Dear John,

Every year, as the country pauses for Memorial Day, I think about my mother. She was a nurse in the U.S. Army in World War II, stationed at a large field hospital in Cirencester, England some 80 miles west of London. She had fought hard for her education: the oldest of seven children growing up on a farm in Oklahoma, she had to move in with an aunt in a nearby town so she could finish high school, and then managed to work her way through nursing school before joining the army.

At some 23 years of age, she arrived at the 188th general hospital—a collection of Quonset huts—just two months before the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The hospital’s first patients, all D-Day casualties, were admitted on June 14, 1944. The doctors and nurses of the 188th would go on to care for a total of more than 11,000 patients before the end of the war. A little over 50 years later, I was able to travel with my mother to the still small town of Cirencester, where we made our way to the open field on the outskirts where the hospital once stood. There were a few Quonset huts still remaining, and in the town, which had officially “adopted” the 188th during the war, we visited the small museum created in its honor, complete with old photographs, medical implements and documents. On the army’s website, she is listed with the other nurses, as “Second Lieutenant, Hughes, Edna M., ANC, N-776510.”

Like many other WWII veterans, my mother never talked much about the war or the horrors she witnessed in her time at the 188th hospital, but it profoundly affected the course of her life. She said that it was the suffering of the many young soldiers gravely injured in the war as they endured operations under the crude anesthesia techniques available at the time, that spurred her to decide to become a physician, an anesthesiologist. It would take her another 8 years following the war to realize her dream, having been turned down for medical school at first because the few slots for women were already filled. She would spend her life advocating for her patients, and for more women in medicine, always speaking up for nurses when the mostly male ranks of doctors often discounted their critical role in patient care.

I’m also thinking of the many women who, like my mother, wanted to serve their country—but instead were denied that opportunity, or forced to hide who they were in order to achieve their dreams. In particular, I’m thinking of Barbara Brass and Col. Patsy Thompson—two such women who played a crucial role in the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy that had long silenced LGBTQ+ service members.

As Cindy L. Abel writes in Ms. this week, this is work that is far from done—despite the policy gains for LGBTQ+ service members under both the Obama and Biden administrations, all it took was a tweet from Donald Trump to roll back years of progress when it came to trans inclusion in the military. “We survived, but we lived on high alert,” Brass tells Abel. “Even if people think we’re safe now, we’re not, in a permanent sense. We have to fight to preserve what we have today.”

Women in the armed service are still fighting for their rights, including crucially a full range of reproductive care in military hospitals anywhere in the country or the world they are stationed. Women in the military are at higher risk of unintended pregnancy, miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy—and are much more likely to be victims of sexual assault. But for those military women living in states that now restrict abortion access, options are limited, to say the least. “Let’s be clear: Women who are active-duty service members do not get to choose what state they live in, which means they could lose abortion access at the whim of any state with an abortion ban,” said veteran Ashley Ehasz. “Now that women in uniform have lost their reproductive rights, our country’s fighting force is hindered and our security is at risk.”

So on this Memorial Day, it’s more important than ever that we recommit ourselves to the fight for the rights of women in the military—whether it’s the right to have autonomy over their own bodies, be free from gender-based violence … or simply to be who they are.

Onward for peace, equality and justice,

Weekly Digest

Weekly Digest

Letter from an Editor | May 25, 2024

This Week's Must-Reads from Ms.

Still Serving: ‘Surviving the Silence’ and LGBTQ Representation in the Military

Dobbs’ Effect on Military Women: ‘Our Fighting Force Is Hindered and Our Security Is at Risk’

Vietnam Nurses: These Are the Women Who Went to War (June 1984)

Don’t Draft Our Daughters—or Our Sons

Another Suspicious Death at a Texas Military Base Shows the Urgency of Addressing Military Sexual Harassment and Assault

The Army Allows Soldiers Charged With Violent Crimes to Leave the Military, Rather Than Face Trial