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Michael Kohan (Mikey), ATCS
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Bright Hancock, Joy, CAPT.
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Last Address Wildwood
Date of Passing Aug 20, 1986
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CAPT Joy Bright Hancock Little Ofstie was one of the leading figures in women's Naval history. She was the one of the first directors of the WAVES, one of the first female commissioned officers, a three-time Navy widow, and the only woman to christen a Navy ship while on active duty.
Historians have paid scant attention to the role of women in the American military. Today, women are an integral part of the armed forces; in the Navy, for instance, they attend the NavalAcademy at Annapolis, serve aboard ships, fly aircraft, and rise to flag rank. Yet it has not always been so. Until after World War II the U.S. Navy had considered women’s service as temporary or peripheral. When Congress passed legislation in 1948 allowing women permanent standing in the regular navy, it was largely because of the untiring efforts of one woman – Captain Joy Bright Hancock. Secretary of the Navy Robert B. Anderson later acknowledged her role: “More than any one individual,” he wrote in a letter to Captain Hancock, “you are responsible for the establishment of the WAVES as a component of the Navy. Your ideals, energy, and enthusiasm are continually reflected in the integration of women into the regular Navy.”
Joy Bright was born in Wildwood, New Jersey, on 4 May 1898. During World War I, after attending business school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she enlisted in the Navy as a Yeoman (F), serving at Camden, New Jersey and at the Naval Air Station, Cape May. Following the war, she married Lieutenant Charles Gray Little, who was killed in the crash of the airship ZR-2 in 1921. A year later, she obtained employment with the Bureau of Aeronautics, where her duties including editing the Bureau's "News Letter", which later evolved into the magazine "Naval Aviation News". In 1924, she left the Bureau to marry Lieutenant Commander Lewis Hancock, Jr., who lost his life when USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) crashed in September 1925.
Joy Bright Hancock returned to the Bureau after attending Foreign Service School and obtaining a private pilot's license. For more than a decade before World War II and into the first year of that conflict, she was responsible for the Bureau's public affairs activities. In October 1942, she was commissioned a Lieutenant in the new Women's Reserve (WAVES). She initially served as WAVES representative in the Bureau of Aeronautics and later in a similar position for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air), rising to the rank of Commander by the end of the War.
In February 1946, Commander Hancock became the Assistant Director (Plans) of the Women's Reserve and was promoted to WAVES' Director, with the rank of Captain, in July of that year. She guided the WAVES through the difficult years of Naval contraction in the later 1940s and the expansion of the early 1950s, a period that also saw the Navy's women achieve status as part of the Regular Navy. Captain Hancock retired from active duty in June 1953. The next year, she married Vice Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie and accompanied him on his 1955-56 tour as Commander, Sixth Fleet. Following her husband's death in late 1956, she lived in the Washington, D.C., area and in the Virgin Islands. She died on 20 August 1986.
Chain of Command in June 1942 the bureau pushed a reluctant Congress into authorizing the Women?s Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve, soon nicknamed the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). As in World War I, women would take over shore jobs, freeing men to fight. The naval establishment gave a collective shudder as the uncertain, and often unwelcome, experiment began. ?Many admirals would prefer to enroll monkeys, dogs, or ducks,? joked one woman.
Hancock joined the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant. The highest-ranking woman at the Bureau of Aeronautics, she was the WAVES representative to the bureau and to the deputy chief of naval operations (air). She also was liaison between the bureau and Lieutenant Commander Mildred McAfee, the Women?s Reserve director. McAfee and her advisers at the Bureau of Personnel had come from the educational and professional worlds and knew nothing about the navy. They found Joy Hancock?s expertise invaluable. With her background as a yeoman (F), a navy wife, and a civilian in the Bureau of Aeronautics, she was the only WAVE leader with a clear idea of how the navy operated.
In her new position, Hancock worked for expanded and different roles for women. Her own administrative, aviation, and mechanical abilities convinced her that properly trained women could undertake almost anything. She persuaded McAfee, and then the Bureau of Aeronautics, to allow women to take specialist training at all-male aviation schools. ?If men and women are to work together,? she argued, ?they must train together, compete against each other in the classroom, and know that they are receiving identical training.? In a practical vein, she added that this approach would save "the Navy the expense of building separate facilities." Hancock opened the way for coeducational training in the Bureau of Aeronautics, and the U.S. Navy's other bureaus slowly and reluctantly adopted the idea.
One of her most important contributions was an effort to open ratings, such as aviation machinist's mate, to women. From her own experience she knew that women could take apart and put together plane engines, but again the navy was not enthusiastic about the idea. Many pilots especially were against women servicing aircraft. But Hancock and other advocates for women had a telling argument in their favor: The war had brought thousands of American women into the nation's civilian factories where they built the very planes the navy did not want them to service. The navy's opposition was untenable and Hancock won her point. Eventually, about 3,000 women aviation machinist's mates donned overalls and helped maintain the navy?s aircraft. The decision was a major breakthrough for women in the armed services.
In pressing the case for an increased role for women in the U.S. Navy, however, Hancock consistently chose to work within the established system and naval chain of command. Her methods were not confrontational; she sometimes used indirect ways to influence her male superiors. Occasionally she would simply plant an idea, watch it grow, and let the men take credit for it. Other times she would listen as an officer described the technical training requirements of ratings for men. She would then inquire if women could possibly be capable of similar training. Even a reluctant ?I guess so? gave Hancock the opening she wanted. Her goal was not personal acclaim, but progress for women and thus, she believed, the welfare of the service.
The Bureau of Aeronautics sent Hancock on frequent trips to naval air stations around the country to check on adequate utilization of WAVES and on their adjustment to military life. Some of the young aviators she had known in the 1920s were now the ranking officers at many air stations, and they smoothed the way on Hancock?s inspection tours. She always made a special effort to talk with enlisted women in the barracks. These informal meetings gave Hancock firsthand knowledge of living and working conditions. She wanted no preferential treatment for WAVES. In fact, she told commanding officers to treat and discipline them as though they were men. Women needed to feel themselves as a part of the service, she believed, and receipt of equal treatment would foster mutual respect between naval personnel of both sexes.
One of her wartime trips, while official in nature, was also deeply personal. Hancock returned to New Jersey in August 1943 to christen the U.S.S. Lewis Hancock at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Kearny. She was understandably proud that the U.S. Navy had honored her husband who had died in the airship Shenandoah. The event, however, was also an honor for her: Lieutenant Hancock was the first naval officer on active duty to christen a naval ship.