Still, many Americans persisted in the view that military women were just prostitutes in uniform, admitted into the military to service the men. It was an old slander that had been used against the yeomanettes in World War I. There were other resentments. Sometimes WAVES were confronted by mothers unhappy that their sons were being sent into combat, thanks to the women coming in to work in the desk jobs. But others thought the WAVES were wonderful and would invite them home for milk and cookies or holiday meals.
The Navy was sensitive to what was being said about its women. The fine print said an enlisted member of the WAVES had to be at least five feet tall and weigh ninety-five pounds. It also stated that she had to be a woman of “good conduct.” Many got the sense that the Navy had some unwritten criteria regarding looks. Millie Weatherly was a telephone operator in North Carolina and went to the recruiting office with a friend. They took Millie but wouldn’t take her friend, saying that “she wasn’t pretty enough.”
Basic training was a learning experience in more ways than one. On the train to Cedar Falls, Betty Hyatt, who up to then had never left rural South Carolina, wondered aloud “what a Jewish girl looks like” and learned to her mortification that the girl beside her, angry and offended, was Jewish. She hastily apologized. Up to that point she had never met anybody who was Jewish or Catholic. At Cedar Falls, the tables were turned and she took grief for being southern. Since southerners were considered slow, her teacher remarked upon how odd it was that Betty was the fastest typist in the class. She flunked the swim test, but—having taken the IQ test—was told she was being given special dispensation and sent to Washington. When she asked if she had passed the intelligence test, the commander replied, in effect: “Did you ever.”
The women officers continued to train at Smith and Mount Holyoke, but by February 1943, boot camps for enlisted WAVES were consolidated on the campus of Hunter College in the Bronx, which could hold five thousand women at a time. Some ninety thousand women went through six weeks of basic training at the USS Hunter. Residents of nearby apartments were evicted to house them. The Navy now saw how valuable these women were. Many bureaus were clamoring for as many WAVES as could be made available. The women began working as gunnery instructors, storekeepers, pharmacists’ mates, and instructors showing male pilots how to use the flight simulators known as “Link trainers.” A single bureau might take an entire graduating class. The code-breaking unit had to compete to get them.
For the women, coming to New York was a revelation. Many southerners had never seen a northern city. Women from small towns were afraid the subway would swallow them up. Even women from Minnesota found the East Coast cold—the wetness, the way it went through your bones—to be shocking.
Jaenn Magdalene Coz, the librarian from California, traveled east on a five-day troop train and alighted into ankle-deep New York snow wearing only her thin civilian clothes, which were soon boxed up and sent back to her parents. She was left-handed but had been forced to use her right hand in school, so she had trouble discerning left from right, and this made marching difficult. On Christmas night, her unit was marching through wet Brooklyn slush and she felt so cold and homesick that she started to cry. The petty officer told her to shut up. As punishment for crying, she was made to mop the dirty snow from the hallways of the apartment building. During training, she asked to be sent back to California and stationed in San Francisco. She was sent to Washington, D.C., instead.
Other women were in for shocks of a different nature. Ronnie Mackey had grown up in a big family in Delaware; her father favored home remedies and she had rarely seen a doctor, so the physical exam came as a surprise. At the gynecological station, she put her feet in stirrups for the pelvic examination. The nurse said, “Put your head down and be quiet,” but she tensed up so that the gruff Navy doctor ventured that with muscles like that, she must be a swimmer or a football player. It also came as a shock when they were sitting in a room waiting to go on “shore leave”—the naval term for a break—and an officer told them they could stop at the prophylactic station. She was convent educated and did not know what “prophylactic” meant.
The WAVES by mid-1943 were a big deal. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia loved to watch the Hunter College women on parade. He would call at the last minute and say he wanted to bring an ambassador or other foreign dignitary, and the women would drop what they were doing and muster. There were reviews every Saturday morning, with a Navy brass band, a WAVES drum and bugle corps, and a color guard proudly carrying the wave-blue flag of the USS Hunter. Barnard’s Virginia Gildersleeve visited often. She found the parades to be useful sociological studies, involving “a remarkable cross section of the women of the United States of America, from all our economic and social classes, from all parts of the country, and from all our multitude of racial origins and religions.” Glad of the chance to study what America’s collective womanhood looked like, she found it looked different from what popular culture and the Hollywood movie industry led her to expect. Standing in the street watching the women march past, she was surprised to note there were not as many blondes as she thought there would be, and the women were shorter than she expected.
It was not only women from rural families who had their horizons expanded. Jane Case was the daughter of Theodore Case, a physicist whose own contributions to communications technology—he pioneered sound in movies and worked during World War I to develop the Navy’s ship-to-shore communications—had made him a wealthy man. Jane grew up in a huge house in Auburn, New York, where she had been crushingly lonely. Her mother was insecure and belittled Jane, making her conscious of her imperfections, such as highlighting her nearsightedness by snatching the glasses off her face. Jane, to her relief, was sent away to the Chapin School on the Upper East Side of New York City. While she loved it there, she hated Manhattan high society. It was stuffy and boring, and elite boys at their boarding schools would lazily throw darts at women’s dance invitations to determine which they would accept. The social scene was brutal. Pearl Harbor cut short her debutante season.