One spring afternoon, a sailor and a Marine walked into a bar in the nation’s capital . . .
Stories with this beginning sometimes end with a bar fight. Our meeting, however, led to a yearlong collaboration and a new understanding of our combined thirty years of military service.
We began with the observation that contemporary books about military women are available and even commercially successful. But the voices of America’s women veterans rarely make it into print, and never with the same level of publicity or critical acclaim as those of their male counterparts. We felt that the public was missing something important about military women, though we weren’t sure exactly what it was. We were also frustrated that the women veterans’ stories told by others didn’t reflect our experience of service in the armed forces, or the service of other women veterans we knew. We wondered what we might discover if we told the story of women’s military service in America from the point of view of—and through the voices of—the women who had actually been there and done that.
The authors of the anthology In the Words of Women: The Revolutionary War and the Birth of the Nation, 1765–1799 note that “too often women were viewed as incidental to the men who dominated the course of momentous occurrences and affected their lives.” This has also been true of America’s view of the role of women in the nation’s defense.
When we raised our right hands and took our oaths of enlistment and commissioning during the height of the Cold War, accession training did not include information about women’s contributions to national defense. Trainers intimated or said outright that our contributions were less significant because women only served in support roles. Women didn’t command divisions, battleships, or air wings; we made only administrative policy. Men often informed us that women’s integration into the armed forces was a social experiment imposed on the military by so-called feminazis who sought equal rights for women at the expense of military readiness and the national defense. We quickly learned to explain that we never took on tough jobs to prove a point about women, or to advance women’s causes. We saw for ourselves that the services used women to fill manpower gaps, but when a critical need no longer existed, military leaders—usually men—once again restricted our roles and opportunities; but having also worked with men who supported us, mentored us, and pushed us to exceed expectations, we knew that the story that women were pawns of men who used our labor in times of crisis and cast us aside afterward was also only a partial truth at best.
In the process of writing this book, we discovered to our chagrin that we had served our country without knowing our own history. We didn’t know whose shoulders we were standing on, whose shoes we should be trying to fill, who had set the example for women’s service and leadership and what they had done, or what we might achieve if we ignored or chipped away at externally imposed limits. We certainly didn’t know how women had come to serve in the armed forces, or what our predecessors had done and endured so that we might have opportunities they did not, and so that we might contribute fully to the defense of the Constitution. Nor had we known what it cost many of them to step outside the conventional roles society prescribed for women.
After reading hundreds of military women’s memoirs, personal essays, diaries, letters, pension depositions, oral histories, interviews, and scholarly histories of women’s participation in the armed forces, we realized that the excerpts we’ve chosen can only be properly understood in historical, literary, and historiographical context. The service of our predecessors—and the ways in which they told their stories—can’t be judged by modern standards. Women veterans of previous wars, some of whose narratives sound absurdly conventional and whose perspectives seem narrow to a modern reader, were operating in a different social and political environment than the one in which we served—a world radically different from the one in which women went off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We learned that women veterans had voices. They published book-length memoirs and professional articles. Their stories had been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed as unimportant. Some even had long, distinguished literary careers (though they seldom wrote about their military experiences).
Their stories are not the stories we were told during our time on active duty. Nor are they the stories frequently told in the news media and other contemporary accounts in which women veterans are seen in limited, binary terms as either “she-roes” or “victims of the patriarchy.” Journalists, politicians, and others have appropriated women veterans’ stories for a variety of reasons. Especially in early narratives, military women’s stories were shaped and sometimes even changed to serve a political, social, or commercial agenda.
We have a different story to tell about the women who have chosen to take up the profession of arms. We believe that we have uncovered a unique historical and narrative arc—a new story about the military service of women in America.
Choosing from the stories we found wasn’t easy. We decided to include stories from women who served unofficially, before women were “allowed” to enlist or to be commissioned into the armed forces, because from the earliest days of our nation women have fought alongside men and worked to ensure that the armed forces were competently supported and equipped. We selected narratives of cooks, laundresses, spies, and medical professionals along with those of women who fired rifles, launched missiles, and dropped bombs. If a woman filled a role now performed by trained and uniformed military professionals before women were legally allowed to enlist, we felt that she deserved a place in the ranks of “veterans.” To separate fact from fiction in memoirs of women soldiers written before the twentieth century, we relied on the work of professional historians.
We looked for the stories of both officers and enlisted women to avoid creating a contribution history, which limits its focus to a handful of successful, decorated women who are acknowledged trailblazers. We wanted women currently serving and those who will follow them to see themselves and their experiences reflected in these pages. We looked beyond the writing of educated, literate women to ways that others told their stories. Illiteracy or a lack of formal education and social stigma prevented many women who served in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from writing and publishing their stories; narratives of women of color who served in those times were most often passed down orally but never committed to paper. Too many have been lost forever. To capture some part of their stories, we used transcribed pension depositions in which clerks captured women’s authentic voices, and lengthy quotes recorded by journalists.
We did not anticipate discovery of such a rich, diverse first-person record of women’s military service. However, most of the stories could only be found in out-of-print books that had been self-published or had enjoyed limited print runs; in professional journals; in unpublished manuscripts carefully preserved in libraries, universities, and archives; and in personal papers. We could include only a fraction of the good stories we found. We cut thousands of words of excellent prose, retaining only the stories that best amplified the themes we found in reading scholarly histories.
Frustrating gaps remain. Too many trailblazers’ stories were told only by others, often men. We ran into dead ends in our research: for example, the family of African American Civil War spy Mary Bowser discarded her diary in the 1950s, unaware of its significance. Women who served in the Korean War era—like their male counterparts, veterans of the “Forgotten War”—reintegrated into civilian society, and most chose not to talk about their experiences. We were unable to do justice to the record of women veterans of color—some of whom left excellent and candid memoirs—or to the complex intersection of race and sex that shaped their stories. We wished that more of our Coast Guard colleagues had committed their stories to paper.
We edited narratives for content and length. We removed or summarized passages that we felt were not essential to the stories. We summarized interviewers’ questions, important in oral histories and even part of the story, if done well: we preferred to focus on the voices of the women veterans they interviewed.
We restored the correct spelling to Harriet Tubman’s telling of her story to journalist Emma Telford of New York. Telford deliberately misspelled words to re-create Tubman’s “picturesque Southern dialect”—a stereotyped “Negro” accent rather than the dialect of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Tubman was raised. Restoration of correct spelling reveals Tubman as a storyteller with a sharp wit, a keen eye for description, an ear for the rhythm and music of language, and an understanding of the power of biblical allusion and metaphor in storytelling. We hope that we have accorded her words the dignity that her contribution deserves. We edited unpublished contemporary manuscripts for spelling, for punctuation, and occasionally for word use.
Finally, we copyedited for conformity with the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style, with a few exceptions for standard practice in military writing: “Marine” is always capitalized!
Had our first meeting ended in a bar fight, we know who would have won.