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The industrial and technological revolution's effects were, of course, not confined to the military. Our national economic, political, and social systems have been substantially altered in this century. Among the most visible changes have been those involving the national perception of the role that women can and should play in society. The contrast between the status of women in Western industrialized nations in 1901 as opposed to 1982 is startling. Nowhere is the change more marked than in America. This development has required a sweeping change in our views on the psychological and physiological differences between the sexes. These changes, for better or worse, are overturning the conventional military beliefs and traditions accumulated over the centuries.

American women's growing emancipation has been both expedited and mirrored by their inclusion in the military services. Their progress was slow and intermittent until the decade of the 1960s. The army inducted its first women when it organized the Army Nurse Corps in 1901. The navy followed suit in 1908. Both have remained in active service to the present. Army and navy nurses did not, however, receive full military status until early in World War II.

Pressed for personnel with clerical and administrative skills during World War I, the navy was the first U.S. military service to admit women to full membership in terms of uniform, rank, and status. About thirteen thousand "Yeomanettes' and "Marinettes" were recruited. They were restricted to shore duty. Moreover, they were discharged immediately following the war. The army considered enrolling women during the war but rejected the idea. Thus, with the disbanding of the Yeomanettes and Marinettes, women in the service were again confined to the Army and Navy Nurse Corps.

During the 1920s and '30s, there was very little interest in enlisting women in the military. In 1918 the U.S. military services had roughly 4,315,000 uniformed personnel on active duty. By 1933 that number had dwindled to about 244,000. Given the size of the services and prevailing economic conditions, male recruits were available in more than ample numbers. At the same time, women who had entered the labor force in response to World War I production demands were squeezed out by the Great Depression.

The onset of World War II gave powerful impetus to the employment of women both in military service and in industry. Within ten months after Pearl Harbor, all services, including the coast guard, had formed women's auxiliary organizations. By the end of the war, 266,256 women were on active duty in the WAACs, WAVES, USMCR, and SPARs. Throughout the war, their performance was impressive. They served mostly in the United States, but about 5 percent were deployed abroad and were employed in all military theaters of operation. They were prohibited from participating in any form of combat, however, and were never assigned to locations close to the front. Moreover, they were always segregated in female-only units and detachments, never integrated into male units except for the nurses in field hospitals. In the main, they served in the so-called women's traditional skills as nurses, clerks, and communicators; they also served in small numbers in some nontraditional skills as aviation mechanics, drivers, and parachute riggers. Nevertheless, the large majority of military occupational specialties were closed to women. In May 1945 slightly fewer than 2 percent of the 12,124,000 U.S. active duty military personnel were women.

Equally impressive, if not more so, was the performance of American women in the civilian work force in World War II. Exhorted by an intensive and sustained propaganda campaign and lured by relatively high-paying industrial jobs, women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers. In 1900, 20 percent of American women over fourteen years of age were employed. They composed 18.1 percent of the total U.S. labor force. In 1940, on the eve of World War II, their participation rate had risen to 27.9 percent and they constituted 25.6 percent of the civilian labor force. Thereafter, the absolute number of women in the work force, their participation rate, and their share of the total civilian labor force increased steeply through 1944. In that year, 36.5 percent of American women over fourteen years old were at work. They then constituted more than a third of the nation's civilian workers.

In effect, women replaced men in the labor force, freeing the latter for military service. Primarily because of the influx of women, the United States was able to maintain a civilian labor force of prewar size (about 55 million workers) and, at the same time, field military forces of over 12 million. Viewed in terms of total contribution, the role of American servicewomen takes on a different perspective. At their peak strength, they composed less than 2 percent of the military forces and less than 1.5 percent of the total female work force. Had the government elected to do so, it could have employed our 266,000 servicewomen in the civilian labor force and freed an offsetting number of men for military service. Thus, without denigrating the excellent performance of U.S. servicewomen in World War II, it is clear that the United States could have just as easily fielded an all-male force. Obviously, the question in America's largest military mobilization was not whether to employ women in combat but whether to employ them in uniform at all. . .

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