{"id":1911,"date":"2021-12-22T21:21:23","date_gmt":"2021-12-22T21:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2022-08-30T20:50:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T20:50:19","slug":"making-women-veterans-visible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/making-women-veterans-visible\/","title":{"rendered":"Making women veterans visible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Elizabeth
Elizabeth Estabrooks<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It was 1977 in La Grande, and Elizabeth Estabrooks, \u201901, hadn\u2019t really planned on joining the U.S. Army. She had just accepted a higher paying job and bought a new Nova SS, but the job fell through and a friend talked her into going down to the recruiters\u2019 office together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt the time, women had to give up custody of children to join the Army\u2014men didn\u2019t, but women did,\u201d Estabrooks said. \u201cI didn\u2019t have kids at the time, but my friend did. She didn\u2019t join the Army that day, but I did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estabrooks has burnished the resilience and intelligence she had then. She now serves as Deputy Director of the Center for Women Veterans in Washington, D.C., ensuring women veterans across the
country have equal access to benefits and services from Veterans Affairs (VA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 12 years after leaving the Army, she embarked on a career in social work and assisted people who had experienced domestic violence or sexual assault. She eventually enrolled at EOU as an online student to earn a degree in Liberal Studies, and later received a Master\u2019s of Social Work from Columbia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI use what I learned in the Army and at EOU and in my career,\u201d Estabrooks said. \u201cAll of those experiences combined have brought me here and allowed me to help women veterans and women in general.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At EOU, she focused on political science and gender studies, and became one of the first graduates with that concentration. Estabrooks was a single parent when she was taking classes online from Baker City. Her daughter was 17 and her son was 5 when they watched her walk across the stage in Community Stadium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She attended some weekend classes, but primarily interacted with faculty and peers through the then-new online classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEOU was doing a lot of work to make sure people could get their college education in a legitimate way from home, and showing that a quality university could provide a quality degree to students who weren\u2019t sitting in their chairs in that town,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A degree from EOU equipped her to pursue larger roles in a field she had long been interested in exploring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been a feminist,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve always understood that women are disenfranchised and there\u2019s a need to acknowledge that in anything you approach. [My degree] put a finer point to that and gave me an academic lens to look through.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’ve always understood that women are disenfranchised and that there’s a need to acknowledge that in anything you approach.”<\/p> – Elizabeth Estabrooks<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Serving in the Army in the late \u201970s affirmed her feminist stance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Women\u2019s Army Corps had just been dismantled and leaders were working to integrate women into the Army. Estabrooks went through basic training with the second group of women to ever complete the course alongside men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe did everything they did. We threw hand grenades, ran the same distance, fired the same weapons,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She scored highly on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), but was shuttled into the supply field with a mass of recruits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that time, thousands of Army jobs were still closed to women. Estabrooks wanted to be a Ranger, but a sergeant told her, \u201cgirls can\u2019t be Rangers.\u201d She finished the 12-week course in half the time and requested to join the 82nd Airborne. A different sergeant gave her a familiar answer, \u201cgirls can\u2019t be Airborne.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs a woman in the Army, it didn\u2019t go well for me\u2014discrimination, sexual harassment and no bonuses, so I left when my three years were up,\u201d Estabrooks said. \u201cI didn\u2019t hate the Army, but discrimination was embedded in every structure, and I hated that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since May 2020, she\u2019s helped lead the Center for Women Veterans and worked to dismantle some of the structures that pushed her out of the military decades ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two million women veterans, but only 800,000 are en- rolled in the VA and just 500,000 use VA-provided healthcare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the biggest barriers is being recognized as veterans,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople assume men are veterans and they assume women are not. I\u2019ve seen it over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This basic acknowledgement has big implications. Being recognized as veterans has the power to tangibly improve women\u2019s lives and quality of care, Estabrooks said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWomen have served in the military and in combat in this country since the Revolutionary War, and the fact that they\u2019re not acknowledged is shameful,\u201d Estabrooks said. \u201cIt\u2019s a shift that needs to happen because it matters how women see themselves, too. Those barriers are so real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She cited statistics that men tend to talk about their service more than women do. That internalized divide, corroborated by popular culture, can stand between women veterans and benefits, healthcare or policy change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI met a woman who\u2019d been a Marine for 13 years, but she told me she\u2019s not a veteran. For years I said, \u2018I\u2019m just a girl who was in the Army, I\u2019m not a veteran,\u2019\u201d Estabrooks said. \u201cIt sounds simple, but not applying that word to yourself gets in the way of the things you deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When women don\u2019t self-identify as veterans, there\u2019s less data about their needs or the ways current policy overlooks specific issues. Estabrooks said women veterans are the fastest growing group of homeless veterans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen they don\u2019t say \u2018she\u2019 on Veterans Day or have women standing up there, they\u2019re leaving out what we\u2019ve done, our experiences and our honor,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her own negative experiences have fueled a lifetime of work toward honoring other women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople hear so much about military sexual trauma, and I always point out that even with the negative experiences, women veterans are resilient,\u201d she said. \u201cResilience is a big piece of the character of women veterans. We\u2019re not defined by the bad things that happen to us. We\u2019re defined by the strength and resilience that we as veterans have gained.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was 1977 in La Grande, and Elizabeth Estabrooks, \u201901, hadn\u2019t really planned on joining the U.S. Army. She had just accepted a higher paying job and bought a new Nova SS, but the job fell through and a friend talked her into going down to the recruiters\u2019 office together. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":491,"featured_media":1987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,119],"tags":[23,139,141,137,138,140],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-stories","category-fall-2021","tag-alumni","tag-army","tag-feminism","tag-veteran","tag-veterans","tag-women"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1986,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/mountaineer-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}