A New ERA for Women in the Navy: Zumwalt, Z-Grams, and the All-Volunteer Force

An article buried deep in the April 11, 1974 issue of the Press-Telegram out of Long Beach, California visually demonstrated the divergent expectations American women voluntarily adopted by the mid-1970s. Above the fold, editors chose to contrast the dual roles of the modern woman: the left image showed a grinning woman pilot in the cockpit of a C-1A Grumman twin-engine transport aircraft while the image on the right showed the same woman smiling adjacent to her fiancé opening wedding gifts in advance of their nuptials. When Barbara Allen Rainey applied for a commission in the United States Navy upon graduation from Whittier College in 1970, she had no intention of becoming a pilot, as naval aviation training remained closed to women.[1] Rainey entered the Navy at an opportune time, however, as the social movements of the previous decade had shifted the consciousness of many Americans toward racial and gender equality. As the war in Vietnam drew to a close, causing the Department of Defense to shift from the draft to an All-Volunteer Force (AVF), and with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) gaining traction, the Navy responded by altering its personnel policies to open restricted billets to women. These changes not only reflected broader social and economic trends, but had the added potential to improve public opinion of the Navy at the end of a deeply unpopular war. This, in turn, could make the Navy more appealing to future recruits as the services competed with one another over the most qualified candidates, regardless of race and sex.

For nearly a decade, American women had voiced their discontent privately in surveys, anonymously in opinion columns, and, at times, publicly at rallies and protest marches across the United States. Beginning in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique—in which Friedan identified the siren song of labor-saving appliances and comforts that lured a cadre of predominantly white women to the comforts of middle-class suburbia—countless women expressed their personal bouts of ennui.[2] The social and economic mobility that came to define much of the 1950s was generally unattainable for women of color, especially Black women who often left school early to work as laundresses or maids in white households to supplement the meager incomes of their families.[3] Despite articles in Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Southern Living, and Women’s Home Companion telling middle-class American women that personal fulfillment could be found in their dual role as housewife and mother, much of these magazines’ target audience remained either dissatisfied, skeptical, or wholly unconvinced.[4] “Their words,” Friedan remarked of her survey respondents, “seem to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.” Friedan identified “a stunting or evasion of growth” among American housewives who simultaneously suffered from a malaise she called “the problem that has no name.”[5] The following year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which included Title VII, explicitly prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.[6]
 
On the heels of the Civil Rights Act, a group of women committed to equality between the sexes formed the National Organization for Women. The group’s founders—which included Friedan and Pauli Murray, an androgynous Black civil rights activist—sought to reform social, demographic, and economic aspects of American life, including the institution of marriage into a partnership of equals.[7] One of the ways parity between the sexes could be achieved, they determined, was through a constitutional amendment. Initially proposed to Congress by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923, the revised text of the ERA now read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”[8] After forty-nine years, feminists found early-1972 as the ideal moment to push for congressional approval and state ratification. Although women accounted for only two percent of the seats in Congress, the ERA garnered support from both parties. At 1638 on 22 March 1972, the Senate passed the amendment with an 84-to-8 vote. Thirty-two minutes later, Hawaii became the first state to ratify the amendment. “Confidence that ratification would be achieved swiftly was expressed by a number of supporters of the amendment,” the New York Times reported the following day.[9]

Anticipating “the imminent passage of the Equal Rights Amendment,” Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., in his role as the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), sought to change Navy personnel policy by dissolving “most restrictions on female service.”[10] Zumwalt intended to achieve such progressive personnel reform through a series of retention study group programs focused on improving all aspects of the sailor experience. In his memoir, published in 1976, Zumwalt said that he drew upon his earlier work with the Personnel Retention Task Force initiated by Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze in 1964. The Task Force “produced a set of dramatic recommendations along precisely the lines of the ones I was planning to initiate as CNO,” Zumwalt confirmed. Zumwalt and his team were optimistic that the bureaucratic “system” of the Navy would implement the reforms. However, “so few of them were put into effect, and so slowly that the impact on morale and retention that the whole package would have had was lost,” Zumwalt lamented.[11] He was nevertheless resolute in implementing changes that would not only benefit active duty sailors, but ones that would hopefully surpass those of the other military services and the civilian workforce to compete for the able-bodied and qualified recruits in the AVF. Nine days after he assumed his role as CNO, however, an incident at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station would serve as a litmus test for Zumwalt’s retention study group program.
 
