Station.” During this period, women actually could join the Navy, though their service life was
drastically different from the men’s. In the spring of 1917, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the
Navy, feared that the Navy was heading into war without enough manpower. Having discovered
that the wording of the 1916 Naval Act, which authorized a build-up of naval forces, did not
specifically exclude women, the Navy decided to invite women to enroll in the Naval Coast
Defense Reserve Force. Most of the women performed some form of clerical work. The women
were enrolled as Yeomen (F), (and commonly referred to as “Yeomanettes”) with the
designation “(F),” for female, ensuring that they wouldn’t inadvertently be assigned to sea duty
(Ebbert and Hall, 1993:4-10).
The Naval Reserve Act of 1925 limited enlistment to “male citizens of the United
States,” in part because some Senators feared that allowing women into the peacetime Naval
Reserve could open the door to women’s service in the Army reserve. The sex-restrictive
language was carried over into the Naval Reserve Act of 1938, meaning that at the beginning of
World War II, women were legally excluded from the Navy (ibid.:19). The Navy initially
believed it would not need to recruit women for World War II and that the Civil Service would
be able to supply additional personnel to perform the tasks that women naval personnel might do.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Navy came to realize that it was mistaken, and in July of 1942,
the new women’s service was created. To stop the newspapers from using terms like
“sailorettes” and “goblettes” to describe the naval women (“gob” was a slang term for a sailor),
Elizabeth Reynard, a special assistant to the head of the Bureau of Personnel, came up with the
acronym WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (ibid.:38).
In 1948, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act made women permanent members
of the Navy, but it restricted women from serving on ships other than some transports or hospital
ships. Very few women served on ships, and most of them who did served in a medical capacity,
rather than running the ships. Early in the Vietnam War, transport ships that had been carrying
dependents became troop transports, making women ineligible to serve on them, and when the
Navy decommissioned its last hospital ship in 1971, even nurses could no longer go to sea
(Holm, 1992: 328). By the time Martin Binkin and Shirley J. Bach completed a study for the
Brookings Institution in 1976 on women in the military, they could report that “[s]ince there are
currently no hospital or transport vessels in the fleet, all seagoing jobs are closed to women”
(Binkin and Bach, 1977:24).
17
Convention