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Women in Firefighting: A History
The honor of being the first known woman firefighter goes to an African-American woman named Molly Williams. Held under slavery by a member of Oceanus Engine Company #11 in New York City. Williams made a distinguished presence in her calico dress and checked apron, and was said to be "as good a fire laddie as many of the boys." Her work was noted particularly during the blizzard of 1818. Male firefighters were scarce, but Molly took her place with the men on the dragropes and pulled the pumper to the fire through the deep snow. In the 1820's, Marina Betts, a tall and impressive French-Indian woman from the Shinbone Alley district of Pittsburgh worked on the bucket brigades at fires. Her specialty, along with passing buckets, was recruiting "volunteers" from among the male spectators. Since she felt that "menfolks should be working" when there was a fire, those within reach of her bucket received a dousing of water; those more distant were intimidated by her imposing presence and sharp tongue. Betts remained a firefighter for ten years. In 1859, at the opposite end of the country and social spectrum, the San Francisco heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit became a fire buff at the age of fifteen. Seeing a fire on Telegraph Hill, she stepped into line with the short-handed Knickerbocker Engine Company #5, grabbed hold of the drag rope, and urged the fire crew on. After that, up until the time of her marriage, she attended every fire of the engine company, which made her an honorary member. For the rest of her life, she wore a gold "5" pinned to her dress, and signed her letters, "Lillie H. Coit, 5." One October night in 1875, the Disston Lumber Mill in Atlantic City, New Jersey, caught fire. The resort town was protected by only one volunteer fire company, United States Fire Company No. 1. Pitching in to help out at the huge blaze was a 20-year-old woman named Adelheid von Buckow. She worked all night long, pumping water with the old hand pumper alongside the regular members of the company, who were amazed by her strength and endurance. Several years later, von Buckow married one of the members of the company, and before the company disbanded in 1904, they voted her into membership. Adelheid von Buckow Specht remains the only woman ever to be a member of the Atlantic City Fire Department. In 1895, Carrie Rockefeller was chosen as a regular member of Engine Company #1 in West Haven, Connecticut, "for her valuable services in helping to pull the apparatus." In Great Britain, the Girton College Fire Brigade was established in 1878 at this women's college just outside Cambridge. The idea for the brigade came to two students as they watched a fire in a haystack near the college. The college at the time had three small hand pumpers stored in the building's corridors, but no one ever practiced with them, and they were frequently left without water. The students designed a structure and a plan of action for the brigade, and weekly training for brigade members began, under the supervision of a London Fire Brigade captain. The Girton College Fire Brigade existed until 1932, when the advent of motorized fire equipment brought the college under the protection of the Cambridge Fire Brigade. In the second decade of the twentieth century, fire protection for much of the Los Angeles area was provided by mixed companies of paid and volunteer firefighters; All-volunteer companies predominated in the outlying areas. In 1912, Chief Archibald Eley decided to encourage the formation of women's volunteer fire companies in residential areas that had a shortage of men in the daytime. The women were trained in the operation of hand-drawn, two-wheeled hose reels; a contemporary photo shows five women in long dresses pulling the rig down a suburban street.
