Opha May Johnson, NatArch RG 127G Photo 515029, https://archive.org/details/WomenMarinesInWorldWarI/page/n7/mode/2up
During the waning years of World War I, the United States realized it needed to include more women in military support positions so that men could be sent to fight. At first, the military used civil service employees, but that didn’t give the military enough control over the personnel, and sometimes the employees didn’t have sufficient clearance to get the jobs done. Opha May Jacob Johnson began as a clerk for the office of Quartermaster General and then became the first woman to pass the rigorous mental and physical tests of the Marine Corps and then to enlist. Other women followed her, but even today, women make up only 8% of the USMC.
Johnson was born on May 4, 1878, in Kokomo, Indiana. Her family moved to Washington D.C. or Vermont at some point, and she attended the Wood’s Commercial Business College’s secretarial program, where she graduated second in her class and gave a speech as salutatorian, on June 5, 1895. After graduation, she supported herself for three years as a single woman. The details of those three years are a bit cloudy. Her first job was at an insurance office. Then she moved to New York to work as a stenographer before moving to D.C. at some point.
When Johnson answered the call to service in the USMC, she was neither a teenager nor a young person looking to make it a career, but a woman of 39. She was married to Victor Hugo Johnson on December 20, 1898, a musician and musical director of the Lafayette Square Opera House in D.C. The couple never had children, and Johnson never had a child. Johnson had a 14-year career in Civil Service at the Interstate Commerce Commission. Johnson’s father was a Civil War veteran, and in rare private letters, Johnson shared with cousins back in Indianapolis that she felt she was as much a soldier as anyone for her service.
18 days after she enrolled, Johnson was the starting point for a Richmond Times article about women enlisting. The article is sexist, pointing out her uniform and saying the Marines have “succumbed to femininity,” all the while referring to Johnson as Mrs. more frequently than Private, which was her official military rank. While this article is sexist, it also mentions that other military services and private companies were opening up jobs to women at the time. Other news articles were not as sexist but more straightforward in their reporting of women joining the USMC, but most, like the Evening Star, mention Johnson in particular as the first woman Marine. You may have been taught that WWII was a big push for white women into paid work, but WWI also pushed women into new roles for about a year.
Johnson was one of 300 women to enlist that day but was the first in line, making her technically the first woman to become a Marine. The USMC may not have demanded as much from their trainees at that time as they do today, but all recruits and Marines were trained, had to do drills, and were held to high physical and mental standards. She worked for the Headquarters Marine Corps in Arlington, Virginia and was in charge of managing the records of women recruits. She did well at her job, because she was promoted to Sergeant, the first promotion to that rank for a woman in the USMC, in September 1918.
When Johnson enlisted, the support staff for all of the armed services of the United States were paid the same regardless of their gender. That quickly changed when WWI ended and women were pushed out of active service on August 11, 1919, just a couple days shy of Johnson’s one-year anniversary of becoming a marine on August 13, 1918. Women who enrolled still received the same veterans’ benefits as their male colleagues in those some jobs.
Johnson may have left active military service in February of 1919, three months after WWI ended, and before women were pushed out of active duty to take on a clerking position in the War Department at Marine headquarters in D.C. until 1943. She was active in her local American Legion and traveled in support of other women fighting to enroll in military service. Coincidentally, Johnson died on August 11, 1955, 36 years to the day after women were forced from active duty, and her funeral was held 37 years to the day after her enlistment.
On August 29, 2018, an obelisk was placed on her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery to mark her position as the first woman Marine, as part of the USMC’s biennial convention. The grave was previously marked only as the Jacob family plot, though it also included her husband Hugo.