Virginia Gildersleeve

In Quarantine

The trip to Hawaii didn’t always go smoothly.

We ported and we were all going on the same ship. This was really under tight orders because they were very careful about us. On the ship, which often happens when people are crowded together, it happens. A case of spinal meningitis broke out and we were quarantined for six weeks in Hawaii.

– Patricia Farrington Siegner, WAVE

This photo shows WAVES crowding an open hatch door even before their transport ship docks in Hawaii. It comes from the National Archives.

Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College in New York, also asked one of her close personal friends to go to Washington and help work within the Navy develop a woman’s program. That woman was Elizabeth Reynard.

Reynard was a an English professor and graduate of Barnard College. She was a strange choice to lobby for a woman’s service because Reynard was by all accounts highly artistic and an unconventional thinker – not perhaps the best civilian woman to lobby for women’s military service. She moved to Washington in early 1942 and would eventually become one of the first women to join the WAVES.

This photograph comes from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

The Advisory Council

Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College in New York, began working outside the Navy to lobby for women’s participation. She set up the Women’s Advisory Council, a group of fellow women who were leaders in education. They would continue their work during the war even after the WAVES were established, acting as a public relations outreach tool for the Navy.

This is a photograph of the Advisory Council c. 1944. It shows, l-r: Miss Alice Baldwin, Dean of undergraduate college for women, Duke University; Emma Barton Brewser Gates, University of Pennsylvania Women’s Club (and wife of Penn’s President Thomas S. Gates); Miss Meta Glass, president of Sweet Briar College; Mrs. Wallace Notestein (Notestein was a professor at Yale); Miss Virginia Gildersleeve, Ethel Gladys Graham, wife of UCLA political science professor Malbone Graham, Congresswoman Margaret Chase Smith; Miss Alice Lloyd, dean of women at the University of Michigan; Mildred McAfee; and Lt. Cmdr. Philip A. Tague Jr. It comes from the National Archives.

“Yes They Are”

Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of the all-women’s Barnard College in New York, believed that it was a duty for women to participate in helping the war effort. After the Pearl Harbor attack, she spoke to students at Barnard College about the opportunities women might have:

Are they really going to use women for ‘trained personnel’? Yes, they are. They have begun to realize that the ‘man power’ of the country includes also the woman power, and that the government and industry will be forced to use women for nearly every kind of work except the front-line military and naval fighting.

This photograph comes from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

As the rumblings of World War II began in Europe, women in the U.S. began laying the groundwork for women to serve in the military here. Joy Bright Hancock began doing some of that work within the Navy, in her role as a civilian for the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics.

But other women also lobbied for for women’s military service. Virginia Gildersleeve was the Dean of Barnard College in New York. She wrote at the time:

It seemed as if Hitler were about to plunge Europe into war and I, having just returned from abroad, was profoundly distressed. I felt that we ought to do something about it. I was intensely interested in this problem … and the enormous contribution that women might make.

This photograph comes from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.