As the Marine Corps celebrated 100 years of women’s service, I submitted the below to an essay competition held by the Women Marines Association. I have attempted to squeeze a century’s worth of history into just a few hundred words. I hope you enjoy.

Originally employed as an emergency wartime measure, women have grown from “Free a Marine to Fight” to fighting alongside those male Marines as equal partners. They receive the same pay as their male counterparts while discovering opportunities, freedom and camaraderie serving in an institution where other women had not gone before. They have contributed to the nation’s security in unique ways. As Lionesses and Female Engagement Team (FET) members, women gave back to the nation in ways that men simply could not. Without women, this would not be the most powerful military in the world.

In World War I, extreme manpower shortages drove Josephus Daniels, then Secretary of the Navy, to consider women as more than nurses.[1] Naval law that referred to enlistment of “persons”, instead of Army law that referred to enlistment of “male persons”, enabled the Navy and Marines to enlist women as reservists to serve temporarily in administrative positions.[2]

Twenty-five years later, another world war and the urgent need for combatant Marines instigated the enlistment of women again, this time in dramatically larger numbers. The Marine Corps welcomed more than 20,000 women in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (MCWR).[3] Though still primarily to “Free a Marine to Fight”, they found themselves serving in more than 200 job classifications – as truck drivers, electricians, mechanics, aerial photographers, cryptographers, painters, parachute riggers, paymasters and aviation technicians. [4]

When the war ended, the Marine Corps expected the women to return to their pre-war roles. Congress legislated women a permanent position in the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, in the first of what would become a pattern of continued recognition for their national service.

The Vietnam War and the women’s movement changed ushered in more dramatic changes. A January 1966 Parade article quoted, “Women fought as hard as men to build this country . . . you’d think we were a bunch of sissies”[5] in protest of male protectionism. A growing number of servicewomen demanded the opportunity to serve in Vietnam – and got it.

Their service, Congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, alongside the transition to an All Volunteer Force, led to the first non-wartime expansion of opportunities. A new generation of women found equal pay for equal work as well as exciting careers. The Defense Department claimed to be on the “frontlines of the war on sexism” as the “equal opportunity employer of choice”.[6] Women helped the AVF by countering the idea of “an army of the poor”. High quality men did not need to join the military, while low quality men struggled with new, increasingly complex, weapons systems. Women, usually with more education, offset the balance with brains.[7]

Commandant Louis Wilson believed in women’s ability to serve. He opened the operating forces, professional military schools and a host of military occupational specialties. Women suddenly (again) became truck drivers, aviation mechanics, combat engineers and logisticians. Over the next four decades, women qualified on rifles, learned defensive and then offensive tactics. They deployed and went to war. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan witnessed women leading logistics convoys, standing watch, searching women as Lionesses and conducting infantry patrols as Female Engagement Team (FET) members. Women have received nearly 450 combat action ribbons since 2001.

As women have answered the nation’s call to serve, they have upended previously held social norms and replaced them with new ideas about what women can and should do for the nation. Today, the military could not operate as the most powerful military in the world without its women. The significance of women in the military has always been a two-way relationship – the nation needed women as much as the women wanted the opportunity to serve, to be treated as equally important in the nation’s defense as its men.

[1] Hewitt, Linda L. Captain, USMCR, Women Marines in World War I (Washington, D.C.: History Division, USMC, 1974), 3.

[2] Ibid., 9.

[3] Ibid., 2–6.

[4] The mission of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve was “to provide women trained and qualified for duty in the shore establishments of the Marine Corps, thereby releasing additional male Marines for combat duty.” (in Pat (Major) Meid, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve in World War II, Marine Corps Historical Reference Series 37 (Washington, D.C.: Marine Corps Historical Branch, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1964), 1.)

[5] Jack Anderson, “Should We Send Our Women Soldiers to Vietnam?,” Parade, January 1966.

[6] Rustad, Michael, Women in Khaki: The American Enlisted Woman (New York, N.Y., United States: Praeger Security International, 1982), 61–72.

[7] Ibid., 86-7.