On this day – May 14, 1942, a bill was passed in the US Congress creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The bill was introduced by U.S. Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Lowell Massachusetts. From the official biography of Rogers from “Women in Congress”:

Congresswoman Rogers’s crowning legislative achievements came during World War II and in the immediate postwar years. In May 1941, Rogers introduced the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Act, to create a voluntary enrollment program for women to join the U.S. Army in a noncombat capacity. Her proposal, she explained to colleagues, “gives women a chance to volunteer to serve their country in a patriotic way,” as medical care professionals, welfare workers, clerical workers, cooks, messengers, military postal employees, chauffeurs, and telephone and telegraph operators, and in hundreds of other capacities. On May 14, 1942, the WAAC Act was signed into law, creating a corps of up to 150,000 women for noncombatant service with the U.S. Army. A year later that measure was supplanted by Rogers’s Women’s Army Corps Bill, which granted official military status to the volunteers by creating the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) within the Army. Rogers’s success opened the way for other uniformed women’s services in the Navy (WAVEs) and the Air Force (WASPs).

Read th full article here at “Women in Congress”: http://womenincongress.house.gov/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=209