The roles of women in the military are increasingly changing as more opportunities open up for females, giving them the chance to distinguish themselves in every branch and from the bottom to the top.
Here, we'll look at three remarkable women who have left their mark on the history of the armed forces with their contributions: Army Cpl. Jessica Ann Ellis, Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, and Army Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown.
These three women represent the often-overlooked history of females fighting for America and what they have achieved.
Corporal Jessica Ellis (1983–2008) was part of a “new generation of warriors,” as Women In Military Service For America Memorial (WIMSA) titled an exhibition in which she featured. As an Army combat medic, Ellis served with the 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. Though her role was officially a non-combat position, she helped the combat engineers of her unit conduct patrols.
Deployed near the Iraqi capital Baghdad in 2008, she told her parents “this is a very dangerous place to be,” per The Oregonian. After her unit’s vehicle hit a hidden improvised explosive device, Ellis was able to escape but with significant injuries. Three weeks later on May 11, 2008, her unit was the target of another roadside bomb. Tragically, she was killed by the blast.
According to her parents, she considered her duty to her country and her brothers-in-arms the most important thing. “The guys looked out for her and she helped them,” her father Steven Ellis said. “She trained with them in Fort Campbell and she went to war with them, and she died with them.”
For her service in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the ultimate sacrifice she made on behalf of her country, Ellis was awarded with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, per the Arlington National Cemetery, where her remains rest.
Soldiers like Jessica Ellis are pioneers of our day, yet there were groundbreaking women who preceded them.
One of the most distinguished in their ranks was Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992) of the U.S. Navy, who was not only a high-achieving officer in the Navy but also a Ph.D. from Yale University in Mathematics. She was also a first-generation computer programmer and coder.
After becoming a professor of mathematics, she volunteered to serve in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) in 1943 at the height of World War II and served until 1946, after which she split her time between computing projects for private companies and the Navy.
She retired in 1986 and left behind a legacy of scientific achievement that continues to inspire women in the computer science world to this day. Speaking about her unlikely achievements and having to prove herself in worlds that are still dominated by men, Hopper said, “If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you’ve just proven a natural law!”
While Hopper proved that women could work at the highest levels of the Navy, Hazel Johnson-Brown (1927–2011) showed that black women belonged in the leadership of the U.S. Army. Johnson-Brown found her way into the Army after graduating from the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing in 1950.
In those days of segregation, the Army was one of the few places where African-Americans could rise to the top after President Harry Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9981 declared that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”
Joining the Army Nurse Corps in 1955, she served at Army hospitals in Japan, Korea, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. She earned her bachelor’s in nursing in 1959, master’s in nursing in 1963, and Ph.D. in education administration in 1978, all with the support of the Army. In 1979, she was named the 16th chief of the Army Nurse Corps and promoted to brigadier general.
Johnson-Brown never stopped striving until retirement, even volunteering to serve as a field nurse in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm (1990–1991). As she said, “Positive progress towards excellence, that’s what we want. If you stand still and settle for the status quo, that’s exactly what you will have.”
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