Charlotte L. Winters - WW1 Veteran

liverpool annie · Sep 24, 2009

This is not up to date news but interesting in any case !

Supercentenarian Charlotte L. Winters was the last living U.S. female veteran of World War One.

When she called on Secretary of The Navy, Josephus Daniels, in 1916 to ask why she could not join the Navy, she may have helped set into motion events that have influenced my life greatly as well as the makeup of our armed forces. A year later she was among the first women to join the service as a Yeoman 3rd Class (F). The “F” stood for Female.

Though Daniels did not say Winters influenced his decision to allow women in the Navy, his niece, Kelly N. Auber of Middle River MD said, “She convinced him that women could be in the Navy, and her visit is corroborated in his journals. While he did not admit that she directly influenced him, he did acknowledge that they had met.”

Secretary Daniels investigated the matter and found that there was no prohibition against women serving in the Navy. It was the start of something big. By 1918, more than 10,000 women joined the Navy.

Winters was assigned to the Washington Navy Gun Factory, also known as the Washington Navy Yard, where she was a typist throughout the war. After the war’s end she returned to her job there as a civilian. She retired in 1951.

Until the early 1980s Charlotte and her husband, John Russell Winters, visited Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields documenting battle strategies and the lives of the soldiers who had fought there. She donated her uniform and other military objects to the Navy Museum in Washington DC and documentation of thousands of Civil War graves to the Hagerstown, MD Library.

Since WWI many women have served in the U.S. Navy, among them my mother and my wife. It hasn’t been all salutes and parades though. Just as women struggle for equality in civilian society, so too do women in uniform, thanks in no small part to the pioneering efforts of Charlotte L. Winters and others like her. From the day Josephus Daniels asked if women could serve, controversy has raged throughout the Navy (and other services too) about the role of women in its ranks.

Charlotte L. Winters, feminist, war historian, and last of a kind, died Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at the Fahrney-Keedy life care community in Boonsboro, MD at age 109
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http://www.deadnotforgotten.com/blog/history-american/charlotte-l-winters-wwi-veteran/

liverpool annie · Sep 25, 2009

New York Times Obituary

Charlotte Louise Berry Winters was born in Washington on Nov. 10, 1897, a daughter of Mackell and Louise Bild Berry. Her father was a haberdasher. Mrs. Winters has no immediate survivors. Her husband of 35 years, John Russell Winters, whom she met while he was working as a machinist at the Naval Gun Factory, died in 1984.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/us/30winters.html

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