Looking for Soldiers and Finding Women

In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female “wire experts” when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire. Without communications for even an hour, the army would collapse. While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Woodrow Wilson struggled to persuade a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote, these competent and courageous young women swore the Army oath. In The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers welcomed, resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Here is an excerpt from the story of how America’s first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the U.S. Army.

The army had not planned to induct women. In fact, it was far behind other armed services in this regard. The U.S. Navy had steamed ahead, abreast of the British War Department. Anticipating the war, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels realized early in 1917 that he already did not have enough sailors for ships being built under the Naval Act that President Wilson had nursed through Congress when trying to defend neutrality. If fighting commenced, the shortage would worsen. One solution was to find a new source of labor for clerical tasks so that more men could go to sea. Since ships defined navies, Daniels may have thought females could fill landlubber jobs without wounding the navy’s pride.

Secretary Daniels asked his legal counsel: “Is there any regulation which specifies that a Navy yeoman be a man?” When advised that no statute prohibited females, Daniels sent out the order: “Enroll women in the naval service as yeomen and we will have the best clerical assistance the country can provide.” (More than a third of the nation’s office personnel were then female.) Despite some skepticism, the navy obeyed its civilian secretary. On March 17, 1917, the United States became the world’s first modern nation to enlist females.

Before he joined Wilson’s cabinet, the genial Josephus Daniels was best known as a North Carolina newspaper editor. Like many Progressives in the South, Daniels walked a fine line between reform and reaction. His father had been killed for ambiguous loyalties during the Civil War, and Daniels grew up with a bone-deep understanding of the risks of nonconformity. An amalgam of contradictory impulses, he led a campaign for white supremacy at the turn of the century that disenfranchised blacks in North Carolina; two decades later, he opposed the Ku Klux Klan as overbearing and violent. But on women’s rights (or at least the rights of white women), Daniels was more consistent. His widowed mother had raised him. As a newspaperman, he had publicly supported female suffrage for several decades and married an independent, high-spirited woman who supported suffrage, too. The secretary of the navy was determined to treat his new recruits with respect.

In the month before war broke out, two hundred joined up. They were ranked yeoman (F), for female. When newspapers dubbed them “yeomanettes,” Daniels objected: “If a woman does a job, she ought to have the name of the job.” The secretary insisted on equal compensation, too. Female yeomen earned $28.75 per month, the same as men. The navy provided no housing for females, so it paid an additional $1.25 per day for billeting. Female recruits received free uniforms and medical care, and were eligible for war risk insurance. Most worked ten hours per day, six days a week, including night shifts. They wore the same insignia as men.

Volunteers had to prove little beyond their age (eighteen to thirty-five) and willingness to serve. Some started the very day they walked into a recruiting office. When one young woman called her mother in Richmond with the startling news, her mother “was stunned into silence for a moment, then asked weakly, ‘Oh, Sister, can you ever get out?’”

Parents, the navy, and the general public had mixed reactions, but opposition soon turned into unaccustomed pride. The women’s pluck, hard work, and stateside assignments mitigated criticism. So did government propaganda. In World War I, many governments communicated directly with their peoples through colorful, artistic posters that allowed citizens to visualize faraway problems in an age before television. Some showed pitiful females in need of rescue or aproned mothers skimping on bread to save food for soldiers. But another genre emerged, too: confident uniformed women embracing military service.

One of the navy’s most memorable recruitment posters featured a short-haired, flirty woman in a sailor suit, saying, “Gee!! I wish I were a man. I’d join the Navy.” Some versions of the poster included the tag line, “Be a man and do it.” But the poster went beyond shaming male “slackers.” Depicting uniformed women as especially attractive and patriotic, it undoubtedly encouraged some females to enlist.

The navy began featuring women in recruitment drives and war bond rallies. Rear Admiral Robert Coontz, head of the Puget Sound Naval Yard, told a supervisor of the female yeomen under his command, “I want people to see we have girls in the Navy.” Previously, only suffragists and temperance activists paraded en masse. Now female yeomen matched their strides to men, establishing new precedents for acceptable public behavior. After one group marched behind horses down Broad Street in Philadelphia, past Independence Hall, their drill instructor gave them an explicit lesson in the gender-neutral conduct expected of sailors confronted with manure. “You don’t kick it, you don’t jump over it, you step in it.”

Such training emboldened some young women. Like men, they yearned to serve “over there.” One Chicago clerk stopped typing, fingers poised over the leggy keys, to tell her supervisor that female yeomen wanted to go to France. The grizzled navy captain looked at her, frowned, and said, “What the hell could a girl do on a battleship? Get back to your job.”

The nickname “yeomanette” persisted despite Daniels’s protestations but may have helped some recruits reconcile their thirst for action with the uncomfortable, unfeminine implications. To the public, “yeomanette” suggested that military women were still “girls” and no one need get too alarmed. They enlisted for four-year stints with the guarantee that if the war ended sooner, they would be discharged with reserve status. Five months later, Josephus Daniels approved induction of women in the Marine Corps, then under the Navy Department. Wearing insignia identical to those of men, the so-called marinettes entered service in August 1918. They and the naval recruits were the first women admitted to full military rank by the United States. Nearly thirteen thousand joined.

The Marine Corps recruitment poster was bolder yet, showing men massed at the front and a self-confident, uniformed woman towering above them with one hand on her marine sword: “If You Want to Fight! Join the Marines.” One of the first ten volunteers was the single mother of Ginger Rogers, later famous as an actress and a dancer. Sergeant Lela Rogers wrote articles for the Marine Corps newspaper Leatherneck.

