The fountain is dry.
Friends who are veterans (and family members):
I had an email yesterday from the Women’s Memorial Foundation, which is in immediate and serious danger of closing.
The Foundation has been forced to cut staff, and when I visited the Memorial earlier in the week I noticed that the fountain is turned off. The Foundation is looking for sources of funding from corporations, organizations, federal programs and philanthropic entities. They need us to pitch in to keep the lights on until funding from those sources becomes available.
Here are just a few of the Foundation’s many shelves of books by and about military women.
Tracy Crow Weidemaier and I could not have written our book (which we’ll be able to say more about soon!) without the help and support of the WIMSA staff and the inspiration of the exhibits at the Memorial. We literally spent days combing through their library, learning from their curators and historians, and studying the exhibits. There is no other resource like it available to scholars and researchers studying military women and our history.
If you’re a woman veteran, please consider joining me in sending the Memorial even a small donation (electronic form can be found here). This is our memorial. Let’s help take care of it.
“Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom. That our resolve was just as great as the brave men who stood among us. And with victory our hearts were just as full and beat just as fast – that the tears fell just as hard for those we left behind.”
– 1LT Anne (Sosh) Brehm, US Army Nurse Corps
China-India-Burma Theater, World War II
Presumption and Folly 