An interesting obit in today's WS Journal.
Remembrances - March 2, 2010: Jeanne Holm 1921-2010: First Female General in the U.S. Air Force
By STEPHEN MILLER
As a rare woman in Air Force blue, Jeanne Holm paved the way to make aerial warfare less of a boys' club. Gen. Holm, who died Feb. 15 at age 88, rose from an Army truck driver during World War II to the Air Force's first female general. Retired Maj. Gen. Jeanne Holm, the first woman to serve as major general in the Air Force and the Department of Defense, passed away Feb. 15.
After a pioneering career in the nation's youngest service, then-Col. Holm in 1965 was named the Air Force's director of women, and she used the office as a platform to lobby for women's inclusion in Air Force jobs that had been off-limits.
"We now say, 'All jobs are open to women' " except combat positions, the newly minted Gen. Holm announced in 1971. It was, she noted, "a total reversal of philosophy" from just a few years before, when women served mostly as secretaries and nurses. But Gen. Holm nearly stalled en route to her first silver star, driven to the brink of retirement over the slow pace of progress. She credited another general, Robert Dixon, with persuading her to stay.
A native of Portland, Ore., Jeanne Holm was brought up as the middle of three siblings by a widow who struggled to make ends meet. Both of her brothers joined the Navy, but that service wasn't taking women, so she chose the Army, where she started out as a truck-driving private. In 1949, she joined the Air Force. She served in Germany during the Berlin Airlift, and later served as a personnel officer stationed with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Naples, Italy. Her home was a Roman-era grotto overlooking the bay, where she scuba-dived on classical ruins.
She returned to Pentagon duty in 1965 as director of women, where she oversaw deployments to Vietnam. "The girls want to be where the action is," then-Col. Holm told the Washington Post in 1969. She fought ceilings on women's promotions and quotas on the percentage of women in the service. She also led the first overhaul in women's uniforms in 20 years. Col. Holm was promoted to general in 1971 and received a second star in 1973, becoming the highest-ranking female officer to date in any service.
The first general in the services was Army General Ana Mae Hays, promoted on 11 June 1970.
In her last years in the Air Force, she was involved in a Supreme Court case that established that the armed forces couldn't discriminate by sex when giving benefits to the families of service members—husbands were as eligible as wives. She never married. Shortly before she retired in 1975, the Air Force announced that women would be trained as pilots, something that had been resisted, since pilots were considered eligible for combat. In retirement, Gen. Holm served on presidential commissions and wrote the history "Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution."
Just 5 feet 3 inches tall but with a business-like demeanor, Gen. Holm said she seldom had problems getting respect from those she commanded. Still, stories about her often noted her blonde good looks. She rebuffed personal questions, but she conceded her appearance might have played as much a role in her career as in any general's.
Just 5'3" but business-like implies that short people aren't taken seriously unless they make it clear they are. Curious.
"Have you ever seen an ugly general?" she asked the Christian Science Monitor in 1984.
Plenty, actually.
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