciplinary procedure that meted out fines and career penalties. With regard to the most celebrated case in the Tailhook scandal, the Marine Corps dropped all charges against the Marine captain charged by Lieutenant Paula Coughlin with sexual molestation. The Corps decided there was not enough evidence to proceed with a court-martial against the captain and that Coughlin had misidentified her assailant. In addition, both the Pentagon’s and Navy’s prosecutorial methods were disapproved of, in particular the practice of granting exemption to a number of junior officers in order to obtain their cooperation. In addition, there was evidence of a highly questionable interview procedure, careless interview reporting, and unsuitable questions asked regarding sexual histories and practices.1122 As documented by the DoD investigators, most of the humiliating rituals at the Tailhook convention had a long-standing tradition and exemplify and celebrate a particular aspect of military masculine culture. Among them were activities such as “The Gauntlet,” a loosely formed group of up to two hundred men who lined the corridor outside the hospitality suites around 10:30 each night of the convention and “touched” women who passed down the corridor.1123 It is clear from a number of accounts that this activity was not uncommon at naval officers’ clubs, training squadron parties, and at “wingings” when naval aviators are awarded their pilots’ wings. During the DoD investigation the following “rationales” for this behavior were offered. These rationales show how deeply certain group norms run in U.S. military culture, mores which, at the very least, are conducive to rape. The most common reason given was that this behavior was “expected” of junior officers and Tailhook was replete with “traditions.” In one officer’s

1122

1123

See United States, et al. Women in the Military: The Tailhook Affair and the Problem of Sexual Harassment. Report of the Military Personnel and Compensation Subcommittee and Defense Policy Panel of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, Second Session. Washington, DC: GPO, 1992. United States, Dept. of Defense, and Office of the Inspector General. The Tailhook Report: The Official Inquiry into the Events of Tailhook ‘91. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. For further discussion of the issue Boo, Katherine. Universal Soldier: What Paula Coughlin Can Teach American Women. 1992. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ navy/tailhook/debate.html#us. Accessed August 12, 2005. Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents. McMichael, The Mother. Zimmerman, Tailspin. The touching ranged from consensual pats on the breasts and buttocks to violent grabbing, groping, clothes stripping and other assaultive behavior as the women were funneled down theline of men, sometimes even picked up on the shoulder and carried into the crowd. A common form of indecent exposure at the convention was attendants publicly exposing their testicles.

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words, “[i]t was condoned early in some of the senior officers’ careers. [...] When this first thing started they were the elite, they thought they could do anything they wanted [...].”1124 Numerous officers viewed Tailhook as a type of “free-fire zone” where they could celebrate without regard to rank or decorum.1125 Tailhook was perceived as an accepted part of the culture set apart from the mainstream of the Armed Forces. Many linked Tailhook to overseas deployment where months of Spartan living give way to excessive partying while in foreign ports. The frequently heard comment “what happens overseas, stays overseas” was the implicit paradigm applied to Tailhook. In earlier years the tacit agreement had been “no wives, no cameras.” Unlike their counterparts in other armed services, aviators do not follow a career progression of command. Most do not have any leadership responsibilities of commanding a unit until the 10-year point in their careers. The authors of the report curiously noted that many senior officers repeatedly referred to the aviation lieutenants and lieutenant commanders as “the kids.” “To us, their use of this term symbolized an attitude where irresponsible behavior and conduct were accepted manifestations of high-spirited youth. The attitude is a major departure from the traditions of the ground forces, where newly commissioned second lieutenants control the lives of their platoon members and are expected by their superiors to demonstrate the personal qualities of a leader.”1126

On Feb. 8, 1994, the military judge stated that Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Frank B. Kelso had manipulated the investigation to shield his involvement. On Feb. 15 Admiral Kelso announced he would retire two months ahead of schedule. The Senate voted to approve Kelso’s retirement as a four-star admiral against the vote of the seven women Senators. After the Tailhook incident, the Navy established a Standing Committee on Women to assess policies on sexual harassment. Despite the establishment of a zero sexual harassment tolerance policy and a number of preventive and educational measures, sexual harassment has continued to be a problem.1127 Francine D’Amico has argued that while Tailhook

1124

1125

1126 1127

PBS Frontline. Rationale for Behavior. [n.d.]. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/navy/tailhook/rat.html. Accessed August 13, 2003. United States. Department of Defense. The Inspector General. The Tailhook Report. Section X: Officer Attitudes and Leadership Issues. 1993. http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/GenderIssues/SexualHarassment/Tailhook-91-part2/sect10. Accessed February 14, 2003. Ibid. In November 1994, several male West Point cadets were disciplined for sexually harassing female cadets, and the Navy investigated charges of sexual harassment by male instructors

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“has changed official policy [it] has had little impact on the practice of sexual harassment in the U.S. military. Tailhook has thus deinstitutionalized the military’s ‘woman problem,’ making harassment as a tool of resistance to women’s presence less visible and therefore less open to challenge. Tailhook has also widened the chasm of suspicion, hostility, and isolation between military men and women.”1128

