Helen G. O'Neill, once familiar to millions of Americans as the U.S. Navy poster girl in World War I, is happy that women have found their place in the military but says they don't belong on seagoing vessels.
O'Neill, who later became deputy director of Women Marines in World War II, is either 88 or 89 ("at this point, it doesn't matter") and lives alone in a tree-shaded condominium village in suburban McLean, Va., with memories of her days as a "yeomanette" or uniformed Navy clerk from 1917 through 1921.She was one of the first 12,500 women to serve in the Navy, recruited by Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels to free enlisted men for combat duty in the approaching war.
Wearing blue serge suits with ankle-length skirts, high-laced boots and straw skimmers, the yeomanettes saw duty as typists, bookkeepers, radio operators, switchboard operators, couriers, translators, fingerprint experts, decoders, munitions factory workers, recruiters and nurses during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
They were paid the same as sailors - up to $60 a month for a chief petty officer. But because the Navy provided no barracks or mess halls for women, they rented rooms, shared apartments or lived with family friends and received a subsistence allowance of $1.50 a day.
When the call went out for yeomanettes, many newspapers published bitterly critical letters from readers. "Preposterous!" wrote one irate retired colonel. "First the women wanted to vote. Then Alice Roosevelt started them smoking cigarettes! Now they're talking about being soldiers. Next thing we know they'll be cutting off their hair and wearing pants!"
Like most yeomanettes, O'Neill came from a comfortably middle-class home. She lived in East Boston across Webster Street from Patrick Joseph Kennedy and his clan. Her childhood chum was Margaret, sister of Joseph P. Kennedy and aunt of John F. Kennedy, later to become president.
O'Neill got a college business administration degree, took a civil service exam and received a job offer from the Navy. Although her father protested that she was too young at 19 to leave home, she packed her bags for Washington for a clerical job at Navy headquarters.
Soon after she enlisted in the naval reserve, the red-haired Boston Irish beauty was invited to pose for a portrait by painter Howard Chandler Christy.
With a few months, posters featuring O'Neill in uniform appeared on streets and in windows of Navy recruiting offices around the country with the slogan, "I Want You for The Navy."
Christy produced another, perhaps more widely remembered poster portraying a different young woman who posed saucily in a sailor's hat and jumper with this inscription: "Gee!! I wish I were a man. I'd join the Navy." The woman who inspired that poster was former yeomanette Bernice Tongate, now 92 and reportedly living in a veterans' home in Retsill, Wash.
O'Neill was flattered but not surprised to see herself as a Navy poster girl. It was a thrilling, hectic period in her life, she says, and "anything happens in wartime."
In any event, few of her friends recognized her in Christy's romanticized portrait, she said.
After the war, she returned to a civilian Navy career that included a stint as aide to the assistant Navy secretary. When World War II broke out, O'Neill was second in line to take the oath as a woman Marine, and she quickly rose through the ranks to become deputy director of the women's corps. She retired in 1959 as a lieutenant colonel.
O'Neill is pleased that 54,000 women - 10 percent of the Navy's uniformed personnel - are working successfully alongside male officers and enlisted men.
"I think they've come a long way," she said, "but I don't approve of women going to sea. That's not fair to the men's wives."
Of the Navy's 54,000 women, about 5,000 are serving on non-combatant ships.
For a long time, O'Neill lived here with her mother and sister, both now dead. She never married.
"I came close a couple of times but escaped," she said. "No regrets."