1 April 1941
As Australian men deployed to the various fronts of the Second World War, women ably stepped into the void they left in the workforce at home. The need for their service in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) soon became clear.
The Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS) was formed in April 1941. Their shore-based communications work included wireless telegraphy and signals intelligence. The group emerged from the Women’s Emergency Signals Corps (WESC), which had been set up by Florence Violet McKenzie OBE in 1939.
Florence had spent much of the 1930s educating women in radio. She also observed that training women in signals and wireless telegraphy would be useful in the looming conflict. Florence was Australia’s first female electrical engineer. She completed a Diploma of Electrical Engineering at Sydney Technical College in the 1920s.
McKenzie was ignored when she first proposed that the WESC be integrated into the RAN. Undeterred, McKenzie’s persistence led to 14 female telegraphists from the WESC joining the WRANS the RAN in April 1941.
As the war expanded into the Pacific, so did the WRANS. By the end of the war, over 3,000 women had enlisted, with 109 graduating as officers. Women were not allowed to serve on ships during the Second World War. However, their roles soon expanded beyond those lobbied for by McKenzie.
Women worked for intelligence organisations and at Government House in Canberra. Some of the roles they undertook were:
- administrators
- recruiters
- mechanics
- messengers,
- educators.
Though the WRANS was disbanded after the war, it was reconstituted in 1951 to meet Cold War commitments. As in the Second World War, there was resistance to enlisting women, but the need for personnel prevailed. Women were still unable to serve at sea, however, and were discharged if they married or fell pregnant.
In December 1959, the WRANS was made a permanent part of the RAN. A decade later, in 1969, married women were permitted to serve, and the automatic discharge of pregnant women ended in 1974.
The introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 made it impossible to sustain a separate women’s service. In September that year, women were made eligible for sea service (though they did not go to sea in substantial numbers until the 1990s). The WRANS was disbanded in 1985, and its personnel incorporated into the RAN.