Another battleground for the affirmation of the fragile ideal of military masculinity and heterosexuality is the discourse around the integration of gay and lesbian service members as promised by the Clinton administration. Although the connection between sexual violence against women and the policy on gays in the military, popularly known as “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, don’t harass,” is frequently not recognized, this anti-gay policy is evidently one of the principal spurs to sexual harassment against women. In 1999 women accounted for 31% of the discharges under “Don’t ask, don’t tell” while they made up only 14% of the total force. “The Don’t ask, don’t tell policy pressures young women into sexual activity with their superiors by making them subject to the threat of discharge as gay.” 1129

1128 1129

at a Naval Training Center. At a number of Army facilities, including Aberdeen Proving Grounds and Fort Leonard Wood, investigations were conducted concerning harassment, fraternization, assault and rape. In 1996, it was found that drill sergeants and other instructors routinely engaged in sexual conduct with female trainees during the 25 week Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Some 50 victims were identified, 1,800 witnesses were interviewed, and 20 instructors were suspended from duty. Ultimately, a dozen drill instructors were charged with sex crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Four were sent to prison; eight others were discharged or punished administratively. Letters of reprimand were issued to Aberdeen’s commanding general and three other senior officers. The most serious punishment was handed down to Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson, a drill sergeant sentenced to 25 years in prison for numerous counts of rape and abuse. United States, et al. Army Sexual Harassment Incidents at Aberdeen Proving Ground and Sexual Harassment Policies within the Department of Defense: Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, February 4, 1997. Washington, DC: GPO, 1997. Bruce Shapiro also comments that “[c]overing up sexual assault is Pentagon policy.” Shapiro, Bruce. “[Editorial] Rape’s Defenders.” The Nation (1996): 6-8, 7. Rosen, Leora, and Lee Martin. “Sexual Harassment, Cohesion and Combat Readiness in U.S. Army Support Units.” Armed Forces & Society 24.2 (1997): 22144. Firestone, Juanita M., and Richard J. Harris. “Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military: Individualized and Environmental Contexts.” Armed Forces & Society 21.1 (1994): 24-43. D’Amico, Appendix Tailhook, 235. “You can't separate this policy from sexual harassment,” says Michelle Benecke, a lawyer, former captain of U.S. Army and co-director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN). “A lot of the perception that women in the services are gay stems from the fact that they’re not sleeping with anyone in their unit,” Benecke says. Ireland, Doug. “Search and Destroy.” The Nation 271.2 (2000): 11-16. See also Shapiro, Rape’s Defenders.

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Not only has “Don’t ask, don’t tell” failed to prevent witch-hunts and diminish discharges of gay service members, it has actually increased them from 617 in 1994 to 1,034 in 1999, at a cost of more than 161 million dollars in training replacements for those discharged.1130 Additionally, the policy has spurred soaring rates of verbal abuse and physical violence, even murder. The Department of Defense itself has now been forced to admit that harassment of uniformed gays remains widespread. In March [year?], the DoD Inspector General released a survey of 71,570 active-duty service members revealing that 80 percent of those who filled out questionnaires reported hearing “offensive” antigay remarks. Nearly 10 percent said they had witnessed physical assault. Significant numbers also reported “offensive or hostile gestures,” “threats or intimidation,” graffiti, vandalism, “limiting or denying training and/or career opportunities,” and “disciplinary actions or punishment” not of the assailants but of their victims.1131 Madeline Morris, professor at Duke University Law School and at the time the Army’s special assistant on gender relations, recommended “the Army give up its ‘macho posturing’.” In a law review article she pointed out that “[t]here is much to be gained, and little to be lost by changing this aspect of military culture from a masculinist vision of unalloyed aggressivity to an ungendered vision combining aggressivity with compassion.” “There is substantial evidence,” Morris continues, “of themes of hypermasculinity, adversarial sexual beliefs, promiscuity, hostility toward women and possibly acceptance of violence against women within current military structures.”1132 From the War of Independence to the present military operations in Iraq, women have participated in the nation’s wars by serving in a variety of capacities – as soldiers, defense workers, nurses, and wives. At the same time, as Madeline Morris has put it, “within traditional military culture, women are cast largely as the sexual adversaries or target, while men are cast largely as promiscuous sexual hunters.”1133 Gender technologies, I have argued, have taken on different forms. During WWII it was the rhetoric of “respectability” that was hoped to bridge the gap between the woman and the warrior, the necessary “othering” of women soldiers, and the need to utilize their services. As was the case during the 1130 1131

1132 1133

Ireland, Search and Destroy. Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Conduct Unbecoming: The Seventh Annual Report on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass’. 2001. http://www.sldn.org/templates/ press/record.html?section=3&record=257. Accessed August 3, 2005. Morris, By Force of Arms, 651. Ibid.

