In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France at General Pershing's explicit request. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Wilson struggled to persuade a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote, these courageous young women swore the army oath and settled into their new roles. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers wooed, mocked, and ultimately celebrated them.The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920, the year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. When they sailed home, they were unexpectedly dismissed without veterans' benefits and began a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979."What an eye-opener! Cobbs unearths the original letters and diaries of these forgotten heroines and weaves them into a fascinating narrative with energy and zest." âCokie Roberts, author of Capital Dames "This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country's first female soldiers." â New Yorker "Utterly delightful⊠Cobbs very adroitly weaves the story of the Signal Corps into that larger story of American women fighting for the right to vote, but it's the warm, fascinating job she does bringing her castâŠto life that gives this book its memorable charisma⊠This terrific book pays them a long-warranted tribute." â Christian Science Monitor "Cobbs is particularly good at spotlighting how closely the service of military women like the Hello Girls was tied to the success of the suffrage movement." âNPR
MERLE EGANâS full adventure spanned nearly one hundred years. The day she met with a newspaper reporter in August 1979, at age ninety-one, she wore the earrings explicitly forbidden when she served with the U.S. Signal Corps during the Great War. At that time, army rules prohibited any jewelry other than rings while in uniform, which meant no accessories except in oneâs quarters. It was the only place a uniform was not required. Even there, soldiers might wear civilian clothing only âwhen not receiving visitors.â1 So there was really no point to earrings. Aluminum dog tags on a string were the closest thing to personal decoration.
Although Merle told the reporter that she didnât care if the army gave her a proper ceremony, she certainly did. She had fought too hard, too long. Once leery of modern feminism, she now championed the National Organization for Women.
They were clip-on earrings, the sort her generation preferred. Merle wore them whenever she had her picture taken, such as when she spoke to elementary schools near the retirement home, telling the forgotten story to eager, upturned faces and showing them the doll with the smart blue uniform she had sewn.2 She had attached the buttons from her own jacket and the metal insignia from the collar: a torch of gold between crossed wigwag flags above the initials âU.S.â The Signal Corps was a small branch of the army with its own mottoâPro patria vigilans (watchful for the country)âand song, its lyrics promising to âspeed the message day or night.â
The plastic doll wore no earrings, and its only concession to fashion were the black high heels painted on by the manufacturer. If Merle had had the talent, she would have cobbled a pair of regulation boots like the ones that had given her such trouble when she crossed the Atlantic on the Aquitania, praying a German torpedo would not send her and seven thousand doughboys to the bottom.
Now, compelled by Congress, the U.S. Army was at last ready to recognize her service. But was she ready for them? Why hadnât she accepted the armyâs invitation to go to Washington, D.C.? Perhaps she was still too mad at those who dared forget Grace Banker.
Merle turned to the reporter in the legal office of her friend and champion Mark Hough. âIâm surprised at them,â she said. âHere they ignored us all these years, tried to pretend we didnât exist. Now they want to make a festival of it.â3
Hough directed the conversation to a loftier plane. The secretary of the army, Clifford Alexanderâthe first African American to hold the positionâmight attend the ceremony. âItâs not final yet,â he said, but if Secretary Alexander came, Merle and âthe relatives of those women who died before recognition was achievedâ would be invited.
Merle broke into a smile and hugged the sweet-faced man, a boy to her at age thirty-four. âWe couldnât have done it without him,â she told the reporter.
And so she would wait. Mark Hough would call with the news. But it would be on an instrument very different from the receiver that President Woodrow Wilson had pressed to his ear when she connected him to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919.
At the outbreak of World War I, no one imagined its unintended consequences for women in the United States and elsewhereâcertainly not the U.S. president.
In 1914, Woodrow Wilson opposed womenâs suffrage, the most dramatic of the demands activists had been making since the Seneca Falls Convention sixty-six years earlier. A whole generation had lived and died since Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott called the assembly to discuss womenâs rights after finding themselves shunted behind a curtain at a London antislavery meeting to protect their modesty against their wishes. They had sailed thirty-five hundred miles to tackle the most important political issue of the day, only to be treated as an embarrassment.
Not that Woodrow Wilson wasnât progressive. He was a fervent Progressive who supported most innovations: the eight-hour workday, nature conservation, progressive income taxes, use of the secret ballot (known as the Australian ballot for its point of origin), and so on. In 1899, before his political career took off, Wilson wrote that government could improve America âby forbidding child labor, by supervising the sanitary conditions of factories, by limiting the employment of women in occupations hurtful to their health, by instituting official tests of the purity or the quality of goods sold, by limiting the hours of labor in certain trades, [and] by a hundred and one limitations on the power of unscrupulous or heartless men.â Like many politicians, he paid close attention to the social reforms sweeping the country and rode the wave to power.4
Yet Wilson drew a line at votes for women, which violated the laws of nature, he thought. Female political activity was both offensive and ludicrous. It violated propriety. Only loose women, or old, used-up women, drew attention to themselves outside the home.
