But even once planners grasped the difficulty of fighting a two-ocean war using only men, the idea of putting women in uniform remained controversial. “Who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?” thundered one congressman. People worried that military service would imperil women’s femininity and render them unmarriageable. Many believed servicewomen would be, in effect, fully embedded “camp followers,” a euphemism for prostitutes and hangers-on who followed soldiers from post to post.
But General Marshall did see the advantage of having women doing clerical and encoding work. Like so many, Marshall believed women were well suited to telecommunications, being dexterous and willing to do work that was boring and routine, and he felt they would make fewer mistakes than men did. President Roosevelt signed the WAAC bill into law in May 1942, a mixed victory in that women were allowed into the Army on an “auxiliary,” or inferior, basis. WAACs were paid less than men and did not hold the same ranks or receive the benefits. Some of this disparity would be rectified when “auxiliary” was dropped in 1943 and the WAACs became WACs, but women were by no means equal. The WAACs, coming first, bore the brunt of negative publicity, enduring gibes about their chastity and criticism of their morals and motivation for joining.
Even so, they fell over themselves to enlist. 10,000 WOMEN IN U.S. RUSH TO JOIN NEW ARMY CORPS, wrote the New York Times on May 28, 1942, noting that at a single recruiting office in New York, fourteen hundred women put in requests for applications in person by the end of the first day, and another twelve hundred by mail. “Mild brute strength was used to combat the feminine forces,” the reporter noted with a flourish of purple prose. “A guard’s broad shoulders held back the tidal wave of patriotic pulchritude.” The Army women were barred from serving as combatants but did fill important ancillary posts. They served as drivers, accountants, draftsmen, cooks, occupational therapists, encoders. They dispelled stereotypes. Despite fears that women would become hysterical in emergencies or that female voices were too soft to be heard, WACs worked in airplane control towers and did well.
Emboldened, Congresswoman Nourse Rogers also began working on the U.S. Navy, which was a tougher nut to crack. As early as December 1941 she had called on Admiral Nimitz (who at the time was chief of the bureau of navigation, which handled personnel) to urge the Navy to establish its own women’s unit. He was not enthused, nor was the rest of the old guard. When Nimitz polled the naval bureaus—the branches of the Navy—only two were receptive. These were the code-breaking operation, which of course already had civilian women, and the Bureau of Aeronautics. The open-mindedness of the aviators was thanks in part to the efforts of Joy Bright Hancock, a former yeomanette who worked to persuade the Navy to allow women to train as mechanics for airplane engine repair and maintenance. She was also a trained pilot.
In May 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt urged the Navy to get a move on. So did First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, joined by advocacy groups such as the American Association of University Women. Barnard’s Virginia Gildersleeve and other college leaders also pushed. It was an uphill battle. “If the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women,” Gildersleeve acidly remarked later.
The chair of the Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs argued that “admitting women into the Navy would break up homes and amount to a step backward in civilization,” as Gildersleeve put it. Elizabeth Reynard, a tiny but flinty English professor from Barnard, was appointed special assistant to the chief of naval personnel, Admiral Randall Jacobs. It was her job to try to make this work. But even she was shocked when she received from Jacobs what would become a famous telegram: “Women off the port and starboard bows. Visibility zero. Come at once.”
In July 1942, Roosevelt signed the law creating a women’s naval reserve, which aimed “to expedite the war effort by releasing officers and men for duty at sea.” The women were politic in victory. It was Barnard’s Elizabeth Reynard who came up with the acronym WAVES—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service—and every word was chosen with care. “Volunteer” assured the public that women were not being drafted, and “emergency,” as Gildersleeve characterized the strategy, “will comfort the older admirals, because it implies that we’re only a temporary crisis and won’t be around for keeps.”
The Navy women were not an “auxiliary,” a term that overtly confers lesser status, but a naval reserve like the men’s. They were “in” the Navy, not just “with” the Navy, a key win. But there remained many inequities. Women reservists were entitled to the same pay as men, but not to retirement benefits. At the outset they could not hold top ranks. Mildred McAfee, the charismatic president of Wellesley, accepted appointment as director of the WAVES. She was a lieutenant commander at first, promoted to captain in 1943. She was often cut out of decisions, however, and deprived of the support needed to navigate a crafty and hidebound naval bureaucracy. Good-humored and beloved by the women who served under her, she joked that the attitude of her male colleagues was like that of the eighty-eighth psalm: “Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.”
The architects of the effort bumped up against lingering subterranean resistance during lengthy meetings over things like uniforms. Virginia Gildersleeve would later recall that at one, a “handsome young lieutenant” ventured that the women’s uniform should not be navy blue like the men’s. “I saw the faces of the women around the long conference table light up with faint, repressed smiles at this somewhat revealing opening gambit,” wrote Gildersleeve. Even after it was allowed that Navy women could wear navy blue, the service balked at letting the women have gold braid. It was proposed that the women wear a uniform piped with red, white, and blue. McAfee, appalled, thought this so gaudy that it looked like a “comic opera costume.”