Early in this century, Silver Spring, Maryland, now a major suburb of Washington, D.C., was still a small country town. In May of 1915, the town formed an all-women's volunteer fire company. Twelve years later, the company was still in operation, and boasted of being "the only fire company manned by women." Back in New Jersey, Emma Vernell at the age of 50 became a member of Westside Hose Company #1 (now part of the Red Bank Volunteer Fire Department) after her husband died in the line of duty in April of 1926. She was a fully qualified and active firefighter for many years, and was the first woman officially recognized as a firefighter by the State of New Jersey. In 1936, also in New Jersey, the borough of Roosevelt formed a municipal government and chartered its first volunteer fire company. When the president of the fire company asked for volunteers, his wife, Augusta Chasan, was the first to volunteer. Chasan became known as the "Fire Lassie of Jersey Homesteads", and said that despite her small stature (5'1"), "I did my share of the work, and they respected me." When she was nearly 90 years old, Chasan was still making one "fire call" a year, riding the engine in the Fourth of July parade. Nearly a decade later women became volunteer firefighters in New Jersey (and in many other parts of the country) during World War II, to take the place of men called to war. The first women members joined the Bradley Gardens Volunteer Fire Company in 1944; before becoming firefighters, the women had served in the department's ladies' auxiliary. In nearby Port Washington, New York, the fire department's ambulance service was turned over to women during the war. Mrs. Lee Warrender was given "an opportunity to prove herself capable of this kind of work...(S)he proved beyond doubt that she can replace the firemen who have gone to the front," and received the gold badge of the volunteer "fireman." The fire departments at Scott Field and the Savanna Ordnance Depot, both in northern Illinois, were entirely staffed by women for part of the war years. Among the firefighters at Scott Field were Elsie Hollenkamp, Evelyn Peters, Arline Pressel and Leona Sprehn. At the Savanna Depot, a newspaper photograph of the period shows fourteen women firefighters with their engine. The accompanying article lists twelve additional women as members of the brigade, which was drawn from Hanover, Dubuque, Mt. Carroll, and the surrounding area. All-women fire companies developed in King County, California, and Woodbine, Texas, in the 1960's. The "Firettes," billed as "King County's fire-fightingest firefighters," were organized in 1962 to provide firefighting and first-aid services to King County Fire District #44 during the daylight hours when male volunteers were scarce. The Firettes attended a firefighters' conference in Yakima, Washington, and put on a demonstration where they extinguished flammable liquid fires, pit fires, and vehicle fires. In 1967, several women in the small town of Woodbine, Texas, grew concerned about the risk posed by brush fires. The nearest fire department was ten miles away, and vegetation fires would often consume a building before fire equipment arrived. The women decided to form their own volunteer fire department. They held raffles and bake sales to raise $125 to buy a 1942 Ford pumper from a nearby department, and received training from neighboring jurisdictions and from the U.S. Forest Service. Undeterred by a lack of protective gear or a formal communications system, the Woodbine Ladies Fire Department grew to include 23 members and protected their community from fire for eleven years. (Click here for photo.)
Women in the wildland fire service The first all-woman forest firefighting crew in California was assembled in 1942. Employed by CDF, the crew, stationed at Soledad consisted of a "foreman," a truck driver, an assistant driver, firefighters, and a cook. One of the women may have been Gladys Craspy, who was listed in 1943 as one of three women hired as a "State Fire Truck Driver." Craspy worked at the Monterey Ranger Unit in San Benito, not far from Soledad, at the Mustang forest fire station. The first women in the postwar period known to have been paid for fire suppression work were wildland firefighting crews working for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). One such woman signed onto an emergency wildland fire crew working on BLM land in Alaska in 1971. Not knowing what else to do, the office worker taking applications let her complete the form; by the end of the day, she was fired, since the crews "didn't want women in the way." Sympathetic media coverage in Fairbanks and the assistance of an attorney put pressure on the BLM to let her work. The agency finally agreed, but only if the woman could recruit at least twelve other women to work with her. She recruited 24. This all-woman crew worked through the summer of 1971 and, according to the BLM itself, "performed in an excellent manner." Nonetheless, they were terminated, and the following year it was decided that crews in the future would be mixed, male and female. Another all-women wildland fire crew worked in Montana in 1971. A young VISTA volunteer, Barbara Konigsburg, was working for a Missoula agency that helped the USFS recruit seasonal firefighters, and became interested in becoming a firefighter herself. Along with several other women, she applied and was rejected, but eventually succeeded in being hired and receiving the necessary training. The team functioned as an all-female crew for two years before going co-ed.
