USAF flight nurses take a break in Korea.

In 1952, Army Nurse CPT Eleanor Yorke was the only female passenger among 4,200 men sailing on military transport from the Far East to San Francisco. CPT Yorke spent more than two years in Japan and eight more months in Korea treating war wounded. On the 13-day trip home, her fellow passengers treated CPT Yorke like a queen.

Besides being the only woman aboard military transport, CPT Yorke was one of only about 600 women—only a few of whom were African-American—stationed in Korea during the entire three years of the Korean War.

	Racial identification was standard on military documents.

The American cultural climate of the time relegated most women to non-professional, low-paying jobs and promoted a feminine ideal of domesticity and maternalism. The US Armed Forces reflected this attitude, offering women “pink collar” jobs with little room for advancement.

As the Korean War began, the effects of decades of protest, and political and legal activism had made few inroads into racial segregation. The inequities of the “separate-but-equal” doctrine of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision still shaped public policy, race relations and white attitudes in most of America.

African-American women who volunteered in the military during this period stepped over dual barriers of gender and race to serve their country and test new policies.