After 29 years in the Navy, Rear Adm. Marsha Johnson Evans was in no hurry to leave. Having chalked up a stunning record of ground-breaking achievements, Evans felt happy and fulfilled in the organization that had given her so many opportunities.
Then she found a form letter that had been sitting in her in-box for weeks while Evans was globe-trotting on military business. It announced that the Girl Scouts were looking for a new national executive director.
“I saw it and I said, `Hm, I was a Girl Scout once,’ ” Evans recalled. “I took it home to my husband and I said, `Well, I’m probably going to be in the Navy for 35 years, but it’s kind of interesting.’ ” She decided to go ahead and apply.
On Jan. 12, Evans was named national executive director of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. In accepting the post, the first woman to command an American Navy base has taken over the helm of the world’s largest organization for girls, a body of more than 3.5 million members, including approximately 2.7 million girls aged 5 to 17 and about 850,000 adults.
To the trailblazer whose Navy career stretched from Watergate to Tailhook and beyond, the new job is “much the same but different.” What’s the same is the emphasis on values, on patriotism and service. What’s different is the attitude toward women. In the Girl Scouts, Evans said, “there’s absolutely no ambivalence about how we value women and girls.
“Today, I’m spending all my waking hours with an organization devoted to helping young girls make good life choices, develop confidence, develop that sense of self-esteem that prepares them and makes them ready for all the wonderful opportunities that will come before them as we expand the notion of what women can and should be doing.”
If the goal is to prepare girls for rapidly expanding opportunities, there’s no better role model than Evans.
In a Navy career spanning nearly three decades, Evans obtained overseas postings in Tokyo and London, served as a social aide representing the Navy at state dinners and other functions in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, served as second-in-command in a boot camp and commanded a technical training center on San Francisco’s now-defunct naval base on Treasure Island.
She returned to Treasure Island in 1991 to assume command of the entire San Francisco base, becoming the first woman to command an American naval base. She later became the first woman to head the Navy’s recruitment program.
Most recently, she divided her time between posts as superintendent of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and interim director of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, an international military think-tank in Garmisch, Germany.
It’s an intimidating resume, but in person the 50-year-old Evans is anything but intimidating. Tall and trim and exuding warmth and enthusiasm, she could pass as a particularly smart and well-organized suburban Girl Scout troop leader.
It’s not a comparison likely to offend Evans, who in a recent speech quoted former First Lady Lou Henry Hoover: “It takes just as much courage to stick to the housework until it’s done as it does to go out and meet a bear.”
Despite a career rubbing shoulders with the world’s major players, Evans, the daughter of a naval officer and an artist who postponed her career while raising five children, reserves her highest praise for people out of the spotlight who simply do their jobs and do them well.
She spoke with pride of her mother, who as a Girl Scout troop leader in what was then French Morocco, where Evans’ father was posted in the 1950s, taught unconventional crafts such as textual painting and who became a successful artist after her children were grown.
She also praised her husband, former Navy pilot Gerard Evans, who “wrote the book on role-reversed marriages,” she said. After his retirement in 1984, Gerard Evans took on the role of Navy spouse, volunteering for charity work and community activities and “helping out in any way he was needed,” said Evans.
“He has a great sense of himself,” she said. “People have asked me through the years, `How can he not work?’ and I’d say, `Well, if he decided to go to work, I’d be really sad because I really like this partnership.’ “
Another of Evans’ heroes was a company commander in the boot camp in San Diego, where Evans was second-in-command.
“He always found a way to give the most misfit person, a person who just couldn’t march left foot, right foot, a task that brought self-esteem to the person,” recalled Evans.
It was a lesson well-learned. If there is any common thread in what friends and co-workers say about Evans, it is that she has a unique ability to bring people together as a team, and to give each member of the team respect and a sense of self-esteem.
“She’s always very positive,” said former co-worker Richard Elster, provost of the Naval Postgraduate School, who described Evans’ management style as “inclusive.” “You leave a meeting with her, even a very difficult one, feeling good about yourself.”
A talent for building consensus and self-esteem may sound like a traditionally “feminine” virtue, but longtime friend Anne Cohn Donnelly, former director of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, said it was central to Evans’ success in the male-dominated Navy.
“To be a woman in the Navy and to rise to the position she’s achieved has certainly not been easy,” said Donnelly, now a Chicago community service fellow and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. “The way she succeeded was by bringing other people up with her.”
“Other people” naturally included the next generation of women.
But after two postings at the Naval Academy, Evans became sharply aware of the hurdles young women face as they attempt to take their places in a changing world. Not only did she hear firsthand stories of pervasive sexual harassment, she also saw how the reluctance of young female midshipmen to major in math and science was keeping them out of leadership-track assignments in the Navy.
Later, as the Navy’s chief recruiter, she saw how problems such as teenage pregnancy, poor academic skills and poor physical fitness were denying many young girls the career opportunities available in the military services.
As a result, she said, the more she learned about the Girl Scouts’ programs to promote math, science, computer skills, physical fitness and literacy among girls, the more intrigued she became. She confessed to Donnelly that “I feel as if I’ve been preparing for this position all my life,” Donnelly said.
Still, when she was actually offered the job, there was a moment of doubt. “I thought, `Is this the job I leave the Navy for?’ ” she recalled. “It took me about a millisecond to say `Yes.’ “
In taking the job, Evans has again joined up with an organization that is struggling to keep up with a rapidly changing world while preserving its basic values and mission. The Girl Scouts recently hired an image consultant in an attempt to shed its “cookies and camping” image and has launched up-to-date initiatives, such as GirlSports, a sports and fitness program, Girls at the Center, a science and technology initiative, and Beyond Bars, which offers scouting to girls whose mothers are in prison.
But with Evans at the helm, don’t expect the Girl Scouts to abandon its old-fashioned values of patriotism and service. It’s clear that to former Rear Adm. Marsha Evans, the Girl Scout Promise, with its pledge to “serve God and my country” and “help other people at all times,” is still very much operative.
“I came from a modest background,” she explained. “There were five children, and we did not have a lot of money. I worked my way through school. It just strikes me that in this country, there are so many opportunities. You obviously have to be motivated, you have to work hard, but they’re there and they’re available for men and women both.
“I have a passion for giving something back,” she concluded, “because I think I’ve been blessed with enormous riches.”
