It’s My Country Too: American Military Women’s Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan. Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow (eds). Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2017.

I often read with a pen in hand, especially when I expect to really engage with a book. I certainly expected to engage with It’s My Country Too: American Military Women’s Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, edited by Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow. This volume shares a series of first-person narratives from women who have served with the American military. I’m a woman veteran, and I’ve made a project of reading and thinking critically about the writing of other women veterans; I was not disappointed. I found that the stories in this book reminded me of, and in many ways were, my own. My marginalia skewed toward exclamations of recognition; even words recorded several decades past felt personally relatable.

The survey format does not allow us to grow particularly close to any one woman—their individual personalities, ambitions, or fears—but what we do start to see is the full breadth of the population of service women. The scope and span are wider than most of us—even those who have served—could have realized. The very idea of a service woman and all her rich and layered experiences starts to take shape. In the excerpts featured, we can also see the evolution of women’s relationship to their own service and assumption of mainstream combat roles. The book achieves multiple purposes and serves multiple audiences. Beyond simply recounting the history of women’s military service in America, the collection also offers the voices of the women, themselves. In this way, it fulfills a need for both people who know nothing about the legacy of women in the military and women who have served themselves and seek familiar stories.

Bell and Crow state their mission clearly in their intro: as two veterans, they did not see themselves represented in military history and literature. This led them to undertake the substantial project of assembling this volume. The editors’ text—introductions to each chapter summarizing the events and context of the primary source material presented— provides a running history of women’s service in each war or conflict, plus interim periods of significant cultural change. The editors’ real focus, though, is the primary source material and memoir extracts they have curated.

It is clear that women have been trying to tell their stories since the formation of our country.

These snippets of memoir, in particular, are striking in their quantity. It’s My Country Too features excerpts from a number of women’s memoirs—at least one, often many, per chapter. It is clear that women have been trying to tell their stories since the formation of our country. Many of these remain unpublished, though, a fact the editors lament in their preface: “We began with the observation that contemporary books about military women are available and even commercially successful. But the voices of America’s women veterans rarely make it into print, and never with the same level of publicity or critical acclaim as those of their male counterparts.”[1]

In featuring these excerpts, Bell and Crow have done more than bring previously unpublished work to light—though that is a service in itself. They tell a different story by assembling a large collection of small snippets. When the prevailing cultural narrative surrounding war and military service is nearly exclusively masculine, and women still struggle for recognition as service members or veterans, the standalone memoirs that largely source this collection can feel by themselves like single drops in a bucket. The women who publish them can easily be mistaken for outliers, rather than members of a long-established and still-growing population. By presenting a survey of voices across time, Bell and Crow send a clear message: military women are a real population with a significant history that has contributed to every war or conflict in U.S. history. In some ways, it’s less intimate. I never came to know on a deep level any one of the women whose words populate these pages. I occasionally wished for continuity in even a single narrator. I ultimately felt, though, that this collection provided something different, something rich and deeply-needed.

Lesser editors might have undertaken the same project without digging deeper than the more-readily-available writing of white women. Bell and Crow have taken admirable care to present a diverse array of voices, noting when systemic factors have limited their available options—a set of limitations worth a reader’s attention on its own—and working hard to seek out alternatives. This effort doesn’t only honor the legacy of marginalized women, though it does that beautifully. It also honors the overall project of the book: assembling—and thus, amplifying—the voices of overlooked populations. And not only with respect to racial diversity; the editors also take care to represent every service, a range of occupational communities, and all the components, from active duty to National Guard, including women who served in the Coast Guard and U.S. Lighthouse Service.

