MARE’S WAR LAUNCH: SISTER, SISTER

Photo courtesy of Life Magazine.

This photograph is of Priscilla Taylor, a truck driver serving in the Women’s Army Corps in 1943, at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. Just look at the double-rear wheels on that rig. Good thing Mare wasn’t driving…

If you’ve dropped in from Lynette Holloway’s AOL’s Black Voices site, welcome! (MARE’S WAR will soon be a featured title there, and thank you, Lynette & Co.!)

Today is the last day of the MARE’S WAR book giveaway, but never fear — this one will be open ’til Tuesday midnight, and there will be other chances to win copies of MARE’S WAR from other websites throughout the summer.

Mare met hundreds of women working in the Women’s Army Corps, but there were more women out there — with a nudge from Eleanor Roosevelt, the Navy got busy authorizing a Womens’ Naval Reserve and the Marine Corps Womens’ Reserve. The Coast Guard followed with the WAVES – Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, and the SPARS, which came from the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus – always ready.

The U.S. wasn’t the only country in which women were serving. The United Kingdom and its Commonwealth countries like Canada and New Zealand had plenty of women filling in the ranks in the WRAF — the Women’s Royal Air Force, the Women in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), and the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which was created in 1907, to serve the combatants of the First World War. Around the globe, doors opened for women in the military and in the workplace as never before. So, my question for you is this: which of the Allied nations allowed women to go so far as to engage in combat, AND what was the derisive (but unintentionally cool) nickname the Nazis gave these women? The first three people to email these answers to me — please don’t post them! — will win a signed copy of MARE’S WAR along with a bookplate. You have until midnight on Tuesday!

EDIT: Congratulations, Laurie!