“This compendium of women’s bravery and accomplishments is a compelling read of firsthand accounts in U.S. military conflicts. No American woman should raise her right hand and swear to ‘support and defend’ without these haunting voices urging her to walk the trail where few have gone. Every American history syllabus should include this book as a requirement. A true inspiration!”
—Maj. Gen. Dee Ann Mcwilliams, U.S. Army (Ret.), president of Women in Military Service for America
“Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow have done a great literary service with this book—for too long, the courage and gallantry of American women on the battlefield has gone unnoticed. This is vital, superb reading.”
—Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood
“This meticulously researched book . . . allows women to speak for themselves about their experiences in American military service. It echoes with voices of many thousands of their sisters in arms.”
—Margaret Vining, curator of Armed Forces History for the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
It’s My Country Too
It’s My Country Too
Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan
Edited by Jerri Bell & Tracy Crow
Foreword by Kayla Williams
Potomac Books
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover: top image courtesy Eon Images; center image courtesy U.S. Department of Defense/Alejandro Sierras; flag image © iStockphoto.com/Ron Thomas.
Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear in Source Acknowledgments, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bell, Jerri, editor. | Crow, Tracy, editor.
Title: It’s my country too: women’s military stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan / edited by Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow; foreword by Kayla Williams.
Other titles: Women’s military stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan
Description: Lincoln NE: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054040 (print)
LCCN 2016057132 (ebook)
ISBN 9781612348315 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 9781612349343 (epub)
ISBN 9781612349350 (mobi)
ISBN 9781612349367 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Armed Forces—Women—Biography. | Women and the military—United States. | Women soldiers—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC UB418.W65 B448 2017 (print) | LCC UB418.W65 (ebook) | DDC 355.0092/520973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054040
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
It isn’t just my brother’s country, or my husband’s country, it’s my country as well. And so the war wasn’t just their war, it was my war, and I needed to serve in it.
—Maj. Beatrice Stroup, Women’s Army Corps, World War II
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Kayla Williams
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The American Revolution
2. The Civil War
3. The Spanish-American War
4. World War I
5. World War II
6. Unconventional Operations, Espionage, and the Cold War
7. Women’s Integration and the Korean War
8. The Vietnam War
9. Gender Wars
10. Desert Storm
11. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom
Epilogue
Conclusion
Source Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Further Reading
Illustrations
1. Portrait of Deborah Sampson Gannett
2. Sarah Osborn Benjamin
3. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
4. Harriet Tubman
5. Lakota contract nurses, Spanish-American War
6. Loretta Perfectus Walsh, USNR
7. ANC nurses with German bomb
8. Army Signal Corps “Hello Girls”
9. Army nurses freed from imprisonment in the Santo Tomas Internment Compound
10. WACs of the 6888th Postal Battalion
11. Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) talk shop
12. Spcs. (Gunnery) Third Class Florence Johnston and Rosamund Small, WAVES
13. Nurses after 800-mile trek behind German lines in Albania
14. Ens. Susan Ahn, USNR
15. Ten of the “Lucky Thirteen”
16. Frances Bradsher Turner, ANC
17. Lt. Sarah Griffin Chapman, NNC
18. Diane Kay Corcoran, ANC
19. Marilyn Roth, Vicki Lapinski, and Lee Wilson, WAC
20. Lt. (j.g.) Beverly Kelley, USCG
21. Lt. Col. Victoria Hudson, USA
22. Capt. Linda Bray, USA
23. M.Sgt. Linda Cox, USAF
24. Sgt. Lauren Nowak, USMC
25. Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, USA
Foreword
Kayla Williams
When I came home from Iraq and began the longer and more complicated journey back into civilian life, feelings of isolation and alienation often dominated during my interactions with people outside the military.1 I could pick out military men from across the room: the haircut, posture, set of jaw. Civilians often could, too, and the common phrase would come: Thank you for your service. Out of uniform, this didn’t often happen to me or the other women I served with. Even sporting obvious markers of military affiliation like bumper stickers or unit shirts was more likely to inspire questions about our husbands’ service, rather than our own.
Seeking to understand my new identity after the fundamentally life-altering experience of going to war, it only belatedly dawned on me that I was a veteran and shared something profound with other veterans stretching back through untold generations. Yet even in books, movies, and gatherings of fellow veterans, I still often felt invisible. Erased. My experiences questioned or subtly discounted.