This broad range of experiences illuminates the arc of women’s roles in the military, which Bell and Crow examine in their commentary. With no recognized path to service at all, the earliest military women broke with the established system completely, often dressing up as men to do what they felt was their necessary part and taking by force the ability to participate in their country’s existential fights. These women seem like naturally defiant and revolutionary types. It’s not surprising to read such remarkable quotes as this from Deborah Sampson Gannett: “…I bust the tyrant bonds, which held my sex in awe, and clandestinely, or by stealth, grasped an opportunity, which custom and the world seemed to deny, as a natural privilege.”[2]

As women begin to assume more formal positions within the military—primarily as nurses, to start—we see a major compromise unfold: women receive a legitimate path to service, but at the price of being shoehorned into traditional women’s work. There are no more fantastic stories of daring women dressing as men and serving on the front lines of combat. Nonetheless, these changes marked the beginnings of recognition, and the opening of a door that leads to even greater freedom for women to serve their country.

Some of the early women felt pressure to pave the way for future service; their words landed with painful familiarity. Esther Voorhees Hasson, a veteran of both the Navy Nurse Corps and the Army’s Reserve Nursing Corps who is profiled in the chapter on World War I notes, “Future women will accept the standard set by us now without question; if it be high they will rise to it, if it be low they will with equal facility drop to its level.”[3] Rocky reception of these first women to break gender stereotypes seems to have further limited their willingness to speak out about their experiences. The editors note that few women who had served published memoirs in the immediate aftermath of World War II—it wasn’t until much later that women started publishing their stories, and then often self-published or published in limited runs.[4]

It seems this trend intensified before it improved; according to Bell and Crow, no women published memoirs following the Korean War, and many of them felt they had a bad reputation with the American public.[5] Still, as the chapters run forward through history, catching up with the present day, we can watch as women prove their value in war and persistently push through barriers to recognized military service in combat.

The excerpts featured in the final chapters are more plentiful, prouder, more literary, and generally focused on conventional combat operations.

Bell and Crow aren’t shy about detailing some of the uglier fallout of this movement and the often fierce resistance that the pathfinders faced. Charity Adams Earley, the first African American officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, speaks movingly and with particular frankness about the racism she and her Black colleagues faced in World War II.[6] While not the focus of this collection, sexism and gender-based harassment run through the book, including an entire chapter called “Gender Wars” that focuses on post-Vietnam integration of women into the regular armed services. In the words of Mary Ellen “Liz” Graydon, who served with the Women’s Auxiliary Corps in World War II: “The women who joined the military meant change, and the men did not want change.”[7] Crucially, though, we watch as women begin to overcome this resistance. The excerpts featured in the final chapters are more plentiful, prouder, more literary, and generally focused on conventional combat operations.

The contemporary chapters offer a complement to the stories of nurses and switchboard operators of earlier conflicts, women who braved existential danger and offered vital service, but were limited in the ways they could contribute and the recognition they received. Contemporary servicewomen’s bravery and selflessness mirrors that of their forebears, even as they have proudly stepped into roles that many earlier women couldn’t imagine, even as they unconsciously laid the foundations for these expanded opportunities. As Bell and Crow note, “Unlike women of earlier generations, who often spend parts of their narratives apologizing for their effrontery in violating social norms for women’s behavior and taking on traditionally masculine roles, women veterans of recent wars assertively claim their wartime experiences, demand to be heard, and insist on being taken as seriously in print as they were in uniform.”[8]

In short, this volume recounts an important and relatively undocumented historical thread, demonstrating that women have contributed to America’s military since the beginning of its history and exposing the evolution of this service. It also illuminates the human faces that comprise this arc. In a time when women’s contributions to military service are still questioned, and women veterans still don’t receive access to services at a level commensurate to their male peers, it’s vitally important that people who don’t understand what women have done for the military of the United States hear this message.

However, it’s also an important volume for those women who have served themselves and may find themselves feeling alone or unacknowledged. In her foreword, Kayla Williams writes of her “feelings of isolation and alienation” after returning from Iraq, and recalls other women veterans approaching her after she gave talks to tell her they thought they were “crazy” until they heard a woman share an experience similar to theirs.[9] I felt this way as I read with a pack of Post-its by my side, flagging startlingly relatable passages throughout the text. Even the editors, it seems, were a bit surprised by what they learned and how they felt, stating in their intro, “In the process of writing this book, we discovered to our chagrin that we had served our country without knowing our own history.”[10] Certainly, this book taught me a number of lessons about my own history. It also made me realize that I stand in ranks more numerous than I originally thought. That’s a comforting thought...and an energizing one, as well.

