American Women's Voluntary Services
AWVS members in various AWVS uniforms, 1942
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| Formation | 1940 |
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| Legal status | Service |
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Region served
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United States |
American Women's Voluntary Services (AWVS) was the largest American women's service organization in the United States during World War II (WWII). AWVS provided women volunteers who provided support services to help the nation during the war such as message delivery, ambulance driving, selling war bonds, emergency kitchens, cycle corps drivers, dog-sled teamsters, aircraft spotters, navigation, aerial photography, fighting fires, truck driving, and canteen workers. Some of its work overlapped with the Office of Civilian Defense and the American Red Cross.
Alice Throckmorton McLean founded AWVS in January 1940, 23 months before the United States entered the war, basing it upon the British Women's Voluntary Services, in order to help prepare the nation for the war. Most of the founders were wealthy internationalist women, and its headquarters was in New York City, making America's isolationists suspicious of AWVS. Others saw the organization as being alarmist. Despite these concerns, AWVS had about 18,000 members by the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Eventually over 325,000 women were trained by AWVS.Doris Ryer Nixon founded the California chapter in August 1941 and became AWVS's national vice president. Nixon is the mother of Lewis Nixon III, an Army paratrooper officer during World War II who is featured prominently in Band of Brothers.
AWVS also encountered resistance because some men did not want women working. The group also sponsored units in African, Chinese, and Hispanic American parts of the United States. This also led to lampooning by the media. By 1944, despite hundreds of thousands of volunteers and large efforts to help win the war, AWVS was accused of being lazy, and the leaders decided to disband the organization at the end of the war. Also, they were formed for the specific purpose of supporting the war, which had been won.
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