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Cold War and after, their mere presence was structured by a discourse on their sexuality: women were either desexualized or hypersexualized, sometimes both. Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, the Commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade who was in charge of running prisons in Iraq, stated in an online interview in May 2004: “I believe there were some male commanders particularly in the active component who resented my success in a theater of war and communicating to me at times that I was not going to succeed and how dare I think I could succeed in their theater of war. I got the distinct impression it was an insult to their warrior instinct and to their masculinity.”1134

After more than sixty years of women’s service from enlisted ranks to general officers, the “gender wars” continue. Even if the lines of demarcation now run through the military itself, the notion of the woman|soldier remains contested.

1134

Karpinski, Janis L., and Washington Post. “Prison Abuse Scandal: Abu Ghraib.” 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24845-2004May13.html. Accessed August 11, 2005.

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Acknowledgements This study is the revised version of my doctoral dissertation which was accepted by the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Working on it over the years, I have incurred more debts of gratitude than I can ever hope to repay. Stig Förster, my advisor, encouraged and supported me throughout the project. I would also like to thank Bernd Greiner and Karen Hagemann for providing generous advice and support whenever I asked them. I thank the editors for accepting this study in the Kölner Historische Abhandlungen series. Thanks to Dorothee Rheker-Wunsch at Böhlau Verlag and also to Terence Kumpf for polishing the manuscript. This work has benefited greatly from debates and discussions in the work group “War and Gender” at the Hamburg Institute for Social Studies (HIS). The interdisciplinary and comparative approach in the DFG-Project “The Military as a Site of the Social Construction of Gender” at the University of Bremen has broadened my approach and provided helpful insights into different methodological approaches. For this I am grateful to Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert. The archivists and librarians at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress, the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne and the National Archives for Black Women's History in Washington, D.C. have been outstandingly helpful. I also thank the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University and Lori Manning of the Women’s Research and Education Institute (WREI) in Washington, D.C. who went to extreme lengths to support my research and enlightened me about the implications of women’s experience in WWII for women serving in today’s military. The H-Minerva list has been a tremendously helpful forum for discussing aspects of my work. Numerous members have provided crucial information, insights, and hints. During the decisive stages of the project I was fortunate enough to benefit from extraordinarily stimulating intellectual environments. I thank particularly my colleagues and students at the Institute of Anglo-American History at the Universität Köln and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin for inspiring discussions that sharpened many an argument. Invaluable too have been comments from and discussions with Eva Bischoff, Birgit Beck, Bob Guldin, Claudia Haupt, Ronit Lentin, Franka Maubach, Leisa D. Meyer, Susan Strasser, Friedrich Tietjen, Amy Schmidt,

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and Frank Zwettler. Thank you for critiques and comments, helpful suggestions, and every imaginable form of support. Writing a book like this is a collective endeavor. Without the unfaltering support, enthusiasm, friendship, and love of a select few who generously gave their time and many talents, this book could not have been written: Veronika Hampf, Gudrun Löhrer, Regina Mühlhäuser, and above all, Norbert Finzsch.

302

Abbreviations AAAC AAF ABCL ACWIS AEF AGCT AGF AKA ANC ASF ASR ATS AWOL BPR CBS CCC CNO CWS DST DoD ETO DoD G-1 G-2 G-3 G-4 IZFG

Anti-aircraft Artillery Command Army Air Forces American Birth Control League Advisory Council to the Women’s Interest Section of the War Department American Expeditionary Forces in Europe Army General Classification Test Army Ground Forces Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Army Nurse Corps Army Service Forces (formerly SOS) Adjusted Service Rating Auxiliary Territorial Service Absent without leave Bureau of Public Relations Columbia Broadcasting System Civilian Conservation Corps Chief of Naval Operations Chemical Warfare Service Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Department of Defense European Theater of Operations Department of Defense Personnel division of the general staff of a division; also, the assistant chief of staff for personnel Military intelligence division of the general staff of a division; also, the assistant chief of staff for military intelligence Operations and training division of the general staff of a division; also, the assistant chief of staff for operations and training Supply division of the general staff of a division; also, the assistant chief of staff for supply Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung; TU Berlin

Abbreviations

MAT MISLS MOS MTOUSA NAACP NARA NATO NCNW NCO NPRC NUL NYA OC CWS OCS OTI RPB SHAEF SJA SOS SPARS SWPA TA; also TD TO; also, T/O UCMJ USES WAAC WAC WAFS WASP WAVES WFTD WMC WRA

303 Mental alertness test Military Intelligence Service Language School Military Operational Specialty Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Archives and Record Administration North African Theater of Operations National Council of Negro Women Non-commissioned officer National Personnel Records Center National Urban League National Youth Administration Office of the Chief, Chemical Warfare Service Officer Candidate School Office of Technical Information Recruiting Publicity Bureau Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force Station job assignment plan Services of Supply (renamed ASF in 1943) “Semper Paratus - Always Ready” (Women’s auxiliary unit of the Coast Guard) Southwest Pacific Area Table of allotment; table of distribution Table of organization Uniform Code of Military Justice United States Employment Service Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Women’s Army Corps Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron Women’s Air Service Pilots Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service Women’s Flying Training Detachment War Manpower Commission War Relocation Authority

