WAVES

WAVES. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Public Law 625 establishing a program for women in the U.S. Navy, as an integral part of the naval reserve, on 30 July 1942. The navy's newest members served for the duration of the war plus six months. On 2 August, Mildred McAfee, president of Wellesley College, became the director of the navy's female reserve and the first female naval officer with the rank of lieutenant commander. To avoid nicknames such as “sailorette,” Elizabeth Raynard, a member of the Naval Advisory Council that developed the women's program, recommended the official nickname WAVES, an acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

Women were recruited from nearly every state. Officers were trained at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The navy organized training schools for yeomen, radiomen, and storekeepers, located respectively at Oklahoma A&M College, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University in Bloomington. In February 1943, a naval station for enlisted recruits was commissioned at Hunter College in New York. WAVES could apply for more billets and were assigned to more locations than their predecessors, the 11,275 yeomen (female) who served temporarily during World War I. WAVES worked at naval shore establishments across the United States as chauffeurs, cryptologists, recruiters, and stenographers. They also filled nontraditional billets as air traffic controllers, link trainers, mechanics, and parachute riggers. About one‐third of the WAVES served in the communications and aviation communities. By 1944, the need to relieve men stationed in Alaska and Hawaii led the navy to amend the original bill that had limited WAVES to duty within the continental United States.

Nothing in the legislation prevented the recruiting of black women, yet the navy did not admit them into the WAVES until 19 October 1944. The next day, the U.S. Coast Guard also announced that African Americans could join its female reserve program, but the Women's Marines Corps remained all‐white until 1949. Two black women, Frances E. Wills and Harriet Ida Pickens, were sworn into the U.S. Navy on 13 November 1944 and were added to the last class of WAVES officer candidates to be trained. Receiving their commissions on 25 December, they became the first black female officers in the navy. The first black enlisted recruits reported to Hunter in January 1945. By 30 July, the WAVES had reached a peak strength of 86,000.

The performance of the WAVES and the other 150,000 women serving in the military services—SPAR, WAC (Women's Army Corps), WASP (Women Air Service Pilots), and the U.S. Marine Corps Women's Reserve—persuaded officials that women should have a permanent place in the peacetime military. Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine achieved that goal with the Women's Armed Services Act of 1948. WAVES continued to serve, particularly during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In 1972, Capt. Robin Quigley, assistant chief of naval personnel for women, wrote a memo discontinuing the navy's official use of the term WAVES, recommending the more accurate description Women in the Navy. This change reflected the navy's policy of integrating women. By then, the women‐in‐ships program had begun and the aviation community was opening up more jobs to women.
[See also African Americans in the Military; Women in the Military.]

Bibliography

Joy B. Hancock , Lady in the Navy, 1972.
Jean Ebbert and and Marie‐Beth Hall , Crossed Currents, Navy Women from World War I to Tailhook, 1993.

Regina T. Akers