As two women veterans who have taken on this project to elevate the voices of other women like them, Bell and Crow are taking an active role in shaping and preserving not only their own legacy but also that of the many undercounted women who have joined them in military service. The pages feel alive with agency and pride. This is a volume with more of a mission statement than a thesis statement. The unmistakable message of this book is: we are here, we have been here, and we have a voice. There are a lot of people who need to hear that.

What follows is an interview with the editors of It’s My Country Too: American Military Women’s Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow.

Kathryn Sudhoff: In your preface you note that you wanted to avoid creating a contribution history with a limited focus on acknowledged trailblazers. You briefly discuss the scholarly legwork required to seek out a more diverse range of stories, many of which had not been published prior to inclusion in your collection. Could you expand on how you found your sources? Where are these stories being preserved?

Jerri Bell: We did a kind of “expanding square” search to find sources. We were simultaneously reading secondary-source histories of women’s military service that had been written by women veterans, while looking for memoirs and other documents to excerpt from. If we read an interesting account in a secondary source, we went looking for an original text written by the woman who lived the experience. The secondary sources led us to a 700-item annotated bibliography of writing by women who’d served in the military from World War I on, curated by a former archivist at the Women’s Memorial in Washington, DC. When we contacted the Women’s Memorial to request a research visit to their library, curator Britta Granrud greeted us with a ten-foot-long library table piled high with books and files she thought we should review. We wouldn’t have had a book at all without Britta’s help! Before we were done, we’d contacted or visited all the military branch archives, a number of college archives, several small museums, the Library of Congress, and the American Red Cross and Daughters of the American Revolution archives. We found excerpts in medical and other professional journals. Some came from memoirs published by small, independent presses and vanity presses. To fill some gaps, we reached out to friends—and to friends of friends—and solicited writing from them.

Tracy Crow: Another valuable resource for us proved to be oral histories from women veterans since World War II, archived and available online through The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project (WVHP) at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. We also received reprint permissions for the Charity Adams Earley memoir excerpt from Texas A&M University Press, permission for Sara Griffin Chapman’s recollections from the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) oral history program, and permission from the United States Naval Institute Press to include at least two of the excerpts. Everyone we contacted was supportive and generous with their time and with permissions.

What was the most important thing you learned through the process of unearthing this writing?

TC: At times throughout the process of compiling It's My Country Too, Jerri and I shook our heads, stunned that even with our collective thirty years of military experience we didn’t know these stories. And when outrage surfaced for us over the many discoveries of blatant sexism, we joked we’d need therapy after we finished this book. For far too long, women’s military service has been discounted to little more than a footnote in history. Our research provides evidence that women’s military contributions have been, in fact, quite significant.

JB: As we started looking at the narrative arc the excerpts we found suggested, and at the histories of women’s service written by military women themselves, we realized we’d been fed three big myths about women’s military service: that women hadn’t served in combat until recently; that women’s participation had been a social experiment pushed on the military by radical feminists; and that men had allowed women to integrate first into the military, and then into combat occupational specialties. The historical record shows women have fought or served at the front lines since the American Revolution, whether or not their service was officially sanctioned or recognized; military women themselves kept pushing the envelope on integration, often enlisting the support of prominent civilian women and the courts for opening more occupational specialties and opportunities; and women fought for every inch of ground they gained in the battle for integration. Nothing was given to us. We fought for those opportunities, and earned them.

Beyond representing a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, how did you select which excerpts to include? What qualities marked an ideal selection for this anthology?

