As of today, 225,119 women serve in the U.S. active-duty military, according to the Department of Defense. In recent weeks, Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard and the U.S. Secretary of War has questioned whether women should be in the military at all.
The suggestion flies in the face of an off-Broadway production celebrating women’s roles in the military over the last century.
Ticket attendants chirped cheerful greetings as bartenders poured drinks for a long line of theater goers as they filed through the doors at the Syracuse Stage. They were there waiting to catch a Broadway hopeful that’s been seven years in the making.
The Hello Girls is a musical about the first women in the army who fought in World War I. It's the brainchild of Prospect Musicals’ Cara Reichel and Pete Mills, commissioned in 2018 for the centennial celebration of Armistice Day. The show opened off Broadway in the boroughs of New York City to positive reviews.
The New York Times called it, "thrilling, smart, human and sardonically feminist" with a lively score.
It appeared to have the momentum to make the leap to lower Manhattan and the lights of Broadway until, COVID shuttered the production. Nevertheless, it stayed relevant through small productions in local theaters and High Schools around the country, and now, in its seventh year, it has landed a big budget production here in Central New York.
“I'm always on the lookout for compelling stories and sort of little nuggets from history that I feel need to be heard,” said Reichal, “This one just kind of grabbed me.”
In the early days of telephone communications, callers relied on switchboard operators who would manually connect calls through a massive switchboard. The position of an operator was almost entirely held by young women who were considered more pleasant to hear picking up the phone, nimbler, and able to hold up better than men under the pressure of multiple callers. They were colloquially referred to as Hello Girls, a term Mark Twain made popular in his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where he wrote, "The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land.”
“The musical is about the first women soldiers in the United States Army that served during World War I.” said Reichal who had extensively researched the war efforts in enlisting the young women.
“They put ads in newspapers all across the country seeking bilingual, experienced telephone operators,” she discovered, “and it was incredible the response that women from across the country gave to this call for support.”
During WWI, U.S. Army General John Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force in France. He needed French-speaking, high speed, multi-tasking operators for combat communications. It just so happened that the best were all women. Seven thousand applied, 100 highly skilled women were selected.
One of them was Grace Banker, a 26-year-old chief operator at Bell Telephone AT&T’s New York office, who went on to serve as the chief operator in France. Banker is the central character of the Musical, played by Chessa Metz, who has experience not only with feminist stories, as the lead character in another 1910’s period musical, “Suffs”, a Broadway musical about the Suffragettes and their struggle for women’s right to vote.
Metz spoke passionately with WAER about her character. “Grace Banker's [role] in the show is pretty true to her story. She was from Passaic, New Jersey… she's one of seven women that get chosen to go to the front lines and operate the switchboards there,” and she had a progressive spirit, having graduated from Barnard College where she was a member of the baseball team, both exceedingly rare for a woman in 1918.
Once enlisted, Banker was not expecting to be put in command of the unit but took the post seriously and was seen by both the women under her command and her male superiors as being kind, but firm.
In March of 1918, she and her team of trail blazing women set sail for France. At first, she and her team were posted at the headquarters of General Pershing, close to the front. Five months later, in late August of 1918, she and six hand-picked operators were sent to the trenches to take part in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the final allied push that would win the war.
During the offensive, she and her team completed calls under heavy shelling. Equipped with nothing but a helmet and gas mask, the Hello Girls connected thousands of life saving calls from the dugouts of the western front.
Grace Banker was later awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, a decoration presented to army members for outstanding and meritorious service, for her actions during the campaign.
“These women were ordering retreats. They were warning people about air raids and explosions,” Metz enumerated, “these calls were literally life or death, and they completed millions of them.”
When asked whether her research showed the Hello Girls made the United States Army a more lethal force in 1917 and 1918, Metz said without hesitation, “So they absolutely changed history, and they saved lives, and they helped us win a world war.”
Despite their incredible contribution to Allied victory, the Hello Girls returned home to find that they would not receive veterans’ benefits. The Army claimed they were civilian contractors, despite swearing oaths to the army. It took until 1977 when Jimmy Carter signed a bill that officially recognized the Hello Girls' place in the military. Most did not live to see the day.
co-author and composer, Pete Mills, seized the opportunity to make a modern connection, “We've always wanted [the show] to have current contemporary relevance, the way that the show begins, it says, ‘Imagine a time when the world is divided into two sides that are entrenched deeply and a time when authoritarianism seems to be on the rise,’ And then we say, ‘We're talking about 1918, of course.’ And hopefully audiences make the connection of like, “Gee, it sounds not so different from our own times.’”
On Wednesday, Hegseth disbanded the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. The decades-old commission kept the Defense Department apprised of the needs of women in the armed forces. That included guidelines on appropriate fitting body armor and health care. Since 1951, the commission's job was to ensure women had a place in the military.
In a November 2024 appearance on the conservative Shawn Ryan Show, Hegseth was critical of women being in combat roles, “It hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
“I think he's wrong. And I think history has proven that.” Metz refuted, “I think we're in a moment in history where a lot of loud people with power would like to see women's role in society regress… Obviously that's dangerous and incorrect and all these beliefs only serve to control women. I will not watch all the progress made in the last 100 years for women get torn down.”
The musical enters its final weekend, with the cast and producers’ eyes set on the ultimate goal of finally making it to Broadway.
