Page 10 - A History of Women in the Coast Guard

In 7973, the Coast Guard ended the Women '5 Reserve
and allowed women to join the regular and reserve Coast Guard. Officer can­ didate school also opened up to
women.
8 • A history of women in Ihe Coosl Guard
member of the Women's Reserve does not alter the effect."
In other words, a SPAR could give orders to a male Coast Guardsman so long as her commanding officer was a man. The logic behind the new policy was rather convolut­ ed, but it put SPAR officers a step ahead of their counterparts in the other services.
On Sept. 27, 1944, Congress revised the law prohibiting WAVEs and SPARs from serving outside the continental United States. Henceforth, SPARs with good records who requested such duty could be stationed in American overseas territories. The war in Europe was almost over by this time, but about 200 SPARs were sent to Alas­ ka and 200 more to Hawaii before VJ Day.
In October 1944, the secretary of the Navy ordered the WAVEs and SPARs to be­ gin accepting black recruits. The first black SPAR was YN3 Olivia Hooker. By then the SPARs' initial recruiting goals almost had been achieved, and the service had stopped accepting civilian women for officer training.
A few black women enlistees did go' through OCS and were commissioned as en­ signs before the end of the war. Personnel records do not indicate the total number of black SPARs who enlisted in the three
months before the recruiting effort began shutting down.
En I ( f tile ~ P 1\1 S
The SPARs had enlisted for "duration plus
six" - the length of the war plus six months. SPAR recruiting virtually ended in December 1944. Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the women's reserve branches of all the services were disbanded, and the SPARs officially ceased to exist (though the label was still being applied informally to fe­ male Coast Guardsmen in the 1960s). A few SPARs were allowed to remain on active duty long enough to finish the projects on which they were working; the remaining 12,000 returned to civilian life. Stratton, who had attained the rank of captain, became di­ rector of personnel for the International Monetary Fund, and later would serve 10 years as national executive director of the Girl Scouts.
During the next few years many Women's Reserve records were destroyed, and the federal government seems largely to have forgotten about the SPARs. But the SPARs never forgot the years they had spent in uni­ form. Dorothy Gleason, who enlisted in 1943 and had just been commissioned an ensign