304

8. Sources and Literature

8.1 A Note on Sources There is a wealth of federal records on the Women’s Army Corps in the National Archives (NARA). Record Group (RG) 94 contains the records of the Adjutant General’s Office. Most relevant for this study have been the many unit histories collected here that speak in detail of the work the WAAC/WAC did. Also in this record group are notes and correspondence of the Office of the Chief of Military History, Historical Services Division, including early stages and unpublished manuscripts of Mattie Treadwell’s history of the Women’s Army Corps. Finally, the documents of the National Civilian Advisory Committee for the WAC account for the positions of prominent civilian women with whom the WAC Director was required to maintain close liaison. The records of the Office of the Inspector General of the Army (RG 159) include few but important documents regarding inspections and investigations conducted by the Inspector General regarding the WAC’s efficiency, discipline and welfare, among them the proceedings of an investigation of suspected homosexual behavior at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.1135 Record Group 165 contains records of the War Department General and Special Staffs. These include the Personnel Division (G-1), which from February of 1944 on included the administrative home of the Office of the Director, WAC (DWAC), the Military Intelligence Division (G-2), the Organization and Training Division (G-3) and the Supply Division (G-4) as well as the records of several special staff divisions such as the Bureau of Public Relations (BPR) and the War Department Manpower Board. RG 165 contains material ranging from WAC policies to the legislative process leading to the WAAC and WAC Bills and to the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. The declassified correspondence of the WAC Director in itself deals with the full range of daily concerns. There are records on administrative, operational and organizational practices and policy matters, historical and background material, on advertising and public relations as well as medical aspects. RG 319 encloses the records of the office of the Chief of Staff. Of particular interest

1135

Investigation at 3rd WAC Training Center Fort Oglethorpe. NARA. RG 159, Entry 26F, Box 17A, File 333.9. June and July, 1944.

Sources and Literature

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for this study were the records of the Women’s Interest Section of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations and the records of the Assistant Chiefs of Staff. The records of the Office of the Secretary of War (RG 330) contain a series of studies and surveys of the attitudes of military personnel, of soldiers’ and public attitudes toward the WAC and one survey of Wacs. The surveys collectively referred to as the “American Soldier in WWII,” as well as several reports and analyses based on them, provide insight into soldiers’ attitudes toward women in various branches of the military as well as Wacs’ attitudes concerning their motivation to join and experience in the WAC. The records of the Adjutant General’s Office (RG 407) include documents related to discipline and discharge, recruiting, training and medical examinations, uniforms and regulations, morals and conduct, rosters and strength reports as well as documents pertaining to desertion, detention, separation and discharge. Among the sources in the National Archives are also a number of Camp Newspapers and other ego-documents, which were produced by Waacs in the field, mostly for recreational purposes. Newsletters such as WAAC Quacks, Dear Folks, WAAC-tivities and others which were only allowed to exist only until March 1943 offer important insights into how Waacs saw themselves, their service, and the Corps and how they dealt with military life and often adverse public opinion. Besides the National Archives, the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, particularly the papers of the WAAC’s first Director Oveta Culp Hobby were of great importance for this study.1136 Hobby’s papers contain a wealth of correspondence, engagement calendars, invitations, photos, clippings and printed matter such as yearbooks and Army publications.1137 Reproductions of the papers of Mary McLeod Bethune, the originals of which are located in the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation Archive on the Bethune-Cookman College campus, Daytona Beach, Florida, are also among the holdings of the Library of Congress. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and its president Mary McLeod Bethune tirelessly advocated and supported Black women’s service in the WAC. The archives of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsyl1136

1137

Oveta Culp Hobby. Papers, 1941-1952. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division. Washington, DC. The WAC Museum, then at Fort McClellan, Alabama was closed at the time of research. It is now part of the Army Woman’s Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia. and its extensive collections of uniforms, video tapes of oral histories and wartime documents are again accessible.

306

Sources and Literature

Pennsylvania contain several collections of personal papers of WAC officers and enlisted women. Wacs who deployed to the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) came in contact with their Australian counterparts of the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS), as documented by oral histories and manuscript collections in the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC. A number of former Wacs have published their recollections of the war, their diaries or their wartime letters. These sources provide valuable insights into what life was like in the top-secret facilities of the Manhattan Project, the tropical climate of the South West Pacific or in a lab on a Texas Air Force Base. The women tell us about the communities they came from, about adjusting to Army discipline, about camaraderie as well as monotonous workdays and the dull routine of “kitchen police” and about the excitement of doing things for the first time.1138 Numerous personal narratives have been re-

