The women’s wartime workforce
The contribution American women have made to our nation’s wars goes back as far as the American Revolution when Margaret Corbin took over for her dead husband in firing cannon at British and Hessian mercenary soldiers attacking Ft. Washington. In the Civil War hundreds of women volunteered to serve as battlefield nurses, and some disguised themselves as men and fought in battles.
However, World War I was the first war in which women contributed to the war effort on a grand scale, including officially serving in the U.S. Military. Some 20,000 women served in the Army Nurse Corps, more than half of which were on the front lines, where, often dodging artillery fire and even poison gas attacks, they cared for more than 200,000 wounded American soldiers.
In France, hundreds of bilingual telephone operators, called the “Hello Girls,” facilitated communications between American officers and their French allies. Another 10,000 women, nicknamed the “Yeomanettes” (female for Yeoman), served as drivers, mechanics and electricians. Red Cross nurses also joined the war effort, working alongside the Army Nurse Corps, and back home, women in the YMCA and Salvation Army provided food and welfare services for the families of servicemen.
Further, young men going off to fight the war represented some 18 percent of U.S. jobs, which someone had to fill given the increase in domestic production necessary to support the war effort, especially production of military equipment, as well as keep the American economy running. As a result, women became factory workers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, technicians, and every other profession in which replacement workers were needed.
Which had one, longsought-after beneficial effect. As far back as the American Revolution when Abigail Adams implored her husband John to “remember the ladies,” when fashioning laws and rights at the Continental Congress, through the mid-1840s when suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony were holding women’s rights conferences, to the turn of the 20th Century, women had demanded equal rights, especially the right to vote, since that right would give them the power to acquire all other rights. Yet they had never succeeded.
Their service in WWI changed that. Having proven they were the equal of men in ability and courage, their demand to be the equal of men in terms of citizens’ rights was finally taken seriously. In 1918, before Congress, President Woodrow Wilson said, “We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil, and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
The answer to that question came this week (Aug. 18), 1920, when the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified. Bruce G. Kauffmann Email author Bruce G. Kauffmann at bruce@history lessons.net.