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Grace Hopper lecture
- Thread starter Mos
- Start date
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
This is right after she retired.
Does anyone know what she actually was? By that I mean she was doing ADP stuff, along what would now be IWO, but she's wearing stars. Was she a GURL?
I understand she was a bit of an anomaly for the time, but big Navy was still so restrictive on where they administratively put females, I'm assuming she was put in some designator that made the Navy happy but continued to let her be successful at her actual job/skill set.
I understand she was a bit of an anomaly for the time, but big Navy was still so restrictive on where they administratively put females, I'm assuming she was put in some designator that made the Navy happy but continued to let her be successful at her actual job/skill set.
I would assume EDO or the equivalent to it back then. And like Rickover, Congress and civilian leadership made sure she was promoted and kept on active duty well past statutory retirement no matter what Big Navy wanted.
Yeah, I just wasn't sure what that was back then. GURL seemed to be a fairly easy catch-all, but I'm not smart on how far someone could go with that designator back then (before Congressional involvement, of course).
The EDO designator has been around since 1947 when several different officer communities were combined into a single Engineering Duty community responsible for all construction, ordnance, weapons systems, maintenance, salvage, and disposal of Navy ships and submarines.
At least according to Wikipedia, Admiral Hopper was an EDO but I'm not sure when that happened. She entered the Navy under the WAVES program and then was retained in the Reserve after WW2. It was likely either during her time in the Reserve or when she returned to Active Duty in 1967 to run the Navy's COBOL program.
Margaret Hamilton is another big woman in computer science.
I tried Google but nothing came up. Was "GURL" some type of acronym for women in the Navy?
GURL = General Un-Restricted Line.
It was, among other things, a catch-all designator that women could commission into since women were restricted from going into certain communities that they can now go to today (basically anything officially labeled as a combat community).
As GURL, you were still a line officer. Obviously the moniker stuck since some notable number of people that were commissioned into the designator were "girls." I'm not sure if an "undesignated line officer" (any 1x00/1x05 designator) today is technically called a "General Unrestricted Line Officer." I never heard it referred to that way.
I have known some former GURLs during my career and they were never permanently GURLs. From what I can gather, they spent a few years as GURLs stashed in various "non-combat" billets and then were forced to transition to RL or Staff Corps communities. For instance, I know quite a few HR O6s who were originally GURLs and then transitioned into their respective communities. From the way they talked about it, the program was very similar to the way we handle the Nuclear Power Instructors where they have to redesignate after 4 years.
I would bet they were forced to redesignate because there was no reason to have it anymore since the restrictions were lifted. Why manage a community you don't need? There was an O-4 GURL at my ROTC unit that left right as I started my freshman year. Thinking back, it's interesting to do the math and see someone that relatively senior was still around in that designator. Then again, I guess that was only a couple years after everything opened up. There was an brand new O-1 that was stashed there, as well, but she left right as I showed up, too.
@AllAmerican75 It's interesting that you ran into so many. I would have thought most would have been senior enough to not be around anymore. Then again, I guess that explains where all those random TAR/FTS HR people come from.