TC: When Jerri first approached me with the idea of working on a book together, I was fully planning to say no. I had already produced four military books, and wanted to shift away from the military because a New York agent warned me I was becoming stereotyped as “just another military writer.” But I agreed to meet with Jerri, to hear her idea, and to offer whatever support I could without fully engaging in the process. But she knew how to hook me: story. When she so eloquently shared the story of Harriett Tubman’s raid, I was hooked. For me, with a background in journalism and memoir, story is always key…what Faulkner refers to as “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

JB: We started by looking for diverse, intersectional representation. We wanted writing by women from all branches of the armed forces, including the Coast Guard and its forerunner, the Lighthouse Service. We wanted narratives written by both officers and enlisted women. We wanted representation of African American women, Latina women, Asian American women, and Native American women. We wanted narratives from women who were heterosexual and who were lesbians—at the time the book went to press, we hadn’t found any narratives from bisexual and transsexual women, but I wish we’d been able to include work representative of their experiences, too. When we’d assembled more than two hundred narratives, we started winnowing them down. It led to some lively discussions: we had more material than we could use for World War Two, and for Operation Iraqi Freedom, in particular. Once we’d chosen the authors, there were more discussions on what excerpts told the best stories, and which brought to life the themes we’d found in reading secondary-source histories. Did we want to include women who’d fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War? Would readers find the excerpt of Deborah Sampson’s speech—so different from modern prose!—sufficiently accessible? We cut, and we cut some more, and we regretted every slice we had to make.

Does a single piece of writing stand out to you from your research and collection process as being the most surprising or engaging?

JB: I kept returning to Harriet Tubman’s account of the Combahee River raid. Tubman had never learned to read or write, but she was a gifted oral storyteller with a keen sense of narrative, of allusion, and of the impact of rhythm and repetition. She didn’t hesitate to talk about the ignorance of the colonel in charge of the raid about African Americans: he had no idea that Tubman’s experience of slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland would have differed from those of the enslaved persons in South Carolina, or that bonds of kinship in African American communities were determined by factors far more complicated than race alone. She called out white ignorance in a few pithy phrases that felt very contemporary to me. I still grin every time I think about it.

TC: I experience an emotional reaction every time I revisit the story of Cornelia Fort. Cornelia was already an experienced pilot in 1942 when she became the second woman aviator to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). In her role as a ferry pilot, she was flying in formation on the way to Love Field in Dallas, Texas, when another pilot, Frank Stamme, Jr., who taunted her with close approaches eventually collided with her plane’s wing, causing Cornelia’s plane to nose dive and crash. I think it’s the senselessness of it all that overwhelms me, still. Cornelia had logged more than 1,100 flight hours by the time of her crash; Stamme, only 250, and his military career was apparently unaffected.

One of my chief takeaways from It's My Country Too was that the book served two audiences equally well: those who have no exposure to women in the military and could stand to learn of their experiences, and those women who have served and seek familiar stories. As two women veterans, which sentiments and feelings expressed in your sources rang most true to you?

JB: The writing of Dr. Mary Walker (Civil War), Josie Wingo (World War II), Senator Margaret Chase Smith (post-World War II), and LouAnne Johnson (Vietnam era) felt especially authentic to me. While I was on active duty I was constantly aware of the tension between my male colleagues and women in uniform. I had to develop a thick skin, invent snappy comebacks, and deflect insults with jokes; I had to struggle, argue, and be persistent to get out to sea on a combatant in 1994; and I always felt a need to go above and beyond, and to find creative ways to make a place for myself in the Navy. Those four veterans seemed to speak directly to my experience.

TC: I concur with Jerri’s list, and would add Louisa May Alcott and Cornelia Fort. Alcott had an intense desire to witness life firsthand, and this desire led her to volunteer to nurse casualties of some of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War. I also identified with Fort’s desire to give the best of herself in service to her country, and for her that was through her love of flying.

Have you heard feedback from readers who don't have military experience? What did this book say to them, and how have their takeaways struck you?

