Women Firefighters Blaze Trail in Male-Dominated Profession

In the past, men have dominated the profession of firefighting globally. But according to history, women have become more prevalent in both professional and volunteer fire departments across many nations. Women have held several positions in the fire service in modern times, including fire chief. Even in the nations where they are most prevalent, they make up less than 20% of firefighters.

From the 18th century onward, firefighting became more organized, first with the growth of insurance companies and then with the development of government fire services in the 19th century. 

Contrary to popular belief, women have been firefighters for almost 200 years. Molly Williams, a slave in New York City, joined Oceanus Engine Company #11 around 1815 and is recognized as the first female firefighter in history.

The San Francisco heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit is one of the early female firefighters whose name is occasionally brought up. After assisting them in dragging the engine to fire on Telegraph Hill as a teenager in 1859, she was made an honorary member of the Knickerbocker Engine Company.

We do catch glimpses of specific women firefighters in New Jersey and Connecticut during those years, though it’s likely that many of the names of women firefighters from the 19th and early 20th centuries have simply been lost to history. From 1878 to 1932, Girton Ladies’ College in Great Britain had an all-female fire brigade. Women’s volunteer fire companies operated in Los Angeles, California, and Silver Spring, Maryland, between 1910 and 1920.

After her firefighter husband passed away in the line of duty in the late 1920s, Emma Vernell joined Westside Hose Company at the age of 50. She was the first woman in New Jersey to receive official recognition as a firefighter. Ten years later, Augusta Chasans, a woman, started volunteering as a firefighter in New Jersey.

Many women across the nation joined the volunteer fire service during World War II to replace the men who had been drafted into the military. During a portion of the war, two military fire departments in Illinois were entirely staffed by women.

In the 1960s, all-female fire companies emerged in Woodbine, Texas, and King County, California. The tradition of the all-women company started to disappear by the 1970s as it became a little more typical for women to sign up for regular volunteer fire departments and work alongside their male counterparts.

WILDLAND FIRE SERVICE FEMALES

In 1942, the first all-female forest firefighting crew was formed in California. The crew, which was employed by the California Department of Forestry, included a cook, a foreman, a truck driver, and an assistant driver.

Working for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), wildland firefighting crews were the first women in the postwar era known to have been paid for fire suppression work. In the summer of 1971, a BLM crew comprised entirely of women worked on fires in Alaska, and a USFS crew comprised entirely of women worked in Montana the same year and the year after.

EARLY CAREER FEMALE FIREFIGHTERS

Many women participated in the Auxiliary Fire Service in Great Britain during the Blitz, both on a part-time and a full-time basis, during World War II. While the majority were employed in non-suppression positions, some were employed as firefighters and pump operators. During the war, more than 20 AFS members lost their lives while performing their duties.

The first women we are aware of to be paid for fighting fires in an urban setting were two who entered paid fire suppression roles in 1973 and 1974. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Sandra Forcier was employed in July 1973 as a Public Safety Officer, which is a combination of a police officer and a firefighter. The Arlington County Fire Department in Virginia hired Judith Livers the following March, making her the first female career firefighter in history. Both women retired at the rank of battalion chief after serving their departments for their entire careers.

Women were beginning to work as career firefighters across the nation by the middle of the 1970s. Numerous African-American women were among them, including Genois Wilson in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1975, and Toni McIntosh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1976.

With thousands of counterparts in Canada, Great Britain, and other nations around the world, more than 6,500 women now hold career firefighting and fire officer positions in the United States. Between 30 and 40 thousand women firefighters, as well as thousands more EMTs and paramedics, are part of the volunteer and paid-on-call fire and EMS forces in the United States. These women’s and their foremothers’ proud and lengthy histories are still being written today.

Several noteworthy examples of women in the firefighter industry come from different parts of the world:

United States

Early in the nineteenth century, the United States had its first recorded female firefighter. Molly Williams was an African American slave from New York who was described as being “as good a fire laddie as many of the boys.” Marina Betts served as a volunteer firefighter in Pittsburgh in the 1820s. The Knickerbocker Engine Company, No. 5 in San Francisco then elected Lillie Hitchcock as an honorary member in 1863.

All men made up the first paid fire company, which was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1853. For years after, women continued to volunteer. Women’s volunteer fire companies existed in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Los Angeles, California, in the 1910s. 

To fill the void left by the men who were fighting abroad during World War I, many women entered the workforce. As a result, thousands of women entered traditionally male-dominated fields. For instance, by 1918, the military employed about 11,000 women for clerical work. 

Following the death of her husband in the line of duty in 1936, Emma Vernell became the state’s first recognized female firefighter in New Jersey. 

To replace male firefighters who enlisted in the military, some women worked as firefighters in the United States during World War II. For a brief period of the conflict, two fire departments in Illinois were entirely comprised of women. In California, the first all-female forest firefighting crew was established in 1942. 

In the 1960s, Woodbine, Texas, and Kings County, California, both had all-female fire departments. An all-female Bureau of Land Management (BLM) firefighting crew battled fires in the wilds of Alaska during the summer of 1971. Additionally, in Montana in 1971 and 1972, an all-female United States Forest Service firefighting crew battled fires. 

Sandra Forcier, who started working for Winston-Salem Fire Department in North Carolina in 1973, became the nation’s first known paid female firefighter (aside from those who fight forest fires), more than a century after the country’s first paid male firefighter. As a Public Safety Officer, Forcier combined his roles as a police officer and a firefighter. Judith Livers was hired by the Arlington County, Virginia fire department in 1974 and became the first woman to exclusively work as a paid firefighter (aside from fighting forest fires). 