Josephus Daniels’s attitude and the spirit of his volunteers may seem extraordinary given the context, yet they were emblematic of the changing times. The war created an entirely new role for both the United States and its citizens. Americans were unused to exercising responsibility outside their borders, or middle-class women outside their homes, but events now demanded it. Citizens’ expectations were in flux. Elsewhere in the world, women were already filling unusual roles.

This was especially true of Britain, with its similar history of representative democracy and a strong suffrage movement. There the war bit deeply into population reserves. As men moved to the front, two million women replaced them in factories and offices. When evaluating the need for a draft in 1915, Parliament took the unprecedented step of requiring both sexes to register their occupations. Universal conscription of males began the next year, for the first time in Britain’s ancient history. Pushed to the breaking point, the beleaguered War Office began eyeing women in 1917.

Many suffragists supported the notion that women should help. Equal rights meant equal responsibilities. Emmeline Pankhurst called for obligatory national war service. Suddenly, her unorthodox ideas no longer sounded quite so preposterous. A renowned public speaker, the world’s most infamous suffragist told followers the vote was meaningless if Britain was beaten: “We are fighting for our existence as a nation and all the ideals for which our forefathers have fought and sacrificed in the past.” Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel Pankhurst, criticized the kaiser’s glorification of military might: “German Kultur means the supremacy of the male carried to the point of obscenity.”

British women turned the European crisis into an opportunity to demonstrate their worth as citizens. Two weeks after the war broke out in 1914, the major British suffrage organizations suspended militant action for the duration. In return, the government released all suffragettes imprisoned for civil disobedience. In British public opinion, women’s suffrage came in out of the cold. This contrasted dramatically with the decade before, when His Majesty’s government had repeatedly jailed Pankhurst, her two daughters, and hundreds of others for crimes that ranged from smashing windows and setting fires to obstructing Parliament. “I am what you call a hooligan,” the dainty, impeccably dressed Emmeline Pankhurst told an amused Carnegie Hall audience in 1909.

Now the British home secretary praised the Pankhurst matriarch as a patriot. The Ministry of Munitions even contributed £3000 to her recruitment efforts in 1914 on behalf of the British Army. For the first time, conservative spectators cheered rather than booed parades led by the Pankhursts.

The inconceivable vote became a realistic possibility. In late 1917, the British Parliament debated enfranchising male soldiers excluded by property qualifications. The last legal barriers of class tottered under the war’s weight. “Tommy,” the nickname for the common British infantryman, had finally earned a right to a say in matters of war and peace. Gender restrictions suddenly seemed less fair as well. When Viscount Peel introduced the Bill for the Representation of the People in the House of Lords toward the end of 1917, he explained that “many have been converted by services rendered by women during the war.” Other members concurred. As one argued, not only had women worked and suffered, but some had “died for their country.” Let there be no mistake, he said, without women’s “heroism, self-denial, skill and physical strength and endurance, this country would never have successfully faced the crisis.”

What were these services? Who had died?

Women’s groups certainly helped with recruiting, and Red Cross ladies knitted, sewed, and rolled bandages. Mothers, sisters, and sweethearts kept farms going to feed the country and its troops. Working women stepped into men’s shoes in war munitions plants. Some died in plant explosions, such as at №6 Shell Filling Plant in July 1918, when 139 civilians perished. Elsewhere, women handling explosives turned so yellow from exposure to toxic chemicals that they were called “canary girls.” These women held British society together in its travail and saved His Majesty’s government. Suffragists pointed to them as examples of civic solidarity.

But the impulse that expressed common purpose more dramatically — and rattled the gilded cage of Edwardian gender relations more alarmingly — than anything else was women’s willingness to shoulder the military burdens of the Tommies fighting in France. Britain’s uniformed women overseas provided the most conspicuous example of the kind of service that impressed Parliament, even while triggering ambivalence and prompting efforts to stem change. Desperate for personnel, Britain began recruiting women around the same time as the U.S. Navy. However, its terms were less egalitarian. Officials in the War Office took care to avoid any implication that women were “real” soldiers.

The British government recruited the first members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in March 1917 and established the service officially in July. WAACs worked in France as cooks, mechanics, clerks, dockworkers, and switchboard operators to free males for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). They retained civilian status to protect men’s morale — and women’s morality. They were paid less on the pretext that they accomplished less. The orders establishing the women’s corps specified that four female clerks equaled three male soldiers. The insignia on their khaki uniforms depicted roses and fleur-de-lis rather than army crowns, crosses, and bars. Press releases emphasized the women’s femininity. Privately, some officials questioned whether those who volunteered could possibly be the most moral girls. The War Office forbade WAACs from saluting or being saluted.

British posters featured apple-cheeked women beckoning wholesomely to female viewers to join the WAACs and become “the girl behind the man behind the gun.” German bombs killed nine WAACs a year later in France. The women were buried with full military honors. The Times of London wrote that they had “confirmed their right to khaki.” Queen Mary adopted the unit, thereafter called Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Treated with a mixture of respect, paternalism, suspicion, and gratitude, more than eighty thousand served for the duration. They were a highly visible fraction of Britain’s Army of five million.

Newspapers across the United States eagerly reported on the patriotic women who inspired the British Army to modify its “masculine traditions.” Before the war, “the only military sphere for which women were thought eligible was nursing the sick and wounded,” one Georgia newspaper told readers. Now, under the supervision of their own noncommissioned female officers, women drove ambulances, ran printing presses, and dug graves.