Women Soldiers in the U.S. Army: When did it become legal?

Not until July 1, 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a compromise bill passed by the U.S. Congress to establish the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) giving women full military status. 

​1943.  How come it took so long?
 
After all, hadn’t women

• practiced home defense on the frontier since Colonial days, provided civilian laundry, cooking, sewing, and nursing services to the U.S. Army since the American Revolution, and enlisted legally with full military rank & status in the Navy & the Marines during World War I?

 
Moreover, didn’t Congress establish

• the Army Nurse Corps in 1901, and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in May 1942? 

 
​And what about

• the “Hello Girls” of World War I -- 223 telephone operators who were bilingual in English and French and who--at the request of General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing--were sent to France;
• the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) -- 1,102 civilian women pilots during World War II who thought they, like the women of the WAAC, would eventually be granted full military status in the Army;
• and the--

WAC Recruiting Ad - Life magazine, September 11, 1944

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​All true, but...
 
As the historian Mattie E. Treadwell explained in The Women’s Army Corps, members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) did not receive the same pay, rank, or benefits as male soldiers—a major problem since women in the Marines and the Navy were integrated. 
 
The U.S. Congress did take the daring step in 1901 to create the Army Nurse Corps “with somewhat the same status as the later Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.”   Congress did not see fit, however, to grant “full military rank to [Army] nurses until 1944, a year after the WAAC ceased to exist and women were legally admitted to full Army status and rank as the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).”

What about the “Hello Girls” who deployed with the Signal Corps in World War I believing they were in the Army?  The women returned home to the astonishing discovery they most certainly were not. 

And the civilian WASPs of World War II?  The war ended without Congressional approval for their integration into the Army. 
​
Veteran status for the “Hello Girls” and the WASPS was not granted until 1977.
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WAAC Recruiting Ad - McCall's magazine, 1943

WAAC Recruiting Ad

The charms of pacifism.  It wasn’t as though no one in the Army ever considered the possibility of creating a women’s service corps.  Treadwell tells us that after the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920,

• “It soon began to appear to the Army, as well as many female leaders, that the mass of American women were dangerously susceptible to the charms of pacifism….”

 
To counter this danger, the Secretary of the Army created a new position in 1920:  Director of Women Relations, United States Army, with an office in the G-1 Division of the General Staff.  The director’s mission would be to build relationships with powerful women’s groups in the United States as well as

• to teach women voters that the Army was a “progressive, socially minded human institution,” and

 

• to convince the ladies that they should not “fanatically demand the dissolution of a ruthless military machine.”

​The first appointee lasted one year.

Miss Phipps and the 1st complete, workable plan. 
Her successor, Miss Anita Phipps (the daughter of an Army family) believed her predecessor left “due to the lack of support given her.”  After nearly five years of building relationships with women’s groups, compiling how both the American and British had utilized women during World War I, and discussing future options, Miss Phipps proposed in 1926 the first complete and workable plan for a women’s army corps.   Her plan focused on proving personnel needs.  Miss Phipps also proposed full military status for women in the Army. 

The General Staff rejected it.
​
Undeterred, Miss Phipps carried on; by 1929 she secured tentative approval of a plan that ultimately failed due to lack of support.  In 1930, in ill health, she made a final appeal to the Secretary of War to define her duties.  Nothing came of it.  She resigned. 

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WAC Recruiting Ad - Life magazine, 1944

In 1931, the “new Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, overrode a favorable G-1 opinion and informed the Secretary of War that he considered the director’s duties to be of ‘no military value.’”
 
Major Hughes.  Meanwhile, in 1928 the Army appointed Major Everett S. Hughes as the chief Army planner for a women’s service corps.  The practical Hughes plan--created in 1928 and revised in 1930--likewise recommended a women's corps in the Army.  Major Hughes focused on the psychological and managerial aspects of incorporating vast numbers of women into the men’s house of the Army.  He emphasized that prior to an outbreak of a war, male decision makers must be trained in understanding the problems of the militarization of women, and females who would help the men make the decisions must be trained in how the Army thinks. 

• “If the women who were to lead the new corps were ignorant, said Hughes, ‘this ignorance, coupled with man’s intolerance, may be fatal.’”
• "Why not take the whole step and do the thing right?" he wrote.​

​Mattie Treadwell goes on to write,

• “Major Hughes prophetic efforts were…buried so deep in the files that they were recovered only after the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was six months old and Army planners had already made most of the mistakes he predicted.”  

