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To sail the seven seas--or not.

Article Excerpt
Susan H. Godson. Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the U.S. Navy. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002. xvi + 512 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $38.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-55750-317-6.

This book is somewhat unusual in that Godson was commissioned to research and write it by the Naval Historical Center. It is, as the jacket text states, a "monumental work." The notes and bibliography comprise nearly as many pages as the text of the hook itself. It is at once an intensely scholarly work, bristling with notes and citations so beloved of academia, and at the same time, eminently readable for the interested lay person.

Since the literal beginnings of the U.S. Navy are subject to debate, so too are the literal interpretations of the first women in that navy. Prior to the American Revolution women often sailed aboard ships as both wives and daughters, less often as crew members disguised as men, and occasionally openly as captains of privateers and pirate ships. The official navy evolved and developed with the country as did the role of women and that navy.

Godson recounts the origins of both the present-day Navy Nurse Corps and the other women in the sea service, who evolved from yeoman (Female) through the Women Accepted For Voluntary Emergency...

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