Women's Army Corps
Martha Settle was one of 40 African-American women selected for the Women's Army Corps (WAC) in 1943. She soon earned the rank of Lieutenant and was assigned to a basic training company at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. There, she was relegated to menial duties such as leading drills and teaching calisthenics. She asked for, and was granted, permission to attend Adjutant General's School in San Antonio to train for an executive or administrative position. This led to an assignment as commanding officer of a WAC Hospital Company at the Gardiner General Hospital in Chicago, a position she held for the rest of the war.
Many years later, when asked in a television interview by CNN correspondent Paula Zahn what "the whole world understand about women's efforts" in World War II, Dr. Putney replied: "They should understand . . . that we were a mighty support force for the male armed forces. I've got to say male because many of us did all of the tasks, all of the . . . military occupational specialties, as a man, except carry a gun." Interviewed on another occasion, she said: "It is my thesis that military integration made the basis for the emergence and the expansion of the black middle class."
Read more about this topic: Martha Settle Putney
Famous quotes containing the words women, army and/or corps:
“Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)