Helen Walkinshaw: Breaking Gender Barriers in the Military During World War II
Rutgers alumna helped lay the foundation for millions of women who followed
'I admit I have never savored the thought of being any kind of an auxiliary in anything I did in life.'– Helen Walkinshaw, Rutgers Oral History Archives, 1996
Helen Walkinshaw, by her own account, was the son her father never had. And in her family, that meant joining the military was a natural decision – even for a woman living in the midst of World War II.
The Rutgers alumna didn’t set out to be a trailblazer when she enlisted in the Navy in 1943, but she and other women who broke through the strong gender barriers of the American military back then helped lay a foundation for millions of women who have followed.
“She was a convention-breaker,” Rutgers historian Alison Bernstein said. “Not a game changer, but she did try to create her own path, and that was significant. The battle for gender equality in the military took at least 50 years, and it isn’t over yet. But it was during World War II that opportunities began to open up for women in the military.”
Walkinshaw, one of thousands of Rutgers graduates who have served in the military during the university’s 250-year history, recorded her experiences during the war and beyond in 1996 as part of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, home to one of the nation’s largest collections of personal accounts of the Greatest Generation. Walkinshaw died 10 years later.
Looking back on a life spent as a woman in a succession of men’s worlds, she said, “If you see yourself as apart, you'll remain apart. If you charge in and give it your best, usually the barriers break down, sometimes they take longer than other times.”
Walkinshaw actually entered World War II before her country did, getting a job after high school graduation in 1940 with an arm of the British Ministry of Supply in New York City that was charged with buying war material in the still neutral United States.
She had a head for statistics and a talent for logistics, and was soon doing work far beyond her secretarial pay grade. But after a few years she found herself unable to advance to staff statistician because British civil service rules prohibited women from such positions. By that time, the United States was entrenched in the war.
“I knew I had reached a ceiling,” Walkinshaw said. “We were all in the war together, and I said, ‘Time to move on, Helen.’”
In her case, that meant walking across the street in New York City and enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Her mother was against it, but her grandparents and father, an Army veteran who served in World War I, were all for it.
“Since there were no male members of the family extant, and besides which I was so much doing my own thing already, that I considered it very natural that I should serve somewhere in the military,” Walkinshaw said.
Friends and neighbors in her home town of Dunellen weren’t surprised she joined up, but other people’s reactions didn’t concern her one way or the other.
“I have never been anyone who had been the least amenable to any kind of peer pressure,” she later said. “I always had fairly clear ideas of deciding where I wanted to go myself, and it didn’t matter whether anyone was with me or not. I couldn’t care less.”
Although Navy rules prohibited women from going to sea, the Navy had a offered better opportunities to women than other branches of the military at the time. Walkinshaw and her fellow female recruits learned how to march, swim and tie square knots just like the men at boot camp. Then she trained to become a yeoman, an enlisted person who performs administrative work.
She worked in the Navy Hydrographic Office making and updating charts. But once again her organizational skills and talent for math soon had her working on other projects, including calculations for new navigation systems.
After the war, Arleigh Burke, the future chief of U.S. naval operations, literally picked up her desk and brought it up to his office so she could help him work on a top-secret project planning the Navy’s role in the nuclear age. She spent two years on the project.
Walkinshaw said she was lucky to get such interesting assignments but stressed other enlisted women also had fascinating work.
“They were all interesting characters,” she said. “I mean, these were women who were clearly not going to go home and knit, you know, in any sense.”
After saving for college, Walkinshaw left the military in 1948 at age 28 and enrolled in Rutgers University's Douglass College – then called the New Jersey College for Women – majoring in mathematics and minoring in physics.
“I think I never opened a book, even a math book, until my senior year,” she said. “Most people who came through World War II had such a mature vision about things and who particularly knew how to organize their time efficiently, that they had such a terrific head start on anyone who was coming out of high school, you know, that it was easy for most of us.”
Walkinshaw graduated in 1953 and went on to earn a master’s degree in engineering at Rutgers in 1956. She got a job at Bell Laboratories as a technician, in part, because she didn’t have a Ph.D., which was considered the mark of a woman who was overqualified.
Bernstein, director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Rutgers, said it was a common practice.
“Women who were gifted but didn’t have Ph.D.s were hired at lower levels and then proved themselves on the job,” she said.
Walkinshaw spent more than 30 years at the company. Her work dealt with underwater sound, much of it under contract to the Navy and much of it classified.
Ironically, the same Navy that wouldn’t send her to sea as a sailor sent her to sea many times as a Bell Labs contractor. It was on one such assignment that she found herself aboard a naval vessel whose crew included a female petty officer, one of the first female sailors assigned sea duty.
When asked if she felt she missed out on sea duty, Walkinshaw said she had gone on to do more important and central things for the Navy.
“I admit I have never savored the thought of being any kind of an auxiliary in anything I did in life.”