As far as we currently know, the first woman to be paid for fighting fires was Sandra Forcier, who was hired as a Public Safety Officer -- a combination police officer and firefighter -- by the City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on July 1, 1973. Forcier moved into a fire-only position four years later. She is now Battalion Chief Sandra Waldron, still on the job with Winston-Salem. In 1973, a dental assistant and cosmetology student named Judith Livers was helping her husband study for his fire science courses. She read the book America Burning and was motivated to become involved in the fire service. In March of 1974, she was hired by the Arlington County, Virginia, Fire Department, the first woman in the world to become a career firefighter. Now Judith Brewer, she retired from Arlington County in late 1999, at rank of battalion chief. Also in 1974, a woman named Sue Mertens became a career firefighter. A physical education major who had worked as a carpenter, teacher, and car salesperson, she had a significant family tradition in the fire service, as her father and two uncles were on the Miami, Florida, Fire Department. Sue moved to Del Mar, California, and got on as a volunteer there before moving up to a career position with that department. In that same year, Carmen Polk joined the newly formed volunteer fire department of Micanopy, Florida. Within two years, she had become the city's only full-time firefighter, running the department during the daytime hours. The San Diego Civil Service Commission in 1974 ordered the hiring of women and minority men into the fire department. As this was the first large department to propose hiring women firefighters, considerable turmoil and apprehension developed around the issue. An organized opposition even raised money to hire legal counsel to block the order. The San Diego Fire Department nevertheless put five women into recruit training, but then washed them out halfway through the twelve-week course, amid much media publicity. The women later won an out-of-court settlement over their terminations. By 1975, women were on career fire departments in Petersburg, Virginia; Fairborn, Ohio; Houston, Texas; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and the U.S. Air Force. Among the first women to become career firefighters were a number of African-American women. An African-American woman named Genois Wilson was hired as a firefighter by the Fort Wayne Fire Department in 1975. Wilson worked in fire safety education and pioneered one of the country's first fire safety programs aimed at deaf children. Another African-American woman, Toni McIntosh, became a firefighter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1976, and Carolyn Mitchell was hired by the Kansas City, Missouri, Fire Department in January of 1977. Anne Crawford Allen Holst, a great grand-niece of the founder of the Factory Mutual Fire Insurance Systems, was probably the first woman fire chief in the world. She became chief of the Cedar Hill, Rhode Island, Fire Department, in Cowesett (now divided between Warwick and West Warwick), in 1931. Known as Nancy, Chief Holst was also a pilot and was very active in forest fire management. Her papers on "Forest Fire Weather" and "The Airplane Angle of Firefighting" were published by the New England Association of Fire Chiefs. She later became deputy state fire marshal, and developed the first "Forest Fire Control Plan for the State of Rhode Island." She died in 1998. More than 6,200 women now hold career firefighting and fire officer's positions in the United States, with hundreds of counterparts in Canada, France, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Trinidad, Australia and New Zealand. Women on Japanese fire departments have worked in non-line positions for many years, and are now working as EMT's and preparing to move into active suppression roles. Hundreds of career fire service women have been promoted to lieutenant, captain, and all levels of chief officer positions, while more than a dozen now serve as the fire chief, FMO, or other top-ranking officer of their organization. Among the volunteer and paid-on-call fire and EMS forces in the United States are perhaps 30-40,000 women firefighters, and thousands more EMT's and paramedics. A large number are officers, up to and including the rank of chief. Many of these women are dedicated and skilled firefighters and rescue workers with a lifelong commitment to their volunteer departments; others, equally skilled, hope to move on to a career position in the fire service. The history of women in the fire service is longer than anyone might have guessed, and though most of it is lost, we can still get a hint of the tradition we are perpetuating through our work. It is our obligation to collect and repeat these names, and to add to them so that the legacy will not be lost to coming generations. Not only are we as women part of the history of the fire service, but we have our own particular history to celebrate, even as we continue to write it. Copyright © 2002 Terese M. Floren. Used here by permission; may not be reprinted without written permission of the author.
Please also see our article about African-American women firefighters Sources |
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