1138

Brown, Frances DeBra, ed. An Army in Skirts: The World War II letters of Frances DeBra. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008. Weise, Selene H. C. The Good Soldier: A Story of a Southwest Pacific Signal Corps WAC. Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1999. Dahlgren, Cyclone Forbes. We Were First: Eglin Field WW II WACS - We Heard the Guns at Wewak. Brownsville, TX: Springman-King Co., 1977. Roensch, Eleanor Stone. Life within Limits: Glimpses of Everyday Life at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Seen Through the Experiences of a Young Female Soldier While on Military Service There, May 1944 to April 1946. Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1993. Women’s Army Corps Veterans Association. Cameo Recollections of Women’s Army Corps Veterans. Cleveland, OH, Kansas City, MO: Women’s Army Corps Veterans Association, 1983. Phillips, Harry Irving, and Herbert Roese. …All-Out Arlene: The Story of the Girls behind the Boys behind the Guns. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran and Co., Inc., 1943. Adkins, Yolanda. Skirt Patrol : Women’s Army Corps, Army of the United States. New York: Vantage Press, Inc., 1993. Bandel, Betty, and Sylvia J. Bugbee. An Officer and a Lady: The World War II Letters of Lt. Col. Betty Bandel, Women’s Army Corps. Hanover, NH, Arlington, VA: University Press of New England in Association with the Military Women’s Press of the Women in Military Service For America Memorial Foundation, 2004. Boles, Antonette. Women in Khaki. New York: Vantage Press, 1953. Campbell, Joan, and Eleanor Stoddard. “One Woman’s War: The Story of Joan Campbell, Member of the Women's Army Corps, WWII April 1943-September 1945. Part 1.” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 4.1 (1986): 157-66. Green, Anne Bosanko. One Woman’s War: Letters Home From the Women's Army Corps, 1944-1946. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989. Henderson, Aileen Kilgore. Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women's Army Corps, 1944 -1945. Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Kelly, Emma Chenault, and Alice Elizabeth Tolle. Emmaline Goes to War. Charleston, IL: BLT & J Pub., 1992. Miller, Grace Porter. Call of Duty: A Montana Girl in World War II. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Perdue, Bernice. WAC Confidential. New York: Exposition Press, 1963. Robinson, Harriet Green. The Gaylord WACS. Laguna Beach, CA: Laurel Press, 2001. Thurston, Doris Joy. A WAC Looks Back: Recollections & Poems of WWII. Stuart, FL:

Sources and Literature

307

corded and printed since the 1940s. Very few of them are critical of the WAC but are sometimes invaluable in providing every day accounts of very different lives. The Minerva Center, founded by Linda Grant DePauw in 1986, publishes the only scholarly journal devoted entirely to women’s military studies, MINERVA: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military. The Minerva center also maintains an H-net discussion list, which serves as a forum for its over 500

Norvega Press, 1996. Bachle, Rosemary Eckroat. Women’s War Memoirs. Waco, TX: Western Heritage Books, 1999. Flint, Margaret. Dress Right, Dress: The Autobiography of a WAC. New York: Dodd, Mead & company, 1943. Grahn, Elna Hilliard. In the Company of WACs. Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1993. Harten, Lucille B. “Life As a WAC: The Story of Louise Parkin.” Rendezvous 22.2 (1987): 87-89. Autobiographies by African American and Japanese American WAC veterans include: Earley, Charity Adams. One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. Charity Adams Early was the commander of the only African American contingent of Wacs to serve in Europe. See also Sims-Wood, Janet Louise. “‘We Served America Too!’ Personal Recollections of African Americans in the Women's Army Corps during World War II.” Union Institute, 1994. Pitts, Lucia M. One Negro WAC’s Story. Los Angeles, CA: Privately published, 1968. Hirose, Stacey Yukari. “Japanese American Women and the Women's Army Corps, 1935-1950.” M.A. Thesis. UCLA, 1993. Women’s Army Corps Veterans Association. Cameo Recollections. Chrisman, Catherine Bell. My War: WWII as Experienced by One Woman Soldier. Denver, CO: Maverick Publishers, 1989. Kochendoerfer, Violet A. One Woman’s World War II. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Pollard, Clarice F. Laugh, Cry, and Remember: The Journal of a G.I. Lady. Phoenix, AZ: Journeys Press, 1991. Pollard, Clarice F. “Waacs in Texas during the Second World War.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 93.1 (1989): 61-74. Pollock, Elizabeth R., Ruth Frances Duhme, and Page Cary. Yes, Ma’am! The Personal Papers of a WAAC Private. Philadelphia, PA, New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1943. Redmann, Betty Beyers. How Memories Are Made: The Journal of an Air WAC. Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975. Smith, Kathleen E. R., and Miller, Emily Ulrich. Lieutenant Colonel Emily U. Miller: A Biography. Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1984. Personal Narratives of service in overseas theaters include: Dammann, Nancy. A WAC’s Story: From Brisbane to Manila. Sun City, AZ: Social Change Press, 1992. Edgar, Louise E. Out of Bounds. Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance, 1950. Green, Blanche. Growing Up in the WAC: Letters to My Sister, 1944-46. New York: Vantage Press, 1987. Lutz, Alma, ed. With Love, Jane: Letters From American Women on the War Fronts. New York: John Day Company, 1945. Prior, Billy. Flight to Glory. Belmont, CA: Ponce Press, 1985. Samford, Doris E. Ruffles and Drums. Boulder, CO: Printed by Pruett Press, 1966. Spratley, Delores R. Women Go to War: Answering the First Call in World War II. Columbus, OH: Hazelnut Publishing Company, 1992. Watson, Georgia B. World War II in a Khaki Skirt. Moore Haven, FL: Rainbow Books, 1985. Weirick, Dorothy Millard. WAC Days of WWII: A Personal History. Laguna Nigel, CA: Royal Literary Publications, 1992.

