Mildred McAfee takes the oath of office to become a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve and Director of the Navy's Women's Reserve at the Navy Department on 3 August 1942. From left, Admiral Ernest J. King, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Lieutenant Commander McAfee, and Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, Chief of Navy Personnel. Photo courtesy of Wellesley College Archives
Lieutenant Commander Mildred McAfee was the first woman commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, entering the U.S. Naval Reserve on 3 August 1942. The ceremony took place in Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox’s office, eight months after McAfee had been recruited to the idea of heading Women Authorized for Voluntary Emergency Service, U.S. Naval Reserve Women’s Reserve, or the WAVES.1 The story of the WAVES and their contribution to the war effort is well known, but perhaps less appreciated today is how important McAfee’s extraordinary character was to the success of the WAVES and in paving the way for the permanent acceptance of women into the Armed Forces after the war.
From Wellesley to Washington
After serving as Dean of Women at Oberlin College in Ohio, in 1936 McAfee was named President of Wellesley College. At 36, McAfee, the Vassar-educated daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Missouri, became the youngest President of any prestigious U.S. college. Her humility, intelligence, and sharp judgment endeared her to the college’s trustees, faculty, and students (who fondly addressed her as Miss Mac), and would serve her well in her later wartime role.2
The nation was in a state of emergency by January of 1942, and Navy leadership reversed its initial opposition and moved quickly to take women into the ranks in stateside roles, freeing more men for overseas duty. Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, Chief of Naval Personnel, became an early advocate after observing a small contingent of Britain’s Women’s Royal Naval Service in Canada, but sought to attract the right women into the Navy. He decided to approach women leaders within academia, and quickly set up a council of university women to advise the Navy.3
Barnard College’s Dean Virginia Gildersleeve was appointed head of the council, and shortly thereafter she convened a conference of “executives of a large variety of women’s colleges” to discuss how to bring more women into the war effort.4 McAfee attended, and was surprised to subsequently receive a letter from Gildersleeve asking her to accept an appointment as the first director of the new organization. In an August 1969 interview for the U.S. Naval Institute’s oral history program, McAfee acknowledged she was offered the appointment in part because she was young enough to be commissioned, but more importantly because the Navy needed someone of stature who was not “politically connected” to represent the program to the public.
The theory definitely was that in appointing anyone to be the head of this, they wanted to assure the parents and boyfriends of girls that they would be looked after in the Navy. That this was not going to be a wild show, but it would be respectable, (headed by) the president of a woman’s college.5
In Washington, McAfee found the Navy a confusing bureaucratic labyrinth of offices and codes. Time was of the essence, however, and she quickly got down to business.
McAfee, Captain Charles Slayton, and Rear Admiral George S. Bryan watch as Frances Bochner, PH3, and Lillian Boscher, PH3, construct a slotted template layout of aerial photographs used in the construction of charts. National Archives
Selectivity, Professionalism, and Humility
Under the discerning eyes of many skeptics, McAfee set forth with a seriousness of purpose, sharp wit, and self-effacing sense of humor that impressed Navy leaders. She made clear from the beginning that women taken into the WAVES should be given no special treatment, be of the highest possible quality, and should serve where the Navy needed them. She was confident the WAVES would acquire talent that would speak for itself, and “the men were simply astonished because it hadn’t occurred to them that they (the WAVES) really would be skillful.…”7 McAfee did not take kindly to attitudes of entitlement or pretentious usurpations of authority that weren’t first earned. For her, the culture of the WAVES must be one of no-nonsense, selfless professionalism.
This required considerable selectivity, ensuring only women of the finest character screened into the WAVES. Working with Gildersleeve’s committee, McAfee helped interview and select the senior WAVES officer for each naval district. McAfee was keen to the problems the Army encountered in rapidly establishing and expanding the WAAC, where a lack of quality screening resulted in discipline problems, providing ample grist for skeptics to mock the idea of women serving in uniform.