The notorious humidity that oppresses the region surrounding Lake Michigan in midsummer feels akin to drinking oxygen. Despite the early morning hour, base authorities stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center main gate on 10 July 1970 not only felt the stickiness of the air around them, but likely the weight of guarding the perimeter of a building that confined four Black women sailors. At about 1730 the day before, those four women sailors, according to the Chicago Tribune, “tried to intimidate” a fifth Black woman sailor into membership in an all-Black union. One of the five allegedly struck an unidentified white woman petty officer who intervened during the “fight.”[12] Security force personnel arrived shortly thereafter and detained the four alleged instigators to a building once used as a correctional facility. According to witnesses, iron bars still adorned the second-story windows.[13]
 
While Navy authorities held the women for “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline,” word spread among Black male sailors, in civilian parlance, of the arrest and imprisonment of four Black women sailors.[14] In an official statement released to the Chicago Tribune, Navy officials estimated forty sailors amassed at the building around 0200 “to determine the nature of charges which had been brought against four black WAVES.”[15] Racial tensions between white and Black sailors surfaced in that moment when a group of white sailors in civvies arrived with intentions to spar with the Black protestors. Details on the incident are sparse; however, journalists reported that the contingent of Black sailors threw stones at the building. Security personnel separated and disbursed the crowds, reporting no injuries or fatalities.[16] Navy judicial authorities administratively discharged the women quietly that same weekend.
 
The magazine Jet, marketed to a national African American audience, reported on the incident in a late-September issue. Writers expanded on the underlying tension absent in the Chicago Tribune report, identifying that it was “a white officer, a white master of arms, [and] a white security guard” who escorted the four Black women sailors to the brig. The article then implied it was the rumor “of the ‘sisters’ being mistreated by ‘the man’” that caused Black male sailors to congregate and demand answers.[17] Awakened at 0200 and briefed on the situation, Rear Admiral Draper L. Kauffman, commandant of the Ninth Naval District, responded swiftly by requesting the Navy send their “race relations team.” Within twenty-four hours of the altercation, the team—made up of seven Black and five white Navy administrators—arrived to initiate hearings and investigations into the racial tensions evident at the Training Station. White sailors complained that the discharged women “got off easy ‘because they were Black’” while Black sailors argued that “they were treated severely ‘because they weren’t white.’”[18]
 
Forty miles north of Chicago, the Great Lakes Naval Training Station is often the nexus through which recruits from across the country complete basic training and become sailors. Recruits brought with them differing, often contentious, regional attitudes toward people of color. The commotion at the main gate indicated to RADM Kauffman and the Washington-based race relations team that Black sailors were “impatient with ‘the system,’” according to editors at Jet.[19] While Kauffman solicited and welcomed advice from Black leaders in Chicago, changes at Great Lakes were, at best, cosmetic and superficial. The Naval Exchange stocked Afro-Sheen and other natural hair products, and the base library kept abreast of recent titles by Black authors and carried recent issues of Ebony and Jet. Twenty-three year old Gunners Mate (2c) Harry Tyner was not impressed, identifying these new additions as the means to “buy us all off with small things” while the Navy seemed to ignore the larger issue of discrimination.[20]
 
It is unknown to what degree, if any, the racial disturbance at Great Lakes affected CNO Zumwalt’s efforts to suppress racial enmity in the Navy. What is clear, however, is that Zumwalt “came to realize for the first time that the Navy did even worse things to its minority people than give them demeaning jobs and stunt their careers. Day after day,” he wrote in his autobiography, “it inflicted upon them, sometimes without even knowing it was doing so, personal slights, affronts, and indignities of a peculiarly humiliating kind.”[21] The CNO’s revelation spurred him to pen “Z-gram 66” in December 1970, in which he simultaneously admonished and demolished the “artificial barriers of race, color, and religion” when he called for equal opportunity.[22] Noticeably absent from this list was any mention of sex.
 