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In 1982, Brenda Berkman filed a lawsuit to protest the New York City Fire Department’s discriminatory physical examination. She and about 40 other women became the first female firefighters in New York City history after winning the case. In addition, Berkman founded the United Women Firefighters and was the nation’s first openly gay professional firefighter. 

In Tiburon, California, Chief Rosemary Bliss was the first woman to lead a career fire department. In 1993, she was named fire chief. 

In the United States, women made up 2% of all firefighters in 2002. 

In 2005, Sarinya Srisakul became the first woman of Asian descent to work for the 

New York City Fire Department. 

Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, made a promise in 2013 to ensure that by 2020, 5% of the firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department would be female. 3.1% of the department’s firefighters were women as of 2018. Kristin Crowley was appointed as the first openly gay and first female chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department in 2022. 

Less than 0.5% of the 10,000 active operational firefighters in the New York City Fire Department in 2015 were female, with 58. Regina Wilson, an African-American firefighter’s association, was elected as the Vulcan Society’s first female president in the same year. The New York City Fire Department’s Laura Kavanagh became its first female commissioner in 2022. 

In the United States, 7% of firefighters were women as of 2016. Now in 2023 the ratio gradually increased. In the current situation when the Amazon fire, the Hawaii-Maui wildfire spread, women came forward to help as firefighters.

British Empire- UK

From 1878 to 1932, Girton Ladies’ College in Great Britain had an all-female fire brigade. According to a report from 1887, a fire at a Liverpool cigar factory was put out by a group of female employees who had organized themselves into a fire brigade. Women’s brigades performed rescue and firefighting operations in the South of England during World War I. Private fire brigades used female firefighting teams in the 1920s. 5000 women were enlisted in the Auxiliary Fire Service at the start of World War II, and that number rose to 7,000 in the National Fire Service at the time. Despite being trained in firefighting, women were employed for jobs like driving and fire watching instead. Many were honored for their bravery. 

Some of the first female firefighters in the modern era were stationed in Scotland, close to Elgin, at Gordonstoun School. Since the school’s return from Wales in 1948, staff and students have been a part of a volunteer unit of the nearby Grampian Region Fire Brigade (GRFB). Girls were admitted to the school for the first time as students in 1972, and starting in 1975, women were allowed to join the volunteer fire department.

They were initially restricted to operating only within the school and were not permitted to be official GRFB members. The pivotal event occurred in 1976 when the GRFB turned to the neighborhood for assistance in fighting a forest fire on Ben Aigan near Craigellachie in Speyside due to its size. There were also representatives from nearby Royal Air Force bases and a group of Gordonstoun-trained female firefighters.

The GRFB agreed to allow women to serve in front-line firefighting roles for the first time as a result of the group’s performance and perseverance over seven days and nights of fighting fires. The same year’s drought prompted the need for additional firefighters and the inclusion of women in other brigades. The press referred to Mary Joy Langdon as the first female firefighter in Britain when she joined the East Sussex Fire Brigade on August 21 as a retained firefighter. She was the country’s first operational female firefighter. 

It was announced that women would be allowed to join the fire service in 1978. After a year of training, Josephine Reynolds joined Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service in the early 1980s and became the first full-time female firefighter in the nation. 

Fleur Lombard, a female firefighter in Britain, passed away in peacetime service for the first time in 1996. 

In a seven-page submission to the Independent Review of the Fire Service in 2002, the Equal Opportunities Commission criticized several practices that contributed to the extremely low hiring of women and people of color in the fire service. The Commission specifically called attention to the system of long day and night shifts, which probably deterred women with children from applying, and the custom of only allowing those with firefighting experience to move into the higher ranks, which rendered control staff ineligible. 

Dany Cotton received the Queen’s Fire Service Medal for the first time in 2004. 

Ann Millington took over as the Kent Fire and Rescue Service’s first female chief fire officer in 2011. As the first female chief financial officer who had served on the front lines of fire, Rebecca Bryant was chosen to lead the Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service in 2016. Meanwhile, Station Manager Sally Harper was awarded the Queen’s Fire Service Medal. 2017 saw Dany Cotton take on the role of London Fire Brigade Commissioner. 

Women made up 5.2% of active firefighters in the UK in 2017, up from 3.1% in 2007. The London Fire Brigade had 300 female firefighters or 7% of all firefighters. 

India

Harshini Kanhekar became India’s first female firefighter in 2002. 

Priya Ravichandran became one of the first female fire officers in the nation and the first to receive the Anna Medal for Bravery when the Tamil Nadu Fire and Rescue Services allowed women to enlist. This was in 2003. Meenakshi Vijayakumar has attended more than 400 incidents while serving in the same organization, and in 2013 she was given the President’s Fire Service Medal for valor. 

In the Municipal Corporation of Chandigarh, a proposal to admit women to the fire services was put forth in 2009. 

Five female firefighters were hired by the Mumbai Fire Brigade in 2012, making them the organization’s first ever. 

The department hired its second group of female firefighters in 2013.

Netherlands

Since at least 1939, there have been female firefighters working in the Netherlands. 

Women made up 3.3% of professional firefighters in 2000.

Challenges

Since women have only recently started to be hired or accepted as volunteer firefighters, the fire service has had to make many challenging adjustments. The fire service is rife with tradition and formalized paramilitary ties in many places. Firefighters frequently form close-knit communities that value “strength, courage, and loyalty,” but they can also be “resistant to change,” according to a 1998 article in Fire Engineering. Even though women are generally accepted as firefighters, it is still assumed that they will make more balanced decisions and have more maternal traits than a team of men.