JB: I was invited to speak about the book at a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in northern Virginia, and there were maybe two veterans in that audience. I think the entire group identified with the idea that strong women have struggled for full citizenship—and we had hoped that the book would on some level speak to all strong women who are fighting for rights and full inclusion, whether it’s in the corporate workplace or academia or some other sector of society. One civilian historian who reviewed the book felt a need to criticize our historical scholarship because we hadn’t read or cited some histories written by civilians she felt were seminal, and didn’t interpret history the way she felt was most accurate. Since we don’t have degrees in history and weren’t writing for historians, that feedback didn’t bother me too much.

TC: We were also both enormously grateful for the Library Journal’s starred review. Public libraries helped us with our research, and they make all stories more accessible to a wide range of readers.

In your introduction to the final chapter on the contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, you note that, unlike what you saw in the narratives of their forebears, "Women veterans of recent wars assertively claim their wartime experiences, demand to be heard, and insist on being taken as seriously in print as they were in uniform." What kind of writing would you like to see from women veterans going forward?

JB: I’d like to see much more writing by women of color, and women across the spectrum in the LGBTQ community! I hope that women who have gone through Ranger school and other tough combat arms courses will tell their stories someday. And I can’t wait to read more literary fiction from women who have served in uniform. We have our own canon of women veterans who wrote fiction, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas (World War I), National Book Award winner and PEN/Faulkner founder Mary Lee Settle (World War II), and Nebula Award winner Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (Vietnam). Now we need to add to it.

TC: Definitely more diversity, and more writing from women in the Coast Guard.

You are both heavily involved in the veteran writing community. Which programs and initiatives to encourage and coach veteran writers most excite you?

TC: I lead a nonprofit, MilSpeak Foundation, Inc., which develops and hosts writing workshops for veterans and family members, and I’m heartened by the number of programs springing forth around the country. For example, to support veterans in the Tampa Bay area, Navy veteran and author Jeffery Hess founded the DD-214 Writers Workshop. In Pennsylvania, Jenny Pacanowski founded the nonprofit, Women Veterans Empowered & Thriving.

JB: The Veterans Writing Project is still offering seminars—most recently online, under the auspices of the Armed Services Arts Partnership. I’d love to be able to offer our women veterans-only writing seminar again! The journals O-Dark-Thirty, Collateral, CONSEQUENCE, Wrath-Bearing Tree, War Literature & the Arts, and anthologies like Proud To Be are still getting veterans’ stories out into the world.

What other veteran writing would you recommend? To whom? Why?

JB: Older memoirs by Mary Lee Settle, Lynda Van Devanter, Kayla Williams, and Brian Turner. Recent memoirs by Anuradha Baghwati and Ryan Leigh Dostie. The fiction of Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and Elliot Ackerman, Phil Klay, and Matt Gallagher. Poetry by Colin Halloran, Farzana Marie, and Maggs Vibo.

TC: I highly recommend Army veteran Kayla Williams’s two memoirs, Love My Rifle More Than You and Plenty of Time When We Get Home; Brooke King’s 2019 published memoir, War Flower: My Life After Iraq, which received a starred Kirkus review; the forthcoming memoir by Marine veteran Teresa Fazio, Fidelis: A Memoir; and the novels by Army veteran Mary Doyle. Military family members are also finding their voices and audiences through the portrayal of various, often-overlooked aspects of military life—check out the impressive work from Abby E. Murray, Katey Schultz, Andria Williams, Kathleen M. Rodgers, and Siobhan Fallon, to name a few.

Kathryn Sudhoff is an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. The opinions expressed are hers alone and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Specialist Janae Gaston (left), a native of Goosecreek, South Carolina, is an intelligence specialist who volunteered to deploy with the first Female Engagement Team to be trained with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, on June 20, 2012. (Sgt. Ida Irby/U.S. Army Photo)

Notes:

[1] Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow, It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Press, 2017), xiii.

[2] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 9.

[3] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 66.

[4] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 96.

[5] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 158.

[6] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 113-14.

[7] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 109.

[8] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, 269.

[9] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, xi.

[10] Bell and Crow, It’s My Country Too, xiv.