In identifying the beneficiaries of Z-gram 66, Zumwalt divided his sailors along the intersection of race. No one aspect of personhood can be experienced in isolation, Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw reasoned.[23] In fact, the Defense Manpower Commission acknowledged in 1976 that “a black woman in this sense belongs to two minority groups—black and women.”[24] If taking into consideration the multitudinous demographics that make up a person, Black, Indigenous, Latin, and Asian American women could have included themselves among the minority race beneficiaries of Z-gram 66.[25] Their womanhood, however, precluded them from doing so.
 
It was not until 1972—as the increasingly contentious debate over the ratification of the ERA raged between Women’s Liberationists led by Gloria Steinem and conservative housewives led by Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum[26]—that Zumwalt took the initial steps to more fully integrate all women into the Navy. Despite his role as CNO and the popularity of Z-grams among the enlisted ranks, Zumwalt could not advance changes to personnel policies that defied federal law. Stephan Minikes, special counsel to the CNO, had been in communication with Peter Coogan, the assistant counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both men agreed that should the ERA become law, sex discrimination in the military would be impermissible. They predicted that it was unlikely the federal judiciary would order women into combat. “If, in the event we come across a six-foot, snake eating amazon female specimen who can do anything a man can do,” Minikes mocked in a memo, “we would probably have to allow her to perform a man’s function, perhaps where she chose.”[27] Minikes promised to check-in with his Senate Judiciary Committee contact regularly for status updates on the ERA.
 
The restrictions and limitations placed on women sailors were the result of legislation and out of the hands of the service chiefs. A new Z-gram, one of Zumwalt’s last, expanded the billets and ratings available to women sailors within the seemingly-rigid confines of the law to alleviate some—but not all—discriminatory exclusions. In a memorandum handwritten by Zumwalt himself, he expressed his “desire to use this time prior to ratification” of the ERA “to review the genesis and implications of current polices and to identify those areas in which we can now, unilaterally, and legally take a more progressive stance.”[28] Anticipating obligatory sex integration through a constitutional amendment coupled with predictions of recruitment pitfalls with the shift to the AVF, the CNO accepted women “as a vital personnel resource.”[29] Although federal law prohibited women from serving aboard combatant ships, as an immediate step toward the goal of equality between the sexes, two women officers and fifty-three enlisted women were assigned to the hospital ship USS Sanctuary (AH-17) in non-medical roles. “Z-gram 116” also directed the Navy to accept applications from women for the Chaplain and Civil Engineer Corps, and to open midshipmen programs to women at all NROTC programs.[30]
 
Professional military education remains crucial not only to the professional development of the officer corps, but is often a prerequisite to promotion. Insufficient grade and years of service made racial minority and women officers ineligible to attend PME schools. By 1976, two-thirds of women in the military remained “in the traditional medical and administrative fields, with no significant concentration in any of the mechanical or electronic career fields.” The number of women in the armed forces did increase, from 1.1 percent in 1964 to 4.6 percent in 1975, but were “disproportionately represented in administrative jobs.”[31] Ultimately fifteen states did not ratify the ERA by the 1982 deadline, and complete sex integration in the Navy (and the other service branches) would take decades—well into the new millennium—to achieve. The institutional change implemented by CNO Zumwalt, albeit incremental, galvanized Navy women like Barbara Allen Rainey to straddle the line between the societal expectation of marriage and family and the thoroughly modern norm of a career in the Navy.[32]