308

Sources and Literature

members who include active servicewomen, women veterans, and scholars.1139

8.2 Archival Sources Federal Records in the National Archives, Washington, DC: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office (RG 94) Records of the Office of the Inspector General of the Army (RG 159) Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs (RG 165) Records of the Army Staff (RG 319) Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (RG 330) Records of the Adjutant General’s Office (RG 407)

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division: Papers of Oveta Culp Hobby, 1941-1952 Papers of Mary McLeod Bethune, 1918-1955 [Reproductions, location of originals: Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation Archive, Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, FL]

U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: Papers of Martha Wayman (Neal) Papers of Margaret Craighill, Medical Historical Unit Collection

State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts Collection, Melbourne, VIC: Mary-Agnes Brown, Lt. Col., WAC. Oral history audiotape. Interview on board S.S. Monterey, Port Melbourne, 1 Nov 1975 Papers of Sybil H. Irving, Col., AWAS

1139

[email protected].

Sources and Literature

309

8.3 Published Sources Adkins, Yolanda. Skirt Patrol: Women’s Army Corps, Army of the United States. New York: Vantage Press, Inc., 1993. Anastasi, Anne. Psychological Testing. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Anderson, Betty Baxter. Julia Brent of the WAAC: A Career Story for Older Girls. New York: Cupples & Leon Company, 1943. Angel, Joan, and Betty Utley St. John. Angel of the Navy: The Story of a WAVE. New York: Hastings House, 1943. [Anonymous]. “The Work of AA Searchlights during the Last War.” Journal of the Royal Artillery (1948): 241-52. [Anonymous: J. W. N.]. “‘Mixed’ Batteries.” Journal of the Royal Artillery (1942): 199206. [Anonymous: Two ATS AA Officers]. “Life in a Mixed Anti-Aircraft Battery.” The Army Quarterly (1943): 82. Aptheker, Herbert. The Negro in the Union Navy. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Aristotle. The Politics, and the Constitution of Athens. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bachle, Rosemary Eckroat. Women’s War Memoirs. Waco, TX: Western Heritage Books, 1999. Baker, Nancy Kassebaum. Report of the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training and Related Issues to the Secretary of Defense, December 16, 1997. http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/git/report.html#EXECUTIVE. Bandel, Betty, and Sylvia J. Bugbee. An Officer and a Lady: The World War II Letters of Lt. Col. Betty Bandel, Women’s Army Corps. Hanover, NH, Arlington, VA: University Press of New England in Association with the Military Women’s Press of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, 2004. Barraud, E. M. Set My Hand upon the Plough. Worcester: Littlebury, 1946. Barsis, Max. They’re All Yours, Uncle Sam! New York: S. Daye, 1943. BBC News. “Jessica Lynch Condemns Pentagon.” 29 July 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3251731.stm. Bell, Iris. Los Alamos WAACs/WACs: World War II, 1943-1946. [s.l.]: I.Y. Bell, 1993. Berlin, Jean V., ed. A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-1863. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Bland, Larry I, and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall. 5 Vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981-2003. Blumenthal, L. Roy, and National Jewish Welfare Board. Fighting for America: A Record of the Participation of Jewish Men and Women in the Armed Forces during 1944. New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1944. Boileau, W. “Searchlight-- A.T.S.” The Gunner (1948): 12.

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Boles, Antonette. Women in Khaki. New York: Vantage Press, 1953. Brigham, Carl C. A Study of Error: A Summary and Evaluation of Methods Used in Six Years of Study of the Scholastic Aptitude Test of the College Entrance Examination Board. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1932. Brion, Irene. Lady GI: A Woman’s War in the South Pacific. The Memoir of Irene Brion. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1997. Bruce, Jean. Back the Attack! Canadian Women during the Second World War, at Home and Abroad. Toronto, ON: Macmillan of Canada, 1985. Buchbender, Ortwin, and Reinhold Sterz. Das andere Gesicht des Krieges. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe, 1939-1945. München: Beck, 1982. Burgh, James. Political Disquisitions or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses. London: E. and C. Dilly, 1774-1775. Burstein, Herbert. Women in War: A Complete Guide to Service in the Armed Forces and War Industries. New York: Service Publishing Company, 1943. Cammermeyer, Margarethe, and Chris Fisher. Serving in Silence. New York: Viking, 1994. Campbell, Joan, and Eleanor Stoddard. “One Woman’s War: The Story of Joan Campbell, Member of the Women’s Army Corps, WWII April 1943-September 1945. Part 1.” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military (1986): 157-66. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Déja Vu: AIDS in Historical Perspective - Illustrations: Glimpses at Past Efforts to Control STDs. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features /Aids/aidspix1.html. Cashin, Herschel V., et al. Under Fire. With the Tenth U.S. Cavalry. Being a Brief, Comprehensive Review of the Negro’s Participation in the Wars of the United States. Especially Showing the Valor and Heroism of the Negro Soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries of the Regular Army; As Demonstrated in the Decisive Campaign Around Santiago de Cuba, 1898 ... Thrilling Episodes Interestingly Narrated by Officers and Men. Famous Indian Campaigns and Their Results. A Purely Military History of the Negro. With Introduction by Major-General Joseph Wheeler. New York., London: F.T. Neely, 1899. Center for Military Readiness. Hunter Admonishes Army on Women in Land Combat. 2005. http://www.cmrlink.org/WomenInCombat.asp?docID=249. Chandler, Alfred Dupont, et al., eds. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. 21 Vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970-2001. Chrisman, Catherine Bell. My War: WWII as Experienced by One Woman Soldier. Denver, CO: Maverick Publishers, 1989. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1950. ---. Vom Kriege. Bonn: F. Dummler, 1952. Cochran, Jacqueline, and Maryann Bucknum Brinley. Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography. Toronto, ON, New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Cochran, Jacqueline, and Floyd B Odlum. The Stars at Noon. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1954.

