“The Government Doesn't Know Anything About Women Veterans”: Women Vietnam Veterans' Activism for Recognition by the Veterans' Administration

On March 3, 1983, nine months after ratification failure of the ERA and a decade before women
veterans would be represented on the national mall, Congress passed HR 1137, a bill that for
the first time established an Advisory Committee on Women Veterans within the Veterans
Administration (VA), forcing that reluctant agency to address women as veterans and implement
gender-specific policy changes. Establishing official institutional representation of women as
military veterans was no small accomplishment. Before 1980 they were virtually invisible to
the government agency charged with attending to their needs. VA studies assessing veterans’
needs had never included women, gender-specific medical care at VA facilities was woefully
inadequate, and the VA admittedly suffered from deeply imbedded sexism that impaired the
VA’s effective delivery of services to women veterans. The VA was transformed between
1979 and 1983 through the efforts of predominantly women Vietnam veterans working as both
Vietnam veterans and women, who developed alliances and networks that looked beyond lines of
separation. While they did not articulate their claims as feminist ones or welcome the label, they
did the ideological work of feminism and reshaped public policy, echoing visions of the postwar
U.S. women’s movement.

Scholarship that examines both feminism and the Vietnam war often restrict the interpretation
of feminist activism to women in peace movements, which obscures the nuance and complexity
of postwar feminism. Using oral history collections from the Library of Congress and interviews
conducted by the author, this paper argues women military veterans capitalized on some of the
foundational tenets of the postwar women’s movement in order to accomplish their goals of
institutional recognition and a voice within the agency responsible for their benefits as American
service veterans.