The Army had no plans to send women other than nurses to Vietnam, but the commander
of US forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland wanted WACs assigned to his
headquarters to help deal with the war’s paperwork (ibid.:209). Over the course of the war,
about 500 WACs served tours in Vietnam. With resistance to the Vietnam War and the draft
growing, in 1967 the Pentagon decided that it would increase the size of the women’s programs
for the first time since the Korean War, by adding about 6,500 women. That same year, the 1948
legislation on women’s integration was modified; some of the restrictions on the promotion of
women officers were lifted, as was the two percent ceiling on women’s participation. Both the
Armed Services Committee and the Defense Department made it clear during the Congressional
hearings that the legal changes were not meant to change the type of jobs that women filled in
the military or to expand their roles in any way (ibid.:201).
As the military began to explore how it might successfully achieve an all-volunteer force,
it looked to women as potential substitutes for male draftees. The 1969 Army study known as
PROVIDE, Project Volunteer in Defense of the Nation, found that in order to increase the
number of women serving, the Army would have to change the image of the Women’s Army
Corp. Lt. Col. Jack R. Butler wrote, “Although today’s women are ranging further into fields of
employment previously reserved for men, they hesitate to enter military service” because of
“traditionalism by parents, males, and women themselves” (quoted in Griffith, 1996:190). Butler
recommended a publicity campaign that would demonstrate to women that “their true value to
the service is not that they are capable of replacing men, an unfeminine connotation, but that they
are women and the feminine touch is required to do the job better” and that would also
emphasize that in the Army, women and men receive equal treatment when it comes to pay,
benefits, and responsibilities (Griffith, 1996:190-191).
The Army’s Office of Personnel Operations, in response to an order by the Secretary of
the Army to reduce dependence on male soldiers, completed a study that recommended opening
more Military Occupational Specialties to women. The chief of the Office of Personnel
Operations advocated the implementation of the study’s recommendations, to “improve the
Army’s image as a pioneer and leader in equal opportunities and the ‘women’s liberation
movement,’ to place the Army in a stronger recruiting position in competition with our sister
her troops back into skirts and pumps. The director was upset when photographs of women in field uniforms
occasionally appeared in newspapers: “in the director’s view, the parents of young girls did not like to envision their
daughters in the rough, tough environment conveyed by the field uniforms; it lowered the desirability of military
service for women and the prestige of the Army as contrasted with the other services, namely the Air Force, whose
women had more feminine work uniforms” (Holm, 1992:238-239).
7
Convention