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Cook, Lauren M., ed. An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, Alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers. Pasadena, MD: The Minerva Center, 1994. Cottam, Kazimiera J. Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II. New York, Ottawa, ON: Legas, 1997. Cottam, Kazimiera J., Nikolai Vissarionovich Masolov, and Nikolai Vissarionovich Masolov. Defending Leningrad: Women behind Enemy Lines. Nepean, ON: New Military Pub, 1998. Crandell, Bradshaw, and United States. Army. Recruiting Publicity Bureau. Are You a Girl with Star-Spangled Heart?--Join the WAC Now!--Thousands of Army Jobs Need Filling! [Recruiting Poster]. 1943. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g01653. Crane, Milton. The Roosevelt Era. New York: Boni and Gaer, 1947. Dahlgren, Cyclone Forbes. We Were First: Eglin Field WWII WACS - We Heard the Guns at Wewak. Brownsville, TX: Springman-King Co., 1977. Dammann, Nancy. A WAC’s Story: From Brisbane to Manila. Sun City, AZ: Social Change Press, 1992. Davie, James C. “Evolution of the Military Uniform.” Quartermaster Review (1943): 6162, 122-24. Delmer, F. Seftton. A Military Word and Phrase Book: Sammlung militärischer Ausdrücke in systematischer Ordnung. Berlin: A. Bath, 1912. Department of Defense. Sexual Harassment Survey, Reference Number: No. 410-96. 1996. http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/1996/b070296_bt410-96.html. Dingle, Reginald James. Woman under Fire: Six Months in the Red Army: A Woman’s Diary and Experiences of Revolutionary Russia. London: Hutchinson, 1924. Dix, Dorothea Lynde. On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Dörr, Margarete. Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat: Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in den Jahren danach. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1998. Earley, Charity Adams. One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. Edgar, Louise E. Out of Bounds. Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance, 1950. Ellet, E. F., Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. The Women of the American Revolution. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848. Ellis, Havelock. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse Love and Pain. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Company, 1903. ---. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Company, 1913. ---. “Freud’s Influence on the Changed Attitude toward Sex.” The American Journal of Sociology (1939): 309-17. ---. Sexual Inversion. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Co., 1901. Ellis, Havelock. Sexual Inversion. 1915. http://www.udayton.edu/~hume/Ellis/ ellis.htm.

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---. Sexual Inversion in Women. Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 2. Philadelphia, PA, 1915. ---. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. New York: Random House, 1936. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 5. 1927. http://www.gutenberg. org/files/13614/13614-8.txt. Embser-Herbert, Melissa. “When Women Abuse Power, Too.” Washington Post 16 May 2004: 1. England, J. Merton. Women Pilots of the AAF, 1941-1944 (USAAF Historical Study No. 55). 1946: AAF Historical Office, 1946. Flint, Margaret. Dress Right, Dress: The Autobiography of a WAC. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943. Fraser, Helen, Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection . Women and War Work. New York, G. A. Shaw, 1918. Freud, Sigmund. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1905. ---. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918. ---. Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker. Leipzig: H. Heller, 1913. Gaynor, Frank. The New Military and Naval Dictionary. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951. Gossage, Carolyn. Greatcoats and Glamour Boots: Canadian Women at War (1939-1945). Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 1991. Grahn, Elna Hilliard. In the Company of WACs. Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1993. Green, Anne Bosanko. One Woman’s War: Letters Home from the Women’s Army Corps, 1944-1946. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989. Greene, Edward B. Measurements of Human Behavior. New York: Odyssey Press, 1941. Gribble, Francis Henry. Women in War. London, S. Low, Marston and Co. Ltd., 1916. Guilford, J. P., and et al. Fields of Psychology, Basic and Applied. Toronto, ON, New York, London: D. Van Nostrand, 1950. Gulick, Luther H. Administrative Reflections from World War II. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1948. Hamilton, Allan MacLane. “The Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts.” American Journal of Insanity (1895-1896): 505-07. Harper, Ida Husted. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 5. New York: J. J. Little & Ives, 1922. Harris, Mary Virginia. Guide Right, a Handbook of Etiquette and Customs for Members of the Women’s Reserve of the United States Naval Reserve and the United States Coast Guard Reserve. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944. Harten, Lucille B. “Life as a WAC: The Story of Louise Parkin.” Rendezvous (1987): 87-89. Hartzwell, Karl Drew. The Empire State at War: World War II . Albany, NY: State of New York, 1949.

