News comes from the family that my Aunt Liz is struggling in her battle with cancer. In honor of Aunt Liz, I would like to republish her essay, “My Mother, The Sailor,” which first appeared in the debut issue of Kmareka in April of 2002. This essay is about my grandmother, Mary (May) Dwyer, who died in 1976. It speaks to the legacy of strong women patriots in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

MY MOTHER, THE SAILOR

by Liz Dwyer Milliken

My mother was a determined young woman. She had a sense of adventure. She was a woman of the Twentieth Century. Her own mother’s mettle had set the example when she fled the hunger and “troubles� of Ireland. Crowded in with the steerage, my grandmother had arrived in the United States with little more than determination.

Later, this very same intrepid immigrant was hesitant to allow her daughter to follow her own resolve. The daughter was my mother. She was almost twenty years old. The year was 1917. She was going to join the Navy. My grandmother was torn between pride and astonishment. In 1917, a woman in the military was a contradiction in terms.

My grandmother would not stop my mother from joining the Navy, but neither would she help. If my mother needed to be up early, no one would wake her, but my mother, in her determination, made sure she was up in time. Afraid that she might oversleep, the future Yeoman Female (as women sailors were called) stayed up all night.

My maternal grandparents immigrated to America from County Kerry. They came individually, met in the New World and married in Westfield, Massachusetts. Eventually, they settled in Waterbury, Connecticut, and raised a family of three sons and six daughters. My mother was the eldest daughter. My grandfather worked for the city. My grandmother tended to hearth and home. They were neither rich nor poor by the standard of the day. The boys followed somewhat conventional life paths. The eldest became a priest. The youngest son, the baby of the family, fulfilled a lot of dreams. He attended Holy Cross University. The middle son went to sea.

One of my grandmother’s tenets, perhaps a novel idea in the early 1900’s, was that “a woman should have something to fall back on.” Two of my aunts became nurses. The youngest daughter attended “normal school” — what is now known as Teachers College — and my mother and two of her sisters enrolled in post-high school courses in office skills. They learned to type, take shorthand, and use the office machines of the day. The factories of Waterbury offered opportunities for any young woman who had acquired office skills. Becoming a military woman, and getting away from a humdrum town and a fairly predictable future, held the greater allure.

The pride my mother had in her enlistment was always evident and was a shared family pride. If there was a time that removed all doubt that my mother’s military experience had been a positive one, it came when I enlisted in the United States Air Force. My mother had a low tolerance-level for busybodies. When the news of my pending enlistment entered the realm of gossip, anyone calling to “enlightenâ€? my mother about “servicewomenâ€? was quickly thwarted by short well-stated answers: “Are you referring to me? I was a Yeoman-F in the Navy, where did you serve?â€? Even the nuns from my high school and the parish priest had trouble defending their innuendo and slander against my mother’s words and experience.

If memory does not betray me, I seem to remember her telling me that she lived in a YMCA while she served. On the eve of my own enlistment, my mother got out a box and showed me mementos of her time in the military. There were photos, a copy of her orders, and her dog-tags. Obviously, my mother took great pride in her uniform. She chose it as her bridal attire. Her attendant, my Aunt Catherine, wore her nurse’s uniform, complete with cape. My future parents both had three-day-passes for the occasion. It was in October 1918.

Some of the most enduring friendships of my mother’s life came from the Navy. I remember her “Navy friends” and the closeness of her bonds with them. After the war, my mother was affiliated with the Jane Delano Post and the Corporal Coyle Post. She was past commander of Mary Gormey Post, and remained involved with the American Legion and the Connecticut Reunion Group of Yeoman-F. She was also very active in other volunteer services throughout her life. Her focus, second only to her family, was the organization of the former Yeoman-F. She worked tirelessly to see military women honored with a postage stamp. She even appeared on the Today Show interviewed by John LesCoulie to further that cause. The stamp did become a reality, but only after her death.

As my mother and father raised five children, the doctrine of “women must have something to fall back on� continued to prevail. All three of my sisters are nurses. My eldest sister was a Cadet Nurse. My younger sister joined the Peace Corps and took her nursing talents to a village in Malay. I wore Air Force Blue for ten years.

My sisters and I have always stood tall. We have to — we are all over five feet seven. Seriously, though, unless you were a nine-year-old girl in the forties who could say with much pride, “my mother was in the Navy,” you would fail to understand how much fun it is, even at sixty-nine, to say, “my mother was a sailor during the First World War.”

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Liz Dwyer Milliken is a writer and grandmother of five. She served ten years in the Air Force and now lives on Cape Cod with her husband of forty five years.