This segment is part of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum’s History at H9 series; a monthly historical presentation on a variety of topics provided at their annex and special collections facility aboard Naval Station Norfolk. In this segment, museum volunteer Jim Leuci, MCPO, USN (Ret.) provides a historical presentation about Women in the Navy from the Vietnam War through 1972. (US Navy Video by Max Lonzanida/Released)
Transcript
By the mid ’60s the Vietnam War has come along. And the Army had women serving overseas, a lot of medical battalions or hospitals, there were enlisted women that went. The Navy at this point was only sending nurses over to hospitals. We weren’t sending any enlisted women. And any women other than nurses had to have approval by the Chief of Naval Personnel to have orders to go to Vietnam. And they were basically, didn’t want to send them. However, there would be some that would go later on. Some of the laws changed in 1967. That cap of 2% of women in the Navy went away. The law was also changed to allow women to be, to keep their permanent rank above commander when they retired. And it also allowed women to be appointed as flag officers but not selected. Their process of being promoted was, it was a direct appointment where males were going through a selection process as they do today. But it didn’t change the law that barred women from going to sea. Women were still barred from going to sea unless you were on a transport ship or a hospital ship. But around this time, ’67, ’68 there were no more of those in commission. And this was actually the law that, as it read, that barred women. Women may not be assigned to duty in aircraft that are engaged in combat missions, nor may they be assigned to duty on vessels of the Navy other than hospital ships or transport ships. And again, nurses were like the exception. And they had been serving since 1921 on ships. And the picture on the left is a nurse treating a, with a wounded soldier from Vietnam. All right, during the Vietnam War, I’m sure everybody’s heard of Admiral Zumwalt.
[Student] For every petty?
Yep, Delbert Black was one of his MCPONs. But Admiral Zumwalt came in in 1970. He was deep selected. Very similar to the CNO that we have today. Grady I believe is his name. Or maybe not. But he was selected, deep selected. He was a vice admiral, Zumwalt, and our current CO. And was picked over several other admirals that were senior to him. But in Zumwalt’s case he was picked over 30 admirals that were senior to him. And he was like 49 years old, which is young for a CNO. And he took over and he served from ’70 to ’74. And under his watch things that we do today or that we take for common today were put in place during his tenure. And the way he did it a lot of times, anyone ever heard of Z-gram? If you hadn’t a Z-gram is a NAVOP, it’s a message that comes out from the Chief of Naval Personnel and it deal, or Chief of Naval Operations, and it deals with policy, personnel topics, any kind of change that comes out that affects people usually comes out as a NAVOP. Those NAVOPs in during Zumwalt’s day were called Z-grams. And they would come out, and he sent out about 120 of them during his four-year tenure. And about 80 of them came out during his first year. And they changed a lot of things. And a lot of it dealt with the quality of life. Like one thing, for example, if you were an enlisted sailor in 1968, ’69, ’70 here in Norfolk, if you were to come and go from work from your ship or from shore duty here, you had to be in your uniform to go and come out the gates. Civilian clothes weren’t allowed. If you were aboard ship you weren’t allowed to even have civilian clothes, much less wear them aboard ship. And there were a lot of rules, gender-biased rules that were affected men differently than women. And a lot of these he addressed with Z-grams. And they were controversial because they were messages that were sent out, they would go, they would come into the Radio Shack, communications center aboard ship, and they would be torn off the teletype, made a copy of, and run down and posted on a bulletin board. And the complaint that a lot of senior personnel had at that time, officers and chiefs, was that it was a, it gave the impression that Zumwalt was bypassing the chain of command because something might get posted on a bulletin board, say, well, sailors are allowed to have beards now, and the CO of the ship doesn’t even know about it and he gets aboard and he’s, and all his, you know, sailors haven’t shaved for a day or so because Zumwalt said we can do it. So that was one of the big rubs was this perception of jumping the chain of command and putting out messages directly. And again, on ships they would have these boards, Zumwalt boards, or Z-gram boards. All right, surface warfare officer designation was established in 1970. We still have that today, commonly known as SWOS. And the pin itself didn’t come around until 1974. And as I had mentioned earlier, during the ’60s and ’70s there were a lot of gender-biased laws that were on the books. One of them, and I’ll highlight a few of them here in the next slide or so. But one of them had to do with pregnancy. If you were a female and you got pregnant you basically, you had to get out of the Navy. And you weren’t allowed to have, if you were female, you weren’t allowed to have dependents that were under 18 years old. And there was also a clause for recruiters called the Promiscuity Clause that recruiters were instructed, directed that when they’re screening female recruits to look into their background to make sure that all is well there, that they weren’t too promiscuous or had a, had any dealings in that area. But there was no requirement for men, nobody was asking men how many girlfriends they had or any of that. But these were rules that were biased against women. There was a, they would go to the courts, the rule on dependents was, there was, if you were a male and you’re married your wife is automatically your dependent regardless of how much money she made or didn’t make. But for a female, her spouse would have to be, by law, in order to be considered as a dependent had to make less than half of what the wife made or be fully dependent upon the wife for income. And so you basically had a lot of men that were married to women that were in the Navy that weren’t considered dependents, didn’t have an ID card, had no medical benefits. And so that was challenged in court in 1970. And that was