At long last, the more than 1.8 million women who voluntarily served with America’s armed forces will have a memorial at the nation’s capital honoring their service.
Ground was broken recently on a monumental project that in the next two years will transform the huge half-circle retaining wall at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery into the Women in Military Service for America Memorial.
“It will be the first of its kind in the world,” said retired Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the Women’s Memorial Foundation, which is bringing the memorial into being.
Designed by New York architects Marion Gail Weiss and Michael Manfredi, winners of a 130-entry national competition, the project will have open spaces created behind the wall to display artifacts from a variety of aspects of women’s service in the military, a 196-seat auditorium and a computer center that ultimately will be able to retrieve and display the life and service stories of hundreds of thousands of women.
There will also be a Court of Honor saluting the women who have been killed in military service, including Maj. Marie Rossi, the Army helicopter pilot who was one of the five women killed in action in the Persian Gulf War, and Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the Navy’s first woman F-14 combat carrier fighter pilot, who died in a crash at sea last October.
The memorial’s imposing exterior, on a direct line with the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol across the Potomac River in the District of Columbia, will retain the basic half-circle retaining wall structure that has been there for 63 years and badly needs repair and rehabilitation.
But it will be transformed, most notably by an enormous circular reflecting pool at its base and several dramatically ascending staircases cut into the wall and leading up to the cemetery proper on the hillside above it.
Along the terrace atop the wall will be an arc of “glass pages,” windowlike tablets that will admit light to the interior chambers below and that will bear, in 4-inch-high etched lettering, memorable quotations from women who served.
The original design called for nearly 40-foot-high glass columns to be erected along the terrace, but the architects withdrew this component at the suggestion of the various Washington boards and commissions that have oversight over such memorial constructions.
At a press unveiling in June, the controversial point was raised that the memorial lacks a large sculpture of a woman or some other obvious symbol signifying that this is a memorial to military women.
The nation’s capital is a veritable sea of sculptural monuments to military men, from the heroic equestrian statue of Gen. Ulysses Grant and his soldiers at the east end of the Mall to the famous Iwo Jima Marine monument set on a hill overlooking Arlington Cemetery.
Except for a statue adjacent to the Vietnam War Memorial honoring the women who served (and died) in that war, there is no sculpture symbolizing women in the armed services.
Three classically robed women surmount the 1877 Washington Peace Monument, but women adorn capital military sculpture mostly in the manner of the naked and half naked adulatory female figures to be found at the bases of the statues of the Marquis de LaFayette and Baron von Steuben in LaFayette Park across from the White House.
“That was a very difficult challenge we decided not to undertake,” said Vaught, a Vietnam veteran and University of Illinois graduate whose last Air Force command was that of commander of the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command at North Chicago.
“To create a single statue symbolizing all the women who ever served, it’s just too much.” she said. “Women have served as pilots and, now, in combat. But they’ve also been typists, nurses, technicians, clerks.
“It would be hard to create a face representing all the ethnic backgrounds of women who’ve served in the armed forces. And their uniforms have been changing constantly. You couldn’t select one to represent all.”
Weiss said that instead of opting for an aggressive military symbol, such as the nearby Iwo Jima statue, they wanted to emphasize serenity and the sense of giving and sacrifice.
“There will be shafts of light coming through those stairwells from the cemetery above,” said Weiss, who with her partner designed the recently opened New American Green Park and Community Center in Olympia Fields.
“And the water represents a life-giving force,” said Manfredi, “something eternal.”
“It shows, as is too often forgotten,” said Vaught, “that men and women served together.”
The total construction cost of the project is $16 million, of which $9.5 million is a grant from Congress in repair and restoration funds. Adding the costs of the computer center, museum displays, furnishings, fundraising and administration, and the creation of an endowment to finance the operation of the memorial, the total will come to between $45 million and $50 million, “which is not unusual for a project of this size,” Vaught said.
She said fundraising has been difficult, noting that the nation’s several veterans’ organizations are male dominated “and tend to be more generous toward memorials honoring men.”
The general said she was pleased the project could get under way this year, when the nation is marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Most of the television specials and museum exhibits on that conflict have ignored the role of women, though it was substantial, with nearly 400,000 women volunteering to serve in uniform during that war.
“Just consider the women ferry (aircraft) pilots,” Vaught said. “They were the ones who had to fly dangerous damaged airplanes back for repairs because they were considered less valuable to the war effort than the male combat pilots.”
Women’s military service in North America predates the American Revolution. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, it was commonplace for women to accompany combat troops on the march, helping with cooking, nursing, laundering and other camp chores. Of the colonial Virginians who fell with Gen. Edward Braddock in his famous defeat in western Pennsylvania at the outset of the French and Indian War, eight of the dead were women.
The same practice was followed in George Washington’s Continental Army, and some of the women, most notably Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley (Molly Pitcher), took part in Revolutionary War fighting.
Women served in all manner of capacities in the Civil War. One, Dr. Mary Walker, a Union Army physician (and spy), became one of our first female prisoners-of-war and the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was taken away from her in 1917 during the height of the suffragette era but was restored posthumously in 1977.
Women military nurses served in the fever-ridden tropics during the Spanish-American War. During World War I, 23,000 women served as Army and Navy nurses, more than 10,000 of them overseas, and 10,000 volunteered as Navy “yeomanettes,” principally assigned to clerical work.
Women served with all service branches during World War II and were made an official component of each branch in 1948. Reserve Officer Training Corps programs were opened to women in 1969, and they began entering the service academies in 1975.
Though the women who served in Korea and Vietnam were nearly all nurses, women were engaged in combat-related activities in the Grenada and Panama actions and in the Persian Gulf War. Now, 11 percent of all active-duty armed service personnel and 13 percent of reserves are women.
Among the quotations to be inscribed on the Women’s Memorial glass tablets will be one from Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross and who tended wounded under fire during the Civil War battle of Antietam, the costliest single day’s fighting in American history.
Barton wrote: “From the storm-lashed deck of the Mayflower to the present hour, woman has stood like a rock for the welfare and the glory of the history of the country, and one might well add, unwritten, unrewarded and almost unrecognized.”
Until now.
