Thelma Robinson — Thelma Morey back then — was 16 years old when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1942. The attack pulled the U.S. out of more than a decade of isolationism and into World War II.
“It was a time when everyone said, ‘What can I do to help win the war?” says Robinson, now 89 years old. “I had thought of different things I could do. I thought maybe I’d be a reporter because I’d always liked to write, but in the end I felt the best place I could serve was to be a nurse.”
Nursing has long been a point of entry for women in the U.S. military, dating back to the American Revolution, when women also served as water bearers, cooks and laundresses. World War II gave women broader opportunities for jobs, from service pilots to mechanics, but it wasn’t until 1948 that Congress passed legislation permitting women to become regular, permanent members of the armed forces. Even then, obstacles remained — until 1967 no more than 2 percent of the armed forces could be women and it wasn’t until 2013 that the Pentagon lifted the ban on women serving in combat roles, a policy that won’t see full implementation until 2016.
There’s still work to be done as women continue to secure equal employment and fair treatment in the armed forces, but there’s little question that female roles in the U.S. military have evolved. At noon on Nov. 19, Robinson will join two other women veterans for a panel discussion called “Women in the Military” at the Dairy Center for the Arts’ Boedecker Theater. Prior to the panel, at 11 a.m., attendees will have the opportunity to view Women Warriors: A Vision of Valor, a locally produced documentary featuring 10 Colorado-based women veterans who served in the wars between WWII and the contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The film explores the history and progression of women’s roles in the U.S. military.
For Robinson and many other teenaged women at the time, aiding in the war effort meant staying stateside, where a shortage of nurses was creating a different kind of battle on the home front. Once Robinson finished high school, the Kansas native applied to the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, the country’s first educational program for women. The program was also desegregated.
Robinson has dedicated her retirement years to educating the public about the forgotten history of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, writing three books on the subject and traveling to Tokyo to talk about her third book, Nisei Cadet Nurse of World War II: Patriotism in Spite of Prejudice. The book tells the story of how more than 350 Japanese American women found release from Japanese internment camps by joining the Cadet Nurse Corps.
“It’s interesting, the name of the panel, because when you think of women warriors — and certainly the two other women [on the panel] who served in [Iraq] and Afghanistan, they were certainly warriors — but what about me?” says Robinson. “Not a lot of people understand that during World War II we did have a war on the home front — poliomyelitis. Cadet nurses were exposed to communicable diseases and at that time we didn’t have the immunization that we have today. We didn’t have the treatments; it was just taken for granted that when you graduated, because you were a nurse, you would have a positive tuberculosis test. With polio [and tuberculosis] we were on the frontlines fighting and we were at risk.”
Fellow panelist Traci Kroupa served in the Navy for 22 years, first as a parachute rigger then as a hospital corpsman. Her work as a corpsman attached her to a Marine unit of 20 to 25 men. Kroupa was responsible for providing the unit with combat medical care — chest tubes, tracheostomies, carrying patients on her back and being able to do some of these tasks while firing a weapon.
Kroupa notes that medicine has always been a woman’s “foot in the door” to military service, but she says that women have always been in the thick of the battle with men, despite laws that have dictated otherwise.
“They talk about women in combat and how they finally opened the door for us to serve with the men. I thought, ‘I’ve been serving with men on the front lines since we went through Baghdad [during the Gulf War],’” says Kroupa. “It’s frustrating for [women] when some policy-writing congressman in Washington, D.C., is saying we need to lower the standards for females in combat roles — well, why don’t you serve two months in boot camp with us and see what we can do first?
“I think [women] bring a level of maturity and a whole different level of thinking [to the military],” Kroupa says. “It’s so hard sometimes to watch leadership in the military pick men over women to be leaders just because that’s the way it’s always been.”
But on the ground, says Kroupa, the view of women is progressive.
“The younger generation’s like, the woman next to me is just a solider, she’s just a Marine and she’s here to do a job. It’s the higher echelon that’s making it a problem, not us on the ground.”
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