Lipstick for the Pacific: Mildred Lewis and the Women's Overseas Shopping Service

Mildred Lewis as a telephone operator for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in France, World War I. NPS Collections, GOGA 35352

During World War II, women serving in the Pacific could write to San Francisco and have someone shop for them — the things from home they couldn't get from the Army, and presents to send to their families. The Women's Overseas Shopping Service was run by Mildred Lewis, and the thanks she received show how much it meant.

A "Hello Girl"

Mildred was born in 1892. On August 5, 1918, she sailed for France on a troopship, one of more than 200 women telephone operators with the American Expeditionary Forces — the "Hello Girls," the first women to support combat operations on a regular basis. Like most women serving overseas then, they tended to be white, well educated, unmarried, urban and independent; what set them apart were the skills the Army needed around the clock: fluent French and switchboard experience.

The work shaped her life. After the war she settled for good in San Francisco, joined the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, and rose to Chief Operator in 1934. She never married, keeping her financial and personal independence and spending it on the outdoors, travel and photography around the Bay Area and beyond. Her family, in many ways, became the women who had served overseas, and who founded the Women's Overseas Service League (WOSL) in 1921 to help one another.

The Shopping Service

During World War II, as president of WOSL's San Francisco branch, Mildred set up the Shopping Service. Everything ran by letter, paid by money order, and the service made a point of answering each request warmly — it was, as its records put it, a personal service rather than a cold cash sale.

One order in her "Analysis of Shopping Service", now in the Mildred Lewis Collection at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, reads:

The analysis also records who ordered, the price, the money sent, and any refund of overpayment — a window into what women in the Pacific most wanted when they could choose.

"Analysis of Shopping Service," with handwritten notes, probably Mildred's. NPS Collections, GOGA 35352

Mostly the orders were cosmetics, toiletries and women's clothing. Some were more unusual: earplugs for sleeping, a camera and film, lace doilies to remind one woman of the dresser at home. Many early requests were for presents to send home — the women's first thought, the records note, seemed to be for their families — like flowers for a sister at Christmas.

The letters Mildred kept show how welcome it was. One woman wrote in July 1945 that her first package had arrived with everything just right, that she felt thoroughly feminine and fragrant, and that everyone had enjoyed the cartoons Mildred tucked in. Another thanked her for her good wishes about getting home: nobody knew what would happen to them, she wrote, but they hoped for the best — getting home.

Recognition

When the Hello Girls came home from World War I, they learned they would not be recognized as veterans, with the status and benefits that went with it: the Army counted them as civilian volunteers. The survivors fought for sixty years before they won veteran status. WOSL filled the gap, helping women whose service went unrecognized.

The Shopping Service was a powerful example of servicewomen looking out for one another. No longer able to serve abroad, Mildred found a way to serve at home — and widened what women could do, overseas and on the home front.

Sources

Based on "Mildred Lewis' Shopping Service Analysis," by Nicole Martin, PhD, in the series Home and Homelands Exhibition: Resistance, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, National Park Service, made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on the Mildred L. Lewis Collection (GOGA 35352) and Jill Frahm, "The Hello Girls," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2004). The article dates one letter to July 15, 1945, and its note to July 5, so only the month is given. Words from the Shopping Service's records and servicewomen's letters are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.