Women's Armed Services Integration Act, a United States law enacted on June 12, 1948, enabled women to serve as permanent, regular members of the armed forces in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and the recently formed Air Force. Prior to this act, women, with the exception of nurses, served in the military only in times of war. The act limited service of women by excluding them from Air Force and Navy vessels and aircraft that might engage in combat.
The act was a major step forward for military women. However, in October 1949 a new Army regulation decreed that mothers with dependent children were ineligible to serve in the military, and female servicewomen with children under the age of 18 were discharged. This regulation was overturned in the 1970s when Congress passed a bill that the President signed into law which allowed women with dependent children to serve.
In 1998, a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Women's Armed Services Act was held at the Women in Military Service for America (WIMSA) Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre delivered the keynote address.
Famous quotes containing the words women, armed, services, integration and/or act:
“The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.... It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,—he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)