Born: 15 October 1896, United States
Died: 4 August 1984
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Frances Eleanor Keegan
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Prior to volunteering for the U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps at age 45 in 1942, Frances Keegan Marquis had been an active suffragist who managed the Franklin Square House, a residential hotel in Boston offering housing and social services for around 700 women students and wage earners. She was also an executive with the American Woman’s Association, which helped working women network and develop leadership skills. Marquis was one of 440 women chosen for the first WAAC officer training, out of around 30,000 applicants. Once she finished, she joined the military at age 46 and was tasked with commanding the U.S.’s first women’s expeditionary force, the 149th WAAC Post Headquarters Company. The elite group of around 200 women was handpicked and would fill roles as drivers, switchboard operators, secretaries, and mail clerks in General Dwight Eisenhower’s North African headquarters in Algiers. Arriving in January 1943, by July, the famed war journalist Ernie Pyle wrote that “When a WAC takes over a switchboard from a soldier, efficiency goes up about 1000 percent.”
In September, as the WAACs were transitioning from an auxiliary into the Women’s Army Corps, Marquis returned to the U.S. to fight a different battle, touring the country giving speeches and interviews to fight the slanderous rumors about her troops. One of the most common was the fiction that many, or even most, of the women had been sent home pregnant. Returning to civilian life after the war, Marquis went right back to her activism for women; she lived another four decades before dying in 1984.