Women who went to war came home to vast changes

IN THIS SECTION

Introduction

Shattered bodies
and minds

Gallery

HOME

NORTHWEST

Obituaries

Sci-Tech

Special Reports

Photo Journal

Transportation

Susan Paynter

SPORTS

OPINION

Home Delivery

See the P-I's front page

Thursday, September 24, 1998

Women who went to war came home to vast changes

By CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Witness to War
If the war began a personal transformation that defined the rest of her life, it also began a transformation of women in general back home.

After more than 50 years of pressure from suffragists, it was the women who served in WWI who finally shamed the government into taking action on the right to vote.

In June 1919, less than a year after the war ended, the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Amendment. Women marked ballots for the first time in 1920.

Laura Frost stands before the Paris Opera in spring of 1919.

By breaking the military's gender barrier, the 33,000 women who served in WWI spurred other social changes. By WWII, women encountered fewer barriers to serving, and more than 10 times that number signed up. At war's end, thousands of them took up work in fields previously dominated by men.

But my grandmother couldn't know back then -- just as the war was ending -- how it would affect her life or her country. She was simply excited to be coming home safely.

"About Nov. 7th, we began to hear rumors that the armistice was being planned," she wrote in her memoir. "We didn't believe it, for we still heard the guns and the wounded were still coming in.

"Finally, one day, the 11th of November, everything became quiet about 11 a.m. and you wondered what was different. There wasn't a sound, for there were no birds to sing, or no cows to moo. We still couldn't believe it possible, as we had so many patients. A group of French trumpeters came in the afternoon and played for us, so that was the only celebration we had."

By the Armistice, her unit had treated 15,000 casualties.

It would be six more months before she got orders to go home. She continued to care for the wounded, but with the war over, she also spent time in Paris, Monaco and the French Alps.

Though the shelling had stopped, the war continued to wound in unexpected ways.

While on leave in Nice, my grandmother bumped into a friend of the first lieutenant she'd fallen in love with during training camp, the man whose letters she read and reread when she was off duty. She was told her lieutenant would arrive in the same city the next day.

"With great expectation, Margaret and I went to the train to meet him," she said.

"He had lost weight and looked very tired and just gave a nod of recognition when we greeted him. We all got in a taxi and he saw that we got off at our hotel, then he went on to where the officers were staying."

She later learned he had been gassed and wounded, and his best friend had been blown apart beside him in a trench two days before the Armistice.

"I never saw him again, and sent the little service pin back to him by a messenger."

But heartache couldn't dampen her excitement at going home. On May 31, 1919, she boarded the Cape Finesterre bound for America.

"Coming into New York harbor was an unforgettable event," she wrote. "Tugboats and fireboats came out to meet us and in my exuberance, I flung my blue straw hat right at the Statue of Liberty. Bands were playing and toilet paper was strung all over the ship like confetti on a happy cruise ship."

She didn't know then that the celebration would be short-lived, that she was returning to a country not ready to hear her stories or those of the other women who served.

"Saying goodbye to all the friends we had made in the service was very sobering," she wrote. "On the train and the streetcar home, I never felt so depressed and forlorn in my life."

Though dressed in full uniform "no one knew or noticed I was a returning veteran."

Many years later, she said she knew how Vietnam veterans felt when they came home.

Next: A rich life followed the war but its haunting memories remain

AP LOCAL HEADLINES
· Cancer survival handbook aims at Alaska Natives
· Trolling for 'the very best salmon in the world
· Historic Ohme Gardens asks for support
· Fast-food workers helping ID dangerous drivers
· Saturday is 150th anniversary of Battle of Steptoe