‘Old’ news: Women have always served the U.S.
“I’d like to Sound Off about the elderly lady that I saw in the death notices in the [Daily} Times. And this lady during World War II went into the Army Nurses Cadet Corps and was an R.N. and helped the war effort with our wounded veterans. I wonder how many of them feminists we see today in these different marches and so forth would do such a thing. Never mind. I know the answer.” – “Old-Timer on Oxford Road” in Wednesday’s Sound Off.
I don’t think you do, “OldTimer.” I don’t think you know the answer at all.
The woman in the obituary was 94 and lived in Parkside. I’m not going to name her because I don’t want dishonor to her by using her name in any way her family might object to.
All honor to her and to the 180,000 other women who served in the Army Cadet Nurse Corps in World War II and to the many tens of thousands of other women who served in other branches and capacities in the military during that dreadful all-out war.
Women were not allowed to serve in combat then or serve on ships but in addition to nursing, they did whatever else they could to free men to go into battle. That included flying newly manufactured warplanes to the front, breaking enemy codes, driving trucks behind the lines and serving in all kinds of desk jobs back home.
Now they, like their male counterparts, are dying in record numbers every day and we need to honor them while we can.
The Parkside woman’s family asked her mourners to forego flowers and contribute to the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, www.womensmemorial.org, which has built a memorial to women in the military at the end of Memorial Drive in Arlington National Cemetery.
The organization is struggling to raise sufficient funds to build a registry of women who served in the military so they can tell their stories. Maybe “Old-Timer” will make a contribution.
But he uses the Parkside woman’s obituary to take a cheap shot at today’s young women, implying they would not have the courage to do what the young women of World War II and Korea did.
“Old-Timer” might be right that most of the women marching last Sunday would not today serve as nurses or in some other subservient, ancillary, nurturing role that he would deem a proper “woman’s place” in the military or society today.
That’s because one of the things that feminists fought for in the 1960s and
1970s and are still fighting for is the right not only to be police and firefighters but also to test themselves on the battlefield, to fly the planes, drive the tanks and fire the big guns, just like men.
Today, women are just as likely to be the “wounded veterans” who need doctors and nurses to care for them.
Let’s look at the numbers:
200,000 women currently serve in our all-volunteer military, 14 percent of the total.
Some 74,000 serve in the Army,
62,000 in the Air Force, 53,000 in the Navy, and 14,000 in the Marines.
In addition to serving in active duty, women make up 23 percent of the Reserves and 16 percent of the National Guard. There are about 2 million women veterans.
The Department of Defense lifted the ban on women serving in combat in 2013, long after women actually began finding themselves in combat situations, such as driving trucks in convoys and flying helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite that victory, women struggle with the physical qualifications for many combat jobs and they suffer sexual harassment and rape at horrendous rates in all branches, for which military men should be deeply ashamed.
Women have been on our front lines since the Revolutionary War when they were the “camp followers,” who traveled with their husbands’ regiments, doing the cooking, laundry and nursing.
Mary Ludwig Hays – Molly Pitcher – helped man a cannon at the battle of Monmouth after her husband was killed, but another “Molly Pitcher,” Philadelphian Margret Corbin, did the same thing at the Battle of Fort Washington when her husband fell. They were called “Molly Pitcher” because they were out there bringing the fighting men water as the bullets flew.
Deborah Sampson famously disguised herself as a man and fought with the Continental Army for 17 months before being wounded, discovered and discharged. Corbin and Sampson both received pensions for their service.
Women fought in disguise or served as spies in the Civil War on both sides. And no matter the war, women were always there to nurse the wounded and bury the dead.
Women were allowed to enlist in the military services or for the first time in World War I. More than 11,000 women enlisted as “yeomen” in the Navy, while the Army Signal Corps recruited 230 bilingual women to serve as switchboard operators in France.
As for those women taking part in the annual Women’s March – there are undoubtedly some military veterans in the march every year.
Our most famous living military veteran, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-lll., who lost both legs while co-piloting a helicopter in Iraq in 2004, gave an impassioned speech at the first Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017.
“This is about our country,” she told the crowd of 500,000. “I didn’t shed blood to defend this nation – I didn’t give up literally parts of my body – to have the Constitution trampled on.”
By the way, Duckworth was born in Thailand and was the first Thai-American elected to Congress, the first woman with a disability to be elected to Congress, the first female double amputee in the Senate, and the first U.S. senator to give birth while in office.
So, yes, “Old-Timer,” you probably saw women marching Sunday who would “do such as thing.” In fact, they routinely do so in greater numbers than ever before.