A History of Women in the Coast Guard part I

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By:Lewis Lowe

Women have been performing Coast Guard duties longer than there has been a Coast Guard. At least one professional ancestor of the modern female Coast Guardsman predated the federal government itself. In 1776, John Thomas joined the Army to fight in the Revolutionary War. His wife, Hannah, took over his job as keeper of Gurnet Point Light, near Plymouth, Mass.

The oldest root of the modern Coast Guard's institutional family tree can be traced back to Aug. 7, 1789, when the new Congress appropriated funds for "the necessary support, maintenance and repairs of all lighthouses, beacons, buoys and public piers ... within any bay, inlet, harbor, or port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy and safe." The first female federal employees probably were lighthouse keepers. The old-fashioned lighthouse was a primitive contraption. Its light came from a whale-oil lamp mounted behind a thick glass lens, sometimes equipped with a weight-driven mechanism to make it rotate and pump oil to the lamp.

Along with the position of keeper went a house, usually built into the base of the light tower, and a plot of land on which the keeper's family was expected to keep livestock and grow vegetables. The position of keeper did not require much education, training, or mechanical skill; it demanded dedication, stamina, patience, and a willingness to work for a low salary. It was just the sort of job, in the social atmosphere of Victorian America, for a woman.

There seems to have been no official policy regarding the hiring of women to work at lighthouses. The early records are skimpy, but two modern researchers, Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, found the names of 138 women who were employed as lighthouse keepers between 1828 and 1947. The majority were the wives or daughters of keepers or other Lighthouse Board employees who died on the job.

'Sturdy little women'

Mary Reynolds became keeper of the lighthouse at Biloxi, Miss., in 1854 with a salary of $400 per year. She augmented her income by caring for "a large family of orphaned children" who were "heirs at law to a considerable estate," the executor of which sent her an annual stipend. Seven years later, Reynolds' world suddenly disintegrated when the city government ordered Biloxi Light extinguished and some characters in Confederate uniforms absconded with her valuable store of lamp oil. She appealed to the governor of Mississippi for help, offering her services to make clothing for the soldiers "to do my share in our great and holy cause of freedom." Lighthouse Board records do not indicate whether Reynolds continued to be paid her salary through the Civil War, but she was listed as keeper of Biloxi Light until 1866.

In 1881, Navy CAPT Charles McDougal drowned in a storm off the coast of California. He left his widow, Kate McDougal, with four children and a Navy pension of $50 a month. McDougal's friends at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, Calif., arranged to have her appointed keeper of the nearby Mare Island Light. She lived there for 25 years, raising her children with the help of donated schoolbooks and tending the residence with the help of a Chinese-American cook. During most of the year her only contact with the outside world was via a telephone line to the naval shipyard, whose officers set up the poles and strung the wire for her as a Christmas present.

The loneliness and independence of life at a lighthouse exerted an odd attraction to some people. John Walker and his German immigrant wife, Kate, were appointed keeper and assistant keeper of Robbins Reef Light, off Staten Island, N.Y., in 1883. The light was a conical iron structure at the end of a submerged reef - a man-made island within sight of the Manhattan skyline. When Walker died of pneumonia in 1886, his widow took over his job. For the next 33 years she climbed to the top of the light tower and filled the kerosene lamp several times each night, assisted by her son and daughter. The children went to school on the mainland, but Walker rarely set foot outside the lighthouse grounds. Over the years she saved some 50 people from drowning. According to a New York Times reporter who interviewed her in 1906, "All that she knows from personal experience of the great land to which she came ... is comprised within the limits of Staten Island, New York City, and Brooklyn ... As a wife, mother, and widow, the happiest and saddest days of her peaceful life have been spent within the circular walls of her voluntary prison. She declares that if she were compelled to live anywhere else she would be the most miserable woman on earth, and that no mansion on Millionaires' Row could tempt her to leave of her own free will."

Walker retired in 1919 and moved to a house on Staten Island, where she died 12 years later. The New York Evening Post carried an obituary: "There are the queenly liners, the grim battle craft, the countless carriers of commerce that pass in endless procession. And amid all this and in sight of the city of towers and the torch of liberty lived this sturdy little woman, proud of her work and content in it, keeping her lamp alight and her windows clean, so that New York harbor might be safe for ships that pass in the night."

In the early 20th Century the number of female lighthouse keepers declined steadily. Steam-driven foghorns replaced the old fog bells, and oil lamps gave way to electric lights. A 1948 issue of The Coast Guard Bulletin commented that these technological improvements had "placed the duties of keepers of lighthouses beyond the capacity of most women." The last of the woman lighthouse keepers apparently was Fannie Salter, who lived at Turkey Point Light, Md., from 1925 to 1947.

'The best clerical assistance'

The Coast Guard was created Jan. 28, 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson signed a congressional law consolidating the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life Saving Service. The new service was to operate under the Department of the Treasury during peacetime, and to be absorbed by the Navy upon declaration of war. A little more than two years later, the latter provision was put into effect when the United States declared war on Germany.

American society in the early 20th Century saw three spheres of the professional world as proper domains for women: the school, the office, and the hospital. During World War I the United States undertook an unprecedented expansion of its armed forces, producing a manpower shortage and a stupefying mass of paperwork. The Navy, which had been operating an auxiliary Nurse Corps since 1908, concluded with some reluctance that war had created a legitimate role for women in uniform.
"Enroll women in the Naval Reserve as yeomen," said Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, "and we will have the best clerical assistance the country can provide." On March 19, 1917, the Navy authorized the enlistment of women in the Naval Reserve, with the rating "Yeoman (F)" and the popular label "Yeomanettes."

The Navy's policy was extended to the Coast Guard, but personnel records from World War I contain scarcely any references to the Coast Guard Yeomanettes. A handful of them apparently were employed at the diminutive Coast Guard headquarters building in Washington. Nineteen-year-old twin sisters Genevieve and Lucille Baker transferred from the Naval Coastal Defense Reserve to become the first uniformed women in the Coast Guard.

With the war's end the Coast Guard Yeomanettes, along with their Navy and Marine Corps counterparts, were mustered out of the service. Daniels bade them farewell: "As we embrace you in uniform today, we will embrace you without uniform tomorrow."

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