"Lady Lookouts" in a "Man's World" during World War II: A Reconsideration of American Women and Nature

"Lady Lookouts" γν a "Man's World" during World War Π: A Reconsideration of American Women and Nature Jan C. Dawson In a 1950 article for American Forests entitled "Foresters Fair," Dorothy M. Martin succinctly described the dramatic rise in the number of women pursuing employment in the field of forestry during World War Πwith the words "and women flocked to the woods." Among the jobs they performed was "watch[ing] for forest fires from lonely towers high on the mountains." Although Hallie Daggett had become the first "lady lookout" in 1913 in northern California's Siskiyou National Forest, forestry had remained, according to Martin, "a man's world" since its establishment as a profession around the turn of the century. The wartime shortage of men gave large numbers of women their first real opportunity to enter forest work, however; and especially on the West Coast, where fire lookouts sometimes doubled as Aircraft Warning System lookouts, women were also able to contribute directly to national defense. Women's wartime "rush to the forests" continued with significant numbers of women graduating from forestry schools in 1947 and 1948; but by 1950, the fiftieth anniversary of the Society of American Foresters, only one woman, according to Martin, was enrolled in forestry school nationwide . Although, Martin concluded, women "did a commendable job" during the war, when the men returned, "the woods just weren't big enough for both of them."1 The experiences of women lookouts in the 1940s is an only recently rediscovered part of their history, inspired by research carried out for the 1991 centennial celebration of the founding of the U.S. Forest Service. In addition to helping restore women to the early record of fire lookout service, analysis of women's accounts of being fire lookouts during the 1940s can further enrich understanding of the "significant, continuous tradition in the interactions of women with nature" recently reconstructed in Vera Norwood's Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (1993). The substance of this tradition, according to Norwood, is appreciating nature by "making it one's familiar and home," reflective of the ways in which "gender roles have informed women's involvement in and descriptions of the environment" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .2 This paper will use unpublished reports and daily logs written by women fire lookouts as well as newspaper and magazine articles about © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 100 Journal of Women's History Fall them to analyze, first, gender role expectations as they came to be focused on the presumed "loneliness" of such women; second, the processes through which women lookouts made the forest environment home; and third, the implications of these processes for changes in gender consciousness , especially as explored in Martha Hardy's reminiscence Tatoosh (1946). The paper will conclude with a reconsideration of the tradition of women's interaction with nature in light of Pacific Northwest women lookouts' wartime experiences.3 Among the women Norwood studied, some "located their nature appreciation and worth within approved gender codes" while others "experienced tension between their efforts and the social expectations of proper female behavior." In the first category were women gardeners whose natural environment was literally part of their home; in the second were women conservationists represented by Rachel Carson who sought to enlarge the meaning of home to include ecosystems.4 Until very recently women involved in forestry work fell into the category of those who felt a tension between their work and gender role expectations, although the process by which many resolved that tension initially involved locating their experiences within approved gender codes. Whether their accounts of their experiences come from the glory days of wartime lookout work or other times, and whether they come from married or single women, women who worked as forest lookouts knew the forest was a man's world in the sense that managing the forest, a public reserve, was men's work but also in the sense that men knew the forest in ways women did not. Part of the responsibility of lookouts or spouses of lookouts was literally to make the lookout station a home; however, this process mediated women...