![]() ![]() It was not until 1993, however, that billets centered on the operation of combat aircraft in support of combat operations opened for women, dramatically expanding the talent pool for such positions. The Department of Defense (DOD), rather, maintained the era’s gender and social norms that associated men with combat duty and women with nursing and secretarial occupations, despite wartime and postwar evidence that confirmed women were just as capable as men in handling combat aircraft on the ground and in the air. While the act permitted women to serve in every military branch in perpetuity, WASIA did not go so far as to sanction parity between the sexes regarding aerial and ground combat duty. Ebbert and Hall also cite two professional groups-“administrative and clerical, and medical and dental”-making up 90 percent of occupations available to enlisted women. Within a decade, that number shrank to 21 percent. According to Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, only 60 percent of the Navy’s ratings were open to women in 1952, a percentage that decreased annually. ![]() Officials further limited women officers in the Navy to ten percent of the total female enlisted strength of the service. The number of women in the Air Force, Army, and Navy, for example, could not exceed two percent of the total strength of the armed services. There were, however, limitations to the number of women who could enlist and restrictions on the occupations they could hold. This 1948 legislation permitted women to seek out permanent careers in the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force. Within three years of the Japanese surrender ending the war in the Pacific, Congress acknowledged the contributions women had made to the war effort as active duty and reserve personnel by authorizing the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act (WASIA).
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