My first book, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, was partly a response to this marginalization. By telling my story, I wanted to give a richer and more nuanced window into the experiences of women serving in the global war on terror. Women who served in prior eras came up to me after talks to thank me for giving voice to experiences similar to their own: “I started to think I was just crazy. No one understood what I was talking about—but you went through the same thing!” It was humbling and gratifying, but also disconcerting: surely I wasn’t the first to share these tales.
Of course I wasn’t. But stories by and of women at war were not deeply embedded into the literary canon, enacted on stage and screen, commemorated in memorials across the land. They were scattered, hidden, erased, and hard to uncover.
Until this volume.
Jerri and Tracy have assembled an incredible trove of stories dating back to the Revolutionary War that ground the service and sacrifice of women serving today and tomorrow in the broader sweep of history. Each war in which we served was also another battle to prove our worth and the legitimacy of our contributions. Roughly a quarter millennium after we fought for freedom in the Revolutionary War, that struggle was victorious: women can now serve in any job and unit for which
they are qualified.
While women today may not face the same legal and policy barriers to service that those who came before them did, they will still find much to recognize in these stories, from the astute observation from a woman who fought in the Civil War that “the biggest talkers are not always the best fighters” to a World War I nurse’s marveling at how easily humans get accustomed to sounds of “terrific explosions.” Many recount missing, years later, the sense of purpose and close relationships that developed while serving, despite the challenges and threats.
These essential stories illustrate the tremendous, ongoing effort toward full freedom and equality in which generations of women, people of color, and other minorities have been engaged since this country was founded. They are essential reading not only for military and veteran women, but for all who want a fuller accounting of how we became the nation we are becoming today.
1 This foreword was prepared in Kayla Williams’s personal capacity; the opinions expressed are her own and do not reflect the view of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.
Preface
“Too Often Women Were Viewed as Incidental”
One spring afternoon, a sailor and a Marine walked into a bar in the nation’s capital . . .
Stories with this beginning sometimes end with a bar fight. Our meeting, however, led to a yearlong collaboration and a new understanding of our combined thirty years of military service.
We began with the observation that contemporary books about military women are available and even commercially successful. But the voices of America’s women veterans rarely make it into print, and never with the same level of publicity or critical acclaim as those of their male counterparts. We felt that the public was missing something important about military women, though we weren’t sure exactly what it was. We were also frustrated that the women veterans’ stories told by others didn’t reflect our experience of service in the armed forces, or the service of other women veterans we knew. We wondered what we might discover if we told the story of women’s military service in America from the point of view of—and through the voices of—the women who had actually been there and done that.
The authors of the anthology In the Words of Women: The Revolutionary War and the Birth of the Nation, 1765–1799 note that “too often women were viewed as incidental to the men who dominated the course of momentous occurrences and affected their lives.” This has also been true of America’s view of the role of women in the nation’s defense.
When we raised our right hands and took our oaths of enlistment and commissioning during the height of the Cold War, accession training did not include information about women’s contributions to national defense. Trainers intimated or said outright that our contributions were less significant because women only served in support roles. Women didn’t command divisions, battleships, or air wings; we made only administrative policy. Men often informed us that women’s integration into the armed forces was a social experiment imposed on the military by so-called feminazis who sought equal rights for women at the expense of military readiness and the national defense. We quickly learned to explain that we never took on tough jobs to prove a point about women, or to advance women’s causes. We saw for ourselves that the services used women to fill manpower gaps, but when a critical need no longer existed, military leaders—usually men—once again restricted our roles and opportunities; but having also worked with men who supported us, mentored us, and pushed us to exceed expectations, we knew that the story that women were pawns of men who used our labor in times of crisis and cast us aside afterward was also only a partial truth at best.
In the process of writing this book, we discovered to our chagrin that we had served our country without knowing our own history. We didn’t know whose shoulders we were standing on, whose shoes we should be trying to fill, who had set the example for women’s service and leadership and what they had done, or what we might achieve if we ignored or chipped away at externally imposed limits. We certainly didn’t know how women had come to serve in the armed forces, or what our predecessors had done and endured so that we might have opportunities they did not, and so that we might contribute fully to the defense of the Constitution. Nor had we known what it cost many of them to step outside the conventional roles society prescribed for women.
