Women serving in the Army Corps supported the war effort in a variety of ways: as cryptographers, pilots, clerks, postal workers, analysts, medical care professionals, electricians, telephone and telegraph operators, and other essential positions. Most women in the Women’s Army Corps served in the United States, but some received assignments worldwide.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Are You a Girl with a Star-Spangled Heart? poster by Bradshaw Crandell for the U.S. Army Recruiting Publicity Bureau, 1943
Serving the Nation: Women’s Army Corps
In 1941 Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a bill to allow women to volunteer for service in the U.S. Army in non-combat roles. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps Act into law in 1942. The following year, Congress approved legislation granting women full military status and allowing them to enlist directly in the Army for the first time. By the end of World War II, more than 150,000 American women had served in the Women’s Army Corps.
If we are to have total war . . . there is a very definite place for women in it. Modern war recognizes no limitations of battlefields, no gender of its participants. To win a total war every resource, every service must be utilized.
Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, March 17, 1942
Women serving in the Army Corps supported the war effort in a variety of ways: as cryptographers, pilots, clerks, postal workers, analysts, medical care professionals, electricians, telephone and telegraph operators, and other essential positions. Most women in the Women’s Army Corps served in the United States, but some received assignments worldwide.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