McAfee listens as Storekeeper 2nd Class Dorothy Oates explains her duties in handling salvage materials at Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 4 July 1945. Items in the background are aircraft engine carburetors. National Archives
With a process for selectivity established, in the ensuing months McAfee focused on building a staff, determining the work needs of the Navy’s different bureaus, and ensuring public relations material for the WAVES comported with the professional image she was committed to establishing. On the latter effort, her job was quite challenging from the outset, as public relations men in the Navy kept proposing ideas that most certainly did not portray a professional image. When the Navy wanted to distribute a recruitment movie that McAfee felt did not portray the reality of the WAVES, she brought in Louise Wilde, head of public relations at Mt. Holyoke College, to squash the film. According to McAfee:
…there was so much cheesecake in it, and it was appealing to an adventure that we couldn’t possibly guarantee. When they showed it to me, I said, ‘I just won’t buy that. We cannot have this thing which will make them think they’re coming in to get their man and to have a thrill....8
McAfee’s diplomatic finesse also was put to an early test. She had no command authority over the WAVES, and was given no defined role or set of tasks when she took the job. During her first year in the Navy Annex, she struggled to influence Navy decision-makers. By the summer of 1943 McAfee had succeeded in getting a WAVES officer assigned to each bureau department but she was still frustrated by the slow progress and decided a new approach was needed. She instructed her officers to propose ideas in a way that allowed one of the senior men in each department to appropriate the idea as his own.
I remember vividly that we solemnly agreed that we were going at this wrong. We could go on having just as many ideas as we wanted to, but under no circumstances must they come from my office to those offices, except indirectly, and it would be the fine art of each of these young women, fine intelligent young women, to get the idea to the man in charge so he (believed he) thought it (up) himself....9
McAfee’s “back-door diplomacy” got the job done. 10
Until the End of the War
By the fall of 1944 the WAVES reached its peak, with more than 86,000 women serving in a wide variety of roles (including as truck drivers and flight simulator trainers) at more than 900 stations in the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii. Captain Mildred McAfee Horton (she married in August 1945) served as director until a replacement was named in early 1946. The success of the program had convinced the Navy not to disestablish the WAVES during demobilization. On 30 July 1948, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act was signed into law, allowing women to serve in the Navy.11
Mildred McAfee spent most of the war in Washington, living in a small, spare one-bedroom apartment. She spent a total of two hours at sea, on the USS Missouri (BB-63) during pre-commissioning sea trials.12 After the war, she returned to Wellesley. In just four years of service, she left an outsized impact on the Navy’s future. Her legacy is still with us.
1 Interview with Mildred McAfee Horton at Her Home in Randolph, New Hampshire, interviewed by John T. Mason, Jr., (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 25-26 August 1969), 18-19. President Roosevelt formally established the program on 30 July 1942 when he signed Public Law 689, an amendment to the 1938 Naval Reserve Act. WAVES was not initially the accepted name for the program. Professor Elizabeth Reynard, of Barnard, came up with the acronym, but McAfee was initially opposed to any name for the program, preferring the women be addressed simply by rank and job title. However, after some unflattering names were floated in the press McAfee agreed to WAVES. The Navy already had an officer classification called Volunteer Specialist (VS), so Reynard evolved WVS into WAVES.
2 “Miss Mac”, Time Magazine, 12 March 1945, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797202,00.html
3 “Miss Mac”.
4 Horton, Interview, 4.
5 Horton, Interview, 6.
7 Horton, Interview, 18.
8 Horton, Interview, 25.
9 Horton, Interview, 29-30.
10 Horton, Interview, 27-28.
11 Hancock, Joy Bright, Captain, U.S. Navy (Retired) (1972). Lady in the Navy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 232.
12 Horton, Interview, 102.
Captain Bray served as a naval intelligence officer for 28 years before retiring in 2016. Currently, he is the managing director in the Geopolitical Risk practice at Ankura.