Approximately 4,000 African American women volunteered for the Army Corps and served in segregated units. In 1945 a unit of 885 African American women from the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was sent to England to process a backlog of mail sent to U.S. personnel overseas. Using a tracking system they created and working three shifts a day, they cleared the backlog in three months.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
First African American Members of the Women’s Army Corps Assigned to Overseas Duty Get off a Train at Night in England, photograph by British Combine, February 1945
Serving the Nation: Women’s Army Corps
In 1941 Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a bill to allow women to volunteer for service in the U.S. Army in non-combat roles. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps Act into law in 1942. The following year, Congress approved legislation granting women full military status and allowing them to enlist directly in the Army for the first time. By the end of World War II, more than 150,000 American women had served in the Women’s Army Corps.
If we are to have total war . . . there is a very definite place for women in it. Modern war recognizes no limitations of battlefields, no gender of its participants. To win a total war every resource, every service must be utilized.
Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, March 17, 1942
Approximately 4,000 African American women volunteered for the Army Corps and served in segregated units. In 1945 a unit of 885 African American women from the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was sent to England to process a backlog of mail sent to U.S. personnel overseas. Using a tracking system they created and working three shifts a day, they cleared the backlog in three months.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