After reading hundreds of military women’s memoirs, personal essays, diaries, letters, pension depositions, oral histories, interviews, and scholarly histories of women’s participation in the armed forces, we realized that the excerpts we’ve chosen can only be properly understood in historical, literary, and historiographical context. The service of our predecessors—and the ways in which they told their stories—can’t be judged by modern standards. Women veterans of previous wars, some of whose narratives sound absurdly conventional and whose perspectives seem narrow to a modern reader, were operating in a different social and political environment than the one in which we served—a world radically different from the one in which women went off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We learned that women veterans had voices. They published book-length memoirs and professional articles. Their stories had been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed as unimportant. Some even had long, distinguished literary careers (though they seldom wrote about their military experiences).
Their stories are not the stories we were told during our time on active duty. Nor are they the stories frequently told in the news media and other contemporary accounts in which women veterans are seen in limited, binary terms as either “she-roes” or “victims of the patriarchy.” Journalists, politicians, and others have appropriated women veterans’ stories for a variety of reasons. Especially in early narratives, military women’s stories were shaped and sometimes even changed to serve a political, social, or commercial agenda.
We have a different story to tell about the women who have chosen to take up the profession of arms. We believe that we have uncovered a unique historical and narrative arc—a new story about the military service of women in America.
Choosing from the stories we found wasn’t easy. We decided to include stories from women who served unofficially, before women were “allowed” to enlist or to be commissioned into the armed forces, because from the earliest days of our nation women have fought alongside men and worked to ensure that the armed forces were competently supported and equipped. We selected narratives of cooks, laundresses, spies, and medical professionals along with those of women who fired rifles, launched missiles, and dropped bombs. If a woman filled a role now performed by trained and uniformed military professionals before women were legally allowed to enlist, we felt that she deserved a place in the ranks of “veterans.” To separate fact from fiction in memoirs of women soldiers written before the twentieth century, we relied on the work of professional historians.
We looked for the stories of both officers and enlisted women to avoid creating a contribution history, which limits its focus to a handful of successful, decorated women who are acknowledged trailblazers. We wanted women currently serving and those who will follow them to see themselves and their experiences reflected in these pages. We looked beyond the writing of educated, literate women to ways that others told their stories. Illiteracy or a lack of formal education and social stigma prevented many women who served in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from writing and publishing their stories; narratives of women of color who served in those times were most often passed down orally but never committed to paper. Too many have been lost forever. To capture some part of their stories, we used transcribed pension depositions in which clerks captured women’s authentic voices, and lengthy quotes recorded by journalists.
We did not anticipate discovery of such a rich, diverse first-person record of women’s military service. However, most of the stories could only be found in out-of-print books that had been self-published or had enjoyed limited print runs; in professional journals; in unpublished manuscripts ca
refully preserved in libraries, universities, and archives; and in personal papers. We could include only a fraction of the good stories we found. We cut thousands of words of excellent prose, retaining only the stories that best amplified the themes we found in reading scholarly histories.
Frustrating gaps remain. Too many trailblazers’ stories were told only by others, often men. We ran into dead ends in our research: for example, the family of African American Civil War spy Mary Bowser discarded her diary in the 1950s, unaware of its significance. Women who served in the Korean War era—like their male counterparts, veterans of the “Forgotten War”—reintegrated into civilian society, and most chose not to talk about their experiences. We were unable to do justice to the record of women veterans of color—some of whom left excellent and candid memoirs—or to the complex intersection of race and sex that shaped their stories. We wished that more of our Coast Guard colleagues had committed their stories to paper.
We edited narratives for content and length. We removed or summarized passages that we felt were not essential to the stories. We summarized interviewers’ questions, important in oral histories and even part of the story, if done well: we preferred to focus on the voices of the women veterans they interviewed.
We restored the correct spelling to Harriet Tubman’s telling of her story to journalist Emma Telford of New York. Telford deliberately misspelled words to re-create Tubman’s “picturesque Southern dialect”—a stereotyped “Negro” accent rather than the dialect of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Tubman was raised. Restoration of correct spelling reveals Tubman as a storyteller with a sharp wit, a keen eye for description, an ear for the rhythm and music of language, and an understanding of the power of biblical allusion and metaphor in storytelling. We hope that we have accorded her words the dignity that her contribution deserves. We edited unpublished contemporary manuscripts for spelling, for punctuation, and occasionally for word use.
It's My Country Too Page 1