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The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers

Amazon.com Price:  $22.07 (as of 23/04/2019 15:29 PST- Details)

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Description

This is the story of how The usa’s first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the U.S. Army. In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the contemporary technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female “wire experts” when he came upon that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire. Without communications for even an hour, the army would collapse.

While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Woodrow Wilson struggled to steer a segregationist Congress to provide women of all races the vote, these competent and courageous young women swore the Army oath. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers welcomed, resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and in the end celebrated them. They received a baptism by fire when German troops pounded Paris with heavy artillery. Some followed “Black Jack” Pershing to battlefields where they served through shelling and bombardment. Grace Banker, their 25-year-old leader, won the Distinguished Service Medal.

The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920, the similar year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment granting the ballot. When the operators sailed home, the army impulsively dismissed them without veterans’ benefits. They started a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979. With the assistance of the National Organization for Women, Senator Barry Goldwater, and a crusading Seattle attorney, they triumphed over the U.S. Army.

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