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Henderson, Aileen Kilgore. Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women’s Army Corps, 1944 -1945. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Herman, Victor J. Winnie the Wac. Philadelphia, PA: David McKay Company, 1945. Hess, Fjeril. WACS at Work: The Story of the ‘Three B’s’ of the AAF. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945. Hirschfeld, Gerhard, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz. Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch: Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs. Essen: Klartext, 1993. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. [1651] New York: Dutton, 1950. Horton, Mildred McAfee. “Recollections of Captain Mildred McAfee, USNR (Ret.).” WAVES Officers in World War II. Ed. [U.S. Naval Institute]. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1971. Howard, William Lee. “Effeminate Men, Masculine Women.” New York Medical Journal (1900): 686-87. Hull, Clark Leonard, and Lewis Madison Terman. Aptitude Testing. Yonkers-onHudson, NY: World Book Company, 1928. Irwin, Will, Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. Men, Women, and War. New York: D. Appleton, 1915. Jacobs, Helen Hull. ‘By Your Leave, Sir’: The Story of a WAVE. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943. Jacoby, Harold S. Tule Lake: From Relocation to Segregation. Grass Valley, CA: Comstock Bonanza Press, 1996. Jones, Anthony R, and George R Fay. AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein, 2005. Kampfner, John. War Spin, Saving Private Lynch Story ‘Flawed’. 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm. Karpinski, Janis L., and Washington Post. Prison Abuse Scandal: Abu Ghraib. 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24845-2004May13.html. Kelly, Emma Chenault, and Alice Elizabeth Tolle. Emmaline Goes to War. Charleston, IL: BLT & J Pub., 1992. Kochendoerfer, Violet A. One Woman’s World War II. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study. Philadelphia, PA, London: F.A. Davis Co., 1892. ---. Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. Brooklyn, NY: Rebman Co., 1908. Lapiri, Rachel N., and Anita R. Lancaster. Armed Forces 2002: Sexual Harassment Survey. Arlington, VA: Defense Manpower Data Center, 2003. Library of Congress. Thomas: Legislative Information on the Internet. Bill Summary and Status for the 95th Congress. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/search.html. Lutz, Alma. ed. With Love, Jane: Letters from American Women on the War Fronts. New York: John Day Company, 1945. Léri, André, and John Collie. Shell Shock: Commotional and Emotional Aspects. London: University of London Press, 1919.

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Loesser, Frank. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition. New York: Famous Music Corp, 1942. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Discourses. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. MaHood, James, and Kristine Wenburg, eds. The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of 45 Victorian Women. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Menninger, William Claire. Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge. New York: Macmillan Co., 1948. Miller, Grace Porter. Call of Duty: A Montana Girl in World War II. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. National Library of Medicine. Visual Culture and Health Posters. 2003. http://profiles.nln.nih.gov/VC/B/B/C/F/. Nelson, Dennis Denmark. The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 17761947. [Washington, DC]: United States. Navy Dept., 1948. [New York Life]. The History of Jim Crow: Jim Crow outside the South. 2003. http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/geography/outside_south.htm. Noggle, Anne. A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994. Ogburn, William Fielding. American Society in Wartime. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1943. Oregon Writers’ Project. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps: A Program for Clubs. Portland, OR: Headquarters, Oregon Recruiting and Induction District, 1942. Ornoff, Anita Bloom. Beyond Dancing: A Veteran’s Struggle, a Woman’s Triumph. Silver Spring, MD: Bartleby Press, 2003. PBS Frontline. Rationale for Behavior. [n.d.]. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/shows/navy/tailhook/rat.html. 13 August 2003. Perdue, Bernice. WAC Confidential. New York: Exposition Press, 1963. Phillips, Harry Irving, and Herbert Roese. ... All-Out Arlene: A Story of the Girls behind the Boys behind the Guns. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1943. Pile, Frederick Arthur. Ack-Ack. London: Harrap, 1949. Pintner, Rudolf. Intelligence Testing: Methods and Results. New York: Henry Holt, 1923. Pitts, Lucia M. One Negro WAC’s Story . Los Angeles, CA: Privately published, 1968. Plutarch. Moralia. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1942. Pollard, Clarice F. Laugh, Cry, and Remember: The Journal of a G.I. Lady. Phoenix, AZ: Journeys Press, 1991. ---. “Waacs in Texas during the Second World War.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (1989): 61-74. Pollock, Elizabeth R., Ruth Frances Duhme, and Page Cary. Yes, Ma’Am! The Personal Papers of a WAAC Private. Philadelphia, PA, New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1943. Poynter, Lidya. “Dr. Mary Walker: Pioneer Woman Physician.” Medical Women’s Journal (1946): 10.

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