While women have served in nearly all of America’s wars, it wasn’t until after World War I that female Veterans achieved access to government health care. The admission record of the first women admitted to one of the branches of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS) invites a deeper look into how women secured this right.
In 1892, women who served as nurses in the Union Army during the Civil War at last obtained recognition for their service when Congress made them eligible to receive military pensions. Five years later, Congress granted honorably discharged Army nurses the right to burial in national cemeteries. However, women were stymied when it came to obtaining the same medical benefits as men. The network of convalescent homes established after the Civil War under the name the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers remained the exclusive preserve of male Veterans.
The status of women within the military and in society at large improved significantly in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1901, women formally became part of the nation’s Armed Forces with the creation of the Army Nurse Corps. More than 35,000 women served in World War I as Army or Navy nurses or in various non-combat roles.
After the war, buoyed by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 giving women the right to vote, female Veterans became more outspoken in their demands for better benefits. The Women’s Overseas Service League, formed in May of 1921 to maintain a social network and assist returning women Veterans, championed their cause. One of league’s major goals was to help ex-servicewomen gain admission to the National Home.
The league’s lobbying efforts led to the landmark decision by the NHDVS Board of Managers in 1923 to admit women to their campuses. The board announced the new policy in a letter to the organization’s district managers: “While fully appreciating the fact that the present facilities of the Home had not been designed nor intended for the care and treatment of women . . . every effort must be made to meet this new demand.”
The first woman to enter a National Home was 59-year-old Gertrude L. Butts of Denver, Colorado. During the war, she and approximately 11,000 other women served in the U.S. Navy as Yeomen (F) or “Yeomenettes” in popular parlance. General George H. Wood, the board’s president, personally approved her application in July 1923.
She arrived at the Western Branch of the National Home in Leavenworth, Kansas, to considerable fanfare. A short report that was published in numerous newspapers heralded the event and predicted that it would set a precedent leading to the admission of hundreds more ex-service women. She ended up staying at Leavenworth for just a few months and then was discharged, only to be admitted to the branch in Danville, Illinois, the following year.
After announcing the new policy, the board designated Danville, which a February 1924 article in the New York Times described as “one of the finest [homes] of its kind in the country,” as the campus best suited to accommodate women who needed general medical care. Two brick barracks with room enough for two hundred occupants were reserved for their use.
The Danville home also established a separate dining hall, kitchen, bath house, and laundry. Not all parts of the campus were segregated, however. The library, theater, chapel, and recreational facilities were open to Veterans of either sex. Women with tuberculosis were directed to the Northwestern Branch in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The new tuberculosis hospital completed in early 1924 set aside a floor in one of its wings for the treatment of female patients.
More women followed in Gertrude Butts’ footsteps, although not in the number forecast. By mid-1924, fewer than twenty had been admitted to the two branches. In 1931, the Dayton National Home, with it’s Miller Cottage, was selected as the new site to house women Veterans. Nonetheless, even if their presence was small, the opening up of the National Home to women was still a historic occasion signifying that female Veterans had the same claim to government medical assistance as their male counterparts.
By Katie Rories
Historian, Veterans Health Administration
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 87: Shoulder Patch for Veterans Administration Military Personnel in World War II
For a time during and after World War II, active duty military personnel were assigned to the Veterans Administration.
That assignment was represented by a blue circle with a golden phoenix rising from the ashes. This was the shoulder patch worn by the more than 1,000 physicians, dentists, and other medical professionals serving in the U.S. Army at VA medical centers.
This was the same patch worn by Gen. Omar Bradley during his time as VA administrator after the war concluded.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
