She could not remember which one of the "girls" serving with her borrowed her typewriter and wrote it. ![]() When going through hr chests full of stuff, we came across this poem. My mother, Bettie Helen Boyce was in the Waves during WWII. By the end of the war, over 84,000 women served in WAVES with 8,000 female officers, which constituted 2.5% of the US Navy's personnel strength. In late 1944, the WAVES program began accepting African American women at the ratio of one black woman for every 36 white women enlisted in the WAVES program. Secretarial and clerical jobs still made up a large portion of WAVES positions, but thousands of WAVES personnel performed other jobs such as aviation mechanics, photographers, control tower operators, and intelligence personnel. While their WW1 counterparts served only as nurses and secretaries, these WW2-era women took up far more responsibilities. Even as President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Navy Women's Reserve Act into law on 30 July 1942, little did people know that female service in the US Navy would become something that would last far beyond the "emergency".īy mid-1943, 27,000 American women served in the WAVES program. Despite the resistance from conservative officers, however, the demand was clearly there for example, as early as Jan 1942, the Office of Naval Intelligence was recruiting female college students. The reason for that was due to political resistance from many who did not believe women had a place in the US Navy, and for the program to take place, creative intrigue had to be used. ![]() The use of the word "emergency", however, signified that when the effort to resurrect female service was in the planning stages, US Navy brass thought female service would cease when the emergency, or the war, came to and end. 23 years later, in early Aug 1942, female officer Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander Mildred McAfee was commissioned into the US Navy amidst World War II to head up the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service program (WAVES). In 1919, a small group of women served with the United States Navy as nurses, answering to male officers.
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