Auxiliary.  U.S. Army planning for a women’s service corps stalled until the war in Europe began in 1939.  The new planners seemed unaware of the worthy efforts of Miss Phipps and Major Hughes, but they did agree women would not be given full military status in the Army.  Indeed, opposition in the Army and in Congress ran so strong against the notion of women in the Army that Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers revised her original intention, and in May 1941 introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps rather than a Women’s Army Corps. 

​That word auxiliary…
 
Auxiliary meant the women were not in the Army at all.  Women in the WAAC did not enlist, they either enrolled or were appointed. 

WAACs were simply a group of women working alongside soldiers—a situation the Army’s Judge Advocate General “feared—all to accurately as it later proved—legal complication in an auxiliary.”  

World War II triggers action.  ​The United States entry into the war in December 1941 spurred consideration of the contributions women might make.  Amid great controversy, the U.S. Senate approved Mrs. Rogers’ bill on May 14, 1942, to establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.   President Roosevelt signed it the following day, and a whirlwind of activity ensued to implement what the new law permitted. 
 
The success of the WAAC could not quell the negative attitudes of the male soldiers, family members, and Americans-at-large who not only refused to accept the notion of a female soldier, but also maligned the members of the WAAC. 
 
The "Slander Campaign."  What came to be known as the "Slander Campaign" exploded with such virulence that in June 1943
​

• ​“a full-scale investigation of possible Axis influence in the rumors was launched by the Army’s Military Intelligence Service….” 

The resulting report concluded that the despicable rumors concerning

• “the morality of WAAC personnel followed a line of rumors already widely circulated by…Army personnel, Navy personnel, Coast Guard personnel, businessmen, women, factory workers and others.  Most…have completely American backgrounds.” 

The WAC:  legal for the duration plus six months. Although many Americans opposed adamantly the notion of women soldiers, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers rallied those who did see the need for change.  Her amended compromise bill survived the Congressional gauntlet, and on July 1, 1943, the Women’s Army Corps was established

• “for the period of the present war and for six months thereafter or for such shorter period as the Congress by concurrent resolution or the President shall prescribe.”

 
The Act that created the Women’s Army Corps in 1943 also repealed the legislation for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. WAAC personnel had to choose either honorable discharge from the WAAC or immediate enlistment in the Women’s Army Corps.  

No one knew how many women would choose discharge.  Ultimately, more than 75 percent of the enrolled WAACs chose to enlist in the WAC.
 
What the legislation establishing first the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and then the Women’s Army Corps could not do was guarantee the acceptance of women soldiers by the men of the Army.
 
Why it took so long for women to become legal soldiers in the U.S. Army.  ​Mattie Treadwell emphasized that the foot dragging and heated debate about the entry of women into the Army boiled down to what Army psychiatrists later noted,

• “in order for women to gain an active participation in military activities it was necessary for man to change his basic concept of the feminine role, to overcome his fear of ‘women generals.’”

 
The women of the WAAC and the WAC served admirably to help win World War II.  The women also shared two other major battles:  survival and acceptance in the role they chose to carry out.   The fight for equality would have to wait.

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​Notes:
"Women in the U.S. Army:  When did it become legal for women to be soldiers?" compiled by Lynne Schall from the following sources.

1. An Act to establish a Women's Army Corps for service in the Army of the United States, 78th Congress, 1st Session - Chapter 187- July 1, 1943  (https://www.locgov/law/help/statutes-at-large, accessed April 27, 2018).
2. Sarah Byrn Rickman, "A History of the Women Airforce Service Pilots," National WASP WWII Museum, Sweetwater, Texas,
   (http://waspmuseum.org, accessed April 30, 2018).
3. Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, Special Studies, U.S. Army in World War II, Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.,1954.
4. WAAC recruiting advertisement, "My Jim would be proud of me!" full-page magazine ad. 
5. WAAC recruiting advertisement,  "How WAAC Officers Are Selected," full-page ad, ?Collier's magazine, January 23, 1943?
6. WAC recruiting advertisement.  ""I'd rather be with them--than waiting for them," full-page ad.
7. WAC recruiting advetisement.  "Mine eyes have seen the glory..." full-page ad, Life magazine, 1944.​​

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