A woman's National Park Service career, 1934 to 1971: Sallie Brewer's story

Sallie Brewer's National Park Service career, which ran between 1933 and 1971 in the National Park Service's own account, shows what it meant to be a woman in the agency: unpaid work as a ranger's wife, a first assignment as a ranger because the men were at war, shirts that did not come in her size, and layoffs that fell on married women and non-veterans. The NPS History Collection tells her story from oral histories, photographs, letters and objects, and says many of her frustrations are still recognizable to its staff.

Sallie Brewer at Tumacacori National Monument, 1947. Her long-sleeved shirt and tie suggest that her "hot climate uniform" was not accepted by NPS managers. NPS History Collection photo by George A. Grant.

Told she could not be a naturalist

Sarah Louise Pierce, called Sallie, was born on April 13, 1911, in Victor, Colorado, and grew up in Arizona and New Mexico. In January 1934 the Civil Works Administration hired her to clean, catalog and study artifacts from the Castle A site at Montezuma Castle; the program ran only from November 1933 to July 1934. A former NPS Director wrote on her behalf to an official in the Southwestern monuments. The official replied that she looked excellent but that "only a man should be considered" for the junior park naturalist job because of rigorous living conditions, and the former Director agreed that a woman could not hold it, citing the travel and the lack of suitable quarters. The post notes the irony: many ranger wives lived and worked in just those conditions, unpaid.

"Honorary custodians without pay"

Sallie married a ranger in 1934 and in 1936 passed the civil service exam for junior park archeologist, but she felt that a married woman stayed with her husband. She spent almost eight years as an unofficial "honorary custodian without pay," as the Southwestern monuments' wives were affectionately called. They lived in eight monuments, in tents, a log cabin, a Navajo hogan and a thousand-year-old pueblo, and it was six years before they had an NPS house. She greeted visitors, made signs, typed reports and led tours, and she co-founded a newsletter, The Grapevine, to connect the wives.

Frank "Boss" Pinkley, general superintendent of the Southwestern National Monuments from 1923, who treated wives as full partners. NPS History Collection photo.

First woman ranger on regular assignment

As men went to war, Sallie applied for work in 1942. In February 1943 she was appointed a ranger at Casa Grande National Monument, and her appointment letter called her the first woman ranger on regular assignment in the Southwestern monuments and in Region Three. The post adds that a couple of women had been rangers earlier in the region, one seasonally in 1934 and one a ranger-naturalist from 1929 to 1931, though most uniformed women were guides or museum aids.

She needed a uniform, and there was no standard one for women. At Casa Grande temperatures passed 100 °F in summer, so she put together a green skirt, a beige cotton short-sleeved shirt and a sun helmet and recommended it as the "hot climate uniform." A clothing company then told her it had no shirts with collars under 14 inches or sleeves shorter than 32 inches, and suggested a dressmaker. The shortage of women's sizes, the post says, would trouble women in the NPS for decades. In 1944 she moved to Tumacacori National Monument, where she and the custodian were the only two staff and she gave more than half the tours.

Her fatigue jacket, ordered in December 1949; the arrowhead patch was added in 1952 and the stars, each for five years of service, around 1958. NPS History Collection photo.

Layoffs and a late career

She did not have competitive civil service status, and returning veterans were given preference. In 1950 she was separated from her ranger job despite the support of NPS management, whose personnel officer wrote that he almost wept. She took a four-month temporary ranger job at Bandelier National Monument, then in January 1951 became an archeologist at the regional office, where she managed the library, answered history and archeology questions and excavated at Tumacacori ahead of a road widening. In August 1954 a reorganization eliminated her job. She recalled being told she had remarried and so did not need to work, though she was broke.

She worked seasonal archeology jobs at Casa Grande and Walnut Canyon, wrote Casa Grande's area history and began a survey of the north rim of Walnut Canyon, which she published in 1961. A permanent archeologist job at Montezuma Castle followed in 1956, then a promotion to GS-7 in 1958, and in November 1958 a GS-9 museum curator post at the Region Three office in Globe, Arizona. She never rose above GS-9. She retired in October 1967 because of a degenerative disk disease but stayed on as an unpaid collaborator at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, leading oral history interviews with Navajo elders until November 1971. She received a Commendable Service Award in 1968.

Sallie Harris receiving the Commendable Service Award, 1968. NPS History Collection.

She wrote or co-wrote research articles under several names as her own changed. In retirement she was active in the National Audubon Society and moved to Prescott, Arizona, in 1981. She died on May 2, 1994, at 83. She recalled that she was not an aggressive or competitive person but was competent, and that she did not always know how to answer women who wrote hoping to join the NPS, since an honest letter would have discouraged them.

Sources

• National Park Service, "50 Nifty Finds #17: Common Threads": https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/50-nifty-finds-17-common-threads.htm. Rewritten from the NPS History Collection's account, whose own sources include a 1978 oral history interview and her papers. The post's family details, other colleagues' names and some dates and salary figures that its text gives inconsistently are left out; quotations are paraphrased.
• National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.