Maggie Gee - Infinite Women

Born: 5 August 1923, United States
Died: 1 February 2013
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Gee Mei Gue, Margaret

The following is republished from the Federal Aviation Administration. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Margaret “Maggie” Gee, a third-generation Chinese American, was born on August 5, 1923, in Berkeley, California. As a young girl, she would watch planes take off at Oakland Airport. She once saw Amelia Earhart, recalling: “When I waved, she saw me and waved back.” When the US entered the war, Gee dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, to help out with the war effort. She worked in the drafting department at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Gee had always wanted to fly and jumped at the opportunity to do so. At age 19, she read about the WASPs and took it as an opportunity to fly for her country. She moved to Minden, Nevada, to attend flight school before being accepted as a WASP. After earning her military wings, she reported to Las Vegas Army Air Field and was assigned to Training Command, serving in a tow squadron. Like Lee, Gee had similar encounters where people mistook her for the enemy. At first, she would get angry, but over time she got used to the accusations. There was one encounter where she bumped into another American plane while on a runway. The male pilot mistook her as a Japanese enemy pilot and hesitated to believe that she was American. Gee handled the situation well but felt like “an exhibit at the country fair, a two-headed cow, the amazing Chinese-American WASP.” But once she got back into her aircraft, she felt free and powerful. After the Army disbanded the WASPs, she returned to UC Berkeley, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on weapons systems. She also had a passion for politics, serving on the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, Berkeley Community Fund, Berkeley Democratic Club, California Democratic Party Executive Board, and Asian Pacific Islander Democratic Caucus. In 2010, Gee traveled to the White House where President Obama awarded her and living WASPs the Congressional Gold medal. She died three years later on February 1, 2013, at the age of 89.
In 2014, the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame inducted her posthumously for her role as a WASP. Currently, there is a campaign to rename the Oakland International Airport “Maggie Gee International Airport.”

The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Whatever the field, Maggie Gee never stopped pushing boundaries. During World War II, she was one of only three women to work as a drafter at Mare Island Naval Shipyard before becoming one of only two Chinese American women to serve in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). After the war, she gained recognition as a research physicist and for her devotion to political activism and public service.

Early Life in Berkeley, California
Margaret “Maggie” Gee was born Gee Mei Gue in Berkeley, California in 1923. She was one of six children. Gee’s mother, born in the U.S., lost her citizenship under the Cable Act of 1922 when she married Gee’s father, an Asian immigrant unable to naturalize. Congress began passing legislation restricting Chinese immigration in the late 1800s.

Despite widespread segregation and discrimination during her youth, Gee fondly remembered her childhood in Berkeley for its racially integrated community and schools. Her mother, involved in the neighborhood community and local Chinese church, modeled a dedication to community service that Gee admired and later mirrored.

When her father died in 1929, Gee’s mother survived through extended familial and community support but also through grit and hard work. She learned to drive when few women knew how. She also picked up whatever work she could, including sewing and housework. World War II offered her a unique opportunity: a well-paying job in the defense industry. Despite being older than most women entering the workforce, Gee’s mother became a “Rosie the Riveter.” She worked in the Richmond shipyards as a burner (light welding) throughout the war.

World War II: The Call to Service
World War II changed the demographic landscape of the Bay Area. This included Gee’s hometown of Berkeley, and particularly nearby Richmond, California, where her mother worked. Almost overnight, the need for workers at the Richmond shipyards attracted tens of thousands of migrants from all over the country. The city became a boomtown. Gee remembers how a sense of community grew during the war years. Neighbors banded together to take care of each other in a difficult time.

When the war started, Gee was in her first year of college at UC Berkeley. She watched her male friends leave college to go fight, and often die, in the war. She felt moved “to do something” to contribute to the war effort. With her mother as a model, Gee sought a well-paying defense job. Mathematically inclined, she took a course to become a drafter, someone who makes detailed technical drawings.

After passing the civil service exam, she worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard for a year assisting an engineer in repairing ships. As one of only three women in the engineering department of a hundred, she grew close to the other women. While Gee found the work exciting, she and the other two draftswomen felt the pull to join one of the women’s services.

