Who Will Do the Cooking?

 Melissa Ziobro launched the Club's first meeting of 2013-14 with a look at the human experience of gender integration in the nation's army.  The large audience responded warmly to Ms. Ziobro's tales of the women who broke the gender barrier to become WACs.  Although women had served to support  the military as both nurses in the Civil War and telephone / telegraph operators during World War I, they weren't considered as anything but support personnel, whose efforts were over when the conflict was.  As Ms. Ziobro explained, the "hello" girls who valiantly "manned" the phones during World War I, weren't awarded veteran status until 1978.  The excerpts from the congressional record, including the quote about who would do the cooking, reflected the concerns society had about the role of women in the military.  Apparently army commanders had no such concerns, eagerly supporting the creation of the Women's Army Corps so that women could fill non-combat jobs.

The presentation prompted many questions from the audience, including some concerning numbers and statistics.  In an e-mail, Ms. Ziobro provided the following sources that should help answer those questions:

• Women In Military Service For America Memorial Foundation, Inc. - Concise source of statistics on women in the military
• U.S. Army Women's Museum - Women in the Army Comparative Statistics by War    
• The Women's Army Corps by Mattie E. Treadwell - the entire book is available on line.  If you scroll down a few pages, the entire table of contents is interactive and allows you to click directly to your particular area of interest.