WAVES and Women in the Navy From WWI to WWII Released by the U.S. Naval Historical Center Large Format Photo Archive

Navy WAVES

Photograph

U.S. Navy women’s service press photograph archive released by the U.S. Naval Historical Center in 1968, documenting how the Navy represented women’s military labor across World War I, World War II, and later twentieth century service. The group links the Yeomen (F) of 1918, the first women formally enlisted in the U.S. Navy, to the WAVES established during World War II and still present in postwar naval administration, inspection, training, and ceremony. The photographs show women’s military participation as clerical work, uniformed discipline, barracks life, recruitment, public parade, and institutional remembrance.

Photo archive of 11 Large silver gelatin press photographs, most measuring 8" x 10", released by the U.S. Naval Historical Center, Al images produced in 1968, with images subjects from 1918 to the 1960s. The photos show a Navy Department office in Washington, D.C., in 1918 with uniformed and civilian personnel at desks; a woman identified in the caption as “Counselor Eastwood in the office”; a group of WAVES passing in review on an airfield; women marching in formation in New York City during a wartime bond drive; women seated in an auditorium; uniformed officers posed outside a building marked “Uniforms”; a woman in Navy dress working beside a bunk; and a line of women in white shirts and dark skirts marching in formation. Earlier Navy memory appears through portraits of Julia Washington Allen, Yeoman (F) First Class, shown with her cap turned to reveal “U.S.N.” and “Yeoman F” lettering, and Elsie M. Long, Yeoman Second Class, identified as serving on active duty from October 7, 1918 to June 4, 1919. A recruiting poster reads, “Women awake! Your country needs you. Learn to be of national service. Join the Navy League. Help the Navy, local headquarters.”

Women entered the Navy in large numbers during World War I because clerical expansion created a labor need that could be filled under existing enlistment language; Yeomen (F) worked as stenographers, clerks, translators, messengers, radio operators, and office personnel while remaining segregated by gendered expectations of acceptable service. During World War II, the WAVES brought women into the Naval Reserve under a formal wartime structure, expanding their work into administration, communications, aviation support, supply, intelligence, training, and stateside naval operations. These 1968 release photographs show how the Navy later organized that history for public use: women appear as disciplined personnel, administrative workers, patriotic recruits, and predecessors in a service tradition that the institution could claim as part of its own record. Light surface and corner wear, verso captions, stamps, and release labels. Overall very good condition. An official record of how the U.S. Navy preserved and circulated the history of women’s military service from the Yeomen (F) to the WAVES and their postwar successors.

Item #23555

Price: $780.00