Navy Women: "Ladies Wear The Blue" 1974 US Navy

more at http://quickfound.net/

TRACING THE HISTORY OF NAVY WOMEN FROM 1917, THIS FILM STRESSES THE IMPORTANCE OF EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY AND HIGHLIGHTS THE CHANGES THE NAVY IS MAKING TOWARD OFFERING A MORE SATISFYING AND REWARDING CAREER TO WOMEN IN NAVAL SERVICE.

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Navy

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Many women have served in the United States Navy for over a century. Today, there are over 52,391 women serving on active duty in an array of traditional (administrative, medical, etc.) and non-traditional (aviation, combat systems, etc.) ratings or careers. Like their male counterparts, female sailors are expected to adhere to regulations specific to appearance, grooming, and health and fitness; however some differences exist for example in physical fitness tests due to performance and in relation to pregnancy and parenting provisions created to help support military families...

History

Pre–World War I

Women worked as nurses for the navy as early as the American Civil War. The United States Navy Nurse Corps was officially established in 1908; it was all-female until 1965. After the establishment of the Nurse Corps in 1908 by an Act of Congress, twenty women were selected as the first members and assigned to the Naval Medical School Hospital in Washington, D.C. However, the navy did not provide room or board for them, and so the nurses rented their own house and provided their own meals. In time, the nurses would come to be known as "The Sacred Twenty" because they were the first women to serve formally as members of the Navy... The Nurse Corps gradually expanded to 160 on the eve of World War I. For a few months in 1913, Navy nurses saw their first shipboard service, aboard Mayflower and Dolphin...

World War II

World War II again brought the need for additional personnel. The Navy organized to recruit women into a separate women's auxiliary, labeled Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES). WAVES served in varied positions around the continental U.S. and in Hawaii.

Two groups of Navy nurses (Navy nurses were all women then) were held prisoner by the Japanese in World War II. Chief Nurse Marion Olds and nurses Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christiansen, Virginia Fogerty and Doris Yetter were taken prisoner on Guam shortly after Pearl Harbor and transported to Japan... Navy nurse Ann Agnes Bernatitus, one of the “Angels of Bataan”, nearly became another POW; she was one of the last to escape Corregidor Island in the Philippines, via the USS Spearfish. Upon her return to the United States she became the first American to receive the Legion of Merit.

In 1943, Thelma Bendler Stern, an engineering draftsman, became the first woman assigned to perform duties aboard a United States Navy ship as part of her official responsibilities.

The first black woman sworn into the Navy Nurse Corps was Phyllis Mae Dailey, a Columbia University student from New York, on March 8, 1945. She was the first of only four black women to serve as a Navy nurse during World War II...

Major changes occurred for navy women in the 1970s. Alene Duerk became the first female admiral in the navy in 1972. In 1976 RADM Fran McKee became the first female unrestricted line officer appointed to flag rank. In 1978, Judge John Sirica ruled the law banning navy women from ships to be unconstitutional in the case Owens v. Brown. That year, Congress approved a change to Title 10 USC Section 6015 to permit the navy to assign women to fill sea duty billets on support and noncombatant ships. During the 1970s, women began to enter the surface warfare and aviation fields, gained access to officer accession programs previously open only to men, and started to screen for command opportunities ashore.

In December 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated that starting in 2016 all combat jobs would open to women. In March 2016 Ash Carter approved final plans from military service branches and the U.S. Special Operations Command to open all combat jobs to women, and authorized the military to begin integrating female combat soldiers "right away."...