Wilson opposed female voting throughout his presidency of Bryn Mawr, a womenâs college whose students he found vacuous, and during his subsequent governorship of New Jersey. In his 1912 campaign for U.S. president, he told a colleague that he was âdefinitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage; womanâs place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent to him.â6
Most men felt the same. So did many women, who constituted the backbone of antisuffrage organizations. The seclusion and subordination of females was centuriesâ old. In the same year that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited disenfranchisement because of ârace, color, or previous condition of servitude,â a founder of the University of California commented that reforms like abolition rectified terrible historical abuses, but proposals such as womenâs suffrage trifled with biology. They courted disaster, theologian Horace Bushnell warned.7
Most nations never confronted the problem of enfranchising former slaves, but all wrestled with the vote for women. It was its own kind of world war, though largely nonviolent. Of the tiny handful of governments that allowed any democratic participation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, none welcomed females. In enlightened England, prominent men vilified political women as âfilthy witchesâ and âhyenas in petticoats.â8
Female suffrage was so controversial that it was the only plank of the 1848 Seneca Falls âDeclaration of Sentimentsâ that failed to pass the convention unanimously. Even Lucretia Mott, the elderly Quaker who called the gathering along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, quailed at the possibly deleterious effects on the gentler sex: âFar be it from me to encourage women to vote or take an active part in politics in the present state of the government.â9
Ridicule met those who dared. As the New York Herald described an 1853 meeting of suffragists, âThe assemblage of rampant women which convened at the Tabernacle yesterday was an interesting phase in the comic history of the Nineteenth Century ⊠a gathering of unsexed women, unsexed in mind, all of them publicly propounding the doctrine that they should be allowed to step out of their appropriate sphere.â When a British suffragist chastised David Lloyd George in 1908ââWe have waited for forty years!ââthe leader of the Liberal Party replied to the amused crowd, âI must say the lady rather looks it.â10
Even women sympathetic to the cause recoiled at suffragists who paraded in public. Few females wanted to be seen in the way Australian activist Louisa Lawson described the stereotype of a womenâs rights advocate in 1900: âan angular, hard-featured, withered creature, with a shrill, harsh voice, no pretense to comeliness and spectacles on the nose.â11 Few wished to risk the security and love that came from attracting a worthy husband.
In 1910, Dutch suffragists chose not to walk in their own parade, anxious to avoid âmaking a spectacle of themselves.â Instead they pinned posters and banners to wagons and cars that male coachmen drove through the streets for them. In subsequent processions, as they became bolder, activists marched in demure folkloric costumes with white caps and wooden clogs to appeal to Dutch nationalism and cloak their controversial message in images of faithfulness, domesticity, and tradition.12
In countries under colonial rule, which described much of the world at the time, women walked an even higher tightrope. Egyptian women who wanted to be part of the independence movement had to contend first with the resistance of their own men. One of these women was fortunate to have a husband who read her statement aloud to a 1910 convention calling for Egyptian sovereignty, since she was not allowed to appear in mixed gatherings. Veiled women marched against British rule in March 1919, claiming their right to public space as well as an autonomous country. After independence in 1922, they demanded the vote. In 1923, feminists Huda Shaârawi and Saiza Nabarawi uncovered their faces in an Egyptian train station as a political act.13
Opponents of suffrage warned that feminism was un-American and would lead women astray. Ex-president Grover Cleveland told the Ladiesâ Home Journal in 1905 that the vote would have âa dangerous, undermining effectâ on proper women. The suffrage movement, he said, was âso aggressive, and so extreme in its insistence, that those whom it has fully enlisted may well be considered as incorrigible.â15 The New York State Association Opposed to Women Suffrage warned in 1908 that civic life would be âdisruptive of everything pertaining to home life.â Women who rejected the vote embodied the highest values of âAmerican Institutions, American Ideals, and American Homes,â the New York organization claimed. It praised a kindred group in England: âThe wiser women of Britain, the women opposed to the extension of the parliamentary franchise to women, are doing the right thing.â16
Aside from the fear that politics desexed and degraded women, a central argument against political equality was that women were physically unequipped for a citizenâs duties, particularly the obligation to defend oneâs country. Citizenship brought responsibilities with privileges.
As a British opponent of suffrage put it in 1907, âWomen are quite as capable of expressing an opinion on political questions as men are, but they are not capable of enforcing it, they are physically disqualified.â17 In struggles involving contests of strength, women depended on men. If a nation could not oblige females to forfeit their autonomy, dress in uniform, and risk their lives, why should they enjoy equal privileges with those who did?
Bringing women into government also threatened to âsissifyâ nations at a time when international rivalries seemed to require virile men. Public leaders like Theodore Roosevelt cautioned against weaklings and pacifists whose fear of strife could rot a great nation âby inches.â The turn of the centuryâan era when social Darwinists argued that only the fittest survivedâwas not the time to bring swooning damsels into government.18
âThe primordial argument against giving woman the vote is that the vote would not represent physical force,â a British author agreed in 1913. Enfranchising voters who had no capacity to defend the state endangered it. For âit is by physical force alone and by prestigeâwhich represents physical force in the background, that a nation protects itself against foreign interference ⊠and enforces its own laws.â Chaos would result. Nothing could âmore certainly lead to war a...