In 1942, President Roosevelt allowed women to enlist in the military. The U.S. Navy was quick to take action, creating the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, more popularly known as “WAVES”.
The Navy particularly wanted educated women with professional experience to help recruit women as clerks, teachers, and for other non-combat duties, and brought in 40 women as officers to do that. Laura Rapaport was one of the first few, and quickly was helping to register and assign duty to the 1,800 women who were recruited per week to fill those jobs. One of her first actions was to eliminate racial discrimination, saying all the women wore the same uniform, and there was no reason they couldn’t share the same living quarters and duties. She remained after the war, too, to muster out the WAVES and close out their facilities in Honolulu.
Rapaport rose to the rank of Lt. Commander and wrote a book about her experiences, Once a Wave: My Life in the Navy 1942-46 *. After the war she married but continued to work, running the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association of the Visually Handicapped until she retired in 1967. Rappaport Borsten, the last surviving member of the original 40 WAVES, died August 11 in Southern California after a stroke. She was 91.