a case where, actually that was a case where a woman had to give up her dependents. And that, the courts ruled that was unconstitutional. And the similar thing happened with the dependents that the court eventually ruled that women and men were equally considered dependents just by the fact that they’re married to a service member. During Vietnam I had mentioned no women were gonna go, however eight did serve on Admiral Zumwalt’s staff. He, before he became CNO he was a vice admiral serving as the Commander of Naval Forces in Vietnam. That was one of the reasons he was selected. And during his tour in Vietnam, the two years he was there, he was very close to young sailors that were in the Riverine Forces that were actually in combat every day. And he had a rapport with the younger sailors which affected him later on when he was CNO. But probably one of the most prominent of the eight women that served was Commander Elizabeth Barrett. She was the first woman Navy officer, female officer to command, have a command overseas in a war zone. And she basically ran special services, NWR we call it today, in Saigon. And she had 450 people working for her. All right, Z-gram 116. Of all the Z-grams, 120 Z-grams, there’s two that you would probably, if you were gonna read this, read two. 116 would be one, which dealt with equal opportunity for women. And Z-gram 66 which dealt with equal opportunity for all. But here I’m talking about Z-gram 116 and it had some very, programs that were established that were very important at the day, and really, some of them are, the legacy still lives on today. But what they did was they opened up ratings that were closed to women. And there were a lot of ratings in the Navy at the time, this was around 1970, ’71, that were closed to women. And there were like a hundred ratings in the Navy and women could only serve in like 25 of them. So then Z-gram 116 authorized women to go into these closed ratings. And it was a majority of them, it wasn’t all of them. There were probably about 10 that were just strictly men’s jobs, didn’t. But for the most part it allowed women to serve in nontraditional areas. It also set up a program aboard the USS Sanctuary which was a hospital ship that was being converted to a dependent support ship. And they were gonna run a pilot program on that where they put enlisted women and officers to serve in ship’s company and to see how that would go. It changed the rule that was affected women officers with regard to command ashore. There was actually, the prerequisite to be command, to command ashore for a Naval officer was you had to be qualified to command at sea. Once you were qualified to command at sea you were allowed to commander, be a commander at shore. However, women couldn’t go to sea, so women officers technically could not be a commanding officer ashore. So this suspended that rule, that was actually a law. But this suspended the restrictions and allowed them, allowed women to be COs ashore without having to go to sea. It opened the staff corps up to women. Up to this point all supply officers, for example, were all men. It allowed unrestricted line officers to serve in restricted line officers’ billet. It changed the path for selecting flag officers to the same for men and women. And it opened all of NROTC on college campuses up to the Navy. At this point for the NROTC that was really the only way women, other than go and do it through Officer’s Candidate School, could become officers in the Navy. And so in 1972 women started visiting ships. Because the anticipation was, it won’t be too long before we start assigning women to sea. So they started doing these PR tours and familiarization tours. But there was always the gauntlet where, you know, these women are coming on my ship, oh my god, what are we gonna do? But it was just something that women had to put up with unfortunately. When, in ’72 when NROTC opened up one of the first beneficiaries of that was a midshipmen, Carol M. Pottenger. And she would go on to be Vice Admiral Pottenger. And she retired in 2013. I think that picture’s from 2012. But she was a Strike Group commander out on the West Pac before she retired. She was the, I think the head of NECC here in Norfolk when she actually did retire. But Carol Pottenger was, she was a trailblazer in her own right. She was one of the fist SWOS, not the first, but one of the first. All right, in 1972 a lot of stuff was happening. Anybody ever heard of the ERA? The Equal Rights Amendment? That was passed by Congress as an amendment to the Constitution in the early ’70s. And the idea was that it’s gonna remove all gender biased rules and regulations. And the effect that it would have on the military was it would put women in combat units. And there was a lot of opposition to that. But the law was passed. And the way the amendments work, Congress passes them and then they’re sent to the states, 38 states have to approve of an amendment before it becomes, you know, changes the Constitution. Well, this looked like it was gonna happen. It got up to 33 votes really quick. And then it stalled and it never actually passed. But it was in the, during this time it looked like it was. And now there was this quote here, “There’s no such organization as the WAVES.” That was made by a Captain Quigley who’s pictured there. And she was the head of, she was, had the, was the head of the WAVES, although we were calling them WAVES, but the WAVE term had actually gone away in 1948. But we were still referring to women in the Navy as WAVES. It’s kinda like how we still refer to this base as NOB. You know, that name’s been defunct since 1945. But Quigley’s point was this, having this second chain of command for women, which she was the head of, was creating a dual chain of command, and it was not making women, putting women on equal footing with men when it came to the chain of command. And she had a quote there that basically saying that, telling women if you want, if you want to keep things the way they are with a second chain of command then you need to be content with being not in the Navy, but being a member of the ladies’ auxiliary of the Navy. Which she, her bottom line for her was we need to have a single chain of command for men and women. And so when she actually transferred out of her office they closed the office. It was called PERS-K. Also did in ’72, the first flag officer was appointed, it was a nurse officer, a nurse corps. And her name was Alene Duerk. All right, this actually.