"Twenty years after they were finally recognized by Congress as the veterans they had been for sixty years, the first women in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, - the only military women not nurses - to serve overseas during World War One, are still
unheard of in the history books and on the world wide web.
Three hundred women were sworn into the U.S. Army as volunteers in
response to General Pershing's emergency call for bilingual
(French-English) long-distance operators to run the switchboards in the
first effort in the history of warfare to connect the foot-soldiers in
the trenches to their generals behind the lines.
These 300 women were selected for their fulfillment of the requirements,
which included the minimum age of 25 -- they were to be given the
equivalent to the men's rank of lieutenant, "same as Army Nurses," which
gave them the 'privilege' of buying their own uniforms, unlike the
enlisted men. They were addressed as "soldier," subject to
Court-Martial and to all U.S. Army regulations plus ten more that
preserved the virtue of women. They also received their mail in the
same way as all soldiers and were hospitalized with them when ill.
Several of them were under 25 --
these exceptions having been made because so few were fluent in French.
My mother was, I believe the youngest as I recall from the roster,
accepted when she volunteered because she was the only one who both
spoke French and had had three years' Bell-Telephone experience for
training long-distance operators.
She has yet another unrecognized contribution that
qualified her for the first one. She had been given the only
supervisorial position open to women at that time, when she graduated from
high school at sixteen.
Of the 300 selected and trained in New Jersey for "self-defense" in case
their behind-the-lines position were over-run, five contingents
totalling 223 women were dispatched to Chaumont, when the astonishing
news of Victory arrived on November 11, 1918.
Although these women were sworn into the Army (my mother twice, the
first time
beside her brother in Detroit) before leaving New Jersey to set sail in
March and June 1918, and although ten of them actually received a
commendation "In Grateful Recognition" from Congress, when they returned
they were told they could NOT have been sworn into the Army because only
men were allowed to be sworn in according to Army regulations.
When these women finally took a bill into Congress in 1930, they
suffered from the worst of all timing -- the Federal Government (it is
still kept a secret) was on the verge of bankruptcy. The stock-market
bust and one-third unemployment had forced a show-down with the men
veterans camped on the lawns before Congress asking only for a
fifty-dollar bonus. For Congress, it was unthinkable to add 223 women
who had served overseas to the men they had ordered to be brutally
dispersed by mounted police with billy-clubs.
Therefore these women had to be lying about their experience, as were
the male officers who had sworn them in! Even the affidavits of all
their commanding officers, including Pershing's emergency-call itself,
were conveniently lost and they were told they had been
"contract-employees" although the Army was never able to produce a
single contract.
It took sixty years for these fighting women to be recognized as
veterans, but it was not retroactive in the sense of their always having
been veterans -- they only "became" veterans as a condecension in 1978.
When one of the buildings, in which these ten women were installed, was
set on-fire, GHQ ordered them to leave and the women refused because the
calls were pouring in from the trenches and communications could not be
interrupted for their personal safety at the height of the battle
because of the order issued in consideration of their sex. The fire was
put out, or they would have been the first women casualties in combat in
the U.S. Army.
In 1978 Congress finally passed a bill
to recognize the 223 women as veterans, albeit NOT retroactive. The
story, consequently that made the papers across the country, was that
this was a benevolent concession on the part of the Congress that had
previously issued its certificate of gratitude to the ten women who had
risked their lives in the combat-zone. Of course, that certificate was
not mentioned in announcing passage of the recognition bill. Only 70
women were still alive. A general came to my parents' home in Michigan
and gave my mother her discharge papers. She joked that she should sue
for back-pay. No laughs from the general and his aides, who shifted
uneasily and glanced at the local reporter in my parents' living-room.
Minerva published a short exerpt from my 100-page research and
interviews of my mother, Oleda Christides, and of the leader of the
fight-for-recognition, Merle Anderson, in 1984, six years after the news
of the 223 women's recognition had received a one-day bonanza-coverage
across the country. Mother was buried with her military hat, the only
part of her uniform she still had. I was told that Ms. Egan-Anderson had
sent her uniform to the Smithsonian, so I'm surprised to hear that even
after the one-day recognition, they never made it into the history
books."
