In the summer of 1918, toward the end of World War I, pickings were slim for able-bodied, non-deployed men to fill manual labor jobs. Women were tapped to work as police officers and factory workers, streetcar conductors and telegraph operators. In California, Yosemite National Park needed rangers.
So Clare Marie Hodges, a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher from the one-room Yosemite Valley School, rode down to park headquarters to find the superintendent, Washington B. Lewis, and apply for a job.
“Probably you’ll laugh at me,” she said. “But I want to be a ranger.”
Lewis, who was either an ahead-of-his-time feminist or desperate for bodies, wasn’t laughing. “It’s been on my mind for some time to put a woman on one of these patrols,” he told her. “Only I couldn’t find the right one before.”
He hired her on the spot, at seventy-five dollars a month. She served from May 22 to September 7, 1918. The National Park Service itself was brand new — Horace
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