Becoming a WASP
During her childhood, Gee spent many weekends with her family at the Oakland airfield watching the planes take off. One weekend, her idol, Amelia Earhart, waved at her. From then on, learning to fly became Gee’s dream, but she never thought she would learn since it was expensive. The war changed everything. When the opportunity came for women to fly as part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), Gee and her two fellow draftswomen used the wages they earned at Mare Island Naval Shipyard to attend flight school in Nevada. While the military trained men from scratch, the WASP only considered women with flight training.

Out of twenty-five thousand women who applied to join the WASP, the program only selected a few thousand to train in Sweetwater, Texas. Of those selected, only 1,074 graduated. The program did not accept any African American pilots and only a handful of non-white pilots. Gee was one of only two Chinese American women to graduate – the other being Hazel Ying Lee – whom she never met. Together, the members of the WASP become the first group of women to fly American military aircraft.

At the time, the WASP was considered a civilian organization assisting the U.S. military. This meant that despite undergoing the same military training as men, women did not receive military status. The WASP pilots performed vital, often risky, functions in order to free up male pilots for deployment. Gee explained, “We were pilots towing targets, doing mock gunnery missions, delivering planes, instructing, and test pilots.” For the thirty-eight WASPs who died in service, their families did not receive any benefits. They also had to pay the cost to transport their loved one’s bodies back home.

WASP Service
Gee served as a WASP pilot for one year, stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. During this time, she grew close with her fellow WASP pilots. They all shared a deep love for flying, as well as patriotism. She reflected, “Because you’re living with them day in day out, and you’re struggling with them, you bond with them. There’s a lot of bonding there.” In many cases, the bonds between the women lasted a lifetime.

Gee and her fellow WASP comrades enjoyed the shock of proving women could fly, but many of their male counterparts resented seeing them fly. Besides hostility from some male instructors, Gee remembered, “There was a lot of sexual harassment, but we just accepted it.” At the time, sexual harassment was a normalized part of society. Gee and her fellow pilots had no recourse but to accept the harassment if they wished to continue flying.

In addition to experiencing sexism, Gee recalled occasionally being mistaken as the Japanese enemy. In a war in which the American media depicted Japan as a “racial menace,” attacks on the Japanese enemy sometimes became a generalized hatred of all Asian peoples. Gee said having her identity mistaken made her feel “like an exhibit at a country fair, a two-headed cow, the amazing Chinese-American WASP.” She believed that a desire to differentiate herself from the enemy drove her to demonstrate her patriotism even more than she might have.

When the WASP pushed for military status in 1944, Congress disbanded the organization. According to Gee, men wanted their jobs and “just didn’t like to see the women fly.” Despite this abrupt ending, Gee believed her time as a WASP expanded her world and perspective, shaping the course of her life to come.

Physicist and Political Activist
When Gee returned from her WASP service, she watched the opportunities women had gained in the workforce during WWII fade away. “[T]hings just kind of began to fall apart,” she explained, noting how the sense of community and common purpose defining the war years dispersed. For Gee, this return to a pre-war pattern sometimes expressed itself through racial discrimination. When attempting to rent a place in Berkeley, landlords would not rent to her because she was Chinese American.

While Gee felt “hurt, more than anything else” by the discrimination she experienced, she fought back. Many years later, she served on a commission on housing discrimination in Berkeley. Gee applied the same determination she showed during the war to local politics. Her desire to help her community eventually evolved into a long and fruitful career in state and Democratic party politics. Her influence landed her a spot on the 1992 Democratic Party Platform Committee.

Gee also returned to U.C. Berkeley and completed a degree in physics. Beginning in the late 1950s, she earned success in another male-dominated field. For thirty years, she worked as a research physicist at Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She worked on weapons systems and the lab’s nuclear and magnetic fusion programs.

In 1977, after years of fighting for recognition, Public Law 95-202 granted former WASPs veteran status with limited benefits. In 2010, President Barack Obama presented Gee and the surviving WASPs with the Congressional Gold Medal. After a long and illustrious life, Maggie Gee died in 2013 at the age of 89.