In the mid-1960s, my mother did something radical: she joined the Navy. She became, by act of Congress, an “officer and a gentleman.” At a time when most women entering the workforce were lucky to be secretaries or office clerks, my mom was a department head in one of those super-secret Navy security offices that litter the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
No one is entirely sure what she did. While she has shared a couple of stories – my personal favorite involves her crossing the Atlantic as the lone passenger on a C130 with a satchel of code books handcuffed to her wrist and .38 revolver on her hip – if she is pressed on the subject she tends to mumble something involving the words “tell,” “kill” and “doing laundry.”
See, unfortunately for my mother – well, unfortunately in the professional military sense, not the personal sense – in the process of seeing the world as a sailor, she also saw, met and married my Dad, a fellow naval officer. Two years into their marriage, my mother had to leave the Navy because she was pregnant with my older sister. The laws and regulations at the time allowed men to be fathers and officers, but women could not be mothers and officers. By the time the law was changed in the ’70s, my mother was too far removed from the Navy to consider going back.
My mom became such a social radical because my grandfather, a career naval officer who earned his commission the hard way on the bright, blazing deck of a dying carrier in the Coral Sea, never let something as trivial as two X chromosomes stand in the way of raising his kids the way he thought they should be raised. He had only one criterion for success: do your job. And, when it came to the Navy, that standard cut across all race, gender, religion and class lines. If a person could do the job, he or she belonged in the Navy.
My mom could do her job. To my grandfather, that meant she belonged in the Navy, even when motherhood loomed. The Navy, and most of society four decades ago, disagreed. So she left her dress blues behind in favor of the baby blues and pinks of motherhood.
Fortunately, times have changed. The Navy, faced with considerable manpower shortages in the 1970s, out of necessity gradually gave women more roles and more latitude in their military careers. Today, we have a force where women can be found across the fleet in virtually any role imaginable and where motherhood is no longer a medically disqualifying condition. To be sure, there are a few last areas where women do not serve – anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the cramped quarters aboard a submarine will understand that taking one coed is virtually impossible. But issues of shipboard plumbing aside, virtually no one actually in the Navy sees women in the service as anything out of the ordinary.
This is a tribute to the flexibility and, dare I say it, progressive character of the Navy. Yet for my mother, it came four decades too late. All of the promise in her career, all of the dreams my grandfather had of seeing his daughter in the same uniform he had worn, came to nothing. I can’t forget this. I can’t forget how we, as a society, gave up a generation of sailors simply because they were women. It was wrong, and we owe them.
So every month, I remind myself of this debt. The night before I report for weekend duty, I lay out my uniform. I make sure all of my ribbons are straight and all of my insignia are properly aligned. And then I pin a simple silver bar on my right collar. It is the mark of a Lieutenant (junior grade) in the Navy, and it was my mother’s. My mother was a sailor. And I am damn proud of that.
Eric Schuck is an assistant professor of resource economics at Colorado State University and officer in the Navy Reserve. He lives with his wife and three children in Wellington.
